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Sept. 6, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:46:49

How To Be a Modern Man! Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain in Conversation

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	And we're live! I'm Anthony Dream Johnson, founder of Twenty One Studios and the Twenty One Convention.
	Today is a special interview and special edition of Twenty One Live, starring Stefan Molyneux from YouTube and Twitter, known around the world for his philosophy show.
	He's an upcoming speaker at the Twenty One Convention this October in Florida.
	And Richard Granite from Spartan Life Coach on YouTube, another big YouTuber.
	He focuses on toxic relationships, healing from them, and abuse.
	And he's also an alumni speaker of the 21 convention.
	He first spoke at our Poland event recently, about a month and a half ago, in Warsaw, Poland.
	Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on today's show.
	Well, thanks. I just wanted to point out, given that your middle name is Dream and Spartans is Life, I feel my middle name is lacking in something, so you can just refer to me as Stefan Daydream Hunkasaurus Molyneux.
	I feel that's a Latin way of describing me, and I think that'll work.
	That'll work. Yeah, for me, it's an old pickup community thing.
	My middle name is actually not Dream yet, but it will be soon.
	Now it's Paul. But I know him by it, you know, whatever.
	Now, are we going to take some calls today or are mostly your questions?
	Yeah, mostly my questions, but we'll take questions from the, not live on the phone or anything, but we'll take them from the chat.
	I can pop them up on the screen like this, and that way the whole audience can see them.
	Yeah, so guys, for those of you watching as you go through the show, if you have questions, just type them up and make it clear and simple, and I'll post it up on the screen and we'll get to them.
	So today's interview in this show I want to focus on is on parenting and abuse and how that affects men and masculinity and the manuscript itself, and how it's even developed, this whole community of men.
	The MGTOW community that's a part of that, the pickup artist community, the red pill community, and even the men's rights activists.
	How parenting and abuse and spanking have affected men and the culture over time, over recent decades.
	Spartan Life Coach here, Richard Grannon, does a really good job as well on his channel of focusing on toxic relationships and abuse and how that helps or affects men and women over time, how they can heal from that.
	Well, Stefan, though, we did a show, obviously, on the Red Man Group just a couple weeks ago, and it was a big splash to even discuss this topic at all.
	I was surprised in that, Stefan specifically, you've probably seen this a lot, but any discussion of parenting like this, it's taken, it's super controversial.
	I mean, it easily ranks up there with, you know, religion and politics, if not even more abrasive.
	So it's fun to see that, but obviously we tried to get off that for the rest of the show and get back to other topics on men and masculinity.
	So Stefan, the first thing I wanted to ask you, how does peaceful parenting help boys become men?
	Why can't we just all be masculine fathers and beat the crap out of our kids and spank them as we need to and all that?
	You know, why is peaceful parenting useful for that?
	Well, I mean, I think that really goes into the heart of the question, which is what is masculinity?
	Well, masculinity is provision and protection, right?
	So what have men historically done for us to become the apex predators, top of the food chain, is men have provided for women because, of course, women were at least economically largely disabled through constant pregnancies and childbirth and breastfeeding and healing and pregnancy and this kind of cycle.
	And women did contribute something to food production in sort of ancient societies, but it was mostly the men who provided the calories.
	So provision is how men are defined.
	And protection, right?
	Because it's sort of like the male lions that circle the perimeter of the pride group and make sure that no other competing lions come in and rip apart the tribe or so on.
	So provision and protection defines us as men.
	Not violence. Now, violence and self-defense, that's one thing, right?
	Protecting your family, protecting your community, protecting your tribe from people who would, usually men, who'd want to come in and do you harm.
	Well, that's an important part of masculinity.
	Not so much in the modern world, right?
	So, how do we best provide and how do we best protect our communities?
	Well, we provide for our communities by advocating for free markets.
	Because free markets allow for the allocation of resources to accrue to those who are the most expert at increasing them.
	Like, if you have a business idea that people perceive as twice as valuable as mine, you're probably going to get twice the investment.
	And if they're accurate in their assessment, you're going to produce twice the wealth than I will.
	The way that we provision for society as a whole is to advocate for free markets.
	Now, how do we protect society as a whole?
	Well, it's really hard to say that you're very concerned with protecting your family if you beat the living crap out of your helpless and dependent children.
	That is not protection.
	That is brutalization.
	And, of course, we all know.
	I remember when I was 11 or 12, I was hiking the woods with a friend of mine.
	And some 17-year-old older boys, you know, and that's quite a span when you're a kid, you know, bullied us for like an hour or two and then eventually let us go and so on.
	Well, that was, you know, a pretty mean and negative thing.
	I wouldn't say that that had anything to do with masculinity because we'd look.
	I said to one of the guys, why don't you pick on someone your own size?
	Because that's kind of gross when you, if you're a man and you say, well, I'm going to prove my manhood by going and punching a girl guy.
	It's like, I don't really think that's proofing your manhood.
	And so provision and protection is important.
	The most helpless and dependent and weak, so to speak, members of society are our children.
	And we do not serve provision or protection by hitting our children.
	We should save any capacity for aggression that we have in the protection of free markets and the protection of our geographical territory in the form of national defense.
	Now, obviously, there's a huge difference.
	Well, at least this is what most people would say in response to part of that.
	There's a huge difference between really severe domestic violence and spanking like a three year old.
	So what do you say to those people who draw?
	They're trying to draw a distinction between that.
	They don't want to knee jerk and say, no, it's not abuse.
	It's just spanking. It's just discipline.
	You know, it's different than getting hit in the face with a closed fist.
	What do you say to that kind of criticism?
	Well, of course, there are differing levels of abuse, but they're all still on the continuum of abuse.
	And the simple answer to that is somebody says, I hit a three-year-old, okay?
	I mean, I don't even know what to say about that other than this.
	The pain, the surprise, the shock, and the pain has to be great enough To be aversive to the three-year-old.
	In other words, let's say the old traditional example, the kid is reaching for a boiling pot of water or the kid is running towards a road, you know, like in the Stephen King movie.
	And so what do you do?
	Well, you grab the kid and you whack the kid to condition the child to not do what you don't want the child to do.
	Well, it has to be Enough of a shock, surprise, and pain that it is supposed to alter the child's behavior.
	So saying, well, it's just a little light tap on the butt, that's not what spanking is.
	Spanking is the infliction of aversive pain to fundamentally change behavior.
	And so there's elements of intimidation and fear in that too, right?
	Well, there has to be. It is something that the child, like if the child's running towards the road, Pet symmetry!
	I couldn't remember. If the child is running towards the road, you clearly do not want the child to run into the road.
	So if you're going to use spanking as your solution to that, then it has to be strong enough.
	Like, you wouldn't spank a child for using the wrong dessert fork, right?
	I mean, it has to be something that's really big and life-threatening for you to spank, at least that's the general idea.
	And what have you taught your child?
	Have you taught your child that roads are dangerous?
	No. All you've taught your child is that daddy is dangerous.
	Have you taught your child that grabbing things from the stove is dangerous?
	No. You simply taught the child that daddy can unpredictably from the child's perspective and randomly explode in rage and inflict pain for no comprehensible reason to the child.
	So that is not protecting a child.
	That is abuse. And of course the law, you know, if you say, well, like if you beat up your girlfriend, but you only spank her, right?
	Or you don't hit her open face, or you try that at a mall, or you try that with a boss or a co-worker, the law is going to say, well, I guess it's not egregious bodily harm.
	But it's still pretty bloody illegal.
	So the law, of course, does recognize differing degrees of abuse, but it doesn't take the lesser forms of abuse and transform them into virtue.
	And why should adults have infinitely greater protection from the law than children?
	So my next question is, what do you say to the response and the criticism that different communities do different things?
	I'm not an expert on this, but from what I understand, for example, Asian parents and culture, they're more prone to spanking and hitting their children, things like that.
	I could be wrong on that specifically, but this is something I've heard.
	I know that from culture to culture, the norm for this kind of discipline and this kind of spanking and abuse and stuff, it differs.
	So what do you say to the kind of relativist argument that, well, my culture does this, this is how I was raised, this is where I came from?
	Aren't all cultures equal?
	Aren't everything the exact same, right?
	Well, the principles are equal.
	And my memory of the data is that East Asians spank the least, white spank a little bit more, Hispanics spank a little bit more, and I think blacks spank the most.
	But the morals are the same.
	We don't have, for the most part, different standards of law based upon racial or ethnic origins, right?
	Like, we don't say, well, you know, East Asians can shoplift, but Hispanics do it.
	It's really, really bad. We have principles.
	And the principle, the foundational principle...
	Of morality is the non-aggression principle, which is you shall not initiate force.
	Responding to force in self-defense is perfectly appropriate and actually, I think, quite moral, but you can't initiate force against others, again, except in an extremity of self-defense, which is not an initiation.
	Now, clearly spanking is not self-defense.
	You know, the child, we assume the three-year-old is not running at you with some flamethrower, and so it's not self-defense.
	It is the initiation of force against disarmed and helpless and dependent opponents Which is, it's bullying.
	That's all it is. And it's very, very clear that it doesn't work.
	Right? This is the thing. If spanking works, why do you have to keep doing it?
	You know, 40% of parents, even when their kids hit their tweens, are still spanking.
	It's like, well, if you've now been spanking...
	For 12 or 13 years, and you still have to spank, clearly, empirically, factually, from a data standpoint, it ain't working.
	And the studies are very, very clear that you will get short-term compliance with long-term resentment and undermining of your authority.
	Hitting children does not give you authority.
	It does not give you respect.
	It does not give you love.
	In fact, it's quite the opposite.
	Damn. It sounds like something Rich Grannon, I'm sure, is chewing on right now.
	I could see it on your face.
	Yeah, it's coming through.
	The psychoanalytic perspective from Zizek on spanking was that effectively, by choosing to hit, you're actually not asserting power and dominance and potency.
	You're expressing the ultimate impotence.
	The only thing I can do is hit you.
	So it's a totally impotent gesture.
	And then we say to our children, use your words, not your fists.
	Talk about a mind frack of the first order.
	If you want something, you can't use violence to get what you want.
	I want you to change your behavior.
	Whack! I mean, it's completely incomprehensible to children that adults are allowed to do things that are expressly forbidden to children.
	And not only is it forbidden to children, it's wrong for children to use force to get what they want.
	But apparently it's perfectly fine for adults to use force to get what they want.
	That is not how you get respect out of a child.
	If you want your child to obey norms, which we do.
	Children shouldn't be completely running wild.
	They don't like the Lord of the Flies unparenting stuff.
	But you model better behavior.
	You model reasoning with other people.
	You model negotiation with your spouse.
	You model all of this kind of stuff.
	And you model negotiation with the child or with the children if they're having disputes with each other.
	You model all of that.
	And then they will inherit that behavior of reasoning with people as surely as they inherit the language they grow up with.
	This is a question of both of you, so I agree with Stefan what you're saying, that it's confusing and hypocritical to hit your children, especially when it doesn't work over time, and that should be apparent through the data you're getting back from the child who doesn't respond to it in short-term compliance and all that.
	My question is, how does being a hypocritical parent through this model, how does that confuse and disorient the child through the development of their childhood?
	I've been chatting a lot, Spartan Life Coach, you want to take this one?
	Yes, I do. And it ties in with the last point that Stefan made about the double bind that children have put in.
	If you hit them whilst in a heightened state of emotion and you've lost your impulse control and you're just going, I'm going to hit you now because I've run out of work.
	And then say, use your words, don't hit another kid at school.
	You put them in a double bind.
	To answer your question, Anthony, that warps the child.
	That breaks their boundaries because now they have to live in this catch-22.
	It's wrong to hit unless, it's wrong to hit unless, and they can't.
	That creates cognitive dissonance, which is extremely stressful.
	It also disempowers them.
	You've both broken their boundaries and asked them to carry a burden that's too much to carry.
