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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:00:46

Parents Have Nothing to Do with How Their Children Turn Out..?

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Time	Text
	Well.
	That sounded decisive, didn't it?
	Hi, everybody.
	It is 8-4-12.
	And it is the Friedman Radio Sunday Show.
	I hope you're doing fantastically.
	The only rant I have to begin with is whiny, bitch-ass, cryin' NASA engineers that run 60 Minutes.
	Oh.
	Oh.
	Now, I don't mind seeing Grown men cry.
	I mean, I see it every morning in the mirror when I brush what's left of my hair.
	But I do have a problem when there was this crane engineer and he was crying on 60 Minutes because, you know, it was the end of an era, ladies and gentlemen, because NASA was finished launching its last space shuttle.
	And he's like, it doesn't have to end this way.
	It's the glory of space.
	It's the glory of the country.
	It's our greatest achievement.
	It's our most noble birth.
	And it's like, oh man, they just don't get it.
	People are so propagandized by the state, they don't get it.
	Everybody should realize, should understand this one basic simple fact.
	NASA is exactly what, and the space shuttle, is exactly what people don't want.
	Hey, it's what they want for free.
	Let's burn this candle!
	It's what people want for free going straight up this massive dildo of engineer rejected, no date, teenage life.
	I can pierce the heavens because I can't get me any cream pie.
	But it's just what people don't want.
	Because if this guy wanted to keep the NASA space shuttle going, no problem.
	You know, set up a donation page.
	If people are that keen, then people should just donate fifty bucks, a hundred bucks, a kidney, a cab, whatever they've got to keep this thing going.
	And yeah, hold a bake sale.
	But that's of course not what happens with people.
	What happens is they whine and they cry and they plead to keep their well-paying jobs, well-paid jobs, and they never think
	Well I'm just gonna ask for donations and see how much people really want the space program and don't get me wrong I like seeing space as much as anybody else but I just think it's tragic and funny how sad and dependent these people get and how how much they know that people don't want the space program because if this guy were to sit around everyone and say we're gonna start up a donation drive for The Space Shuttle.
	Everybody knows that nobody would give them any money, or certainly not nearly enough people would give them money to even get a model Space Shuttle.
	Hurl the loft on a Meccano slingshot.
	And so this is the reality.
	Everybody knows that nobody wants a space shuttle, at least enough to pay for it voluntarily.
	And so they whine and they cry and they plead and they get sentimental like all parasitical, blood-sucking, state-sucking, second-hand, hanging off the jugular, Leachy boys, they get all kinds of emotionally manipulative, and it's just sad, sad, sad and pitiful to watch.
	So, good riddance, Space Shuttle.
	That's it for my intro.
	Having gored so many sacred cows in one particular run, I really can't call myself the Pamploma running of the bulls, and I guess, do we have any callers?
	Yes, but before we get to that, you wanted to have the Next, several dates lined up for your speaking engagements?
	Indeed, indeed.
	I'm going to have James read it so it doesn't sound quite so vain.
	Right, right.
	Should I adopt the funny accent?
	Wear the hat?
	The bald cap?
	You know what?
	Please, do an imitation of me reading my own speaking engagements.
	I'd like to hear this.
	Oh god, no, I can't do it now.
	First of all, I very rarely start with oh god.
	Occasionally I end with oh god, no.
	This is the internal thing because now you're criticizing me.
	No, no, do it as a sinister guy from New Jersey.
	Make it vaguely threatening.
	That'll be all.
	Seriously?
	So next up we have the porcupine.
	I think the swear to word ratio would be a little too high for this program.
	But anyways, so next up, first up on the list we have the Porcupine Freedom Festival from June 21st to 24th in Lancaster, New Hampshire.
	That's at porcfest.com.
	We have FreedomFest, July 11th through the 14th in Las Vegas.
	FreedomFest.com, hopefully you will not... Ah!
	The Stays in Vegas joke.
	Cue.
	Capitalism Morality 2012 on July 28th in Vancouver, British Columbia.
	That is a J-A-N-T... I'm not going to try to spell it out or say it.
	I'm going to say J-A-Y-A-N-T-B-H-A-N-D-A-R-I.com seminar slash seminar 2012.
	Libertopia, October 11th through the 14th in San Diego, libertopia.org.
	Second annual Liberty Clues on the 15th through the 19th in October, leaving from San Diego, fdrurl.com slash cruise2012.
	And the Toronto Liberty Festival, Toronto, Ontario, November 3rd, 2012.
	That doesn't have a website, but those are the lists.
	Upcoming speaking engagements.
	All right, and I just wanted to add that there are two more that have come in.
	The first is, what's today, Monday?
	No, Sunday.
	So Tuesday, count-em, Tuesday, I'm going to be doing a Liberty Chat, which you can go to libertychat.com.
	It's a Q&A.
	It will be also broadcasted through JustinTV.
	And last but not least, Actually, I'm doing an interview this week with somebody from Iceland, so I will be enjoying that.
	And last but not least, I will be speaking in Dallas, Texas, at the official state convention for the Libertarian Party.
	That's in June.
	I'm sorry, I don't actually have the... Jay James, can I just ask you to check that?
	I don't have the date in my email.
	But that's when that will be occurring.
	And I think that's it.
	That's it for now.
	I'm going to have a surprise TV appearance coming up as well, which I will talk about in a little bit.
	And it will not be gate crashing the finals of Canadian Idol, because apparently security had been given my photo.
	I just can't get through them.
	So, yeah, that's it for the news and the weather and freedomainradio.com forward slash donate, fdrurl.com forward slash donate or freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.aspx.
	I can't even remember what I was going to ask now.
	Something about donations.
	Yes, if you would like to come and donate, that would be mostly appreciated.
	And now, let's get to the brains of the outfit, also known as the rotating orbs of the Borg brain called the Collective Listener Genius.
	Spit at me, and I will attempt to get the news and the weather.
	Okay.
	So I can talk now?
	Yes.
	If you dare.
	As you can.
	So, you were talking about the NASA thing.
	How do you propose that we get off this course that we keep ...buying into these government-run programs and all these types of things like that nature.
	Well, I think the reality is to point out that nobody wants the space program.
	Because if they wanted it, the government wouldn't need to force it on people.
	It wouldn't need to force it to be.
	You see, remember, politicians and other kinds of hysterical, manipulative, brain-dead leaders are very into vanity projects.
	Right?
	Look at the Robert C. Byrd everything in the deep south.
	The Robert C. Byrd displayed of grass right there by your foot.
	The one next to the Robert C. Byrd dandelion.
	They love to name things after themselves.
	Empty personalities need to make a big impression on the world, says the guy who's got 40 million podcast downloads.
	That's different!
	In ways that I will come back to you as soon as I can figure them out.
	But they love vanity projects.
	And so, you know, we're going to get to the moon, not because it's easy, because it is hard.
	And you know, that's what people remember JFK.
	JFK sent a man to the moon.
	And for a guy with back problems, that's really quite impressive.
	It's nonsense.
	Just point out, look, I mean, if it's worth anything, it's voluntary.
	I mean, we all understand that a man who forces a woman to marry him does not have her free expression of love and is not Generating a quality marriage, but rather institutionalizing rape.
	The hero of John Fowles, the collector who chloroforms a woman and throws her in the back of his van, is not gently wooing her in seductive ways, but rather simply befogging her brain with chemicals and having her wake up in a crypt in his house.
	So, you know, the Cask of Amontillado is not the description of the opening of a hotel, but rather the walling up of a man in a basement because you don't want to be there.
	So wherever there's a gun, whoever's there Doesn't want to be there.
	And so if it's a government program, it is a reflection of what the majority specifically does not want.
	iPhones are a reflection of what the population wants.
	Sadly, keeping up with the Kardashians is a reflection.
	I've watched two episodes.
	I actually do find it eerily and deeply and disturbingly fascinating.
	But that is a reflection of what people want.
	And of course, what people want is very much warped by religiosity and state propaganda and so on.
	But just point out to people, why don't they set up a donation site for the space shuttle?
	Well, they wouldn't get enough money.
	Okay.
	So then it's not a reflection of what people want.
	It's really that simple.
	If you love something, set it free.
	If it comes back to you, it is yours.
	If it doesn't, hire a high-priced lobbyist to get Congress to net it, tranquilize it, and drag it back to your dungeon of vanity.
	Does that help at all?
	Yeah, I totally agree.
	I was thinking the same things, really.
	Because, I mean, if it's not what the population wants, then obviously it won't provide enough money.
	Same type of principle.
	I also wanted to say that I have bought those five books.
	That's awesome.
	I've read them all.
	Thanks.
	So, I'm in government schooling right now.
	I'm 17.
	I'm a junior in high school.
	And I'm just really confused on where my life is heading because I don't want to buy into all these state-run things like school to the next level.
	I mean, I like learning and I like all these things, but there's such a large economic incentive to stay into school.
	Oh, was I not taught?
	Oh, to stay into school, there's a large economic incentive.
	So what do you propose that I should do?
	Like, I don't know what to do.
	I want to learn and I want to do all these great things, but I don't know what to say.
	The first thing I would do is learn Mandarin to be able to converse with your national debt porpoise dungeon new overlords of the future as you toil the rice fields in a thong.
	No, look, in all seriousness, I know what you mean.
	So you have a great desire for learning, which is quite the opposite of government school, but at the same time you have a desire for food and shelter, which means get some pieces of paper that open doors for you economically, which is kind of the opposite of learning in some ways.
	Is that your dilemma?
	Yes.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, I can tell you what I did and I don't have really regrets about it at And so maybe that will be of help to you.
	I got the pieces of paper and I found them very helpful.
	You know it's it's just sad it's sad but true that if you want you know the only way to really enjoy business is to I mean unless you really enjoy something specific and technical is to get into some sort of management position where you have some capacity to set direction, talk outside the company, You know, responsibility without authority is a nightmare and there are so many bad managers out there that it's worth trying to get a management position.
	To do that, you generally need higher education, unless you're going to be a complete entrepreneur.
	I mean, nobody's going to say to Steve Jobs, we don't want you because, well, you're dead.
	But before he was dead, we don't want you because you don't have a degree.
	So if you want to be an entrepreneur, you don't need that so much.
	But if you are going to work in a more traditional employee route up to the business world, a degree is pretty important.
	But you can have fun.
	in uh... in getting a degree you can enjoy it uh... if you're in the states there's a little bit more opening for libertarianism than there was uh... it was certainly twenty years ago up here in canada but i think you can have fun going to school there are to do the country arguments is that There's a lot of opportunity cost economically of going to school.
	You forego hundreds of thousands of dollars of income.
	You can incur tens or more of thousands of dollars of debt.
	So I would definitely look at this.
	A YouTube series somebody posted on the web about the ripoff called higher education.
	So, I'll just mention this briefly because I've talked about this before.
	If you have a very specific thing that you want to get into, like being a doctor, then you have the hoops you have to jump through.
	That's just the way that you have to play the game.
	If you have a great idea for a product, I would just go and do it myself.
	But if you don't exactly know where you want to go, then the problem is that you have to get a generalized arts degree, the economic value of which is open to question, to say the least.
