Sept. 15, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:58:31
4196 ‘My Wife Has A Boyfriend’ - Call In Show - September 12th, 2018
Question 1: [0:00] – “It is often difficult to describe something one is lacking, even when it is glaringly obvious that there is something everyone else is experiencing. I am intellectually aware of something referred to as, ‘a sense of accomplishment,’ but have only the vaguest imaginings of what it probably feels like. The closest I ever manage is the absence of feeling the stress of needing to get something done. I generally managed to brute force myself through the necessities of the day but tend to feel like my gas tank is empty when it comes to doing productive things I’d like to do that are not necessary for day-to-day living. I have many rational arguments for why I should do things in my spare time that are more challenging than others, but I have yet to find an argument that is convincing. What have you found to be most useful when you are negotiating with yourself?Question 2: [1:55:28] – “I've heard Stefan talk about not shying down from showing/using your intellect, not making yourself look smaller as the metaphorical tall guy since it's lying to yourself and not using your gift to a full potential. But from my experience nothing good ever came from showing my intellect to my peers or teachers, it always came down to them belittling me or in some cases extreme bullying, which leads to me trying to ‘fit’ in with the other kids, i.e. not getting the grades I could, not talking to about the things I'd like to, etc. Which lead to me not willing or able to go to school anymore because of extreme depression at a very young age. My question would be if intelligence is something that pushed our society out of the muck, why does it feel like a curse more than a gift?”Question 3: [2:34:46] – “While I am generally in favor of capitalism and the free market I believe that there are some big limitations that prevent pure capitalism from working in today's global market. The capitalism of a global economy gives rise to large corporations that too big and limit opportunities for the majority of people. Specific examples would include Google and Facebook, which started off as great companies but now that they are market leaders and essentially can't be replaced have turned to enforcing the leftist narrative. I believe there is a role for some government regulation and some government programs such as military, infrastructure, policing, and eventually some sort of universal basic income. Anything extremist view can be harmful, and while freedom is important, unlimited and unchecked freedom with no restrictions is harmful. The non-aggression principle is an ideal and is not realistic enough to promote ultimate freedom.”Question 4: [2:59:04] – “I've heard a few young ladies on your call-in show talking about delaying motherhood in order to set a career in motion first. Despite your best efforts to convince them otherwise, some still seem to unconvinced by your suggestions to have children younger and pursue a career once the kids are older. I have made many mistakes in my life including convincing myself that I didn't want a family and instead achieving a high-earning STEM career, only to find myself wholly unfulfilled. I was able to realize my error before my fertility window closed and now have an amazing husband and son, and I'd like to share my story in the hopes that some of the ladies out there might hear it differently from the mouth of a fellow lady who almost missed out on the most important title I could imagine - mom. I'm also hoping that Stefan would briefly discuss with me the idea of how to balance taking responsibility for one's actions and forgiving oneself (i.e. avoiding self-blame) specifically as it relates to choices made in the teenage years. I think this might help me in relation to dealing with my own choices and mistakes.”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Frederick wrote in and said, But of only the vaguest imaginings of what it probably feels like.
The closest I ever manage is the absence of feeling the stress of needing to get something done.
I generally manage to brute force myself through the necessities of the day, but tend to feel like my gas tank is empty when it comes to doing productive things I'd like to do that are not necessary for day-to-day living.
I have many rational arguments for why I should do things in my spare time that are more challenging than others, but I have yet to find an argument that is convincing.
What have you found to be the most useful when you are negotiating with yourself?
That's from Frederick. Hey, Frederick, how you doing?
Hey, how's it going? Well, how old are you, Frederick?
Uh, 34. 34.
And what do you feel you might be capable of if you set your mind to it?
Good question. I don't really know because there's just not that burning passion to go out there and do things.
What do you want from me then?
I mean, if you don't really want to do a whole bunch of stuff, then don't.
It's your choice, right?
Maybe I'm missing something here.
It's like me calling someone up and saying, well, I really, well, I was going to learn piano.
I started a little bit.
I feel kind of dissatisfied.
It's like, do you want to learn piano?
Not really. It's like, I'm not really sure where to go.
I'm open to it, but I'm just not really sure where to go from here.
Yeah, that's kind of always been my problem with negotiating with myself is just sort of being in the position of, you know, well, let's go and do this and make it happen and Getting the response of, eh, I guess we could.
Yeah, so maybe you can just bump through life like a cloud, like a leaf on a stream, and end your days that way.
I mean, I'm not criticizing.
It's like, if you don't really want to do anything, I guess you don't have to do anything, right?
I'm just so sure what the problem is.
Mostly, I was just curious, because you've...
You know, kind of put forth this very rational sort of method of coming upon morals.
And I was curious if you had a similar take on just like human motivation of just sort of a rational...
Oh, I see. Because everything that you say that has importance has air quotes around it, according to what I'm hearing.
Like, morals, rational arguments, and so on.
Would you say that you're a cynical person, Fred?
Yes. Okay, good.
Not good, but I understand.
And why do you think you're a cynical person?
Sorry, before we get to that, what does cynicism mean to you when I say that?
Very contrarian.
No, that's called a contrarian.
What do you mean by cynicism? Just being very skeptical when people tell me things.
Well, that's also called being philosophical, right?
You should be skeptical when people tell you things.
But what about, that doesn't mean you put everything in air quotes, right?
Are you skeptical of like me?
I mean, do you think that I strive to tell the truth and all that?
Yes. Okay, so then why is my shit in air quotes?
That's what, because when you're talking to me about my rational arguments about morality, like my stuff's in air quotes.
And that's, I guess, where I find, I'm not offended or anything.
I'm just kind of curious as to why, if you think I tell the truth, you'd put my perspectives in air quotes.
I guess I wasn't intending to.
Yeah. No, no, but you say that you're a cynic.
So you know that you have that tendency, right?
Yes. Okay. So why do you want to put my stuff in air quotes if you claim that I'm a truth teller?
Or another way of asking this, since I know this is a tough way to put it, is...
What if you didn't put my stuff in air quotes?
What if I was a genuinely decent moral person trying to do good in the world?
What would that cost you to not put my stuff in air quotes?
Honestly, Honestly, I think I was just too busy filing through my mental filing cabinet to properly articulate my words.
Okay.
So are you bailing out of the conversation here because you're giving me a non-answering?
No, no. I'm not quite connecting what you mean by air quotes and what I was trying to say.
Well, it means that when you talked to me, and you'll listen to this.
You'll hear this when you listen back to it, Frederick.
Yes. When you were talking to me, it's like you come up with rational arguments about morality, and it's all very emotionally distant and disrespectful, not to me, but to your own sense of judgment, right?
If you listen to me, then I assume it's because you think I have important and valuable things to say.
And so when you talk to me, if you put what I have to say or my arguments in this kind of emotionally distant air quote stuff, I don't quite understand why you would do that, if that makes sense.
Yes. I was trying to...
Because so often morality is very emotionally charged with most people.
And you've managed to present it in a way that is...
Clear and concise and doesn't have all the emotional baggage attached to it.
Right. So why air quotes when you're describing my position?
I was not trying to do air quotes.
I know. I get that. I get that.
Yes. Do you get any sense that I might be correct about your distancing and diminishment of my perspective?
What you're saying makes sense.
I think mostly the fault is mine in that...
I didn't say fault. I think it's a habit.
I don't think you were trying to do anything mean.
I don't think you were trying to do anything disrespectful.
I'm certainly not offended. But I still notice, right?
I still notice. So what happens if you're not cynical with me?
That was the purpose in calling is...
No, no. Just answer the question.
Don't keep jumping out to frame it.
Just answer the question. Or don't.
I mean, but tell me you're not going to.
What happens if you're not cynical with me?
I mean, I know. I'm just wondering if you know.
I don't know.
Payne. Okay.
Payne. Because what if you do have great gifts?
What if you're in a cowardly way backing off from the necessary gifts that you could give to the world?
What if you could help make people happy?
What if you could help make the world a better place?
What if you're kind of chickening out?
What if you're squandering the gifts that you've been given?
What if you're consuming The courage, the moral courage of those who came before you who built a free society without adding anything to it and in fact detracting from it.
What if? I'm not saying that's true, but you got to be thinking that at some level, right?
Well, I think that's entirely correct.
All right. How are you going to feel going forward, Frederick, if you continue To be distant.
To air quote things.
To be cynical. And to achieve nothing.
Of substance. Where do you see yourself at the age of 40 or 50 or 60?
More or less the same place I am now.
That's not correct. Life is always change.
You understand? You're either going to change for the better or you're going to change for the worse.
But change you will. And it ain't going to be a change for the better if you continue, right?
Yes. Do you think anyone can love a coward?
No. Do you think a coward can love himself?
Not really. So, if it's true that you have this concern about being a coward, you understand the price that you're paying for this perspective is...
No self-respect, no love, and a growing sense of futility, depression, anxiety, emptiness, which you will feel very tempted and probably will succumb to the temptation of spreading.
You see, everything that we decide, we universalize, whether we like it or not.
So if you back down from necessary challenges, do you know what you say?
Well, there's no such thing as truth, really.
All morality is a con.
Everyone's just trying to rip you off.
And I'm a wise and smart and sensible person for not playing the game.
You spread it. You spread it.
Everybody spreads, whoever they are.
We're like a dollop of batter when you're making pancakes.
It just, bloop, spreads.
And smokes. Everyone spreads, right?
So if you're making these choices, I spread it.
I spread what I have committed to.
And if you've committed to non-commitment, you're going to spread that as a wise move and you're going to infect other people with that very perspective, just as you tried to infect me earlier in the conversation by inviting me to a cynical distance from my own position by putting everything I do in air quotes.
Fair enough. So who taught you that power was either abusive or impossible?
who taught you that commitment was only for the crazy or the bad um nobody that I'm aware of When did you first have this cynicism or this distance?
As soon as I became responsible for things.
What age was that?
Well, it's hard to pinpoint because it's something that ramps up over time.
When you first have to start doing chores, it's a very small amount of responsibility.
As you go through life, it grows bigger and bigger.
The best way to breed cynicism, Frederick, is for someone to have power over you who's a rank hypocrite.
Cynicism is then the defense against manipulation.
Does that make any sense to you?
Yes. So in your Adverse Childhood Experience score, you said that you had a household member who was depressed, mentally ill, or a suicide attempt.
And who was that? Both my mother, my younger sister, and myself were all diagnosed with depression at some point.
I'm going to assume your mother first.
Yes.
Why do you think your mother was depressed?
I've never tried to articulate it into words.
Thank you.
I'm not sure. Why do you think?
if you had to give an answer.
That she felt like she wasn't doing as much as she could be doing?
I'm sure that's completely unrelated to your experience though, right?
I'm sure it is perfectly related to my experience.
Of course it is.
Do you think that your mother had abilities that she backed away from?
No, I think she was fairly accomplished.
Accomplished. Perhaps not in her hobbies, but she was definitely on top of things as far as the necessaries.
You know, work, taking care of the kids, getting us fed and clothed and all that fun stuff.
Fed and clothed and all of that fun stuff.
You see, this is constant with you.
Even that's kind of snarky and cynical, right?
It's not intended to be.
No, I'm not. Again, I'm not blaming.
I'm just pointing it out, right? If you hit a high note, I'll say you hit a high note, right?
But was she a good person?
A moral person? Yes.
How do you know? I can't think of any examples of things that I would consider being a bad person.
Dude. Dude.
Really? Because you were very convinced that she was a good person.
I'm not saying she's not, but you know, I'm an empiricist.
I want evidence, right? So when you say that your mother was a good person, and I ask you how you know, and then you say, well, I can't think she didn't kick hobos to death.
Like, you know what I mean? She didn't steal.
She didn't run a Ponzi scheme.
She didn't work for the Federal Reserve.
Like, I mean, how do you know she was a good person?
I have trouble going through memories because my memory is very associative.
So when somebody gives me an abstract and says, you know, present examples of this from your past, the examples aren't anchored to the idea they're anchored to.
All right. I don't know what any of that means.
So let me just ask you some more basic questions.
All right. Did she hit her children?
No. Did she yell at her children?
Very rarely.
Did she ever call you names?
Nope. Did she teach you how to think for yourself?
Not in so many words.
Well, what? Hand gestures?
Mime? Colors? Unicorn calls?
I don't know what that means. It means I feel as if...
Thinking for myself was...
I'm not sure how anything she did would directly connect to me thinking for myself.
If I were to break it down further, I might be able to come up with some things, but nothing is coming to me at the top of my mind.
Let me ask you this then, Frederick.
Did she know that you were cynical as a child?
Yes. And what did she do to help you deal with your cynicism?
I don't think she knew what to do.
What do you mean she didn't know what to do?
I mean, I'll give you an example.
So my daughter is a bit of a perfectionist.
Yep. So it is difficult for her when she can't do something that she thinks she should be able to do.
She has a very uneasy relationship with that.
And I'm not just going to say, you'll be able to do it, or it's no big deal.
Like, you have to engage with your kids.
I don't know exactly what the answer is for her.
But I think it's important that I recognize and talk about these things with her to make sure that she neither backs away from challenges nor gets too upset to be able to complete them positively or have a positive relationship with them.
And I struggle with some of these things myself, so it's something I know and it's something that I talk about because I care, right?
So if your mother knew that you were cynical and knew that you were emotionally distant or knew that you were overly skeptical even to genuine virtue, that's something you'd want to help your child with, right?
Yes. Because now you're 34 and you're somewhat frustrated at not having achieved stuff, right?
Which is related to the cynicism and the emotional distance and the air quotes and all this stuff, right?
So, if your mother knew that you had this challenge, why wouldn't she say, I mean, nobody has to have some big magic answer.
You just stay in conversation about it.
She knows that you're cynical. And you say, oh, well, when did the cynicism come about?
Or what do you feel when you feel cynical?
And do you know anyone who's not cynical?
How did they make you feel? And all that kind of stuff, right?
I mean, it's – excuse me.
It's just basic parenting, right?
I mean, just – or friendship or caring about someone is talk about things that matter, right?
Yes.
So what did your mother do to help you with your cynicism?
You can say no, because if she had done it, you'd remember it.
And if it was just once, you'd remember even more vividly.
And if you don't remember it at all, it means she didn't, right?
Yes. How long did you live at home for?
Till I was 24.
Yeah, so she has a quarter of a century.
Minus a couple of years from when you're very little.
Let's just say 20 years.
Let's say 15 years. Doesn't really matter to me.
But she's got year after year after year of knowing something about you that's difficult for you without talking to you about it.
I never know what the hell people talk about, Frederick.
Yeah.
I mean, I hear this story all the time.
You've heard it before on these shows.
It's not personal to you.
I was home for twenty years.
I dealt with this crippling issue and no one ever talked to me about anything.
Why? TV was too good?
Candy crush level too enticing?
Like how on earth do you live with people year after year after year and not talk about a single goddamn important thing?
Or connect with anyone about anything real.
Or notice and act on the fact that people have challenges or issues.
It just blows my mind.
What is everyone doing with their time?
We have the flappy mouth hole with teeth, tongue, and voice.
And we have the two side flaps with ears that we can hear.
Use them, people.
Talk to each other.
What about your dad? He was a long-haul trucker, so I saw him...
infrequently growing up.
And he I think part of I think both of my parents were I don't know if afraid is the right word but they seemed very convinced that I was smarter than they were.
And so I just kind of got the feeling that they didn't really know what to do.
Hmm. Well, did they try?
Did they pick up a book called So You Think Your Child is Smarter Than You?
Or So You Have a Gifted Child?
I mean, did they try anything?
Yeah, my mom did. My mom did read books.
Books along those lines and tried to get me involved in, like, our atrocious public school did have some sort of gifted program thing That I was involved in in grade school.
Once it transitioned to middle and high school, instead of having the class for the gifted kids, they would just shove all of those into the AP courses, which was basically the same as everyone else, just with more work and a big test you had to take.
Oh, yeah. No, it's a huge problem with a diverse society that you're going to get more East Asians and more white kids in the gifted class.
So guess what? You can't have any gifted classes anymore because it's racist.
Meanwhile, China is investing in every genius they can lay their hands on.
Huh! I wonder how that's going to play out in the world today.
Well, the math classes were the worst because there they just skipped you ahead of years.
So you were in class with all of the, you know, ninth graders who were a year behind.
Oh, right. On the tail end of the dullards ahead of you, right?
Pretty much. Right.
And what happened with your sister?
She's always just had issues with depression.
From teenager till today, Do you think that when your mom read the book on, okay, so you have smarter kids, do you think that those books said, make sure you spend 24 years not talking about anything related to their personalities?
I have no idea what would be in those books.
We have some idea, don't we?
I can guarantee you that none of those books said, so you have a really gifted child.
Try and speak about the least important things for two and a half decades.
Small talk, nothing talk, useless talk.
None of that would have happened, right?
Well, I think I tended to do most of the talking because I would get interested in something and would just talk nonstop about it.
And what happened from there?
I mean, nothing specific.
She would...
I don't know that she would ever ask any questions necessarily, but if there was something I was interested in, she'd take me to the library and Help me get all of the books on that topic that I wanted.
Which you could have easily done for yourself.
When was the last time you were excited or passionate about things the way that you were as a kid?
It tends to happen frequently, but it tends to be very short-lived.
Like, I'll come across something that I find interesting and will Go a little obsessive-compulsive on it for, you know, a week or two weeks and then just be back to zero.
My God, man. Do you listen to yourself at all?
You are characterizing your interest in something as a form of mental illness and insanity.
It kind of feels that way sometimes.
Just because of how fleeting it is.
Wait, you think obsessive compulsive disorder is fleeting?
No. So what are you talking about?
The whole point of obsessive compulsive disorder is you can't stop!
Can't stop washing your hands 500 times a day, day after day, week after week, year after year.
Why would you characterize your level of interest in something as a massive, life-destroying mental dysfunction?
Because when I'm in the midst, it does kind of feel that way sometimes.
Like I can't do anything else.
That's called enthusiasm!
Why is that mental illness to you?
Because it just burns itself out.
Well, of course it burns itself out because you keep calling it crazy!
It's mental illness.
It's obsessive compulsive disorder.
Hey, enthusiasm, where are you going?
Stomp, stomp, squish, squish, pee, pee.
Of course it goes away.
Is it welcome? Apparently not.
You verbally abuse your own damn enthusiasm, man.
I don't know why I can't maintain my enthusiasm.
Well, maybe you should stop punching it.
Yeah, it's...
Oh, God, man.
I have a tough time not beating up on myself.
And where did you learn that from?
We're not born that way.
I'm sure part of it is being told throughout my entire childhood that I have so much potential to
So when I would, you know, not do what I was supposed to, that was very disappointing.
And who tells you that you had so much potential?
Sometimes my parents, but mostly like teachers and school counselors and stuff.
Right. And in what fields or in what disciplines, Frederick, did you have the most potential according to your teachers?
In school, all of them.
All through grade school, I did very well in pretty much everything.
And then when I got to middle school, I found out I had a great deal of difficulty organizing my thoughts along the lines of a paper.
