Dec. 30, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:05:54
4273 "What Makes Us Girls" Brittany Pettibone and Stefan Molyneux
We cannot give what we do not have. So if we do not love ourselves, or even if we are too obsessed with ourselves, how then can we love others? "What Makes Us Girls" examines the topic of self-worth through a modern cultural lens. Using examples from the author’s life experience and the life experiences of a variety of other girls, What Makes Us Girls analyzes seven of the most common issues that result in a destructive sense of self-worth: comparison, rejection, bullying, inauthenticity, purposelessness, betrayal and guilt. Every girl in the world, no matter our age or the country we are from, will have to face a battle for self-worth. Some of us will win and some of us will lose. But those of us who win will do so for two reasons: because we are able to see the battle for what it is, and even more importantly, because we have the right weapons to fight it."Website: https://brittany-pettibone.comBarnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/what-makes-us-girls-brittany-pettibone/1130002498?ean=9780997202977Brittany Pettibone, born in 1992 in California, is a writer and conservative political activist. Her passion for politics, which began at a young age and is heavily influenced by her Catholic upbringing, compelled her to enter the political scene in 2016. Since then, she has produced numerous videos, from interviewing notable right-wing figures to reporting on-the-ground across America and Europe. A long-time student of the writing craft, Brittany is the author of a non-fiction book, scheduled for publication in December of 2018, and the co-author of the award-winning science-fiction and fantasy novel, Hatred Day. At the moment, she lives in Idaho, but will relocate to Austria when she marries her fiancé, fellow political activist, Martin Sellner.▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour 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▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
She has written a book called What Makes Us Girls that I found spoke to me in ways I couldn't really imagine.
But I wanted to talk to her about it because it's a really fascinating read.
And if you've heard the sort of media flybys of Brittany, then, you know, you get this unidimensional view of her.
And the one thing about reading someone's thoughts, their experience, their life, their dreams, their hopes, their fears, is it really does multidimensionalize up the person quite considerably, which is kind of what we want, to have richness and complexity in our interactions with each other and not reduce each other to petty labels, usually slanderous and to have richness and complexity in our interactions with each other and So I wanted to have Brittany here to talk about the book and her experience in writing it, what she's hoping to achieve with it.
So first of all, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Okay.
Of course, Stefan. It's a pleasure.
I absolutely love your show, so I'm very honored.
Oh, thank you. Fifteen!
Boy! For those who aren't feeling precocious enough, you were saying that at the age of 15, you started in on the publishing field and industry.
Help people understand when that dream first arose from you and what you hope to achieve as a writer.
Yeah, so it was around 14, 15, and I started with writing poetry.
I homeschooled, so...
Being that I had all this free time, just the last two years of high school I homeschooled, so I did attend a private school for a while.
I had all this free time on my hands and I spent a lot of it reading.
The main books I read were the classics.
I read hundreds of them.
I don't know, I just got in this trend that I just couldn't let go.
I went through all the Russian ones and Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, all of them.
And from there I Decided that I wanted to give it a try myself and I started with poetry then wanted to expand because my poems are becoming like 40 pages long and so I gave it a shot myself of course the first several years it was terrible because the main mistake that most amateur writers make is they adopt the style of their favorite authors which is only natural but it takes a few years before you are able to have your own style and be confident in what you're writing so my twin sister and I worked for about 10 years we rewrote Our science fiction book about 10 times from white paper because we're crazy perfectionists that torture ourselves when,
oh, it's all wrong, just burn it, and then we would restart.
And so our experience in the writing industry, we went into it thinking essentially what you give is what you get.
But unfortunately, around this time when we were really, you know, getting older, 17, 18, 19, and really trying to make our mark in the writing industry, this is when all the political correctness really started to come out in full swing.
And so what you have to do is you have to approach a literary agent, and if they read your manuscript and like it, they'll agree to represent you, and they're the ones who sell it to a publishing company.
So all of these literary agents have essentially wish lists on their websites, what they would like to see in books.
And they had every politically correct thing in the book, like diversity.
You know, they all said the same thing.
LGBT characters.
Just down the list, every single one said the same thing, and my sister and I thought this was really weird.
Like, it's some kind of cult, they all have the same thing, and why would this make it a better book if you included this type of character?
Shouldn't it be genuine?
Shouldn't it come from the creativity of the author, or are we all just trying to create essentially the same book here?
So we started to become really disenchanted, just disillusioned with the writing industry over the course of a few years, but we kept at it.
And that was until the day that we decided to speak out and become politically active.
But for a while it was very difficult because we knew it was a career killer.
That most likely you weren't going to get picked by a traditional publisher.
Most literary agents wouldn't want to represent you.
So we kind of looked at it as, what do we want and what's right?
We eventually made the more courageous choice, but I will say that I was cowardly for a long time because it took me many years and so I'll never judge people who take a long time to speak out because for a while there I was very scared myself and couldn't do it.
It's a funny thing, and it did mirror my experience to some degree.
For those who don't know, like I started out, I did poetry, of course.
I wrote like 40 plays.
I've written, I think, seven novels, and I was in the National Theatre School.
I directed plays.
I came very much out of the art world.
And because you study classics that are not politically correct, you know, try writing Taming of the Shrew these days or having a character like Othello.
I mean, you'd have a tough time.
Even The Merchant of Venice would be very tough these days.
So the art world worships these non-politically correct, highly...
And so, because they use all of that in order to pump up their reputation and gain an audience, you think, wow, you know, they're edgy, they're cool, they don't care about political correctness and so on, they just want great stories with great characters and gripping prose and dialogue and excitement and all of that.
And then you start circling or encroaching the art world and they're not edgy at all.
They're very stodgy.
They're very, in a weird way, I hate to sort of say conservative, but as you say, everyone has the same list.
It's not... It's very sterile.
It's programming. It's indoctrination.
It's leftist propaganda.
It's like toiling with a thousand monkeys producing yet another edition of the Soviet-era Pravda newspaper.
Like, they have no interest in anything like that.
And when my talent as a writer was recognized, as it very often was, I'd had one PhD reviewer of one of my novels say that it was the great Canadian novel that Canada had been waiting for, for, you know, blah, blah, blah.
But then there's this weird indifference because it's like, oh, I guess because I'm writing from my own experience, it's like white male heterosexual characters.
So it doesn't fit into what they want.
And then you begin to think, well, maybe I'm not that good.
And that whole process of trying to figure out whether there's actually a meritocracy in art or whether it is just leftist-controlled propaganda was...
It was like that scene from...
A Clockwork Orange, where Malcolm McDowell's character has the toothpicks prop and his eyes open.
It takes a long time to see, but man, once you see it, you can't see it at all.
Yes. And kind of on that note, you can't win with these people.
So they want you to be diverse in your book.
So for example, then you'll include, you know, an African American character.