	On the plus side, people who are college educated or greater have a much less, like half or less of the unemployment rate of the general population.
	So that can help.
	There's a lot more to school than just the piece of paper.
	I mean, you do learn some skills, some reading, some writing skills, some debating skills.
	You can join a lot of extracurricular clubs, like I was in the debating club the whole time, which turned out to be quite fortuitous for my bizarre half-career now.
	And, of course, you will make friends and contacts with people who may be of value to you economically throughout the rest of your life.
	So, you know, there's lots of arguments, pro and con, but those would be my ideas about it, if that makes any sense.
	Awesome.
	That makes a lot of sense.
	All right, so I know I want to be like a lawyer.
	I want to study in philosophy and such, but I know I really don't want to send my kids to these government schools, and so I know I won't have time, but is it really worth it to me for pondering like this future that it's gonna be Fifteen years off?
	I mean, uh... So it's your concern that you'll be so busy as a lawyer that you won't have time to homeschool?
	Yeah, but then you would think that your spouse would do it.
	If she was really your spouse, you would have the same ideals and blah blah blah.
	Sure.
	Look, I mean, first of all, I really want to compliment you and admire where you're at in terms of thinking about what you want your life to be in 10 or 15 years.
	That's fantastic.
	I mean, congratulations.
	You're way ahead of the game as far as that goes and I really just wanted to admire and applaud you for that.
	That's wonderful.
	As far as... Look, you can take a couple years off.
	The most important thing is not Homeschooling, the most important thing, is the first three years.
	You know, my daughter's three and a half now.
	I was just saying to Christina the other day, I mean, we're kind of done.
	You know, the rest of it is just tending a little bit.
	But, you know, her personality is pretty much set in stone.
	And if I wanted to change it now, which I don't, it's delightful.
	But even if I wanted to change it now, I couldn't.
	Because that's how she is.
	So it's the first couple years.
	If you can both stay home, fantastic.
	If you're a lawyer, then you will have that luxury.
	If you Yeah, I mean, lawyers can make some decent money, although I've heard some reports from people sending me emails about that they're lawyers and can't find jobs, so you might want to check that out.
	But, you know, lawyers can earn some pretty decent coin, so just take a couple years off.
	And, you know, you've got to move into a smaller place for that.
	Kids don't care whether you're in a tent or a mansion, as long as they have their parents there.
	And it certainly wouldn't hurt to say to a potential spouse that you have some significant reservations about government schooling.
	The other thing, of course, is you can look into the Sudbury School, there's the Lancashire School, there is other kinds of Montessori education that's more child-centric that may be closer to your
	Ideals for education that don't require to like even necessarily one stay at home parent for you know eight hours a day so There's lots of options that you have if you have a spouse that is on the same page as you Philosophically in other words that is philosophical Then I would say that there's almost nothing you can't do together.
	I If you don't have, if you're not on the same page, there's almost nothing you can do together except I think head for Splitsville at some point, but if you have somebody in your life, whether it's a friend, a business partner, a girlfriend, a wife, if you have the same methodology, not the same conclusions, the important thing is not public school is bad, but what is the methodology we have about making decisions about what is best for our children.
	Well, what we do is we look at the data.
	Because homeschooling is, you know, for people who are skeptical of state education, it's not just like, well, I don't want the man programming my kids.
	I mean, there's that aspect to it, but homeschoolers statistically just do way better than kids in government education.
	Way better.
	And so if I want quality education for my children, then private school or homeschooling or unschooling, and you might want to check out Unpluggedmom.com, M-O-M, for Lorette's information about that.
	But, you know, I want my kid to get a great education.
	Philosophy, all it is is a blank slate.
	All it is is a blank slate.
	I'm going to come into this without programming, without prejudices, without any prior conclusions.
	I'm not going to jump to conclusions.
	I'm going to crawl across the broken, bloody, smoking glass of philosophical methodology.
	And if you are, you know, any parent who's out there and you're interested in a quality education for your children, I invite you, as an empiricist and a rationalist, I invite you to look at the data.
	And if you look at the data, it will be very clear that a quality education, the last place you want to send your kid is a government school.
	And that's true even in good neighborhoods.
	In bad neighborhoods, of course, you're basically just sending them to To prison without solitary, which, you know, if I'm in prison, I really want to be in solitary, but that's not the case in school.
	You don't get solitary in school.
	You get murder ball and punched in the arm in the hallways and wedgies and all that kind of stuff.
	And so, yeah, just look at the data.
	So it doesn't, you know, if you meet someone...
	And you're like, we've got to homeschool our kids.
	That's not a very inviting place to talk to them from.
	But if you say, you know, the data that I've looked at, I mean, I think there's good reasons behind it, but the data that I've looked at says the government schools are the worst place to get your kids educated.
	And that's true.
	Statistically and empirically.
	And so if they have the methodology called, we look at the data and we make decisions without prejudice, you're always going to end up in the same place.
	And it's an important thing.
	It doesn't matter if the person's an anarchist or an atheist or a homeschooler.
	These things don't matter.
	What matters is the methodology.
	But the methodology, you're both driving in the same lane in the same direction.
	Makes sense.
	I have another question.
	A couple more actually.
	So, recently my family has said I've been mean lately.
	the same conclusions.
	And so as long as you've got reason, it doesn't matter how divergent your conclusions are at the beginning, because they will always draw closer and closer together.
	So that would be my suggestion.
	Makes sense.
	I have another question, a couple more actually.
	But so recently, my family has said I've been mean lately.
	Like, I've been mean as in like, I've been hurting them or something.
	But I really all I'm saying is words.
	And I'm like, contradicting things that they take for granted, like, religion or culture or something government.
	And this whole idea of like, religion and politics are not allowed at the dinner table.
	Like, it really shows me why that's a dictum in our in our society, because people just get so enraged when Right.
	I mention things of the nature of libertarianism or anything like that.
	Right.
	So should I just keep these things to myself?
	I mean, what do I talk about?
	Because everything else seems like a little not worth it.
	I don't know.
	Right.
	Well, if you have relationships with people who take offense at rational arguments, then my suggestion would be to have rational conversations with rational people and not to try to have rational conversations with people who respond to reason with offense.
	I mean, I'm hurt is not a valid argument.
	it It's not even an invalid argument.
	It's not anything.
	It's just a statement.
	It's a non sequitur.
	I mean, to take a silly example, if I go to the dentist and the dentist says, you need a root canal.
	And I say, it really hurts me that you would say that.
	What's my dentist going to say?
	I'm sorry that you're hurt, but can we still talk about the root canal?
	I'm trying to be a good dentist here.
	I'm really sorry that you don't want to talk about me being hurt.
	I'm really hurt that you don't want to talk about how sorry you are that I'm hurt when I told you that I was hurt and you weren't talking to me about the root canal because it really hurt me emotionally.
	And it's like, uh, drill yes or no?
	Are we going to drill yes or no?
	That's, you know, kind of, I feel now that you're ignoring my hurt about the hurt that you've got when you're talking to me about that.
	You know, you can't have those conversations.
	If somebody believes that being hurt and upset is a valid response to a philosophical argument, then I don't think you can have those discussions.
	That doesn't mean that you can't have a relationship with those people.
	I mean, there may be other things that you can talk about that's fun that doesn't upset them.
	But, you know, when people talk about no religion and no politics at the dinner table, what they're basically saying is no atheism and no anarchism at the dinner table.
	You can talk religion all you want.
	Sit down with a bunch of Christians and talk about how great Jesus is.
	I'm sure they have no problem with religion at the dinner table.
	What they mean is no reason at the dinner table, because reason leads people to places that are emotionally uncomfortable, and we've all been there.
	Yeah, and so, yeah, no philosophy at the dinner table is what people mean.
	And so, I would not, I mean, you can do whatever you want, and obviously I can't, nobody can tell you how to run your relationships, but if people are not speaking the language called reason, then there's no point speaking to them in that language.
	I mean, any more than if you were over at some Hungarian family's dinner, and, because you were hungry, see, Anyway, I'll type that one out in case anyone didn't get that.
	But if you were at some Hungarian family's dinner and they didn't speak English and you didn't speak Hungarian and you just kept speaking in English and got frustrated and yelled louder and louder, that would obviously be irrational.
	And attempting to have rational conversations with people who are not rational is not rational.
	You know, sorry, but... So, you can talk about other topics, you can... I mean, you can certainly ask them Why it's upsetting for them and see if they're willing to talk about their feelings, which I think is a very useful thing to do.
	If you find that somebody's emotionality, dare I say hysteria, is blocking the free flow of communication, then you talk about that.
	It's like if you're driving down the road and there's a big ass log in front of you What do you do?
	You get out, you try and move the log so you can keep driving and so you can talk to them about why is this upsetting to you or what was it that I said that was so upsetting and why do you think it's upsetting and you can talk about that but if people don't want to do that then you know you can't make people want to be rational.
	You can't make people want to understand things that they emotionally aren't ready to or aren't willing to or just are set against processing.
	So I would just, you know, you can ask a little bit about their feelings, but if that's a dead end, then yeah, just talk about other things.
	And you can, I mean, the best I can suggest is you, it's not how I view it, but you can philosophy, you can view philosophy like stamp collecting, you know, some people just aren't interested in stamp collecting, so don't bore them.
	That's the only thing I can suggest if that helps.
	Yeah.
	I just don't know what else to talk about now.
	Yeah, but you can also ask what they want to talk about and then ask why they want to talk about it.
	That could be interesting.
	Trying to get a sense of what they want to do and why, that can be interesting.
	It's more evidence, more empiricism that I think is always valuable.
	Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense.
	But I'm with you about small talk.
	Sorry, I just wanted to mention, I'm with you about small talk.
	I can do a little bit.
	I can do a small amount of small talk.
	But for me, holding back philosophy is like holding back a morning BM after a particularly spicy Indian meal with laxatives.
	You know, I can do it.
	And you can see when I'm holding back philosophy because I'm Walking down the hallway fast like a cowboy clutching my ass.
	That actually really speaks to me because... I don't know if you can ask where you're calling from but I do notice a slightly porcelain echo.
	Have you ever muted your Skype when you're flushing?
	I need to know that right now.
	No, I'm outside in a balcony.
	I'm just, I'm waiting for the first Sunday call from a bubble bath.
	And, oh!
	Mr. Ducky has a question!
	Sorry, go on.
	Now I'm lost, give me a second.
	Victory!
	You're welcome, welcome to my debating techniques.
	Look at this.
	Darn, I cannot think of my question.
	It's all on the spot.
	No problem, we'll go to another caller.
	You can come back when you're ready.
	No worry about that.
	James, do we have somebody else?
	It seems fair.
	Yeah, no problem.
	Yeah, we do.
	We have next Fraser up on the line.
	Alright.
	Hi Steph, how are you today?
	I'm well, how are you?
	I'm good, thank you.
	Basically, I want to ask you about the value of having multiple friends.
	The reason why I ask this is because I've had a very isolating and lonely life for almost the first 17 years of my life, and I'm 18 now.
	And I've met the best friend and, well, my only friend, which is my girlfriend.
