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Nov. 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:35:02

Hispanic Dad NEEDS HELP! Freedomain Call In

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	Well, I guess thanks for the email.
	And do you want to start off by reading it so people know what we're talking about?
	My name is, I'm 27 years old, currently lost in life.
	I have three children of the ages of nine, eight, and five.
	I'm a full-time single father.
	I currently live with my parents due to high rental prices in the And where I'm currently located.
	I'm destroying my life and I want to change that because I don't want to be a negative influence on my children.
	I've been watching your YouTube videos for the past seven months, which I came across by a fellow YouTuber.
	I just wanted to check, if you don't mind, that that wasn't a turn signal.
	I mean, I don't think it's good to do this while you're driving.
	I'm just pulling over right now.
	Okay, good. Let's not check while you're driving.
	Okay, just let me know when you're...
	In a stationary safe spot.
	So I'm ready right now.
	All right, all right. So I guess a little backstory is helpful.
	How did you end up being a single father?
	What happened to the mom and all that?
	So all this started back in 2016.
	You know, we got separated.
	I found a couple messages on our phone.
	And, you know, I didn't have to look any further to know that she was cheating on me, right?
	And she's the one who filed for divorce.
	How do I say this?
	I didn't get to see my kids for several months.
	It was really hard. And I picked up drinking for a while.
	And then I stopped because I thought to myself, if I'm going to see my kids again, would they want to see me in the current state that I am right now?
	Or do I want them to see me as the best possible version of myself?
	So I had quit drinking for a while.
	And a year ago, or two years ago, We were still fighting custody over in the courts.
	And my ex-wife had told me that I was allowed to see the kids for a while, right?
	And she pretty much, at last minute, she said no.
	And that day that I was supposed to get the kids, my best friend and I were supposed to go out, you know, with our kids because he has a daughter and he was murdered.
	That day. Oh my gosh.
	What happened with that?
	Yeah, it was...
	And that...
	We were supposed to hang out or whatever, right?
	But I guess he went to go do something else.
	I didn't get the kids and he was murdered.
	Was it just like a random crime thing or someone he knew or what?
	They went out hunting and I guess the people he was with, he trusted them I guess.
	And that's pretty much what happened.
	But it wasn't like a hunting accident, right?
	No. Well, it's classified as that, but, you know, when you grow up in a rough neighborhood, you know, there's certain things that the police know about or they don't know about that the neighborhood does.
	I don't know if that makes any sense.
	No, it does. It does for sure.
	It does. Wow, well, I'm sorry to hear that, of course.
	It was really... That was really hard for me.
	He used to live a block away from me, so we would hang out all the time.
	And then one day I just get the call and he's gone.
	And that's what pretty much started my alcoholism again.
	And... And right now I have full custody of my children.
	I drink a lot, but it's not to the point where I'm drunk driving.
	I try to be careful with that because I'm with my kids 24-7.
	So I don't want to put my kids in that danger.
	I don't want it to escalate to that point.
	And how did you end up with full custody?
	So, in 2018, I managed to get Monday through Fridays for my kids because I told my ex-wife, she was working full-time.
	I work, you can call it part-time, but I work seven days a week, so I work every day.
	I don't have any days off, but I only work like five hours a day.
	So that allows me to spend more time with the kids.
	So I pretty much told her, like, hey, if you don't let me be in the kids' life, I'm going to sign my rights away.
	And you're going to deal with them full time.
	And, you know, she wanted me to keep paying child support.
	I couldn't take it anymore, you know?
	I was barely surviving myself.
	Well, and you weren't really seeing your kids, right?
	Right, right. So the ROI wasn't really there for me.
	Right. So that got approved in 2018.
	A year later, which is just a couple months, I think it's in February of this year, she took me to court, you know, again, because she wanted to reverse the custody.
	So for me to get them on the weekends, because she was getting them now on the weekends.
	But she worked here in the week, right?
	So how could she...
	Right. But the courts out here where I'm located, you know how it is with the feminism and the male patriarchy, all of this.
	They supply the mother an overabundance of resources and You're pretty much guilty until you're proven innocent.
	And that's how I viewed it in the court system.
	Right. Thankfully, the judge...
	Well, there was a judge that was in charge of our case for a few months, and she kept putting these obstacles for me to jump over.
	And then she had an emergency, and they had to replace the judge.
	With a man.
	And he pretty much ruled like, hey, this is unnecessary.
	This is what you're going through.
	The custody stays the same, right?
	Wow, that's like falling out of an airplane and landing in a swimming pool.
	That's a deep swimming pool.
	That's some good luck right there.
	But sorry, go on. So, and back in So after that happened, I would say June.
	Yes, it was June.
	My kid, I have three kids, right?
	The five-year-old came home with a bunch of bruises, right?
	And, you know, I picked him up from grandmother's care.
	Oh, boy. And...
	And I didn't notice until a few hours later, and I noticed a bunch of bruises all over his face, like in the back of his ears, his body.
	And I asked him, like, hey, what's going on with you?
	Why are you all bruised up?
	And he told me that mom's boyfriend had been hitting him and picking him up by his ears and doing all kinds of abusive things.
	Kind of things. Man, I am so sorry about that.
	What a gut-busting emotional experience that some other man is manhandling your kids.
	Not that you should be doing it, obviously, but that's a punch.
	That's a punch in the ass.
	I'm so sorry. That's brutal.
	That was really hard for me.
	I was going to do...
	You know, I was going to commit some stupidity, but thankfully people came around.
	They were like, hey, calm down, you know.
	But I called CPS, right?
	I called Child Protective Services.
	They came and interviewed all three children.
	And I also found out that he was hitting my other two children.
	Did your ex-wife know about this when she wasn't around?
	She would have seen the bruises, right?
	Right. So the thing is, she's a child development specialist.
	So she's a mandated reporter.
	And she knew all this was going on.
	Oh, so if she sees evidence of child abuse, she has to report it, right?
	Correct. All right. And so it was happening in her home, according to what you say.
	Right. And she didn't report it.
	Oh, man. And then?
	I didn't know she was a child development specialist.
	You know, we haven't spoken in years, right?
	Oh, so she got this after you were married to her?
	Yes. Of course, you've only been communicating through lawyers.
	Okay, I get it. All right. Correct.
	Correct. So, you know, I go through all that.
	The social worker...
	And this is going on throughout the week.
	This happened on a Monday.
	And as the week is progressing, you know, I'm telling the social worker, like, hey, I need something to be done about this because once Friday comes around, the kids, according to the court order, they got to go back to mom's.
	And I don't feel safe with my kids going back to mom's, right?
	Well, especially if the boyfriend was...
	Angry, right? If the boyfriend was angry about them telling or you finding out, I mean, the fear then is like additional punishment is going to pour down on the kids, right?
	Correct. Yes.
	So the social worker gave me a...
	She told me, okay, she pretty much asked me if...
	If the kids stay with you full-time, would I be willing to accept that...
	How do you call that responsibility?
	I'm like, of course, they're my kids.
	And she told me to go file a police report.
	And I don't know the boyfriend.
	You know, I just seen him. I just know him by face.
	I don't know his name.
	I didn't know none of that, right?
	So I told the social worker, the Child Protective Services social worker, I need his information.
	She gave it to me. I filed the police report and at the police department they were shocked because it came back that the mom's boyfriend is a police officer.
	Wow. So and you know I have high risk you know I respect You know, the police department, the police officers, but, you know, on top of that, it came back that he was a police officer, you know? So that really, that really, it was really hard on me, you know?
	Oh, man. Like, again, just massive sympathies, brother.
	That is unbelievably brutal to go through, and I feel for you, man.
	I really do. I just want to make that very clear, but sorry.
	Go on. Thank you.
	So, Child Protective Services did an emergency...
	Okay, let me go back a little bit.
	They... They pretty much told mom, like, hey, we do believe your boyfriend was abusing your children.
	You need to kick your boyfriend out if you want the kids to have overnight stays.
	And she said, no way that's not going to happen.
	She took the boyfriend's side.
	Oh, man. You know, it's funny because in these stories, things rarely get better.
	But I'm still a little shocked at sometimes how bad it gets.
	But sorry, go on. Yeah, so she pretty much said no way.
	And they did an emergency custody removal, which was for like a week or something like that, because they needed to set up an emergency court hearing.
	But then the social worker told me that the kids needed to see their mom, according to the law, right, that weekend.
	So the meetup was at a grandmother's house, which is mom's mom.
	And I told the social worker, like, hey, what if they interfere with the investigation?
	You know, I don't want them to start brainwashing my children to say that they made everything up, you know?
