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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:59:21

Dr Warren Farrell Hosts the Freedomain Radio Sunday Call In Show with Stefan Molyneux!

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	Good morning, everybody.
	It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	Oh, what a wonderful morning we have.
	Dr. Warren Farrell on the line who has – I won't even tell you what hour it is in his locale, but I can only assume that his hands are still dripping with the cow's milk because he must be getting up that early to milk the cows in order to be ready for a show like this.
	Thank you so much, Warren.
	I really appreciate your time.
	Oh, good.
	So we're actually in the shed.
	So we're going to get a play-by-play.
	You know, if you have a calf giving birth, I think that would be an excellent drama.
	This show doesn't have all the live births in it, and I think that they seem to be quite popular with people, so we'll hopefully work that in somehow.
	So we did a chat recently and one of the things that came out, we're going to take some listener callers in a sec, but one of the things that came out that I thought was a really great comment was, and it certainly was accurate in its description of me, I'm not sure about you, but
	Somebody wrote and said, y'all seem to be, I don't know if there was a y'all in there, but I just thought I'd throw it in, y'all seem to be tiptoeing around the question of female violence and I think there is a sense of that, you know, because we get so much, we hear so much about how women are victims of various things and the idea that women can perpetrate violence is sensational.
	I mean, it's lurid and occasionally you'll hear some of the, you know, moms who kill their children kind of thing, which It's the kind of extreme that excludes or occludes the mean.
	And so I was wondering if you thought a little bit about that.
	The statistic that came up was, you know, that more women than men engage in child abuse.
	And one that came up as well was circumcision, that women seem to be, or some women are pro-circumcision.
	Not that the men are uninvolved in that decision, but that's another kind of aggression that is important.
	Did you think it's true that we have a tough time talking about female aggression or female capacities for abuse in our society?
	Yes, and the deeper reason is that we do consider men to be disposable in war and work and so we have an easier time sort of not protecting men because the very protection of men leaves us unprotected.
	And then the purpose of our willingness to be disposable, whether it's in war and work, is to protect women.
	And so to protect the society, to protect the society for children to be doing, our children to be doing better than we do.
	So the very, and the way that we, the heterosexuals among us, the way that we get women is by being the, is being the knight on shining armor, the one that is willing to You know, kill the enemy or make a killing in Wall Street.
	And so there's an enormous amount of desire for us guys to, when a woman complains, to compete among each other as to who will be the savior.
	And to think of the person that, and women play into that by being a bit on the fragile, you know, pretending to be fragile.
	Even when they're not.
	And so the, and so men's weakness is often our facade of strength and women's strength is often their facade of weakness.
	So you have that underlying dynamic going on now on top of that.
	So, so, and that's the only thing that explains what I'm going to be sharing next, which is really quite astonishing.
	And you know, when I first did the research for the myth of male power, I discovered that, you know, men and women in everyday domestic violence situations.
	Women and men hit each other about equally and that that was you know and that the studies the first studies that came out on that or by people by Strauss were by people like Strauss and Gellis, Murray Strauss and Richard Gellis and they interviewed men and women all around the United States and they and they asked them about six different levels of violence from being hit to being to being slapped
	And punched to having to being hit with something, an object like a pot or a pan, to being actually shot, to being, obviously, then they looked at the data on being killed.
	The data on being killed is very complex.
	I'll explain that a bit more in a moment.
	But it's, we usually think of women as being killed by men more than men being killed by women.
	But I'll explain why no one really knows whether that's true or not, and why that probably is not true.
	But that's, as I said, a more complex answer.
	So when I first put that out in the myth of male power, people went, you must be crazy!
	You know, that type of thing.
	So I realized when, by the time I did the research for Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say, that I wanted to do a whole chapter on exactly that.
	And then as I ran the chapter by initial readers, the reaction was sort of, you know, backs got tense.
	That type of thing.
	So I realized that when I said that, I had to take the 50 largest studies that had been done.
	Fortunately, at least half of them were done by women and most of the women were feminists and most of the feminists were good enough to tell the truth about that when they had done academic studies.
	And the truth was, and I had to put a whole appendix in the back of the book Documenting and annotating each of the studies and explaining what they were about, what the methodology was, and what the findings were, in order to have any credibility.
	And I persuaded my publisher, who wasn't very much inclined toward appendixes filled with studies, I said, you know, I'll be seen as being crazy or misogynist if I publish these without an in-depth explanation.
	And so I did that, and here are the basic findings.
	First of all, if you have a son or a daughter, girls are more likely to hit boys than boys are to hit girls when they're dating.
	And so that process starts very early in the male-female life.
	So girls will hit a boy or slap a boy across the face.
	And you see this on TV all the time or in the movies.
	And go to almost any adolescent type of movie that appeals to young men and women.
	you'll see the girl slapping the boy across the face for saying the wrong thing.
	Whereas if the boy had slapped the girl across the face, we'd have a much more tense reaction to that.
	So then once you get into living together in married situations, a woman is far more, when women themselves were asked, In domestic violence situations, who was the first person to do the first hit?
	Women acknowledge that they are the first person to do the first hit a little bit more than 50% of the time.
	Men say it's more like, asking men the same question, they say it's more like 70-75% of the time.
	But most domestic violence situations are more complex than that.
	They involve both male and female hitting each other.
	But when the male calls the police, and the male, first of all, if he's hit by a woman, is far less likely to call the police.
	And very few of the men being interviewed did call the police.
	And so you have that aspect of things happening as well.
	So that's a little bit of – and then the escalation of violence goes all – is about equal on the part of both sexes, a little bit more female-initiated and male response.
	However, men do tend to hurt women more, injure women more.
	At least that's what the data says.
	But what we're not sure about about that data is when a man is hit by a woman, he's much less likely to call the emergency room than when a woman is hit by a man.
	So we don't know whether that's a factor – that's a result of the male being fearful of calling the emergency room.
	We also don't know whether the reporting to police is the meant, whether result of the males being more fearful of calling the police or just, you know, it's not less manly a thing to do, to call the police and say, my wife hit me, my girlfriend hit me.
	You know, the police sort of look at you like you're crazy, unless, unless the abuse is very severe.
	Now on the last level, the killing level.
	We obviously can't interview people who are killed, so we don't have great data on that.
	So we have to deal with the data that comes from what's reported when somebody is killed.
	And it is reported that women are 50% more likely to be killed by the men than the men are to be killed by the women.
	So that seems like a pretty clear statistic.
	However, it isn't clear at all.
	And the reason for that is that men and women kill differently for different reasons and different motivations and different styles.
	When a woman kills a man, it's almost always a man that has a will, that has a reasonable amount, usually a decent amount of money.
	And if she's a middle or upper middle class or wealthy woman, she hires somebody to do the killing.
	If she's economically poor, she usually gets involved with a boyfriend and does the killing.
	Either way, it's a multiple offender killing.
	That is, it's the female with a male plotting to kill the male.
	So, when a woman and man kill each other, the man almost always does it spontaneously, like in anger, kills the woman with a knife or a gun, and the evidence is very clearly there that he killed her, and then he turns around and usually kills himself.
	When the woman kills the man, her desires are usually to get free from the man and be able to live a happy life free from him.
	In order to do that, she usually cares about getting money to be free of so she can live her life effectively after that.
	And so she wants to kill him in such a way that does not appear like a homicide or doesn't even appear like a suicide.
	So the insurance company will release the monies.
	So she will, so if she's wealthier, she will hire somebody.
	So it will be usually a male and her killing the husband or the boyfriend, but usually the husband at the, in the wealthier levels and in the, among poorer people, it can be boyfriend or husband.
	And, and it will be usually the, the woman will be involved with a new boyfriend and say that she's trapped by the old boyfriend and that he hits her.
	And that she and he will be infuriated that he hits her and so that he will conspire with her to kill him.
	But in order to get the insurance money, it has to be seemed like an accident.
	So they'll stage an accident in some way.
	So the ideal of when that killing is successful, that it's never discovered that it's been a killing, so therefore it doesn't get recorded as a woman killing a man.
	But if it is, and this is the crucial and amazing thing, if she is discovered as she and he has plotted a killing, whether it's the boyfriend or whether it's a hired killing, the FBI records the statistic, in the United States at least, as a multiple offender killing.
	So therefore, when you look up the data and the killing of the other gender, when you look up the data on men killing women or women killing men, all of the multiple offender or all of the contract killings do not get counted.
	And when you look at the number of contract killings versus the number of killings in general, there are far more contract killings than there are male-female killings.
	But we don't know, but some of those contract killings are not male-female killings.
	There are other contract killings and the multiple offender killings are not broken down based on domestic violence.
	So in brief, the best answer that we can get is that women and men probably kill each other about equally, probably maybe women killing each other.
	killing men a bit more than men killing women, if you look at the data really objectively, but you really don't know the answer to that question.
	So the brief answer is that men and women kill and hurt and do domestic violence to each other at every level of violence.
	I hope your question feels that that's an adequate answer.
	Well, I think also we used to have, at least in art, I mean, I come from sort of a theater art background, there used to be more consciousness, I think, of the capacity for female evil in society.
	I I'm just sort of thinking back about my Greek and Roman myths.
	I mean, I don't remember the female gods being particularly peaceful.
	In fact, they were quite aggressive.
	Medea ate her own children, fast-forwarding to the 16th century we have Lady Macbeth and the Taming of the Shrew and the capacity for female evil seems to be explicated in culture but that seems to have to some degree at least been shunned to decide and I think that's a shame because it's an important thing to remember in society.
	Yes, first of all I totally agree with you and what we really have to understand is that You know, men and women are in many ways remarkably alike.
	We're very different in the way we carry out things, but we both want approval, love, affection, and to be cared for.
	And we both, when we feel like we're not getting, and we both want to survive.
	And when survival is threatened by either, you know, for either of us, we behave in ways that lead to survival, not and protect ourselves and we can act out and kill and hurt other people.
	And so we both have it.
	And the way that manifests is that we both can be really evil and we both can be really wonderful.
	We both, all of us want to do wonderful things for people.
	But when we are threatened, we almost all do pretty terrible things.
	But your basic instinct about the literature and the art of the past being different than the art of today is right on target.
	And here's an example of this.
	If you watch older movies, 1950s movies or movies from the very early era, you will see times when women are violent toward men.
	And you'll see women even dying in the movies.
	However, if you take the following type of movie, Hollywood-produced movies, US-based or Western world-based, but especially US-based, where a female who is considered feminine, that is, she's not threatening other women, she's not directly portrayed immediately as a person who is Undermining the future of other women or is playing an evil role.
	And that's the number playing an evil role are very, very small.
	But, but when you, when you look at those women and it's a fiction movie, not a nonfiction movie based on reality, but a fiction movie, then you will then, and that woman appears for more than three scenes in a movie.