	We have a very fulfilling relationship.
	We discuss everything together and we haven't really argued.
	Everything has been discussed through reason and evidence and we've learnt a lot from each other and I think this is the first time we've actually had a relationship.
	And I feel that Because I've been lonely for such a long time, now that I have a friend, it's sort of like a starving person eating a nutritious meal for the first time.
	And I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to pursue other friends.
	You mean other than your girlfriend?
	Have you had any experience?
	Yeah.
	Because I also have an issue with connecting to people, which is due to my autism and social anxieties from my childhood, the parent-child relationship.
	Well, first of all, I want to congratulate you on your relationship with your girlfriend.
	I mean, that sounds perfectly delightful.
	And so, good for you, good for her.
	Yay.
	Fantastic.
	I don't think you should pursue friends.
	I don't think that's wise because what that does is it puts the onus of the relationship onto you.
	The way that I view building a relationship is that, you know, if you're going to build a bridge across a river, You can build the whole thing yourself when you're across the river and you've got complete control, but that's not possible.
	The other side of the river is the other person.
	You have to be building a bridge to meet in the middle.
	You have to be building a bridge to meet in the middle.
	If you're just out there building a bridge, I guess you can get over there, but there may be nobody there.
	There may be nothing there.
	And so I take a step towards people.
	If they take a step towards me, I can take another step towards them.
	It's a little bit of a dance, but I, because if you were like, I have to go and get a friend, I got to see, Oh, I really like this person.
	I'm going to call them.
	I'm going to, then you are not, I think as open to the evidence of how they're experiencing you and whether they like you.
	Um, I go with that old, it's an old Randian thing, whereas my estimation of someone goes up if they like me.
	I mean it just has to because I like me and I think there are good reasons to like me and so if somebody likes me I'm like oh okay so you have more quality than I thought that's great I am now going to move into your lower pant leg and follow you around until we become friends.
	So yeah I would say be curious about the degree to which people are positively responding to whatever it is that you're saying and doing Because you want to give them room to be attracted to you as a friend as well.
	And I think it bespeaks confidence if you're waiting for reciprocity.
	It only betrays neediness if you're in pursuit.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yes, that makes perfect sense.
	You know you can see people as a learning tool or you can see people as Like a lifeguard jacket, but you're in the sea and you're desperately clinging on to and this is something I've also realized in our relationship as I said we have a very open discussion with one another and I
	At first, we had a kind of dysfunctional relationship where we were both, like, sort of feeding into each other's issues, but because we both had open minds, we got over this, more or less.
	And now I'm just interested to see if there's any other meals out there, if you get what I'm saying.
	Like, friends to represent different parts of nutrition, which would make me a better person.
	As I said, I have quite an isolating life and it's... Right, and you understand that it's not fair or rational to expect people to make up for the deficiencies that you had as a child?
	Yes, I understand.
	If my parents didn't feed me enough meat, I don't get to spear the steak on someone else's plate at a restaurant, right?
	It's not their job to To fulfill the deficiencies that my parents or my upbringing left me with.
	That's using other people to selfishly fill a hole within yourself, which I would guess is perhaps what happened with your parents.
	So you don't want to be reproducing that kind of behavior.
	If you ask people to
	Fulfill what was missing in your childhood then you just kind of using them and I think that people of quality will sense that and they may talk to you about it if you have a relationship that is that way or they may just recoil a little bit and say because they'll sense that deep hunger and that also sense that you know pain needs to be dealt with it needs to be expressed it needs to be brought to light it can't be masked by other people right so all the things that people do
	in an attempt to avoid the pain of childhood or upbringing whatever happened.
	Everything that people do in order to attempt to avoid that ends up reproducing and escalating it.
	I mean to me that's what addiction means.
	Addiction is temporary satisfaction at the expense of long-term symptoms.
	Right?
	So if you eat because you're depressed you're gonna end up more depressed.
	If you have sex Because you don't like yourself, you're going to end up liking yourself even less.
	Philosophy of course is not about symptoms, it's about causes.
	And so if you had a lonely life, for which I sympathize, I empathize, and I think I understand, I think I do.
	But if you had a very lonely life, then you need to deal with the pain of that loneliness, but you cannot expect other people to make that less for you.
	That won't work And I guarantee you that it will only make you feel lonelier.
	Which will then, if you have a thing called, well I'll get friends to feel less lonely, the friends that you get, the friends that you will be able to get with that paradigm will not be people who can cure your loneliness.
	Because they will be people who are susceptible to being drawn into the black hole of unfulfilled and unprocessed childhood needs.
	Those kinds of people will not have enough of a presence, enough of a self, enough authenticity to genuinely connect with you.
	And so you will be lonely in a crowd, and you will feel that you will need more and more people, and you will feel less and less satisfied, and you will feel caught forever in this childhood web of solitude and distance.
	And so, you know, deal with these issues with yourself, with your girlfriend.
	I always recommend with a therapist, with journaling, to really deal with the loneliness.
	And it's not just loneliness, it's a big abstract thing.
	I was lonely as a kid.
	But, what that means is that there's a whole bunch of social skills that you didn't develop, right?
	I mean, if you say, I was lonely as a kid because I was raised by wolves, what you're saying is, I never learned English because wolves don't speak English.
	And so, there's a whole load of skills and all of that that you need to learn and the loneliness that needs to be processed.
	And then when you've got closure on that, you will be able to enter into social relationships with potential friends without it being a need, without it being addictive, without it being a cover-up, and with the social skills that you have learned through processing with prior loneliness that are going to make that transition much easier.
	Sorry, sorry for a big long lecture.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yes, it makes perfect sense.
	You're basically saying that instead of Instead of, like, pursuing friends, I should sort my own problems out completely, and then just, like, let the bait see if it can grab any fish, if you get what I'm saying.
	I agree with you, except I wouldn't put the word completely in there.
	Sorry, I agree with you agreeing with me.
	But I just say, you said, sort my own issues out completely.
	I don't think that's possible.
	Because if you break a bone, then you can get that bone set, get a cast on it, do physio, and you can end up like your arm was never broken, right?
	But that's not the way it is with wounds to the soul, wounds to the personality, because in the very act of healing prior wounds, you become a different person than if you'd never have those wounds to begin with.
	It's like if you learn a foreign language, And then you forget it.
	You still have a different brain because you learned that foreign language.
	You can never go back to someone who'd never learned that foreign language.
	And that's a minor example relative to... So if you have trauma that's given you, significant trauma or loneliness as a kid, that's given you a kind of personality.
	And then if you, and I say nobly and courageously and honestly, then work through those issues, learn better ways of dealing with things, come to moral and philosophical and emotional conclusions about what happened.
	you have a depth of self-knowledge that you never would have had without that trauma or it's unlikely and so there is no completely because you can like even in the very process of working through issues changes who you are into someone that you never would have been without the trauma so there's no such thing I think is as completely ending that like you can just set a bone back and it's it's fine and you go play squash again like you were never injured I don't think it, at least in my experience and I think sort of empirically it doesn't
	Doesn't work that way.
	Trauma changes the brain.
	Now we can see that in MRI scans.
	Trauma, significant childhood trauma, changes the brain.
	And the hot-blooded pursuit of self-knowledge changes the brain even further, but it doesn't change it back into a pre-traumatized brain, because that's not possible.
	It changes it into something else entirely.
	And so I just think that idea of having dealt with my issues completely, I think is not, you know, there's certainly a time when it's enough, but it's like saying, when I'm perfectly healthy, well, Certainly, maybe I've got the prejudice of being over 40.
	You never feel perfectly healthy.
	There's always some damn thing that's going on.
	I just wouldn't have that absolute standard.
	You'll know when the time is right and so on.
	It's when you're just curious about whether the other person likes you.
	You're curious about whether the other person likes you, but you're not necessarily looking way ahead about whether this is going to be a lifelong friendship.
	I hope that helps a little.
	Alright, thank you.
	May I ask another question?
	It's going to be shorter, I would imagine.
	Sure.
	Recently I have been in a competitive field.
	I've been playing chess at a semi-professional level.
	And recently I've signed a contract with various sponsors.
	And I was wondering, because I have an issue with marketing and advertising, I think it's quite manipulative into depressed people, how goods that are not necessary are marketed towards people that are quite depressed and have quite an addictive personality.
	And I was wondering how I can sort of fulfill my dream of being a professional chess player But also avoid the sponsorship and the marketing side of it.
	It seems to go hand in hand and it's sort of like a philosophical dilemma for me and I was wondering what your take was on it.
	Sorry, just remind me, I may have missed that part, was it issues with specific advertising content or was it the general principle of advertising or marketing as a whole?
	It's not necessarily to do with the specific products, but just the thought of me being a billboard for things that I don't necessarily agree with.
	The methods that advertisers use, I don't really agree with.
	But I also want to fulfill my dream of being a professional player.
	So it's It's kind of an issue for me and I was wondering how I should go about this.
	That's a very important question and again I really want to compliment you on your sensitivity and wisdom in asking that question.
	I mean over the years I've had offers for advertising, mostly very densely texted billboards on my forehead which has the space for that.
	But I really want to compliment you on that and thinking sort of that far ahead.
	So I have had offers of advertising and I have not accepted them.
	And it's not because I have any problem with advertising.
	I think that advertising is a very useful and valuable service to have.
	So, again, I think it's great, but I shared similar concerns, I think, that you have, which is, what if the advertiser is also advertising something or, you know, even if what they advertise on my show is fine, what if they're doing something else that is not fine and that kind of stuff?
	And I could not find a good answer for that, which is why I stayed with the donation model.
	I mean, plus also, it's different with Chess, with sponsors, but I didn't want Sunday shows to be interrupted.
	eight times during some pretty intense conversations you know about I have a pill that turns your toilet water into champagne or something and of course if somebody does have that pill they can't advertise I just want to mention that but so I I really do I do accept and respect your sensitivity in this issue you can of course
	Go for sponsors and advertising and try to get advertisers whose message you approve of.
	I mean, there are people who have integrity in business.
	There are people who are honest with their customers.
	There are people who do a good job and provide valuable goods and services to people.
	So those people should not be denied the opportunity to sponsor you.
	So I think if you are careful about the kind of advertising that you're looking for or will accept, I think it can be very helpful.
	But, you know, I think it's a very important thing.
	Because it can take, of course, a lot of the pleasure out of what you're doing if you feel that you're associated with something less than savory.
	Yes, absolutely.
	I feel very strongly about things that most people just overlook and they just accept.
	It is a big issue for me because I don't want to promote something that I wouldn't want myself, if you get what I'm saying.
	The simple principle is don't advertise a product that you have not tried and are satisfied with and are happy about.
	I mean, I've put pitches in for stuff that I really like.
	I mean, PowerDirector 10 is a fantastic editing software for videos.
	It's cheap.
	It's great.
	The Pamela recording software that I use is occasionally a little unstable, but has got fantastic recording quality.
	Skype is free and great.
	And so there's, you know, lots of great stuff that I use.
	I don't take any money for these recommendations.
	These are just products that I really like.
	Given how much time I spend trying to find the right product, if I could save other people from that quagmire, I think that's fantastic.