	It's very, very warping.
	It's going to have a warping effect on the kid's perception and on the kid's boundaries.
	That would be my short answer to that question.
	Yeah, both of you are good at extending answers to this stuff.
	I love it. My next question then is going to be, let's take a step back.
	Why is it so controversial to have any serious discussion or debate over spanking or any kind of physical discipline of children?
	Like the minute this comes up, it's like the whole fucking world shuts off.
	There is no debate on it. Everyone shut up.
	We're not allowed to talk about it.
	In my opinion, it's even worse, I think, than religion and politics.
	There's a few things above it and like, you know, parenting, abuse and sex seem to be the only things that surpass those.
	So why is that? Why can't we talk about it?
	Well, because we're complicit for the most part.
	You know, people don't like to have moral rules imposed that show them in a bad light.
	We all want to be the moral heroes in our own life, and we can either do the high, hard road of actually becoming moral heroes, or we can just redefine morality to justify anything that we ever did.
	And when you start poking around with that kind of stuff, it's tough.
	People have a lot of regret.
	They have a lot of regret about this stuff.
	It's like the stuff that I post on Twitter about women when I say to them, listen, you're going to live for 80 plus years.
	What are you going to do with the last 40 when you're no longer sexually, nearly as sexually attractive to men?
	That's a lot of time to fill with, you know, volunteering at the old cat shelter.
	And so when I started this show with the non-aggression principle and all of that, I mean, it was not that complicated a question.
	I said, okay, I want philosophy to have the most impact on where people live, how they actually act.
	Now, I mean, there's things I really, really don't like.
	Central banking, foreign policy, and wars, and so on.
	But I don't have any particular direct levers to change those things.
	I can't snap my fingers and get rid of central banking and have a rational economic system again.
	But when it comes to the non-aggression principle, most of us have not been beaten up in an alleyway, at least as adults, at least I hope.
	Most of us have not been to prison.
	Most of us have not necessarily been in a whole bunch of street fights in our 40s.
	But where is it that we enact the most violence As human beings.
	Well, unless we're part of MS-13, it's in the home and it's against their own children.
	And that's where most people are morally compromised.
	And they're morally compromised the most.
	And it's even worse because in their minds, not only do they think, well, you know, I lost my temper, but it's part of parenting.
	They think it's a good thing. Spare the rod, spoil the child, which is a complete misinterpretation.
	Of course, the rod refers to instruction, not to beating someone with a stick.
	So this is where people have had the most...
	Violations of a moral rule in their life, both as victims and often as in actors.
	So when you start talking about a moral rule that is not abstract, But it's where people have put most of their hands and fists to work.
	People get very, very uncomfortable.
	And that's why it's so hard to progress in society because there's so many people who react so strongly to regret and shame that rather than say, you know, I did the wrong thing, man.
	I really should have read more.
	I really should have learned more.
	I really should have empathized more.
	They say, oh, you're a bad guy for bringing this topic up because apparently evil is just whatever makes hedonists feel bad these days.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Damn. We have a question here, by the way.
	I think it's related enough to bring on the show.
	It was from Charles Van Dusen on YouTube.
	Hi, I'm a fan of Stefan, BA political philosophy, made a career in IT, kids now out of the house.
	Curious to hear you guys discuss the origins of and reason for male circumcision in Western society.
	This seems similar to me in that it's a physical intrusion on a child.
	I know that circumcision is a whole fucking issue we could get into, and I don't think we need to do a half hour on it.
	But I'm curious about your thoughts on it in relation to things like spanking and abuse.
	It's evil. Evil.
	Totally wrong. Totally immoral.
	And needs to be stopped today. And the origins are very simple, right?
	Which is it was an anti-masturbatory device.
	Wow. You can look all this stuff up.
	That's all it is. It's to stop pleasure.
	That's what it's for. It's simply when they couldn't demonize human sexuality through religion, they ended up demonizing it by hacking off a third or more of penis skin.
	And it is an assault upon a child.
	It is incredibly destructive.
	I mean, the first thing you experience is having the most sensitive part of your body mutilated as a human being.
	And they've done these studies where, with babies, cortisol, of course, is a stress hormone.
	It comes out with fight or flight.
	Six months, six months after, Circumcision, babies' cortisol levels are elevated relative to intact babies.
	It is a brutal, violent, vicious, mutilating assault upon a helpless newborn, and it's a way of branding human beings as livestock to be owned by society, in particular men, because men are the tax livestock of society.
	We're net tax contributors, whereas women are net tax takers for the most part.
	So yeah, it's just branding us.
	We're goddamn owned by society and we're just a bunch of livestock to produce and shut the hell up.
	And here's the proof. We took half your cock.
	Yeah, Jesus.
	It has no place in modern Western civilization.
	None whatsoever. For men, for women, for little boys, little girls, keep razor blades away from children's genitals.
	Things you shouldn't have to say, you know, like, shouldn't have to say, please don't saw off a third of the baby's penis.
	Would that be something we could do?
	Yeah, it's almost as if the way you're born is fine, assuming you don't have any genetic defects, right?
	So just to be clear here, you both view it as conceptually related to things like spanking and childhood abuse.
	This is an intrusion.
	It's almost like the same mechanisms that parents are going through in their head with this.
	But it's worse. It's even worse.
	It's worse. So being beaten is bad.
	I mean, I was beaten as a child.
	It certainly is bad. But as a child, it doesn't permanently alter your physiology.
	I mean, assuming that the beating is not completely psychotic, right?
	But mutilation of the penis is, I mean, it's an assault upon just about the most intimate part of a man's biology and it's permanent.
	And so, yeah, it is, to me, worse, even, because spanking at least has some, you know, oh, well, you know, there's some behavioral modification stuff.
	Like, what the hell is this weird sadism of hacking off babies' penises, half of them?
	I mean, that's just completely strange, completely surreal, and it's one of these things, like, they look back through the tunnel of time in the future, and they'll say, what on earth were you people thinking?
	That's completely bizarre. Can I hit that with a slightly conspiracy theory angle, Anthony?
	Absolutely. Hey, post Epstein, man, there is no such thing as a conspiracy anymore.
	That term is going to be completely discredited.
	So yesterday I went through the full Red Man Group video and I was listening to what Stefan was saying.
	There was something that Stefan said that I don't think people heard.
	Perhaps this is my reinterpretation, correct me if I'm wrong, please, Stefan, was that when you spank children, you're breaking their boundaries in such a way as that means they're more likely to be submissive to state control.
	Did I just hear that? Was that you said?
	Yeah, I mean, very, very briefly, you're bigger than the child.
	So all you're teaching the child is might makes right, and then you wonder why the child becomes a bully when the child gets older.
	You've taught the whole lesson. The biggest person willing to use the most violence gets his way.
	So then the genital mutilation at birth of children, I would say, looks an awful lot like an attempt to bind people psychologically and emotionally to the big, you know, the big state, the big authority figure, you know, you submit or else.
	I mean, originally, this was the type of thing that would be done to genital mutilation was It was done to slaves, historically, before it was done to civilized people in the eyes of the people at that time.
	They would say, okay, you're a slave, you're lesser than me, this is where the genital mutilation comes in.
	It seems to me like it could be a kind of way of binding people to a state submissive mindset.
	Stefan, is there any data on how children come out as adults in terms of their political leanings with regard to spanking and abuse and things like that?
	Ah, that's a good question.
	I don't know. Yeah, so the first thing to recognize, just in general, is that the political spectrum, I mean, it's kind of narrow left, right, it's kind of inhibitory, but, you know, nonetheless, we'll use it as sort of common colloquialism, that political beliefs are significantly genetic.
	And this sort of Democrat, Republican, left, right, Labour, Conservative, and so on, these are genetic battles, as surely as they would be racial battles in some contexts.
	Are you referring to RK selection theory?
	Yeah, well, it's not just the RK selection theory, which I've got a whole series on, which people should definitely check out.
	It's called Gene Wars, G-E-N-E Wars.
	But even among sort of mainstream psychologists, there are massive predictors.
	Of political leanings based upon the genetics of twin studies, you name it, right?
	So that's certainly something that is important to understand.
	I would say that spanking conditions children to...
	Well, both submit to and thirst for authority, right?
	Because if it's basically kill or be killed, well, you want to grab control of the gun in the room.
	And so spanking teaches children that you're either going to get spanked or you're going to be doing the spanking.
	And so that either makes them sort of blindly, dumbly compliant and avoidant of society, because it's just a hit fest, so to speak, or...
	It provokes this bonobo brain, dopamine hunting, sociopathic lust for power, which is like, hey man, if there's going to be hitting into society, I'm not going to be on the receiving end.
	I'm going to be on the dealing end.
	And I think that's where a lot of political ambition comes from.
	So you're saying it basically results in codependency and contradependency.
	Because I think, Richard, that's what that would be called?
	Yes. Yeah, either codependency or counterdependency.
	I was thinking about the effect of hitting in myself and this codependent trait to me, but then there's this abject rejecting of any authority and being rebellious, but in a very, as an infantile defense, in a very infantile way of doing rebellion.
	And I do think I would directly relate that, not just to the hitting, but to the atmosphere of terror in which I was raised.
	So there was hitting, and then there was interrogations, and then there was insinuations, and there was like religious stuff there as well.
	All of that, I think, has a massive impact on how people are going to believe politics should be played out, because it is really, we're just...
	When we're arguing politics, we're only really discussing how should power be used.
	That's it. There isn't really much else there.
	Let me just jump in here real quick, which is to point out something that I think is underappreciated in society as a whole, that the presence of biological fathers is the greatest antidote to child abuse that is known in society.
	So studies are very, very clear on this, that when a non-related Adult male is in the household.
	Children are 40 times, not 40%, 40 times more likely to be physically and or sexually abused.
	Wow. That's called the boyfriend abuser effect.
	And this is so single motherhood where you often will get a whole sort of conveyor belt of low rent trashy guys roaming through the bedroom and snarling at the children in this very sort of wolf pack kind of mentality.
	It is incredibly dangerous.
	I think, as far as I understand it, it is the biggest single risk factor for children is having a non-related biological adult male in the household.
	Not only are children 40 times more likely to be physically or sexually abused, they're 50 times, 50 times more likely to be killed.
	Wow. And so the presence of biologically related males to their children in the household is the greatest protector of children, which is why I say men should embrace their roles as providers and protectors.
	So this is something that the fragmentation of the family, the rise of single motherhood and so on, this is where the snowflake generation comes from.
	This is where the hysterical, reactive, trigger generation comes from.
	First they're dumped in daycares and then often they're preyed upon or abused by men roaming through their single mom's household.
	We've just created a whole generation of incredibly traumatized And, you know, it's a lot easier to break someone than it is to fix them.
	Yeah, and I was going to say too, now we're creating a multi-generational cycle of trauma that's just repeating itself and getting worse over time.
	And obviously we're trying to break that with YouTube channels and media and events and things like that, but it's fucking tough.
	It's tough for the nails. We have a question from one of the viewers here.
	Here it is. Awesome stream, guys.
	This is from Brian Perriera.
	Awesome stream, guys. I would love to hear your thoughts on mother versus father abuse on kids, how they differ, and the varying effects.
	We'll ignore single motherhood and single parenting for a minute and just focus on, you know, a biologically intact family.
	Stefan, do you have thoughts on this or data?
	Well, the data is that women abuse children more than men do.
	Okay. I mean, so that's fairly uncontroversial.
	I mean, there's been some studies where women are hitting their children 5, 10, 12 times a day.
	And what's your theory on the reason for that?
	Is it the inability to properly...
	Let's see, parent or dominate in a non-abusive way.
	Not dominate, but...
	I mean, I can go to...
	Yeah, I can go to... So men in general have a little bit more...
	It's funny because I don't want to say intimidation, like we glower and we growl.
	Our voice is deeper. Yeah, our voice is deeper, being larger.