	She will not, and this is spoiler alert here.
	She will not, no matter how much she's in jeopardy, no matter how much she is threatened during the movie, no matter how much the entire movie is focused on her being in jeopardy, she will not be killed or very seriously injured during the course of the movie.
	She may be injured at a light level, like having a little bit of blood come out, but not at a very serious level during the entire course of the movie.
	And, you know, given how many Hollywood movies have been produced since the politically correct era, of the late 60s and on.
	We're talking now about almost 50 years of movie production in which there has been almost no exception to that rule in Hollywood movies.
	Okay, so Dr. Farrell, I had a question somebody asked.
	I've had a woman on the show, her sort of nomenclature is Girl Writes What on YouTube.
	She's got some very excellent gender-related videos.
	And she put forward a political argument that I thought was very interesting, I wonder if I get your comments, where she said that single moms tend to vote to the left and married moms, married women, tend to vote to the right.
	And she said that I mean, it's always tough to reduce these things to one variable, but you said one variable that's kind of underreported is that single moms are voting left to keep social programs going, to give them resources to raise their children, whereas married women are voting right in order to try and get the economic opportunities or the free market, the general republican small government free market ideology.
	So that their husbands can have more resources to bring home to the kids, which I thought was a quite an interesting argument.
	Do you think that this new constellation of families where, you know, the sort of dual married families, definitely in the minority these days, that it's having an effect on voting patterns and the political process?
	Yes, first of all, the program that she does and her website is very good.
	I really enjoy it.
	She's one of the most perceptive women on these issues in the world.
	And so I definitely encourage listeners to tune into that.
	Secondly, she's basically correct with a refinement that increases her correctness, actually.
	And the refinement is that the – so basically, yes, women who are poorer economically and single women, they do tend to vote more toward the left.
	Now, there's a couple of refinements on that, which is that, for example, never married women who have never had children, they actually earn more than never married men who have never had children.
	And so there's a – so those women who are in that – never married who have never had children as opposed to the majority, many, many women who have not been married have had children.
	And so when women have had children and they've not and they're not married, then they tend to vote more to the left.
	When they are never married and never had children, those are really an interesting group of women to look at.
	I haven't seen data on whether or not the women who has never been married and never had children, who again earns more than the never married, never had children male counterpart by 17% and has earned more than the never married,
	male counterparts since the 1970s, by the way, and the most recent data about the 17% difference between never married women who have never had children and never married men who have never had children.
	That 17% gap is true even when you control for education, when you control for a number of years in the workplace, when you control for numbers of hours worked.
	All the data on that is in a book I wrote called Uh, why men earn more, uh, the startling truth behind the pay gap.
	So if you want more depth on that, that's, that's about that issue.
	And the, and the voting patterns of those different groups are in there as well.
	Now the, the top part of that is also fascinating, which is that, you know, that when women are married, um, and they're poorer.
	Then their husbands tend to vote Democratic and the wife tends to vote Democratic.
	And when they're wealthier, then the husbands tend to vote, they're more likely to vote Republican.
	And the Democrats are more likely to vote, I'm sorry, and the women are more likely to vote Republican, unless there is certain ethnic groups like Jewish people who are Wealthier tend to vote to a higher degree, more Democrat, even though they are, you know, they'll have to probably on average pay higher taxes if they, if they do that.
	And so, and I, and there's so many ironies in all that too, that, you know, when Democrats are in office, we usually think of, you know, the, the best reflection of the, of economics and business success probably being reported in any one given statistic in how well the stock market does.
	And when Democrats are in office in the United States as president, the stock market does considerably better on average than it does when Republicans are in office.
	And we sort of saw that most recently, you know, when in March of 2009, there was the stock market in the United States was at 600 and 6,500.
	And today it's at 14,000, you know, a little bit over 14,000.
	And so there's more than a doubling of the stock market since Obama took office or at least two months after Obama took office to today than there was during the end of the Bush administration, at least.
	So, yeah, once you peel back the rhetoric from the political parties and you look at the actual data of what occurs, the rhetoric really does dissolve like a morning mist.
	I mean, Republicans are supposed to be about small government, but social program spending rises faster under a Republican administration than it does under a Democrat, as you point out.
	I mean, perhaps because the Democrats tend to influence the printing of more money, which drives a lot of stock market activity.
	Yeah, it is.
	If you actually look at the data, the rhetoric seems to be rather obtuse.
	So, James, did we have one more caller before I continue to pepper the fine doctor with questions?
	Yes, absolutely.
	Ryan, you're up today.
	All right.
	Hi, guys.
	So, I had a question for the both of you.
	My question is, what advice do you both have for me as a kind, empathetic young man in my mid-twenties trying to navigate the modern dating scene?
	I'd like to find a similarly kind and empathetic wife as soon as possible, but I'd also rather not remain celibate while I'm searching.
	All the casual sex that is supposedly available nowadays doesn't seem fairly distributed, nor can I get much of it myself.
	My experience is that either I find women who fall significantly short in terms of personality, or I find that my focus on connection prevents or kills sexual interest in the woman.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Very good.
	Ryan, that's an excellent question.
	And A, first of all, Stephan, do you want to start with that?
	Your thoughts?
	No, no, go ahead.
	Go ahead.
	It's an excellent question and it's exactly what most males who are kind and empathetic and loving and are experiencing as well.
	So first of all, we have to realize that women are still attracted to men who are good performers.
	Women are still attracted to men who take initiatives.
	Women are still attracted to men who take risks.
	So the challenge of any young man is to both be, but yet women also like men who are kind and empathetic.
	They just don't want men who are reading books like Why Men Are The Way They Are or any self-improvement book in an unemployment line.
	You have to be in the employment line first.
	You have to be the risk taker first.
	You have to be performer first.
	And then, once you're a performer, the qualities of which are inversely related to empathy and sensitivity and good listening skills, Then you are desired to have good listening skills, empathy, and other things.
	So let me just spend a moment on what the tension there is about.
	So when you become successful, the qualities it takes to become successful, let's say you become successful as an attorney.
	And let's say that Ryan, you and I are two attorneys and we're arguing against each other.
	And let's say that Stephan is my, let's say Stephan is the other attorney and you're my client.
	Okay.
	And Stephan and I, let's say we're getting into an argument against each other.
	So my job, if I'm going to represent you as my client really well, is to spend a few seconds listening to Stephan, try to find the flaw in his argument, if there is any.
	If there is no flaw, to distort something, he said, so there appears to be a flaw.
	And then once I've found either a potential distortion that I can argue is a flaw or not, I then begin to listen in my own mind's eye to an argument I can make to defeat Stefan.
	And if I do that very well, I've served you, Ryan, my client, very well.
	But if I were to be empathetic and sort of sympathetic and really a good listener, I would say, Oh, wow, Stephan, that's really an important point that I hadn't thought of before.
	Can you elaborate on that?
	And gee, you know, I don't think Ryan and I have ever thought about that before.
	Isn't that insightful of Stephan and Ryan?
	And in the meantime, you'd be furious as my client, because I'd be representing, I'd be helping Stephan articulate his perspectives better.
	And I'm supposed to be representing your perspectives, not him.
	So I take that same behavior home to work, that ability to cross-examine and interrupt and self-listen to Stefan.
	And I listened and my wife is saying, gee, I've had a tough day at work and I'm interrupting her, listening to myself, create a solution to her, listening to myself, find a flaw in what she is saying, interrupting her at the first chance of doing that, distorting what she's saying.
	And I'm a terrible husband.
	I do the same thing to my children.
	I'm a terrible father.
	And so the qualities it takes to succeed at work are inversely related in many respects to the qualities it takes to succeed at home.
	However, women fall in love with us based on our success or our potential.
	And then once we have that success and potential, they want us to be empathetic, warm, tender, open, loving, and facilitated.
	Many women do fall in love initially with wealthy men or successful men and eventually they feel that that is not important to them and they break up with them because they're not empathetic and warm enough, they're too arrogant, they're too self-centered and so on.
	And so they convince themselves that it's not important for them as to how much money or success or potential the man has.
	But then they go ahead and fall in love with another successful man and gets very frustrated because both sexes fall in love with the members of the other sex who are the least capable of loving them.
	And then they blame the other sex for characteristics that they have that are inversely related to love.
	So we do the same type of thing.
	We fall in love with women who are younger, women who are more beautiful.
	As a rule, women who are older are more mature and capable of loving us effectively than women who are younger.
	The more beautiful the woman is, the more she's like a genetic celebrity and all men compete to make her happy and she becomes more spoiled and self-centered.
	But we still continue falling in love with the more beautiful women.
	And so the key solution is – That it's really important for you to know that being confident, so taking the question you were asking, writing it down, and then saying to yourself, you know, I'm going to ask it from my heart.
	I'm going to ask it without reading it.
	I'm going to ask it as if I'm confident.
	That type of thing makes a woman sort of more turned on.
	than asking it very timidly.
	I mean, you asked it very well, but I'll just give you an example of the type of things that turn women on.
	So both sexes get turned on based on qualities that were useful for survival thousands and hundreds of years ago, but qualities that are really much more dubious in terms of their ability to have a long-term loving relationship today. but qualities that are really much more dubious in terms So that's the reality, the best I can give it to you relatively briefly.
	I would add a few other things as well.
	And this is all with the caveat that, you know, if you engage in a sort of strict pursuit of self-knowledge, almost anything is possible.
	But in the absence of, you know, a dedication to self-knowledge and perhaps therapy and so on, in the absence of that, what I have found helpful is to look at And to ask questions of a woman's constellation of genetic and in particular gender value.
	And that sounds ridiculously abstract but it really is quite helpful.
	One of the things that I mean I've now been very happily married for over ten years and I mean I come from a single parent environment, single mom environment, so I didn't really have a template.
	Now I did therapy so of course that I think was key in changing that pattern.
	But you can ask Ask the woman.
	Now if she comes from a household where The man's value was not clear, and there's a lot of propaganda about how men are not valuable.
	You've probably heard the statistic that, I guess, women work 16 or 18 hours more a week at home.
	What's not mentioned is that men work over 20 hours a week more outside the home.
	So the question is, for the woman, what is her constellation of gender values?
	You know, if she grew up with a single mom with a series of trashy men passing through her living room, you know, who never lifted a finger and
	and so on uh... then she's going to have a sense of a lack of male value and that's that's going to be a challenge you know she's going to need to confront that and and deal with that and so on if she comes from a household uh... you know my wife came from a household where things were fairly egalitarian the mom and the dad worked and uh... there was no sense of you know one person sitting on the couch while the other person cinderella style scrubbed the floor whatever and so she had a strong sense of masculine value to the family
	And so I would really suggest trying to figure out where people are coming from.