	So, I have no problem promoting stuff and promoting shows that I think are great, like, you know, Brett VanNutt's School Sucks and Free Talk Live and all this kind of stuff.
	But, so yeah, if you're happy and satisfied with the products, then allowing the advertising, I think, is a helpful service to people.
	So, you could have that principle that just says, Even if it sounds outlandish, I'm going to try it.
	If the advertiser is a quality business person, then he or she is going to respect you for that.
	You're going to say, look, I need to try the product and see if I like it.
	Then I'll be happy to enter into a partnership to promote the product if I like it.
	I would say just have that.
	If you can try it out, fantastic.
	Then you can go, I think, with a good clean conscience about that.
	All right.
	Awesome.
	Thanks, Steph.
	You're welcome.
	And let's never play chess together.
	I just wanted to really...
	I had a friend who was a real keen chess player.
	And I'm keen, but undisciplined and random.
	And so I played chess for a long time, and then he was a very good chess player, and I beat him.
	And since then, I've never played again. - Because why would I?
	Because that's silly petty vanity that I'm just not willing to let go of yet so I'm afraid I can't I can't break my last game 100% unbroken winning streak by ever playing chess with you, but I certainly do respect your abilities and wish you the very best in your chess career.
	Thank you very much.
	Actually I could, maybe I would when you discuss my play.
	There's some random people down there, I don't know what the hell it is that I'm doing.
	I'm going to put the queen on top of the pawn sideways.
	It's called monkey gets fruit.
	I win!
	Sorry, that state is debating.
	Anyway, thanks so much and let's move on to the next caller.
	All right, next up we have Juan.
	Hello, hello.
	Surprise!
	You're on.
	Hi!
	Yeah, sorry, I thought it was somebody else before me.
	Yeah, how are you Steph?
	I'm fine, how are you doing?
	I'm good.
	I'm a little anxious about this topic that I want to bring up.
	You're aware of it and I'm not sure... Would you like to talk about it privately?
	It doesn't have to be something you feel uncomfortable about.
	Well, it's not necessarily a personal matter.
	Not specifically.
	It's more sort of a... I guess we could call it a community issue.
	I'll just give you a vague summary of what it is.
	You've been hearing about this, some of these premises, and I guess documentaries and ideas coming out saying that genes overshadow parenting or environment, right?
	I mean, if you analyze that stuff philosophically, it makes no sense, and the evidence is against it and all this kind of stuff.
	But what's interesting to me is that
	Some of the people proclaiming this stuff, they're kind of... I'm not sure how to say this... Sorry, just while you get your thoughts together, if I understand the context correctly, there is a certain amount of information that's out there, I haven't produced it in any great detail, which basically says that
	The personality of the child is, and it tends to go one of two ways, maybe it goes both, but it's either genetically based or it's peer based, but the parents have very little influence on how the child turns out.
	That's the general context that you're coming from?
	Yes, that's right.
	That's right.
	Okay.
	And I mean, I'm not particularly concerned with the arguments themselves.
	I feel fairly certain and comfortable with stuff like the moment of the brain and my personal experience with self-knowledge and exploring this kind of stuff.
	But the interesting thing that happened is that some of the people that are proclaiming this stuff, they were people that were very close to the FDR community in Facebook, right?
	Sorry, what does very close mean?
	I'm not sure what you mean when you say very close to the FDR community.
	Right, sorry.
	Well, I mean in Facebook, like the community, the freedom and radio community as I see it, right?
	Some of the people that I admire, that I've met or gotten in contact with through FDR and like the forums and stuff like that.
	And just friends that I have, you know, these common values with on Facebook, right?
	That's what I call sort of the community.
	That's what I experience as some of the FDR community.
	Right, okay.
	Some of these people that have gone through FDR and have sort of bounced out are the ones that are starting to proclaim these beliefs or talk about these genes of our environment stuff.
	And they're also sort of... See, I'm not sure if I want to go on right now on the Sunday show.
	Well, let me talk about it for a bit.
	Let me talk about my thoughts about it.
	Let me talk about my thoughts about it.
	And see, maybe this will be of use to you, or maybe it won't.
	Sure, sounds good.
	You know, we just, we go to where the facts are.
	Right, Juan?
	We just, we go to where the facts are.
	If the, this is for those who don't know, this is information that was gleaned from over 18,000 participants in Kaiser Permanente's health study, where early childhood experiences were correlated with later emotional, psychological, and health and relational disorders.
	And so there was a questionnaire, Adverse Childhood Experiences they were called, and the Statistics that came out were, I mean, to me, irrefutable.
	I mean, 18,000 is unbelievably large for a study in psychology.
	I mean, you read some of these psychological studies and it's like, we had 14 people and two of them, you know, it's tiny.
	And of course, the smaller the study size, the larger chance there is for randomized outliers, so to speak.
	So this is over 18,000.
	This study has been going on many, many decades and the results are about as incontrovertible as things can get.
	It doesn't mean that maybe there was some massive fluke that could be overturned in some other way, but it's about as incontrovertible as things can get, which is that there is a graded proportional relationship between adverse childhood experiences and adult problems.
	Problems ranging from ischemic heart disease, to cancer, to smoking, to promiscuity, to drug addiction, to alcoholism, to poor finances, to inconsistent job performance and randomized resumes.
	You name it.
	In terms of dysfunction, it is incredibly correlated to adverse childhood experiences.
	Now, the argument against it being the result of child abuse is to say, well, it's genetic.
	Right?
	So people say, Okay, so people from ADHD come from bad households, but that doesn't mean that the bad household produced the ADHD.
	What that probably means, say some people, is that ADHD is genetic and so the bad parents are themselves victims of ADHD and this resulted in their bad parenting, but it's genetic, being passed down.
	And that faces the significant and I would say overwhelming challenge that argument and it's a clever argument don't get me wrong I don't think it's an argument people would empirically come to but it's a clever defensive argument but the problem is that truly genetic diseases Huntington's disease is not cured by talk therapy
	Whereas emotional dysfunctions can be significantly remediated, cured, or you can even end up better than you were before through talk therapy.
	And so that's, you know, the fact is that the adverse childhood experiences, the child abuse is related.
	And my understanding is that Adopted children who are abused end up with about the same negative results and of course they share no genetic information, direct information, with their parents or their adopted parents, their step-parents and so the genetic argument seems to me very weak.
	Now I do believe, this is just amateur hour as usual, but I do believe that there are genetic susceptibilities to environmental factors So there are people who have, let's just say, take the, there's real examples of this in the literature, boys who have a particular gene for aggression, if they are subjected to physical abuse they tend to almost overwhelmingly become criminals.
	But so what?
	I mean I don't see what that, that doesn't mean that the behavior is caused by the genetics, it means that people have a susceptibility to it.
	So some people have a susceptibility to lung cancer.
	And, you know, some people can smoke and they don't get lung cancer, but the majority of people who smoke do have lung cancer and some people don't have to smoke very much to get lung cancer.
	That doesn't mean that the smoking didn't cause the lung cancer.
	It just means that there's a genetic susceptibility to that.
	Some people, osteoporosis advances more quickly in some people than it does in others.
	But if you sit on your ass all day and never do any resistance exercises, then osteoporosis is going to advance.
	Some people faster than some people slower.
	But the cause is still the inactivity.
	The acceleration may be genetic, but the cause is still the inactivity.
	And of course, parents who abuse their children do not know, because nobody knows, how the environment is going to affect the child.
	And if some of it is psychological and some of it is genetic, you still don't know ahead of time.
	Just like the smoker doesn't know if he's going to get lung cancer or not.
	And the woman who's overweight doesn't know if she's going to get breast cancer as a result of that, or how long diabetes is going to take to come, or if it's going to come.
	We don't know these things, because it's all so complicated, and there's still so much that's unknown.
	And even if it was all known, we probably still wouldn't be able to predict the effects of environmental factors on anyone's particular biology.
	Because the genetics paradigm is very clear, that genes are not something we're fixed with at birth.
	When somebody says, it's genetic, I think most people make the mistake, if they don't know much about the subject, somebody says, oh, it's genetic.
	They probably mean that you were born that way.
	But that's not what genetics means.
	What genetics means is there's stuff we're born with that's actualized, and there's stuff that we're born with that is potential.
	In other words, there are genes that are turned on or turned off through exposure to particular environmental factors.
	So there's an argument that homosexuality is the result of particular stresses that occur during a certain time in pregnancy and then it becomes permanent.
	And so there are genes that are activated and some genes that are permanently activated as a result of exposure to the environment.
	So if people are saying that personality is genetic Then you can ask them, do you mean genetic like inherent?
	Or do you mean genetic like exposed to the, like triggered through the environment?
	And if they don't know the difference, then they just don't know what they're talking about.
	And this is obviously just a conclusion in search of data.
	This is just ex post facto reasoning, which itself is significantly correlated with child abuse.
	People who've gone through a lot of child abuse end up With the conclusions they end up with ex post facto reasoning.
	I emotionally need this conclusion so I'm going to walk backwards to find the data that supports it.
	They are not blank slate people.
	They are people who are distorting facts to fit their own disturbed emotional needs and requirements.
	So, I'm perfectly fine with aspects of the personality being genetic.
	I mean of course, of course there are aspects of the personality that are genetic.
	And there are two kinds of genetics.
	Again, this is very broad and please, you know, if anyone out there knows more than I do, which is probably very many people, please correct me on this, but that's stuff that's inbuilt.
	You know, the fact that I have a nose is genetic.
	It was not the result of exposure to any particular thing in the womb or any particular environment, right?
	I didn't get a nose because my mom yelled at me.
	I mean, that's just, that's genetic.
	But there are genes that have been turned on and genes that have been turned off As a result of my post-conception, pre-birth, post-birth environment.
	Yeah, gender, for instance.
	So, something as permanent as gender is the result of environmental factors.
	And so, these... When people say it's genetic, what they're trying to say is, I'm not responsible for how my child turned out.
	Now, who on earth would be in hot pursuit of not being responsible for how their child turned out?
	Would it be people whose children turned out well?
	Would they be the ones seeking to absolve themselves of responsibility for how their children turned out?
	No.
	That would not be that which is driving.
	It doesn't mean it's true or false.
	We're just looking at the motivation of the people who would be either pursuing this line of study or who would be very interested in reading and devouring this kind of information.
	Well, no.
	It's a kind of relief.
	Right?
	There's a market out there for providing relief for bad people.
	Some of it is religion.
	Your child fell prey to a devil.
	Was seduced by a devil.
	It's not your fault.
	The devil walks and tempts and you did the very best you could as good Christian parents but your child bedded with Beelzebub.
	and has turned out this way.
	The secular humanists have led society astray and corrupted the children.
	Video games have made my child bad.
	ADHD, ODD has made my child bad and they need to be drugged because they have a chemical deficiency.
	Teachers can't teach because children aren't willing to learn.
	Because they just want to play with their cell phones and we have a shallow generation of children who blah blah blah, right?
	There's a huge amount, understand, there's a huge hunger for release from a bad conscience in this world.
	And there are lots of people who will send information down to those people and there are people who will hungrily devour that information because their conscience is plaguing them.