I can't remember the exact type of paper where you spell out a position and defend it and intro conclusion and all of that.
Like an essay? Yeah.
Yes. All right.
So you had it easy and then you had a challenge, right?
Yes. Something that didn't come easy.
Yes. And what happened then?
I was more stubborn than everyone else.
When it wasn't easy for you but you had to work for it, what happened?
I was more stubborn than everyone else.
I don't know what that means.
If somebody tries to get me to do something I don't want to do, I will dig in my heels and not budge.
Oh, I know. But what's interesting is that you call your enthusiasm obsessive-compulsive disorder and you call not taking coaching admirable stubbornness.
Like you've got it entirely backwards.
Quite right. So when someone says, here, I'm going to help you learn how to do this, and you're like, I don't want to know, I don't want to hear, like, would you just say no?
Are you uncoachable?
Nobody has anything to offer you, nobody has anything to teach you, nobody has anything value to bring to the table to you?
No, there are things that I'm interested in that I'll become involved in.
No, no, but that's you driving it.
Yeah.
You had essays that you had real trouble writing.
Did people, I mean, I assume people tried to help you, correct you, coach you, something, right?
You could have gone to the library, you could have learned how to write essays, you could have read the best essays around you, all the things, right?
Mm-hmm.
And what did you do?
Made a half-assed attempt.
Why?
Why did you back away from that challenge?
I'm not sure.
Well, I'm asking you now.
Look, I'm a smart guy. I'm a smart guy.
There's stuff in school I found really, really tough.
Really tough. I still remember a friend of mine helping me who was better at math than I was grinding through algebraic division.
I got so tired of scraping by in math class that I decided to spend part of my summer retaking the math that year so at least I wouldn't be so not like always playing Mr.
Catch-up. Going forward, right?
And when I was doing my master's, I had to learn how to translate French.
I don't like that.
I don't like that at all.
But I worked at it and found a way that I could do it.
I mean, it sucks. There's lots of stuff that doesn't come easy for me.
And are you gonna let that stop you in life?
I don't see how that would benefit anyone.
Well, obviously, it benefits someone in your life.
Otherwise, you wouldn't be doing it.
But yeah.
Who are you that you never have to work?
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm sorry, what was that? Who are you that you never have to work?
Like that if it doesn't come easy, you just don't have to do it.
You just avoid it. You resentfully just pull away from it.
Do you think that everything should come easy for you?
That everything should be effortless?
That like, the moment that something difficult comes up, you just you get stubborn and resentful and no one can tell you what to do.
Well, that's not always the case.
Don't tell me you've got an issue and then say, well, a few times in my life I did.
Come on, right? I'm not wasting my time if you're going to 1% me.
No, you're correct.
Okay, so let's stay with this.
See, here, this is exactly right.
I'm asking you some difficult questions and what are you doing?
You're trying to beam out. You're trying to fog me.
You're trying to 1% me.
Well, 1% of the time I know a tall Chinese guy, right?
Yes. Why?
What's wrong with something being difficult?
You're a smart guy.
What's wrong with something being difficult?
Nothing. Now you're just avoiding me again.
You're giving me a fuck you here, right?
Because you said that when things are difficult, you gave me the example, when things are difficult, you dig in your heels, you don't take coaching, you avoid, you just do a half-assed effort, right?
So then I ask you, what's wrong with things being difficult?
and you say nothing, after you've just spent 15 minutes explaining to me how you avoid doing things that are difficult.
Because I'm not going to do the work of two people here.
Right. You can participate with me in the conversation or I got lots of people who want to chat.
I'm not threatening you.
I'm just saying that I'm not going to work both sides of the convo here.
It's about as much fun as playing table tennis against yourself by running around the table tennis table until you crack yourself in the hip.
I'm honestly struggling to keep up with The conversation.
Well, maybe you're not as smart as you think you are then.
Good. Then you don't have to worry about this big achievement that you could have, right?
I mean, if I'm not smart, then...
No, no. I didn't say you weren't smart.
What did I say? Interesting that you'd flip that though.
What did I say? You'd have to repeat it.
See? Now, it's not that you're not smart.
It's that you don't want to listen. What I said was maybe you're not as smart as you think you are.
Not that you're not smart. Okay.
Yes. Okay.
Because right now you're going rubber bones, right?
So we're having a challenging conversation and just like when you're having trouble with the essay as a kid...
You're just doing a half-assed attempt and all of that.
So my suggestion, Frederick, is look into that.
I mean, I get we're not going to get anywhere today other than, okay, so here's a challenge and you go rubber bones.
And the question is, why do you go rubber bones?
You know, like that when you're a kid and somebody tries to pick you up and you just go completely limp?
Right. So yeah, the question is then, why do you go rubber bones when you hit a challenge?
Well, because you have an ego based upon success.
You have an ego based upon being smart, things coming easy, and succeeding relatively easily at what you're trying to do.
That's your identity. And then, when you come across something that's hard to do, that threatens your identity, and rather than readjust your identity to include things that are difficult and the pride that comes from mastering difficult things, what do you do?
You dig in, you fog out, you rubber bone, you passive aggressive, you just manipulate your way out of the situation, right?
Mm-hmm. That's a choice.
But, I mean, you can do anything you want in your life.
Just be aware of it, right?
Just say, okay, well, I've got a pretty fragile ego.
I like to pretend that I'm really smart and everything comes easy.
And the price of that, the price I pay for that, is that I never take on any challenges in my life, which leaves me fundamentally dissatisfied.
Okay, well, these are all choices.
Do what you want, but know what you're doing.
That's sort of my particular philosophy.
And it's a shame that your parents...
Didn't help you over that pretty significant hump when you were a kid and you faced your first big challenge in essays and you just kind of folded and everyone was like, well, okay.
I mean, it's a shame. It's a shame.
I would not say it was a...
They did try.
They tried to help you learn how to write an essay?
Yes. My mother did put in a lot of effort to try to get me to be successful.
Right. Which is a double-edged sword, right?
The more effort she puts in, sometimes the less effort you put in, right?
Right. Because she's trying to will you to do something, and if you have a certain kind of personality and or choice, You resist being told what to do, even if it's the right thing to do, right?
Exactly. You put being right above being happy.
Yes. And the teachers at ISUM also tried to help you.
Yes. And you kinda shit on everyone who tried to help you, right?
Yes. It was a very shitty thing to do.
So why? But why?
Why would you do that? Forget the blame or, oh, it was wrong.
I'm just genuinely curious, like, why are you facing a challenge?
People are trying to help.
Maybe badly, maybe well, I don't know.
Doesn't hugely matter, but they're trying to help.
So why would you spurn them and turn in this half-assed nothing essay?
The first thing that pops into my head is that I could.
Yeah, it's not much though, because you could also have learned and learned how to write better essays and gotten the genuine pride out of overcoming something that's difficult.
You know, doing something that's easy, it's not going to give you a lot of pride.
Hey, look, I can climb stairs holding a glass of water.
Champion of the universe, right?
Doing something that's difficult, that's going to give you some real pride.
So, saying, well, I said no because I could, well, you could have said yes.
I mean, that's something you could have done as well, so I'm not sure that answers much.
Agreed. I think a big part of it is just that if I do this and do it well, then... The expectations are going to increase, whereas if I do it poorly, then the expectations stay the same.
But that is circular, because of course the expectations are going to increase.
You want that, at least if you don't want to become bored and dissatisfied in your life.
Again, nobody sits their whole life learning how to play piano by getting chopsticks right.
So, it's not that expectations would increase.
First of all, you want that over time.
And secondly, there's nothing wrong with expectations increasing if you have confidence that with work and dedication you can rise to meet those expectations, right?
There's nothing wrong with expectations rising if you understand that Continuing to take grade 5 over and over again for the next 40 years and calling yourself a genius for getting the material right is not a path to happiness.
And also if the expectations rise and you're like, good!
I can work, I can achieve, I'll gain more self-respect from the next set of challenges.
So what's wrong with the expectations increasing?
Um... There's nothing wrong.
I just don't want them to.
Would you like the answer, Frederick?
Yes. Now, I'm fully aware that you're putting me into a position where to keep the show going, I have to give you the answer rather than have you work for it.
So I'm fully aware that you're putting me into exactly the same situation as the people in your past.
I'm aware of that.
The answer is that you are really fucking pissed off with someone.
Well, if that person is me, what's the best thing to do about that?
No, the person is not you, because you're the one who's suffering.
If you decide not to learn how to write an essay, who suffers?
If I decide I'm, well, I'm not going to learn how to translate French for my master's degree, who suffers?
The school continues.
My teachers continue. They get paid.
I just don't get my master's, right?
Right. So it can't be that you're mad at yourself because you're the one who's suffering.
You're willing to harm yourself in order to thwart the happiness of someone else.
Now my guess would be that your mother had significant ego investment in you being smart or you being successful or you doing well and you were mad at that because it wasn't about you but just your abilities and you were thwarting that in her.
It's a possibility. That doesn't strike me as true.
I could be projecting. Like I remember when I was in grade 8, I took an adult computer science class at a local college.
And it was about how to read and write disc sectors on five and a quarter inch floppies.
Boring as hell. So I sat in the back and I programmed computer games because I was bored.
My mother kept introducing me as, here's my son.
He's taking adult computer science courses and blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
Now, I never got the credit because I never did the work and didn't show up for the exam because I didn't care one tiny little bit about reading and writing bytes to sectors on a five and a quarter inch floppy disk.
And eventually, because she wanted me to keep taking the next course, and I was like, no, I'll get around to it.
And I finally had to say, no, I didn't.
It was a stupid course. It was not for a little kid.
And, you know, I didn't do it.
I can't take the next course. Now, that wasn't, I wasn't just because it was my mom or anything like that.
But I, yeah, so it could be that it's something.
To do with that, it could be something to do with something else.
But you backing down from a challenge, your teachers still get their retirement, they still get their pension, they still get paid, they still get their healthcare, they still get their summers off.
It's you who gets stalled, right?
You pay. You pay.
So why are you willing to self-sabotage?
It's not because you hate yourself.
The consequence of self-sabotage is hating yourself, it's not the cause.
It's because you're mad at someone else.
Were you mad at your dad for being gone all the time?
No. Well, that's where I would look if I were you, somewhere around that, because it's a very aggressive thing.
When you're a kid, and this is true for most people who are adults too, the emotions we recreate in others are usually the emotions we cannot accept in ourselves.
So you're really frustrated in your life, so you're trying to frustrate me.
It's unconscious and all of that, right?
Yes. And you go rubber bones when you're a kid, so you go rubber bones with me.
And what that produces, if I didn't have self-knowledge, would be frustration and anger, right?
And in your teachers, you produce frustration and anger because they're saying, hey, no, ma'am, we'll help you learn how to write an essay.
And your mom's like, oh, I got a book out.
We can help you learn how to write an essay.
And you're like, fine, you can try.
But fuck you anyway, right?
Yes. Okay, so that means that you have a lot of frustration and anger that you're not communicating or not able to communicate or no one's curious about.
And because you can't express it, you end up recreating it in other people.
I can't imagine who that would be.
You said you didn't care that your dad or you didn't really matter to you that your dad wasn't around.
I got to see him regularly and in the summers I'd go with him.
You'd go with him in the truck?
Yeah. And how was that?
It was fun.
It was kind of a little adventure.
Was there any other teacher or adults that you had any challenges with?
I know I did not get along with my fifth grade teacher.
My mother did not like her either.
Why? The only thing I can remember is just that she was mean.
What are you feeling at the moment, Frederick, in this conversation as we talk?
Completely ill-equipped to keep up.
That's not a feeling.
Curious, fascinated, None of those are feelings. Nothing?
You feel nothing. That's the only thing I'm feeling right now is nothing.
I don't know if you get, this is kind of like a once-in-a-lifetime conversation, right?
About your history, about your potential, about your future, about your happiness, about your cynicism, about your capacity to love and be loved.
Unless you have these every week, which I don't think you do.
This is kind of a once-in-a-lifetime chat, isn't it?
Yes. Right.
So you feel nothing.
That's sad, I think.
It's sad for me.
Yes, that is sad.
I know before the call I was feeling super excited and elated and worried I was going to totally fanboy getting to talk to you.
But at the moment, I don't really feel anything.
Was there any time in our chat that you felt something?
Mostly just overwhelmed.
Is that fear? What do you mean by overwhelmed, as far as feeling goes?
Like, bad, sad, bad, glad, scared, you know, whatever it is, right?
But it's not, like, we tend to overcomplicate our feelings.
Yeah, it's, you're just...
Very insightful and intellectually I can't keep up with everything that's going on.
I'm not asking for your intellect.
Like we're not having a discussion about abstract philosophy here.
I'm asking for you, for your feelings, experiences, right?
I'm not asking for your intellect.
We're not having an intellectual discussion.
I guess I just view my entire history just through a very analytical series of events.
Which hasn't worked for you, right?
No. So why would you want to do something that doesn't work?
I don't know how else to shuffle through my memory.
Right.
How's your dating life?
Yeah.
I'm married. How long have you been married for?
Ten years and a month.
And you have kids? Two.
Congratulations. Thank you.
What's your wife's biggest complaint if she has one?
That I'm not there enough.
You mean like emotionally or physically?
I think both. I tend to not ever be in a hurry to get home.
Partially because I stay in the morning to get the kids on the bus and everything.
So even if I left on time, the younger would already be in bed What do you do?
I am the IT department and accounting assistant at a small company.
Right.
Why don't you want to go home as much?
Um, because, uh, my, my wife tends not to be very interested in, in talking about ideas and, um, in talking about ideas and, um,
She's very bought into the sort of feminist frame of how the world works, and so if I try to bring up anything counter to that, it goes not well.
Was she a feminist when you met?
No, I wouldn't even necessarily say she is one now.
It's just a lot of the wage gap and the sorts of things people who don't identify as feminists still think are true.
Does she work?
She works part-time.
So you pay most of the bills?
No, actually we live with another couple.
So I pay less than 50%, more than 30%.
You live with another couple?
What does that mean? Yes. We have a household of four adults and two children.
Why do you live with another couple, Frederick?
Because we all wanted to live in the same house.
Okay. Why do you all want to live in the same house?
We originally considered ourselves all one big family, but I unfortunately am the black sheep.
Wait, what do you mean? Everyone sleeping together?
No. The three of them...
Don't have super high libidos, so that's sort of a non-issue.
Wait, but if they did have high libidos, you'd be sleeping together?
If everyone was cool with it.
Okay. And how did you meet this couple?
We've all been friends.
My wife and the other woman were friends all through high school and same with me and the other husband.
Me and my wife were also friends with the other husband in high school and we used to all hang out.
But have you guys been monogamous within the household on principle, or is it just this low libido thing?
It's just the low libido thing.
I have permission to go and do other things if I should so choose to do so.
Oh, so you have an open marriage?
Yes. Right. And is it specific to the couple who lives with you, or is it other people as well?
Other people as well.
It hasn't really gone anywhere, though.
What do you mean it hasn't really gone anywhere?
It's kind of foggy. I'm not going around sleeping with a bunch of people.
Have you slept with other people since you got married?
Yes. Okay. How many?
Two. And does your wife sleep with other people?
She has a boyfriend.
I don't ask regularly for details.
Really? Yes.
Do you think the kids are yours?
Yes. How do you know?
The one we had before...
When it was just the two of us and we were monogamous.
And the second one is biologically the other partners.
Wait, one of your kids is the other man's in the household?
Yes. So...
I guess that's one of the things that ties you all together, right?
Yeah. How did this come about?
It just sort of happened.
No, no, no, no. Don't rubber bone me on that.
Come on, man. Come on, man.
Hey, oops, tripped and fell into my friend's wife's vagina.
Well, you know, sometimes there's fish on the floor, you slip, you know.
That's the most straightforward explanation because the details of it's the other male who was a friend of mine from high school moved in with us when it was just me and I and there had been Feelings between the two of them in high school,
but they never really did anything with it, and I didn't have an issue with it.
Wait, you didn't have an issue with a guy your wife was hot for moving in and putting the moves on your wife?
Correct. I don't excuse romantic jealousy.
Why would you not have an issue with that?
As long as it's As long as they're having fun, it doesn't bother me.
Whatever that biological button is, mine doesn't work.
I don't feel romantic jealousy.
Has your wife had sex with her boyfriend with you in the house?
No, because we don't...
Because that would be weird. No, well, we don't ever bring partners to the house.
Well, you do bring partners' children into the house, so...
Yes, but we were already considered ourselves a single family at that point.
And your wife...
Wants to sleep with her boyfriend.
Does she sleep with you at all still or no?
Not since the whole anti-feminist thing.
That kind of...
Oh, so when you question some of her feminist indoctrination, she stops sleeping with you but continues to have sex with her boyfriend?
I don't remember the exact order of events, but the things between her and I had sort of cooled off over time.
Like, she, and I don't actually know if she and her boyfriend have had sex.
They might just, you know, cuddle and watch movies.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, they've had sex.
Come on. They probably have.
Come on. They probably have.
Cuddle and watch movies.
However, she is of the opinion that she would rather just, you know, masturbate than to have sex.
Yeah. That's very empowered of her, I suppose.
She just finds it to be less work, even if I'm doing most of the work.
she's just, for whatever reason, she would rather masturbate than have sex.
Hmm.
When was the last time you felt emotionally close to your wife?
I Love my family to death and do whatever I can to provide and protect.
Do you even know when you're not answering the question?
I'm just curious. Halfway through what you're saying, you say, I'm going to get him.
I'm not going to answer the question.
I'm just getting Hallmark card generalities with squishy lips sticking out from every corner.
I don't notice.
When was the last time you felt emotionally close to your wife, if ever?
I can't recall a specific instance.
Were you ever, do you think, emotionally close to your wife?
Have you been emotionally close to anyone?
I don't know.
That's a no. You can't miss it.
It's like saying, have you ever been in a car that rolled over?
Not sure. You kind of remember.
Right? Yes.
Why did you marry her?
It's going to sound kind of silly, but I knew it was what was supposed to happen.
I realize it's a completely irrational belief.
Do you mean like a mystical thing? Like it was fated?
Yes. Basically, yeah.
Well, that's the price of not working on your essays now, isn't it?
Complete indifference as to how your will can affect your world, right?
Are you a determinist?
No, I operate on the presumption of free will.
No.
But you married out of a deterministic kind of commitment, right?
That statement appears true.
It doesn't feel quite right.
Do your kids know that they're half siblings?
What's the porous there?
I feel like I've got to put everything through nine layers of your legal department or something.
What do you mean? It's kind of yes or no, right?
Have you told them? I guess that's about it.
Have you told them that they're half siblings?
That they have different dads?
I'm struggling to try to recall the exact details.
Oh my god, Frederick, come on.
You can't forget that.
Has anyone told them that they have two different fathers?
Or do they call you dad and the other guy not dad?
No, they call me papa and they call him daddy.
Okay, so do they know that they come from different fathers?
I mean, if they're one and two years old, I get it, they're kind of young, but I'm just curious.
Ten and five. Okay.
Does the ten-year-old know that he has a different father from the five-year-old?