	And she says, oh, we're going to make that clear to grandma and mother that they're not allowed to do that because it's going to get worse for them, right?
	So they went over to the grandma's house for a few hours on Saturday and Sunday.
	And then they were evaluated on the following Tuesday and they found out that mother and grandmother decided to try to convince the kids to say that they were lying about the whole situation and they had made everything up.
	That part is not overly shocking, I suppose, but risky on their part.
	Sorry, go ahead. I wasn't really surprised either, but it was shocking to me why would someone take the side of someone...
	Why would they protect someone else besides the children, you know?
	That to me itself was shocking, but that was a few months ago and then we lead up to today.
	Right now she has supervised visits because of that incident, monitored and supervised twice a week for an hour each day.
	She's not allowed to have any type of contact with the children.
	Right now, our next hearing is in March to see whether the courts find it safe for the kids to go back to the mother's house.
	So, yeah. But it's hard to see.
	I mean, again, I'm no lawyer or anything like that, but if the boyfriend is still there and they've already tried to convince the kids that They should retract their stories.
	Then I'm not sure how I could see it becoming like a safe environment for the kids.
	Well, she claims that the boyfriend isn't there.
	So that's what the courts are going based on.
	And I was speaking to my attorney like, hey, you know, she pretty much said a few days ago when this all first had happened, She's not willing to kick the boyfriend out, and now the boyfriend is out of the house.
	You know? And keep in mind, he's a police officer, so he's a mandated reporter himself, too.
	Right, of course. Of course.
	Holy crap, man. What a mess.
	What a mess. What a mess.
	How are the kids doing?
	They, you know, my daughter, she's a daddy's girl.
	She loves to spend time with me.
	She tells me she doesn't want to go back to mom's house because she says, oh, all mom does is put the TV on for us and we sit at home all day.
	We don't do anything. So...
	She's already moved on.
	She's really, really mature for her age.
	She's seven.
	That in itself bothers me because a seven-year-old shouldn't be worried about that.
	They want to be kids.
	You hear this kind of thing like, oh, she's so mature for her age, but usually what I hear is, man, she's having to grow up pretty fast, right?
	Correct. And the five-year-old, he has a rough understanding, you know, what's going on, but he seems pretty happy.
	The eight-year-old is the one who, the older one, because he experienced both of us living together.
	You know, you remember, so does my daughter.
	The little one doesn't really remember.
	And he misses his mom a lot.
	And, you know, I told him, like, you have to understand that your mom didn't protect you when We need it to be protected.
	You know? I tell my kids, I don't bring my girlfriend around you guys because, you know, I don't want anything like this happening, you know?
	And it's just...
	I don't know if I make any sense.
	And that, uh, so yeah.
	I have a couple of questions about earlier on.
	Is there more that you wanted to tell me about the current situation?
	Go ahead. So, I guess, if you could tell me a little bit about your own childhood, right?
	Because I would imagine that some sort of thread or some sort of dominoes in your childhood Led you to be a little bit more maybe susceptible or attracted to this kind of woman or this type of woman?
	And what was your own childhood like?
	And how were you raised?
	How were you disciplined?
	That kind of stuff.
	So, my father, when we were growing up, it was...
	It was three of us, right?
	So I'm the oldest, then it's my brother, then my younger sister.
	She's like eight years younger than me, so we don't really have a connection.
	So my brother and I, we're really tight, you know?
	But my father used to hit us a lot, you know?
	I remember my father hitting me every day, every single day for years, you know?
	And for me, it was kind of contradictory because we would go to church on Sundays, you know, and then throughout the whole week, I would get, you know, hit with the bell, you know.
	My brother, too, you know, and it was...
	My father has apologized, you know, to us because he...
	Well, at least to me, how he used to treat us because I guess he sees his faults.
	I'm sorry to hear that again, of course, but what was his story about, you know, parents usually have to have some story about why they're hitting their kids.
	Like, you were disobedient, you spoke back, you didn't do what I said, you disobeyed, whatever it is, right?
	What was his story as to why he needed to beat his children, like, every day?
	What was his story that he told to you?
	Because usually, I mean, the wounds, the bruises and so on, they heal, But the story is kind of what sinks into you, if that makes sense.
	Like the story of why it's being done.
	That is usually what does...
	The most harm as adults is a story, not obviously...
	I mean, unless the beatings left you with some crippling physical problem, which doesn't sound like it.
	But what was his story about why he was hitting you guys so much?
	His story was that, you know, we would misbehave...
	I mean, we, it was pretty bad too.
	We would, you know, like one time I remember at elementary school, I found a dead pigeon and I threw it in the teacher's lounge.
	I don't know, I remember that clearly.
	I was like five.
	I don't know why I did it.
	That was, it was mostly behavioral issues.
	I remember One of my friends, I guess he wasn't acting how I wanted him to act, and I was wearing a belt, and I hit him too with the belt, you know?
	Wait, so hang on. Let's go back.
	The thing when you were five is really quite powerful, right?
	So you found a dead pigeon, and you threw it in the teacher's lounge, right?
	And you said you're not sure why you did that.
	I mean, I think I might have an idea.
	It's your life, obviously, so you're the final expert.
	On it, but I would say that, I mean, you were showing up to class, you know, you might be limping, you might have trouble sitting, you might be wincing, you might have bruises, maybe visible bruises, so you were coming to school with clear signs of child abuse, right? Uh...
	You could, uh...
	Not really, because the teachers never saw any bruises on me.
	How do you know? Because I guess the teachers never brought it to my attention or to anyone else's attention.
	You mean like your ex-wife and her boyfriend?
	No. Correct.
	Like, listen, that's a big statement.
	Hang on, that's a huge statement to say the teachers never knew.
	You don't know that, right? I mean, sort of factually, you don't know that for sure.
	There were probably dozens of teachers who saw it, and, you know, it's pretty hard to hide those signs.
	You know, especially, like, you get ass-whipped with a belt.
	It's hard to sit for a day or two, right?
	Yeah. You're not running like a normal kid, right?
	I mean, you hurt.
	It hurts like hell. And it lasts.
	So the idea that there weren't any signs that you sort of magically shrugged off all of the brutal effects of this physical abuse and were just like a normal happy-go-lucky kid, I can't see how that could possibly happen.
	I mean, you're not a superhero, I assume, right?
	So you're going to not be able to shrug this stuff off physically.
	And the reason I'm saying it's like, it's a remarkable thing to go through as a child who suffers physical abuse and I mean, emotional abuse for sure, but physical abuse in particular because it's more easily detectable.
	A child who's been beaten with a belt cannot handle...
	Yeah, I can see that.
	The monkey... I can see.
	I never looked at it that way.
	Right. So a child...
	Who's been physically beaten with a belt, obviously beaten with a belt, like they just can't do the monkey bars the way that other kids can because they're aching and they're bruised and they don't have the physical flexibility and they're wincing a lot.
	I mean, it's pretty clear.
	So I'm, you know, because those of us who went through physical abuse, we kind of sail through society with this big mark of cane on our forehead, so to speak, and the mark of cane is I'm being beaten.
	And I know there's mandated reporting is, I guess, new.
	I don't think it was around when I was a kid.
	It's like, I don't know, 45 years ago or whatever, right?
	But we kind of sail through society and unfortunately we see a pretty horrifying view of society, which is we're being beaten and no one does anything.
	No one says anything.
	No one takes us in. No one asks us questions.
	No one calls the cops. Now, you're changing that, right?
	You see the signs and you deal with it, right?
	But I'm going to assume, and you know, tell me, of course, if I'm wrong, but you went through, I don't know, maybe 50 teachers, maybe more, maybe 75 teachers.
	Maybe you went to summer camp.
	Maybe you were in daycare. Maybe there were other kids in your neighborhood.
	You're over at their house. Their parents are around.
	I mean, there were probably hundreds of adults who saw you while you were being Physically abused.
	And we're not talking like a little bit.
	We're not talking like, well, spanked too hard.
	We're talking belts.
	I mean, that is harsh on the skin.
	That bruises like hell.
	And you move like an old man as a little boy.
	And there were probably hundreds of adults who saw how you were being abused.
	And of those hundreds of adults...
	Who had every reason to suspect something.
	To suspect something. You know, I mean, because it's not just physical, right?
	I mean, you're nervous.
	You're depressed.
	You're anxious. And you're quiet a lot.
	You don't talk about your home life.
	You're scared of authority.
	You flinch when people raise their hand to scratch their eyebrows suddenly.
	Like, there's a lot of signs.