	In the absence of significant self-intervention the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior and the best predictor of future relationships is an examination of past relationships.
	So I think that's important because there are a lot of women I hate to use the word feminism because feminism is one of these words that you can parse out almost any way that you want, but sort of the more extreme kinds of marriages, slavery, and the patriarchy rules all, the sort of stereotypical extreme
	feminism, there are a lot of women who don't like that and who specifically reject that concept.
	And I think having conversations about the value of gender, you can ask a woman who's dating, what value do you think a man is going to bring to your life?
	What value do you think a man is going to bring to your home?
	What value do you think a man is going to bring as a husband, a father, a friend, and so on?
	And what specifically does a man have a value to offer that you can't necessarily get from a woman, I mean, other than the obvious pointy bits.
	So I think, and now the longer the pause the woman has, the less perhaps, you know, you want to make decisions on a split second.
	But if you say, well, what value can a man bring to your relationship?
	If there's this long pause, then that may be a gap which you can flush a few years down if you're not careful.
	So I think that's important.
	I mean, obviously, if you're If the stereotypical extreme feminism were true and, you know, if you put women in charge everything will be great, then of course the kids of single moms would be doing fantastically, when of course the complete opposite is true.
	I think as some writers have mentioned.
	There's no better single predictor for failure and problems and dysfunction in life than being from a single parent usually single mother household.
	So you know just having women around is not great.
	I mean I grew up in a series of apartment buildings in a series of countries.
	It was all pretty much the same.
	I called them the matriarchal manners because it was all in the 70s when divorce rates were skyrocketing and it was all Women who'd left their husbands and basically taken up with various social programs and had, of course, a public school to park their kids during the day.
	And they worked, and they weren't lazy or anything like that.
	I mean, some of them.
	But it was a very, very dysfunctional environment.
	And it was a largely man-less environment.
	And that doesn't work very well.
	And if women are not aware of that, that if the men aren't around, the family structure and the children in particular suffer enormously, enormously, then you're going to have a tough time convincing women of the value if they've only heard propaganda to the contrary and haven't looked at the actual facts.
	Then I think it's going to be tough.
	And I don't think you want to be in a relationship with someone who doesn't value your gender or has listened to the propaganda about how disposable men are, which is very much counter to the evidence.
	So I'm sorry that's a really abstract thing, but I think this stuff is really important to talk about early on.
	I mean, people say, you know, the dating phase, you know, it's just lovey-dovey and so on.
	But if you're interested in settling down, I mean, gosh, ask the deep questions.
	And you either find someone who is interested in...
	In the deep questions, which is a good thing, because you can't run a family without answering the deep questions.
	How are we going to raise our kids?
	What's our relationship to discipline, to religion, to in-laws, to extended family, to community, to all of that.
	I mean, you got to have those deep questions.
	And I think early on in the dating phase, it's really important to focus on those deep questions.
	If you've got someone who's willing to discuss them, fantastic.
	If not, then I would say cut your losses sooner rather than later.
	I would, um, this is Warren again.
	Um, I would, uh, definitely agree with that.
	And I, on the issue of, um, children doing so much better when they're raised by even by single dads and single moms.
	Um, and, and, but you know, the, the best way children are raised by the way, just to elaborate on Stefan's point for a moment are, is in an intact family.
	Uh, that is really what works the best.
	The second best way is when children have an equal amount of time with the father and mother, when the father and mother live close to each other, and when there's no bad-mouthing father to mother or mother to father.
	And then if you have to choose between being raised by a single mom or a single dad, even when socioeconomic variables are controlled for, children do significantly better being raised by single dads than they do by single moms, which is counterintuitive but accurate.
	If you want all the data for that, you know, based on meta-analyses of the best research on that, it's in a book I wrote called Father and Child Reunion.
	And that really explains what the dynamic is.
	But the most important thing to remember is not that children raised by single dads do better than children raised by single moms, but rather children raised in intact families do better than any other family structure.
	So that's one thing.
	Let me give you five quick things, Ryan, that really are things that you need to bring with you to every single date that you go on or every single encounter that you have with a woman.
	This is really true in gay relationships as well, but with a few modifications that are with common sense.
	The first thing is that when you're on that date, there's nothing that you will be able to say to a woman if you are not first caring to her.
	So your empathetic skills, your caring propensities, those really will serve you well.
	It's a filter through which you can't say things to a woman intellectually if they don't think that you care.
	Second is Listen first.
	So if you have something to say, ask a woman what she thinks on the issue and listen to her.
	And when I say listen, I mean listening by asking her, not just sitting there waiting to have your turn, but saying, you know, what I hear you saying is this, you know, did I distort anything?
	Did I miss anything?
	Is there anything else you want to add?
	And when she feels fully heard, that's when she will relax to be able to fully hear you.
	Third, once that happens, once those first two steps are taken, then take your third step, which is articulate fully what you feel about that issue and articulate it as diplomatically as you can.
	Because once she is heard, she will not need extreme rhetoric in order to be able to hear you.
	She'll be able to be a A much better listener shall want to be as good a listener as you are.
	Fourth, you have to also show that you are successful or have potential.
	You have goals.
	You have ambition.
	So if you don't have those things, you really need to work on both the type of things that Stefan talked about.
	Do counseling on that issue.
	Do some really good interventions with yourself.
	And work particularly on the issue of postponed gratification.
	Postponed gratification is one of the key pathways to success.
	Next on the date, be yourself.
	Because being yourself, even though it may alienate the woman on some level, it also shows the woman that you have the courage to risk rejection and the courage to risk rejection is a prerequisite to becoming successful, which the woman intuitively picks up and makes her attracted to you.
	And then finally, Ask her about her past relationships and let her talk fairly extensively about her past relationships.
	Draw her out about her past relationships.
	If the man is always at fault in the past, as Stefan said a minute ago, the best predictor of the future is the behavior of the past.
	You can assume that you will be the next man that is being talked about negatively by her in the future.
	So if but if on the other hand, the woman is saying, you know, we broke up.
	But, you know, now that I look back on my relationship, I saw that one of the problems was that that I contributed to it was this or that I was really the main problem or I didn't really do this effectively enough.
	Then that's the type of woman you don't want to be scared away from.
	That's the type of woman you want to make sure you have a second date with.
	Does that answer address some of the issues, Ryan?
	It's all really good advice.
	I just I feel that I've been doing most of that stuff already, focusing on like asking about the woman's past experiences, focusing on really connecting with the woman, showing that I've got economic potential, can showing that I've got economic potential, can take risks and try to do great things with my life.
	And even the confidence at the gain, I've had.
	Had to practice that quite a bit, but I've had some pretty spectacular Approaches of women that have impressed a lot of my guy friends, but it's still Not really coming together for me, and I don't as Steph was saying about trying to Spend the early dating phase getting to know the woman and seeing how that will affect the later dating
	I don't even get past date number two.
	Sorry, Ryan, what's your template for the value of a woman?
	What sort of family structure did you come from?
	So I had both parents.
	It was pre-egalitarian.
	My mom and dad both worked full-time.
	My mom did more of the household chores, a lot of the cooking and such, and she got home earlier to, like, bury us kids around to our different activities.
	But in that sense, a lot of what I got for the Temple of a Woman was Not all that much different than man.
	So let me ask you about this, Ryan.
	When you're with a woman, do you reach out, take her hand?
	Do you kiss her?
	Do you reach out and initiate kissing her?
	Do you do that when you're not even sure whether she's interested in that or not?
	For me, more often, it's failing to do that when she is interested.
	It's something I'm working on, but that's just kind of from my background.
	I came from a sexually paranoid background, so it's been something I'm working on.
	I'm getting better at it.
	Let me talk with you a bit about that, Ryan, because it's really crucial that whatever messages you got, the basic cultural message is sex is dirty, boys, you initiate the dirt.
	And the result of that is from the sex is dirty message that boys and men, because we're interested in sex even more than women are, that we start feeling shame about our interest in sex.
	And yet women need – but women are also fearful of risking rejection with us because when you reach out and you take – when you're a female and you reach out, you're fearful that the guy will see you as not desirable you're fearful that the guy will see you as not desirable because you're sort of too – because you're initiating and you're not very So women do really play that role.
	Women will be much more attracted to you if you're the one initiating and you initiate.
	You can assume that if a woman is out with you and part of what will turn her on is you're initiating because she sees you're a man who's able to take risks and able to risk rejection.
	There is a historical and biological reason women are interested in men who take risks because in life, in general, men who don't take risks, no matter how bright they are, no matter how empathetic they are, they don't get very far.
	And so women are on an unconscious level wanting that.
	And you don't have to worry about the sensitivity part of it that I would play the other side of that coin if I sensed from you that you were sort of an arrogant male who just wanted men, women to go to bed with him.
	You're not.
	You're not in that category so I don't have to worry about that with you.
	But the deeper work that really absolutely needs to be done and probably done with a good sex therapist is working on feeling, um, seeing sex from a very positive, sex positive type of way.
	So I would really encourage that.
	I think that once you do that, that you have to solve that issue first before you feel comfortable, um, initiating, um, sexually and, and then, um, and then begin to go out there and do the sexual initiation to a much greater degree.
	Does that make sense?
	It does, and I'm sorry, Ryan, just before we move on to the next caller, and I know it's a big topic, but you mentioned that you have a history of sexual paranoia, sexually paranoid history.
	I'm not sure what that means.
	If you could just explain that a bit?
	Yeah, so my mom was raised in a devout Catholic household and then a lot of those same messages that she got about, you know, sex being bad at least openly outside of the context of a marriage got transmitted through me and I guess a specific example to show what that
	looked like was, you know, as a kid, if there would be some sort of sexual portrayal on TV or something like that, and my mom was in the room, she would say all hopefully, I don't like you watching that.
	And if she's got access to the remote, she'll go and change the channel immediately.
	That is a really good example of both sexual paranoia, but also the behaviors that emanates of sexual shame and And once a boy or girl is feeling negative about sexuality, their whole relationship to love and intimacy is really messed up with.
	And so if you're a parent listening now, let me just address you for a moment.
	There's a real litmus test you can use that's very much related to what Ryan is talking about.
	about sexual shame.
	So you walk into, imagine yourself having a 13 and an 8 year old child, one girl, one boy, and they're both watching TV.
	And you see CSI or some type of murder mystery program on TV.
	Do you imagine yourself noticing your 13 and 8, your 9 year old child or whatever, watching that CSI and just moving on to the kitchen and continuing your work?
	Probably you do.
	Now Imagine yourself 10 hours or 10 days later walking by the same TV, the same two children are watching it, but this time there's a naked man whose penis is erect going into the naked vagina of a woman that's visual on TV.