I think so.
I'm 99.9% sure.
Did you ever tell him?
No.
Why not?
Thank you.
According to you, there's nothing wrong with it, right?
So why wouldn't you tell him? It was never a, like, part of the conversation?
No, don't fucking do that to me.
No, come on. Take some fucking ownership here.
What do you mean it was never part of the conversation?
Like, he's just supposed to bring it up?
Well, no. Come on.
Have you ever told him you said no?
So has anyone ever told him?
Otherwise, how would he know?
I.
Why wouldn't you tell him?
He's got to know sometime, right?
He's got medical history.
He's got biology he's got to work with.
He would probably want to know who his biological father is.
He's got to know sometime, right?
Well, I have not specifically told him, but he does know because everyone in the household knows that the younger is of the other male.
You mean everyone in the household So you assume the boy knows through osmosis?
What do you mean?
How would he know unless he's told?
I'm pretty sure the other wife has told him.
But I don't understand.
Don't you all talk about this stuff?
I mean, don't the adults sit down after the kids go to bed and say, eaty, meeny, miny, moe, catch a tigger, bye.
Oh, you get to tell him. He's got to know.
When's he got to know? When are we going to tell the five-year-old?
We got a non-traditional situation here that has significant implications for everyone involved, including the children who damn well didn't choose to have two different fathers living in the same household.
Nobody's talking about this.
Nobody's making any decisions.
What the hell's going on? I don't think it was ever implicated that the younger was mine.
What now? Nobody knows the younger is yours?
No, it was never presupposed that the younger was mine within the household.
I don't know what this means.
I don't know what it means.
There was never a time, if I'm remembering this correctly, when my wife got pregnant with the second one, it wasn't a secret who the dad was.
Which is you? No.
So you're the ten-year-old's father, the five-year-old is the other ones?
Yes. So are you saying that everyone knew that the five-year-old was not yours?
Yes.
And how did they know?
Because that's who the dad is.
Yes.
So that's the five-year-old has had it introduced that Frederick is not your father.
He's daddy-ish, but this other guy is your dad.
Don't call me dad because that's your dad over there.
Well, in that regard, no.
It's he's daddy, I'm papa, my wife is mommy, and the other wife is mama.
So it's completely unclear to the baby then, right?
Or to the five-year-old. To the five-year-old, yes.
To the 10-year-old, maybe.
I'm...
I'm pretty sure...
I'm pretty sure they're...
Was a discussion.
I don't trust my own memory very well.
I don't know if you even know how dissociated you are.
Do you think you've made things easier or tougher for the kids in the household?
You adults.
And by the way, that was in air quotes.
Tougher. Right.
Why are you making it tougher for the kids?
No good reason.
in.
So they can take comfort in knowing that they've been kind of screwed over, but at least it was for no good reason.
So do I justify it in my own mind or, you know, accept that it was a poor decision?
What was a poor decision?
to having a blended family. - Was it a poor decision for you?
I think on the whole, it has worked out for the positive.
How can you say that?
Your wife's fucking another guy.
You're not getting any sex.
The kids don't even know whether they're related or not and how much they're related.
They're calling a whole bunch of people mom and dad with no idea who the biology is.
Come on. Are you putting this as a poster of successful human interaction here?
No. Okay.
So tell me where the success is here.
I'm open.
Make the case.
Thank you.
I mean, for your wife, sex is like you facing an essay question as a kid.
I'd rather just flake out.
I'd rather just, you know. Yes.
Um... Financially, we are better off as a blended family than we would be as two separate households.
Well, that's a hypothesis.
You don't know that for sure.
True. Because you've got no null hypothesis, right?
No comparison. Yes.
I'm supposing what it could be compared to.
I mean, if You and your wife were close and having great sex and she was supporting everything you did and you weren't dissociated and like who knows where your career could go, right?
You say you're an assistant, right?
I'm the IT department and the accounting assistant.
It's a very small company. So you're an assistant in a small company?
Yes. Not exactly climbing Mount Vesuvius of career excellence, right?
Correct. Right. So who knows where you could be if you didn't have this messed up cluster frack of a genetic frisbee game going on at home, right?
Yes. If you were happy in your marriage and your wife loved you and supported you and you were close and your kids knew who the hell the sperm came from.
Correct.
And is that the price?
Say, well, my wife can screw other men if it benefits me financially.
Well, at the current point, it's not financially benefiting me, but it is definitely financially benefiting the children.
We recently had a renegotiation of the financial arrangement.
It used to be that Everything would go into the family pot and each of the adults got $150 a month to spend on whatever they wanted and all of the rest of it was for bills and the adults sit down and discuss what to do with any extra.
But I recently renegotiated my position so that I could have a bit more Financial freedom to do what I want.
Because originally it would be like, for example, if there was something wrong with my car that I knew I could fix myself, it didn't really make sense for me to spend an entire weekend fixing it myself when the repairs would just come out of the family pot.
Whereas the renegotiated position is I'm I pay my share of the bills, of the household bills, and then any expenses that pertain only to me, I pay out of what I make.
So you tried socializing wombs and wallets and it didn't really work out, right?
It didn't work out for me.
Everybody else is still happy with the arrangement.
So they're happy exploiting you.
But you're one big happy family.
No, I consider the renegotiated position to be fair.
But they were happy until you renegotiated it.
I was happy too until I got a big bonus at work that I wanted to keep.
So you want to keep your big bonus at work, just not your wife.
That's where your possession is.
Kicks in. Share the wife's vagina, share the wife's eggs, share the wife's ovary and womb and fallopian tubes and all that.
That you can share.
But the money?
Oh man, that's too far.
That is too far.
I can cuck and have my wife bang some other guy.
He can even be the father of her children.
Or her child. That's fine.
But when it comes to 250 bucks, man's got to draw a line somewhere.
I realize it doesn't make any difference, but it was significantly more than 250 bucks.
I said that in part so you would say that.
Because the fact that you feel the need to correct me on the number is part of the problem.
True. I did walk into that one.
Yeah. How does this go down in the neighborhood?
Does everyone know? No.
From the outside, we're just two married couples living together.
So nobody knows?
No. Why?
It's not a very tight-knit neighborhood.
Everyone just does their own thing.
Well, you don't have any friends in the neighborhood?
The kids do, but the adults mostly just stick to themselves.
So, does anyone know that the kids are two different dads and the two dads live in the home and the wives are handed out a little bit like Halloween candy?
I mean, does anybody know this stuff?
Not in the neighborhood.
Who knows? Your parents?
Yes. All of the parents know.
What do they say?
Mostly that it's really weird.
It doesn't help that...
For the two sets of grandparents...
This is, well, no, this would be the second grandchild for one of them.
You know, there was, sorry, go ahead.
Well, there was a time where the five-year-old was the first grandchild to one set of grandparents.
I wonder how the boomers feel about their addiction to relativism now.
Now, let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this.
Do you think if your wife loved you enough, she wouldn't want to share you?
Like, you know how you love that bonus so much that you didn't want to share it?
Do you think that if your wife loved you that much, she wouldn't want to share you?
Possibly, possibly not.
That's not an answer. You didn't want to share the bonus, right?
I preferred not to.
Why are you redefining me, dude?
What the fuck are you doing? Okay, sorry.
What are you doing? You're trying to correct me by giving me a synonym.
Let's go north. No, I want to go the opposite of south.
It's really productive. Fair enough.
You didn't want to share the bonus, right?
Correct. You cared about the bonus.
It felt bad or wrong to share the bonus, right?
Yes. Even though that was breaking the sharing rule, right?
Yes. Why doesn't your wife feel about you the way that you feel about the bonus?
Maybe she does.
If it had come to not being able to find a negotiable position, I would have given up the bonus.
I'm not sure. I don't follow that at all.
Sorry. If we couldn't have come to an agreement on a different way of handling money, I would have handed over the bonus.
No, no. You're misunderstanding what I'm saying, which probably means I'm being unclear, so I'm sorry for that.
So, Frederick, why does your wife not care about you enough to not want to share you in the way that you care enough about your bonus to not want to share your bonus?
I don't know. Why does she prefer masturbation to sex with you?
I don't know. After this whole conversation, you don't know?
Can you theorize a little?
Not particularly, because I don't equate avarice and because I don't equate avarice and romantic jealousy.
See you next time.
Well, you were jealous of other people using your money, weren't you?
For the most part, no.
No, no. Now, with the bonus.
You were jealous of other people using your money.
You wanted to keep the money for yourself, right?
Yes. In that one instance, yes.
But you're not jealous of other people using your wife, the mother of your child.
And she's being used.
Why? Because I doubt the boyfriend wants to move in and be dude number three dipping his wick in the sloppy thirds, right?
So she's not available for a relationship.
She's a mom. She's a mom and a half.
No, she's a dual mom.
There are two, it's like you guys were an entire Section 8 housing complex together, right?
So your wife is not available for a romantic relationship.
She's married. She's half married.
There's half bastards floating around all over the place.
So she's not. So why is he there?
He's there for sex.
He's using her for sex.
We know that because if he really loved her, he wouldn't want to get involved with her because it would be too painful to love her and not be able to be with her.
So she's being used because she can't commit.
So what does a guy want to hang around a woman for if he doesn't love her enough to really want to be with her?
What's he there for?
He's there for sex.
That's assuming that they are having sex.
They have been friends since high school.
Yeah, okay. Spock.
they're having sex but okay let me get back to your question here Thank you.
It is often difficult to describe something one is lacking, even when it is glaringly obvious that there is something everyone else is experiencing.
What do you think you're lacking that you think everyone else is experiencing, Frederick?
A sense of time.
A sense of? Time.
Time? I don't sense the passage of time.
That's partially why my memory is so screwed up.
Did you do drugs when you were younger?
No. Alcohol problems?
Other addiction issues? No.
No, it's just the clock in my head is broken.
So what does that mean?
It means that I tend to be fairly disassociated from things that are based on time.
I can't tell the difference between 20 minutes and two hours without some sort of external stimulus.
I got to tell you, Frederick, I mean, I know we've been chatting for an hour and a half and all of that.
I got to think that other men dumping jizz in your wife's body might have a little bit more to do with your issues than losing track of time.
What you're lacking is not, well, you know, time flies when you're being cucked, right?
I mean, that is...
What you're lacking that other people are experiencing is commitment, is monogamy, is love, is relational sanity.
Loyalty.
You didn't marry this woman to hand her around like a piñata, right?
Was that the plan from the beginning?
The blended family actually didn't start until we had already been married for seven years.
So it wasn't the plan.
Right? Whose idea was it?
Mine.
Why?
Yeah, why did you want that blended family stuff?
As you said, it was a bad decision.
So why did you want a bad decision? I mean...
You...
You think it's a bad decision.
No, you said it was a bad decision.
Now, I know that you have trouble with time.
But you can hear it back.
But let's forget that. It doesn't matter whether it was a good or bad decision right now.
Why did you want to invite other people into the house to have sex with your wife?
Because it didn't bother me and they wanted to.
It didn't bother you that another man wanted to fuck your wife?
Correct. How do you think your wife experienced the fact that it didn't bother you that another man wanted to fuck your wife and that you facilitated that and invited him in?
Well, it wasn't a surprise.
She always knew that about me.
So, before you got married, you said, well, you know, if some other guy wants to come along and have sex with you, I'm going to invite him to move in.
And I'm going to head out, you know, get a latte at the cafe down the corner so that you can have your fun.
That was what she knew about you before you even got married?
Everything except for the moving in part.
So she married you knowing that you would be fine with her having sex with other guys?
Correct. I think that was after I proposed to her before we got married.
So she agreed to marry me not knowing that.
Ah, see, there's a little bit of a difference there.
Right. So she married you thinking that it was going to be monogamous, right?
Yes. How long after you married her did you say, I'm breaking the vows of monogamy?
Bait and switch, honey! It was going to be monogamous, now it's not.
How long after you guys got married did that happen?
It didn't.
While we were engaged, I told her that I understood that she was not okay if I wanted to sleep around, but that it didn't bother me if she wanted to.
I had no problem committing to a monogamous relationship.
But that she could have sex with other guys if she wanted.
Yes. Do you understand why that is wrong if you have kids?
Yes. Why?
Because it has the potential to create an unstable environment.
Well, it has created an unstable environment, right?
A bit, yes. A bit?
Two half-siblings who don't even know who their fathers are?
A bit, really? I'm pretty sure they both know who their fathers are.
Okay, I'm not going down that little dance with you again, because that's either something you're going to get or you're not.
Fair enough. If you want to have kids, You need a stable pair bonding in the family.
The mother and the father, stable pair bonding.
Let's just go with the traditional genders for the moment.
Now, if there's a lineup of guys banging your wife, one of two things, I guess one of three things is going to happen.
Number one, she gets a horrible STD which then spreads like wildfire through the family.
Not good. Number two, she gets pregnant, as you have found out.
Not good. Now you've got a messed up family structure.
Number three, she gets hollowed out emotionally by having sex with guys outside her husband's circle, or her husband himself.
Four, and then she's unable to bond, unable to maintain, and you know, whatever, right?
The bond. Or, the last possibility is that She falls in love with one of these swordsmen.
And then she leaves the family.
And you're destroyed.
The family's destroyed.
So the pair bonding is what's best for the kids.
So my question is, Frederick, did you know that before you got married that you wanted to have kids?
Yes. Right.
So, why would you risk your children's stability by saying to your wife, go have sex with other guys?
It's fine with me.
Because if you love your kids enough, you wouldn't want that, right?
so what's missing in your heart that you would threaten the stability security and happiness of your children by saying to your wife go have sex with other guys it's not what they want
right uh I didn't see it as catastrophic at the time as it is likely to be.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you're not a religious man.
No, not terribly.
Terribly. Because, you know, there's these hard-won lessons that Christianity has gathered over thousands of years of, well, just these kinds of disasters, right?
Mm-hmm. Did you not feel concerned that your wife might bond with another guy and then leave you?
No. Why?
I'm not concerned about it now.
But she's not bonded with you now, is she?
Maybe I'm missing something.
Why would you not be concerned about something that's already happened, which is her not being bonded with you?
Well, she's most certainly bonded to the household.
You mean the other guy?
No, the other woman.
Not in any sort of romantic way, but just...
Okay, good, because I'm running out of hazmat suits to put on with this conversation.
Okay, so your wife has not become the lesbian lover of the other half-mom in the household.
Okay. No.
Oh, no half-moms in the household.
The other woman has not had any kids, right?
Yet. Correct.
Are they planning on it?
They have been planning on it for years.
It still hasn't happened yet.
Are you going to pinch it, do you think?
I mean, the clock is kind of running out on that.
Oh, she's too old, right? Well, I mean, we're all early 30s.
Oh, so not too old. No, not too old yet, but obviously the window is closing.
Yeah, she's got some time, like a half decade.
All right. A sense of accomplishment.
You don't feel a sense of accomplishment, right?
Correct.
You know, a happy family with secure children is a great sense of accomplishment. a happy family with secure children is a great sense But that kind of got fucked, right?
It's a little sideways, but it's not a complete flaming disaster.
How's it going to play out when the kids get older, Frederick?
When they start having real questions?
When they get into their teenage years, the rebellious years, when they're looking for any crack in the facade of parental hypocrisy?
How are they going to feel about their family structure?
When you're...
Is it a boy who's 10?
Yes. When your boy gets to be 13 or 14 and he's full of hormones and anger and frustration and curiosity and skepticism and scorn and cynicism, how's that going to play out?
Is he going to respect you when he finds out that mommy has a boyfriend and doesn't have sex with daddy because masturbation is better?
It's entirely possible that he won't.
He won't what? Find out?
No, he won't respect me.
Would you if you found this out about your father?
Let's say that when you were 14 or 15 You found out that your half-sister was actually from another man or your sister was actually a half-sister from another man and your father had given full permission for your mother to have sex with other men and she'd had a boyfriend on the side and no one had told you about it and that what you had been led to believe wasn't true.
What would you think about your father?
What do you mean what you have been led to believe wasn't true?
Well, does your son know about your mother's boyfriend?
I don't know if he has ever been called boyfriend.
friend.
So no, he doesn't know about your mother's boyfriend.
just as he may not know, that the two kids have two fathers.
What's your son going to do Or how's he going to feel, Frederick?
This is the third eye, right?
Can you see how you look to others?
If you have found out that your father had given permission for your mother to have a boyfriend, what would you think of your father's masculinity, of his strength, of his capacity to evoke devotion on the part of someone else?
What would you think of your mother's love for your father if she wanted to and then went out and got a boyfriend?
I am not sure how my 14-year-old self would perceive that, but I wouldn't have an issue with it.
Right. So you hate vulnerability most of all?
You hate the vulnerability of not being good at something in school and you hate the vulnerability of saying please don't go and have sex with other men because I love you and I care for you and I want you to only want me.
You hate vulnerability in this conversation which is why you use bullshit legalese like correct.
You're keeping your heart deep and far away from this conversation.
Because you can say to your wife, yeah, you can go have sex with other men.
Doesn't bother me at all.
That's a power play, you understand.
It's saying you don't care.
You don't feel vulnerable.
You don't feel any insecurity, any possibility that she might bond with some other guy.
Because you're a tough guy, right?
You don't show weakness.
You don't show vulnerability. You fog.
You dissociate.
You go rubber-bones. You're passive-aggressive.
You deny what is blindingly obvious to everyone else.
That your teenage son is not going to respect a rampant cuck.
He's just not going to. No man could.
And this tough guy stuff is costing you everything.
I believe. This...
Inability to be vulnerable and to need people means that you're not needed.
You're not needed for sex.
You're not needed for love.
Well, you're needed for money, and you've been paying bad.
But what if you really did need someone?
What if you did say to your wife, I hate that you have a boyfriend.
That's wrong. Please dump him.
Please just be with me.
Let's find a way to make it work.
Well, that would put you in a position, Frederick, Where you might be rejected, which goes back to you as a kid with the essay question that you weren't good at.
You did a half-assed effort, so when you got a C or a D, you could say, yeah, but I didn't really try, so it doesn't matter.
Whereas if you really try, and then you fail, that's painful.
That's painful. I have recommended to people on this show, I think mostly men, That if you care for a woman, you really want to be with a woman, you declare yourself.
Which means you go and you tell her that you really care for her and want to be with her.
And I've done that.
Sometimes you get a yes and sometimes you get a no.
And the no It's very painful.
It's very painful to be out there in the world and say, I care.
Because most people, I shouldn't say most, a lot of people, view you saying you care as knowledge about how to control you.
I'm vulnerable here.
Ah. That means I know how to push this person's buttons.
So if you say to your wife, I made a terrible mistake.
I offered you up to someone else.
I refused to fight for you, to win you, to hold you, to keep you, to make you feel treasured, to make you feel wanted, to make you feel mine and mine alone.
I didn't want to selfishly hold on to you as mine.
I let you go. I let you wander.
I let you go have sex with other guys.
I even asked a guy to move in.
been.
That's how committed I am to never being vulnerable, to never appearing to need anything.