	Please understand, I'm not arguing for the truth or falsehood of these claims.
	I'm simply arguing that this is not the most objective place to start.
	And the other thing that I will say is that in Free Domain Radio, dare I say in philosophy as a whole, truth is a virtue.
	And if you had parents you have issues with, Which is to say, if you had parents, because I think I'm a pretty good parent, but I will have no doubt that Isabella will have issues with me, well she already does have issues with me, which are fair and right and just for her to bring up and in which I am deficient.
	But if you have issues with your parents and you're into philosophy and philosophy says honesty with the issues with your parents is a virtue, how scary, how scary, how scary is that conversation?
	How much do people want to grab whatever they can to avoid that conversation?
	How much do people want to say, oh wow, who I am is genetic?
	Well then I guess I don't really have any complaints to talk about with my parents.
	Oh, thank heavens I don't have to have this chat.
	At least not for now.
	Maybe I'll, you know, look into this some more or whatever.
	But it allows people to postpone things, right?
	It allows people to postpone things which are difficult and frightening.
	I hope that helps put something in context and I hope that has something to do with what it is that is the issue for you.
	Yeah, it definitely helps.
	The reason why I'm actually bringing this up, I mean I think it's an important thing to talk about of course, but I felt particularly threatened by this stuff.
	I'm not sure if it's I could be projecting, you know, I'm a pariah, as we talked, you know... Sorry, Dindrup, you should be threatened by this stuff, because if it's true, if it's true, then it's unjust to blame parents.
	Right?
	Because it's determinism.
	If it's determinism, then morality is an injustice.
	I don't take it personally when it rains on me.
	I may not be happy, but I don't shake my fist at the morally erring clouds, right?
	It's like, oh man, it's a bummer, it's raining.
	That's inconvenient.
	But I'm not pulling a King Lear and screaming at the storm, right?
	And so if who I am is genetic and my parents had almost nothing to do with who I am, then for me to saying I have problems and
	your bad parenting was causal in that is completely unjust it's it's it's crazy it's like I don't know some black kid going to his black parents and saying I hate that you made me black sorry that's just the way genetics work it would be unjust it would be irrational it would be crazy does that make sense?
	yeah it makes sense to me I mean I It seems to have affected me a little bit more than other people, maybe.
	I'm not sure if this is totally true, but that's sort of the sense that I get.
	Like, I've unfriended a bunch of these people that are sort of proclaiming this stuff.
	And what I found interesting about my relationship to this stuff and to this, I guess, these ideas coming up, and to the people that are sharing this, is that I'm at a pretty vulnerable spot right now, as you know.
	I'm sort of between defluent and therapy, right?
	And this stuff, when I first heard of this, the people that were sort of talking about it, they were people that had a lot of credibility with me because they hung around people that I've had great conversations with and that I've seen around the Freedom in Radio boards and podcasts before.
	I sort of took them for their credibility and for their relationships and then this stuff just hit me like a rocket or something and I just felt kind of dizzy and I was obviously anxious and angry and it just seemed so convenient that it sort of...
	That this stuff is coming to my life at a point where I'm so vulnerable, right?
	Well look, so, okay, but look, let's say, let's say, I'm so sorry to interrupt, but I mean I really get your anxiety, but let's concede every point and see what happens philosophically.
	Because it's always been my contention that if an argument is erroneous, you can concede every point and it still doesn't work.
	So let's say that who you are had nothing to do... Let's go to the complete extreme.
	I'm not sure if anybody says this, but let's say that who you are has nothing to do with how you were parented.
	All right?
	Let's say that we accept that a hundred percent.
	That your parents were in no way responsible for who you are, right?
	Any of the difficulties or troubles or traumas or Whatever that you have.
	Are we willing?
	So you get what I'm saying?
	If we accept that, let's see what happens philosophically.
	Are you with me?
	I'm with you.
	So let's pretend that that's completely true.
	Okay.
	Well, if who you are is completely genetic, then your parents should never have called you names.
	Because if, let's say, I don't know what your parents called you, but let's just say they called you lazy.
	Well, lazy is a pejorative, which implies that there's a standard of excellence that you're not achieving.
	But if you are, quote, lazy because of your genetics, then it was unjust and wrong to call you lazy.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, makes sense.
	And so, if... Because again, we always think it's about parent-child.
	Like, the children can't blame the parents because the parents had nothing to do with who they are.
	But if the parents had nothing to do with who they are, then the parents should never, ever have tried to correct the children with reference to a higher standard.
	Because you are who you are.
	Right?
	It would be exactly the same as my mother calling me stupid because I have blue eyes.
	Right?
	Even if we accept that my mother did not cause my blue eyes, my blue eyes are genetic, and she had nothing to do with me being... like, none of her behavior or her style of parenting had anything to do with the color of my eyes, it is still, or especially, it is incredibly unjust and wrong to call me stupid for having blue eyes.
	Even if we accept that my mother had nothing to do with me having blue eyes, she damn well shouldn't call me stupid for having blue eyes.
	So if it is true that the personality of the child is genetic, then the parents should never have particularly used pejoratives in any attempt to correct the child's behavior.
	Because the behavior is genetic.
	And it's like calling a child stupid for having blue eyes.
	In which case, you have problems with your parents if they've treated you badly, and
	their behavior had negative effects on you if the behavior had no negative effects on you and they treated you badly and it was all genetic you still have problems with them that you need to talk about because they treated you wrong and that is logically completely obvious and the only way that it wouldn't be completely obvious is if people were using it as a way to avoid discussing their issues with their parents
	Does that make sense?
	Makes sense to me.
	Michael just... No, no.
	Not does it make sense to you, does it make sense.
	The two are very different.
	I was with you until that last two words.
	Okay.
	Well, someone in the chat just put up a kind of quibble to it, which is that parents don't have any option either because they're, you know, it's genetic for them as well to be abusive, right?
	So... Oh, sorry.
	It's genetic for them.
	to be abusive?
	Well, yeah, that's their personality.
	They're just, you know, calling people names, right?
	I mean, that could be argued, I think, you know?
	Well, then, the question comes back to the basic question of determinism, which is, is somebody writing this article with the intent, let's say somebody's writing an article about how behavior is all genetic, are they writing that article in an attempt to change behavior?
	Yeah, exactly, right?
	It's a self-contradictory statement, yeah.
	Like, yeah, that's where I came to.
	Like, if parents and environment cannot affect the behavior of people long term, right, outside of the direct stimuli, like, you know, move or I'll hit you kind of thing, then there's no way that some guy on Facebook can change our behavior as far as, you know, recent evidence, you know, just with the post, right?
	Like, recent evidence is preventive, right?
	And so if you want to try to argue somebody out of a wrong position, such as that childhood has a great effect, Then it's just pointless, right?
	Well, the other thing too is that if abuse is genetic, then it must have evolved prior to philosophical language.
	Right?
	Philosophical language, the language of virtue, is pretty new.
	Right?
	I mean, apes don't call each other stupid or lazy.
	Yeah, or even abusive.
	So, the language of verbal abuse is very new in the four billion year evolution of life, right?
	Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by the language of abuse.
	Like, do you mean like the actual terminology that says, okay, this... Morality.
	Morality.
	Morality.
	Verbal abuse is fundamentally predicated upon having a higher standard that the child is not reaching.
	If you call a child stupid, then there's a standard of intelligence that the child is not reaching.
	That the child is capable of reaching.
	Does that make sense?
	If I say to, and if my child was Jeremy Lin, the basketball player and I say you're an incredibly short man because there are sequoia trees that are way taller I would be comparing him to a standard but that would be an insane thing to say, right?
	so if I'm calling my child lazy because it must be because there's a standard of work that my child could reach but isn't reaching like I won't I couldn't conceivably call my child lazy because my child only cleaned for 20 hours a day and slept for four hours a day, right?
	Because you gotta sleep, right?
	And so, the verbal abuse in this particular context, you verbally abuse someone by saying that there is a standard of excellence that they can achieve, that they should achieve, which they're not achieving due to a fault in them.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, makes sense.
	Okay, so if people are going to say that abuse is genetic, then they have to explain verbal abuse, which of course is the most prevalent, I think.
	They have to explain verbal abuse in that it is so consistently hooked into standards of excellence or standards of morality.
	You're a bad child because if you really cared about me you would do X.
	You need to be more sensitive to your sister's needs.
	You need to listen to your father more, because it makes him very angry.
	You need to do this.
	The standards of excellence, the standards of good behavior, which the child is deficient in, for that to be genetic, it would have to have arisen prior to conceptual standards of excellence language, which is generally called morality.
	And since morality, these standards of excellence, moral terms, are very new.
	They cannot have been arrived at genetically.
	Does that make sense?
	No, you kind of lost me there.
	But, I mean... Well, genetics take hundreds of thousands of years.
	And there's no moral language that we know of that was hundreds of thousands of years back in human evolution.
	Okay.
	Like there'd be like, you know, might makes right kind of thing, right?
	Like there'd be some sort of alpha male or something and... Well, I'm just... The other discussion could be sort of physical or sexual abuse, but I'm just talking about verbal abuse at the moment.
	Verbal abuse, okay.
	Because if you can prove that verbal abuse cannot possibly be genetic, then you've made a strong case for the other forms of abuse.
	But this is the easiest one, right?
	Because you could say sexual abuse, well, sexual drives have been around since the beginning of the species, the beginning of all species I assume, and...
	So you can't make that case.
	Physical domination occurs prior to language in lots of different species and so on and so physical abuse but verbal abuse in particular moral abuse, calling a child bad, calling a child lazy, calling a child stupid, calling a child inattentive, calling or whatever it is that you've got a standard of excellence that the child is responsible for not meeting, that cannot be genetic because that is a very very recent addition to the human vocabulary, to the human lexicon, to how human beings communicate.
	And there's no way that we invented moral language and then went, hey, the genes went, hey, we should really start to use this for abuse and control of children.
	Because that's, I mean, I don't know, I mean, the first written language was 6,000 years ago.
	The first, and I don't, I mean, I guess there was virtue and vice and good and bad back then, although it tended to be a lot more tribal.
	You look at cave paintings from 15,000 years ago or whatever, and they don't seem to have a lot of moral exposition going on, and so morality, we can say, can't be much more than 10,000 years old.
	That's a very generous estimate.
	It's probably a lot shorter than that.
	Five to 10,000 years, let's say.
	That's not enough for there to be such a widespread phenomenon of verbal abuse of children in the world.
	It's just not enough.
	It's not time enough for that to become a universal phenomenon.
	It's just not enough time for the genetics to spread so perfectly, so universally across the world.
	It's just not enough.
	And so verbal abuse simply cannot be explained with reference to genetics.
	it cannot have genetically involved because there's just not enough of a time frame for it to be this universal.
	All right.
	Yeah, I think I need to listen to this again later on because it's...
	It's a, you know, it's a, you know, I was, I suffered through a lot of verbal abuse itself.
	So this stuff is like kind of foggy for me.
	Right.
	And I think that I was just thinking that psychologically this may be, you know, verbal abuse may be what makes people vulnerable to this kind of ideology.