	A lot of signs. And of the hundreds of people, and I'm not even talking about your immediate family or like your dad's family or your mom's family or like just hundreds and hundreds of people in the community, in the neighborhood, in school and daycare and family and friends and parents, like hundreds of people, adults, saw or were exposed to very, very clear signs that you were being abused.
	And, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, of course, but I would guess not one of them did a damn thing.
	Now, that is a hell of a thing to see in society, right?
	Because society is all about, oh, we care about the children, and it's all about the children, and everything's for the children.
	You know, you see these magazines like, oh, on the cover, it's like this child got separated from her mother at the border and they're throwing children in these cages.
	Like, it's the manipulation of children.
	And, you know, Greta Thunberg is out there.
	How dare you? You know, like, oh, but the children, we care about the children so much.
	But if you're actually a child being harmed in society, tell me, my friend, what does society do to acknowledge or protect you?
	When you were going through this year after year?
	Nothing. And that's the reality of the world that we live in.
	And the people who aren't abused don't see it.
	And the people who are abused see it really clearly.
	And it's like, same planet, different worlds.
	You know, that old phrase. We just view society very differently.
	And of course, all the people who weren't abused...
	They all imagined, oh man, if I saw a child who was being abused, I'd do something.
	That's what everyone says, right?
	I would stand up for that child.
	I would protect that. I would make the calls.
	I would confront. But they don't.
	Right? They don't, in general.
	Now, you do with your kids.
	And man, good for you.
	Good for you to infinity.
	But the reality is...
	Society, generally, doesn't give much of a rat's ass about kids in terms of protecting them.
	In general, there's exceptions and so on, but that's like your experience, my experience, the experience of many other people who've called into this show.
	I know it's a bit of a self-selecting group and so on, but still, it's pretty damn common for no one to do anything to help children, to protect children.
	Yeah, good luck, kid. Walk it off.
	Shrug it off. And then, of course, it leads to a lot of adult problems.
	And so what lingers?
	Like, again, the physical bruises, the welts, the discomfort, the muscle bruising and all of that, that passes.
	But your father's story about why he did it and your clear and certain knowledge of the indifference of society to the suffering of children, that stays.
	That stays. And, like, that's an additional, like, man, great for you for standing up for your kids.
	I know it's hell. I know it can be hell, but, man, talk about breaking the cycle.
	It's incredible. It's, you know, I see myself, you know, sometimes I hit my kids too, and I don't like it. You know, I spank them, and it's not like I hit them with belts or anything like that, and I just don't like it, you know?
	Like, I'm conscious of it, because I know I didn't like it.
	And I remember you, I think you I watched the 21 Convention video you did a few weeks ago, where you said if spanking really did work, why do you have to keep doing it?
	And that really, that really, that really stuck to me, you know, because, you know, I was pretty much beaten my whole, my whole childhood and it never worked.
	Well, I mean, it worked insofar as it relieved some of your father's bad temper for a short period of time.
	I mean, it didn't work in terms of behavioral correction.
	You know, like if you get a physical injury and you go to rehab and the guy says, oh, you know, you do these exercises and you'll be better.
	And then it turns out you have to do these painful exercises for the rest of your life.
	It's like when you were sold a false bill of goods.
	Right.
	So, yeah, you know, like a significant proportion of kids are hit even into their teenage years.
	You know, that's from the age of like one or two to like 12 or 13 or 14.
	Like how on earth could it be close to a decade and a half that you need to keep hitting kids if hitting works?
	It's like, hey, you got a headache, take an aspirin or whatever, right?
	It's supposed to get rid of your headache, but it's like, nope, you have to take 12 aspirins for the rest of your life because you had one headache.
	It's like, well, that's not a cure. That's just a sale.
	So, yeah, so what's going on with your kids?
	What behaviors are they...
	I guess, what's your story about hitting your kids?
	Why is it something that you end up doing, do you think?
	I think, you know, I try to, everything I do, I try to be logical.
	You know, when I, like, I get emotional myself, like, if I get angry, if they're not behaving the way I want them to behave.
	you know, if they're, uh, horsing around, you know, they're misbehaving or whatever, but it leads to that, you know, I, I, uh, I've been cutting down on it, you know, they, uh, I've been issuing timeouts, which kind of works.
	But the younger one, he's a little bit more defiant than the other ones.
	My daughter, you know, she listens to me all the time.
	So does my older son.
	The younger one is the one who struggles with behavioral issues.
	Kind of reminds me of myself when I was a kid.
	You know, and it's been getting better though.
	He also had a pooping problem where he would poop himself like all the time when he was over, when he was staying at mom's house and then when he started staying at my house.
	It sort of kind of went away.
	He does it once in a while.
	And sorry, how old is he again?
	Five.
	Right.
	So you understand that the pooping at the mom's place is the same as you throwing the pigeon into the teacher's lounge and at the same age, right?
	Which is he's angry.
	You're angry at the teachers for not protecting you.
	So it's like, okay, here's a dead bird.
	And you threw it into the teacher's lounge because you assumed, I think probably deep down, that the teachers were discussing you and decided to do nothing.
	It's like, okay, here's your dead bird, you bastards who won't protect me.
	And if your son is pooping himself...
	It's, I mean, I hate to compare him to a cat, but, you know, cats do this too when they're angry.
	Like, if you go away and they're angry that you left them alone, they'll pee on your prized possessions, right, or whatever it is, right?
	So that's the kind of behavior that indicates that he's angry, and no one will listen to him being angry, so he just becomes, quote, inconvenient, so to speak.
	And... Yeah, kids, there's a lot of rebellion, a lot of rebellion from kids, and I really want to dredge this frustration and anger that kids have towards a society that doesn't protect them or bring it to the surface, because when you have that in your head, then you don't want to hit your kids.
	Like, you won't want to hit your kids once you understand that, right?
	Because your kids, of course, like, there's expectation, right?
	My kids should do what I want them to do, right?
	Correct. I've got to be there for my kids, right? Your ex-wife, I'm sure, has done things that you don't go around spanking her, right?
	So, the judge or her lawyer, who knows, right?
	But there's lots of people who aren't doing what you want them to do, but you find a way to restrain your temper, right?
	But your kids, of course, are the most innocent, so they're not doing what you want them to do.
	Well, their life is full of people who aren't doing what you want them to do.
	And they see you not hitting anyone else who doesn't do what you want them to do, but only them, right?
	And so it's because there are no immediate negative consequences.
	And that's really...
	Because, you know, you have the capacity to not hit people who don't do what you want because you've been doing that with your ex-wife and all this, her boyfriend or whoever, right?
	So your kids know that you have that capacity, you just don't exercise it with them, right?
	And that's kind of humiliating for them.
	Like, why does everyone else get to be reasoned with, but we get to be hit?
	And I'm not saying you don't reason with your kids and all that.
	I'm just talking about on the occasions when you do hit them.
	The problem is that the consequences accrue.
	The consequences gather in the hearts and minds of your children.
	It's just that the blowback comes later, if that makes sense.
	The blowbacks will come in their teenage years.
	Like when you're bigger and stronger, yeah, you can hit your kids, you can yell at them, and you can suppress them, and they're like, okay, well, you're five times my size.
	Okay, I got it, right?
	But hey, old man, you're getting older and weaker, and I'm getting stronger and taller.
	And if the bigger person gets to bully, well, guess what?
	In ten years or eight years or whatever, I'm the bigger person.
	And then we'll see how things go, right?
	So they kind of wait and bide their time and all of that.
	So, I mean, I think you should not be hitting your kids, of course, right?
	And I think you know that deep down.
	You say you don't want to. But you gotta think of the lessons you're teaching your kids by not hitting other people who don't do what you want and then hitting your kids where they don't do what you want.
	You're just saying, hey, if you're bigger and stronger and you can get away with it, this is what you can do.
	And you know what?
	That's what I fear the most.
	For them to, you know, once they become teenagers, when they rebel, if they decide to rebel, you know, I don't want them to Do things that are going to...
	that can pretty much ruin the rest of their life, if that makes any sense.
	It certainly does. I mean, your friend you were talking about earlier who went on the hunting trip, I mean, he obviously kind of got in with the wrong crowd, right?
	Right. You know, there's a lot of stuff, you know.
	I used to think very, very differently, you know, of Prior to my divorce, prior to my separation, I was anti-authority.
	Whenever I saw authority, I would see...
	How would you say...
	Kind of like...
	Anyone that was authority, they were oppressive.
	Does that make any sense?
	I had a distaste for law enforcement when I was growing up.
	I experienced a lot of things where...