But then the moment you do that, it's like, how dare you try to live their experiences, pretend that you understand them, and they'll freak out at you either way.
But then if you don't include them, then, oh, you must be racist because you only have white people.
So I've seen this happen to many of the popular authors even, and it's terrifying because you just can't win with them.
You can never do it right.
So what's the point in trying? I say just Be creative.
Put out something genuine that comes from yourself because otherwise all of it's going to be the same and you're never going to write anything groundbreaking that has really stood the test of time and will actually influence people the way that many books have because they have a great power.
Books, but they're just losing all of that because there's just nothing behind them anymore.
No sincerity. Well, and I think for me one of the turning points More recently, well, it's not that recent now, I think she's a Canadian writer, Anne-Marie MacDonald, who wrote a book called Fall on Your Knees, which I read because it was the book and, you know, I'm like, well, you know, I've got to really make sure I understand what's going on in the literary scene.
And she wrote a very funny play called Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet, I think it was.
And the book had beautiful language in it.
And when I was trained as a writer, There was a bestselling author who trained me as a writer.
And her books as well were, the language is beautiful.
Like you could take a warm sudsy bath in the prose and just emerge a better person.
And there was this, all of this icing of lovely prose around basically a stillborn corpse of a story full of horrible people and horrible situations.
And this, seeing the beauty of language wrap itself around the most macabre, zombie, eye-socketless festivals of gore and horror and horrible situations, to me, was really appalling.
I don't mind characters being in difficult situations, but when you have nothing but horrible people doing horrible things in horrible situations with no redemption at the end, it seems almost like the prose...
is the meaty worm on the hook of nihilism that's supposed to pierce your soul.
Exactly. Yeah, this is the main problem with story nowadays and all of its mediums.
If you study traditional story structure, the entire book depends upon your moral argument, upon your character arc and their self-revelation.
And if you don't have one, or your morality is skewed, Then it's not going to be a good book, just 100%.
So one of, I think, the best structural stories that I've ever seen, it's pretty much flawless.
Obviously, many of the classics have it, Shakespeare, all of them, but a bit more modern, the 70s is The Godfather, part one.
It's absolutely flawless.
Of course, he has a negative moral arc, and he becomes...
You know, evil at the end, so to speak.
But he started out good, and he had that moral arc, and by the end of the films, even though the third one is awful, he does get what's coming to him.
He doesn't die happy, he dies alone and miserable, and he's lost his daughter.
And this is supposed to show the audience, you know, without shoving it down their throat, like, believe this and that, it shows them subtly, you know, right and wrong, and that there are consequences to immoral actions.
But story has largely lost this.
And that's why when you study traditional story structure and then you read many of these books and watch many of these movies, you can see exactly what's wrong with them.
Not everybody who can see what's wrong with them could write a book any better because there's a lot, you know, that goes into execution, but it's definitely a gaping hole in the art world today.
Yeah, and I do believe that there's a hunger for better stories, more morally clear stories.
But of course, what's happened is the only people who still have moral arcs are comic book movies.
And so unfortunately, the whole beauty, you either get beauty of language and moral horror, or you get...
Better morals, but the language is dumped down to the, you know, level of a Fortnite-playing 11-year-old.
So it is one of these horrible compromises.
And if you wish to generate beautiful language and beautiful stories, I don't know that there's much place in the publishing houses for you these days.
Yes, they've made it very difficult.
But, I mean, there are still smaller outlets we could go to.
Or self-publishing used to be It's largely frowned upon.
If you were a self-publisher, it automatically meant that you could just never get traditionally published because you were an awful writer.
But actually, nowadays, there's a lot in it for the author.
So, of course, they have to do all their own marketing.
But actually, as an author who's just being picked up, a debut author, you have to do most of your marketing as well.
And if your book doesn't do well, then they're just going to toss you out.
So that's why the vast majority of authors are debut authors, because most of them don't make it and then never publish another book with a publishing company.
But There is a lot now to be gained from self-publishing.
So I would not discourage that.
Oh no, it's certainly been my route.
This idea of being famous after you're dead when you can just self-publish instead.
I don't really see the point.
And I remember this too.
And I want to get to your experience when you went to these seminars and writing classes and writing courses trying to meet other writers and people in the industry.
I remember the first day when I went to the National Theatre School, I was taken in for playwriting and acting.
And the head invited all the first-year students in.
There were like 2,000 people who apply, and 16 people get in.
And it's a grueling audition process.
And you have to take your favorite play at one point and boil it down to three minutes.
I did Albi's A Zoo Story, which was a play I liked at the time.
But I remember going into the director's office with all the other first-years, and he kind of looked at us like we'd taken some sort of steamy dump on his rug.
And said, aren't you all very young, white, and bougie?
Which I guess was slang for bourgeois.
I'm like, oh great! The elite institution is a communist hellhole.
Why? Because they all are!
It's like, oh man, this is going to be a struggle and a half, right?
Now, we did some great work.
I think we did a very good version of King Lear and other...
But it was just a battle to try and get anything beautiful across.
And at one point, I just...
I just remember looking at everyone in the school, at the cafeteria, and the teachers.
I remember sitting there going, I love art.
I don't like these artists at all.
Yes. And you had that experience, I think, when you were going through trying to gain acceptance and contacts and friendships in the art world when you'd go to seminars and so on.
Absolutely. It eventually, after many years, reached the point where examining all the messages that these men and women were promoting in their New York Times bestselling books, we were thinking, okay, but we don't agree with these messages, you know, at all.
These are not moral messages.
So in order to be their friends, to be accepted by them, to be accepted by the writing industry, we essentially have to compromise our own principles, which when we really were able to boil it down to that and see it clearly, we said, no, no way.
We're not, then you just become, you just lose all integrity as a writer as well.
And you're never going to put out anything that means anything to you.
And that was something that my sister and I just could not do.
So it took a long time, but just after a while, it's a premise that I use in my book.
It's one, you know, we all know very well, but you could apply it to this as well as you can't give what you don't have.
So attending many of these colleges, universities, seminars, whatever it may be, whoever's teaching you, If they don't know how to write good books, how are you ever going to learn anything from them?
How are you going to learn anything from any of these authors?
So what we eventually did was we found an amazing teacher.
They call him a screenwriting doctor.
So he's a guy in Hollywood who they call when there are problems with scripts.
And he'll say, okay, this is what's wrong with your script.
This is why it's terrible. This is what you need to do to fix it.
His name is John Truby and he's an older gentleman and he teaches traditional story structure.
So everything he teaches, he's using things from, you know, older, mostly older films or classic books because they did it right.
And he's telling how you can, he's teaching you how to write it for nowadays.
So in any medium of story form, so books, movies, television, whatever it may be, because they all have their own structure and steps.
And also it differs depending on the genre.
So he taught us all of this knowledge and for two years we listened to every CD, went to all these classes and learned more in those years than we had learned in like the eight or nine that we had spent going to all of these other seminars.