	Right.
	And why I think it got to me so, sort of hit me so close to home kind of thing.
	Well, no problem.
	It may be worthwhile for you to listen to this again.
	I mean, there are lots of other arguments against it, but just as the ones that popped into my head, and I do want to make sure that we have time for the other callers.
	But it's a great topic to bring up.
	And, of course, if people do have, please email me, of course, host at freedomainradio.com with whatever you have in terms of the material.
	I would love to have somebody on the show who knows a lot about this stuff and can step us through the material because it is very important.
	So I appreciate you bringing this up, and I hope that people will...
	Give us more information about it.
	Awesome.
	And I wanted to suggest maybe having a group chat about it.
	I don't know if people are interested in this kind of stuff, like in talking about this as a more kind of, I don't know, I feel kind of like a resistance to say in a community, right?
	Because, you know, it's like, okay, what do you mean by community, right?
	It's a very important topic.
	Look, if against all reason and evidence it is shown that parents are not responsible, for their child's personality then the first thing of course that we should focus on is getting parents to stop attempting to correct their children we should stop you know we should stop all forms of religious and civic instruction we should stop all forms of psychotropic medication.
	We should stop all forms of attempting to put children in any kind of conformist atmosphere like school, like church.
	We should not have children have any expectation for children's table manners or anything like that.
	We should simply not have any standards that we apply to children because their personalities are genetic.
	And we should never be focusing on the children what the children should be doing as adults.
	We should be focusing entirely upon educating the parents That they simply are yelling at storm clouds and wasting their time.
	So it still doesn't have anything in particular to do with the kids.
	We would still be focusing entirely on the behavior of the parents.
	Okay, great stuff.
	Thanks for your thoughts and maybe we can talk about it more later on.
	You know, the one thing I will say is that I think in a state of peace, I think that there are some genetic aspects to personality.
	I think that there are.
	I mean, to me it's like this.
	You are genetically programmed as to your height, but that's kind of dependent upon your nutrition.
	Right?
	So, if you get twins and they're both well-fed and grow up in peaceful, happy households, I would imagine they're going to be pretty much the same height.
	And whether the parents want a tall kid or a short kid, they're gonna get whatever genes there are.
	So I think, you know, we wouldn't want to conflate abusive and non-abusive situations.
	So, yeah, if you have two twins and they both grow up in healthy environments with good nutrition and exercise and good amounts of sleep and, you know, whatever it is that makes people tall, then they're gonna be about the same height.
	But to say then that parents have no effect on the height of the child is completely to miss the point.
	Because if you take one of those twins, put them in a healthy environment, take another kid, I'm given 300 calories a day, sure as shit the second kid ain't going to be as tall as the first, right?
	We know that because people were like a foot and a half shorter in the Middle Ages because they just didn't have any nutrition.
	So you don't want to make the mistake, I think, of saying well there are genetic similarities in twin studies and so on and the personalities and they both like betting on horses and they both like this kind of cigar and whatever, right?
	Well, you would have to compare one twin in an objectively and verifiably healthy environment and one twin in an objectively unhealthy and verifiably unhealthy and destructive and abusive environment and then you would end up with different aspects of the personality.
	I mean there's no doubt of that in my mind and I think the study of epigenetics really reassures us that that is the case but I think what people are doing and again I don't know people of course should school me on this as in all things where the collective wisdom of everyone is infinitely greater than mine
	But I would be concerned about people taking the twins raised healthily end up the same height and saying, you know, and they both like the color blue and they both really are into the indigo girls and saying, well, that means that parents have no effect on the personality.
	That doesn't follow at all.
	And the discussion that was on the boards, there was a bit of a, coverage of what it means to say that there are genetic things.
	And I think the best thing I could say is that there's a probability, something like 30, 70, or 50, 50, or whatever it is, but that's only a predisposition, like a predisposition towards lung cancer.
	And if you smoke, your odds go way up, but you still only have a predisposition.
	It's not like a guarantee.
	Yeah, I mean, not everyone who is a non-smoker avoids lung cancer and not everyone who is a smoker dies of lung cancer.
	But that doesn't mean... and not everyone who is abused becomes an abuser.
	Correlation rates, as far as I remember, are only thirty or forty percent.
	Still higher than the non-abused to be abuser population.
	I'm going to... Yeah, but everyone who is an abuser was abused.
	That seems to be pretty, pretty consistent.
	I mean, unless they have a brain tumor or something, you know, something A screw went through their head at a weird angle or whatever.
	Not that there's a non-weird angle, I guess.
	A screw can go through your head.
	Have you ever heard of that?
	Like, genuinely verified?
	Like, that happening?
	I certainly have read about, and you can go to Oliver Sacks for more of this, I have certainly heard about people who have brain tumors undergoing significant personality changes.
	Particularly in terms of escalated rage.
	And I think I remember a story about a guy who, yeah, he got a nail through the head in some horrible industrial accident and they pulled the nail out and he was kind of functional but his wife divorced him because he was just melancholic and rageful whereas before he'd been sunny and happy.
	So, yeah, I mean, there's no question, I mean, that's just, I mean, the brain is a physical organ and the consciousness is an effect of the brain and you damage the brain and you damage the personality.
	The personality is simply an effect of whatever's going on in the brain.
	and you can strengthen it, you can weaken it, you can change it.
	You know neuroplasticity is a well-documented phenomenon but I certainly have read that there are personality changes that occur as a result of brain injury through disease or some sort of physical injury.
	So I don't doubt that could be the case.
	So yeah I mean not everyone who's screaming at someone is the victim of child abuse but there If you count that child abuse damages the brain, which I think objectively we can statistically certainly say that it does, then all forms of brain damage alter the personality.
	And whether the brain damage is a nail gun, a brain tumor, or previous child abuse, then yeah, it damages the personality.
	Right.
	Adding a phone caller now.
	Phineas Gage.
	P-H-I-N-E-A-S-G-A-G-E got a tamping rod blown through his skull, became angry and spontaneously rageful after his accident.
	It irrevocably changed his personality.
	Yeah, of course, I mean... Stephen King's The Stand is where I go for most of my neurobiology and in Stephen King's The Stand there is a character Who was played by the blind guy who will uncoach.
	I'm not proud that I know these things.
	I just do.
	And he was developmentally handicapped, mentally handicapped.
	And at one point he becomes lucid and he says, I'm God's Bob.
	You know, I'm the Bob that God knows.
	Like so somewhere in his physically damaged brain is his authentic and genuine intelligent and sensitive personality.
	It's the flowers for Algernon thing.
	You grow the brain and then it descends and so on.
	And I mean that's just not true.
	I mean that's why it's in Stephen King novels and novels and it's not true.
	There is no healthy brain in a damaged brain.
	I mean any more than, you know, You know, cut away the lung tumors and reveal my perfectly healthy lungs within.
	No, your lungs are diseased.
	I can cut them away, but they're going to be back to the same as exactly like healthy.
	So, yeah, frontal lobotomies as well.
	I mean, you give someone a frontal lobotomy, you know, Randall Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, there's not a shadow hymn between his ears that can come back if you, you know, tamp up the rest of his frontal lobes with tapioca or something.
	I mean, it just doesn't happen.
	I've tried with many, many a hamster.
	So I hope that helps.
	Well, we have a phone caller up.
	Hello?
	I like this.
	I had a teacher in high school who had a brain tumor removed.
	She completely changed, but we got voicemail.
	Sorry, that's just somebody I didn't realize.
	And I remember there was a kid in my boarding school who was, you know, a great soccer player, smart guy, engaging, funny, and a pretty kind Guy.
	He's a blonde guy.
	Grant his name was.
	I can't remember his last name.
	Grant his name was.
	And we were in the swimming pool and he tried to do a flip into the shallow end.
	Slipped.
	Hit his head.
	Was underwater for, unfortunately, about 20 seconds too long.
	I don't know.
	He was unconscious.
	I don't know if he... Obviously, I don't know.
	I was six at the time and he was probably seven or eight.
	And, you know, he was gone for a long time and when he came back he couldn't play soccer.
	He couldn't... He could hardly speak.
	He was, you know, in a special class all on his own.
	And he'd never recover from that.
	You know, he would run and his sort of face would be half-dragged down once.
	He'd had a stroke, which had never come back.
	I mean, he was just gone.
	And that to me was, I mean, terrifying, of course, and instructive about the degree to which the personality is dependent upon the physical structure of the brain.
	It's not an independent art.
	It is the physical structure of the brain.
	It's like saying gravity is dependent upon mass.
	No, gravity is an effect of mass.
	And I never imagined that there was a perfect grant in there somewhere that was uninjured, you know, any more than a guy who's had his arm removed has the ghost of an arm he can play basketball with in another dimension.
	He just, he's like, he's one-handed.
	Steph, can you hear us?
	Yes, but that would require that I stop talking, so effectively, no.
	Stop.
	We have a phone call around.
	You're up.
	I can't hear the caller, if that helps.
	Hello?
	Can you hear me now?
	I can hear you now.
	Hi, my name's Jesse.
	I'm calling from Denver.
	I actually started to get some questions relating to epigenetics and free will, and came across some interesting research that I'd like to get your interpretation on.
	I've been looking into the effects of various viruses and bacteria on human behavior, either during the course of infection or pre-symptomatically at any point, and have kind of come across some interesting effects towards viruses relating to various activities of human violence.
	For instance, Rabies, people who are rabid will tend to bite other people at later stages of the infection.
	People with Hep C, it was recently discovered that Hep C also infects the brain, will tend to become more aggressive and violent.
	I was wondering what your take on the effects of medical progress relating to free will and helping to relieve people of these various ailments that can afflict their personality over time and how that may change over the course of the next few decades.
	That's a pretty specialized question which I'm not even remotely competent to answer.
	I will say this though, that I do believe that trauma results in a diminishment of the capacity to make good choices.
	And that is a non-controversial statement in anyone who's read the literature because, again, the ACE correlation, adverse childhood experiences to bad decisions in adulthood, is so strongly correlated that it's like if a guy has to carry an anvil that puts him at a disadvantage in a sprinting race and somebody who has experience
	significant adverse childhood experiences has a diminished capacity to make good choices doesn't mean that they can't it just means that they have a diminished capacity to do so and so if we want to create conditions where in free will can flourish then we need to have peaceful parenting.
	We need to have children raised without trauma.
	We need to have children raised without aggression, without abuse, without spanking, without intimidation, without threats of abandonment, with less daycare, with greater consistency in primary caregivers both emotionally and physically just in terms of their presence.
	That will give people the chance to make better decisions without being running around with an anvil that half the time they don't even know they have and they blame themselves for never winning a race.
	So yeah, I guess the guy with the anvil might win the race, but boy, A, people gotta be pretty slow he's racing against, and B, he better train really damn hard with that anvil.
	And so I hope that, you know, philosophy is all about people making better choices.
	And I can't find it within me to ever say that we can harangue people to make better choices with no Regards to their histories, because statistically bad choices so often result from traumatic histories.
	And so, and you can read Gaber Mate for more on this, particularly in the realm of the hungry ghosts.