	I never joined a gang or anything like that because my father was always there even though he would beat us or whatever.
	But I knew a lot of people that were into that life.
	It was like... Yeah, yeah, so...
	Well, and I don't want to get into details, but you do come from a minority community that has, I guess you could say, an uneasy relationship with the cops in many situations.
	Correct, correct, yeah.
	And, you know, I grew up with that...
	And it's...
	You could call it racism because it was, you know, because...
	What the schools and the communities would teach us.
	It's like, oh, white people are racist.
	And they're out to get you and all of that.
	Once you swallow the red pill, you come to find out that it's all a lie.
	It's so shocking that we can't all get along better when everyone's programming us to hate each other.
	Isn't that terrible? Isn't that just awful?
	You and I are dads, and we care about the future of the world.
	We care about our children.
	We're struggling to make a way of it in a sometimes very corrupt and dangerous world.
	Why on earth would we end up hating each other?
	We want to support each other.
	We want to help each other. I mean, that's what we're here for.
	And yeah, there's so many people just whispering all of this poison into our ears about how we've got to be enemies and all of that.
	That's wretched. It's absolutely wretched.
	Anyway, I don't want to get off on a big soapbox rant about that, although I could, but let's stay with you.
	Tell me a little bit about how you met your ex-wife.
	What attracted you to her?
	How things went early on? I think we were like 12 years old when we met.
	We were in high school, but she went to a different high school.
	Where my high school was, The public transportation would pass by her high school first and then it would pass through our high school.
	I knew a bunch of people that went to her high school and then a bunch of people that went to my high school.
	We all knew each other, right?
	So that would take us down to the neighborhood where we would hang out or whatever, right?
	Because our high schools were located in the upper class neighborhood, you know, but So that's how I met her.
	We would do graffiti, you know, all that stuff, you know, when you're growing up, hanging around with the wrong crowd or whatever.
	So you were kind of like a bad boy, she was kind of like a bad girl in a way, right?
	Yeah, yeah. So after that, you know, I ended up getting kicked out of the high school.
	Went to a couple continuation high schools.
	What were you kicked out for? Was it fighting or graffiti or something else?
	It was behavioral issues, graffiti, but they never really caught me.
	I guess they knew, but they couldn't prove it.
	And they were just pretty much fed up with my behavior.
	They're like, you know what, you gotta go.
	Was it your behavior relative to the teachers or other students?
	It was towards some teachers.
	I had a good relationship with some teachers.
	We would skip class and go around the hallways and sneak into people's classrooms and the teachers wouldn't notice.
	We would do pranks and, you know, we did all that kind of stuff.
	Right. So, I mean, you didn't really have much respect for the authority and also you didn't...
	You know, I mean, you've got kids, right?
	So you try and teach your kids something, and one of the first questions out of your kid's mouth is like, okay, why does this matter?
	Or why do I want to learn this? Or how is this important?
	And they may say that explicitly, or they may just indicate that they're not interested.
	And explaining to kids why they need to know something, right, is kind of tough.
	And it's really tough for teenagers.
	If you don't respect the school, you don't respect the teachers, they fail to protect you when you're younger.
	And now they want to teach you, like, algebraic long division.
	And it's like, yeah, I don't, you know, I don't really get why this is important.
	And you don't have any authority.
	And this just feels like punitive, like punishing busy work.
	You know, like, is this a way to trap me into not doing homework and be bored and have control over me?
	And, you know, knowledge is punishment.
	I think it kind of rolls around at the base of our brains quite a bit when we're there.
	Like, yeah, my friends and I did pranks in high school, and it is a kind of...
	I mean, it's sort of a very upgraded version of poop in your pants when, you know, your kid's at their mom's place or whatever, right?
	I mean, or throwing the dead pigeon into the teacher's lounge.
	I mean, it's a way of trying to rebel.
	We did this thing, too. I don't know if this ever happened at your school where...
	Every now and then, the kids would all just start coughing together.
	And, you know, that's a pretty, I don't know, middle class kind of rebellion.
	But the kids, like one kid would start coughing, another kid would start coughing.
	And then for like a couple of minutes, we'd all be coughing.
	And what's the teacher going to do?
	Say, stop coughing? And eventually it would die out.
	But that was a sort of little protest.
	You know, I mean, that's kind of sad, but it's all we could kind of muster at the time.
	So anyway, so yeah, you got kicked out.
	Did you end up going to your ex-wife's school or what happened?
	Yeah, so what happened was we ended up going to a charter school that's located in an island.
	We would get picked up from home.
	I went through several high schools, and I ended up at this high school.
	And we met up there again, and we would hang out, we would talk to each other.
	And as the years went by, we started dating.
	We were minors when she got pregnant with her first child.
	Right. What were the circumstances that you guys were having?
	Like unprotected sex? Did you think it through or was it just heat of the moment?
	Yeah. It was pretty much unprotected sex, heat of the moment.
	We Now that I think of it, you know, it was like we were really stupid for that, you know?
	Well, it does kind of put your life on a train track at that point, right?
	Because, you know, it's like, okay, well now we've got at least 20 years of having this joint project, which is going to be pretty much all-consuming, called at least raising one child.
	So it does put your life on a real train track, and it means that your future capacity to break up becomes very, very limited, right, as you can see, because you've got this joint responsibility.
	Anyway, this is all stuff you know.
	I just wanted to sort of mention it to the To the audience as a whole.
	Oh, definitely. You know, I grew up in a pretty conservative family.
	You know, we're Hispanics, right?
	But a lot of Hispanics, they don't know this.
	They grow up pretty conservative.
	You know, they believe in hard work, all that kind of stuff, right?
	You know, I had a I had both my parents growing up, and she did it.
	She grew up with a single mother.
	Her mother had three kids in total with three different guys, which was a red flag, you know.
	The older sister, she was a single mother too.
	She's a single mother.
	And she has a younger brother, which...
	Dad is currently there.
	He's an alcoholic.
	He uses drugs.
	Not the proper atmosphere for kids to grow up in.
	She grew up in government housing under welfare, food stamps, all that.
	My parents didn't believe in that.
	They were more of a They felt like welfare and all that kind of stuff is theft.
	So it was two different structures of values, if that makes any sense.
	Like, on her family was like, well, we gotta get over on the government.
	And my parents' side was like, hey, you gotta work hard for whatever you want.
	You gotta work hard for it.
	You know, the...
	Her family was involved in gangs.
	Wow. So...
	Well, you know, that leads me, my friend, to my next question.
	And I'm pretty sure you know what it is, right?
	Which is, okay, what assets did she bring to the table to make up for this huge value divide?
	Which is another way of asking, how pretty was she?
	She's really pretty. You know, she's...
	She's really charismatic too.
	She knows how to manipulate people to get what she wants.
	So I guess I fell for that.
	I can see through her now.
	I see after taking the red pill, I can tell she's not a happy person.
	Last year, she was hospitalized.
	I forgot for what.
	She asked me to go see her at the hospital I went.
	And this is one of the moments where I noticed how lonely she was as a human.
	No one went to see her, her mother, anyone.
	She resorted to her ex-husband, you know.
	Right. I went to see her out of respect.
	It's not like I wanted to spark anything back up or anything like that.
	Well, I mean, if you have a kind of personality based on using people, then the people in your life want to use you back.
	And when you're in hospital, well, they can't really use you for anything, right?
	So why would they come? Right.
	So that moment itself, you know, last year, that's when I noticed.
	I was there for, I would say, like 45 minutes and that to me in itself, I was like, she has gone through a lot where she doesn't even know who she is, you know? Right.
	Right. Now, do you know much about her childhood?
	In other words, I know a little bit, of course, about yours and what happened to you, but do you know anything about her childhood and the manner in which...
	I mean, it sounds like she was abused.
	Did you know the manner in which she was abused?
	She... I know her father.
	Her father... So her father...
	So I get two different stories.
	I believe what the father says...
	So she grew up in a single mother's home, right?
	Her father, I guess, walked away because, I guess, her mother cheated on him or something.
	And what happened was her mother got with another guy, and that guy, I guess...
	My ex-wife and that guy had a connection, right?
	She looked at him as a father figure or whatever.
	And... Her mom ended up dumping him and he committed suicide.
	So she...
	My ex-wife blames her mother because the guy committed suicide.
	Wait, was that her biological father?
	No, no, this was another guy.
	Another guy, okay, got it. So...
	A few years later come by, which she gets with another guy.
	And she has a kid with him, which is her younger brother.
	And my ex-wife hates this guy.
	She's claimed that he sexually abused her when she was like eight years old or something like that.