Because something that they do is, like just as an example, a very common thing they would say is, you have to hook your reader in the first five pages.
And it's like, oh, okay, thanks.
I must have heard that a thousand times.
And it's like, but how do you do that?
That's what they would never teach you.
It's important to have characters who are interesting and dynamic.
It's like, yeah, but that's like calling yourself a business expert by saying it's really important that you have cost-efficient products that your customers like.
It's like, yes, adjectives are not knowledge.
Positive intentions are not equal or achievable results.
It's important to use prose that is engaging and enjoyable.
Yes, I get all of that.
I mean, my cat could have told me that.
Exactly. It's so common sense.
It's like saying to... I don't even know if this is a thing, but like a figure skater, you need to know a triple axel, but not actually teaching them how to do it.
I don't know if that's an actual real thing.
It sounds like it is, but something along those lines.
See, Brittany, if you're a figure skater, and this advice I give for free to all the figure skaters out there, it's important to...
Do your routine very well to not fall and to get high marks from the judges.
Oh look! I'm a coach!
Woohoo! Yeah.
And so, for example, what John Truby taught us is how you hook your readers in the first five pages is you give your reader a ghost.
And what the ghost is, it's something traumatic that happened to them in the past that hooks in with their main character arc.
They eventually come to get some kind of closure from it by the end of the book, but it's torturing them in the beginning.
And you'll see this story beat in so many stories all the time.
There's always something torturing the protagonist.
From the beginning, and that's a very good way.
And so he taught us this tool, and out of all the hundreds and thousands of people I had met, not one had ever mentioned something like that.
That's something I can work with.
So I'm saying, okay, this is actually pragmatic advice that I can put into effect here.
It's not just, well, hook your reader, okay.
So these are the kinds of things he taught us that just made a tremendous difference in our writing.
Well, and human beings are fear and desire in a lot of ways.
And that's what, to me at least, the best Art is the art that teaches us where to aim our desire and how to overcome our fear.
Because if you aim your desire in the wrong place, overcoming your fear is a bad thing.
You know, like, I really want to punch someone.
It's like, well, don't overcome that fear because that fear is good.
Don't go around punching people. So if you have an art that helps you to aim your desire in the right way and then also teaches you how to overcome your fear...
You know, Hamlet's fear of action and so on, right?
Then you have something that adds to the muscularity of the achievement of Aristotle's virtues, right?
The pursuit of excellence in the pursuit of civic virtues.
And I think now, I think what's happened, and this is why I think the political aspect of what you've done and other people have done, Brittany, is so important, is now we can't write heroes, we have to become heroes.
We can't create fiction.
We have to live documentary in order to portray the virtues that are needed to save the world.
And to step into the story and become the protagonist rather than type about the protagonist, I think, has been certainly the pendulum enthusiasm and torture of my veering between creativity and activism.
And I think that there's some aspect of that in the book that I've seen.
Absolutely. I think something that I had to learn is you can't just say things.
You have to lead by example.
And that's been something that's been very difficult for me because I'm always very reluctant to put myself out there.
For example, I think the main reason I chose to become a writer is because I prefer the background and I'd rather something I wrote be the product as opposed to myself being the product.
So I struggled immensely on YouTube at first.
And I still do now.
I actually really dislike doing interviews.
You've made this really wonderful though, so I thank you for that.
But I've said no to so many just because I don't like being out there and doing stuff.
But in times such as now, and I think you said it perfectly, you have to become it.
You have no choice. I mean, because what's at stake here?
Everything. So it's not something that you can just turn a blind eye to.
Or if you do, you're a little bit at fault.
Everybody will share the blame who does that.
So, what's it like working with a twin, if I am in fact speaking to Brittany?
I'm not sure. I'm never sure. But, yeah, what's it like working with a twin?
I mean, there is this sort of myth that, you know, twins have this secret language that nobody else understands, and it must be a fluid and creative and productive working experience, the likes of which people who aren't genetically identical can never even imagine.
Right. It's actually wonderful.
So, I know a couple sets of twins.
Interestingly enough, most of them don't get along at all.
My twin sister and I are very close now, but we're opposites.
So we're opposites that complement one another, and this is so useful when it comes to our writing.
Because, for example, I'll see the bigger picture, she'll see details.
So we're able to write in a way that It fits, you know, puts the puzzle together perfectly.
And if it was only just me, then I would miss so much that she could have given had she looked at the book.
So she actually did edit this book that I wrote and did an amazing job and pointed out a lot that I overlooked initially.
So we worked together for many years.
I think it would be hard for me to sit down and just write a book with anybody else, but we've just developed a process that's so cohesive.
And we see things, we agree on a lot of the same things, the most fundamental things, which Works in our favor, but then of course we do think very differently as far as our strengths and weaknesses, what they are.
So that has helped a lot and I love writing with her and we definitely will continue in the future.
The next book I'm working on she'll edit as well and then I'll edit her next book.
Oh, that's handy. It's like a tennis ball back and forth of editing and writing.
That's nice because editing is a whole different process and has its charms as well.
And it's certainly easier to snip than to create.
And so it's nice that you have, I guess, that sort of back and forth, those back and forth roles.
Now, the one thing that, well, there were many things that I found really, really interesting in the book.
And the one thing that I'm appreciative for as a man is seeing the kind of social, romantic, sexual struggles that teenage girls and young women go through.
Because it's often hidden from what do they call the male eye, the masculine gaze or whatever, right?
But I really really find it fascinating to see The kind of struggles that go on and and you do talk very frankly and very honestly and I think admirably openly About these was it tough to include that kind of stuff?
Did you hesitate a lot or was it like damn the torpedoes?
I'm just gonna bear my history So I have been wanting to write this book for over a year, but I didn't sit down to actually do it until a couple months ago because I knew that in writing this book I had to reveal a lot of my imperfections because otherwise the book,
any kind of book like this, if you don't include yourself in it, it just comes off as preachy, you're sitting on some moral high horse like, girls you need to shape up and I'm perfect and that's not what I wanted at all because I'm so well aware of my own imperfections.
And I think, you know, there's so many wonderful friendships I've also made over the course of the past few years with girls who are, you know, political or nonpolitical that I've met in all my traveling and everything that I've been doing and I see that they're all going through the exact same thing.
No matter if they come from a wonderful family with wonderful parents and siblings or, you know, they have a really good religious community or they're politically conservative, whatever it may be, they still go through all of these problems.
Huge ones are like purposelessness, for example, or being inauthentic is such a hard one for girls.
And I know a lot of these do apply to men as well, but I would never claim to be able to define how they experience this.
No, but they manifest in different ways, and that's what I mean.
We all have that same challenge of individuation versus conformity, but the way that it manifests, like the conversation that you have with the girl on the beach And the popular pretty girls who were like, well, surely you've slept with your boyfriend by now.