	But, you know, drug addicts, as you say, I mean, the drug addict is a drug addict, but she was, you know, they've all been sexually abused as children.
	Nobody wants to be raped when they're three.
	And so the fact that they're making, quote, bad decisions as adults doesn't have anything to do with anything other than the fact that they were raped when they were three.
	So, yeah, I would like people to make better decisions, but I want a level playing field for good decisions so that we can justly evaluate
	people's decisions rather than just say well that's person just making bad decisions or dumb decisions as opposed to well this is a person who unfortunately is in a society which does not which does not accurately reflect back the effects of childhood on adults because if we did if we sort of if we actually knew that if we accurately reflected that back people could make better decisions.
	We're a society that tells smokers that smoking has nothing to do with lung cancer which means that all that happens is people smoke more.
	We're a society that does not say openly to people you're making bad decisions most likely as a result of childhood abuse and your dysfunction is the result of childhood abuse.
	We say that to adults but we don't say that to adults with regards to their their childhood so we're almost all of us are complicit in masking up This most terrible of plagues of child abuse, I'm not talking about you of course, but I mean we're complicit in masking this up.
	You know we are infinitely worse than the doctors who covered up the correlations between smoking and lung cancer in the forties and fifties.
	We are worse, far worse, than the people who cover up the negative effects of psychotropic drugs and they're extremely dubious.
	quote, remedies for non-existent ailments.
	Society as a whole, without addressing this issue of child abuse and without continually exhorting people to become better parents and sympathizing with those who are abused as children, as so many children were, we are all complicit in covering this up.
	And it is to the guilt and shame of the entire species that this even remains a remotely controversial topic.
	But I hope that wasn't too much of a rant, but please continue with your thoughts if it was, or even if it wasn't.
	I very strongly agree with most of what you said.
	I suppose the crux of my question, because I do have a little bit of personal experience with this, but definitely, is that essentially as medical technology is improving, and it seems almost that childhood care is improving, and I'm kind of relating back to the Journal of Psychohistory and Lloyd DeMoss' books,
	And for my reference on that, and what I'm kind of curious is now, are there a lot of co-factual issues that are just kind of pushing this forward?
	And regardless of how much we sidestep or backstep in the short run, to me it kind of seems as though there seems to be a natural tendency to almost move forward regardless and that the evolution to a peaceful society just seems inevitable almost because it's happening on a micro scale.
	I think you raise fantastic points and I strongly recommend to everyone who's listening to this to go to psychohistory.com or you can read, I've been doing a reading of Lloyd DeMoss' The Origins of War and Child Abuse, which you can get at freedomainradio.com forward slash free Just sort of scroll down, the feed is down at the bottom.
	It's fantastic material and he's basically saying that the history of society is the history of childhood.
	As societies get better, you look back a generation or two to better childhoods and that's the result.
	And I agree with you in many ways and I'm ambivalent about this issue.
	I don't have any firm conclusion.
	I don't know if a firm conclusion is possible but I certainly don't have one yet.
	The case four is, of course, that corporal punishment is banned in most schools.
	In many places, spanking is either illegal or at least it's publicly frowned upon.
	I was just talking about a friend of mine just the other day that his dad would spank him, you know, bare-assed in public, and that's not so common anymore.
	I haven't seen that in forever.
	So as far as corporal punishment goes and even the Canadian Pediatric Association has just come out with a negative evaluation of spanking.
	It seems that even the psychological profession is beginning to actively and bravely take a stand on information that has been well known within the communities, within the psychological communities, for about thirty years or so.
	They are bravely and forthcoming, slowly beginning to crawl out from under their hidey places and talk about this stuff openly.
	So I think that there is, there is progress.
	But there are two areas where there are risk factors, I think, that were not there before.
	The first is in the two-parent working household abandonment to daycare situation.
	That's pretty new.
	That is pretty new.
	I mean, don't get me wrong.
	I mean, 18th century upper class French women sent their kids off for years to be wet nursed by peasants.
	But for society as a whole, it was not common.
	Sorry, three factors.
	Yeah, so the first is the abandonment to daycare.
	And studies seem to show that a child abandoned to daycare for 20 years or more experiences exactly the same psychological results as a child abandoned by his or her mother.
	So that is significantly traumatic for children.
	That's number one.
	Number two, the rise of psychotropic drugs, which permanently alter the brain of children, shrink brain mass, and create addictions, and just don't do unbelievably bad things to children's brains.
	That's relatively new.
	Number three, of course, is the massive explosion in single-parent households.
	Incredibly bad for children as a whole.
	Just tragically awful for children as a whole.
	The single worst determinant of childhood outcomes.
	The single worst single determinant of negative outcomes for children is being raised in a one-family versus a two-family household.
	And the general denigration of the nuclear family as a whole.
	Statistically, the very safest place for a woman to be is in a marriage.
	I mean by far the safest place for a woman to be is in a marriage.
	Yet of course all you hear is about husbands beating up their wives and so on and that wives and women are just so free and independent of violence when they're not in a marriage.
	It's not true.
	Women are far more subject to violence outside of marriage.
	The marriage is the greatest single protector of the security and safety of women.
	And so this general denigration of the nuclear family, you know this horrible new thing where Women under 30, the majority of children born to women under 30 are born outside of a marriage, outside of a stable commitment, socially accepted, historical marriage.
	It's nothing about the piece of paper.
	It's a social commitment of permanence that's really important.
	And so I think that in some ways the more obvious traumas are definitely being beaten back, so to speak, and I think that's fantastic.
	But there's a lot more subtle stuff going on.
	The fourth, I think, is, of course, the length of time that children spend being propagandized is just horrendous these days.
	You know, I mean, a hundred years ago, even if they were in state schools, they got out by the time they were in grade six for the most part and then went on to do things like found America.
	You know, as all these guys had grade six education and, you know, they founded what many consider the greatest experiment in minarchism that has ever been tried.
	And I would certainly agree with that.
	Certainly the most instructive.
	And now, of course, children until they have this unbelievably extended childhood adolescence.
	I mean, a lot of kids aren't getting their life started until their mid to late twenties, for heaven's sakes, which would be far beyond the lifespan of most people in the Roman Empire.
	You'd be dead before you even got started.
	And so I think that this protracted childhood, which means basically more propaganda than should ever be inflicted on a legion of miscreants, I think these sort of four factors are negative drags or backwards gravity wells on the forward progress of children, but they're a lot harder to identify, which is why I think they're going to be a little bit harder to combat.
	So, yeah, I mean, as is so often the case in history, one step forward, three steps backwards, two steps sideways, do-si-do, do the flip, stick the landing.
	That's the best I can say.
	I mean, I suppose I also at the same time that I see all of those because I'm only 25 and, you know, I'm entirely not disagreeing with people not even being able to enter the workforce right now at my age.
	But I suppose what I'm seeing is I'm also seeing a few other cofactual trends, things that people probably wouldn't even be able to be aware of, just how much more communication they can do with each other nowadays and how much more ideas can be freely shared.
	And, you know, I'll say that.
	Although I do see a general tendency towards anti-intellectualism, I see a lot less of it in kids than I did personally when I was youth.
	So, I mean, I see, aside from the medical trends, I see, I suppose, other factors in correlation that, at the least, I don't know if it could get worse.
	In the short run, I suppose my own viral theories have kind of led me to my own theory as to why it's gotten worse now.
	But that's about it.
	Yeah, I mean, we're just in the middle of yet another massive round of social engineering.
	I mean, we're in the middle of, I mean, just a staggering round of social engineering, where we have said that the satisfaction of the parents, and dare I say in particular of the moms, is more important than the mental health of the children.
	And we are in a radical revision of historical society.
	I mean, the experiments in uncoupling the economic drivers of the traditional family unit is even more a radical experiment change than Marxism, than like full-on Marxist-Leninism.
	It's not going to end well.
	There's no question.
	You know, when you deviate from that which has been, you know, I mean, modern families are the fast food of the digestive system.
	You know, I mean, you can deviate from that which we were historically designed to ingest only to end up with 60% obesity in the adult population.
	So, it is, you know, we're just right in the middle of a throw of massive social engineering where
	I'm just touching it very briefly because we could do a whole show on this, but I was just reading this article about in California, you know, they tried doing this experiment in the nineties under Bill Clinton where they said, well, we want single moms to get off welfare and get into the workforce, but in order to do that we're going to have to give them free child care or heavily subsidized child care.
	What the hell the point of that was, I don't know.
	Other than, you know, just making noises to satisfy the anti-welfare right-wingers.
	Because what's the point?
	I mean, to say we want the woman to get off state subsidies called welfare, but in order to do that we have to give ourselves state subsidies called child care, is just switching a hot rock from the left hand to the right hand and thinking you've put it down.
	I mean, it's embarrassing and ridiculous.
	Of course, what's happened is, you know, women, they have a kid and they go on welfare.
	Not, of course, not all, you understand, I was talking about a particular trend.
	I think there's, is it 1.2 or 1.5 million of these single mom households in California alone.
	It's California alone.
	And these are just the ones that are recorded.
	And so we've got this thing, you know, fundamentally you need two parents because one parent is raising the children and the other parent is Getting the grub, building the shelter, and keeping the bears at bay.
	And we've decoupled that.
	I mean, literally, we've decoupled that.
	And we have said now that the father is optional, but that doesn't solve the problem of the woman needing resources to raise the kid.
	I mean, I tell you, I'm a stay-at-home dad.
	I know that I have just one child.
	It takes an incredible amount of resources to raise a child.
	I mean, economic, financial, emotional, spiritual, dare I say.
	I mean, it takes a huge amount of resources to raise a child.
	Children are dependent and economically useless for the first number of years of their life.
	And so we've got this thing where we said, okay, well, you can be a single mom.
	Okay, but it doesn't solve the problem of the fact that single moms need huge amounts of resources to raise their kids.
	They create, and you have a kid, you create a black hole of resource consumption, time, money, energy, resources, food, shelter, you name it, healthcare, healthcare.
	You create a massive black hole where resources are going to be drawn in and disappear.
	And normally, the person feeding that black hole is the father.
	And we have said, ah, that is old-fashioned bourgeois thinking.
	We don't need the dad around.
	That doesn't solve the problem.
	The fact that you still have a black hole that resources need to be fed into and all we've done is we've substituted the state for the father.
	Except the state sucks as a father.
	Sucks like a vacuum as a father.
	And because the real resources that need to be there aren't even fundamentally financial.
	They are emotional.
	They are the actual presence.
	And so, you know, and I talked about this in a show recently, that until we can get rid of these, until we can ameliorate these black holes, we're never going to be able to get rid of the state.
	Until we can create more functional families.
	I mean, a woman with three kids, what's she going to do?
	Become a libertarian?
	I'm not going to take these resources.
	Well, she needs these resources.
	What's she going to do?
	I mean, you're not going to put her kids in a briefcase and take them to work and expect them to sit quietly all day while she does her job.
	Of course not.
	And so we're just, we're right in the middle of this just wild ass, completely boring, completely predictable, completely repetitive experimentation where the selfishness of the adults holds sway and Everybody else gets roped into dealing with the irrational selfishness of the adults, and we're all helpless, because we sure as hell can't punish the kids for the bad decisions of largely the moms.