	But he was younger, right?
	Wait, who? Her brother?
	Her brother was younger.
	I think he was a newborn at the time.
	I'm so sorry. I just lost track of who sexually abused your ex-wife.
	So, the new man that came into her mother's picture.
	So, there was a new man that came around.
	And her father is not around, right?
	Right. So, she grew up hating her, I guess...
	Her mom's new boyfriend and she would emotionally torture her brother, I remember.
	When I would go to her mom's house, her little brother would be playing around and she would hit him and tell him, oh, you're fat.
	You know, all kinds of nasty things.
	Well, I mean, obviously she was angry at her stepfather and took it out on his kid, right?
	Correct. And I've spoken to her biological father, and he's pretty much said, like, hey, you know, I try to be there for you, but your mom always says, would say, oh, you can't see her today.
	Come back tomorrow. So I guess my ex-wife...
	Would be waiting on the couch, sitting waiting for her dad for like five hours, and then her mom would say, oh, your dad's not going to come today.
	Right. So she blames the dad for the mom keeping the dad away from her.
	Right. Right.
	Yeah, that's a tough thing.
	You know, with the single moms and kids and adult males, unrelated adult males in the house, man, that's a pretty rough situation.
	And I've talked about that before, so I won't go into great detail here.
	But, you know, kids who are with a male in the house who's not biologically related to them are like 30 times more likely to be abused.
	And it's bad.
	It's bad. It's really cranking out a whole lot of messed up people.
	And this is old wisdom, right?
	You say your family is conservative, right?
	I assume that's the Catholic influence to some degree.
	And the old family structures, they were there for a reason.
	You can smash up the family and you can have welfare and you can have rotating boyfriends and so on.
	And it's like... I guess that serves the immediate pleasure of the parents sometimes, but I mean, it's the kids.
	Well, the kids can't vote, right?
	So that's why, unfortunately, they just get thrown under the bus, so to speak.
	But yeah, there are a lot of people out there who want to prey on kids, and if there's a dad around, they're kind of hampered from that, right?
	Which is why I think a lot of people who want to prey on kids kind of advocate smashing up the family so that, you know, the dad's out of the picture, they can get access to the kids, and You know, that may have happened with your ex-wife's family and that's, I mean, that's hell.
	That's literally hell. I mean, it's one thing to be physically abused.
	That's bad enough, but it's a whole other level of ugly and creepy and dysfunctional to have this kind of sexual abuse on you.
	And then, of course, for your mom not to protect you, for you not even to be able to go to your mom and say, I mean, God, this guy's a monster.
	Get him out. You know what?
	She has a lot of hate for her mom too because her mom took her partner's side when she told her that.
	Oh, she told her mom and her mom sided with her partner.
	Right. Which mirrors, I guess, that you told your ex-wife about the abuse and to some degree, at least for a while, she seems to have sided with her boyfriend, right?
	Correct. Correct. So, yeah, that's how she pretty much grew up, you know.
	It was a bunch of red flags, you know.
	She had tattoos, you know.
	My family's really anti-tattoos, you know.
	I don't have any tattoos myself, even though the culture where we grew up in and it's a highly Hispanic, you know.
	Where a lot of young Hispanic males, and even the females, they get a bunch of tattoos, whether it's a gang tattoo or whatever it is.
	That was a red flag too.
	And so you knew all of this stuff, I guess, right?
	And I mean, you were a kid, right?
	I mean, you said you were underage when you got pregnant.
	And did you think...
	What did you think about in terms of the future?
	Was it like, well, love will conquer all.
	She's going to be fine.
	Did you think that much about that in terms of staying with her?
	Or it was like, wow, she's pretty and she's charismatic and she's exciting and she's hot.
	Sorry, was there any sense of where things were going long-term?
	Well, it's like I go back.
	I wasn't really exposed to the single motherhood Kind of thing.
	I think I was kind of naive about that.
	You know, now that I look back because my parents, you know, when we would go to family reunions or parties or stuff like that, it was usually people because my parents chose carefully who they associated with.
	So I didn't really see that many single mothers, you know, in a in family settings or parties or anything like that so I wasn't really aware of the issues that come along with children that grow up with uh single mothers you know uh well and it's not like the media or the culture is helping you out there because it's always like the heroic single moms struggling because they were just abandoned by mysteriously bad men and they have no fault and Unfortunately,
	you get a lot of counter-information to what's often the case.
	Right, right. I would see it in the school.
	I remember there was a kid where...
	I was in elementary school too.
	At the time, he was my best friend.
	We would hang out all the time.
	We'd Me and him, we were one of the bad kids of the whole school.
	He grew up without a father.
	He knew who his dad was.
	He would see him around the neighborhood.
	I remember one time where we were in class and we looked outside the window and his dad was a roofer.
	He told everyone, hey look, there goes my dad working up there.
	The dad saw him And he was expecting for his dad to come down and say hi to him.
	But I guess they were going through a divorce.
	Now that I look at it, right? He couldn't get near the child.
	He couldn't even come down the roof and say hi.
	He had a rough life.
	He ended up getting killed through gang violence a few years back.
	Oh, man. So he's announcing to the class, hey, look, that's my dad.
	And then his dad doesn't even come down.
	Oh, man. Oh, that's rough.
	Oh, man. Right.
	That's harsh. That's really harsh.
	And that's going to leave a mark emotionally that's real deep.
	Yeah, that's one of the first signs that I saw with struggling kids living under single mother homes that I see today.
	You know, with that particular person, you know, I... My mom used to walk him home because...
	And we were in elementary, right?
	My mom used to walk him home or when we would go to school, he would tag along with us, you know, so he could walk with us.
	He gravitated towards my dad a lot.
	You know, he used to call my dad grandpa, you know.
	It was pretty sad, that kid's story.
	Oh, man. You got a lot of sorrow in your circle, man.
	Yeah. Yeah. This is one of the reasons I emailed you, because I've been having a drinking problem where I don't want my kids to grow up like, hey, it's okay to be drunk all the time.
	I tell myself, well, I'm not going to drink today.
	I'm not going to drink today. Next thing you know, I'm I'm at a bar that's a few feet away from my house drinking, you know, getting hammered and then the next day I feel like crap, you know, and it's time going to waste, you know, my health.
	And I just really want to be the competent father that I know that I can be and that I should be and what my kids need, especially what they're going through, you know.
	Right. I admire that, of course, and whatever I can do to help.
	Just out of curiosity, before we get into that, how did you end up finding what I do and what drew you into listening, do you think?
	Can you repeat it again?
	Sure. I just wanted to ask how you found my show, Free Domain, and how you ended up being interested in what I talk about.
	I found out about you through another YouTuber.
	He... He...
	He talks about you all the time.
	You know, he doesn't have a big of an audience like you.
	He... So, it was a big...
	So, right after my divorce, I was feeling kind of weird, you know?
	It was around 2016...
	After my separation, I started doing research, you know, like, what am I feeling?
	Like, it was really weird.
	And then I came across the Red Pill.
	I came across a bunch of those guys you did with the 21 Convention across their YouTube channels, and it was just a big...
	Like, aha moment, you know?
	Like, this is what I'm experiencing, right?
	And then this YouTuber, he talks about you all the time.
	He swears by you, too.
	So, since you gotta listen to Stefan Mullen...
	That's good. That's slightly alarming, but that's good, I guess.
	Sorry, go ahead. He could be a little bit...
	He's not as sensitive, I would say, as most people out there on YouTube.
	He curses a lot and all this.
	He had a rough childhood, too.
	And I decided to take a look at your YouTube channel.
	I looked you up first, and the first thing I see on Google, it says, Is it Stefan Molyneux?
	Is this alt-right racist person?
	You know, the whole...
	Yeah, we don't have to broadcast that stuff particularly, but let's just say there's a few negatives out there about me.
	Right. But you're like, okay, well, let's hear how nasty this guy is, and I guess it didn't seem nasty enough to you that you couldn't keep listening, right?
	No, and it was just...
	A lot of the stuff you talk about is...
	I feel like, okay, that makes sense.
	I see why that is.
	I don't see any racism in this.
	Just because it's true and you don't like it doesn't mean it's not factual.
	It doesn't mean it's not what reality is.
	So... Well, to be, you know, really, really blunt and with all due respect to your dead friends.
	I mean, if you, let's say you take a bunch of Hispanic youths, right, and you say to them, well, you know, white people all just hate you and white people are racist and they just want to hold you down and keep you down.
	You've got no future. There's all this institutionalized racism.
	Well, it's going to fill their hearts full of despair and hatred and despair and hatred.