	Are you more likely to go over and turn the TV off, be shocked, take the remote away from your son or daughter and say, what are you doing watching that?
	Where did you get that from?
	If your answer is yes, and the chances are about 99.9% that it is, That is that you're more likely to take the remote and be shocked and be chastising with the naked people having sex than you are with the people killing each other.
	The basic message to your son and your daughter is that sex is worse than murder.
	And that's a pretty tough message to send your children out with.
	Your daughter, rather than being sexually open and receptive and involved and fluid, which is a very key dimension of maintaining a good marriage and relationship with your daughter.
	Will be much more constrained and fearful and your son will be you know He's the one that's going to be told to take the initiatives and he's also going to be told to respect love and care for women So if we're told respect love and care for women and sex is terrible and dirty and he knows he wants sex More than the average woman does and he certainly wants it from the beautiful women more than the beautiful woman Maybe want it with him
	You're putting him in an extremely challenging position for the rest of his life, but particularly during his single years.
	And so this underlying message, which is not just common to Catholicism, but almost to all strong religious upbringings all over the world, by the way.
	is really something that needs to be questioned by a very good sex therapist.
	And probably 90-some-odd percent of the population needs to be working with a sex therapist on these issues.
	Oh, I mean, I echo that, and I'll try to avoid my usual spittle-laced rant.
	But, I mean, the reality, of course, is that the average child by the time they reach 18 has witnessed tens or over 100,000 acts of violence on television, and not to mention video games where it's immersive and you are the enactor of the violence.
	But dear God, Janet Jackson's nipple gets exposed during a dance routine and everybody goes insane.
	I mean, I sometimes try to travel down the path towards the future and this is something I learned from Voltaire and the Enlightenment writers did wonderful, wonderful jobs of exposing the insanity of their existing culture by pretending that they were, you know, the savages, quote, savages who came from North America after the discovery of North America.
	They come to the court of Louis XVI or whatever, and they try to understand how this culture works.
	Trying to understand how your culture works from the outside is a wonderful outside-the-matrix mental exercise.
	I think it really is the essence of philosophy.
	You know, not that I'm a Platonist, but we want to get to the Platonic forms of the truth and not try and drill through the cultural distortions, the shadows on the cave wall, as Socrates talked about.
	And in the future, they will look at us as positively medieval, and they will wonder how we manage to morally stomach pumping endless amounts of violence into our children's minds, which is always negative, while at the same time instilling in them a truly medieval, Tertullian-style horror of the simple while at the same time instilling in them a truly medieval, Tertullian-style horror of I mean, it is just completely insane.
	And in the future, they will look back, and they will absolutely not understand how we were able to tie our shoelaces, given how insane we were about the basics of life.
	Anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
	I could go on, but I think we have some more callers.
	Thank you so much for sharing, Ryan.
	I hope that it somewhat helps, but I think… I think Warren's right that the negative descriptions of sex, the implicit negativity around sex and masturbation and so on is really terrible and it does leave a very negative legacy.
	James, if we could move on to the next caller, I think that would be most excellent.
	Yeah, I just wanted to say also for myself, I've always got my own issues or my own If you want to start in a safer place, perhaps do some reading.
	out of the clear blue sky, but from my history about sexuality.
	And the thought of going to a sex therapist is kind of terrifying.
	But maybe it's a good place to consider going for that particular aspect of my history.
	All right.
	No, if you want to start in a safer place, perhaps do some reading.
	And somebody who writes good stuff on this issue is a fellow named Marty Klein, K-L-E-I-N.
	And just look up Marty Klein sexuality.
	I think his most recent book is Sexual Intelligence, and he's really a very thoughtful player on this area.
	If you're interested in some of the more cross-cultural dynamics of how sexuality got distorted and became a problem, and how it plays itself out in its current culture, a book I wrote called The Myth of Male Power deals most effectively with that.
	But I'd suggest starting with Marty Klein and his work on sexual intelligence.
	Alright, thank you.
	Next up today we have Brian.
	Hello, can you guys hear me?
	Yes, go ahead.
	Oh, cool.
	I have a more abstract question than the last caller.
	It's more about uneven distributions in society between men and women.
	I really had a question if you thought the cause of uneven distributions was based more on discrimination and environmental incentives Or like a biological or RNA causes for... Sorry, I just want to make sure I understand.
	Uneven distributions of what?
	Of like socioeconomic status and stuff like that for women and men.
	Or like earnings.
	Like... Oh, so sort of the typical thing about... Are you asking about pay gap?
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	Okay, go ahead, Doctor.
	But, I mean, not even specifically that.
	It could be other things too.
	I'm sure there's other uneven distributions that we wouldn't necessarily expect in society that we do see.
	I'm going to work on the gender pay gap because I've written the book I wrote, Why Men Earn More, is completely focused on that issue.
	The gender pay gap is one of the most misunderstood things of our time and it sort of plays into where I sense your question is leading.
	which is that we believe that men earn more money than women for the same work.
	Basically, what is true is that men earn more money than women.
	What is not true is not for the same work.
	So we often hear that it is for the same work because it's controlled for numbers of hours worked and so on.
	But it is not controlled for many of the most important variables.
	So when I did the research for why men earn more, I found that there were 25 things that men and women do differently in the workplace.
	Every single one of those 25 things leads to men earning more money.
	But every one of those 25 things leads on average to women having more balanced lives, doing more fulfilled work and so on.
	So let me give an example of that.
	So men, for example, are much more likely to become engineers.
	When we ask people whether they want to be an engineer or they want to be a writer or an artist, the great majority of people would prefer to be a writer or an artist than be an engineer or a mathematician.
	But men intuit ahead of time that being an engineer is going to be more likely to make them more money.
	than being an artist or a writer, which usually is preceded by the word starving artist or starving writer.
	And so the men know that in order to be – if they ever want to get married and have children and be a father, that the woman who marries them is going to want to have options, options to be involved in taking care of the children or options to be involved in being in options to be involved in taking care of the children or options And so options are best attained by marrying a man who earns money.
	And so men know that we are more lovable the more money we earn.
	And so we go out and we figure out what we can do to earn more money.
	But it's not earning more money we think of as power.
	But in fact, it's oftentimes – pay is about – is a paradox.
	The pay paradox is that you get the power – What you do to earn money, earning money is a toll road.
	To earn more money you pay tolls like tolls of working more hours, tolls of working in hazardous jobs, tolls of traveling a great deal during weekends, tolls of doing things you don't want to do in order to basically working for somebody else.
	So you lose power but earning money is about losing power in order to gain power.
	The power you gain is the power of the paycheck.
	The purchasing power.
	The purchasing power.
	So it's the paradox of that.
	And so when we look at the gap between pay between men and women, it is – So it appears that, for example, the males earn more than females.
	But if you say, well, wait a minute, suppose both the male and the female are a doctor, then that gap in pay goes down if they're both doctors.
	But there's still men who are doctors earn significantly more than women who are doctors.
	So you take the magnifying glass to the next level and you say, well, wait a minute, men who are doctors are more likely to be cardiologists, let's say.
	Or surgeons and women are more likely to be general practitioners.
	So let's compare cardiologists to cardiologists and general practitioners to general practitioners.
	Well, then the pay gap, the gap between male and female pay shrinks enormously, but there's still a gap between male and female pay.
	So then you take that to the next level and you say, well, wait a minute, what about general practitioners who work in their private practice versus comparing them to versus who work in HMOs?
	Then who earns more?
	Then you find the person in the private practice who's been working more years, who has more hours that they put into their work, that when you control for the hours, the years work, the amount of specializations they have, the types of specializations they go into, that's when you find that the types of specializations they go into, that's when you find that the pay is not – there's not a pay gap between There's an equal amount of time, equal amount earned.
	But there are so many distortions.
	Let's say, for example, you go to school as an art history major.
	Are you more likely to be female or male?
	The chances are you're much more likely to be female.
	So you take an art history major who graduates and then you compare her to – to a, let's say, a person without a college education who picks up garbage, who is likely to earn more, who's more likely to be, the chances are the person picking up garbage, picking up garbage, needs to, not picking out garbage,
	but picking up garbage, earns more, but picking up garbage, earns more, because we all need our garbage picked up, but we don't all need an art history major as much as we need our garbage picked up, so that there's more, The more fulfilling your occupation is, and women are far more likely to choose occupations based on the criteria of fulfillment, the more fulfilling your occupation is as a rule, the less it pays.
	The reason it pays less is because of supply and demand.
	There are more people competing for things that are fulfilling than are competing to pick up garbage.
	Therefore, the person who wants a fulfilling occupation, like I have as an author in talking to you, are far more likely to earn significantly less money.
	And so those are the things that need to be controlled for and to frame men's greater likelihood to earn more money as privilege and power is to completely miss the concept, the idea that in many respects it's compensation for our feelings of inferiority.
	When we pay for women on a date, that's basically saying I am not worthy of your love and your romantic interest until I pay for you.
	That means I have to compensate for my inequality by paying for you.
	The person who's paying is compensating for their inequality.
	If you were to pay me to be a consultant, the amount that you're paying me is the amount that you're compensating for your inequality to my time when you're asking me about the areas in which I'm the expert.
	And so that's the – all those things have not been understood.
	So if you're interested in a much greater depth and explanation of that, I don't want to elaborate here, but it's in Why Men Earn More.
	That really explains that much more effectively.
	like Cool.
	So you don't think that it's a problem, though?
	You don't think that it's a problem?
	So you're saying that the uneven distributions conform to some concept of justice in supply and demand, but also that there are environmental incentives that create These uneven distributions as well.
	So it's like a combination of a lot of different factors.
	None of which are really discrimination, right?
	Well, I'm saying in the gender area that the male-female discrimination is really not the... There are many areas of male and female discrimination.
	Women are discriminated against in certain
	Careers and professions and historically in this in this area have been significantly discriminated against but more in the last 25-30 years when for example when you have never married women who have never had children as I mentioned earlier in the program and you compare them to never married men who have never had children and they both have worked equal numbers of years or about the same number age and they have the same education and they're both working full time the never married women in that category that group of descriptors I just gave
	They have out-earned their male counterparts since the 70s, and today they out-earn their male counterparts by 17%.
	And so, gender discrimination now, and that's because there's also a whole series of discriminations against men.
	I mean, if you train to be a massage therapist and you're a male, you are not going to be as much in demand as females are.
	If you train to be a dental hygienist, the average person does not want a man's fingers in his mouth as much as a woman's fingers in his mouth.
	And so even though 10% of the people who train to be dental hygienists are men, only about one half of 1% of the people who have jobs as dental hygienists are men.
	And so you go on and on about discriminations that impact both genders because of our stereotypes gender-wise.
	In terms of the broader issues of You know, why do certain people make more than others and should there be environmental constraints on that?