	And the dads, too, of course.
	The dads have sex with these women and then bugger off, and that's terrible, and that's terrible.
	But unless it's rape, it's still the woman's decision.
	And men are making ridiculously bad other decisions largely to do with Social policies and war, which I would blame more men for.
	But in this instance, the procreation of children outside of marriage is largely the woman's fault.
	Now, of course, the women who make these bad decisions themselves come from tragic histories of alcoholism, and you can look at it all up and down.
	So it's with judgment and with sympathy that I talk about this stuff.
	But we're just in the middle of this just other stupid ass experiment where we're going to say, oh, OK, well, let's not offend the parents, right?
	Let's not offend the single moms.
	Let's just throw resources at them and consider the problem solved.
	When, of course, it's not solving the problem, it's actually making it worse.
	And it's like 70% to 80% of health issues are entirely the result of lifestyle choices.
	But you're not going to get a president or anyone in any particularly prominent position in the public sphere saying to the American population or any other population, get off the couch and put down the Doritos and stop whining to me about health care costs.
	Because 70 to 80 percent of the health care costs in this country are the result of people making obviously bad lifestyle decisions.
	Smoking too much, drinking too much, not exercising, eating too much.
	And no, it's all about We need Obamacare!
	It does.
	Because if you refuse to manage yourself, you end up having to control other people.
	And that's the theme that I wanted to talk about.
	Anyway, I hope that makes some kind of sense.
	And thank you so much for your call.
	It does.
	Thank you very much.
	It's fine.
	I had a question.
	So, So, I really am interested in learning, like, a lot.
	So, what would you recommend to read?
	Like, would you have a reading list that you would say is awesome or something of that nature, if you understand?
	Yeah, I've been meaning to put that together for a while.
	I just haven't yet.
	Because I get at least five requests a week for a reading list.
	So, I will put it on... I will move it up on the list, if that helps you, and I will try and get it done relatively soon.
	Okay, fair enough.
	That was basically it.
	it.
	All right.
	That's what I wanted to ask.
	Yeah, Anatomy of an Epidemic is an awesome book.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Uh, no, never mind.
	All right, James, do we have any other yearning burnings from the chat window that I can dispense of and dispose of with my usual brevity?
	So you mean easy questions?
	Yeah, I can lengthen out even easy questions.
	I like it, you know, I put on some big-ass speech and then basically the listener says, so in essence what you're saying is blah blah blah.
	It's like, yeah, but Can I make one interjection?
	I do have to contradict some of your things about having one parent household being so terrible for the child because I live in a one parent household.
	My mom took care of me when I was a child and I believe I am fairly reasonable And I use Logic daily to go about in my ways, so it's not always the case.
	I mean, you can't always put the case that just because there's one parent, it can't be successful.
	I'm sorry, perhaps I misspoke.
	When did I say, if there's one parent, it can't possibly be successful?
	I don't think you did, but that's the idea I had.
	Well, not to be too personal, but that would be an example of a lack of success, right?
	That you're responding emotionally and inaccurately to a statement that I'm making.
	I wouldn't say it was emotional.
	Sure it is.
	Don't you feel strongly about this?
	No, I was just making a point.
	You don't feel strongly about this?
	No.
	So you wouldn't take it personally if you think I'm saying some stuff about your mother in particular?
	Oh, no.
	Because I think I'll Of course she's done some bad things, I've done some bad things, etc.
	in our relationship.
	So, that would be a fair... I would have to hear what you said.
	I'm not sure you're being particularly honest with yourself, if you don't mind me saying so, but that's okay.
	I'm not sure that you're contradicting my theory, or at least the information that's out there, but that's okay too.
	But yeah, I think... Look, I mean, there are single moms, I think, who do some good stuff.
	But these statistics are pretty damning.
	No, of course, I agree with you with the statistics.
	I do.
	I mean, the statistics, of course, are very simple.
	It's pretty wretched.
	The outcomes in general are wretched for single-parent households.
	And that doesn't mean, of course, that every single person who is raised in a single-parent family is terrible, right?
	A book called Guilty by Ann Coulter.
	Of all single mothers in America, only 6.5% of them are widows.
	called Guilty by Ann Coulter.
	Of all single mothers in America, only 6.5% of them are widows.
	Almost 40% of them are divorced and 41.3% gave birth out of wedlock.
	The 6.5% of single mothers whose husbands have died shouldn't be called single mothers at all, We already have a word for them called widows.
	Their children do just fine compared with the children of married parents.
	Right?
	So, that's important.
	Here's the lottery ticket that single mothers are handing their innocent children by choosing to raise them without fathers.
	Controlling for socio-economic status, race, and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent.
	By 1996, 70% of inmates in state juvenile detention centers serving long-term sentences were raised by single mothers.
	72% of juvenile murderers and 60% of rapists come from single mother homes.
	70% of teenage births, dropouts, suicide, runaways, juvenile delinquents and child murderers involve children raised by single mothers.
	Girls raised without fathers are the most sexually promiscuous and more likely to end up divorced.
	A 1990 study by the Progressive Policy Institute showed that after controlling for single motherhood, the difference between black and white crime rates disappeared.
	Various studies have come up with slightly different numbers, but all the figures are grim.
	According to the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, children from single parent families account for 63% of all youth suicides, 70% of all teenage pregnancies, 71% of all adolescent chemical and substance abuse, 80% of all prison inmates, and 90% Of all homeless and runaway children, a study cited in The Village Voice produced similar numbers.
	It found that children brought up in single mother homes are 5 times more likely to commit suicide, 9 times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely to commit rape for the boys, 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home.
	Single motherhood is like a farm team for future criminals and social outcasts.
	Many of these studies, for example, are from the 1990s when the percentage of teenagers raised by single parents was lower than it is today.
	In 1990, 28% of children under 18 were being raised in one-parent homes, mother or father, and 71% were being raised in two-parent homes.
	By 2005, more than one-third of all babies born in the United States were illegitimate.
	That's a lot of social problems coming.
	Imagine an America with 70% fewer juvenile delinquents, 70% Fewer teenage births, 63% to 70%, fewer teenage suicides, and 70% to 90%, fewer runaways, and you will appreciate what the sainted single mothers have accomplished.
	The illegitimacy rate has gone up by more than 300% since 1970.
	Moreover, even assuming that sometime around the year of 1969, the entire human race lost the ability to defer gratification, there is still the wholly volitional decision not to give the baby up for adoption.
	In 1979, only about 600,000 babies were born out of wedlock, and one quarter of them were put up for adoption.
	By 1991, the number of illegitimate births had doubled to 1.2 million, but only 4% of them were allowed to be adopted, and most of these babies were snapped up by either Angelina Jolie or Mia Farrow.
	By 2003, 1.5 million illegitimate babies were born every year, but only about 14,000 of them, less than 1%, were put up for adoption.
	Not surprisingly, unwed mothers who care enough to give their children up for adoption also come overwhelmingly from responsible backgrounds.
	They tend to have higher education and income levels, and to come from intact, upper-middle class families with highly educated parents.
	You will note that we do not read about adopted children filling up the prisons, welfare rolls, and runaway shelters.
	Adopted children are no worse off, and indeed are generally better off, than non-adopted children.
	I think, let's see, single mothers unwed or divorced cost the U.S.
	US Taxpayer 112 billion dollars every year.
	And okay so yeah according to the US Justice Department crime statistics domestic abuse is virtually non-existent for married women living with their husbands.
	This is what I was talking about earlier.
	From 93 to 2005, the number of married women victimized by their husbands ranged from 0.9 to 3.2 per 1,000.
	Domestic violence was about 40 times more likely among divorced or separated women Ranging from 37.7 to 118.5 per thousand, even never married women were more than twice as likely to be victims of domestic violence as married women.
	A Cornell study found that unwed mothers are 30% less likely to marry than other single women.
	So, yeah, I mean her argument or the argument that the facts seem to put forward is that if you care about your children, if you're an unwed mom and you care about your child, you should give that child up for adoption.
	I mean, you can get as mad as you want, I know.
	Ann Coulter, oh my god, you know, but these are the facts that she's working with, and if there are contrary facts, I'm certainly happy to help publicize those as well.
	But she's saying that, and statistically, the kids who are given up for adoption, like Steve Jobs, they tend to do just fine.
	I mean, they eat a lot of fruit, and they can be a little intense, they are prone to turtlenecks, but they tend to do They tend to do quite well, very well.
	In fact, no worse, in some ways better off than children from, like who are just born to regular old married couples.
	And so she's saying that in the past, of course, if a woman got pregnant and there was no, like outside of marriage, then either the man had to marry her, which made the men a lot less likely to be careless about birth control, or the woman would give the child up for adoption.
	You'd go on vacation for six months and come back with strangely baggy midriff.
	You would give the child up for adoption and that child would do very, very well because, of course, parents who are looking for adopted kids tend to be parents who are highly motivated to become parents and really want the job and really want the responsibility and so on.
	And so to hang on to your kid and subject them to all of these negative outcomes, her argument is that that's kind of selfish.
	My argument is not that it's selfish, it's just that that's enabled by the society that we've set up where you can do that economically.
	Whatever you subsidize increases, whatever you tax decreases.
	You are subsidizing single parenthood and you are taxing happily married parents.
	So of course you're going to get more and more single mothers and more and more social problems to resolve from that.
	And this doesn't have anything to do with the love that single moms have for their children and it doesn't have anything to do with the attachment and the effort that they put in and the nobility and sacrifices that they make.
	You know, we're just designed to be raised by a man and a woman.
	We're just designed to be raised by a mommy and a daddy.
	And, you know, Isabella is as attached to me as she is to Christina.
	Well, during the breastfeeding phrase, that was a physical thing that was a little different.
	She was disappointed with mine, although they did come with floss.
	She was quite disappointed with my nipples.
	But this is just the way that we're designed to be raised.
	And I don't know any way around it.
	I mean, people could certainly send me statistics and I will be happy to compare those to these statistics.
	I'm always interested in the stuff that runs counter to propaganda, or at least counter to conventional wisdom, and this stuff certainly does.
	So I hope that's helpful and useful.
	With that note of, I'm sure, massive offense, but hopefully fact-based offense to half the population, I would like to thank you for dropping by.
	Thank you, as always, to the wonderful, wonderfully kind listeners and smart, sensitive, open, and eloquent listeners who call in with just the most amazing questions in the world.
	I mean, I listen to other shows from time to time, and you guys are trumps when it comes to smart, brilliant, genius-type questions.
	And thank you, of course, to all of the donators who are supporting the show and giving me the chance to continue working on the documentary.
	Thank you to those who are committing to working, who have committed to and are working on the documentary.
	It is coming along, I think, very nicely. - Yeah.
	My interpretive dance of the seven veils, I do agree with everyone, is a wonderful, wonderful way to open it as long as there is absolutely no lights in the room and we keep the cap on the camera, the lens cap.
	I think that seems to be the way to start.
	So have yourselves a wonderful week and I will speak to you in one week minus two hours and ten minutes, if not sooner.

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