	See, I mean, as you know, this whole concept of neoteny, that women retain childlike characteristics throughout their life, right?
	They don't lose their hair. They're facially hairless like little boys.
	They have higher voices like children.
	They're smaller just like children.
	So it's harder for little kids to look at moms and differentiate them as clearly from children as children.
	Men, as adult males with deep voices and sometimes facial hair or baldness or physical size and all that kind of stuff.
	And so because men kind of have an implicit authority, you know, the old wait till your father gets home kind of thing, they generally don't have to escalate.
	I mean, I've never raised my voice at my daughter.
	I've never called her a name.
	I've certainly never hit her. Not that my wife has either, of course.
	I'm going to be clear about that.
	But we just have a kind of natural and easy authority.
	And I think there's something else too.
	Because we don't carry the child, this is just speculation, but because we don't carry the child in our womb, women take it much more personally when their children are different from themselves.
	Because this carrying the child in the womb, giving birth to it, breastfeeding, holding it for the first year or two of its life, there's kind of a fusion there, which is very healthy and very appropriate and serves to protect and nurture the child.
	But when the children begin to resist the mother's personality and identity, which is a natural part of growing up and a very healthy part of growing up, the women sometimes take it a little bit more personally than the men.
	And the men are like, yeah, you know, disagree with me.
	Fantastic. Let's learn how to disagree productively and so on.
	Whereas women kind of take it as, well, you're rejecting me.
	You know, like you're not part of me anymore.
	You're against me. And I think that can...
	Serve to escalate.
	And then, of course, you know, particularly, I know we didn't, single moms or divorced moms, this is really bad.
	How is, just talking about the son, how on earth is the son supposed to respect the single mother?
	Because the single mother, there's two possibilities as to why dad ain't around.
	Number one, he was a bad guy.
	He was a bad guy. And okay, if he was a bad guy, then the single mom, when she was far older than the child, made a terrible decision about the most important decision in her life, which is who you have kids with.
	That's the most important decision you're ever going to make.
	So how on earth is the child supposed to respect the mother who chose a bad man to be the father of her children?
	Because clearly she has...
	It's not even bad judgment.
	It's like negative judgment.
	It's catastrophic. It's the opposite of any kind.
	So how on earth is she supposed to teach you how to live when her life is one big advertisement for everything to do that's wrong?
	Or, see, here's the other thing, other possibility.
	He was a good man, and she drove him away, or she left him.
	In which case, I don't know which is worse, it's kind of hard to say, both of them indicate to the child that the single mother, and this could be true for single fathers too, but they're such a tiny percentage, we've got to deal with the majority, that she has such bad decision-making skills.
	That it's inevitable that he's going to turn to the peer group.
	He's going to turn to, perhaps, shady characters on the internet.
	He's going to find some way to get life done.
	Ask YouTubers. Yeah.
	I mean, because when you look at your mom and she's a single mom, you say, well, the only thing you can teach me is how to make disastrous decisions like you.
	I don't want to do that. For me, I bounced off into philosophy, which was a real lifesaver, but you've got to look elsewhere than your household when you have such negative examples in your environment.
	Yeah. I was going to say, too, there was alternatives.
	Like, the father could have died in a fucking car crash or something.
	No, no, that's a widow. No, that's a widow.
	That's not a single mother. Yeah, yeah, no.
	People like to say, oh, she's a single mother, too.
	And it's fundamentally different.
	And that's a very small percentage of how mothers end up single.
	Yeah, you wouldn't want to confuse an accident with a suicide.
	Like, one is willed and one is not.
	And you wouldn't want to confuse a widow with a single mother.
	One is willed and one is not.
	So to be clear, when you're talking about single mothers, you're talking about how her choices were directly related to that happening in her life, or that result.
	Okay. So I wanted to take a step back on this, or continue on this topic, actually.
	So how does childhood abuse and spanking and these things, how does that affect boys and girls differently, independent of which parent or both parents doing it?
	How do little girls and little boys respond to this over time as they develop into teenagers and adults?
	Obviously, men and women are different.
	We have different brains.
	We have different responses to life.
	We have different behavior patterns.
	So how does this happen, or how does this change over time or evolve through childhood, boys and girls?
	Spontane Life Coach, you want to take that one?
	Yeah, I think the stats on this, if I stay within my wheelhouse with the cluster B personality disorders are that you'll have a PTSD style response to the trauma, which will be for men, narcissism, for women, for personality disorder, and histrionic personality disorder, of which there and histrionic personality disorder, of which there are crossovers.
	I think it's a power thing.
	So these children are looking and going, my God, I'm overwhelmed with this authoritarian tyrannical abuse.
	How am I going to regain some kind of power?
	I know I'll withdraw into an infantile, defensive, shame-based story of who I am.
	I'll pretend I'm infinitely beautiful or infinitely sexually desirable or infinitely powerful in other ways, whatever it is, whatever the story is.
	Women will tend to have a story that leans in one direction.
	Men will have a story that leans in another direction.
	So that's probably where you would see it manifest.
	That's why we get higher stats for men with narcissistic personality disorder, higher stats for women with borderline personality disorder.
	Can I get where I want to get by being direct, by being aggressive, or do I need to be covert?
	Do I need to be more manipulative, work behind the scenes, blur the boundaries, that kind of thing.
	So yeah, I think we see it there.
	Well, the other thing too, and this is related to both abuse and father absence, is that our genes aren't done when we're born, right?
	Our genes continue to look at the environment and attempt to adapt ourselves to the greatest or best survival strategy in the environment.
	Now, if you are in a two-parent stable household where people are reasonable, that indicates to your genes that civilization is around you.
	You know, things are predictable.
	You can make plans.
	And what that does is it promotes sexual control, control over your sexuality.
	It promotes the deferral of gratification and impulse control and all these kinds of good things that we kind of need for there to be a society that we can sustain.
	On the other hand, father absence tells Children, boys and girls, that there's probably war or famine or some sort of chaos or some sort of instability, which is, I mean, why would men get killed in general in history?
	Because there's a war. Now, in a war, you have a very different reproductive strategy.
	Which is spray and pray, right?
	This is the R versus K selection, which I've talked about before.
	So if there's father absence, if there's violence, if there's chaos in the environment, you get programmed to be all rabbit and no wolf.
	In other words, you have high aggression, low impulse control, rampant promiscuity, right?
	I mean, because our genes have not adapted to the fact that there's birth control.
	Because that's your best survival strategy.
	When there's random predation and chaos, then your best reproductive strategy is just try and have as many kids as possible, invest into them as little as possible, and just cross your fingers that one of them makes it somehow to adulthood where the cycle repeats.
	And so we have two societies in the West.
	We have the society of the stable middle class household where they're being programmed for civilization.
	And then we have this sort of chaotic single mother of various addicts and promiscuity and often poverty which is programming people for a very, very different kind of society.
	And this tension is really growing in society between the left and the right.
	Yeah. So I want to get to some more viewer questions here.
	One here is from Dalton C. He actually gave a super chat as well a few minutes ago.
	Thanks, Dalton. So his question is, where does the nuclear family versus community come into play?
	For most videos we see on tribes, they all call each other family and even breastfeed different kids and seem to be more healthy and happy.
	What are your thoughts, Stefan and Richard, both on community versus nuclear family in terms of parenting and abuse and things like that?
	How does it even happen, for example?
	Why doesn't a community stop in?
	I feel like today, obviously, your local community is dying off.
	We're not the first people to talk about that.
	But in the past, they used to step in and put a stop to this or push it down.
	Stefan, I'll defer to you.
	All right, all right. I'll have a go after you've done it.
	Okay, so high investment in offspring is what drives evolution, right?
	So if you have tribes, and I haven't heard of these tribes, but, you know, they say it takes a village to satisfy Bill Clinton, sorry, to raise a child.
	And so if you have, well, you know, I'll just breastfeed anyone and it doesn't matter about my own genes, then you're not going to get any particular kind of evolution because there's no positive selection for child investment in your own offspring.
	That's very rare. I mean, in nature, In general, particularly among mammals, you know, the males don't particularly like to invest in other males' offspring because those who do, their genes are going to die out and the other genes offspring.
	So there's this tension, right? So I think that we should focus on our own offspring.
	We should focus on, I mean, again, it's a weird thing to say so.
	Like, if there's some stranger's kid In a boat, that boat is sinking and I can only save one kid and there's my kid in there.
	It's like, hey man, I'm sorry, but that's my kid in there.
	I would expect you to do the same with your kid.
	That's just the way. And the people who are secularists and atheists and people who are into evolution and so on kind of deny this kind of thing.
	Oh, diversity, no problem.
	But the whole point of evolution is you prefer genetic proximity to genetic distance.
	Evolution can't work in any conceivable way without that.
	So they're kind of pillaging a theory to get rid of God While at the same time opposing that theory to promote this rampant multiculturalism.
	So, yeah, I do think that local communities are important.
	We're kind of programmed to deal with 100 to 150 people.
	After that, ideology takes over because we can't keep that many social balls in the air.
	I'd like to see the citation for the tribe where they're breastfeeding other people's kids.
	I've not heard of that.
	There is a little bit of a false dichotomy there, where it's presented as we can either have a community or a nuclear family.
	Where there's been more of a leaning on a nuclear family, it's probably economic.
	It's probably the way we developed consumerism, materialism, individualism.
	People spend more if they're more individualistic.
	The community, as Stefan just said, that's what we're evolved for.
	We're evolved to be tribal.
	We're evolved to know each other within a community.
	I can see a lot of reasons or a lot of ways in which it would be helpful to live in a more community-based society.
	You can take up the slack in child rearing.
	That would probably lead to less stress.
	That would probably lead to less abuse.
	It would also expose the children to more role models, different role models who are experts in different fields of life.
	That seems to be useful.
	But a lot of it is freeing up the parents, the biological parents' time and stress levels so that they're less likely To engage in spanking, which I would suspect in the real world is more about impatience and frustration than it is about actual discipline, teaching some moral truth.
	I don't think it happens like that very often.
	I think it's usually just frustration.
	I haven't got the mental or psychological resources for this.
	I'm going to hit you. There's also the elephant in the room is what happened to the extended family.
	We talk about the nuclear family, we talk about the local community, what happened to grandparents, uncles, cousins, aunts, things like that.
	I did a stream with DDJ earlier this year, or late last year, not too long ago on my channel.
	And it was the fall of the extended family.
	How this too has gotten, you know, killed off.
	And in some ways, it's even more important than your nuclear family.
	And it might not take a village to raise a child, but it does usually take and helps a lot to have people around you, family that you can trust, people related by blood, people that show your genetic legacy or some component of it.
	Well, I mean, that's peak boomer, right?
	Peak boomer is the 60s generation and sort of thereon.
	Follow your bliss, man.
	Be a hedonist. Don't let anything interfere with your pleasure.
	If you want to go get a job, dump your kids in daycare.
	Don't really focus on the quality of the kids' education and just follow your own thing.
	You want to move to get a new job and more pay, just move.
	It doesn't matter what your kids need or their circle of friends or anything like that.
	Just focus on your own pleasure and drag everyone's misery along behind you like...
	Dead rats tied to a kite, you know?
	I mean, this peak boomer stuff, right?
	And so the extended family, you know, my daughter grows up, she has kids and so on.
	I'll just move to where she is.
	I want to spend time with my grandkids, you know?
	I mean, just find a way to...
	It's not even a sacrifice in my mind, you know?
	Yeah, of course. So now the blowback is happening to the boomers where the boomers are getting old and the kids are saying, well, we don't have any real connections, so I'll just put you in a home.
	And the boomers are like, well, that's terrible!
	And it's like, well, yeah, but...
	You did it to me when I was six months old, so I think it's fair to do it when you're 70, because you have had a whole life to show me who you are, but you did it to me before I was even formed.
	So we have another question from a viewer that I think is worth taking here, and that's from Charles Van Dusen.