	The decision about whether or not we should have things like minimum wage, those are really the freedoms involved in a decision like that is the freedom to make a social contract or not make a social contract.
	In other words, if you want, if you make a decision as a society that you want to be sure that people who work full time have a certain minimum wage, Then the freedom involved in that is the freedom to say that's something that I have as a stronger value than the freedom to go out there and to maybe earn $2 an hour because maybe I can't get a job that earns more than that and I would not have a job at all if there was a minimum wage.
	So those are things that you have to balance as to where are your values.
	And any society, the freedom really comes in the freedom to make whatever social contract that you want and live in a society that has a social contract that is most connected to your values.
	Let me just throw one thing as well because the data does not support in general the discrimination against women but yet it is so strongly perceived of in society and I think this comes down to a problem of funding.
	I think that of course most questions come down to sex, power or economics.
	I think this is a little bit more on the third.
	Every revolution should be voluntarily funded.
	It has to be voluntarily funded because otherwise how on earth do you know when it's over?
	Say someone comes to your house, bing-bong, they knock on the door, ding-ding-ding.
	Listen, dude, you've got to give me money.
	We really want to eradicate polio in Cleveland.
	And you'd be like, look it up quickly.
	Hey, wait a minute.
	There's no polio in Cleveland.
	What are you talking about?
	Oh, okay.
	No, no, wait, wait.
	We need to get rid of slavery in Alaska.
	No, dick, dick, dick.
	Hey, wait a minute.
	There's no slavery in Alaska.
	I mean, what are you talking about?
	I'm not going to give you money for that, right?
	Because these goals have been achieved.
	These goals have been achieved.
	And whenever you have coerced or state funding of any revolution, the revolution extends itself beyond all reason.
	And after the original problems have been solved, it busily sets itself about inventing new pseudo problems to continue its funding.
	If you voluntarily have to fund something, then you know when it's over because you achieved your goals.
	We've ended polio, smallpox, slavery, all these other kinds of good things.
	And so people start funding it.
	And then people go on and are released to find more productive ventures.
	But the moment you start to have academics involved and government funding and up here in Canada, literally hundreds of millions of dollars goes to feminist groups.
	And what are they going to do?
	Are they going to say, no, no, no, here, take the money back.
	I think we've achieved most of what we want to achieve.
	We're going to go and do something more productive with our time.
	No, they start to invent stuff.
	And this is very well documented.
	I would recommend, of course, some great, I would say, extremely competent feminist writers like Phyllis Schlafly, Christina Hoff Summons, even some Ann Coulter stuff is great.
	Yeah, Who Stole Feminism is a fantastic book.
	And she goes into great detail, Christina Hoff Summons, about how For instance, the recent, quote, crisis in women's education.
	Girls lose so much self-esteem between the age of 8 and 14.
	I mean, the data is incredibly sketchy.
	And yet, because of the amount of social energy and really government-enforced money behind it, it ended up producing quite a revolution in education to the point where now the pendulum has swung so far to the other side.
	That Philip Zimbardo's got books out and lots of people have books out called The Demise of Guys about how men are just being incredibly shortchanged in the educational environment, boys and men, and being drugged at nine times the rate of girls and graduating at far lower rates, far fewer of them in college and so on.
	And of course you don't hear that because men's groups don't get huge amounts of government funding and there's not a particular bias towards understanding those issues in the media.
	So I think it's important to recognize where the perception is and where the reality is.
	The gap between those two explains a lot.
	Hi, this is Warren again.
	Yes, I very much agree with a great deal of what Stefan is saying there.
	Once something becomes institutionalized, really in any area, when I first worked for the U.S.
	Department of Education very early in my career when I was a kid, I was shocked in my first meetings that I walked into and they would say things like, it looks like we're not fulfilling our budget this year and if we don't spend everything we have, we are not going to be able to get the same budget next year.
	And I would raise my hand and say, excuse me, but isn't it a good thing that we're producing the things we need to do for less money?
	And they say, well, the problem, Warren, and looking at me very sweetly like I'm an innocent little boy, is that if we don't, as I said, if we don't do this, if we do this effectively this year, we're going to be punished by a smaller budget next year, which will make us less able to do the things we need to do.
	And so that's just one of a thousand examples of the way government bureaucracies do tend to perpetrate themselves.
	And certainly in Canada, where boys are falling significantly behind girls, as they are in every one of the top 35 industrialized nations, according to the OECD of the UN.
	But in Canada, the boys are 51 points behind girls on reading scores and they're also behind girls on writing scores.
	And reading and writing are the single biggest predictors of not being able to get a job and not graduating from high school and not graduating from college.
	But yet we have ministries for women in Canada but not ministries for men in Canada.
	And in the United States we have Men are still dying five years sooner than women and people just think that's a biological difference.
	But in fact, it's not a biological difference.
	In 1900, the average woman lived to be age 46.
	The average man lived to be age 45.
	There was only a one year life expectancy gap between women and men.
	Today, there's a 5.2 year life expectancy gap between women and men.
	And yet there are seven federal offices of women's health and zero federal offices of men's health despite that gap.
	And so there is definitely a propensity.
	And I was the leading male voice on the women's movement throughout all of the world in the late 60s and early 70s.
	I was on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City.
	And so I do not come at this without an understanding of the value of much of what the women's movement has contributed.
	But once something becomes institutionalized, it is extremely difficult for the institution to become introspective and And what we've done with gender is we should really have at the very minimum four gender discussions happening simultaneously in every university at the same time.
	We should have it by liberal women like feminists.
	We should have it by conservative women like Phyllis Schlafly.
	We should have it by Christina Huff Summers.
	We should have it by liberal men, of which I am one, and we should have it by conservative men.
	And so all four of those discussions need to be happening at the same time in order to have a balanced view of what's happening with genders.
	And those are only the starting discussions.
	To say, I'm not even incorporating here, you know, people who have foci on transgender issues or gay issues, but, you know, they would become a portion of that whole discussion.
	Well, thank you so much.
	Excellent.
	Now, listen, we've still got... Yes, thank you so much for your question.
	We still have another few callers, so we'd like to get into them before the show.
	The inevitable curtain of podcasting comes slamming down like the wall of night on our show.
	So, James, we have another person up?
	Yes, we have one more at the moment.
	His name is Matt.
	Hey, you guys.
	Hey, Matt.
	Hello.
	Hey, I really love your stuff, Warren.
	It's really great.
	Thank you.
	Okay, yeah, so my questions, I'm afraid you may have just answered them, but it's about... Sorry, Matt, to interrupt, can you just back off from your mic a little bit?
	Yeah, is this better?
	Yes, thank you.
	Please go ahead.
	Okay, cool.
	My question is, what has led to the implosion of feminism?
	Because my understanding, Warren, is that you kind of think the feminist movement has really been good in liberating women from gender roles that they've been in, extending the choices that they have.
	That's correct.
	And how is that, how is it like, how is, cause it was initially a good thing.
	How's like feminism grown into this thing that works against women really fundamentally.
	And like, it has a grown and has it always kind of been doomed potentially?
	Because I really don't understand feminism too well, but when I think of the word feminism, that it's focused on women in relation to the world, and it's not really focused on just men and women in relation to the world, it's inherently not focused on men.
	Yes.
	Yeah, and with that, now that it's kind of become this kind of monster that doesn't want to look in the mirror, what is it that attracts women to feminism now?
	Yes.
	Well, good.
	Very, very important question.
	And so here's what was good and here's what was bad about it.
	In the beginning of the women's movement, the second round of the women's movement, second wave of the women's movement in the late 60s, Basically, feminists felt, it was after World War II, in industrialized countries where there was, and in the portions of industrialized countries where there were people who were middle class and above, there were, women were married to men who, the women who were part of the feminist movement were basically women who were quite well educated.
	They were usually married to men who were fairly successful.
	Um, when, when, when we become successful economically, we start having a freedom.
	The freedom is to look at what do I want more than just money alone?
	Uh, do I want to be respected?
	I want to have options.
	I want to be able to go out there and, and be fulfilled in the work world.
	But at the same time, I want to be able to have the option to be full-time involved with my children, or I want to have the option to do some combination of both.
	And so in the, in the 1950s, early sixties era, the expectation was You know, that women were supposed to be, if you were a very talented and bright woman, you were supposed to be a teacher or a nurse or a secretary.
	And so if you wanted to work, but basically you should put your energy and your focus into your family.
	And there's a lot of positive value for anybody putting their energy and focus into a family, but women didn't want to be limited that way when men weren't.
	And so because we were, but nobody sort of saw the strength and the weakness of that argument.
	The strength is that who wants to limit women?
	The weakness of the argument was, well, wait a minute.
	No one sort of said that both genders had historically been limited.
	That is that women were limited to raising children and men were limited to raising money.
	Men and women both had a different experience of powerlessness.
	Women's experience of powerlessness was obvious.
	They didn't have the choice to raise money in as many diverse ways as men did.
	Men's experience of powerlessness was never articulated.
	Unable to unconsciously understand that feeling obligated to earn money that someone else spent while they died sooner was not a very good definition of power.
	That power is really about better defined as controlling your own life.
	But men had bought into this sort of Invisible definition, like if I'm going to be a powerful man, I have to earn money.
	Well, the second you say to somebody you have to do something, you're no longer talking about power or freedom like almost every libertarian understands because you're not controlling your own decisions.
	And so people, we ideally should have started not a women's movement, but what I call a gender transition movement in which we said, we now have survival enough mastered in the middle and upper middle class and industrialized countries to be able to focus we now have survival enough mastered in the middle and upper middle class and industrialized countries to be able to focus on fulfillment to a better degree, which would then free men to be more involved to be the full-time fathers that they wish, free men
	That would free men equally to freeing women to be full-time mothers, full-time workers, or some combination of both.
	So no one looked at the need for a gender transition movement to Move from the old rigid roles of the past to more flexible roles of the future Which would it be and how to make a transition to those?
	To those with both sexes working together to do that instead we took the civil rights model because the civil rights model was before us and And we also took the Marxist feminist Martin the Marxist model so we had two models that were politically powerful among the educated and the and the wealthier people in the industrialized world.
	One was the civil rights model which said that blacks were oppressed by whites and there was slave owner and slave and we saw, "Uh-huh, women are sort of being oppressed by men.
	Let's think – and we put the men and women into that dichotomous win-lose type of model." And then the Marxist model was there were oppressors and oppressed.
	There was the wealthy and there was the working class and the wealthy were oppressors of the working class who were oppressed.
	And so who were most likely the workers?
	More likely the workers, it was males.
	And who were more likely therefore the oppressed?
	It was females, or so it was believed.
	And so instead of taking a gender transition model, both sexes historically were limited by their roles.