If you want to be accomplished, if you want to feel a sense of accomplishment, Frederick, you need to feel vulnerable.
you Do you know, like every time I've done thousands of these shows, like every time I put a show out, I'm like, oh, I wonder what people think.
It matters. It matters to me.
I care. And you have to be vulnerable.
You have to risk.
You have to commit.
You have to wear your heart on your sleeve in order to get a sense of accomplishment.
Because if you hide yourself and you pretend to be indifferent and cynical and listless and...
I guess you'll never feel rejected.
Why? Because you've rejected life already.
You can't be rejected if you've rejected life.
Well, that happened a long time ago.
You say that happened like you weren't even there.
You don't think you made any damn choices?
Ever? Just happened?
Well, I've made all of my choices.
I'm not sure how I go back and undo that.
Or how to start undoing that going forward.
I just told you, man.
You sit down with your wife and you say, Honey, I done fucked up.
I was all kinds of diehard tough guy.
I pretended I didn't need you.
I pretended I didn't care.
I pretended I was fine with it.
I'm really not. I'm really not.
The worst mistake of my adult life was to let you go.
Worst mistake. Worst mistake, it's cost me everything.
It's cost me happiness, peace of mind, energy, any capacity to feel pride, a sense of accomplishment, anything.
It cost me everything. I can't even imagine what any kind of sense of accomplishment would be like.
You know, we prattle on about fucking the wage gap and feminism and bullshit.
That's not where my heart is.
That's not where my balls are.
It's not where any part of me is.
What I am is a man broken by pride.
What I am is a man broken by an armor I put on to protect myself that emptied me out and now all I am is clanking rusty bullshit.
I refuse to be vulnerable to you.
I refuse to be open with you.
I refuse to express preferences with you.
And I kind of dared you to take another man because I just didn't care.
Well, it turns out, my darling, it turns out that not caring about you means I don't care about anything.
I've become so tough, so self-sufficient, so proud and alone in my own tower that I feel like I'm never going to touch the ground again.
Never going to feel simple grass on my souls.
I took a terrible wrong turn.
Before I met you, a terrible wrong turn.
I was tempted into appearing indifferent.
I was tempted into appearing cynical and carefree, careless.
And it's emptied me out.
It's emptied me out.
I can barely make it through the day.
I don't want to come home.
I'm actually scared of where our family unit is going.
I'm scared of what's going to happen with my boy when he gets older.
I'm scared of what's going to happen with you.
I'm scared of this distance between us, which seems to only be growing and getting worse.
I'm scared of everything.
So I pretend I'm scared of nothing, and I have nothing, I feel nothing.
I have no love, no commitment, no connection, no loyalty.
And you'd rather have your hand than me.
I'm less than a digit.
And I did that, I did that, I did that to you.
By telling you I didn't need you, by telling you you could go and do whatever you wanted, like it didn't matter to me.
It was a lie, and the only The only defense I have is I didn't even know it was a lie.
I didn't even know it was a lie. I thought it was true.
But it wasn't true. And the way that I know it wasn't true is I'm miserable without you.
And last, I'm just going through the motions.
I'm a machine. I'm empty, purposeless, senseless.
I have no sense of time.
I have no sense of purpose.
I have no sense of accomplishment. I have no sense of anything.
And you can say no to me.
Of course. It's got to come as a bit of a shock because I've been tough guy, rusted armor, empty head for 10 years and I've been fine with all of this.
Which I thought I was! I thought I was.
Got to lie to other people. First, you've really got to lie to yourself to the point where you don't even know what the truth is anymore.
And I just wanted to tell you the truth.
That I have made terrible mistakes.
You can say no to me now and it's going to break my heart.
You have that power over me to shred my life, to break my heart, to wreck everything.
But I'd rather take that risk than feel nothing.
How do I go about convincing?
No, no, I'm not letting you rubber bone me.
That's my suggestion of what you should do.
It's obviously up to you and I could be completely wrong.
But don't stop rubber boning me and don't stop putting me in a position where I've got to move your arms and move your mouth and make you say stuff to me.
That's just my suggestion about what I think is going on.
I think what you said is really close, but I think the one part you got wrong is that it's an act.
Because I've convinced myself that it's true, that I don't feel anything.
That's what I said, though.
I said that I... When playing you in that monologue, I said that I had fooled myself.
I believe that you have.
I don't believe you lied to anyone consciously, Frederick at all.
I can feel in your voice in the break now that we're getting somewhere, right?
How do I get to the truth?
Thanks.
Thank you.
See, that's another question that's just designed to paralyze the conversation.
If what I acted out for you was close to the truth, that is the truth.
Just go fucking say it.
Or say what's in your heart.
And if nothing's in your heart, say, nothing's in my heart.
If that doesn't scare you, then there's no point for this call at all, and there was no reason to call in, other than to serve as a warning for others, right?
Yes. You want her to want you, don't you?
You want her to want you, not some guy.
You want her to want to have sex with you, not with her hand or some boyfriend, right?
Come on. You're a human being.
You want that. Wouldn't you, if you could choose?
Are you saying completely indifferent to whether your wife has sex with another guy or with you?
You have no opinion about it whatsoever.
Come on. You can't. I won't believe that for a second.
Unless this was a seance, and even then with the seance, you'd have the regret of the perspective of the afterlife.
I have a preference, but I wasn't kidding about the not feeling romantic jealousy.
You have a preference, right?
I do have a preference, yes.
So, you have a preference that she want to have sex with you rather than her boyfriend or her hand, right?
Yes. Okay. Have you told her that preference?
Not in a lot of years.
So you're lying. You're withholding.
Yes. You're hiding. Yes.
Right. So you say, well, how do I get to the truth?
Just tell her the truth. That you don't like it that she's having sex with the boyfriend and you'd rather she want to have sex with you.
But you know that things have gone wrong to the point where that's where you are.
And you apologize for not telling her the truth in the past.
You apologize for not telling her the truth about how you felt when she took another man.
And you make a commitment to tell the truth going forward.
And you do it partly for you, Frederick, but mostly for your children.
Because your children need to see a man who tells the truth.
You understand? Yes.
Well, that requires a man that knows the truth.
No, you're rubber boning me again, man.
You know the truth. It's...
Well, I've...
You'd rather be close...
Come on. You'd rather be close to your wife than not close to her.
You'd rather feel love than nothing.
You'd rather have a capacity to have a sense of accomplishment than feel nothing of it.
You'd rather want to come home.
All of these things you would rather have.
And you've been pretending indifference because it gives you a petty kind of stupid power.
Whereas honesty and vulnerability, hey, you know what, Frederick?
You might tell her this and she might tell you to fuck off.
She might say, I hate you.
She might say, I feel nothing for you.
It's all dead. It's all gone.
It might rip you in two, to be honest.
And you don't have to, but you already know the alternative.
That's why you're called in, right?
But, yeah.
I still don't feel like I'm pretending, though.
I feel the indifference.
Fuck. Listen, man.
Stop it. Stop this bullshit distant act.
You already told me you have a preference, right?
Yes. Okay, so shut up about everything else because you already told me you had a preference.
So then say, well, I don't feel and I don't care.
You told me you had a preference, right?
Yes. So that's the truth.
You want something and you're not being honest about it.
You want her to want you.
You want her to want you.
And you're not telling her that. So then when you say, well, but I don't know, you already established this.
Now, you might need to listen to this conversation 10 times in a row and write it down.
But you already said that you have a preference.
I definitely plan on re-listening to this.
All right. Okay, good.
Well, I appreciate...
Your patience and your commitment to the call.
And I certainly wish you and your children and your wife the very best.
I'm not sure about these other dudes, but that's a topic for you to mull over.
But useful convo?
Yes, absolutely.
It was the entire reason I wanted to have it because it's...
I generally don't have someone to talk to that is anywhere close to as insightful or as intelligent as you.
And I want the best for you and your family.
I really do. I know I'm harsh and sometimes it can be grating or shocking, but it is because I want the very best for you and I work every conceivable fiber that I can to try and help you get it.
That's what I'm all about, just so you know.
I believe that.
And one last thing I would like to say, I know, Stephan, you know this, but you have an absolutely phenomenal producer.
He does an amazing job.
Oh, very good. Thank you.
I appreciate that. Great to hear.
All right. Keep me posted about how it goes, all right?
Will do. All right. Thanks.
Thank you. Alright, up next we have Kevin.
Kevin wrote in and said, I've heard Stefan talk about not shying down from showing slash using your intellect, not making yourself look smaller as the metaphorical tall guy since it's lying to yourself and not using your gift to a full potential.
But from my experience, nothing good ever came from showing my intellect to my peers or teachers.
It always came down to them belittling me, or in some cases, extreme bullying.
Which leads to me trying to fit in with the other kids, i.e.
not getting the grades I could, not talking about the things I'd like to, etc., etc.
Which led to me not being willing or able to go to school anymore because of extreme depression at a very young age.
My question would be, if intelligence is something that pushed our society out of the muck, why does it feel more like a curse than a gift?
That's from Kevin. Hey, Kevin.
How are you doing today? I'm pretty nervous, but yeah, I'm doing all right.
Well, thanks for your patience. I know that last call was...
Oh, it was super interesting.
Good, good, good.
All right. Right, right.
So, give me an example of a vivid thing that happened when you showed your intellect and got bullied.
Well, I think the one I go back to the most in memories is when I was like in second grade.
I skipped first grade and I got into school really early.
Like normally in Germany here, you go into school at six years old.
And since I was born at the end of the year, it's already like you get pushed forward into the next semester.
So I was in school at five.
They noticed I was ahead of the first year semester already.
So they put me into second grade at the immediate beginning.
I was good at math, reading everything on the level that they told me was 3rd and 4th grade and higher than that after a while.
I had this teacher.
I don't know what she was.
I keep thinking back to it.
Maybe she just didn't know how to handle me.
I don't know. Maybe she was like an elementary teacher that never had to worry about kids talking back to her or whatever.
But I remember vividly we had an essay.
And we were supposed to talk about our favorite things, shit like that, right?
And wait, is it okay if I curse?
Sorry. Oh, hell yeah.
Okay. Yeah.
And I wrote about my favorite things, obviously, but I guess she was expecting something else.
When I read it to her, and I can't remember exactly what was in it, it's so long ago, but she took me to the principal and she called my mother and it went into this whole tirade about how she cannot have me in class.
It was scarring for life because I didn't know what I was doing wrong and nobody told me to this day.
Because my mom can't really remember either.
She just remembers there was a big problem about it and it stayed for a couple of weeks and was kept bringing up by the teachers.
You don't know what you did or what you said?
No, I remember I told them about my...
It's foggy. I remember only the way I felt about it and what they told me about it, but I don't really remember what I did know.
That's very Kafkaesque, right?
Yeah. Was it The Trial?
Joseph K. gets caught into this bureaucratic hellhole with no idea what the hell he did.
No one would tell him. You were out of school for a couple of weeks, is that right?
Yeah, I took out of school for two weeks while they were, I guess, processing what to do with me.
But your mom doesn't remember?
Well, the thing is, we talk about this often, as you can imagine, and she always brings up that it was nothing, let's say, disturbing.
I didn't talk about anything fucked up.
I guess they didn't know how to deal with...
With the way I presented it, I keep remembering like I was fucking with her, like I was fucking with the teachers, right?
If you're playing a prank on someone, you know the expression that happens as they figure out what the fuck is going on, right?
I remember that, and I guess it was so strong for them that they had to make this whole big ideal out of it that I genuinely didn't know what the fuck was going on, right?
Like, that's the only thing I can remember about it.
It's been so long. And you were five or six, you said?
Yeah, yeah. Around that.
Like five and a half-ish.
So, at that age, it's hard to imagine that you would be punished in that way for whatever happened because you're just barely out of toddlerhood.
Yeah, exactly. All right.
And was that tough when you went back into school?
Like the other kids are like, whoa, that's the kid who...
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
I mean... That's the German kid who broke a rule!
Yeah. Next thing you know, we're heading to Poland!
Okay, yeah, I got it. Yeah, it was...
It wasn't nice. I mean, obviously, when you go into school and you're already the guy that skipped the grade the first time he goes to school, you're already apart from the crowd.
And then you leave for two weeks and probably the teachers told them about me.
I mean, I would imagine they did, right?
And yeah, school was fucking hell my entire life.
I guess it wasn't a good start.
Right. Now, that's something where it was not your intellect that you know of that brought this Punishment.
What's about another time where the intellect caused you trouble?
Well, I guess comparing it to my peers, the teachers, they were kind of like, obviously the teachers didn't go and parade about or were mean to me when I got good grades or something like that.
But the students were, I mean...
It was hell. In Germany, I don't know if it's like that in other countries, but when you get good grades, all the grades of everyone get called out.
Obviously, when you're always having A's, I didn't always have A's in some stuff.
For example, I was always bad at sports and shit like that.
When you get called out like that after a while, the kids get envious or mad.
I don't know. I always was the runt when it came to that shit.
They paraded me like, oh, the geek get it again, right?
Nobody wanted to be the friend with the guy that always had it, right?
Weren't there other like-minded kids you could hang with?
Sadly, not in my first couple of years.
Later in school, there was this one girl that she was really, really smart and really nice, and we bonded over that, and she was...
Like a best friend for a while, but no, a lot of my earlier years.
Yeah. Bruce and I were just tossed in the art room.
These kids are really smart.
They like to read. They like to discuss.
They like to debate. Can't really handle them in the main class.
We'll toss them in the art room, though, with a pile of books and ask for some book reviews later.
That was the big solution where I was.
No, and when I first came to Toronto in school, a wonderful boy, Mark, his name was, and I've mentioned this before, we used to walk around and just chat and have great conversations and so on.
Then he just died.
He just died. Oh, wow.
He just died of some congenital heart defect nobody knew about, just didn't wake up one morning, just dead.
Well, like a guy I was friends with when I worked up north.
Guy's jogging along, he's going to be married that summer, he's jogging along a dark road.
Gets smashed by a car and dies.
I got some gravestones floating around.
That's all I'm saying. But anyway, so did they give you any kind of advanced courses or anything like that?
Oh, yeah. But sadly, when you're in elementary school, advanced courses were just more of the same.
I always had teachers, especially in math, coming to me.
And since I was done with the work almost instantly after they gave it to me, the way of them, I guess, giving me more input was just giving me more of the same shit they have given me before, but in different variables.
Pretty much the same questions, but asked differently, right?
That was advanced courses, yeah.
Now, quick question, my friend.
Was it a lot of female teachers?
Oh, yeah.
All of my teachers, except one, and that's the only one I liked, were female.
Now, how do you think I knew that?
Yeah, I mean, tell me about it.
That's the first thing I always think about when it comes to that back then.
How do you think I knew that?
I mean, the way I think about it is that...
I guess females don't, from my experience, female teachers didn't really know how to deal with anything apart from the main course of students.
They didn't know how to deal with the ones performing lesser, and they didn't know to do with the ones performing better than the average.
The price of endlessly appealing to female vanity is anti-male sentiment.
Yeah. Because what needs to be told to women, if you respect women, is the truth.
That there's going to be very few exceptional women compared to men.
Yeah. I mean, that's just a fact.
I mean, if you look at the, I don't know, do you play chess at all?
I played, yeah, I played it when I was younger, but I kind of got my fill after.
It's a long story. Yeah, I did.
So, I think except for one exception, The top female chess player is somewhere around the 500th male chess player.
I went through this whole thing in the Serena Williams presentation, which people should check out.
I know the topic has come and gone, but there's a lot in there that's kind of timeless.
Just about how terrible female athletes are compared to males.
Terrible. Terrible.
The only reason there is, there are female athletic events, really, I mean, that are paid and that are top tier and so on is because they don't compete with men.
Now, except in shooting, right?
And some people have said a little bit of horseback riding and some long distance, like ultra long distance running, like 200 miles.
Like, yeah, that's a fun sporting event.
Still running, still running, still running.
But there are no women who come anywhere close.
Like, Who come anywhere close to men.
One of the top tiered female players was saying that, oh yeah, her brother who was like a low-ranked college tennis player just beat her like 6-0, 6-0.
Like there was never any competition.
And that's when he wasn't even really trying that much.
So... And the funny thing is just the one thing that women do absolutely amazingly incredibly that men can't do is the one thing that is denigrated these days, at least among white women, and that would be having the babies.
One thing that women can do, men can't do.
And so when we don't tell the truth to women about men and ability, They get mad.
And they're perpetually discontented.
They believe in this magical patriarchy that keeps them from the highest positions.
It's like, no, it's just nature.
It's just biology. It's just the way the bell curve works.
And it's going to be that way for the foreseeable future.
And the reason I talk about this stuff is because I want women to be happy.
I want women to be happy and the way that they've set the system up at the moment, it's designed, almost like designed, to perpetually frustrate women and make them resentful and mad and discontented and resentful.
You're exactly the same as men!
The only reason you're not for the male sexism!
Oh, you should go and get educated.
Then you should have a big, long-ass career.
And then, you know, if you want kids, you'll just pick up from the big, giant target heap of eligible bachelors worth a million dollars in your 30s.
You know, like, you couldn't set a system up that's going to make women less happy.
So you start telling women the truth.
You've got to lock down a quality guy early because they get taken really quickly and they get hung on to like grim death.
I'm not going out into the dating pool.
So you've got to lock down a guy early when you're at the height of your sexual power, your height of your sexual market value.
That's when you've got to lock a guy down.
Have kids when you're young. You've got plenty of time to have a career.
Later on, you can work till you're 80 if you want because you're probably going to live 7 to 10 years longer than your husband or boyfriend.
So, you just got to tell women the truth.
It's not male sexism that keeps you from the highest positions on average.
It's just the genetic spread of intelligence.
It's probably genetic. 85% of our intelligence is genetic.
In our late teens, it's probably pretty genetic.
Let's just go with that assumption, because it doesn't really matter either way.
We have what we have, right?
So just tell women the truth and they won't keep getting mad all the time.
Of course, right?
If I thought that there was some magical power that was keeping me from achieving my full potential, oh wait, actually that would be social media companies.
Well, okay, that's a different matter.
They definitely are prejudiced. So when a female teacher comes across a brilliant male student, a lot of times, and we know, we know that female teachers are prejudiced against male students.
We know for sure because When you gender neutral essays and so on, the boys score significantly higher than if they know that it's A boy, the female teacher.
So female teachers, it's one of the few instances and clear-cut cases of rampant, massive sexism against children, against little boys.
Female teachers, on average, are rampantly, rabidly, ferociously, and brutally sexist against little boys.
And part of that is because people just aren't telling them the truth.
Yeah, you're going to get a couple of dullards in your class who are boys, and you're going to get some magic carpet geniuses in your class who are boys.
It's just the way the scattergram works.
So that's one of the reasons I want to...
I don't want women to be mad all the time.
I don't want them to end up not getting what they want in life.
I don't want them to end up thinking that they're going to get to the very top tier of everything and bypass all of the other great things that they could be doing, like building communities and having families and being moms and being great support people.
And there will be some brilliant women who I are going to do...
I mean, the woman who influenced me, the most intellectual...
I mean, the philosopher who...