I don't want to be a prude and I want them to like me.
These are unique, I think, things that women go through that I think men have kind of suspected, but we don't usually get that view.
And this lifting the veil.
I mean, it sounds like a book for girls, of course, but...
There's so much in it for men to understand a female experience.
I think that's a very, very common thing.
And I just sort of put it, you know, as silly as this, but, you know, to put out, to not put out.
Is it worse to be thought of as a slut or a prude?
I mean, these sound like almost quasi-Victorian themes, but I think that's still very powerful for modern women.
Yeah, absolutely. Something that I came to realize is I think that for a while there I was Too hard on, you know, women in general.
So, of course, there's a lot of blame to put on all these feminist people, whatever.
I'm not speaking really about them, but I'm talking about young girls.
Because Where are the good role models in our society?
I can hardly name even one.
If you have a good role model, it's probably locally, like your mother, your father, a mentor, a teacher, friends, whoever it may be.
But out in the world, the people held up is so great and noble and admirable and we should replicate their actions and their paths to success.
They're not exactly good people and they're not promoting good messages.
So most of our youth are exposed to this in their schools.
Sleep with a million guys, because girls and boys are exactly the same, and they're going to process it the exact same way, and girls don't form deeper emotional attachments, and will probably be very scarred from this.
And also, not to mention, this is something that I forgot to mention in another interview, and there was someone very angry at me in the comments, but of course I understand it as well, that if a girl sleeps with hundreds of men, what guy's going to want in her?
Not very many. Well, I mean, the 101st maybe, but not for very long, right?
Yeah, exactly. So there are just a lot of these issues nowadays that girls are facing and that aren't being talked about.
So one that I think is very important in this book and that I came to realize about myself, especially through my mother's advice, is that nowadays there is no...
Encouragement for self-improvement.
Everybody's perfect. That's the message.
You're perfect the way you are, whether you're obese or anorexic or whether you're, you know, cruel or nice.
You're just perfect the way you are. There's no need for self-improvement.
And this is exactly why telling women also that we're all victims, none of them are ever going to take responsibility because it's not only that they're told that they don't have to, they're encouraged not to.
Because we're all victims and somebody else is always to blame.
Oh, yeah. I'm sorry to interrupt. I just had one of these on Twitter.
Man, it drives me nuts because, you know, I'm the father of a daughter and I don't want her growing up in a world where everyone keeps trying to convince us she has no agency and is always a victim.
It's terrible. And so I was talking about some bad motherhood thing that someone on Twitter was talking about.
And then somebody was like, well, yeah, but that's what happens when women get pressured into having babies.
And it's like, what?
They just have babies because people tell them to, and then they just become bad moms because of that.
And they have no choice, no agency, no capacity to change.
And it's like, ah, it just drives me mad.
It's so disrespectful to women.
And who is pressuring women nowadays to have kids?
I think it's quite the opposite.
They're pressuring women to have careers.
Muslim husbands, I believe.
Yeah, if he's referring to the husband, but largely, like, the dominant culture says, don't have kids till you're 30s, but then you're too old and maybe most men don't want you because, as I said, you've slept with a thousand guys by then.
But there is no encouragement towards motherhood nowadays, and there's no spotlight placed on it as...
Even saying that it's a worthwhile thing.
You're inferior almost.
This is the way that you're treated as a mother.
But so they're largely behind the curtain and everything they do is in the dark and the women who are the career, you know, that choose the career and then the CEOs, then, you know, the spotlight's on them and then the most wonderful women ever.
But I think that it's just really dishonest and it's Because when they promote these things, girls believe them.
Like teenagers just in general, whether you're a girl or a boy, a lot of them are very impressionable.
And what authority is telling them, you know, society, whether it be like their favorite celebrity or their teacher, whoever it may be, if they're telling them this is going to make you so unhappy, you know, from advertisements, entertainment, Hollywood, everywhere, the media, then they're going to believe it, most likely, and they're going to choose this path and be very unhappy in the end.
I think that at the very least all angles need to be shown and all the pros and cons of both need to be taught to kids so they can choose for themselves instead of this indoctrination and terrifying them of marriage and having a family and Being able to settle into that role when you're young.
They used to get married when they were like 16, way back when.
Of course, I'm not saying that people should do that nowadays, but nowadays it's getting older and older and older, like 28, 29, 30, 35.
And that works for some people, and it's fine because they never found anyone before then, but encouraging it is...
It's very... Well, no, but if it's not even in your mind, like the moment when women start to really feel concerned is, you know, the wall, the famous wall, right?
So in your late 20s, early 30s, suddenly you wake up from the glitter-baked haze of partying and dancing and all of that, which is all great fun, and then you're like, ooh, you know, actually, come to think of it, I should start looking for a stable...
Decent, reliable, honorable provider, you know, who's going to be able to take care of me while I have kids and breastfeed, who is going to be a good father, who's going to be a good provider, who's not going to cheat around and all that kind of stuff.
And so what happens is your entire radar, and I was really struck by this bit where your mom, we'll get to it in a sec, your mom was a little harsh, but you know, I'd like to know the backstory.
Tough love. It's great. You know, it's funny, no matter in life, you kind of end up finding what you're looking for.
So if you're looking for some, I don't know, let's take a cliche, right?
Some long-haired, David Beckham-looking-like, washboard-ab, leather-pants guy who rides a motorcycle and hasn't had a stable job ever, then yeah, you're going to find that kind of guy.
But then when you sort of, your eggs are like, hello, we're getting kind of dino-eggy down here, we're getting kind of dusty, we're kind of running out of babies down here.
And they're like, whoa, I've really got to change.
And then what women do is they say, now I want to find the best possible guy that I can when I have slept with a lot of guys and thus really impaired my capacity to bond, when I have not taken good care of my health, when I have spent a lot of time in an office, and Guess what?
The best guys are gone by then.
It's like showing up late to an auction and think you're going to get top pickings.
The good guys are getting snatched up all over the place.
Waiting for good guys in your 30s is like expecting the very best cars to be on the used car lot.
No. The cars that are on the used car lot are the cars that nobody wants anymore, and the reason they don't want them is because they're not very good cars.
In general, there's exceptions.
I married in my 30s, so I think that there are exceptions, but if you don't even think about trying to find a stable, good, honorable provider for your children, Then you're not going to even...
A, you're not going to look for that person.
B, you're certainly not going to find them.
And C, to get to your story, you're not going to develop the kind of virtues that are going to attract such a man.
Yeah, because it takes...
Many years. It's not just, oh, I'm going to wake up and be the most noble, charitable, hardworking, loyal person in the world overnight.
That doesn't happen.
You can't change that way. So the advice that my mother gave me when I asked a question that was very unfair, and I never should have asked it, I was, In a bad mood, you know, because I was had been searching been open to dating more for Let's go back a bit about I'm gonna be a nun for typing phase Which is where you said that you weren't going to date until you got a book published, which could be five plus years.