	And both sexes now had the ability to be free from their roles.
	We were taking instead an oppressor-oppressed model, and feminism adopted those oppressed-oppressor models.
	That became part of academic thinking that is in every gender studies class at all the major universities all over the industrialized world.
	And it hasn't been questioned and that's what needs to be questioned if there's really going to be a compassion between men and women and a working with our sons that is effective because our sons In the United States, for the first time in U.S.
	history, our sons will have less education than our dads.
	And in Canada, our sons are doing as badly as is true in most of the industrialized world.
	Does that respond to your question?
	Yeah, completely.
	So yeah, what attracts women to feminism now then?
	Well, some women are attracted to feminism and some women aren't.
	What attracts women to feminism, the ones who are attracted to feminism feel like, well, gee, I want more rights.
	And, you know, and and and they do buy into the argument that that, you know, that they're You know, there's discriminate, you know, that men are still earning more money than women for the same work they feel inaccurately.
	But they feel that way because that's what they're being told.
	And then they look around and they say, what is power about?
	Power is about, well, let's see who has the most positions of power and who does have the most positions of power.
	Institutional power.
	Clearly, males have more positions of power than females do of institutionalized power.
	But that and so looking at those brief synopses of those two types of definitions of power, it appears to many women that there's still a lot of progress that needs to be made for women because they don't look at the hundred or so other variables about how many – about the fact that when a woman, for example,
	gets to earn about $100,000 a year, she gets to earn about $100,000 a year, she begins to start saying, I don't want to earn more money.
	I want more time with myself for my private time.
	I want more time with my women friends.
	I want more time to travel.
	I want more spiritual time.
	I want more time with my husband.
	I want more time with my children and more time with other things because she wants a more balanced life.
	And what is power about?
	Power is about a balanced life.
	So a woman makes a decision when she earns somewhere between $80,000 and $115,000 a year, she tends to make a decision that she wants a more balanced life.
	So therefore she is less likely to become the CEO of a major company because she doesn't want to spend her time that way.
	That's real power.
	That's what men need to learn from about women, but by being told that women aren't as likely to be the heads of companies or the heads of governments, she falsely assumes that women have less power and that the result, that is not a result of her decision and her freedom and her real power to make a decision to have a balanced life.
	It's a result of she assumes discrimination and that's what attracts women to feminism without looking at a full dimension of the picture.
	Right, yeah.
	And I thought I have as well, it's like a It's a really good way to give yourself value without actually working to give yourself value.
	I'm a good person because I'm a woman rather than I'm a good person because I'm honest, etc.
	etc.
	all the kind of virtues.
	You're right on target, Matt.
	Men have been trained not to think of ourselves as human beings but human doings.
	When a woman goes to a party and she says, gee, I'm single, is there a guy around here that you'd suggest host?
	that I could maybe be connected to.
	And she'd say, well, yeah, the guy over there, he's just finishing med school.
	And the guy there is an attorney at such and such a firm.
	And the guy over there is, well, he's a sweet guy, but he likes to write or he likes to be an artist.
	And he really hasn't done that well.
	So you don't even, she, that guy becomes as invisible to the female host who's connecting up the female to a male.
	As an unattractive older woman is to a male at a party where he's looking for his next date.
	And so women have been much more likely, especially recently, to be valued as human beings.
	And men are much more valued as the human doings, the doctor, the lawyer, the surgeon, whatever, than as human beings.
	And the freedom that we are really on the verge of, if we seize it and take charge of it, is the freedom to be human beings rather than be the ones most likely to be expected to go to war and die.
	We need to fight to be the elementary school teacher that we wish to be.
	We need to fight to be a dad full-time.
	As likely as a mother is a mother full time and to have that type of freedom if that's our part of our personality.
	But that's not even considered in the option of male female dialogue when a woman becomes pregnant today.
	Let me just add something as well which is that, and I'll try and keep this brief because I want to make sure we get to the next question, but I mean I've been a stay-at-home dad now for four years and my wife works and so I've had a kind of female experience from that standpoint and man alive the amount of resources it takes to raise, I mean I only have one child and she's awake 14 hours a day and at her age she needs a parent's attention statistically about every three minutes.
	I mean, you can't get anything else done.
	You can't get anything else done.
	I mean, I really don't want to because she's so much fun, but where do the resources come to provide that luxury to raise your children?
	I mean, this is a fundamental question, and it's a gender question.
	I mean, it's the most important question, I think.
	I mean, the care of children is the future of society and so on.
	So the question is, and this is I think something I've always had a problem with, with sort of the more extreme kinds of feminism, which is, okay, so if you want to have kids, and most people do, if you want to have kids, where are the resources going to come from to raise the children?
	Traditionally, they have come from the father.
	They have come from the father, and that is the constellation, right?
	The dad goes out, and as Gil writes what he talks about, like the Inuit, he goes out in some stupid-ass leaky boat trying to throw a toothpick into a 200-ton whale and bring home some blubber.
	And so the idea that she could be like a feminist and say, I don't need men, it's like, well, no, you really do, because you're going to be incapacitated by pregnancy and breastfeeding and raising children.
	And so you're going to need someone to bring you resources.
	And feminists who want to be free of that, I think it's fine.
	But then if you want to have kids, the problem is where do you get the resources to raise the children?
	And as we can see from particularly the lower ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, what happens is they turn to the state.
	They turn to the state for food stamps.
	They turn to the state for subsidized housing, for free daycare, for, quote, free public school, for health care, for dental care, for, I mean, you name it.
	There's huge amounts of resources that go into it.
	And the sort of go it alone sister thing is fine if you don't want to have children.
	If you do want to have children, then someone's going to have to provide those resources.
	You either save like crazy and then live off your resources during the first, you know, if you have a couple of kids, it's five to seven to ten years if you want to stay home till they're five.
	So that's a lot of money to save up.
	Or you rely on a husband to bring home your resources.
	Or you have to turn to the state.
	I think turning to the state has caused huge amounts of problems because having liberated men from the need to provide women, it keeps men in a state of perpetual immaturity of adolescence and there's less incentive for them to grow up to attain and achieve financial success and emotional maturity and responsibility and so on.
	And I think that ties, sorry if we can just get to the next question, which I'm just going to read from the chat room.
	I'll try not to do a Valley Girl accent, although when the questions are phrased like this, I always want to.
	A question for your guest.
	What's up with all the single people in the U.S., man?
	Why aren't more people getting married?
	And is there a correlation to the issue of divorce?
	Also, if you could touch on low birth rates.
	What are your thoughts?
	Good doctor.
	Yes.
	Well, first of all, very good question.
	And here's how bad it's getting.
	The 53% of women in the United States who are under 30, 30 or under, are having children without being married.
	Now, I don't have an issue with marriage as a moral issue, but here's what does come when you're not married.
	When a woman has a child without being married, like Stephan was just talking about a few moments ago, she is far less likely to involve the husband.
	The husband is far less likely to be involved.
	When he does get involved, he's more likely to feel like he's being gatekept, that is, he's treated like a babysitter, like the female values protect the child and be careful the way you play and don't take risks that are more likely to dominate like the female values protect the child and be careful the way you play and don't take risks that are more likely to dominate
	If the child's in a classroom where the teacher is too strict and the child comes home to mom, the mom will be more likely to say, I'll call the school and work something out.
	We'll get you out of that class.
	The dad is more likely to say something like, excuse me, sweetie, but you're going to have all your life.
	You're going to have people you don't want to work with that don't want to like.
	This is a good experience for you to learn how to get along with somebody that you don't inherently like.
	And the mother and father will have a huge argument.
	In an intact family that argument is likely to take place unless the male withdraws and feels he can't win, can't have sex, can't get emotional responsiveness from a woman when he doesn't have that argument.
	And so when men are either defeated in that type of balance of parental power in an intact relationship or when women have children out of wedlock and they don't have the man involved much at all,
	then the child tends to grow up overprotected and the woman feels very stressed out because she's trying to juggle a world between working and her reliance on the state very frequently and then also her need to connect with the children individually.
	It's a very difficult job when you have, as Stefan just said, because the child takes so much time.
	You don't have time to really be an effective worker and raise children full time.
	And so you end up doing things like turning to the state and excluding the male from the process.
	At the same time, we haven't trained men.
	To think from early childhood years to think of it as being a viable option to be a full-time dad and to be and present that and so if a woman wants to be a have-it-all woman have a great career and and have successful marriage and have a successful children what she needs to be looking for is a man like Stefan who would allow her to be fully focused on the career while the child was raised in a devoted caring
	loving attentive type of way, but many women instead of looking for a guy like Stephan, excuse me Stephan for using you as the example here, but is much more likely to say, you know, I want a man who will at least earn as much as I do as a prerequisite for getting married.
	And so the next stage of the evolution of the human species is encouraging men to be able to think of themselves as being lovable, as having purpose by being full-time dads as much as we think of a woman as having purpose by being as having purpose by being full-time dads as much as we think of a woman as having purpose by
	Because very clearly children do best when they have an equal amount of both parenting, but when they can't have an equal amount of both parenting, then a father involvement is much more likely to give children boundary enforcement.
	And boundary enforcement is much more likely to lead to postponed gratification.
	That's much more likely to lead to a child being more likely to be successful and therefore having a higher self-esteem, being more likely to be empathetic and assertive and not aggressive.
	And so those types of things Sure.
	So, it is around, of course, the decline in marriage, which has, of course, got a lot of causes, and also the decline in birth rate.
	So maybe go back over the core of the question again, and I'll see if I missed any portions of it.
	Sure.
	So it is around, of course, the decline in marriage, which has, of course, got a lot of courses, and also the decline in birth rate.
	And I agree with you, of course, that, I mean, women, if they want to go out and have a great career, then they need a man to stay home.
	Unfortunately, the breasts, if I remember correctly, I'm no doctor, but the breasts tend to go with the woman, where the woman goes.
	And breastfeeding does seem to be very positively correlated with infant well-being.
	So that's all kind of tricky.
	I mean, you really are fighting nature, you know, and I remember reading an article written by a woman who said, you know, she's in a corporate washroom pumping milk in, you know, through a machine into a bottle and so on and just thinking like, wow, this is not exactly a state of nature kind of motherhood.
	I mean, that is really far away from how we were sort of designed to be raised.
	And I think so if the mom does want the to breastfeed and to breastfeed a series of children, which is for the best.
	If you're just going to make decisions based upon what's best for the kids, then that's what you would do.
	I mean, that does take her out of the workforce for a significant amount of time.
	I mean, there's a lot that I can do, but you know, I'm all taps and no plumbing when it comes to the boobs, so I can't really do much of that.
	Absolutely.