Who influenced me most was a woman, so I've got no problem with massive, wonderful, staggering female achievement.
Oddly enough, women do, because it was Ayn Rand, who apparently women just hate.
But I just wanted to put that little bit of rant in here before we get on to more of the substance of your question, because you were subject to, probably, most likely, almost certainly, statistically, you were subject to rampant anti-boy sexism coming from From feminist indoctrinated teachers, and it is brutal to experience.
Oh yeah, for sure. All right.
So, Kevin, one rant shall follow another.
And this is going to be the rant that releases you from resentment.
Are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready.
Got your crash helmet on? Yeah, I'm ready.
Got the rubber gloves, everything.
All right. Boil those babies up.
All right. Here is, because, I mean, I'm a smart guy.
I deal with a lot of averages.
Do you see me getting overly resentful?
No, and I'll tell you why. The world is designed for the average.
You understand, right? You ever see a really tall guy trying to fold himself into an airplane seat or just go through a door?
You know, he's got some truly insane Robert Walpole kind of guy who's got to duck his head to get through stuff, right?
The world is not designed for him.
He can kind of get through it, but it's not designed for him.
Right? Any more than it's designed for a guy who's four feet tall.
Again, he can get by, he gets a lot of legroom on a plane, but the world is designed for the average, right?
We can accept that, right? Right, right.
So you're just not going to fit, right?
You're just not going to fit. Now, I don't think that means it's fine to abuse you, but the world is designed for the average, and you are not the average.
Nobody who listens to this show is the average.
So... Let me tell you how to love this situation.
When the world is designed for you, do you want other people to change it?
Well, no, of course.
No, of course not! I mean, if you are an average height, you don't want the airplane seats calibrated for people who are four feet tall, right?
Because it's going to be really crampy for you.
Right. So when the world is designed for you, you don't want people messing with it, right?
Right. What are you going to do with the world, Kevin?
You're going to mess with it, right?
You want to change it, right?
Right. You want to change it so you have a little bit more scope, so you have a little bit more room, so you get a little respect.
It wasn't your fault that you were born smart.
You shouldn't be blamed for it.
You shouldn't be attacked from it. You shouldn't be dismissed.
You should be called a nerd. You know, all the people, the little, shitty little kids, oh, texting, ooh, Kevin's a nerd, Kevin's a nerd.
It's like, yeah, that's right.
Who built the shit you're texting on, people?
That's right. People like Kevin.
So, it's pitiful, right?
But the world is designed for the average and you want to come and fuck with the average, right?
Right. Do they want you to do that?
Well, of course not. Right.
And if you were in their average shoes, you wouldn't want you to mess with it either, right?
No. So now we have something where we understand the opposition.
It's not that they're just blind and stupid and ignorant and aggressive.
Hey, the world is made just for them.
They got custom shoes just for them.
And they don't want your Steve Martin Krul shoes going on their hands, right?
They don't want the world to adapt to you because it's already adapted to them.
So now, you're in a game rather than a battle.
It's like sports.
You don't want to kill the other team, but you want to beat them, right?
Right. So if you look at it more like, okay, world's built for you.
I get it. I want to wedge my way in there and adapt it for people like me.
No, you can't do that.
It's built for us. It's like, yeah, well, you know, I don't care that you're not flexible, but things are going to change.
Things are going to change because it's not fair that the world is just built for you because there's a lot of people like me around too, right?
Right. And we are, smart people are a minority.
Right. Often we're a visible minority because we come with pocket protectors and horn-rimmed glasses and physical non-dexterity, lack of sports skills, lack of facial hair, right?
So smart people are often a visible minority.
And like blacks in America who said, you know, this slavery, Jim Crow, segregation bullshit, that's terrible.
You're going to need to adjust your society to make room for us, right?
Absolutely fair. Couldn't agree more.
Now, okay, let's not do the whole affirmative action shit and I'm terrible and all that.
But, you know, you got to adjust so that I can get a drink on a hot day from a fountain.
So I can go to the washroom.
I mean, read Black Like Me.
It's a story of a guy who made himself into dark skin and traveled through the South.
He spends half the day wandering the streets of Memphis trying to find a toilet he can use because they're all only for whites.
That's not right. So, the visible minority called Blacks came and engaged and said, things gotta change.
You gotta adjust your society so we got some room here.
Fantastic. Love it.
It was wrong that it was ever any other way.
Now, of course, they were like, well, all of these things that I talked about, slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, all government programs.
All government programs.
So now we're replacing it with another government program called Affirmative Action.
That's terrible. But, We've got to think of ourselves, okay, this is a civil rights issue in a way.
Because we're a visible minority called smart people and society's got to bend and adjust to accommodate us just a little bit.
Not least of which because we run society.
We are responsible for civilization.
We build everything.
We make everything. We make everything work.
We're responsible for your freedoms, for the free market, for the separation of church and state, for cell phones, for engineering miracles, for bridges, for dams, for buildings, for elevators that don't go sideways and crash out the building.
I mean, we make everything run.
Can a brother with a big brain get a little bit of Alperum, please?
And they're like, no, we don't want them adjust to you.
It's like, well, you're going to have to, you prejudicial bastards, because we ain't going anywhere.
Or if we do go places, well, it's South Africa five years from now when everybody's trying to eat tree bark.
Oh, God. So do you hear what I'm saying?
Yeah, I do. Yeah, for sure.
It's perfectly reasonable for the average to design the world for the average and for the average to resent the smart.
In the same way, it's natural for the smart to resent the average.
But if you view it like a sports game rather than some combat, you can have a lot more fun with it.
Of course they're going to push back.
Of course they don't want to change.
And the average, see, everyone's a superhero in his own mind, right?
Everyone is the best.
Everyone is singular. Everyone is amazing.
Everybody is unique. We're all special snowflakes, right?
Right. Until...
Until you come across somebody with real ability.
I'll tell you my moment.
There was a singer, he died quite young, Robert Palmer.
You're gonna have to face it, you're addicted to love.
I don't know if you remember this, probably before your time, but he's a good singer, a good performer and all that.
Shut your eyes, shut the shade.
You don't have to be afraid.
I'll be your baby tonight.
It's lovely. You should look him up.
He's a great singer. Anyway. So, I'm like, I don't know, 17 years old and I talk my way into some karaoke bars the first time I did it.
And I'm like, oh, I like that song, Addicted to Love.
I think I'll go and sing it.
You ever tried this? Karaoke or something?
Yeah, sadly I did.
And I'm... Not very good.
It must be amazing.
You know, I think of like people who are just incredible singers, you know, like Freddie Mercury, Billy Joel, Sting, like people who just like they open their mouth and without training and stuff, Celine Dion, like they just, I mean, the opera guys, you know, like they train and there's, you know, that whole thing and they learn all these languages.
But the people who just open their mouth, it must have been like they're in the car, they're singing along with the radio and people like, damn, Sammy Hagar, that sounds pretty good.
Yeah. You know, like, it must be at some point where they say, holy shit, I can do it!
Woohoo! But, um, so I go up there and I'm trying to sing this song, Addicted to Love, and I'm, you know, amateur baritone guy, and this is like tenor, and it's like, gets pretty high, you know, and I'm like, holy crap.
That's why those guys get paid.
That's why I'm buying drinks and annoying people with my singing, and they get paid good money for it.
And I can do a couple of songs all right.
I can do Superstition pretty well.
I can do New York State of Mind if they take it down a little bit.
I can do an okay Unchained Melody.
There's a couple of things, but I'm pretty limited.
I don't have one of these voices that can do everything.
You know, everyone's a great singer in the shower, but you get up there with the backup in karaoke and it's like, ooh, daddy's leaving a sonic mark on the souls of the people around him and it's pretty black.
And so then you're like, well, I guess I'm not that good, right?
And so everyone's a superhero and everyone, you know, everyone's like, you hear this on the show all the time.
People call in. You know, like that guy who called in to tell me I was wrong about separation of church and state.
You know that guy's the big fish in the little pond.
He's the smartest guy around the table just about everywhere he goes, right?
Or certainly the fastest talking, you know, like the Peter Joseph pufferfish ego stuff, right?
But then you bump up against somebody who's really smart and really experienced, and it's like, boom.
I mean, you saw this with Patti Gower in New Zealand, right?
He's like this media guy, whatever, or the other people who tried to interview us, Lauren and I, it's like, yeah, a fragile leaf meet forces of nature.
It's like, the limitations, like, you bump up against these limitations, it's hard on the ego.
It's hard on the ego.
Right. So you, unfortunately, are constantly sanding down the irrational overconfidence of everyone around you.
Now, if they were wise, they'd say, well, that's actually probably pretty good before I went and embarrassed myself, you know, like, good, you know, like, okay, that's fine.
But because they're average, they just resent you.
And it's natural that they're going to resent you just as you resent them.
But it's just a game.
Just elbow your way in.
They're going to be annoyed. They're going to be annoying.
They're annoyed by you.
You are annoying to them because they don't have your abilities and they haven't been told enough about the bell curve.
Like, I don't resent. It's not like Billy Joel stole my singing voice.
You know, he's just born with a great singing voice.
You know, he's like, I don't resent him for it.
I mean, when I was younger, I'd be like, wow, I really wish I could sing like that, those bastards or whatever, right?
But I mean, the world needed a philosopher no more than it needed a singer, so I think it all worked out pretty well.
Singers often don't have great speaking voices because they're kind of Michael Jackson softy and I need a good speaking voice for what it is that I do.
It's better for that. Have you ever heard this?
You think you're just too good for us?
Oh yeah, of course.
Yeah. Now, they wouldn't say to a guy who's six foot eight, oh, you think you're just too tall for us.
Right, because they're physical markers.
You can't really see smart.
And there are physical markers.
Unless you see it. Yeah. But there are physical markers for intelligence, right?
The ability to get A's, right?
So, it's like, no, I don't think I'm too good for you.
I think I'm too tall for you. I kind of am.
And I don't even know what too tall for us means, you know?
I mean, what does that mean? What does that mean?
I don't know. It's like that guy, there's a guy who's got a card.
He's a tall guy. He's got a card.
He just keeps them on him. And anytime people start small talking with him, he just hands them the card.
And on the card, it says three things.
Number one, six foot eight.
Number two, yes, the weather is fine up here.
Number three, no, I don't play basketball.
That's, you know, saves him a lot of time, right?
Right. So you're smart.
And the normies didn't like it.
And it's perfectly natural that they didn't like it.
It's not their fault. If people had told them more about the bell curve and the genetics of intelligence, they'd be like, yeah, he's a tall guy.
He's naturally lean.
He's got great hair.
It's just genetics, right?
Yeah, right. I wish one of those applied to me.
Well, the smart thing is the best.
Yeah, right. And would you trade?
No, no. At this point in life, no.
Earlier in my childhood, yeah, for a second.
Without even thinking for a second.
Right. Right.
Right. No, I mean, I did have a...
I was lucky, as far as this combo went, that I was smart, but also a very good-looking kid.
And not as a kid, really, but definitely in my teenage years, as a good-looking kid.
Good-looking young specimen.
Good slice of man meat.
So that helped a little bit, but that also gave me the goal of abandoning my intellect in pursuit of women, which was actually kind of fun.
But anyway, so your question is, is intelligence something that's pushed society out of the muck?
Why does it feel like a curse more than a gift?
Because you're looking at yourself through the eyes of others, which is always a very dangerous thing to do.
It's good to have a third eye, to know how you're perceived by others, but you don't ever want to judge yourself by the judgment of others.
Because to the average, it does feel like a curse for there to be somebody really smart around, because then they know actually where they are in the bell curve.
Right. And everyone's a genius in their own mind.
You get it, right? Yeah, right, of course.
So that's just their view of you, but you've got to have your own view of you, which is it's great to be the exception, but the price of being the exception is trying to fit yourself into a society that's designed for the norm.
Right. So you're six foot eight and nothing seems to fit and the doorways are all too short and the airplane seats are too small.
Well, what are you going to do? You can't shrink.
Can't become shorter. And then, you know, when you sit down in your airplane seat, people are like, oh great, a tall guy.
Now his legs are going to spread and I'm going to get this cave in of like basketball knee coming into me.
But it's a dance.
It's a dance. It's a game.
It's a sport. Who changes who?
And if you can look at it that way, it takes some of the resentment out of it.
Like, okay, look, I mean, school did not fit me and it was boring as hell and stupid and useless and so on.
Yep. But I'm running the world's biggest and best philosophy show.
You know, school should not have been designed for me.
No. You understand?
Like, if I'm that rare, an intellect...
Why on earth would you want to design?
That's like designing every seat on every airplane for people who are seven feet tall.
Yeah. That would be the wrong decision.
And are you going to go teach public school, Kevin?
Oh, yeah, right.
No. Why not, you selfish bastard?
Right. Go help the young little Kevins out there who need your guidance.
Yeah, right. No, in general, it's the idiots who end up becoming teachers, statistically speaking.
I'm not making that up.
It's the people at the bottom of the SATs who end up becoming teachers.
The average IQ of teachers is one of the lowest of any profession outside of outright lampposts.
Right? Why?
Because why would you want to waste your brilliance trying to teach average kids?
And why would, especially if you think for yourself, why the hell would you want to end up teaching children?
So you can tell them the truth, they can go home to their parents, and their parents will then get you fired.
Yeah. Teacher Kevin, is there such a thing as God?
Oh boy. That's going to be a fun session.
Yeah. I had one of those questions when I was hanging out with my daughter.
Oh my, yeah. What are you going to do?
Well, uh, Ahmed, let me tell you something.
Actually, I got quite a lot to tell you, Mohammed.
Quite a lot to tell you.
And it's going to give you some very exciting conversations with your parents tonight.
And then you get to go to the mosque and spread your wisdom.
You're gonna have so much fun.
Yeah, please don't share the name, though.
That's right. I can tell you, but it has to be anonymous.
Why, Yuna? You gonna tell the truth to kids?
No. I just mean that allegorically.
Yeah. Or do I? No, but I mean, you can.
What are you going to say? What are you going to say?
Why do I have to come to school?
Oh, because your parents will be thrown in jail if they don't come.
But make sure you don't use any violence to get what you want, kids.
Yeah. Well, especially in Germany.
I mean, there were homeschoolers trying to get refugee status in other countries, right?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I remember.
It was a big thing a couple of years ago.
Yeah. Yeah.
But thank God, at least when I went to school, the whole refugee stuff wasn't happening.
So I at least got safe from those problems when I go talk to people nowadays.
Oh, it's much worse now. Oh my God.
I mean, there are lots of schools in Germany where there are like two little blonde kids in a sea of white kids.
Yeah, right. Did you hear about the story where these 11-year-old kids actually raped another 11-year-old boy?
Sure. My God.
Yeah. And just imagine how much is going on that gets suppressed.
Yeah, right. Just imagine what happens behind covers.
Fuck me. Yeah. Yeah.
So, it's not a curse for you, but it can be a curse for others.
And that's natural.
It's natural.
Well, It sure didn't feel like that, but I totally get where you're coming from.
What you've said so far has given me a lot to think about when it comes to perspective.
Don't hate the average.
It's uncharitable.
Yeah, of course. It's not their fault.
You didn't earn being smart.
I didn't earn being smart.
I didn't earn charisma.
I didn't earn a sense of humor.
I mean, I work at some of these things and blah, blah, blah, but it just kind of happened.
Just the way things happen.
I was listening to one of my early shows for something the other day, and I was like, that's pretty good.
Like, that's pretty good, even all the way back.
This wasn't like the first Queen album.
This is pretty good. So don't hate the average.
It's not their fault. And it's not their fault that they dislike the exceptions to the norm.
It's all natural.
It's all kind of inevitable.
But don't become a determinist because of it.
I mean, they still don't get to run everything because if the norms get to run everything all the time, we'd never even have moved into caves.
I'm fine under this tree.
It was good enough for my daddy and it's good enough for me.
Listen, Mohammed. Yeah, the 12 generations in 100 years, that sounded like a fun plan.
Yeah. Yeah, so we have to accommodate the average because...
Well, there's a lot of them. But they have to work to accommodate us, and if they don't like it, like, I'm sorry, it's just fuck them.
Like, I mean, we can't just not have any progress in society because the normies get upset.
Yeah, right. So, just, you know, they're going to make their noises, and they're going to make their complaints, and they're going to do their normie outrage, and then they're going to say, wow, this is great that we've got all these advancements in society.
Yeah. Yeah, I like this phone.
I hate the guy who made it.
Vestiges of free speech is really cool.
Prop 13. Yeah, we lost that.
Feels bad, man. Well...
Article 13.
Well, I'll do a whole little bit on that at some point.
But listen, all it's going to mean is that the The memes go to the ground, right?
The memes go underground. And the dark web is going to expand.
And all it means is that now people can't keep track of what's going on.
And that's going to end up, I think, with people having more freedom in a way.
Well, yeah. I mean, the people who try to escape from the watching eye, I guess.
But yeah, the public will be fucked for a while, I'm pretty sure.
Well, it's a pretty clear relationship between the EU and the rest of Europe.
It's certainly going to wake the hell up out of the younger generation and that's where the future is.
Yeah, exactly. I definitely agree.
I think it's rattled some heads, this one.
Does that help as a way of looking at it?
Oh, yeah, it does for sure.
Thank you for the insight. I mean, it's hard to disagree when you lay it out like that because it makes total sense.
Good, good. Well, listen, I appreciate the call.
Let me know how it goes and I'll move on to the next caller now.
Yeah, thanks for the time, man.
You're welcome, man. Anytime. Okay, up next we have Joel.
Joel wrote in and said, While I am generally in favor of capitalism and the free market, I believe that there are some big limitations that prevent pure capitalism from working in today's global market.
The capitalism of a global economy gives rise to large corporations that too big and limit opportunities for the majority of people.
Specific examples would include Google and Facebook, which started off as great companies, but now they are market leaders and essentially can't be replaced, they've turned to enforcing the leftist narrative.
I believe that there is a role for some government regulation and some government programs such as military, infrastructure, policing, and eventually some sort of universal basic income.
Anything extremist view can be harmful, and while freedom is important, unlimited and unchecked freedom with no restrictions is harmful.
The non-aggression principle is an ideal and is not realistic enough to promote ultimate freedom.
That's from Joel. Oh, Joel.
Oh, Joel.
Oh, my gosh.
All right, all right. You know, making statements is not an argument, Joel.
It's an ideal and not realistic enough.
You're just making sounds.
You're just typing shit, right?
I mean, it's not an argument. Right.
Well, I can't put an entire argument in an email.
Before we do that, let's do our definition thing.
All right? Sure. All right.
What is capitalism?
How is it characterized?
And what are its characteristics in practice?
So basically, capitalism, I'd say capitalism is essentially just the free market.
People have the freedom to choose what they want and to set their prices.
And in the free market, generally, there's private property and people can decide what to do with their private property and that leads to Innovation and there's rewards for certain risks that people take.
I don't really have a better form of definition for you.
Private property, free trade, right?
Sure. What does Google and Facebook have to do with the free market?
Help me understand that.
Google and Facebook are basically...