	Can you guys discuss how it was that the ancient philosophers thought it best to raise children?
	I recall an extensive dialogue between Plato and Socrates basically enumerated how Greek society should do so.
	I know both of you are fans of Greek philosophy, as far as I know.
	So to both of you, that's open.
	I wouldn't claim enough expertise in Greek philosophy of child rearing to have too much intelligence to say.
	Okay. Rich?
	Yeah, no, me neither.
	Because... It's a great topic, though.
	It really is. It's a fantastic topic.
	I don't know about...
	And I've not read that. I've not read the advice given on child rearing or anything like that from a Greek standpoint.
	I can tell you how the Spartans did it, and we can have a full...
	That we know. That we know....in how to abuse kids thoroughly and to murder a psychopath.
	But... That's probably outside the realms of this.
	Well, you are the Spartan life coach, so let's go.
	So let's move on back to the Manosphere a little bit.
	Stefan, you have some familiarity with the Manosphere, obviously.
	You're obviously aware of the Pickup Artist community, the Red Pill community, the MGTOWs, obviously the Men's Rights too.
	The Manosphere itself is this large, loosely organized collection of men now, these different groups.
	Do you have thoughts on how the single motherhood generation and childhood abuse and spanking and feminism, the rise of feminism over the past several decades, how this has affected and resulted in the formation of this large online community of men, the numbers in the millions?
	For example, the pickup artist community is known for not just picking up women, but at least trying to help men understand social skills, dating skills, sexual skills.
	Why do these men lack that by the millions?
	Just to focus on them, never mind the MGTOWs who are in much higher numbers, leaving the sexual marketplace and dating marketplace completely.
	How does childhood abuse and spanking and these things, how does that affect young men becoming men or growing up into young men and then being dysfunctional in these ways?
	You know, the sex it is, all this stuff.
	Well, so... I think it all circulates around this central concept of the demon female.
	Now, the demon female is not that all females are demons.
	Of course, I'm happily married. I have a wonderful daughter and so on.
	But women's capacity for evil, which used to be very well known throughout society.
	I mean, think of Medea killing her own children.
	You know, the vagina dentata.
	Think of taming of the shrew.
	So women's capacity for evil...
	Well, I mean, think of Eve, for heaven's sakes, right?
	So women's capacity for evil used to be well-known and balanced things in society.
	Now, with rank sentimentalism and feminism coming along, women were always portrayed as victims, and now it's metastasized into a genuine psychological phenomenon called, women are wonderful!
	Women are always wonderful.
	Women are always great. They're always thoughtful and caring and nurturing.
	And if anything bad happens, they're always bleating victims, being towered over by some nasty Neanderthal man specimen, right?
	So we've lost the capacity to recognize women's capacity for evil.
	Now that is a very, very bad thing in society because if women can't do any wrong, then all of the wrongs in society must accrue to men.
	And if all the wrongs in society must accrue to men, but men are not responsible for all the wrongs in society, then men are being given a Sisyphean task that they can't achieve, which is to rid the world of evil or to break the cycle of violence.
	And so because we've lost what Jung would call the shadow, right?
	Our own capacity for immorality.
	Solzhenitsyn talked about this, of course.
	It's a very, very important part of modern psychological literature.
	That if we completely deny, to go back to Spartan Life Coach's point, narcissism believes that they can't ever do anything wrong, so they end up doing a whole lot of wrong.
	Because they could just justify everything they do.
	If it's impossible for me to do wrong, it's sort of like saying, well, it's impossible for me to eat badly, so I unearth what I need, the science of nutrition.
	And so we've lost our capacity to recognize that women are as capable of great evils, of great immoralities, as men are.
	And so we've completely lopsided the conversation.
	We've provoked both guilt and helplessness in men.
	Guilt because men feel, or they're told, we're responsible for all the world's evils.
	And helplessness because we're denying the demonic female and therefore we can't fix society.
	Any more than, you know, if you've got a big plank that takes two people to lift and you try and lift one end of it, you can't lift it off the ground because you're missing the other half.
	And so by demonizing men and turning women into angels, we've completely broken our capacity to break the cycle of violence.
	And this is why violence in the family remains such a core issue.
	Because once we start to understand that women are human beings, women have a wonderful side, they have a dark side, they have a good side, they have an evil side, they're as tempted into as great a set of immoralities as men, We can't have a productive conversation because it's pretty narcissistic for women to just say, well, we're always perfect and anything that goes wrong is the man's fault.
	And you see this in online debates all the time.
	You can see this on my Twitter feed, right?
	I point out something about women and what's the first thing you hear?
	Well, what about men? And it's like, hey, man, we've been talking about men for the last 50 years.
	What Cassie J said in her interview about the red pills, a great documentary people should check out.
	She said, you know, can we talk about men's issues for five?
	No! We cannot talk about men's issues, men's vulnerabilities.
	We can't talk about high male suicide rates.
	We can't talk about how divorce courts destroy men.
	We can't talk about high male death rates in dangerous occupations.
	We can't talk about male depression or anxiety.
	We can't talk about any of that because Women are wonderful and anything bad that happens to men is all men's fault.
	And that is a pathological place to pretend to have a discussion.
	Yeah, and I've seen this, you know, in real life countless times.
	When I wear my hat, you know, Make Women Great Again, when people actually realize it's not a MAGA hat, it's a Make Women Great Again hat, a lot of them are shocked, especially women.
	Women are all great, all great, all great.
	Yeah, are women already great? Why are they not great?
	I'm like, yeah, I have criticisms.
	Like, are you okay with that? And they can't deal with it.
	You know, even if I don't say anything, I just stare at them.
	They just cannot fucking deal with it.
	And it's so sexist, sorry to interrupt, it's so sexist to say men can handle being foundationally criticized for well over half a century.
	But you point out that lipstick is sexually manipulative on the part of women and everybody loses their minds!
	Yeah. It's extremely narcissistic to have that split between angels and demons.
	Men are infinitely evil.
	Women are infinitely good.
	They're blameless. You must never say anything about them.
	And I'd never thought about it that way before, but actually what we've done societally is engaged in splitting.
	So we're going, everything that is bad, project that into men.
	Everything that is good, preserve that in women.
	Of course you're going to end up with men completely frustrated, completely lost.
	As Stefan just said, the double binders, men are told, eradicate evil in the world.
	And then we say to men, do you want to know where the evil is?
	It's in you, mate. You're the problem.
	So then what do they do?
	They're depressed, they're frustrated, they're anxious, they have no place.
	They can't move forward because they're stuck in this double bind.
	They end up shooting up schools, man.
	Yeah, I mean, they're told their whole life, they're screamed at, that they're demonic, violent pieces of shit.
	Surprise, none of the father around, they end up shooting up a school or doing some other crazy shit.
	Yeah. Well, here's the thing, too.
	I mean, when you say that women are wonderful, The great female weakness is vanity.
	The great male weakness is status and aggression.
	Status and aggression is the great male weakness.
	But not to say that status is bad or aggression is always bad and so on.
	But that's where we have our greatest susceptibility.
	That's why we can be goaded into this heroic war fighting for useless ends.
	But women's great weakness is vanity.
	And so when men get pumped up for status and aggression, we really have to be careful of that because that's how we can be manipulated by the elites, right?
	But for women it's vanity.
	And you can see this all over the place when you look at this, that when do women ever say, oh, come on, stop blowing smoke up my ass.
	We're not that, like, come on.
	Now you're manipulating me.
	This almost never seems to happen.
	And so we have to remind women, listen, you have a weakness, and that weakness is called vanity.
	And it's used to control you.
	And by putting all of the ills on men, And all of the virtues on women, the elites, the media, you name it, they are robbing you of your capacity for love and connection and commitment and succor and comfort and companionship in your old age.
	So you can be pumped full of vanity and you can be told that you're wonderful and everything that's twigs and berries is the root of all evil.
	There's no Eve, there's only Satan and he's male.
	Then you get robbed of your capacity to love men.
	You can't love men if you're good and they're evil.
	If you're always a victim and they're always participating in rape culture, they rob you of love.
	They rob you of the greatest treasure that we have, which is connection and children and family and community.
	So yeah, you can feel wonderful because everyone's blowing smoke up your ass, women, and telling you that you're all wonderful, you never do anything wrong, and if anything wrong happens, it's the man's fault, right?
	You know the old thing in an infidelity situation?
	You know, if the man is unfaithful, it's because he's a bad man.
	And if the woman is unfaithful, it's because the man wasn't fulfilling her emotional needs and he's a bad man.
	We all know this. So women can get all of this vanity and they can be controlled and manipulated through their vanity And they lose the greatest treasures in life, and what do they get?
	A box of cats that is going to eat them after they die.
	The kingdom of cats.
	I actually saw a study, too, about a year ago, and I think it's still a topic that continues.
	Alcoholism is skyrocketing for women in their 50s, which is no surprise.
	We're probably going to see that dip in women in their 40s along with psychiatric medications, too.
	Yeah, they're called wine aunts, right?
	Especially the childless women.
	You know, hey, wait a minute.
	My peak sexual market value doesn't survive menopause.
	It's like... Surprise.
	It's such a shame though, isn't it?
	Because they're bound into this toxic ideology.
	They're fed that for life and there's no safety net afterwards.
	They're just abandoned to it. They're like, well, I thought it was infinitely good, infinitely beautiful and perfect.
	Where have I gone wrong?
	It's like, no, you didn't. You didn't go wrong.
	You were lied to your whole life.
	And wresting that ideology from women is really hard.
	Yeah, they went wrong by accepting the lie.
	Like, there is some responsibility there.
	They were lied to and they're not responsible for that.
	I'm 31 years old. I'm not responsible for the existence of feminism.
	But I am responsible in my youth for accepting these kind of lies that I was told by society and things like that.
	And it's hard to see through that, especially when you're young and you've been, you know, if you didn't have, like, a strong family culture around you, positive parents, healthy parenting and stuff.
	Yeah, it's in the culture as a whole.
	But the other thing too, of course, is that the pickup artistry community is kind of a feminist factory as well.
	Because the pickup artist community, by pursuing the pump and dump mechanism, is just creating a lot of bitter women who hate men.
	And then they're just creating this open wound through which the virus of feminism can infect the female nature.
	I don't like the pump and dump stuff.
	You know, I have a daughter. Don't do it to my daughter, man.
	I'll find you. I will find you.
	And, you know, because, you know, we're not just, you know, the old line about Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.
	Tennessee Williams described him as a gaudy seed bearer.
	And it's like, you know, he's just this, but he's committed.
	He's, you know, he's got a wife.
	He's got a kid on the way.
	You know, provision and protection is not just about dropping your load in random holes in the world.
	You know, that's not healthy and that's not good for men and it's really, really bad for women.
	Before we move on, there's a couple of viewer questions, including a super chat I want to get to.
	Rich, you've been talking with me and observing the manosphere for a while now, and you first spoke recently at the 21 convention, the manosphere summit of the world, right, in Poland.
	So what are your thoughts on childhood abuse and the resulting, you know, CPTSD and trauma and things like that, resulting in the formation of the manosphere over the past, say, 20 years, since the late 90s?
	Do you think there's a connection there?
	And what have you seen by observing me and the speakers and what we do in relation to what you do?
	You want me to talk about your psychological profile, Anthony?
	Ooh, I can stay for another hour.
	Let's open Pandora's box.
	That's right. Let me get volume four of my notes.
	Rich Granin has been super helpful on a personal level to me in my life.
	Coming out of the relationship or the marriage I had years ago, as well as the whole childhood of extreme domestic violence and all kinds of crazy shit.
	He's one of the best guys I've ever found for that.
	And I'm so sorry for that, Anthony.
	I feel for you, brother.
	That is a hell of a thing to go through.
	I'm really, really sorry about that.
	Thanks. On the positive side, I've built this entire company in response to it, so there you go.