	And just to be clear, the data does support what you're saying, Stephan, that the children who are breastfed, that there is something about human milk from the mom that has more nutrients in it that are effective for children's development than there is about cow milk or goat milk or whatever.
	for the child and so that is very so that that type of those types of things need to be worked out and you know so one of the possibilities is you know that in Canada is you know that you have a paternity leave and you also have maternity leave and so the society has to ask itself the question because we because children you know children that are functional are important to our life do we want to provide that for for for people as part of the transition or do we not?
	And I don't care which way you come down with that but there are pluses and minuses to both types of modalities but it's a question that needs to be asked.
	Stephan, how did you and your wife work that out?
	Stephan, how did you and your wife work that out?
	She stayed home for a year, actually no more than a year and she breastfed.
	And so she was able to keep that going.
	And she did work sort of part-time for some of that time, but we were able to keep that continuity going.
	And I think it was about 18 months or so that she stopped.
	It's, I mean, I think it's essential.
	I mean, there's also the antibodies, right?
	You get a stronger immune system through being breastfed, which is, of course, quite important.
	I mean, you don't want to be one of those kids who's, ah, yes, my first eight years were having a cold.
	So, yeah, so I think there is that just sort of, the nature is not egalitarian from that standpoint.
	And there are some feminists who will argue sort of grimly that until men can give birth and breastfeed, there just isn't going to be that kind of equality, because But these are all just choices.
	I mean, if you don't want to have kids, then you can live the life of a single man.
	And if you do want to have kids, then, you know, if you want to do what's best for them, that's going to interrupt your career, the breastfeeding and so on.
	And then you can go back to it and the husband can stay home has been the case with me.
	But these are all just choices.
	And of course, I mean, everybody wants the best of every world, right?
	Of course.
	I mean, but, you know, the reality is that every plus comes with a minus and vice versa.
	I think this is really a question where everybody has to come together.
	No, no, this is a new question.
	So if you send that to that one, then if you could finish off, that'd be great.
	Yeah, I think this is really a question where everybody has to come together.
	We do have to realize that there's a huge amount of orientation toward the male as the worker to the degree.
	And so CEOs or medical doctors, they were expected to work 60 to 90 hours a week.
	And people who work in the 70, 80, 90 hour a week category, certain types of things happen.
	They tend to be totally exhausted.
	The women tend to be home feeling that they're isolated.
	Um, the men tend to have affairs.
	They tend to become more alcoholic in their orientation.
	They feel lonely and isolated in their huge amount of travel or medical doctors who work that level tend to become sloppy with patients.
	And that's the old male model where we felt that when a man had a position, he had two or three or four or five children he had to support, that he would not stop with getting to a that he would not stop with getting to a – he would be willing to work as many hours as was required to get more of a status and honor in the society.
	and that's one of the things that we need to question.
	So for example, we need to have MBA programs, I believe, do work with having top positions being filled by three or four people working together so that if you and I were interested in libertarian issues, Stephan, that we would, and we were the president of some society on that issue, And it was, it was a worldwide society.
	It was taking a great deal of time that rather than have it be Stephen or Warren Farrell, or, you know, Joe Jones that there'd be four of us working in one function, but the training to work in one function is both viable because of all the technology.
	That is happening in it today that was never available in the past.
	But it's also a new set of skills as to how to communicate with each other, how to juggle it, how to learn from people that have done this well, how to learn from people who have failed.
	And so these are the types of discussions that are the discussions of the future and in the discussions of how to make the home male friendly to dad.
	So dads have support systems when they walk into parks with their children that other people aren't, they don't see all female groups tied together talking about female types of things that women are educated to incorporate the father.
	The fathers are educated to know how to incorporate themselves so they have support systems when they're raising children.
	When our parents recommend one of their children to be babysitters, that we don't, as parents We don't automatically say.
	Oh, yes.
	Our daughter is available.
	She's 16 now.
	We are as likely to say our son is available.
	He's 16 now.
	And so there's hundreds of dimensions of discussions that need to occur if we're going to have real freedom on the part of both genders to both raise children as well as raise money.
	All of freedom has been defined by women having equal opportunities to raise money.
	Nothing has been very minimal discussions have occurred about men having the freedom to be equally as likely to be honored for the most important single function we have in the world, which is raising children.
	Yeah, I meant to that.
	Okay, so I think we can squeeze in one more and thanks again so much.
	We've got a question from the chat room where somebody says, The government's role in determining economic guidelines for child support for divorce and unmarried parents.
	And deadbeat dads, there's a lot of publicity and so on, particularly since the government became involved in the issue.
	The listener is curious to know if this problem really exists, is it something that has been manufactured by the government?
	And in general, of course, I think a lot of men – I did a show on this recently that was quite popular where I think a lot of men look at marriage as an extremely dangerous situation.
	I mean, if it works out, great!
	But if it doesn't work out, Lord above, you can really get taken to the cleaners in pretty horrific kinds of ways.
	Yeah, so the government's involvement in the dissolution of marriage and whether that, as the men's rights groups advocate, that seems to be quite unbalanced in favor of the woman and the mother and not so much for the husband and the father.
	What are your thoughts on that?
	Yeah, unfortunately I have to say that I agree with that.
	that the the the um i have um you know i i make i make my living i thought i made my living as an author and then i wrote a book called father and child reunion and that book became so needed by so many dads that were um that were losing um the ability to be equally involved with their children after divorce that
	i ended up not writing a book for the last five years because i so many i was responding to that demand.
	And most of the fathers that called me, by the time they called me, they'd already spent $100,000 to $150,000 with lawyers and in courts just to become equally involved with the children.
	Now, this is absurd because it meant that the calls I was getting were almost only from wealthier men.
	That millions of men who were less wealthy, they were told by their lawyers and were being very honest with them.
	If you're going to fight this battle, it's going to cost you $150,000 to a quarter million.
	And you might as well just pay her more child support and let her be the primary mother and go on and have another marriage and get involved with those children.
	And the man is freaking out.
	And what's happening here is that the children.
	The system has, yes, definitely become so biased that it can't see the forest for the trees.
	And that is that, you know, that the, the presumption, the law needs to make it clear that the, um, that when children have, uh, are, uh, when there's a divorce, uh, that three things must happen.
	Uh, that is that children need to have both parents involved.
	And if one parent is to not be involved, the burden of proof needs to be on the parent who doesn't want the other parent involved, because that parent is abusing or is in some ways a really alienating parent.
	Secondly, the mother and father cannot move away from where the other one was.
	You can both move if you want to, but you have your primary responsibility as a parent.
	The three things that children need who do best if they're children of divorce is to have both parents equally involved.
	Secondly, is to have both parents living close enough to each other so that the child doesn't have to forfeit friends and activities when it sees the other parent.
	and that the third of the child can hear no bad mouthing from the mother toward the father or the father to the mother.
	If you have those three things working after divorce, you can have a reasonably decent divorce.
	Every court needs to know that.
	The law needs to do that.
	Now most people, most courts in the US and Canada do believe that, but if the woman says, oh I don't want the father involved because I'm fearful of him or I want to move to another province to be with a new man in my life and I can get a better job in this other province or my future husband will have a better job in this other province, then the courts tend to say, well, you know, that seems perfectly fine to me.
	I should allow you that freedom.
	No, they shouldn't allow her that freedom if because the greater obligation of the court is to understand that you've made a commitment to children and the children have your first priority once you have those children and those children do best when they shouldn't allow her that freedom if because the greater obligation of the court is to understand that you've made a commitment to children and the children have your first priority once you have
	Now, I say that when I started the research for for father and child reunion.
	I was a stepfather and my bias was in the direction of believing that a stepfather could be every bit as good a father as a biological father.
	The data just does not support that.
	The data does support that the child is basically half of the genes of the mother and half of the genes of the father.
	As that child gets older, Especially if the father or the mother is being bad-mouthed by the other parent, that child begins to look in the mirror and see the propensities, the body language, the eyes, the nose of the other parent that's being bad-mouthed and begins to fear that it is that unreliable person, that liar, that drinker that the other parent is.
	And so the child, in order to know itself, needs to know both of its parents.
	Otherwise, it grows up feeling very insecure about that half of itself that it's not around much of the time.
	Unfortunately, if there is going to be a movement focusing on men's issues, it probably needs to focus more first on the importance of men being equally understood for the value they bring to the family table than any other single portion of the men's issue.
	Oh, yeah.
	I can certainly – my mom with my brother, my brother looks very much like my father.
	My parents divorced when I was an infant.
	And, yeah, my mom would say to my brother, oh, you're just like your father.
	And I think unconsciously my brother would look over at the smoking crater where my dad used to be and say, ooh, that's not good.
	And she would – I reminded her of her father and who she really liked.
	And so there is a lot of imbalance that can come out of that kind of parenting.
	And it is a very – Deceptively dangerous, but easy to do kind of self-indulgence to end up bad-mouthing someone who's exited the family scenario.
	But yeah, the impact it has on the kids is intense.
	Yes, I'd say it is the most insidious form of child abuse.
	Right.
	Okay, so I guess the last thing I'd like to mention is what do you think of the declining birth rates, particularly in Europe?
	It's increasing in the US.
	In Canada, I think we're definitely below replenishment.
	What do you think is behind that?
	Well, the more selfish we become, the fewer children we want.
	Children, as you know, are huge.
	There's three basic stages of human life.
	It's you know, the first is what I would call the I stage the second the we stage and the third the other stage and The I stage is of course when we're totally focused on ourself and the we stage is when we get married and now it's about we and how do we create partnership and once you have children it's about other and you know, I remember receiving you know Christmas and Hanukkah cards and you know from From all my friends, you know, when I was younger, they were all single and they'd say, I did this and I did that.
	I'm going here.
	I'm going there.
	I'm, you know, I became, you know, I got this grade, that grade, this major, that major, it was all I, I, I. And then they got married.
	It was much more my husband and I, my wife and I. And then I, then they had children.
	It was like, I was sending my child to the Waldorf school, a Montessori school, a private school.
	Do you know, you know, it's all about the children.
	And so the – but the more we tend to – but our parents, when they grew up, they tended not to think about rights.
	They tended to think about obligations and responsibilities.
	And then when they brought us up, our generation, they tended to focus on, my goodness, I want my – I want things to be better for my children than they were for us.
	And they put a huge amount of attention and focus on us.
	And so we became much more self-centered.
	And so when it came to us having children, we intuitively sensed that a lot of children meant a lot of time.
	And we wanted careers and wanted to travel.
	We wanted freedom and we wanted to have fewer children because it was a lot of time, a lot of effort.
	And so we had the option to do that.
	And the wealthier that people become as a rule, the fewer children they tend to have and the more they want to pursue their own options.
	And so I think that's a huge factor in the game.
	And we see this all over the industrialized world compared to the less industrialized portions of the world.