Yes, I was, I don't know, maybe, I don't remember how old I was.
I was in my teens. I just want to point out, you were rather an intense teenager, which, you know, I love complaining about.
I was an intense teenager too, but it's just like, I shall see no man until I see my name in print.
It's like, well, that's dedication.
I give you top marks for that.
I have a problem with moderation and that's why I wrote a whole chapter on this because I think it's the solution to a lot of problems.
So my ideal work day was like 18 hours of just work.
If it's not an extreme solution, it's just not a solution, right?
Yeah, so what I had told myself was, okay, I'm not going to date till I'm published and this is out of the way.
It wasn't like, oh, I'm going to just go have fun and sleep around and all that.
I was like, I am literally living in my room and I did do that for like, it was, I don't know, three or four years or so.
And then I started to get lonely because humans are social creatures.
It's only natural if you're only there all day alone with your thoughts.
Yes, you do get lonely after a while.
And I was thinking, okay, I'm being unrealistic.
I mean, even nuns have nuns, right?
Yeah, what if it takes me 10 years to get published and then I'm wasting my whole life here, essentially, and my time is running out?
Or what if you don't even get published?
Exactly. If I never get published or what if I had been out and about in social and I would have met the man that I was meant to marry, but I was locked in my house because I was hiding away from the world and I never met him.
So I was considering all of these things as they started to feel more lonely in my isolation.
And then, you know, after a while of searching and I couldn't meet anyone, it wasn't that the people were bad, it was that we just weren't compatible.
And I was taking that out on them because I'll chalk it up to my immaturity and being selfish at that time.
And how old were you? Is this the early 20s?
No, it wasn't the early 20s.
It was still my later teens.
Late teens, okay. And I asked her, Mom, where are all the good men?
And instead of saying to me what I think many, many parents, especially if they have the modern mentality nowadays, if they've adopted what our society says, she probably would have answered to me, you're perfect, honey, you just haven't met him yet, just because none of the guys are worthy of you, blah blah blah.
There are no good men, it's a patriarchy that oppresses you.
Instead, what she said to me is, Brittany, if you want to meet a good man, if you want a good man to be attracted to you, you need to develop the qualities in yourself that you want in a good man.
So before complaining and putting down all the other men, look at yourself.
Instead of constantly looking outward, look inward and examine yourself and see, do I have all these qualities that I'm criticizing other men for not having?
If the answer is no, go work on yourself.
And once you're finished, you're more likely than not to attract a good man.
Eventually I did.
One that I don't even believe I deserve to be perfectly honest.
And I'm now engaged.
Believe it. And congratulations.
Thank you so much. But it was, yeah, a lot of years just working on myself, trying to, you know, develop these qualities.
But certain times just in my life, I hear things that somebody could talk to me for an hour and I might, nothing would resonate with me, but somebody could say one sentence to me.
And it'll hit me so hard it'll just completely turn me on my path.
And that was that moment with my mother.
It was such good advice and I thank her for it.
Even though it was a bit harsh, it's exactly what I needed to hear because it knocked my pride out of the equation.
And it's funny too because it's sort of like If you love playing tennis and you keep complaining that you can't ever play with really, really good players, you know, what are people going to say?
They're going to say, well, probably because really, really good players want to play with really, really good players.
So the best way to end up playing with really good players is to improve your tennis game considerably.
And then the good players will want to play with you.
And it's the same thing with love. Right, exactly.
And it's just like, you know how people say you are who your friends are.
It's kind of the same thing, like who you end up being with.
They're probably a good representation of who you are.
Oh yeah, if you want to look in a spiritual mirror, just look at your social circle in particular.
It's more telling than your family, because family is not chosen and friends are.
But yeah, if you want to know how people see you, look at your friends.
Okay, let me ask something else, which sounds odd, but I'm going to ask anyway.
How is it physically or chemically possible to destroy your hair for three years with henna?
I asked around people that I know, and there was a great deal of confusion over what on earth you did.
How did this come about?
So, I'll even send you pictures.
It is absolutely horrific.
So, my mom ordered this henna dye from, I don't know, Amazon, the internet somewhere.
And yeah, I'll leave it at that.
And she's like, it's healthier because normal dyes are very unhealthy for you.
So I was like, okay, why not?
And I put this dye in my hair and it turned it completely black.
And it was supposed to be dark brown.
And it had, when you went in the sunlight, this weird glint on it that was like greenish blue.
And my hair was so long and beautiful.
I spent all this time growing it out.
It was completely destroyed. You look like a vampire guppy.
That's sort of the image I'm getting in my head.
I'm so pale naturally.
And then I had this black hair because I could never go out in the sun.
I have this Czech-German skin that just, it's so hard to tan.
But I went to the salon and they tried seven times.
My scalp was on fire, burning by the end of the day, to get it out.
And they couldn't get it out.
Did it mess with the texture?
Because sometimes the hair color, I guess the green tinge, like this aqua girl look in sunlight isn't great, but did it turn it all feathery, or did it make it stiff, or how did it mess it up other than the color?
It killed it. It just fried it.
And what they had to do is, because I had to end up growing my hair up from the roots all the way, they cut it like this short.
It was really short to help it, you know, grow out and I didn't have to have long hair that was like half brown and half black.
So they cut it really short and I had to grow it out from all the way to the roots and it was just an awful time in my life.
It was like three years of completely growing it out and I was just miserable.
I will send you pictures just to prove that I'm telling the truth here.
It was, yeah, not a good look and everybody thought that I had gone through this like goth phase.
But it was intentional.
There was nothing I could do unless I went to a tanning booth after, I guess.
But I'm not a fan of those.
It struck me. The reason why I wanted to pause on that is I find that an interesting story.
I messed up my hair just by passing the age of 24.
It's interesting to me that this was difficult and traumatic for you, and I don't mean to minimize it.
I mean, in your early 20s, late teens, even now, it matters a lot.
And three years with bad hair, you know, women are upset if they have a bad hair day.
If you have a bad day, third of a decade, or bad hair day, third of a decade, that's pretty rough.
But it really struck me in reading that, Brittany, just how so many young women will do this voluntarily, will make their hair As unpleasant looking as possible, as ridiculous as possible.
You know that short blue, spiky red garbage that goes on where you look like a half lamented ghost of Christmas past Christmas tree ornament that's fall over and half died in an acidic rain.
Right. And they do this voluntarily and for you it was like the worst thing ever but there are women who are talked into making themselves as unattractive as humanly possible I don't know.
To me, it's all just part of making sure white people don't have babies.
But, you know, I just found it remarkable how difficult it was for you and how many other women who don't have to do it will voluntarily do it out of propaganda.
I would actually, I think there are, I would say there are two reasons for this.
One probably a lot more obvious than the other.
And the first and more obvious one would be that nowadays society places so much importance on physical beauty.