Companies that were born out of the free market, right?
But now that they've grown in size, there are very few alternatives that can be...
No, you don't have to give me the basic stuff.
I get it. Yeah, they're big companies.
They can have a huge amount of influence and it's tough to come up with competitors.
I get it. All right. What does that have to do with the free market?
So, for instance, in America, is there a free market in money?
No. Okay.
Is there a free market in interest rates?
In interest rates?
Yes. To some degree.
To a small degree, right?
The Fed sets the rates and major banks follow suit.
And even if we say there's some free market in interest rates, it's determined by how much the government borrows, whether it restricts borrowing, how much unfunded liabilities.
I mean, it's a whole bunch of stuff, right?
But there's not a lot of interest rate slash free market overlap, right?
Sure.
Is there a free market in education?
Not really.
Not much, right? There are some private schools, but...
But they still have to follow the garbage government curriculum, right?
Right. For the most part, it's heavily regulated.
Right.
Is there a free market in banking?
Partly, but most banks follow...
They have their certain restrictions.
It's backed up by the government and guaranteed, which is why we had the financial crisis in 2008.
There are a lot of restrictions and there are very few banks, so it's essentially an oligopoly.
Yeah. And when the government says, as they did in the lead up to the housing crisis of 07-08, when the government says, oh, we don't think you're making enough loans to Hispanics and black people, so you better do it or we'll shut you down.
And then there's a big housing crisis because you lend money to people who can't pay when the interest rate goes up and all that.
So is there a free market in insurance and health care?
I don't know too much about that industry.
I'm in Canada as well, so in Canada for sure not.
It's the same garbage in both. There's no free market in healthcare in Canada except some aspects of places like dentistry or pets, veterinary and so on.
Insurance, no.
I mean, it's so heavily regulated.
It's so tough to get in. When was the last time a new insurance company came along in Canada?
Couldn't tell you. It's been a while, right?
So I guess here's what I am trying to figure out.
So you say, well, I'm generally in favor of capitalism and the free market, and they stop bringing up shit like Google and Facebook.
Now, Google and Facebook get a huge amount of government protection.
First of all, corporations as a whole are legal fictions invented by government to bribe rich people into supporting government programs by removing legal liability from rich people when corporations do bad things.
It's not been the case forever.
In the past, when a bank went bankrupt, you could take the house of the bank executives.
Now, they didn't like that very much, now did they, right?
So governments allowed them to create this legal fiction called a corporation, which shields people's personal assets from malfeasance or criminal activity on the part of the corporation, which means you can't pierce the corporate shield and get to their personal assets, even though they get all their money out of the corporation and convert it into personal assets.
It never goes the other way. So the fact that there are corporations is not a free market system or situation or society.
Now the reason why Google and Facebook want to jig and mess around with things is because the government has so much power to control resources that it matters to Google and Facebook who's in power, right? Right.
So for instance, Do you think that Google and Facebook, let's just talk about Facebook, do you think that Facebook prefers there to be a welfare state or not?
I don't see how it would benefit Facebook, but that's just my ignorance and not saying that they would or would not prefer it.
Alright. Do you think you have more time to be on Facebook if you're unemployed or if you're employed?
Okay, I see where you're going with this.
And I agree with you on a lot of these things, but a lot of the examples that you used...
Hang on! Hang on!
Just do a couple more of these and then we'll move on.
So, let me ask you this.
Do you think that Nike likes that there's a welfare state?
Um... You're probably going to say yes.
I would think no, because if there's a welfare state, then people would have less money than they would otherwise in a true free market system.
Nike loves that there's a welfare state because then money flows into particular communities who are more likely to buy Nike shoes.
Okay. So, because there's a welfare state, because there's alimony, because there's child support, Because there's huge amounts, trillions of dollars being transferred from men to women from one ethnic group to other ethnic groups, you name it.
Entire businesses have untold amounts of money invested in these markets.
So if the welfare state ends tomorrow, then huge numbers of companies are very likely to go bankrupt.
If alimony ends tomorrow, Malls are gonna have to close down.
Well, they're closing down anyway, but you know what I mean, right?
So the fact that the government redistributes wealth has been part of business plans for the past half century.
Business people do a lot of market research and right now a lot of their market research says the existing configuration of society is how we're gonna make our money.
And so Google and Facebook have evolved to make money off the existing configuration of society.
They don't want that existing configuration to change because they haven't planned for it.
One of the reasons why a lot of businesses oppose Trump was they had, in their business plan, a continuation of the existing system.
Trump represented a disruption to that system, which is why a lot of big...
Let's say that Trump gets his way and reduces immigration.
Big businesses have made multi-year payroll plans based upon H-1B visas and massive amounts of third world immigration, including illegal immigration, to drive down wages.
That's baked into their business plans and they have billions, hundreds of billions of dollars hanging off that stuff.
So of course they care who gets in power.
And Hillary was a hell of a lot more predictable than Trump.
Now, there is also social justice warrior stuff, there's minority stuff, there's women's stuff and all of that.
That's all going on as well.
But why does Google care about jigging results?
Because the government has so much power, and they're dependent upon that government power to some degree, just to maintain their profits.
Also, Huh.
I don't know if you've found this out, but Google has been found to be tracking people even when they have tracking turned off, like geographically, right?
Yeah. Yeah, I've heard that.
How much is Zuckerberg going to be held personally liable for any of that stuff?
Most likely not at all.
The legal system has nothing to do with the free market, and it is almost impossible to use the legal system to hold any of these giant companies accountable in any way.
And so, where the hell is the free market in all of this?
You can find a little bit here and there, but that's like finding a few spots in a storm where it's not currently getting wet and saying, oh, it's sunny, right?
So, you start talking, well, it's a free market and free market and free market, and it's like Google and Facebook.
What the hell does that have to do with the free market?
They almost have nothing to do with the free market.
Just because there's private profit and a stock market doesn't mean that it's a free market.
It means there are vestiges of the free market.
But where are they getting their money from?
Well, a lot of them are getting money from the military industrial complex, the welfare state, the rich and the poor, subsidies that get hollowed out from the middle class and sent both ways to either side of the evil donut of state redistribution.
And, I mean, look at someone like North Grumman or Boeing.
Military industrial Providers, massive companies that get untold amount of money from the Pentagon.
Do you think they want a war?
Of course they do. Now you could say, well, but an abstract level in human suffering is like, yeah, but they're going to make out literally like bandits if there's a war.
Now, with Hillary Clinton, oh, they'd have had their war already, right?
And with Donald Trump, I mean, they're working to get it, but they haven't got it yet.
Hillary would already be carpet bombing Syria at least by now and probably would be provoking the hell out of Russia.
So that's not a free market, man.
It's not a free market.
It's like calling the prison industrial complex something to do with the free market.
It's not. So that's why I kind of gave you these groans at the beginning, because you start talking about abstract things like capitalism, the free market, and then you start talking about autocratic, semi-fascistic companies like Google and Facebook that are largely profiting off government protection, either directly through the existence of corporations or indirectly through the ridiculous inefficiency of any kind of legal system, and also because the government's shoveling money to people who then end up consuming their products.
They're not part of the free market.
There's very little that is.
Right. Right.
So I think, I don't have my question in front of me, and I wrote it a while ago.
Oh, I can put it in Skype if you like.
Sure. But I think what I was trying to get at, or at the very least, if it's not what I said, it's what I meant to say, if I didn't articulate it correctly, is that we don't really have A lot of capitalism, like pure capitalism today.
And a lot of it's because of government regulation, but what I was trying to get is that I think there should be a lot less government regulation, but there should be some, not socialism, but certain socialized programs, such as Like army defense spending.
I do think there should be some level of healthcare provided.
I do think. A wish list is not an argument, right?
So just saying things that you would like, it's like, you know, I like ponies.
It's not an argument.
Sure, but those are examples.
And I'm very happy to actually go into some of those examples.
Are you willing to use violence to achieve what you want?
So, you do that a lot when you say it's violence, and while technically, yes, there is a bit of force...
Oh, come on, man!
Technically, yes, there is a bit of force?
Well, technically, yes, there was a bit of rape.
Come on, man. Are you saying that taxation is not force?
It is, but you get into a problem when...
You have public goods.
So I'm sure you're familiar with the tragedy of the commons.
Yes, that's called the government. The government is the tragedy of the commons.
The public treasury is the tragedy of the commons.
Trying to solve the tragedy of the commons by using the government is, well, not sensible.
Because the government is subject to the tragedy of the commons.
Everybody wants to use it for their own financial profit and doesn't care about the future.
Right, which is why there should be very limited services and Right, but every time I try to go into an example...
No, because I'm talking about a principle here!
If you say you're willing to use violence, okay, then we can start to discuss the other things.
But if you're going to start to give me examples when we're still trying to talk about a principle, then I have to drag you back to the principle, right?
Because that's the foundation of a conversation.
Sure, then I would concede that some force would be required to tax people in order to provide some socialized programs.
And so you think, or you would like healthcare for people, some sort of limited healthcare.
Now, if I disagreed with you, Joel, would you be willing to have me thrown in jail for disagreeing with you?
I don't think that the government can provide good healthcare.
I think it provides terrible healthcare in the long run.
Just look at the VA. People under Medicare have worse health outcomes than people who aren't even insured at all.
And so I disagree with you.
Am I allowed to disagree with you in your society without you wanting me arrested?
Sure, but let's go a bit deeper into healthcare, for example.
No, no, hang on, hang on. You just did a real sure there very quickly, which means that you've contradicted your earlier principle.
Earlier you said that healthcare from the government should be funded by taxation and you were willing to use violence against that.
Now, if I disagree with you and you send your police to get taxes for the system that you want, Are you willing to have me arrested and thrown in jail because I don't want to spend money on a system I think is immoral?
No, I don't think jail would be the appropriate punishment.
Then it's not taxation. Well, there are other methods.
So sure, you're going to say it's stealing or whatever, but there are There are other methods without putting you in confinement and limiting where you're able to go, such as the government can garnish wages and they can order banks to take out money from your bank account.
There would be other solutions that the government could do without putting you in jail.
And if some other bank robber tried to do that, I would be perfectly...
Hang on. If some bank robber tried to steal from me, I would be justified in using force to protect myself, right?
If some robber tries to steal from me.
Yeah. Okay. So if the government comes and tries to steal from me, would I be justified in using force to protect my property?
And what if I'm using crypto and they can't take from me that way?
What if everybody shifts to crypto because it's a free marketing currency and the government can't just garnish you wages or take people's money from a bank?
What then? That's not sure we're working towards that, but it's still in development and there's not enough research or anything for me to properly articulate.
All right. What if I say, I don't want to have a bank account because the money could be taken by the government.
I just want to be paid in cash and I just want to deal in gold and I just want to deal in whatever, right?
Silver. And then the government has no bank account to steal from.
No, because when the government garnishes wages from you, they don't take it from you, they take it from the employer and the employer deducts it from what they give out to you.
What if the government doesn't even know how I get paid because I get paid in cash and gold and silver?
There are reporting requirements and the government knows how much companies Pay their employees based on the salaries that they report and deduct as an expense for the company.
Okay, so now everybody has to report all of their economic interactions to the government because you want the government to run healthcare.
Well, they do already.
What do you mean they do already?
Of course they do already, but the question is, should they?
Um, I, I, I don't know.
I guess not.
And what if the bank manager decides he doesn't want to steal from one of his customers because it's bad for business?
Does that bank manager then go to jail?
It would.
Like, like you, it's at this point, it's kind of just pushing, pushing the, pushing the straw further down the road or whatever the expression is.
It's going to keep going up to some level.
Until... I'm not sure what would happen.
I don't know. So why on earth would I listen to you about how society should be organized when you don't even know how anything would happen?
Like if you haven't bothered thinking it through, why on earth would I listen to you about something as complex as healthcare or education or national defense or whatever if you don't even seem to have a clue about how any of this would be implemented?
Okay, so use force.
Sure. I've already conceded that the government would ask for force.
Yes, but then when I ask you for force actually being enacted, you back away from it.
Okay. So yes, then I guess eventually you would get put in jail.
Okay. So if I disagree with you, you would be happy with me being put in jail or you would accept me being put in jail?
I would... Yeah, I guess I would accept it.
So why would I pretend we're having a rational argument when you're just waving a gun around?
You want your way, and if I disagree with you, you're okay with me being put in jail.
So why would I want to pretend that there's some veneer of civilized discussion going on here?
I don't want to use force against you, Joel.
You understand? I don't want...
I would specifically disavow the use of force against you because the use of force for political ends is the very definition of terrorism, you understand?
So I don't want to... If you have a great idea for how healthcare should be provided to poor people, more power to you.
Sit down, we'll talk about it.
I don't want healthcare to be provided to poor people.
I want healthcare to be provided for children only who do not have the free will or capacity or means to provide for themselves while they're in their infancy stages.
I don't think there should be socialized healthcare for adults.
Yes, but you would have to give the money or the card or the right to poor adults, right?
Who would then take their children to the doctor, right?
But let's say you say to me, you come to me, Joel, and you say, Steph, I've got a great idea.
Here's how we can give healthcare to poor children, right?
I'd be like, hey, let's hear it.
I mean, I want poor children to get healthcare.
Of course I do. I'm a caring human being.
I want poor kids to get healthcare.
So you sit down and we try and work it out.
And maybe we can come up with something charitable.
Or maybe we can come up with something which says, you get free healthcare when you're a kid in return for 10 years or 5% of your income when you become employed and you get all...
Whatever. I don't know. Something.
Maybe there's some charity, some benefit.
Who knows, right? Some genius way to get healthcare provided to poor people.
I'd be like, fantastic, let's do it.
At no point will I ever tell you, Joel, that you should go to jail if you disagree with me on how to provide healthcare to poor children.
Never would I do that.
Now, the fact that you are willing to do that makes the discussion a whole lot fucking less civilized, you understand?
And it makes me pretty fucking resentful.
That you're sitting there saying, I've got great ideas, and if you don't agree, I'm going to put a gun to your head and drag you off to jail.
Sorry, man. Screw you.
You want to talk to me in a civilized way?
Let's talk in a civilized way.
You want to start talking about waving guns around at me?
Can't do it, man. Moving on to the next caller.
Okay, thank you. Alright, well up next we have Anna.
Anna wrote in and said, I've heard a few young ladies on your call-in show talking about delaying motherhood in order to set a career in motion first.
Despite your best efforts to convince them otherwise, some still seem unconvinced by your suggestions to have children younger and pursue a career once the kids are older.
I've made many mistakes in my life including convincing myself that I didn't want a family and instead focused on achieving a high-earning STEM career only to find myself wholly unfulfilled.
I was able to realize my error before my fertility window closed and now have an amazing husband and son and I'd like to share my story in the hopes that some of the ladies out there might hear it differently from the mouth of a fellow lady who almost missed out on the most important title I could imagine.
Mom. I'm also hoping that Stefan would briefly discuss with me the idea of how to balance taking responsibility for one's actions and forgiving oneself, i.e.
avoiding self-blame, specifically as it relates to the choices I made in my teenage years.
I think this might help me in relation to dealing with my own choices and mistakes.
That's from Anna. Anna, I forgive you for assuming my gender.
Thank you for the call.
I appreciate that.
Are we on? Hi.
Hi. Yeah, I'd love to hear the story.
Tell me all about it.
Can you hear me okay? Yes.
Okay, sorry. My internet service is terrible, so it's a little bit spotty.
I'm not totally sure where to begin.
It's obviously a complicated long story, but I thought maybe I could start by kind of explaining what our day-to-day life looked like before we decided to have kids and what it's like now, just to kind of illustrate what When some of these ladies or others think that the career is what's going to bring them happiness in their day-to-day life.
Sure. So my husband and I have been together for almost eight years and married for almost three.
And before we, when we were married, we thought we didn't want children and we were both working in, we're both in STEM careers and life was busy.
I need to put one word to it.
It was busy and we were both high earners.
But just the day to day, try to get dinner on the table and get to bed on time and try to plan, you know, dentist appointments and all that kind of stuff.
Like the logistics of it were pretty nuts.
No one was getting enough sleep, you know, or exercise.
And we weren't doing lots of overtime.
It was just typical 40 hours with kind of a long commute, but it was crazy.
And both of us were feeling like, man, this The years are going by too fast.
Like, you know, how is it already Christmas and those kind of things?
And no matter what we tried to do, it really was rat race kind of thing.
And I was in the career that I had, you know, worked so hard to be in.
So it's not like I couldn't get the job I was hoping for.
But it was just crazy.
And I just kept thinking, we've got to do something different because life is going by too fast.
And, you know, what are we making all this money for?
When we're not home enough to enjoy the things we can purchase or we were going on great vacations once a year, but that's, you know, a week or two at most, plus a weekend here and there.
And it was like, I don't know if this is really chalking up to be worth it.
And we had toyed with the idea of me just being a stay-at-home wife.
And every time we sat down to look at the finances, it was like, oh, look at all these things we'd have to give up and lots of excuses that we would make for ourselves.
Wait, sorry, you said a stay-at-home wife?
What do you mean? Not a stay-at-home mom, but a stay-at-home wife.
For me to just quit my job?
Yeah. So we were still of the mindset that neither of us wanted kids.
So we were thinking if I quit my career and stayed at home and just to take care of the house and stuff, maybe it would be less busy.
Oh, so you do the chores and the groceries and the optometrist and the dental?
Yeah, okay. Yep.
And the budget and all that stuff, right?
And then maybe we wouldn't be so busy and maybe that would help.
And then it was just more of a financial decision we were weighing in.
But so to throw one thing that I left out of my letter at, so you might want to put your crash helmet on.
So I had had my tubes tied when I was 30 and it was a year into the relationship with my husband.
We were dating and we were serious.
And another detail that's relevant, my husband has a son from a previous marriage who is now 10.
And so when we met, he was 3.
And we have partial custody of him.
So that, of course, complicated everything.
Why did you have your tubes tied?
I'm sorry, what was the question?
Why did you have your tubes tied?
I, oh man, there's so much in my history that led up to this.
You know, there's a pill.
That I would never want. I know.
And I was terrified of getting pregnant.
You know, of having like an unplanned...
I was just terrified. I knew enough girls from high school and college that had, quote, accidentally got pregnant.
I know you've gone through that with other callers.
It's never really an accident. But you know what I mean?
I was so scared of...
Having a kid and having that responsibility, if it wasn't something I was truly wanting and ready for, and I had been on the pill, but you hear stories of women, oh, that one in a million, and I'm not sure how much of that is them not taking it right, but I was just scared, and I thought for sure that I would just never change my mind.
There's a big answer to that question, so much that goes into that, but I was just sure that I would never change my mind.
And every time I told anybody that I didn't want kids, they would say, oh, you'll change your mind.
But that's all I ever got.
No one ever said why or what was wonderful about having kids.
No one really ever worked hard to make the effort to change my mind.
And I was fairly resistant to it, so I'm not going to pretend like that was just, oh, I didn't ever get good advice.
Sometimes I got good advice that I ignored.
But... So when my husband and I got married, that was part of the deal.