	It's a deadly combination because it produces nihilism, which is like, well, there's no future for me, so I'll just live for the now.
	Why on earth would I care about the laws of my society when they're specifically designed to oppress me and my community and so on?
	I think that what killed your friends was not bullets, but words.
	It was a kind of mind virus that gets placed into People's heads, and it gives them no future.
	And when you have no future, you live for the present.
	You make decisions based upon hedonism and all of that stuff, like you're just some mammal.
	And you end up getting yourself cornered into a kind of life or a kind of world where you might get a bit of money, but all it does is paper the way to an early grave.
	And I just think that's wretched and terrible, and I can't even...
	I've expressed to you the anger that I feel towards all of the people who poisoned the minds of various communities into believing in this overarching racism narrative and so on because, I mean, I don't know if they want to destroy people or if it's just an after effect of some other, I don't know, maybe even worse plan.
	I don't know, but it's just so destructive.
	It's so destructive. There should be no foundational reason why we can't get along.
	I mean, yeah, we need to talk about differences and I've talked about that to the point where even I'm bored of it, but...
	Everything could be so much better, and we could enjoy and celebrate all of our differences instead of saying, ah, there's a difference.
	That must mean white people are evil, the law is corrupt, the cops are all racist, and you've got no future.
	I mean, telling people that kind of stuff over and over and over again is about as destructive A thing to do, as I could conceivably imagine.
	And it does lead to a lot of early deaths, a lot of irresponsibility, a lot of pointless confrontations with police that escalate.
	It leads to a lot of nihilism.
	And it really, really makes me angry.
	I think it's one of the worst forms of abuse that's going on in the world today.
	So I'm very glad that you looked past the language and Actually listened.
	And of course, I'm incredibly glad that you trusted me enough to have this conversation.
	And I appreciate your courage and caring for your children that you're doing it.
	Oh, well, thank you.
	It's an honor.
	It's like I said, I enjoy your show.
	It's a level of brainwashing, I would say, that I've spoken to my friends about it, and they call me a race traitor.
	They call me all kinds of things.
	It's really hard to digest when the people you grow up with that you really care about, you're trying to present them with a different point of view, and they...
	They automatically categorize you as a brace traitor, which...
	If it's any consolation, I get called that sometimes too.
	So it's... I mean, it's one of the tragedies of just pursuing the truth, but I mean, what other choice do we have?
	I mean, the disaster of the lies continuing to fester is so big.
	Anyway, we can talk about this perhaps another time.
	It's big socio-political stuff, and it's really fascinating, but I really want to make sure that we talk about you.
	Now, I was interested... In everything you're saying, but also in particular that you said, I'm not going to drink today, and you go to a bar, right?
	You go to a bar. Now, why do you think...
	Is it common that you drink in a bar rather than alone?
	Well, yeah.
	And why do you think... I mean, it's more expensive, right?
	But that must mean that it's more than the alcohol.
	Because if it's just the alcohol, right, you could drink more cheaply at home, but you go to a bar...
	And the question is, why?
	It's like, you know, double or triple the cost, but there's something in the bar that is more important to you than just the alcohol.
	I would say so, but I drink alone.
	You know, it's not like I'm...
	No, no, you're in the bar.
	Yeah, I get that. But you're in the bar rather than home, right?
	And I think that means something.
	Why is it that you want to go to the bar rather than drink at home?
	I believe it's because I want to escape reality.
	But you could do that at home too, right?
	If you get drunk enough, right?
	There's something in the bar that is a plus that you can't get at home.
	I'm not really sure.
	Sure.
	Does it feel more social?
	Even though I know you're drinking alone and all that, but you're not like at home staring at a wall.
	You're like in a bar, there's music, there's people, there's a bartender...
	You know what?
	I don't even do it for the social aspect.
	I would say I'm more of a...
	Not necessarily an introvert, but it's just...
	It's not like I'm going out because there's a bunch of people or anything like that, you know?
	If anything, this is a pretty quiet bar.
	I don't like being around, like, Like at a nightclub or anything like that.
	It's just too much noise, too much going on.
	You can't even speak to someone.
	So I'm not really sure.
	I mean, this is something that just sort of popped into my head while you're talking.
	I don't know if it makes sense or not.
	But when I left the business world for a while, I was working on...
	I wrote two books.
	And I liked to write at the local Starbucks.
	And... I could, of course, easily write at home and I could have a coffee cheaper at home.
	I loved lattes, but I didn't have the money to buy them, so I'd buy an Americano and nurse it for like two hours.
	But I liked being there because it felt like it wasn't quite so alone, if that makes sense.
	It wasn't quite so isolated.
	I was with other carbon-based life forms who were around and Welcome to my show!
	So I wasn't there to socialize, but I preferred being where there were people because, you know, writing is kind of a solitary activity.
	And I liked just there being people, some noise, some movement rather than here I am alone in my room, you know, writing away.
	And so it wasn't that I was there to socialize, but I preferred being in a social environment, even though I wasn't participating in it, so to speak.
	Okay, I see where you're going.
	I think that could be it.
	Yeah, I could see that.
	And it also might hide from you to some degree.
	Like if you're sitting there pounding back drinks alone, staring at a wall, it's pretty hard to hide that you have a problem, right?
	But if you say, oh, you know, I'm going to the bar, have a beer or two, I'm going to unwind or whatever it is, right?
	It's a little easier to kind of mask that you have a problem, if that makes sense.
	Yeah. Yeah. When did you first...
	Sorry, go ahead. Go ahead.
	When did you first start drinking?
	I mean, and I don't mean like every kid tries alcohol and all that.
	I don't mean like they have a couple of...
	But like drinking to the point where it was like, you know, hangover or, you know, what we used to call when I was a kid, a teenager driving the big white bus, which is when you're kind of leaning over and throwing up into a toilet and gripping the porcelain around the edge.
	When did you first start drinking to, I guess, to excess?
	It was right after my friend...
	Passed away. You know, the one that went hunting right after that.
	It was... So I had three friends that I would hang around with, right?
	I mean, two. So it was three of us.
	So it was me, the person that passed away, and another one.
	We all went to the same middle school, high school.
	We hung around together.
	My friend that passed away left the daughter behind.
	He was struggling too.
	I guess I would hang around with him.
	We would hang out every day.
	He lived a block away too from where I lived.
	The bar was literally a block away from our home.
	The other guy, he ended up becoming a drug addict.
	We stopped hanging around with him.
	He ended up Started using crack and meth and he just wandered off to the streets.
	And then after my friend passed away, like we would hang out, we wouldn't get hammered or anything like that.
	But after he passed away, I guess you could call it loneliness.
	One of the reasons I drank, you know, I would, uh, uh, we would talk about like philosophy and all this kind of stuff, you know, uh, I guess you could say I would have intellectual conversations with him.
	From my point of view, through society, how I see society, I see people...
	I guess you could say I do feel lonely because everyone else is...
	Subscribed to the latest music or the latest trends, the latest clothing, all of that.
	And to me, that doesn't really bring any value into my life.
	I don't know if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, it does. They all, I guess you could say, commit financial suicide by Buying the newest Mercedes or the newest cars, all of that.
	And I can't really see myself connecting with those people.
	You know, I've tried to and I've came to the conclusion, why am I going to...
	I don't see myself surrounded with those people, you know?
	So I would say that has a lot to do with it.
	And parenting, like parenting is a single parent.
	It can be kind of lonely, and it sounds, you know, oh, you've got your kids there and so on.
	It's like, yeah, but they're kids.
	So you're not going to sit there and have philosophical discussions about the nature of society with a seven-year-old, at least I don't think you should.
	You know, I mean, you can talk about ideas and all that, but, you know, age-appropriate conversations, I mean, there's a reason why they're still kids and we're adults and we're independent and they're not, is that their brains are still a long way from maturity.
	So being a single parent, you know, can be...
	You can be pretty lonely, right?
	I mean, I remember seeing some show.
	It didn't... It had to do with parents.
	I think it was like a supernanny or something.
	I think it was this guy in Alaska who had four kids and he was a single dad and all that.
	And, you know, he would sleep in the same room with his four kids.
	And JoJo, what was her name?
	She basically said, well, that's because you're lonely.
	I do the same thing, too.
	Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it's...
	I mean, we're kind of designed to have adults around and kids around as a whole, right?
	And not to sit there and just, you know, play Hungry Hippos for like 12 hours straight.
	We need that sort of spiritual nutrition of, you know, words with more than three syllables or two syllables or whatever, right?
	So there is, I mean, there's real loneliness in...
	Being a single parent.