	Yeah, and I think, just hearkening back to the issue with Catholicism and sexual paranoia and so on, I think that it's been hard for people to have a lot of fun raising their kids for a variety of reasons.
	Obviously, throughout history, kids were, you know, If they were so inherently wonderful to have, you wouldn't need to restrict sex to marriage, and you wouldn't need to have all of this propaganda about kids.
	But I'm sure, as you're aware, there's numerous scholars using a wide variety of data sets from Europe and America have found that on aggregate, parents report statistically significantly lower levels of happiness, of life satisfaction, marital satisfaction, and mental well-being.
	And this occurs even after the kids leave home.
	And so I think that what's happened as well, a lot of people Parenting has always been challenging.
	I think it can be a wonderful thing if you have the right support structures, but those tend to have sort of faded away to some degree.
	But I think what happens is, and this is certainly my perspective before I met my wife, and look at my friends who had kids, and it's like, whoa, you know, you've got to get up two hours earlier, you have no money, and you're always shuttling things around, and then you've got to go to work, and you're tired, and you don't even really get that much quality time.
	And so I think, particularly with both parents working, it's really hard to make a case for the Absolutely.
	approach to parenting.
	You know, if you have those kids, it's going to be just fantastic.
	It just seems to lighten people down.
	And the statistics support that certainly in the modern age, having kids is overall declines people's satisfaction and happiness, mental well-being.
	And, you know, I think that that would be a problem we'd really want to address as a society, but we just seem to sort of keep blindfolded and staggering on through the storms.
	Absolutely.
	The single most important thing that we can do in Canadian, U.S. and other school systems around the world, if we want to have a much happier outcome for raising children, is to start training our children in kindergarten, is to start training our children in kindergarten, first grade, early years, to know how to communicate effectively.
	And the key issue of communication is the ability to handle personal criticism from a loved one without becoming defensive.
	The Achilles heel of all human beings, male and female, is our inability to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive, especially from somebody we love.
	We go into, historically speaking, when we heard criticism, we felt it was the enemy and therefore we built up our defenses or tried to kill the enemy before the enemy killed us.
	That was great for survival.
	It's terrible for intimacy.
	And so rather than making laws as to how You know, keep people married longer or make marriage tougher to get into or tougher to get out of.
	Laws are not the answer.
	The answer is in helping ourselves know how to communicate in a way that will serve us in any type of relationship we have.
	Mother, father, gay, straight, or working relationship, or Israeli and Arab.
	Nobody listens effectively to anyone when people are disagreeing with them and until that skill set comes down when men and women are parents and in marriage and there's a pressure of the children that's going to decrease the intimacy of a marriage as opposed to increase the intimacy which children can do but they can only do it when the communication is good.
	Yeah, so communication from a loved one, criticism from a loved one is always an opportunity.
	It's either an opportunity for you to accept criticism that is valid or to find out why criticism is invalid.
	It's always an opportunity for intimacy.
	We view it as a challenge, as a win-lose, but if you start looking at criticism as a win-win, It can be a wonderful opportunity for self-knowledge.
	I mean, the myth of, you know, I think men have this to some degree as well.
	Like women have the myth of physical perfection and men have the myth of status perfection and to learn to surrender to the authority of somebody who knows you really well and to good heavens.
	I mean, imagine going through life without a mirror.
	I mean, you wouldn't even know if you had crumbs stuck to your face or whatever how your hair was looking, but to have somebody around who's your emotional mirror is such an incredible opportunity for a well-rounded view of yourself, somebody that you love and you trust, who can see so much more than you can see from the outside.
	I mean, obviously you can experience a lot more from the inside, but the view from the outside to give yourself a rounded and rational perspective of yourself is so essential, and that is going to come with criticisms and to take it personally and to get defensive is almost a sure recipe for cracking the relationship perhaps permanently.
	So yeah, I really, really encourage people.
	If people around you are criticizing you in a truly negative and destructive way, then you can try and reform that.
	But if you have people around you who you love and trust, and hopefully that's your marriage and the parent of your children, really, really, I would encourage people to look up on criticism as an incredible opportunity.
	And where there's no criticism, there is only stagnation.
	I mean, criticism is an essential part of growth.
	I mean, we're all going through new things in life.
	We're all experiencing new things in life.
	And we're all trying new things, hopefully.
	And whenever we try new things, we get some things right and some things wrong.
	And so the criticism is the best way to hone.
	And if you ain't being criticized, you ain't in love.
	And if you ain't being criticized, you ain't doing anything new.
	So I really wanted to, I think, reinforce what you're saying and hopefully encourage people to view criticism as an incredible opportunity to get close to people and get the kind of feedback that we need to have a balanced view of ourselves.
	Very good.
	No, no, please finish, I don't want to go over your time, but if you want to take another minute to finish up, we don't have an end date, so please go ahead.
	Okay, great.
	There's one key mantra, I mean, I think the most important work I hope that I do is in couples communication and it's just we don't have enough time here to develop this, but the most important single thing that I could leave somebody with
	is that you really have to train yourself to do a work around your natural biological propensities to be defensive when you're criticized.
	That's what's in our biological system.
	And the best quick step toward that workaround is by basically before you need to set aside a time during the week where you share problems that are challenging for you.
	But before you listen to what is a challenge to your partner, one needs to alter your psychological state.
	And altering your psychological state starts with seven different mindsets that I discussed.
	but let me just leave you with one of those mindsets.
	The first mindset is an inner dialogue with yourself that would be called the love guarantee.
	And the love guarantee is saying to yourself, if I provide a safe environment for my partner to share what's really going on with her or him, my partner will feel more loved by me.
	And therefore, anyone who feels more loved by somebody and a safe environment for sharing what they really are feeling is going to feel more love for me.
	So what's about to come is something that I might traditionally hear as criticism, but what is about to come at me is an opportunity to be loved more deeply by my partner and to To give the person I love more than anybody in my life an opportunity to feel safe.
	That is a gift that will always bring me more love.
	So when you focus on the opportunity for love coming forth with every word that is being said, that is the most important single step that one can take toward communication that tends to make people feel they have the greatest gift.
	which is a partner that provides a safe environment for them saying anything that is on their mind.
	I think that's great advice and the other thing I would toss in is that I think we often make the error which is perfectly natural.
	We're given this idea that we have an identity, that we are one thing, one person, one soul, one personality and I mean I'm a big fan of Richard Schwartz, Dr. Richard Schwartz.
	He's been on the show.
	He runs Internal Family Systems Therapy which a lot of my listeners have pursued with great Great effect.
	And I did a lot of that kind of work when I was in therapy, that we are not a single person.
	We are not a single identity.
	And so to be criticized is not to be criticized as a unit.
	You know, like if you're looking at a painting and you say, I don't like the painting, that's the painting as a whole, right?
	But if you just look and you say, I think that this one little fingernail is not painted well on the hand, that's actually praise for the rest of the painting.
	Because when you focus on one little thing to criticize, you're actually praising everything else that you're not focusing on.
	And so if we accept that we are not I call it the MECO system.
	The identity is an ecosystem.
	It's who we are innately.
	It's who we have been impacted by people in our life, both positively and negatively.
	It's cultural influences, religious influences, educational influences, authority influences.
	Some of those things are positive and some of those things are negative.
	And things so bad habits that I have, I have some of them are just bad habits that I've developed, but some of them are things that were imprinted upon me when I was young as a kid by negative experience as a kid.
	And I didn't like them as a kid.
	And so if somebody criticizes and says, you shouldn't do those things that you didn't like as a kid, they're actually helping me.
	They're getting me in touch with my sort of earlier experiences.
	They're helping me to discard that which I didn't like as a child as well.
	And they're not criticizing me.
	They're criticizing somebody's impact upon me, which remains unconscious to me.
	And I think that's really, really important to not assume that we are being criticized as a whole.
	We are being criticized for our individual components which come and go, which rise and fall.
	And if we remember to piece ourselves out as a composite rather than think of ourselves as a single unit, then we can be criticized without taking it as a criticism of the whole.
	Because I think it's hard to make the case that there is a whole.
	When it comes to personality, but rather something specific, maybe being criticized, which you yourself would have criticized someone for as well, and that's an opportunity to deal with that particular aspect, or I guess as DeMoss would say, an alter ego, a particular aspect of ourselves, rather than being the whole identity.
	I hope that's not too abstract, but I think that is one of the ways that I found it to be helpful.
	I think that's really brilliant and important, and I think also your analogy to the mirror, that we all need mirrors in our lives, is very helpful too, Stephan.
	Fantastic.
	Okay, well, I could keep going and going and maybe we can do another show about couples communication because I think that's essential in an area where I think abstract thinkers don't spend enough time.
	I'm still waiting to find the long-lost book on Nietzsche's Guide to Personal Relationships.
	So, listen, Dr. Warren Farrell, thank you so much for taking your time.
	Let me just make sure I plug your website.
	Dr. Warren Farrell, two Rs.
	I guess in both the first and the last name.
	WarrenFarrell.com, the author of Why Men Earn More, which you should definitely take to your next performance review, Father and Child Reunion, Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say, The Myth of Male Power, Why Men Are The Way They Are, Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men, and Dear Lord, a huge amount of media appearances, plus one now, I guess, since this morning.
	So, gosh, thanks again, Warren.
	I really, really appreciate your time and attention.
	The listener feedback has said that this show Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show.
	He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S.
	and Israel.
	Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA, SIFMA.
	Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
	Member NYSE®, a Fidelity Investments company.
	His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered at www.profile-financial.com.
	Well, thank you very much.
	Just a few items of business that we have.
	I will be guest hosting the radio show Free Talk Live tomorrow night from 7 to 10 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time.
	I think that's mostly going to be listener calls and so you can get that at Free Talk.
	Just do a Google for Free Talk Live.
	We have a special announcement next week.
	Oh, it's going to be very, very cool.
	The documentary is coming along beautifully.
	The first 11 minutes are out and we've recorded with live musicians the musical score.
	Ah, it's too cool.
	And you will be blown away when you find out who's in charge of the music.
	I'm not going to talk about it yet, but it would be quite astounding.
	So thank you everyone so much for your support for all of that.
	It really is not possible without the support of you.
	Dare I say, the genius listenership.
	And remember, I mean, you guys drive the quality of the show.
	It's the quality of your questions, the quality of your feedback that drives the quality of the show.
	Freddie Mercury, my favorite singer, once said that he can only sing as well as the audience wants him to.
	And I really think that that's very true.
	So, you know, any praise you hear for the show, if you've participated or supported it in any way, please take a goodly portion of that for yourself.
	Because this can't be any better than the questions and the participation that we receive.
	Thanks again, James.
	Thanks again, Dr. Farrell.

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