	I wouldn't be as good a parent if I didn't have as bad a mom.
	That's just the weird thing that happens in life.
	It's like that, isn't it? I mean, I wouldn't bother doing what I do if I hadn't felt that kind of pain and suffering and feeling trapped and imprisoned in childhood.
	Yeah, most people, like, they have a fork like this, right?
	It's like, and it ends up, like, this is good and evil, right?
	So most people, if they don't have a lot of trauma when they're kids, they have a fork like this, and it's kind of easy to miss the turnoff, right?
	It's kind of easy to, oh, well, you know, I can still see this side from this side, and eventually, we have forks like this, right?
	It's like this way or this way.
	There's no thing we're going to be, you get horns or feathered wings.
	There's nothing if you're angel or devil.
	That's your only choice, man.
	And it's like, okay, well, that sucks.
	But it's not that complicated a choice to make.
	Whereas this kind of goofy stuff where you chisel away stuff, you know, it's the boiling frog thing, you know, so I don't know.
	It's kind of like I don't want the abuse, but I kind of want to give people that fork in the road stuff before it's too late.
	It's very unambiguous for us.
	Very unambiguous. You're given a great opportunity and it can go really positive or really bad.
	I like the way you put it last time, Stefan, in the Redman group.
	You said people go through really rough childhoods, you come out gods or devils.
	And I never heard that before. I thought that was really good.
	But Rich, to give you a little more direction and juice to the question too, and the manister I've seen, I've been a part of it for 13 years now, literally in my entire adult life since I was 17 years old, still a teenager.
	I've been involved with it almost every day on a personal level as well as a business level.
	What I've seen over the years, whether it's the pickup artist community or the Red Poe community, the two that I'm most familiar with of the four major groups, any discussion of childhood abuse and parenting and these kinds of things, it gets immediately disregarded and disrespected.
	It's not a serious topic.
	Man up, shut up. It's not a big deal.
	Get over it. It was in the past.
	All these things. The knee-jerk response is really strong to it, basically, regardless of what the focus of that particular sub-community is.
	So I just kind of want to hear you speak about what your thoughts are in relation to the atmosphere.
	There's a line, I think, from the last Christopher Nolan Batman movie where somebody's trying to take out Bruce Wayne.
	And they say to him, so you're trying to take out a guy who's a multi-millionaire martial arts expert vigilante who beats people up for a living?
	Really? And the guy's like, actually, yeah, that's not such a good idea.
	So I'm aware within this community that there are serious So I will moderate my response.
	I have a lot to say, but I've genuinely, genuinely been concerned.
	Like, I'm like, okay, I better be careful with this.
	So what I've seen is sliding off the scale from borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder.
	It's a full blown psychopathy.
	That's the part of the community that concerns me.
	So you asked how does it relate to childhood trauma?
	I've seen evidence of guys in the community who clearly have antisocial personality disorder.
	They're only within the community to express childhood trauma, create chaos, and stop other people from recovering.
	Now, the red pill community in the manosphere doesn't exist to use words like recovery and healing.
	But that's what they need, essentially.
	That's what a lot of it should be, is about recovery from pain, recovery from trauma, and healing from abuse.
	There's nobody there who hasn't been really badly hurt at some point in their lives.
	I can see it. Even with your speakers, they're excellent at this, they're excellent at that.
	They're exceeding, they're at elite levels for, you name it, all kinds of weird and wonderful things.
	You don't do that unless you're highly motivated, and that's usually the pain in childhood.
	Yeah, I can say in particular that the red pill community, more than the others, it's a result of men.
	Men find it as a result of toxic relationships, specifically the cluster Bs, things like that, which is eventually how I found it.
	I gave a speech on my experience with that on YouTube and stuff now.
	And one of the audience members actually that saw live wanted me to find this community immediately in response to the ideas I was kind of tackling and Sure.
	or cluster B personality disorders.
	But yeah, manosphere ones and particularly the red pill I think that's a higher percentage of that.
	So, we can get to some questions here from the audience again.
	There was a super chat I wanted to hit.
	Where did that go?
	Sorry, whilst you're looking for a question, the thing I wanted to add to that is the resentment towards women as just an idea of women What? That is an elephant in the room.
	We're not allowed to talk about it, Rich. What are you talking about?
	That doesn't exist, dude.
	Right. Yeah, exactly.
	And that's where the ideology started to frighten me a little bit, because it felt, at times, at the red pill end of the swimming pool, Stalinistic.
	There are certain words you can't use, you'll be denounced, you'll be accused of failing purity tests, of being a heretic against the orthodoxy, then you're due to be burned at the stake, and it's like, wow, guys, aren't we men together, you know, like brotherhood, and help each other out here, have a sense of humour, you know, be cheerful?
	I didn't get that vibe from them at all.
	Well, I mean, this is one of the big challenges.
	I think it's Warren Farrell's statement.
	He's got many great statements, and one of them is, a woman's strength is her pretense of weakness.
	A woman's strength is her pretense of weakness.
	A man's weakness is his pretense of strength.
	Oh, that's good. You can ponder that for a week, and it's a very, very powerful statement that he makes.
	And it's hard for a man to say, I've really been harmed by women.
	And there's reasons for that, sort of historical and all of that.
	But first of all, it's not women in particular.
	It's women plus the state.
	It's not women like, power corrupts everyone.
	And the fact that we've thought that women are angels and women's uniting their power, their voting block, their voting base, their extended lifespan, voting length, Uniting female sexual and romantic power and nagging power.
	Of course, you know, a young woman gets what she wants through sexual attraction often and an older woman gets it through nagging often.
	Not always the case. I'm in a nag-free marriage and all that, but it happens.
	But you unite women's romantic power with their voting power.
	And that is the big problem, and this is why I focus on reducing state power.
	We won't know what female nature is in a state of freedom until we can decouple femininity from the power of the state.
	And the only way to do that is to reduce the size and power of the state.
	Because women, their negative behavior, their tendency towards abuse or nagging and so on, was limited By the fact that if they got divorced in the past, well, oftentimes they didn't get much, right?
	If anything. And so women had to choose well, and they had to provide value in a marriage.
	And so did men. Please understand me.
	This is not a one-sided thing, right?
	Now, the fact that women can gain access to male resources through the power of the state, rather than being a boon companion in a man's life journey, has corrupted them.
	It has turned what used to be more of a free market relationship between the genderists into communism, into socialism.
	Now, if you're in socialism, you get paid whether you produce anything or not.
	You get paid whether you show up or not.
	You get paid whether you're good at your job or bad at your job.
	So why on earth would you go the extra mile?
	You get the resources anyway.
	And women don't have to provide much value to society other than voting once every couple of years in order to get the precious resources out of the man's wallet at the point of a gun held by the state.
	And specifically, you mean both like welfare queens, like single mothers who are, you know, deliberately abusing the system, getting as much stuff as they can, as well as things like divorce court that are a little bit separated from voting, but are still systemically biased against men and fathers.
	And government employment.
	And government employment.
	And if you look at government workers, you know, in particular sectors, it looks like your average HR department, right?
	I mean, I worked briefly at the Department of Education in Canada, in the Canadian city, and there were like two guys.
	And it was like a sort of a taxpayer teat-sucking coven as far as the eye could see.
	And so this whole propping up female income through laws that forbid any kind of differentiation between males and females despite the fact that women go off and have kids and sometimes don't come back and women don't work as many hours and don't have as much testosterone and all these kinds of things which make women wonderful but not always as productive as men in the economic sphere.
	So you've got all of these government laws propping up female income, and the purpose of that is obviously to buy votes, but it's also to draw women out of the household into the workforce so that the children can be separated from the parents and programmed by the state.
	I mean, this is just population control 101.
	separate children from the parents and have them thrown into state institutions where they can be subject to propaganda and drag queen dances.
	I mean, this is basic.
	And of course, the other thing too, drawing women into the workforce with artificially high wages also drives down wages for men.
	Because when women all swarmed into the workforce, all they did was supply and demand.
	They depressed wages for men.
	And of course, they were a tax base that hugely profited the state, right?
	Stay-at-home moms don't pay taxes.
	But if a woman goes to work, then she consumes more, she pays taxes while she's at work, and also you have to pay taxes or income to pay for the people who are taking care of the children who aren't the parents.
	And so it's a huge clusterfract that benefits the elite and, again, feeds into the vanity of women.
	Did I just hear some Battlestar Galactica terminology here?
	Yeah, I have imbibed both theories, although I didn't finish a second.
	But yeah, so this kind of stuff is really, really important.
	We're not looking at female nature in the current system.
	It's like looking at the work ethic in a communist country and saying, well, those people are just lazy.
	It's like, no, they're not lazy. They're just responding like we all do, most of us do, to particular incentives.
	So thinking that female nature is somehow defined by the current incredibly corrupt System is unjust and unfair.
	Again, it's like calling Cuban factory workers lazy because they don't seem to want to, you know, do overtime.
	It's not the case. The system is wrong.
	Stefan, I have a specific question.
	Is it your opinion that welfare for single mothers and children and things like this, is it harmful to children and that it enables single mothers and women everywhere to make bad decisions and to, you know, disregard consequences for those decisions?
	Or it basically offsets them is how I see it.
	Well, with regards to the welfare state, we can certainly argue consequences.
	But the problem with consequences is you can always find someone who's benefiting from it, and reasonably so.
	The question with the welfare state, again, goes right back to the beginning of our conversation, Anthony, which is the non-aggression principle.
	How is the welfare state funded?
	Well, you point guns at people, take their money, and hand it over to buy votes.
	And so thou shalt not steal, kind of foundational to any moral ethical system.
	And so we can argue with facts, but that gets murky and complex.
	The moral cause is just wrong.
	Like, I don't care what you do with the $500 you stole from me.
	Like, I don't care if you use it to buy drugs or give it to charity.
	You stole it from me. So talking about the effects gets all complicated and there's lots of counterexamples and you end up with a bell curve and, you know, the principles.
	It's like, thou shalt not steal.
	Cool. Let's get to some of the viewer questions.
	This was a $10 Super Chat from Darius Thurman.
	How should a young man who was abandoned by his father and has developed a void and attachment style cure his transient sense of self-worth and constant need for validation?
	How does he become secure?
	Well, first of all, you'd recognize that it's not that you were abandoned by your father.
	That, again, earlier, all the problems are defined as male problems, right?
	You were not abandoned by your father.
	That certainly happened, but you're missing the foundational part of the equation, my friend, which is that your mother chose a man who abandoned his Their children.
	Your mother chose a man who abandoned their children.
	Listen, we don't need any more pressure to look at bad actions of men.
	We've had that hammered into us like nails into a palm for the past 50, 60 years.
	So we don't need more characterizations of Bad men.
	You know, if you have a seesaw and there's like 50 pounds of rocks or 50 tons of rocks on one side, you've got to start putting some rocks on the other side.
	People say, well, what about this side?
	It's like, well, this side already has 50 tons of rocks on it.
	We've got to put some on the other side to balance it out.
	So I am for maximum female responsibility at the moment.
	Maximum female responsibility.
	Look, we all know how the game works.
	Men ask women out and women get to choose from any number of waving penises that are floating around.
	She can grab, you know, it's like somebody in the Titanic and they've got like 600 pieces of wood around them.
	If they drown, it's their own fault.
	Get out, right? And so women have, like, it's this weird Madame Tussauds world, right?
	Like, the penis forest, you know?
	Like, the penis farm.
	You can just go and choose, you know, just about any penis.
	And you have...
	It's a seller's market if you are young and have a vagina.
	And so... You know, if I only have one job offer and I gotta eat, okay, I'll just take that job.
	If I've got 200 job offers, it's incumbent upon me to choose wisely if I have more choice.
	So I am for maximum female responsibility at the moment.
	So did your father abandon you?
	Absolutely. Is he responsible for that?
	He sure is. But who's the most responsible?
	Your mom. For choosing a guy who abandoned you.