The way you look. If somebody's beautiful, they must be a wonderful person who deserves a huge following and fame.
You know, this is what many of the celebrities are, for example.
Oh, they're the best looking man in the world, Brad Pitt.
Oh, he's wonderful, you know.
Nobody ever talks about what virtues they might have, what good things they've done for the world, even just down to their character, if they have a good character.
So there's so much emphasis placed on this, and so that's why girls are obsessed with it.
Sorry to interrupt, but just to reinforce that, there was, I think, a picture from last year or something like that of Kim Kardashian and Emily, no one can pronounce her last name, who were giving the finger...
To a mirror with their tops off.
So boobs were hanging out.
They're giving a finger to the audience.
They post this and everyone's like, yay, cool, edgy.
It's like, that's gross.
They're topless. They're standing next to each other.
They're giving the finger.
And yet this is like, wow, let's give these guys endorsements worth millions of dollars.
Exactly. Well, they're redefining what worthiness is, and that's actually what I go into in my book as well.
For example, female empowerment, that's empowerment.
You know, being naked in front of a mirror, flipping somebody off, rather than...
Is it much more empowering to give birth?
I would think so.
Raising a kid takes way more work, takes way more self-sacrifice, you know, your personal time.
So it's just really inverted there.
But... Also with, I would say, the second reason is, you know, a lot of reasons why people do this is I would say it's also down to identity because there are so, you know, we've ignored or we're not allowed to talk about, you know, our actual inherent identity so people are adopting others.
Like, oh, I'm part of the emo subculture.
I'm part of, you know, Aria Grande's fan club and this is how people define themselves because we just, we innately have to somewhere, fit in some group.
So if we're not going to You know, go by what naturally defines us.
We're going to find a place where we fit ourselves.
In the same way that I think that humans inherently have this need to worship.
You know, so if we're not worshiping a god, we're worshiping some celebrity or, you know, the newest fashion.
Or ourselves. Yes, or ourselves, exactly.
And that's the main one, probably.
So I do talk about both.
A lot of the book is lack of self-worth, but the other half is, you know, the end part is too much self-worth.
Because I think we have both. And it's really interesting.
Some of the girls you think have, you know, love themselves way too much and have so much self-worth and are so confident are some of the most insecure women you'll ever meet.
Many women who look so beautiful and like they have it all, completely 100% insecure.
And that's why something like a bad hair day will completely shatter them.
I was insecure through my whole teens, like incredibly so.
I've since gotten over it largely.
Of course, I still suffer from it from time to time, but finding out who you are and having a purpose that you're passionate about that you think is noble, that is dignified and is going to fulfill you goes a long way because then you have a goal that no one can deter you from and you're not defined by how you look one day or if you have the best-looking boyfriend or whatever.
It's something in you rather than external.
Yeah, I've said this for many, many years on my show that there is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.
There is nothing out there that you can mortar on your insecurity that's going to make it better.
In fact, it generally makes it worse because if you say, oh, well, you know, I'm insecure because I need to lose 15 pounds and you lose 15 pounds, it actually makes you worse because the insecurity is still there and your solution didn't work.
And now you don't have that solution anymore.
So you're one step closer to actually dealing with whatever it is that's making you insecure.
And people who say, well, if I get a raise or if I get a prettier boyfriend or a prettier girlfriend or...
I don't know, I win the lottery or anything.
I have sex with this person or I achieve this number of views on YouTube and so on.
It's not going to fix you.
It's not going to make you better.
It's actually chasing those things.
It's a confirmation that you lack the inner resources to make yourself better and it's a surrender to external control.
Now, you're under the control of the people who may or may not watch your videos.
You're under the control of people who may or may not invite you to come speak at some conference.
You're under the mercy of other people, which means you have less Locus of control within your own heart and mind, which means you're going to feel more insecure.
You just have to confront whatever is driving that negative self-talk.
Usually it comes from authority figures in one's history.
It could come from other places.
Something is driving that negative self-talk.
It's usually implanted in there by the powers that be to make you ineffective in advocating for productive social change.
You just have to, you know, you can't run from the demon.
You can't make the demon go away by doing sit-ups.
And you can't make the demon go away by getting a boob job or hair transplants.
And, like, you just have to stare one-on-one into the face of fire and make your peace with it.
Exactly.
That's the thing.
It's like, you know, the roots of the tree are rotten and you're trying to heal it by working on the leaves.
It's never going to work.
But this is something that I think is a huge problem nowadays is people People always say all the time, you know, don't care what others think about you.
Actually, you should to a degree, those who you love, those who you respect, those who are good people who genuinely care about you, yes, you should take their opinions into consideration.
But as far as the world, if you are so focused on their perception of you, then you're never going to be happy.
It's the most unstable, traumatizing, miserable life you can possibly live.
Because imagine if your self-worth is determined by your Instagram likes.
And what if you get, you know, 100 one day, but then 50 the next day, what did I do wrong?
Everyone hates me now. Or you get one mean comment.
If you let their perception of you define you, you're just never going to be, I think, capable of achieving great things because you're just too unstable of a person and constantly unhappy.
And if you're in this state, then...
You're just not in a position.
And that's something that I had to figure out and discover, too.
There's so many things. I don't consider myself...
Oh, go ahead.
No, no, go ahead. I was just going to say, I don't consider myself, even to this day, no matter, you know, even though I've been on YouTube a while, I don't think I'm very verbally good at expressing myself at all.
I stumble, you know, I can never find the right words.
I'm not very articulate, but it's completely different when I sit and write.
Oh, yeah. I'm feeling eloquent, but it never matches what's in my head.
It's like this platonic ideal.
There's this Plato's form of what you want to say, and then there's this ridiculous...
It's like when I was a kid, and I remember very clearly at the age of...
I was in preschool, like four or five years old, and I wanted to paint this picture...
Of a little boy with rosy cheeks going down a sled, on a sled, on a snowy hill.
And that was very clear in my head.
All the little rosy cheeks, the apples, and his scarf flying behind him.
I even knew the green color of it.
All the detail, everything. And then what you do is you go over, because it's preschool, and you have...
You know, these paintbrushes half the size of brooms and you have this like half watery paint that someone spilled glue in and then it's like, I remember taking it like, you know, you end up with this big giant close-up mural mess of, you know, and then you peel it up from the table and half the paper gets stuck behind because it's so wet and it's like, well, there's your image in your head.
This is what you could actually achieve.
And I know that is, that's the challenge, but that's what art is for is to try and polish that.
Into something that is more easily transferable.
And that aspect as well, too.
Let me talk about this joiner thing, because I've been really, really wrestling with this.
So I'll submit to your wisdom and knowledge in this area, because you've got more experience here.
I've been a joiner at some times in my life, but I find groups pretty volatile.
And I find groups, sadly...
I'm unprepared for any kind of troll assault.