He had his son from his previous marriage and we had discussed that very early on about what we wanted from our relationship and whether or not we wanted kids together.
And at the time, his ex-wife is a complete disaster and we have challenges with my stepson.
And so he said, you know, I have the one kid I got burned real bad from that situation.
So I'm not looking to have other kids.
And obviously he's changed his mind since then.
But when he and I met, we were You know, he was of the mindset of like, man, I don't ever want to go through that again if this is what family life looks like.
He got drugged pretty badly through the family court system.
And so he was pretty gun-shy, and I was coming out of a bad relationship.
And so both of us were like, well, I'm looking for companionship.
But the family part of it was just something that both of us were sure we never wanted.
And he's a fair amount younger than me.
He's six and a half years younger than me, so I'm 36.
And he's just about to turn 30.
So when we met, I was 29, he was 22.
You cradle-robber.
I know. You daycare fly-by snatcher with a windowless fan!
No, I'm just kidding. Anyway, come on.
I feel like I'm getting sidetracked, so feel free to bring me back on target.
I do that. If I'm going off on the rails in some details.
Mommy's going to get you some shaving gear, honey, just about next year.
I'm just kidding. Go on. We've heard it all.
It never gets old. Oh my goodness.
So I just, I grew up in California.
And so feminism was, you know, all those ideals everybody always asks when I grew up.
You know, what are you going to be when you grow up?
What are you going to be? What are you going to do?
And it was like the whole mom thing was never a central focus.
Of all the guidance and the questions I was asked, and I never felt nurturing.
I have a terrible bio dad, and I'm sure that has a huge amount to do with all of that.
I think I was always scared to be a parent.
I think a big part of it was scared to replicate mistakes and afraid that I wouldn't have the confidence to do it well.
My husband and I, by the way, gave me a 0% chance that I don't cry on this call, so here it comes.
Your heart seems to have stretched a few dimensions recently.
Oh, man. Nothing brings out your highest and lowest and your biggest fear like having a tiny creature that you're responsible for, right?
Oh, I hear you. So, anyway, I had just convinced myself that a career would be enough for me.
You know, a career and a dog, so at least I wasn't a cat lady, but...
So, fast forward to two years ago.
Life's crazy. We thought we knew what we wanted.
I thought I knew what I wanted.
I had the career. I had the husband.
He's a fantastic man.
And we had been listening to you for a few years because he heard you on Peter Schiff.
He was looking for some financial advice and found you.
And you just turned the whole world upside down.
Thanks, Steph. Yeah. Um, and a few red pill moments, like, um, you did a presentation on circumcision and my husband showed it to me and he's, you know, just kind of, what do you think of this guy?
And it was like, holy shit, that seems so obvious.
How did I ever think differently? How did I ever accept that as normal?
And it led us down this road of what else have I been thinking and believing that that may not be true?
And it really changed a lot of the way we think about, you know, politics and society and anarchy and all of these things.
But you talk about parenting a lot, too.
And, you know, all these other women that said, oh, you'll change your mind one day when I said I didn't want kids.
You know, they kind of neglected that part where you got to prepare to have kids.
You know, if I waste decades in college and all of my fertility and stuff spending time on that, you can...
Wake up one day and go, oh, you're right, I've changed my mind.
Well, that might be too late and that's what I'm hoping that if some of the things that I say will relate to others, then I might red pill them on that too because specifically what you said that started me thinking was when you started talking about looking backwards at your life from your deathbed and the things that you've created and the things that you'll be leaving behind and who you'll be surrounded with and what you've done with your time and That kind of hit me.
I'm like, you know, I was really good at the career that I had, but when I die, nobody will remember that I did it.
Nobody will have cared. I'm totally replaceable, as evidenced by the fact that someone else has been doing it for a year now.
And who's going to be at your funeral?
Who's going to be at your funeral if you just work all the time?
There'll be like one grave digger.
Exactly, exactly. That's it.
Who's even going to know what song you want played at your funeral?
I don't know. Exactly.
And that really sent a feeling of loneliness, of like, oh man, I have friends now that I care deeply about, but friendships do come and go, and what will I be left with?
And I'll have done nothing in the world that will last.
Nothing I will have done with my time will remain.
Well, and all of your friends, you know, you're rolling the dice when you get up in years about who makes it.
You know, if you have kids, all things going well, they're going to be around when you get old.
But you never know, friends, they move, they die, they whatever, get married, they join cults, like there's a bunch of different things that they do that doesn't have any much guarantee about whether they'll be around when you get old.
Yeah, and oddly enough, I know I mentioned in my original email, too, that Gavin McGinnis was one of the other voices, and the reason I say it's funny is because you two have very different approaches, and I appreciate them both.
You know, Gavin, we just watched a lot of him, and he was always saying, like, we're a loser if you don't have at least three, and he's kind of tongue-in-cheek about it, but not really, you know, and he talks about, he's so rough around the edges, but he clearly idolizes And your body.
Yes. Yeah, exactly.
And the other huge challenge is, I'm in a marriage with a man who we said that we didn't want them.
So if one person changes their mind, that can be a problem.
That can be kind of a deal breaker.
And I love my husband, so I forget exactly how I brought it up.
But I mentioned it to him when we started listening to this.
I said, you know, I'm not saying that I... That I've changed my mind and I want kids, but maybe I wanted the option, like maybe I'm at least regretting closing that window so permanently, because there's different methods for having your tubes tied, and the one I did is pretty permanent.
And just because it was inexpensive and less invasive, and my husband, his answer surprised me.
He said, Well, we didn't really close that window permanently.
There's always IVF, which is, you know, in vitro fertilization, which is ridiculously expensive.
But he didn't say, you know, he didn't try to talk me out of it or calm me down.
He just said, well, we didn't really close that window if we really need it.
And I thought, well, are you changing your mind too?
You know, are we starting to think that maybe we do want a family together?
And a few of those conversations happened between us where it wasn't like, I changed my mind.
I mean, we need to do this, but I'm starting to wonder, was this a mistake?
I've toyed with this idea.
At that point, we had listened enough to your peaceful parenting that it was a package deal.
If we were going to start a family, I was going to be a stay-at-home mom.
You knew that you could do it differently, right?
Than your parents?
Yes. Luckily, he and I had both spent a lot of time That was part of our histories with our parents and his ex and how he ended up in that situation.
We had a pretty good handle on why we made the choices that we did that led us to where we were at.
It wasn't ground zero.
We're a complete train wreck, luckily.
You did have the child through IVF, is that right?
Yes, we did.
How much was the IVF? Oh, since none of it was covered by insurance, the grand total for everything, including all of our kind of travel and stuff, was $17,000 cash.
I've heard worse. Huge amount of money.
It's kind of funny how you say, well, I'm going to be this career woman.
I'm going to make a lot of money.
I'm going to have my tube tied so I can make all this money.
Hey, let me take a big pile of money and hand it over for IVF because, you know, it's like it's just kind of a flow through.
That thought has not escaped me.
I thought, you know, how much did I really make in my career when it's all said and done based on the literal price that I've paid for my mistake?
Did you graduate with a lot of student debt?
No, thank God I did not.
My paternal grandparents, when they passed, education was always important to them.
And they had left me...
Enough money to go to school.
So luckily I did not.
And I worked part-time to cover living expenses and such.
So at least there was no student debt.
And my husband had a scholarship because he's ridiculously smart.
So neither of us had any student debt.
Thank goodness. Yeah.
I mean, it cuts into the old money you can use for the down payment.
But yeah, it's certainly better than having that kind of debt.
Right. And we already owned a home.
So... And it's funny because the finances, right?
I mean, we're both very much the plan ahead kind of people.
And every time we sat down and look at finances of single income, it was always, well, we can do it, but we have to give up X, Y, and Z. And there was some of it where I thought, you know, I worked with this guy who was not very smart and had two kids.
And I thought, how the hell does he do it?
You know, if he can do it, we can do it.
And it wasn't meant to mean necessarily a mean thing.
But seriously, if that guy can figure it out, we can figure it out.
Well, there's another thing, too, which you'll figure out, I'm sure over time, maybe you've already noticed it.
But when you look, let's say you both make $100,000 a year, make $200,000 a year, and you say, well, if one of us stays home, we're back down to $100,000 a year.
But that's not how it works.
The way that it works is, if you're home, if you're taking care of things, if you're supporting him, and if he's got a really good and big reason to go make money, he's back up to $200,000 before you know it.
You can end up with more money with one person staying home and babies than you had when you were both working because the clarity of mind is there, the purpose is there, the drive, the ambition is there.
It's just how it plays out and it's hard for people to understand because the math before and the math after are totally different.
Even dumb little things that you don't think about.
When we were both working, we were both in remote locations, so you have to pack a lunch.
We're using half as many Ziploc bags.
Dumb stuff like that.
It's impossible to calculate how much money you're actually going to save when one of you is not leaving the house.
There's a lot of hidden costs like that.
Neither of us ever make a big decision without planning, but when it came down to it, We had talked about this, you know, maybe we do want a family together, and the night it came down to it, it was right before Christmas in 2016, and we went out to dinner, and we were discussing the subject of having a family again, and my husband said, let's just get pregnant, and we'll figure the rest out.
And that's not our style.
Like every other single generation for about the fast three billion years.
Celine Dion's mom, it was like in the 1960s or whatever.
She had like eight kids.
They all lived in a shack.
I mean, look at Little House in the Prairie.
That's where we all came from was nobody had anything.
Yep. Especially when my husband makes really good money.
He's like, this is ridiculous.
Let's get pregnant. We will figure the rest out.
How spoiled are we?
I started to cry. I know, I know, right?
It's sad. The next Monday, I called the fertility clinic and the rest is history.
We handed happily over every penny of that and luckily got pregnant on the first try, which is not always the case for IVF, but since mine wasn't caused by any health issues, but just by choice, You know, I was healthy and we were able to get pregnant quickly.
And that was an amazing experience, you know, to be pregnant.
And the whole thing is just amazing.
So tell me about, yeah, tell me about that, you know, that little waka waka when you see the little Pac-Man going on the ultrasound.
And I mean, what's all that like for you?
The first time you see the heart beating and the first time you feel the move.
And the first time he gets the hiccups, and when you start, you're like, oh man, I've never been this hungry in my whole life.
I mean, I swear, I don't know how I didn't gain more weight.
It was crazy. But I mean, all of it just to, you know, every movement and all the silly cravings and, you know, the funny conversations you have trying to pick names and That always brings up stories like, oh no, I knew a kid with that name.
It really does change your focus and everything becomes more about relationships and the grandparents.
We told our parents early on before we told anybody else and swore them to secrecy in case it didn't pan out.
But to see how much joy that gives to grandparents and it's like, I can get that one day maybe.
If you don't have kids, you don't have grandkids.
And just how much joy it brings to the family.
But just between my husband and I too, I tell you, any ladies who are listening, you think you love your husband, but when you see him become a father, it's totally different.
Oh, that's the whole thing, isn't it?
It's amazing to watch him with ourselves.
That's what people forgot to tell you, Anna.
It's not like, oh, you're going to change your mind.
It's like, no, no, some great guy is going to come along and change your mind for you.
Because you don't just want kids in the abstract.
You want kids with someone in particular.
That's exactly it.
And it's like, it's not just about changing your mind.
It'll change your whole life and all for the better.
Yeah. And it's exactly what you said.
It's like when you're with the right person, then it's like, you know, if it's just the two of you, then that ends someday when you both die.
Best case scenario, right?
But if you have a child together, then it never ends.
You know, you take the love that you have for your spouse and make something living with it.
It's amazing. And you end up, in your old age, you end up surrounded by life, not death.
Because in your old age, people are just dropping like flies.
Like, everyone's going to die around you.
But if you have kids, you have grandkids, you're surrounded by life and newness and beautiful eyes and learning how to walk and you're part of the cycle of life.
It's just a mausoleum.
Otherwise, when you're old, you're just like surrounded by crypt keepers biding time.
And the number of...
You're totally right.
The number of...
Small day-to-day things that will just catch you off guard in the best possible way when you have a child around.
You know, like, this week, he started to offer me his toys.
He's nine months old. And when he's happily playing with something, he gives it to me.
And oh my god, that, it just, you know, you're like, he has empathy.
He can share. Like, he understands.
He started to laugh just when I laugh, even if nothing else funny is going on.
If I start to laugh now, he laughs.
Like, it just...
All those things that are just small day-to-day development, if you're connected and you're paying attention and you're trying to have the perspective of seeing the world through your child's eyes and everything becomes amazing again.
We go outside for walks and I'm pointing out the shadows from the leaves or a butterfly or things and I'm like, I wasn't stopping to enjoy things like this before and I am now because of the child.
It's not just about the baby.
Everything changes. Your perspective, your appreciation.
Like I said, everything that I feel for my husband.
In a way, I feel like our days are fissier, but so much more worthwhile.
I know those phases don't last forever either, but I can tell you that no one in my career ever appreciated me the way that my husband and I know my son does, even though he's little and he doesn't have those concepts yet.
It doesn't matter. I know the impact of what I do every day now is very obvious to me.
Whereas what I did before kind of didn't matter.
Every night I have the privilege of putting my son to bed.
Half the time he falls asleep in my arms.
I think every night my husband could tell you, I come downstairs and I just give him a big hug and sometimes I cry because I'm just so overwhelmed with how amazing this whole thing is.
And those are the good tears, right?
When I'm just like, man, I told him a couple weeks ago, I would have never even known how much to regret missing out on this because all these little moments are so amazing that, man, it's really real to me that I almost missed this and that would have been Just the biggest mistake ever.
This is so amazing.
We want a couple more and that's the plan as long as medically everything works out.
We'd like to have a couple more.
And to have a house full of giggling children, what could be better than that?
There's no career in the world that could ever take that place.
Well, it's funny because people...
You're right to.
Look, it's a beautiful thing. And your big heartedness is hugely appreciated by me.
And I'm sure by the millions of people who listen to this.
And the funny thing is that I was always sold this garbage that parenting is repetitive.
And somehow a career.
Yeah. That's where the change is.
That's where the excitement is. You know what?
But after a while...
Careers are, yeah, you know what's going on.
You know, it's not, there's not that much variety.
You know, when you're starting out, you're learning and, you know, but, you know, once you, I mean, I did just about everything in business from coding to sales to marketing to, you know, I mean, R&D. I mean, there really wasn't much left that was new to do.
But parenting, man, it's new every day.
It's new every day.
There's something new that's really, really cool.
I now know what dabbing is.
Nobody else, you'll know when she starts watching Minecraft videos, but I now know what dabbing is.
And it's always something new.
Like when, you're right, when my daughter first looked at her food and then fed me, it was like, whoa!
Connection, built, bridge, empathy, it's working.
Everybody stand back.
Miracles are occurring in this house.
And it's just, you'd want to just, you know, you know, it's happened a billion times, but it doesn't matter.
It's happening to you. And that's incredible.
Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing.
Just the little things that seem ordinary to us that the baby finds just amazing.
It's so neat to experience that with him.
You're right. When they start to share back with you, I described it to my husband.
I said, He's not even sold, so I'm just kind of used to pouring everything into him, all the affection and attention and resources.
And so you know one day it's going to come back, but you're just not ready for it because you're not thinking about it.
So one day, baby turns around and gives you something back, and it's like, oh, I think my heart just exploded.
I know how the Grinch felt when his heart grew two sizes.
Right. Right, because, you know, you also hear, oh, kids, they take it, they take, and it's like, no, I don't think so.
I don't think so. They're very generous.
They like to be liked. They're very reciprocal.
And... It is a reciprocal relationship, more so than I imagined.
Because, you know, like Anna, you and my wife and your husband, we're having the kind of families that have never hitherto existed on the planet.
I'm telling you that straight up.
This idea of no punishment, peaceful parenting, but consequences and reality and empathy and modeling.
What we're trying to put together in this parenting framework has never existed in the world before that I know of.
And, you know, keeping your kids out of toxic government schools and making sure they have positive relationships all around them.
This is new.
This is new. And so there's no way to judge it by what came before.
This has no relationship to my child at all other than a vague height ratio.
Yeah. Yeah, the whole thing.
And it just, it makes you be a better person.
It makes you want to be a better person, right?
I mean, like you've said before, your children, just a mirror reflecting back at you.
It's like, man, that's no joke because it is reciprocal, like you're saying.
And they will show you any of your bad habits.
And we're not quite that far yet, but I can see how that happens.
And not just that, but your consistency with You know, like with the peaceful parenting and government education and stuff like that, you know, people are always talking about, oh, aren't you excited when you start kindergarten?
He's actually going to be doing that at home with me.
You know, it does open up those conversations for, you know, all of our friends and my husband's got some cousins nearby that are pregnant with their first and it gives us, you know, like a springboard and have all these other conversations And, you know, enrich other relationships.
I mean, it really is life-changing.
There's no way to imagine, you know, before you do it, how much of it changes.
And it's really all for the better.
I mean, no joke, it's a huge amount of work.
And we're still going through a rough sleep phase.
So if I can promote motherhood when I'm still missing out on this much sleep, then you know it's the real deal.
It's all uphill from here.
I mean, the hard part is what we're doing right now.
The light sleep is also often a sign of high intelligence, so it's tough now, but it's a lot easier later when it's so much easier to negotiate.
Oh, you were just talking about that recently on a call-in show with someone who was asking about, or on your Q&A, how to get your toddler to sleep.
And you're reassuring that I'm like...
Okay, you know, I just have to buy my time and know that it's going to be better later.
And man, it's a huge struggle now.
Yeah, the only way to get a kid to sleep reliably is to date a dunderhead.
And we don't want to be doing that.
So I'm afraid you gotta...
And also because you have a boy and you and your husband are both very smart and the odds are very likely you can have a very smart kid.
And that's going to be even more enjoyable because...
I mean, given that you're smart, I mean, seeing the intellectual development that is just like a rocket is just an astounding thing.
Now, tell me this, Anna.
And it's also given me...
No, go ahead. I was just going to say, it's also given me an appreciation for, you know, raising a boy and being sensitive to the fact of how boys learn and things like...
I do have my work cut out for me in that sense, but it's also helping me to...
Not assume that everybody interacts like I do and communicates like I do.
You know, it's making me very aware that, man, boys are definitely a different creature, but it's really cool to experience.
And so it probably also helps me stop a few more times and try to see things from my husband's perspective now, too, because I'm like, okay, I'm really getting a real taste of how different boys are.
Not that I didn't know, but it's really visceral now.
So it's a very cool thing in how it can enhance your other relationships, you know, if you're open-minded and willing for it, too.
Right. Now, answer me this, please.
So, we always think about loving our children, but something that we touched on earlier, but tell me a little bit more about, is what it's like to see your husband with your boy, and what that does to your relationship to your husband.
Oh, my husband's awesome.
He's... I'm...
He's much more private than I am about sharing things with the public or being silly or goofy or whatever in public.
I'm much more the one goofing off or telling dumb jokes.
So my husband is more composed.
He's the mature one. I know we joked about the age, but really he's the grown-up in our relationship.
And so it brings out a side of him that I didn't get to see very much before when they play.