	And all that we focus is on the abandonment.
	And you didn't say anything about your mom in there.
	Focus on your mother.
	And that, because otherwise you're just focusing on everything that men do wrong.
	You're a man. You're going to internalize that and you can feel like crap.
	And don't do it, man.
	Focus on female responsibility.
	Hey, they wanted equality.
	I'm giving it to them. Yeah, what it sounds like to me is you're telling him to focus on what's being hidden from him in the world right now.
	Yeah, he knows his father abandoned him.
	What he's missing is the female engineering of that situation.
	I even mean to socially and culturally, like, we're told to just completely ignore and avoid at all costs any discussion of female responsibility.
	Like, calling a woman a deadbeat mother is just, like, heinous right now.
	Whereas deadbeat fathers you see literally on billboards in America and stuff like that.
	Well, you know, war is characterized as a male endeavor, but female rulers throughout history have started more wars per capita than men ever have.
	So again, it's just one of these sad things.
	And women are part of the cycle of violence, and they're foundational to the cycle of violence.
	Because women raise children.
	You've got single moms. You've got dads working.
	You've got primary school teachers.
	The vast majority of them are women.
	Most boys who don't have a father in the house don't meet a male authority figure until they're in junior high or high school.
	So now we're talking the women control the environment of the children for at least the first 10 years of most children's lives.
	And then women say, well, the world is terrible.
	You know, it's bizarre.
	I mean, if I'm the farmer, do I get to blame my crops for not growing right?
	It's ridiculous. Women want all this control over childhood.
	Okay, fine. I don't agree with it, but you've got it.
	Then stop complaining about the world that you made!
	If I carve a statue and I say, well, this statue is incomprehensibly ugly, I don't know what happened, people would look at me like I was insane!
	So women complaining about the world when women create the world?
	Come on! It's like they're gaslighting themselves.
	There's gaslighting. Rich, do you have any thoughts on this, Rich?
	Yeah, I think, given the context of when this conversation has taken place, there are psychological solutions to this, but also from a philosophical point of view, to see things clearly, to see the truth as it is, and to accept it all, as Stefan and Anthony just said, you've got to look at what is not there.
	So you've framed the question in a certain way, and there's things missing from the terrain, Once you've seen the terrain fully, you've got a much better chance of having a full recovery.
	You want to secure, attachly, attach securely, safely, sorry, to a partner.
	We all want that for you. Every man sat here is like, great mate, please do that.
	You're only going to be able to do that once you've recovered from the pain that you're already experiencing because you're going to end up projecting and it's going to skew your perspectives.
	So actually seeing the situation as it is is going to help.
	Having a good philosophical stance on this, being able to think critically, critique your own thoughts, critique your own thinking, your own decision making, your selection process is going to be very, very important in the years ahead.
	Last thing I wanted to mention, sorry for jumping in again, but...
	People, men say they don't trust women, and that's not the accurate statement.
	The accurate statement is you don't trust your judgment of women.
	There are good women out there, and there are bad women out there.
	If you can differentiate between the two, then you can trust women.
	It's not whether, because if you can't trust women because you don't know how to differentiate a good woman from a bad woman, then you're going to say, well, women are untrustworthy.
	It's like, no, no, no, no, it's your judgment that is untrustworthy.
	And I said this to a woman, she said, I don't trust men.
	It's like, no, you don't trust your judgment of men.
	Because if women or men are just bad, then you're helpless.
	Again, you're helpless and powerless and you can't get love and you can't have a family and you can't maintain civilization and you can't give the gift of life that was bestowed upon you by the universe.
	It's terrible. If you learn how to differentiate a good woman from a bad woman, a good man from a bad man, then you can trust Not a gender in abstract, but specific individuals and their own moral qualities.
	And then you get the aforementioned love and family and continuation of the four billion year journey of life itself.
	With that said, I want to move on to some of my original questions here from before the show.
	So how does childhood abuse affect long-term pair bonding and mate selection?
	Specifically in men, let's focus on men.
	Man is fear or not. Like how do men who are abused and grow up in these kind of really traumatic environments, how do they end up choosing mates and things like this?
	How does pair bonding affect?
	We just talked about attachment disorder and things like that.
	But any further thoughts on that?
	SLC, go.
	Sounds like your lingo land.
	It is my lingo land. That's a big topic.
	So you would end up with a propensity towards a certain, because it's a highly traumatic environment, childhood abuse is you facing being beaten or questioned by or shouted at by this huge god.
	It has a massive impact on the central nervous system.
	Like NPDs, NPDs end up with BPDs a lot of the time, right?
	If I'm not mistaken. They do, 100% because more, I think more so, see we talk about it in the narcissistic abuse community as though there's, you know, codependence with narcissistic people and actually cluster bees end up together with each other because it's repetition compulsion.
	They're the victims of childhood abuse.
	They want to play that out with their partner.
	Some days they'll be the predator.
	Some days they'll be the prey.
	That tends to be the thick end of the wedge.
	You respond in a primary biological way.
	You will either tend towards fighting, fawning, freezing, or flighting, running away.
	That's how it's going to manifest in your adulthood.
	Yeah, if you think that abuse is somehow endemic to the human condition, you'll end up repeating it.
	Right? I mean, if you think that a woman has to be a mammal, you're going to end up dating mammals.
	I mean, just by definition, right?
	So what you have to do is you have to denormalize the abuse that you suffered.
	But that's a hard thing to do because then you have to say, my parents did some pretty evil stuff.
	And that's hard.
	We're wired to bond with our parents.
	In history, if your parents didn't like you, they'd leave you on a freaking iceberg or something, or just wouldn't give you enough food, or just abandon you in the forest.
	So we bond with our parents.
	So the challenge of denormalizing abuse means that we have to run right up against the most primal gods of our entire existence, which is our parents when we're young.
	And we have to say, you know what, my mom, my dad, they did some really evil stuff.
	They may not be irredeemably evil.
	Maybe I can talk to them. I hope that people can talk to their parents about this kind of stuff and achieve some kind of resolution.
	But you have to call a spade a spade.
	You have to call immorality immorality.
	You have to clearly separate it from morality.
	That gives you choice about who you date in the future.
	You know, if everyone's abusive and your parents are just doing the best they could with the knowledge they had and they had the best of intentions and so on, you can't ever find a good person because you've just defined them out of existence.
	Any more than you can say, well, I'm only going to date women with three heads.
	Okay, well, just be a monk, right? So if all people are corrupt, if female nature is evil, if men are just predators and rape girls, then you've just defined your capacity to find a good partner right out of existence.
	So you have to go through that valley of the shadow of death, of ascribing moral responsibility to your parents who may have done some really, really bad stuff.
	Once you go through that process, then you can open up the possibility of finding someone better.
	Yeah, what you're just saying, like the shadow of the valley of death and all that, it reminds me of a grieving process.
	When some traumatic event happens, it's almost like men, and even women too, they come out of these childhoods, they're stuck in a grieving process.
	They make rationalizations and excuses for their parents.
	They say how they did the best they could, you have to be okay with that, all this bullshit.
	And sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't.
	And sometimes you don't, people get really upset with because there's blood ties.
	Well, you learn a lot about society.
	If you criticize your parents in a foundational moral fashion, which is necessary for progress, you find out a lot of ugly stuff about society and its collusion with parents in child abuse.
	Because why do parents abuse children?
	Because they can get away with it.
	And why can they get away with it?
	Because they know, they know for damn well certain that society, when you grow up, is going to rush to their defense and abuse and ostracize you for questioning the ethics of your parents.
	They rely upon this massive groundswell of support and enablement for child abusers.
	And that you are going to be the one attacked for pointing out that your parents were abusive if they were abusive.
	And as long as we continue to enable that, all we're doing is subsidizing evil.
	And then whatever you subsidize, you get more of it.
	Yep. Richard, do you have something?
	Yeah, just what Stefan's just said, I think, is a very, very nuanced point.
	Not everybody's going to get it the first time around.
	They're going to have to go back and listen to it again.
	You're talking about, here, what we're talking about is the individual having the sovereignty to be able to say, that is evil.
	And to those of you watching who didn't experience Charles Ijibushka, well, Why can't you do that?
	If it's a fundamental law in the environment in which you're raised, when you're a child, you're a primitive, you're this primal little creature, you will never question your mother and father, ever.
	You'll hold it till death.
	So I'll be wrestling with clients in the psychic plane going, give me the judgment of your father.
	Tell me he's a piece of shit.
	And they'll go, no, he didn't mean it.
	He did the best he could.
	And I'm like, if you hold that, you're going to drown.
	Well, You know, blub, blub, blub, blub, because I'm not letting go of it.
	It's really important.
	Why do people hold on to it though?
	I have a suspicion it's because if they can say, my father was actually a piece of shit.
	He wasn't a very nice guy.
	They lose him. I'm taking daddy away.
	You're taking daddy away and I don't want to lose.
	I'd rather live a horrible life or a life that doesn't go anywhere than lose mommy or daddy.
	Because that was your entire fundamental experience of fatherhood.
	It's horizontal, too, because you start saying, if I say my mother did some really evil stuff, then everyone around you blames you and defends her, which reveals the caustic...
	Corruption of the people around you.
	And it's not so much that you want to lose your dad.
	I mean, that's important.
	I don't want to downplay that.
	But it's also like you don't want to reveal the natures of the people around you who are going to rush to the defense of someone who abused you and escalate the abuse against you for bringing up such a taboo topic.
	You don't want to turn the light on and see where you're actually living.
	It's much better to live in dream world for a lot of people, at least in the short run.
	Nice. I have a question here that I think will be a lot of fun.
	A lot of fun for us anyway to discuss.
	And that's a fun to be to grow up around.
	So we're talking about spanking.
	We've been talking about circumcision, obviously, you know, domestic violence, any kind of childhood abuse and stuff that's physical.
	But what about nonviolent abuse, things like emotional neglect, and other forms of, say, let's call it passive abuse, for lack of a better term right now, I'm coming up with.
	How serious is non-peaceful parenting, so spanking and things like that, compared to less obvious forms of abuse that some people, especially if they didn't grow up around it, would not even regard as abuse?
	They would say, oh, that's life, you know, whatever.
	People get in fights and arguments and they neglect their children sometimes, just deal with it.
	I think that outside of sexual abuse, neglect is about the worst.
	And we know that because children will act up even to get negative attention from their parents.
	It's better to have a negative bond than no bond.
	Because you can find a way to wrestle through a negative bond and transform it into a positive bond.
	But no bond?
	Neglect? You know?
	So a way to look at it is like this.
	So imagine that you get captured by some psycho and you're like lowered into a lotion in the basket well in the ground or something like that.
	And you can't feed yourself and you can't get your own water.
	Would you rather get food and water and abuse or be completely ignored by the guy who's put you in a hole in the ground?
	Well, you'd rather get food and water and abuse because you could survive that.
	But if the guy ignores you, you're going to die.
	If he completely ignores you, right?
	Because he's removed all other capacity for you to get food or water.
	And it's the same. Childhood is a prison.
	I mean, it's an inevitable prison.
	There's nothing immoral about it.
	But when my daughter, like she's older now, but when she was like, you don't have anywhere to go, what's she going to do?
	Uber up to some other place and, you know, hang out with Drake?
	I mean, come on, it's not going to happen.
	She's stuck in my house and she's stuck with me and she didn't choose either.
	That's just a reality. Childhood is a prison.
	And again, it's not a bad thing.
	It's just an inevitable consequence, right?
	So if you are ignored by your parents and you're trapped with your parents, which we all are when we're very little in particular, that's really harmful.
	It's really harmful. It's the difference between if you teach a child curse words versus don't teach them any language at all.
	The second is worse because then you grow up feeling like an alien in your own country.
	And the other thing, too, is that if parents neglect their children, it's not like their children's needs for companionship suddenly vanish.