	And, you know, once you are a single parent, particularly if you have three kids, it's sort of my humble opinion is that the one mark of the quality of a woman is her desire to have children.
	Now, if you already have like a custody battle and complications and three kids, then, you know, it would be a little bit tougher to attract a woman who wants, I don't know, two or three kids as well, right?
	Because your resources kind of already tied up and It's complicated, so it is a challenging life, and just another reason why I wanted to take the call.
	We hear a lot about single moms and all of that, but single dads, loneliness is a significant problem in this environment.
	If you feel alone and you can't get company, one thing you can kind of do is erase yourself, if that makes sense, because then you're not alone, right?
	To be alone is to be a person in isolation.
	And if you kind of unperson yourself through alcohol, then you're not alone, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, that does make sense.
	You know, I'm really thankful for my brother, you know, because he thinks similar to To what I do.
	We hang out a lot.
	You could say almost every day.
	We have these talks.
	He also doesn't have any friends.
	He doesn't have an alcohol problem.
	He lives with his wife and his children.
	You know, he...
	I guess he sees the world the same way I see it.
	I don't know.
	I really don't understand what it really is.
	That's my main...
	I know I feel lonely, even though I'm surrounded by a bunch of people, but when I try to engage myself with other people, it's...
	It's usually, oh, did you see the game?
	Or did you see the football game?
	Or I'm going to go get this car.
	And it's like, to me, that's not, you know, it's materialism.
	Like, that really doesn't...
	But it's boring. It's boring, right.
	Yeah, it's boring. It's boring.
	I don't know. Like, I mean, small talk and stuff like that, it's, you know, it's fine.
	And, you know, when you normally, when you meet new people, not at these calls, right?
	But normally when you meet new people, there's a little bit of small talk.
	You're kind of gauging each other and all that.
	To me, small talk is, I don't know if you've ever been, like, you go diving in a lake or in the ocean or whatever and, like, you've got to snorkel or something.
	You kind of go down and then you've got to come back up, right?
	And for a lot of people, that's like a deep conversation.
	Like, I can have a deep conversation, maybe for a couple of minutes, but then I've got to come back up for air and I've got to stop, right?
	Because it's But I think for people like us, it's kind of the opposite.
	Like, we can have small talk for a couple of minutes, but then we want to get to something more real.
	More... Correct. More substantial.
	Something that's not just like...
	To me, small talk is like junk food.
	Yeah, it's fine. And every now and then you can have, I don't know, half a handful of Skittles.
	It's not going to kill you or whatever. But a steady diet of it will just destroy you.
	Right? I think. And so it's...
	It's hard to avoid the thirst and need for a deep conversation, but it's kind of tough because those deep conversations, they can turn pretty volatile pretty quickly.
	Or people can just shut them down if they find themselves getting uncomfortable, which they often do and then blame you, right?
	Like, you're making me uncomfortable.
	It's like, it's not me.
	It's not me. People get mad at me.
	It's like, it's not me. I'm just a guy making sounds, right?
	It's whatever, the truth, the argument, the implications of what I'm saying.
	Who knows, right? But there is a great loneliness in thinking deeply.
	And there is a great prejudice against people who think deeply, which to me is just basically thinking, right?
	And there's a hostility.
	To me, there's a big war.
	It's kind of a subtle war.
	It's like an underground war between the deep and the shallow.
	Now, that has something to do with intelligence, non-intelligence, although, you know, you can have smart people who are very shallow, and you can have less smart people who are really deep.
	I've sort of experienced both sides.
	But, you know, there's probably a bit of a correlation, but it's not like perfect or anything.
	So it's tough, right? So you want to have actual, meaningful, important, philosophical conversations.
	And it's hard.
	I'm so glad that you have your brother for that, right?
	And you're home, and you've got all these thoughts going on in your head, right?
	All these thoughts going on in your head.
	And the best way to organize your thoughts...
	People think, oh, keep a journal and a diary and write.
	Okay, that's good and that's not bad at all, but the best way to organize your thoughts is through conversation.
	And that's why people who, like the powers that be, that don't want our thoughts to be organized, they are constantly interfering with the necessary conversations we need to have, right?
	And it's...
	Thoughts outside of conversation just tend to race around like those hamsters in a wheel or a train around a little toy train track or something like that.
	Just go round and round. And you find yourself revisiting the same perspectives over and over.
	But in conversation with another human being who can talk back to you and help you work out ideas and contribute their thoughts, you get somewhere.
	And that's why conversation is so essential.
	And that's why, like, 15 years later, I'm still very eager to have conversations like this.
	So it's hard.
	This battle between the shallow and the deep is kind of like a moral or intellectual civil war that's going on.
	I think it always has gone on in the world.
	And I think it's going on right now.
	And I think that you might be self-medicating away the isolation, right?
	Because how do the shallows punish the deep people?
	Well, they isolate them, right?
	They talk smack about them.
	They talk shit about them. They, whatever, I try to drive other people.
	So they isolate people. And that's hard, right?
	Now, you, of course, being a guy who's divorced, being a guy who's, you know, currently going through a very difficult time with his ex and has been doing that for quite some time, and who then still has to, you know, you're sitting with your kids, and you don't want to be Mr.
	Like, oh, you know, things are going badly, and it's really stressful, and you want to be there for your kids.
	You want to be, you know, peppy and positive for your kids, and that...
	That takes something out of you, too, to put on a happy face, which, you know, again, I'm sure you do, and I respect you for doing it, because they're kids, and this is more than they should know, but it takes a bit of a toll, right, to be that way.
	Yeah, it does. It's really hard, you know, sometimes I... It's hard to describe.
	It's... I've always felt...
	Growing up, I guess I always felt like I was stupid.
	Because I never got good grades or anything like that.
	But the way how I saw...
	I guess...
	How I saw society was...
	I guess everyone was a conformist.
	If that's... And anyone outside of that, if you don't fit into this box, you're pretty much outcasted.
	Growing up, I guess, based on the level of indoctrination, I was able to hide it, right?
	So I was able to go in certain circles, you could say, and mask myself.
	And people had no idea.
	You were able to blend.
	Correct, yeah.
	To turn two-dimensional and slip into the flatland of cliche.
	Right, and it's like right now, I'm in a point of my life where it's too exhausting to try to blend in, but it comes with the consequences of loneliness, if that makes any sense.
	But I felt that regardless...
	I felt that regardless, even though I was trying to blend in with the crowd.
	I do that once in a while.
	I do it just to see how those social circles interact with each other.
	It's pretty disgusting what I come across because I'm brown-skinned, right?
	And I lean more towards, you know, I'm Hispanic.
	I lean more towards conservative.
	So I'll give you the perfect example real quick.
	A few days ago, our culture celebrates Day of the Dead.
	It's called Dia de los Muertos.
	And I decided to take my kids to a small parade or festival.
	And the level of bigotry that was within it I couldn't take it.
	I was only there for a little bit.
	They were protesting.
	Whatever the social norms are, anti-male, anti-this, it has become this political movement instead of this culture holiday where you celebrate the dead.
	It's done a 360 where Where it's like, okay, I'm not going to go out there and blast my beliefs to everyone else, but I can easily sneak into these and blend into these circles where I felt lonely at that event.
	Because they have a political agenda that you don't share.
	Correct. Right.
	So all of that has a lot to do with it.
	I've even been thinking of cutting out the internet because I feel like that has a lot to do with it.
	With what I'm going through.
	Yeah, the internet is one big giant experiment in how much bad news can individuals take on any given day, right?
	Yeah. So, did you have any other questions?
	I have a couple of things to say.
	And you can interrupt as you see fit.
	Obviously, this is your life.
	These are just my thoughts. I think that there are people like yourself, like myself, who want to have conversations with you, and I think the drinking comes from the shallow people.
	So I think the drinking, like your impulse to drink, comes from the shallow people to keep you from connecting to the deep people.
	It's like your punishment or your curse for not being one of them.
	So I don't think that you're drinking fundamentally to avoid loneliness.
	I mean, I think that that's an immediate thing.
	But you know, of course, the drinking...
	Is going to intensify your loneliness down the road.
	Because when you're drinking, you're not out there creating meaningful connections with people you can have conversations with, right?
	In fact, sort of sitting there in a bar drinking alone, people are going to look at you like, wow, that's not good, right?
	So I think that this is kind of like a moat that's being put around you.
	And I think it's actually serving the needs of the people who don't have your best interests at heart.
	And it's kind of like an unconscious battle that goes on, right?
	So I think that the drinking, yeah, it comes out of an immediate need to not feel lonely.