That's been a repeated experience of mine and you talk about this in the book that you're part of a group of activists and then someone starts spreading some rumors or somebody publishes something and then you know the whole thing just full house of cards and everyone's turning on each other and betrayal and and this formally cohesive group where people are toasting each other and swearing fealty Spartacus style till the end of time and then like some tweet comes up and everybody turns on each other like it's Lord of the Flies on on fast-forward How has that conditioned you in terms of working with groups?
Because, you know, I was in Poland and I'm like, yeah, I don't really want to do this alone anymore.
But then I hear these stories of these mass implosions among groups of former allies turning into a bunch of feral dogs fighting after the last diseased squirrel.
And it's a little tough to find the motivation.
Where do you sit now, having experienced this a bunch of times in terms of group and trust and all of that?
I'm very mistrustful of most people.
So initially when I came to this I was the most idealistic, I'm still idealistic, but in terms of just trusting people and expecting only the good in people, thinking that nobody could ever betray you or be manipulative or two-faced or whatever it might be, or use you to accomplish their own goals.
So I came into it thinking, oh, we're all a team.
We're all in this together, you know.
But then I went through a whole sequence of being betrayed by people, you know, having them give information out.
Like, you say something in confidence to someone, just maybe about your personal life, whatever it might be.
And then people share it with others, and it goes around.
Or observing all the drama.
I've never taken part in any of the drama that has ever happened in the right wing since Trump's election.
There have been plenty, but I've always stayed out of it.
Because... I just think that it's a waste of time like there's so much bigger battles to fight but the main thing I learned is people are trustworthy but many people aren't so before you Go all in with somebody and trust them with very sensitive information or rely on them because very few people are reliable as well Just do what they say they're going to do to the best of their ability You just need to vet people give them time before you let people into your closest circle so I would say I have,
like, acquaintances and then I have a very, a smaller group of very close friends that I'm willing to do anything for and they return it as well.
So I would just say be very careful, especially, yeah, people's motives can be pretty shady.
That's what I've learned. But I haven't, like, lost hope in people in general.
But I would say that it's very wise, especially when you're on the right wing and you have so many people that want to take you down.
Like the media, for example, they're just itching for that information to When you say that the motives can be bad,
what are the various motives that you've seen that seem to trip people up the most or seem to be what makes them most susceptible to betrayals?
Or betraying others, I guess.
I would say fear is a huge one.
So, oh my gosh, if this information comes out, this is going to take me down to not only them.
Well, I'm out of here.
You know, I'm getting out of Dodge. I'm going to, you know, throw this person under the bus so that I save myself.
I've seen this happen a lot.
And I don't know, you know, in some situations people have families, all that I know.
So I'm not judging anybody, but it's more, I think somebody put it one way.
His reason for not getting too close to people was that if you're in a minefield and somebody steps on a mine and you're working and close with them, it's going to blow you up too.
That was his reasoning. And I think this is how a lot of people see things now.
But it's also, I think, jealousy sometimes.
It's not always jealousy.
Sometimes people are saying, oh, they must just be jealous.
That's why they're criticizing. Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it isn't. And I would say maybe also just Using people to boost your image, your YouTube channel, your Twitter, whatever it may be.
So there are a lot of different motivations for jealousy, but I just see it come out a lot in this movement.
I wouldn't call it a movement.
I call it more of a network because not many people really work together very cohesively.
At least a lot of people have different goals and different beliefs, so I wouldn't necessarily call it a movement.
I definitely see a lot of that happening.
We don't have a leader, for example, so that's why nothing is cohesive or stable and there's so much fighting because there's nothing coming from above to keep everyone in line.
So many people are just kind of on their own doing their own thing.
I think there used to be more unity, but there's been too many fights for much more of that.
But I think that on certain issues we could really use it.
Right. I mean, one of the big challenges is anybody who reaches prominence in, I don't know whether to call it the right or just the counterculture, the counter-leftist culture.
Anybody who achieves prominence must have, almost by definition, a strong will, a strong sense of independence, a strong self-directed energy, usually for better, sometimes for worse.
So then, of course, the problem is that you have these very staunch individualists who are used to fighting against collectivism, so to speak.
And I've been one of those people. And then to say, okay, everyone get in line.
You know what I mean? I mean, that's a big ask.
And I'm trying to think of who would have the commanding presence or the resources to just say to everyone, no, you go here, you do this, you stop doing that, and people are just like, okay.
You know, it's such an individualistic movement that for us to have any kind of Quasi-paramilitary form of organization in a secular or non-statist sense.
I don't know. It's a big ask, and it would require such a big and powerful personality that...
I don't know.
That's sort of my thought about it.
I've thought about it often, and I don't know if it's possible, and I don't see right now...
If there could be somebody that everybody would be willing to listen to or even if that person would make the right decisions.
You just don't know.
And movements are very tricky because all they have to do is put some plants in the movement, our opposition, and record them saying something horrible and be like, the whole movement's radical.
Well, no. See, they don't even have to record you saying something horrible.
They can just slice and dice or take you out of context or anything like that, right?
Yeah. Yeah, so it's tricky.
I don't know. What have the major conflicts...
I mean, this isn't technically gossip, but I do actually love gossip.
But what are the major conflicts that have emerged that, I guess since Trump's victory, or I guess maybe even since the faltering and failing of Brexit, what are the major themes in the conflicts that have emerged, do you think?
Within the movement? Yeah.
I would say there was a huge split between what they would call the alt-right and the alt-light, and they were just constantly fighting.
And for me, it was difficult because I was always in the middle.
I was neither.
I don't even know really what to call myself anymore politically because There are so many things that I don't agree with fully in either area.
So I was always feeling really lost.
And I just call myself Catholic now because I don't know what to say politically.
That's why I used the term philosopher, because you're just in pursuit of wisdom, pursuit of truth, regardless of where it may take you.
But to say, I'm going to sit in a conclusion is to reject the act of thinking.
Yeah, it just became really difficult because there were so many...
You know, people out to dox one another, to share stuff with the media even.
I think people were recording one another, attacking people trying to get all their videos flagged and taken down.
Just this kind of stuff. All this public drama that just made us seem like that, you know, sister that's a complete train wreck and is never going to get her life together.
That was us. I don't know.
Everybody was fighting all day long.
Once one fight ended, there was another one, and I just kind of started to stay more to myself.
That said, there were a lot of wonderful people in this movement, and I'm not naming anyone in particular as being awful, but it was way too volatile, as you said, and unstable and unreliable.
Going to a rally is just one example.
I never trusted that I was safe, that it was under control.
Like, somebody literally could have died.
There wasn't, you know, the proper steps taken beforehand to set things up.
It wasn't disciplined.
All these sorts of things.
On that note, in fairness, I know a lot of times the police would stand down and Or the mayor, you know, would order, you know, the whole thing canceled or whatever.
I don't know. There were many various things where things were shut down.