	It's just that they become incredibly vulnerable to other people, mostly predators, who will...
	Satisfy their emotional hunger for connection, usually at an enormously great cost to themselves.
	It lends them to be susceptible to bullying.
	Bullying occurs against children who do not have a strong bond with parents, even a negative one.
	And it, of course, lets them be far more easily groomed by predators.
	Jesus. Rich, do you have any thoughts on this?
	How does it affect the brain?
	How does it affect your psychology as you develop to be neglected and maybe not even loved by your own parents?
	I'll give you a very straight answer to that, which is unusual for me.
	So if you have two gulags, and in gulag number one, we beat you every day.
	We say, you are a piece of Anthony.
	You are an enemy of the state.
	You're a disgusting infidel.
	Beat him. Whip him. He's an infidel.
	That's going to have a certain effect on you.
	Probably counter-dependency.
	If you're a child, you're going to grow up and be like, I hate authority.
	I hate it when people tell me what to do.
	We put you in another gulag.
	Exactly the same treatment.
	We whip you and we beat you and say, Anthony, we love you.
	But you have perverted thoughts in your mind.
	And brother, we need to draw them out.
	We need to re-educate. You need to wash your heart and make it clean again.
	You'll become a fawning codependent.
	At least in one scenario, Stefan just says, you can say, these guys abused me.
	I know that they did.
	I have the scar. I can say it.
	I'm me. They're them.
	They did a thing to me.
	At least you could say, well, thank you for that.
	In scenario number two, you'll never know.
	You'll never be sure. Maybe some type of training is just extra hard, dude.
	Maybe tough love is a thing that you, I don't know, maybe you did have perverted thoughts in your mind.
	It's a much more insidious, boundary-breaking way of torturing somebody.
	And you know which, for And you know which one was called the fatherland and which one was called the motherland.
	And the reason for that is probably that there's multiple layers of abuse going on, or multiple layers of thinking to deal with it, as it comes to mind when you're talking about it.
	Whereas, yeah, the physical scars are obvious.
	Someone beat you over the head or broke your face, you know it.
	The most messed up kid...
	Sorry, just thinking of the movie The Breakfast Club, I'm sure you've seen it.
	You should, right? And I guess it's now considered to be a classic, because I'm old.
	But in the movie, the most messed up kid was the one...
	Whose parents dropped her off and she turned to wave goodbye to them and they just drove off.
	No contact, no connection.
	They would just drop her off like a sack of groceries or potatoes or mail and then just move on.
	She was the most messed up of them all.
	Worthless, yeah. It's like you have zero value to the gods who created you, essentially.
	Exactly. You must be seen.
	It's better to be in pain than to be nothing.
	Pain is still part of existence.
	Nothingness is death in life.
	Tim. So, Stefan, I wanted to ask you this at the beginning, but we'll get to it now.
	What is the goal of promoting peaceful parenting, other than some of the obvious benefits of children not being abused?
	Is the goal to affect the entire culture or influence it in this direction?
	Is it to get 80% of it?
	Is it just to promote it in general and just get as many as you can?
	Like, what is kind of the long-range, say, 30-year goal of this?
	Well, the long-term goal is a free society, and a free society is a stateless society.
	It's a big topic, so I don't expect everyone can recoil as much as they want.
	I completely understand it.
	I did when I first thought of it and was exposed to the ideas.
	But in the long run, governments initiate the use of force.
	The initiation of the use of force is evil, and therefore we need to have a stateless society in the same way that we have a slave-free society and so on, right?
	Now, how do you get there?
	Well, when children are traumatized, they end up being dependent on the state quite a bit, right?
	Because they make bad decisions, because they don't take care of their health.
	Child abuse takes an average of 20 years off people's lifespan.
	Child abuse contributes to the growth of cancer.
	It contributes to drug abuse, promiscuity, nicotine addiction, alcoholism, ischemic heart disease, you name it.
	And I've got a whole series called The Bomb and the Brain going into the science and the data and an interview with the guy who ran the biggest study on this, Dr.
	Vincent Felitti. And if people are traumatized, they don't end up usually independent.
	They repeat cycles of violence and they need a lot of health care.
	They need a lot of welfare. They need a lot of propping up.
	So if we can grow a stronger and more healthy and more independent and more reasonable society, not least of which, why do people run to the state?
	Because they're afraid of criminals. Well, where do criminals come from?
	Criminals come from child abuse, almost exclusively.
	There are boys who have a particular gene, and if those boys are physically abused, 100% of them become criminals.
	100% of them become criminals If they are physically abused.
	So criminality, and I'm not just talking about the obvious guy in the alley with a knife, but, you know, all the way up to politicians, central bankers, you name it, right?
	This kind of predation comes from child abuse.
	So if we can reduce the prevalence of child abuse, we end up with independent people who can negotiate, we end up with fewer criminals, and at some point we'll look at the state like a rocket looks at the base when it's out of fuel.
	Like, we don't need this anymore.
	It's time to jettison. So what I hear from all this is that foundationally, a peaceful parenting is extremely important to living in a free and rational society.
	The only way we can get there, man.
	It's the only way we can get there.
	Okay. Rich, do you have some questions for Stefan you wanted to hit?
	Definitely do. Watching the Redman group discussion again yesterday, there was a point where you were chatting to Steve the Dean and there was an issue where you said he brought up spare the rod and spoil the child and you said that doesn't mean hit them with a rod.
	Can you expand on that?
	Because it kind of got moved past very quickly, and it felt like what you were saying, there was a lot to be said.
	Like, you weren't for softballing children.
	You weren't, like, what he was saying, what Steve Dean was saying was, well, then they'll end up with kids with no boundaries.
	And I didn't get from what you were saying that they would end up with no boundaries.
	What would it mean to you to enforce the rot in that situation?
	So, boundary is a very, very interesting point.
	And boundaries only exist when there are two people in the room.
	When you're beating someone, you're erasing them.
	When you use violence against someone, it's 100% you and 0% them.
	You are erasing their existence in the equation because you're not negotiating with them.
	They're running. They're cowering.
	They're hiding. They're curled up in a ball.
	They're crying. They desperately don't want to be there.
	There are no boundaries in violence.
	I mean, when you think about a knife going into someone's body, that's foundational to a boundary violation, which is a physical skin boundary violation.
	The only way that there is boundaries, the only way that you can have boundaries is when you're negotiating, when two people are bringing their needs and trying to find a win-win situation to a particular conflict.
	So when you're hitting a child, you're not teaching the child boundaries.
	You're teaching the child that the child does not exist in the face of superior power.
	That's not boundaries. That's a complete erasure of another personality, which is really what violence is supposed to do and also neglect sort of by the by.
	So we are, and I think this was more my generation.
	I was born in 66. I think this is more my generation than most of the generations that came before.
	We were incredibly untutored by our parents and untutored by society.
	And all of these basic facts about men and women and monogamy and sex and responsibility and maturity, none of that existed in my upbringing.
	The church had been abandoned.
	Sexual education was simply about don't get pregnant and crabs can outlast you in the bathtub.
	There was nothing particularly, and so we were kind of abandoned to our animalistic natures, which is where, you know, promiscuity and a lot of hedonism and so on.
	We were taken from human to monkey in like one generation.
	So spare the rod, spoil the child means the rod is the rod of instruction.
	It's of wisdom. It's of passing down the accumulated knowledge painfully extracted from millions of years of evolution, you know, 150,000 years of humanity existing, massive amounts of trial and error.
	We've gotten some pretty basic and important principles.
	You know, voluntarism is better than violence.
	Pair bonding is better. It's better than single parenting.
	Massive income transfers are incredibly destructive to society when they're run by the state.
	Freedom is important. Freedom of speech is important.
	The right to own arms is important.
	We've kind of extracted horrible, blood-soaked lessons from history, and then one post-war generation, that all evaporated.
	That all vanished. It was the great undoing of the West, and we were abandoned to our mere Space, mammalian, animal, fight, sex, food, lust, distraction.
	We were reduced to the animal.
	In one generation, it all just evaporated.
	Now, the rod, if you think of a shepherd, what does a shepherd do?
	Well, he uses the rod, he goes ahead, and the sheep follow him.
	Why? Not because he doesn't beat them with the rod.
	I've never seen that.
	I've spent some time on farms.
	You don't see the shepherd out there hammering away on his sheep with the rod.
	He's not hitting them. He's leading them somewhere.
	And the rod is the rod of instruction, of wisdom, of knowledge.
	Now, the funny thing is we lost that for like two generations.
	But now because of the internet, oh man, it's coming back.
	It's coming back.
	We now have elders.
	I mean, you guys get cold internet.
	Dad, I do all the time too.
	We now have the capacity to refill the cup of wisdom and pass it down to the next generation because of the internet.
	It wasn't going to happen in the home.
	Single moms can't teach you anything.
	Single dads usually can't teach you anything other than, don't do what I did, which is, you know, okay, great.
	There's a couple of things I shouldn't do.
	Doesn't help me with all the things I should do.
	Like, don't go to Hawaii.
	Okay, well, I don't know where I'm supposed to go other than not to Hawaii, right?
	So now we have this resurrection, like this coming back to life.
	of the great golem of wisdom, of history.
	And so all the people who wanted to scrub knowledge out of the intergenerational transfer of wisdom, they don't like the internet.
	Why all this censorship is happening?
	Because we're resurrecting and re-transmitting essential truths about the world, about society, And we are way out-competing the propagandists, which is why stuff like this does better than most mainstream media shows, which is why I have over 600 million views and downloads.
	Because we're resurrecting.
	We're like shocking back to life.
	The golem of wisdom that used to instruct the young.
	And all the people who need us dumb and easily controllable, well, they don't like it too much.
	Lovely. I only met Steve in Warsaw recently.
	I love the guy. And he seems to be relating it to criminality and the idea that without that, kids would grow up criminals.
	But you're talking about quite a rigorous system of instruction, of wisdom, with boundaries, where this is not some airy-fairy like, oh, just let them do whatever they want, right?
	Oh, gosh, no. Listen, look, all kids experiment with lying.
	My daughter was no... You did, I did, everyone did the experiment with lying, right?
	So I catch my daughter in a lie.
	Like, what am I going to do? Yell at her?
	No. It's very easy.
	I just say, oh, is that what we're doing now?
	We don't have to tell the truth in the family anymore.
	So I can make a commitment to you to take you to a playground or take you to Chuck E. Cheese or whatever it is.
	And then I can just not follow through on it.
	Is that what we're doing?
	She's like, no, no, no, I don't want that.
	It's like, yeah, okay.
	So it's really not that complicated.
	All you do is universalize what the children do.
	Right? And they don't want it to be universalized.
	And I'm like, yeah, okay, well, so let's not do that then.
	And she's like, okay. You know, and so it's not hugely complicated, right?
	I mean, you know, not that she ever has, but if she ever, I don't know, took five bucks from me, well, she's got, she's saved some money from her allowance.
	I'm like, oh, okay, we can just take from each other now.
	Is that, that's the plan? Okay, because, you know, there's times when I need money, and I know you've got money in the house, so...
	No, no, no, I don't want that.
	You know, it's really not...
	It's not that complicated, and you don't need to be a bully about it.
	You just need to say, okay...
	This is a Kantian rule, right?
	This is the categorical imperative.
	Act as if your action created a general rule that everyone had to follow.
	And, I mean, I have my own theory of ethics called UPB, which is, I think, better, but this is a pretty good one for kids.
	Oh, we can lie to each other now?
	We can just steal from each other now?
	Woohoo! Okay, great.
	I didn't think we had to. I don't want that.
	It's a great way to teach empathy and just basic ethics.
	Thank you. Richard, do you have additional questions for Stefan?
	That was the big one because I worked in the education system in the UK for about five years and not only was that not present, I saw people actively trying to erode it.
	So if you actually offered the kids guidance, leadership, any sort of a sense of wisdom, they really hated it.