You know, when my husband will get down on the ground and make silly noises and goof around and I don't want to say roughhousing, give people their ideas since he's a baby, but there's still a baby version of roughhousing, you know?
Or just peekaboo.
Oh man, our son loves peekaboo.
But he likes it the best if we're both doing it.
If one of us is holding him and we're sneaking around corners, then he'll start screaming with joy.
When else would I have seen my husband in that capacity?
Never. So it brings out this really...
Like, playful, kind of carefree side to him that's so enjoyable.
And just, you know, the caring side of my husband.
Like, when I was pregnant, you know, it's kind of hard to feel pretty when you're super pregnant and your ankles are swollen.
You know, like, you're sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night for a brownie.
Like, it's kind of hard to feel sexy.
But my husband never looked at me like I was, you know, anything other than the day we met.
And just, he was excited when...
He could feel a kick and, like, just real enthusiasm for all of that, you know, really sensitive, intimate stuff.
You talked about this on the earlier call, like, intimacy.
It's not all sex, right?
There's other types of intimacy.
And this very, you know, gentle, caring, nurturing, build a shelter around our family and keep all the bad stuff out.
Yeah. He's always been my protector, but now it's different.
It just brings out this...
He's always been very thoughtful, but it seems like some of these things are just amplified now.
I'm definitely the worrier, so we fall into some of these personality stereotypes as far as men and women go.
He's reassuring.
He helps me relax and go with the flow.
It's just really amplifying these wonderful characteristics that he balances With my personality that's so necessary when you have a kid to stay balanced, especially when you're not sleeping well, right?
But specifically the nurturing and the excitement for all of the little things.
I think sitcoms have really screwed up how women view men and, you know, they're just macho and don't care about that kind of stuff.
I mean, if you have a good man, they really do.
And... To see it and have them go through all that with me, I mean, it's amazing.
But specifically right now, it's the playfulness.
You know, my son plays with my husband much more enthusiastically than he plays with me.
You know, daddy gets the play and mommy gets the cuddles.
And they're both amazing, right?
I mean, we each have our things that the baby bonds to us for and with and Neither of them is replaceable.
It's so amazing to see that my husband can give my son things that I can't.
Just to watch the two of them play or check things out.
My son really likes to just sit with new objects and turn them over and over in his hands and just really study them.
We say he's a chubby little scientist.
But he can do that quietly for quite a long time and that's very much like my husband's personality.
The two of them will sit together We have a little chair for my son and he'll sit there and my husband will sit there and they'll just quietly spend time there just looking at things and it's so amazing to see that between the two of them and I can't even describe it and I guess that's silly right?
I'm here to try to convince everybody and then I can't describe it but it's something that I thought I loved my husband before but now it seems like I had no idea.
I had a girlfriend say that to me the other day, too.
She's got a husband and two kids, and she said, I'm sorry, honey.
I thought I loved you before, but things are just different now.
She means it in a good way, because it almost feels like nothing before ever mattered, and now everything matters.
Right. Well, let me ask you this, though, because a lot of...
Women that I've talked to when they're younger, they hear this story, well, you've got to have your own career because you don't want to rely on the man.
You don't want to be dependent on the man.
You've got to stay independent.
Had you heard that or how did you deal with that in your mind?
Yes, I had heard that and I'm glad you mentioned it because I had thought about this in relation to our call.
So my parents were divorced and so my mom...
You know, ended up having to go back to work.
She was a stay-at-home mom when we were little, and when I was six is when they divorced.
And she went back, she went into teaching specifically so that she would be home when we were home, so that we wouldn't have to do, you know, daycare or anything like that, so that she could have hours that lined up with us being in school.
But that was very, you know, it was a very realistic reality for her that she had to have a backup plan and rely on herself in that way.
And so, and, you know, being in California with a lot of lefties and, you I was a feminist, especially when I went to college.
That was always a common thing I heard.
You've got to make sure you rely on yourself.
That's stupid because I think all that's going to do is cloud your judgment as a woman with who your husband should be.
You want your husband to be someone that you can rely on.
If you're constantly looking for what your plan B is, you're not going to choose wisely with your husband because that should be a massive motivation.
You need to pick a man that you absolutely can depend on.
Not only that, I can't think of the way to word this.
It's not going to make it sound like something I don't mean for it to, but it holds me to account in the sense that I am earning my half of our income by the work that I do here.
Making sure that I've got good meals and not TV dinners and crap like that.
There are times where you're like, I don't feel like it, but it's my responsibility to take care of things in a certain way.
It's not... I don't feel like I'm in a helpless position by being dependent.
I feel like it's exactly the way things should be because I'm dependent on him for the finances, but he is massively dependent on me too.
It's just for different things.
And so to make it seem like it's all financial and that's one way, I think it really skews the relationship, and that's what it should be, where there is dependency both ways.
You know, he's trusting me to do things with...
Our son the way that we've discussed and agreed to and to handle our budget and finances and stuff like that.
There's a huge amount of dependency both ways.
And I think it's also delusional to imagine that you can do it all yourself.
I mean, that's what I was describing before with our day-to-day.
That's what we were trying to do, and it's a disaster.
It just doesn't work.
It makes you exhausted for all the wrong reasons and have nothing to show for it.
So, I mean, that's what I would say to anybody who's thinking that.
It's like, no... You want to choose a husband that you can depend on and not feel like you're not pulling your weight, like you're guilty, like you have to justify...
If you have the right partner, those things are not an issue.
Right.
Now, what's happening with your stepson, Anna?
He...
So my husband's ex-wife, my stepson's mother, is...
Legitimately borderline personality.
And so for anyone who doesn't know, it's like the antisocial personality and all those things are very related.
There's overlap. She's legitimately certifiable.
Do you know if she's been diagnosed that way or...?
Yes. And most people with those personality disorders will never go in front of a therapist because part of that personality disorder is an absolute inability to ever admit that there's any flaw with them.
Yeah, yeah. But there was some family court mandated with their custody issues, and the social worker did say that she was borderline, which we already knew, right?
And that is one bad diagnosis, too, because that's unbudgable, as far as I know.
It sucks. Yeah, it is.
It's horrible and there's no reformation for people with personality disorders like that.
And with my stepson, when my husband and I met, he was three.
And he and I had a good relationship in the beginning.
There was a little while there where I was his favorite.
We did fun things and we had unique things that we bonded over and games that we played and stuff like that.
And I'd drive him to school and All these things, but as of the last, I want to say two or three years, the relationship between he, not just he and I, but between my stepson and his father, my husband, it's really gone bad.
We've been seeing a counselor for, I want to say almost five years now, because it started out manned by the family court and we continue to go, but things are really deteriorating with him.
So when you said how things are going with him, I'm not sure if you had Something more specific, but it seems that he's kind of got some of the precursors for the personality disorder as well.
He seems to be going down that path.
Oh boy. And so what do you see that's problematic that's showing up?
Yeah. He's extraordinarily manipulative.
Everything is a one-upper, looking for loopholes, looking to pick fights.
A big concern for my husband and I is there's a lot of low empathy.
He's very lazy and has issues with attachment, you know, like that I hate you don't leave me thing.
He wants to pick a fight but then seems overly attached if you pull back.
But he can't admit when he's wrong, ever.
If you try to point out objectively, like, okay, well, you said this, and then you did this, you know, if you try to point out things that are, if you try to take the emotion out of it and get to the objective, he changes the subject, or finds a loophole, or that's not what I meant.
And a lot of that is very typical of the personality disorder types.
And it's starting to show up at school.
He's in public school, which is not what we would prefer.
But with custody, you don't have a say.
With custody arrangements and his mother.
So he's in a charter school at least.
But there started to be behavioral issues the last year or so there too.
And that's not a good sign.
You know, at first when it's just in the home and nowhere else.
That's kind of stage one.
But when it starts to manifest elsewhere, then that's when you start to get more concerned.
And how old is he now?
So dishonesty.
He's almost 11.
So just about to hit puberty and all of that excitement.
Yes. Yep.
And my husband and I have guessed for a while that puberty would probably be the make or break situation.
You know, it's either going to, you know, either amp up his testosterone enough to finally stand up to his mom and break free from some of this stuff, which of course would not be easy, but preferable to the alternative where it would just kind of Project him like a rocket ship down that path, and that's what we're afraid of.
But I think that time is upon us here sooner than we think.
So I think he's probably pretty close to puberty based on a few things that are personal.
I know you guys don't know who he is, but I won't share my steps on business.
No, of course. I think he's close to puberty, though.
Of course. Is your husband's ex...
Remarried? Is she dating?
Are there other influences that you know of that might be around your stepson?
She has a second son with a second now ex-husband and is now dating another man who we know people who know people and live in a small town.
He had a vasectomy after an oops baby with a girlfriend from before so he can't get her pregnant but she's working on a big old That's a mixed family business on her end that's pretty gross.
And this guy that she's with now, he's much older and not very intelligent, doesn't have a lot going for him, and is more of just superficial, kind of the Facebook liars, you know, like they lie about what their life looks like on social media just to be impressive that they're those types of people.
So not a great influence, like nothing, you know, outright abusive, but not a good influence.
Right. Right.
And I assume that she was pretty when she was younger.
How's that hanging on for her?
That's funny that you mentioned that, right?
That's how my husband got hooked.
She was very pretty when she was younger.
He's not an idiot, but he's got a penis.
Not that you didn't already know that. Right.
Well, and he was 18.
He had turned 19 the month before his son was born, basically.
So it was... That didn't help.
Back to your question. She was very pretty.
She is now in her 30s and she's always focused on being very thin.
But as you know, that doesn't necessarily help a woman age well because then I kind of exaggerate the wrinkle.
She doesn't have enough fullness in her face to keep the wrinkles at bay.
Oh, yeah. You can have a nice face or you can have a nice butt.
You don't care about it. Yeah.
Yep. So she's one of the types that, you know, makeup tutorials and like pounds and pounds of makeup.
So she's trying her best to hide it.
But if you get close enough, you can...
I'm 36 and I personally think I look a hell of a lot better than her.
But that's probably not the most objective perspective.
The wall takes no prisoners.
There are no prisoners in the wall.
It grinds on.
There's no escape. And my husband and I... My husband and I anticipated that to be rough for her because the same year she turned 30, her youngest son started school.
So she was all of a sudden, you know, without children to control in the house 24-7 and hitting the wall.
And we thought that might kind of escalate some of her rage towards us.
But it seems to be unending in a way.
I'm glad you mentioned all of this too, though, because that's my other warning for some of these, any ladies out there who are Dating a single dad, and my husband's sitting right here, so this is not anything he hasn't heard before, and I don't mean this in an insulting way, but ladies, you don't want the mixed family stuff.
The ex can poison your household through the shared child, as long as she feels like it, you know, until you've got to stop paying child support, which is its own beast, right?
It's not something you want to do.
It's not easy.
It's not without its own whole world of problems.
Well, here's the thing too, and I've talked about this with single moms, but it's equally true if it's a very disturbed mom for a single dad, then what happens is you want to have a good relationship with the child.
You want to have a good relationship with your stepson.
Your husband obviously wants to have a good relationship with his son.
But what happens is the better your relationship gets, the more the jealous and vindictive ex is going to try and sabotage it.
So good becomes bad very quickly and you can't win.
You can't win. Oh, I really want to go to Aunt Anna's house.
She's great. Oh, let me tell you about Aunt Anna.
Like this Shelob venom goes into the kid to make sure that he doesn't end up liking anyone outside the mom.
Because she's not going to raise her game and become a better person.
But at least she can drag other people down in a vindictive way and isolate her kid that way.
Yeah. And I'm sure what you're saying is true for even just the average crazy ex that you enter personality disorder into that.
And it's that on steroids.
I mean... Nothing that we can ever do.
Like you said, we try to do better and it makes everything worse.
We're really in a no-win situation.
The things that she has told my stepson about us that are just blatant lies and he's a child.
He doesn't deserve to be in that position whether or not these things were true, but they're not.
The world of bullshit that that poor kid is going to have to deal with is I mean, and I know because my situation was very similar.
My own father is bio dad, antisocial personality disorder, which is why all of this was very familiar to me when my husband and I met.
And that was actually something I kind of bonded with my steps and over a little bit.
Like, I know where you are.
I know what this feels like.
He doesn't have... Any other split families of people that he's close to that he can relate to.
And I've told him all along, I know exactly what this feels like.
I've been there. This is not new to me.
So I know firsthand the kind of damage that it can do and the kind of stuff that you have to unpack.
And that's why my husband and I have been trying with therapy for a long time now to try to do everything that we can.
But I'm in this Real psychosis is really destructive.
Yeah. And you're stuck.
You're stuck. In a really weird way.
Yep. Now, before we close up for the night, I wanted to not miss the end of your letter, Hannah, where you say, how to balance taking responsibility for one's actions and forgiving oneself, avoiding self-blame, specifically as it relates to choices made in the teenage years.
What did teenage Anna get so wrong?
I mean, kind of all of this, right?
When I was 19 is when I stopped talking to BioDad.
The relationship became disruptive enough.
And at least I had family support in that because they did all know how crazy he was and how toxic he was.
So at least there's that.
And so getting away from that early was probably better for me than not.
But... I went through a pretty rough phase of just rebellion, probably just for the sake of rebellion.
You know, anything that my mom, you know, rules for the house, corpus and stuff, I would just break it, just to break it.
And I'm sure that really all had to do with bio data, right?
Like, sick of being told that everything was wrong and what not to do.
So it was just a way of kind of taking control of things in a really destructive way, but my whole life I had no control.
So it was all control maneuver.
But... Part of my choices and my history that I'm extraordinarily not proud of, but it is what I've done.
I had a fairly promiscuous phase, and my husband knows this, and it was something we discussed early on, right?
So we both had some dings against our sexual market value, and that was mine.
And all the rest of this, right?
You know, denying maternal instincts and going for a career and stuff.
It's like, I set a lot of the wheels in motion for some of this by my choices.
And I know it was a recent call show.
You're talking about the guy with the office fire and he was really self-abusive.
And I've kind of struggled with that in the way of it's like, man, I feel really stupid for some of the stuff that I've done.
And I know I'm smarter than that.
And I start to get a little bit self-abusive.
And then I have to go, you know, I really need to cut myself some slack.
Like I was just a kid, right?
Like 18. It's really just in between when you're a child, you literally have no control over Nothing's your fault.
As an adult, it's all your choice and your responsibility in that middle area.
It's not like one day it just changes.
There's some overlap where I guess I was just probably looking for reassurance that I wasn't trying to dodge responsibility and also not trying to beat myself too much about I did things that I'm not proud of.
I did things that were really stupid.
I understand now, based on my history, that I wasn't set up well for some of those things by my parents and my environment.
But even though those were my choices, I shouldn't be too hard on myself given the environment that I came from and the environment that I was in.
My mom has done a ton of work to apologize and express remorse and work on the things that she did as far as her choice in my father and those things.
She continues to offer Whatever she can to help and answer questions.
So she really has done what I feel she needed to do to make that right now.
But it was really just revolving around that kind of stuff.
When you've grown up with some of this garbage and abuse and you end up making stupid choices, it's like...
I really feel like I should not beat myself up for some of those really early mistakes, but just understand why I did that and work to make sure that I don't repeat that cycle in my kids.
Not that I would, but you know what I mean.
Promiscuity is an issue for me now, but you know what I mean?
I can't right some of those wrongs other than trying to make sure that the people around me that I care about don't do the same.
Let me give you the sentence that helped me the most with that.
Because, yes, I made some mistakes when I was younger.
But let me ask you this, Anna.
Was there good advice, sensible, wise, committed, intelligent, helpful advice, that was around you in those days that you just rejected?
No. Right.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
See, there's your answer, and there's your forgiveness.
Okay. So when I say, oh, I should have made better choices when I was 18, it's like, to me it's the same as saying, I should have made cell phone calls when I was 18.
There were no cell phones when I was 18.
Okay. I was inventing things on the fly with hormones, with intelligence, with rejection, with fitting in and not fitting in and chaos in the media and bad song examples and rap lyrics.
You know what I mean? It was a mess.
The boomers had abandoned the transfer of civilization to the next generation.
It took 14 billion years to accumulate wisdom that was handed to the boomers.
They're like, eh, forget it.
Sex, drugs, rock and roll, government debt, anti-war, music, selfishness, sex, key parties, narcissism, and greed.
We're done. We're done transferring it.
This burden of civilization, it's too much.
We're just going to throw it all away for fiat currency.
So, my mom taught me nothing about how to be...
I begged her for wisdom.
I begged her for answers.
What do I do when I get too angry?
What do I do if I'm just...
Basing things on emotion.
I begged and I was willing to listen to teachers.
No one had anything useful to tell me.
Everybody was self-absorbed and nobody wanted to give me any rules because they didn't have any rules for themselves.
They'd be revealed as hypocrites if they gave me any good advice.
What was my mother going to do?
What was my mother going to say?
It's important to control your temper.
Yeah, right. She was going to tell me that, right?
So, if there was no good advice around you, But you have to make decisions.
You just do the best you can.
You just do the best you can.
And it's one thing.
Trial and error. Yeah, and it's one thing.
Like, we are the raw children of a primordial universe.
We post-boomers.
I know I'm much older than you, but in general, we are the raw children of a primordial universe.
We are the ones who had to reinvent civilization out of our Darwinian muck, abandoned by the neutral Christianity and anti-Western values of the boomers.
We were handed Nothing plus debt, plus bigger government, plus crappy schools, plus terrible health care, plus bad advice, plus selfishness, plus isolation, plus daycare, plus narcissism, you name it.
We are the primitive children of a primordial universe, and we had to evolve pretty damn quickly.
Was it messy?
Hell yeah. Were mistakes made?
Hell yeah. But look where we evolved to, Hannah.
We evolved to be way better.
Then our parents. We evolved past them.
They left us behind in the muck and the mire.
And then we evolved like a rocket ship past a jumping frog.
We evolved into the future from a past we failed to inherit.
And that is a pretty goddamn good thing to do out of the nihilistic muck we were handed.
Well, thank you for that, because I just needed an objective voice to tell me if I was off the mark on that.
Yeah. If you got good advice and you rejected it, that's one thing.
If you didn't get any good advice, well, that's on them, not on you.
All right. It's been a very long show.
I hugely appreciate the call, Anna.
It was really enjoyable. Please do call back anytime and keep us posted on what's going on.
I congratulate you on...
Having a baby instead of paperwork.
That is a lot more satisfying in the long run.
And I'm glad that you're enjoying it.
And I hugely appreciate you sharing that because we don't hear enough of the beauty of parenthood, particularly, you know, smart people always say, well, often say, well, it's too dull work and so on.
It's not. It's fantastic.
And smart kids need smart parents.
And Lord knows the world needs smart people as a whole.
So thank you so much for that. Thank you, everyone, so much for calling in, for writing in.
Please don't forget to pick up your copy of The Art of the Argument at theartoftheargument.com.
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I'm very, very pleased with the tentatively called Essential Philosophy.
It's great, great stuff.
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Thank you, my lovelies. I will see you at the next live stream.