Even with Milo's thing at Berkeley, the whole thing was like canceled.
I don't really know what happened there, but it's just happened time and time again.
I never really felt that there was somebody in control, that it was like, I've worked really hard.
This is going to go, you know, this has a plan.
That's the word I was looking for, that I never really felt like there was a plan.
And so I kind of just moved off into doing...
My own thing and I think that the thing I've always been most passionate about is writing and so I was so happy to finally finally get back to writing because I don't necessarily genuinely believe that YouTube was ever my thing but I did it because I saw it as a way to counter what I find to be despicable and that is many of the things that the left is advocating for.
Well here's a funny thing too and it didn't really struck me Sorry, it didn't really strike me as much, although I've chatted about it a bit with Lauren, but it didn't really strike me as much until you talked about it in the book, Brittany, which is for the young female activists, there is the tension between activism and motherhood.
You know, for a male, like just sort of take the stereotypical example.
So for a male who's pursuing activism while you're out there, you're getting more prominent, you're getting more famous, maybe you're getting more donations, maybe you're getting more resources.
So in a sense, deferring fatherhood for a man who's on the ambitious upswing is not...
A bad idea because you gain the traditional, you know, your daddy's rich, your mama's good looking, you can end up with more resources and more fame and more access to potential dating partners and maybe end up with a better wife.
But of course, for the female activists, it's really a very different equation.
And I've read that part several times just trying to sort of knead it into my bone marrow so that I could really understand what that process is.
But how's that been playing out for you?
It wasn't such a big issue initially because I was single.
But as soon as I met my now fiancé Martin, because I knew that he was the one right when I met him, basically, it was a crazy story.
But that said, it started to just really, it started as this little seed that just grew and grew and grew and grew.
And I'm thinking, I'm imagining myself with a child saying, like, sweetie, watch the baby.
I'm going to a riot, wearing gear, possibly might get killed, thrown in prison, whatever.
It just seemed completely irresponsible and unrealistic.
Granted, I could make YouTube videos, but I really want to try to be the type of mother that my mother was.
She speaks three languages.
She has a master's, very well-educated, owns a few businesses.
But she was there for us full-time, 100%, eight children, because her businesses didn't require her to be there.
She managed from a distance.
But she was always there, and I saw how much we needed her.
And I would hate to not be there.
I was thinking how many times I needed my mother, and then she was there, and then try to put myself in the shoes of my future child if I wasn't there.
It would be, you know, tremendously damaging.
I was also a nanny for a while and I saw how much the girls missed their mother.
She was a wonderful woman, absolutely wonderful, but the children really, really missed her and they needed her and I wasn't a good enough replacement as a nanny.
And so I... Thinking about it, I was like, okay, I think I have time for a hobby, which could be writing.
I could get up early, write a few hours, or after the kids go to bed.
But really, motherhood is a full-time role if you want to be a homemaker and a mother.
And that's what I decided. And this was this conflict that was growing and growing and growing in me.
And I was thinking, I need to leave YouTube.
You know, I am going to.
Because I see that I don't want to split myself.
And what's more important to me is being a mother.
And why I've wrestled with this decision is thinking, oh, I'm abandoning my duty.
We're in such an important time now.
You know, now or never, basically fight or die at this point in time.
So I'm like, am I being a coward?
Am I abandoning everyone, walking away from the fight?
But in a way, I can still contribute through books.
And then I'm also helping, I would say, by being a mother, because we need more mothers, we need more children, we need more stable, healthy families.
So that's... Can I give you one other...
Absolutely. Post-parenting prop up to what your resolution is.
You're a very fierce fighter and a very brave woman.
But I will submit to you that you don't really yet know how fierce you can be until you become a parent.
Yes. You know, I mean, for me, like some of the topics that I've taken on, you know, like, I mean, Sensible people don't touch it with a 10-foot pole.
People with lots of resources and education and so on have openly stated they're not going to touch, you know, race and IQ and so on with a 10-foot pole.
It's like, well, I don't know what their feelings are towards their own children, but I'm not, if I can help it, going to have my daughter grow up to be called a racist for facts far beyond her control.
Like, no, no, that's just not going to happen.
If my daughter wants to Grow up and marry some guy.
I don't want him to be excluded from job opportunities because of his race.
I'm sorry. I love her to the point where I'm just gonna keep telling the truth about that which is important and the resolution that you have.
There's no contradiction between activism and parenting because parenting focuses your activism to that which is the most essential and the most powerful in a way that I couldn't really have anticipated.
Before really becoming a parent and recognizing how powerful that love is.
Yeah, I can definitely imagine, but I don't think...
I can never perfectly conceive of what it's like, I know, until I have my own children.
But I'm trying to think of not what I want, but what is right.
And that's how I've been posing the question.
I've asked so many people for advice.
And I'm pretty near my decision now, I think.
I've had babies. It gives you something to love, something to fight for, and does contribute, I think, to having more reasonable woke people in the world.
Well, listen, I don't want to go too far into the book because I don't want people to get the idea that they read the book, which is a great book.
I just wanted to remind people.
So let's make sure that people know exactly where and how to get a copy of the book.
The book is called What Makes Us Girls, and it's available pretty much everywhere.
You can go to your local bookstore and order the book.
Within a week, it'll be delivered there, and you can pick it up.
And I would encourage people to do either this or order via Barnes& Noble or Amazon, a Kindle version, because Amazon has decided to be really difficult with me.
I'm not accusing them of doing this deliberately, but it's a really shady situation.
They're saying it's going to take three months to print my book.
Just You know, for each person and then two days to ship it.
And they're saying this is because of holiday shipping delays, but I don't understand why this would go on for three months if so.
So I feel a bit sabotaged here.
So if you do want the book within a normal time frame, please order from Barnes& Noble.
All of the links are on my website.
I also have available signed hardcover or paperback copies, which I'll mail anywhere in the world with free shipping.
And that's all on my website. And as for an audiobook, it's coming in the...
The third or fourth week of January, it will be available on Audible.
My twin sister is currently reading it.
Aha! I knew that was going to be a switch!
Well, the good thing with having a twin is you do save money on author headshots.
All right. Well, thanks, Brittany.
It was really a great pleasure to chat with you.
I just really wanted to remind people to get the book to read it.
Whether you're a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, it doesn't really matter.
It is a wonderful window into someone's life and thoughts.
It reflects back onto my own experience in very deep and powerful ways.
It's beautifully written, and I even like the font.
So, yeah, the book is What Makes Us Girls.
The author is Brittany Pettibone, and I'll put links to it all on the show notes, and I hope you have a wonderfully happy new year.
Thank you so much for taking the time today.
Oh, that was to me.
Sorry. Thank you so much.
Are you talking to someone else? Thank you to people for listening.
Okay. Thank you so much, Stefan.
It was amazing talking with you.
I can't believe it went an hour. It felt like 10 minutes.