	They actually actively fought against me trying to do that.
	Jesus. We have another viewer question here before we wind down.
	This one is from Chaz.
	Stefan, this one's probably for you. Is there an IQ component to peaceful parenting?
	Are low IQ parents capable of it?
	Will low IQ kids respond to it?
	Yeah, of course low IQ parents are capable of it.
	I mean, what I just talked about is something that just about everyone can do.
	Now, okay, I mean, if you start talking about 70 IQ, maybe you've got some challenges, but, you know, that's not the vast majority of people in the West.
	So, you need to make philosophical principles user-friendly.
	Which means they can't be overly complicated.
	They can't be French.
	So, you know, this deconstructionalism and Derrida and sexual violence addict Foucault and so on, these guys, they're just mucking everything up.
	They're just throwing sand in everyone's eyes.
	They're peeing in the swimming pool of wisdom that we all have to swim in it from time to time.
	So you just got to make things comprehensible, right?
	So I have this Wild ability to take very complex abstractions and translate them into actionable items.
	I'm a boiled down kind of guy.
	Think of all the engineering that goes into your cell phone.
	Now, when I first started programming computers, when I first started working with computers, you got like a black screen screen.
	And a flashing cursor.
	And that was your, like, now you've got icons and you can buy things and you set up email with one click and all this stuff.
	So you've made the technology user-friendly to the point, you know, it takes an IQ of 140 to design and build a cell phone.
	But you can use one with an IQ of 80 because they've made it user-friendly.
	And that's my purpose with philosophy.
	And this is why the academic philosophers really don't like me so much because, you know, I'm actually doing what they claim to do.
	It's back to Socrates versus the sophists, right?
	So just make things comprehensible.
	Make things easy for people to understand.
	That's really the goal of those of us who have wisdom.
	The most important thing to do is to make it as user-friendly as humanly possible.
	Socrates never used the word epistemology.
	He never used the word metaphysics.
	Right? And there's nothing wrong with those terms.
	They're fine for technical discussions and so on.
	But, you know, I wrote a book called The Art of the Argument and some people were crabbing at me.
	It's like, well, you didn't have the proper distinction in this particular case possibly between valid and sound and blah, blah, blah.
	It's like, dudes, it's called The Art of the Argument.
	You know, it's supposed to be user-friendly to help people win arguments to save the world, not hair split over logical terms that logicians have had 2,000 years to instruct the general public on but have failed to do so.
	So, just make things user-friendly.
	Make things actionable. And that's why...
	Economics is fascinating, but we can't do much to change it.
	When it comes to violations of the non-aggression principle, the most prevalent by far is child abuse, and by that I include spanking.
	That we can do something about.
	That's where philosophy can actually gain traction and change things for the better in your actual life, as opposed to being an abstract discipline that distracts you from things that you might do.
	I want to change what people put into their bodies, not their abstract definitions of carbohydrates.
	Got it. Closing thoughts, guys, to round this down or close down the interview today.
	What are your thoughts on young adults who survived a violent, abusive childhood, male or female?
	What can they do best to recover from that, to heal and to grow?
	Aside from studying the issues and understanding them intellectually and things like that, you know, just watching videos, like what can they specifically, what is most important for them to focus on to do in action to heal?
	And this is open to both of you.
	I would suggest that you've got to deal with some of the biological effects.
	You've got to get into some sort of a tactic that allows you to re-regulate the emotional system.
	If you're extremely emotionally dysregulated, your perceptions are faulty, your decisions will be bad, you'll create bad states in yourself and in other people, and people make even worse decisions when they're in a bad state.
	So that would be part of it.
	And they should develop some kind of a philosophical perspective that allows them to live a life.
	Because if it's intense childhood abuse, all of that will have been smashed apart.
	Developing some kind of moral philosophy allows you to construct internal boundaries.
	And that's where a lot of problems lie, I think.
	I would say that wisdom, moral wisdom in particular, it's really important to think of it sort of like the antibody system.
	In your body. Now, the antibody system can go bad in one of two ways.
	Either A, it attacks healthy tissue, which is bad, or B, it fails to attack destructive cells like cancer, right?
	And so if you look at the fact that you were attacked by a foreign entity called evil as a child, if you suffered this kind of abuse, for which I have enormous, enormous bottomless sympathy, So the question is, given that you were attacked but you weren't allowed to fight back, I think that your self-protective mechanisms get disrupted in the same way that your antibody system can get disrupted in your body.
	So either you end up attacking healthy tissues, so to speak, so you end up getting mad at healthy people, and you can see this all the time.
	I'm out there on Twitter.
	People should follow my Twitter feed.
	I think it's really great.
	You would also mean like self-sabotage in this case too, right?
	Yeah, so we'll get to that.
	So you can end up attacking healthy people.
	So I bring up provocative topics and people get all kinds of mad at me.
	It's like, no, no, these are facts.
	These are reasons. These are arguments.
	People get mad at me. This is an example of their antibodies attacking something that's healthy, which you don't want your antibodies to do.
	They can get you killed, right?
	Now the other thing, of course, and I just saw this.
	There was something that came out of Time magazine this morning.
	I didn't read the whole article because I just saw it before this, but Robert Mugabe, multi-decade, brutal, murdered tens of thousands of people, dictator of Zimbabwe, died, I think, just today, right?
	And Time magazine referred to him as controversial.
	There's controversy. You know, hey, believe it or not, there's controversy about Hitler, but nobody calls Hitler just controversial, right?
	So this, I mean, this guy destroyed Zimbabwe, half-starved his population, produced a life expectancy from one of the highest in Africa to the lowest actual in the world in the 30s, a brutal dictator who tortured and imprisoned and slaughtered tens of thousands of opponents and so on.
	So he's just controversial. Now, look up what the mainstream media says about me.
	They refer to me in far more negative terms than a multi-decade, brutal, murderous dictator.
	Yes, Stefan, I have been amazed at what bringing you on as a speaker has done at the 21 Convention.
	I knew it would be a big deal, but it's been, like, huge.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I get all of that, right?
	And so that's an example of not only attacking healthy tissues, me, but failing to attack cancers like Robert Mugabe.
	Yeah. Right? So how do you fix this problem where you're, you know, hatred of the good for being the good, right?
	And love of the evil for opposing the good.
	This is the great satanic pit that the modern world is being lowered into.
	Well, you got to get, you want your antibodies to get mad at the cancer and you want it to not get mad at the healthy stuff.
	So how do you get mad at the cancer?
	Morally, you define evil as evil and you get angry at it.
	Now, I don't mean violent.
	Violence is suppressed anger.
	Anger is healthy. Anger is your body's way of fighting back against something that is threatening your soul, your existence, your happiness, your integrity, your identity.
	So you want to get angry at evil because the only way that you can love good is to get angry at evil.
	The only way that your body can attack cancer is by not attacking the healthy system.
	So we have to accurately identify evil and we have to give ourselves permission to be really damn angry at evil.
	And if we allow ourselves to get angry at evil, we end up with the other side of that difficult process, which is our capacity to love virtue.
	Because what is love? Love is our involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous.
	To become virtuous, we must both love virtue and we must hate evil.
	Now, hate evil, again, it's not violence, it's not aggression, it's not beating people up, it's not anything like that.
	It's just having a very clear moral knowledge about evil.
	And I'm not talking about people who've done something wrong or who've done something bad.
	We've all done that. I mean, people who are committed to it and won't ever admit it and double down whenever confronted.
	People who are just committed.
	To evil. So if you can hate evil and you can love virtue, then you can end up with happiness and pair bonding in a stable relationship because your antibodies keep the bad people away and draw the good people closer.
	And that's the closest thing to paradise I've found in this existence.
	Well put. Oh, it's fast.
	Very nice. Yeah.
	And that's why people are getting mad at you for having me come as a speaker.
	I'm sorry, it's just the way it is. Like, I interviewed this guy who's the Minister of the Environment in Brazil, right, to get some facts out about this Amazonian thing, right?
	And, you know, people just, they get hysterical.
	And, you know, being hated by bad people, you know, I mean, the cancer hates the antibody, so to speak, right?
	And that's, I'm sorry, I don't really care that much about the feelings of the cancer.
	No, I see it as a very positive thing.
	I love it. The guy that's getting so much...
	Well, the controversy is one thing, but really the heat.
	It's a positive thing. It's people that I hate who hate you.
	That's why I know that you're great.
	I mean, when... You know, I didn't actually...
	In 2016 with Trump, for example, I didn't actually...
	I was voting not for him up to that point.
	I was like, fuck the Republican Party, fuck this two-party system.
	I hate it, right? And not unjustly so, I would add.
	Oh, of course. But then at the last minute, the pussy tapes came out, and it dawned on me.
	I was like, every single organization and person in this country that I hate hates this man unanimously.
	He must be fucking great.
	And so I switched my endorsement and all that and did that.
	And it kind of reminds me of bringing you on.
	It's brought so much... I've never seen a speaker bring this much controversy and negativity, but it's a positive negativity because it's coming from people that are fucking losers, to put it bluntly.
	Well, I'll tell you this, too.
	I mean, they're not my enemies, because they're just enemies of philosophy.
	They're enemies of truth, of reason, and evidence.
	I mean, that they personalize it in me just shows how immature they are.
	They hate what you represent and what you do.
	Yeah, it's not about me.
	And, of course, the whole job of a philosopher is like being a good coach.
	You know, being a good coach is, man, I hate that coach in the moment.
	And, man, that coach saved my life later, right?
	I mean, so the job description of philosopher is, hate me now, love me later.
	So I get all of these emails when I talk about women's declining fertility in their 30s and the need to use their sexual market value to get a good man rather than just jump around the carousel and waste their youth and fertility.
	So I get all these emails from women.
	Oh, I'm so mad at you. Oh, they're so terrible.
	And then like six, 12 months later, it's like, here's a picture of my baby.
	Thank you so much. It's the job.
	It's the job. The saying no...
	In the face of rampant hedonism provokes a lot of anger, and later people are like, wow, you know, so hate me now, love me later.
	That's, you know, like it or not, that's the job description, and I'm happy to accept that.
	That's been the case for all good philosophers throughout human history, and there won't be any exception for me, but I'll tell you this, man.
	My enemies light a giant runway for my friends to find me.
	And this is sort of what you're talking about.
	It's like, oh man, I'm lost.
	Oh my gosh, there's a huge amount of fire and flurry and activity over there.
	I wonder what's going on.
	And then they find out that, you know, they're clearing the woods, this giant lighted runway, and people are just landing by the millions.
	Fuck yeah. Well, with that said, gentlemen, this has been absolutely fantastic.
	I appreciate both your time today and your input.
	I love doing it. So I'll round down the interview today.
	You guys can meet myself and Stefan Molyneux at the 21 Convention 2019 of Orlando, Florida, this October 24th through the 27th.
	And special announcement I'll be making separately later today.
	All tickets bought before October 1st are buy one, get one free.
	So you can bring a friend to the conference if you buy before the end of this month, if you buy in September.
	Link to buy tickets will probably be beneath the video description, other places in the chat, things like that.
	And you can always just Google 21 Convention and you'll find everything you need right away.
	Stefan, Richard, thanks for your time today.
	Appreciate it. Well, thanks. I just wanted to mention that if you're watching this on my channel, click on my affiliate link below.
	I'm not getting paid for all of this, but we do want to check how many people come in through what it is that I'm doing.
	So I'll put an affiliate link.
	Below this in the video and into the podcast and just if you want to buy click on that link it would be really really helpful.
	It doesn't enrich me but it certainly enriches the data that these guys can work with regarding me.
	Cool. All right guys.
	Thanks guys so much. I really appreciate it.
	I'll see you next month in Florida.
	Absolutely. We'll stay on private.
	I'll know the broadcast now. Sure.
	And it's about offline. - Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest free domain show on philosophy.
	And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
	Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
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	So thank you so much for your support, my friends.

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