	But it's kind of like...
	I don't know, like this is this incel thing, right?
	This involuntary celibate thing that's like the big new insults on the internet and so on.
	And it's about, you know, young men who, because there's a lot of hookup culture and a lot of sleeping around, you know, the top 20% of men get like most of the women and the rest of the men are kind of left out in the cold.
	And it's this big, big insult.
	Like it's not the result of women chasing men using their sexual market value as their bargain chip, which is kind of humiliating and gross.
	It's not the fault of women at all.
	It's just men who are neckbeards and live in their parents' basement.
	It's always their mom's basement, like never their father's basement, right?
	But the incel thing switches later in life.
	So the incel thing for women is, okay, they hit the wall, they're 35, 45 or whatever plus, and now they're involuntarily celibate because they didn't use their youthful sexual market value to lock down a good man and they didn't get into a good relationship and they don't have kids.
	So now they become invisible in the same way that The majority of men are kind of invisible to the alpha-chasing females when everyone's young.
	When everyone's sort of middle-aged and older, the women then become invisible to everyone else.
	So this kind of flip on the incel thing.
	So the incel is kind of like an argument that boomerangs, right?
	Because as the men are involuntary celibate, a lot of times they'll work on advancing their careers, saving some money, and maybe they'll start exercising or whatever.
	So they become much more attractive.
	And then the women who won't date the men when the men are in their 20s, those men who are in their 40s won't date the women in their 40s.
	They'll date younger men. So the whole thing just kind of It flips around and it's one of these things that it's kind of unfair because the women get the short end of the stick, so to speak, later in life when it's too late to fix it and the men often improve through rejection and the women, by the time the rejections roll in, it's kind of too late to make the eggs new or whatever.
	So sometimes it's kind of like a reversal and with this situation where you're compelled to go and drink, you're out in public Advertising your loneliness, which is not going to be something that brings good people to you to have a chat.
	Now, I mean, like if, I don't know, just take some silly example.
	You join, I don't know, a photography club, a book club, or whatever it is, right?
	Well, then you're out there having conversations.
	You're not drunk, and you can actually meet the people you can connect with and have friendships to replace, you know, the friend who you've lost to drugs, the friend who you've lost...
	To a bullet and you don't have a replacement plan and obviously like drinking alone in a bar, that's not a replacement plan, right?
	So if it's not serving your needs, it must be serving someone else's needs.
	That's the foundational thing, right?
	And so if you drink in a bar, it's not serving your needs, which it's not, then it's serving someone else's needs and those needs are not like kind of in opposition to yours.
	Yeah. I think the bell of truth went off.
	I hope, anyway. I hope.
	Oh, no, it's a...
	Yeah, I get it. It's the door, right?
	So if you can understand, or at least if this is a reasonable approach, that your drinking is there to keep you isolated, that it's serving the needs, it's kind of like a social punishment or an ostracism moat around you that the shallow people have kind of put around you or I it's kind of like a social punishment or an ostracism moat around you that the shallow people have kind of put around you or I guess caused you to put around yourself, then it's kind
	Now, if that's the case, then you can replace drinking, which puts you in an isolated position, which then you want to self-erase in order to not feel the loneliness.
	But if you don't put yourself in an isolated position, then I think that your desire to drink will go down because, you know, I got to tell you, man, I'm sure that if you had a great conversation to have instead of a drink, you would choose the great conversation.
	I mean, I assume you're not drinking now, right?
	You're in a car and all that.
	But you'd rather have a good conversation than a drink.
	But the drink is interfering with your good conversation, and that's my, I guess, major concern.
	Yeah, you know, that definitely I would rather have a...
	A great conversation with someone else.
	I didn't bring this up earlier.
	I've even isolated myself from women.
	I haven't dated after my separation.
	Did you mention a girlfriend earlier?
	Did I mistake that for something else?
	I did, but that was just for...
	When I gave the example to my kids, I don't bring my girlfriend around, you guys.
	I don't have a girlfriend, so I pretty much told them that so they can see that, okay, mom's boyfriend shouldn't be doing this, so my girlfriend isn't going to do that to you guys.
	Does that make any sense? Now, you understand, though, let's say a quality woman comes into a bar and sees a guy drinking alone.
	You're not going to be first on her list, right?
	Right. But sorry, so you kind of, and this is the thing, right?
	When you sort of understand the court system and how it's somewhat corrupted some aspects of female nature for some women, you know, it's kind of tough to get back on the horse again, so to speak.
	It's, how do I say it?
	I haven't seeked for it, because I don't know if that makes any sense.
	I've had a bunch of opportunities, but I look at my circumstances, then I look at the women I want to engage with, and it wouldn't be fair to me, it wouldn't be fair to my children, and it wouldn't be fair to the other person.
	If that makes any sense.
	First, you don't have an alcohol problem.
	Second, I'm going through all these legal issues with my ex-wife and my kids need a competent father, you know?
	And throwing another relationship into this mix, I know it's not going to help out.
	It's not going to help out.
	I think you most need a friend at the moment.
	Or more friends.
	Right, right. You know, I've gone to a couple I don't know if you heard of meetup.com They have a couple group settings and all that and it just it doesn't really cut it for me.
	It's really hard, you know.
	When you want to talk about specific things and then no one else is, you know, pretty much I would say the vast majority of people in this country are into the latest trends,
	you know, and that in itself, you know, Especially women around my age, they don't want to be intellectually stimulated.
	They want to be doing whatever they're doing.
	They want to go out and party and do this and do that.
	So it's not like a...
	I wouldn't even call myself an incel.
	Yeah, you have the opportunity, but you don't want to pursue it.
	Right. It's...
	I don't think it's the right moment for me at the time.
	Right. Especially that I'm a full-time father.
	And what happens if you can't get your drinking under control over time?
	How's that going to play out, do you think?
	I can see it. I can see what's happening.
	I had an uncle where...
	He was an alcoholic for like 27 years or like 30 years.
	My father was an alcoholic but he stopped drinking for like when he I think when I was like 3 he stopped drinking so I never saw his alcoholism but my mom tells me it was pretty bad you know where he would uh He would get drunk and be like, oh, let's go out. And he'd go driving or whatever.
	I don't want that.
	I don't want to put myself in the situation where I'm just drinking every day and driving around with my kids.
	But I can see.
	I know I'm an alcoholic because I specifically choose the times When I drink, where I don't have to drive.
	I don't know if that makes any sense.
	And if I have to be somewhere and I end up drinking, I'll end up catching an Uber.
	So you could say I'm responsible in that aspect.
	Yeah, but it's hard on your finances, it's hard on your health, and you want to not have this in your life, right?
	Yeah. Now, listen, I don't know how to stop drinking, but I do know this, that if you get to the root of a bad habit, it's a whole lot easier to let go of it.
	If you just try and, like, white-knuckle, it's called, you know, like, I'm just not going to drink, and you don't sort of figure out why you're drinking, it's usually a losing fight.
	It's like dieting, you know, like, I'm just not going to eat.
	It's like you've got to get to the root of what's going on with overeating, and I think when you do, it becomes a whole lot easier to change, right?
	So... So that's sort of why I'm looking at what might be at the bottom of the drinking, right?
	If it is a form of self-erasure because you're lonely.
	If it is a form of kind of warding off good people because loneliness is the curse that is put upon you by the shallow people of this world for asking uncomfortable questions and so on.
	And like if you can get right to the bottom of it, Then, in my experience, it's a whole lot easier to sort of fix things when you get to the root because you get to the root and you're not then trying to hold up a heavy weight, you know, like those stress exercises, you know, hold up, hold 20 pounds at arm's length.
	It's like, yeah, you could do it for a while, but eventually your arm's just going to go down, right?
	Whereas if you're not in that position, you're not fighting a losing battle.
	So that's sort of why I'm trying to figure out, like, what's at the root of it.
	Now, listen. Here's the pluses, right?
	This is what I want you to be happy and proud of, right?
	In my opinion. It's more than opinion.
	I take it as a fact, right? So you were brutally treated as a child, my friend, and I'm incredibly sorry for that.
	And I'm sorry that nobody lifted a damn finger, it would seem, to help you.
	And I totally understand your frustration and anger.
	And you just, none of us can look at the society the same way if we've gone through that situation.
	And I've gone through it repeatedly year after year.
	And even if you're an adult, right?
	If you're an adult, if this topic comes up or you tell people, a lot of times there's just this uncomfortable silence like, well, don't tell me.
	Because what people do is they then sit there and think, well, wait a minute.
	Did I know any kids that I didn't help when they were kids being abused or whatever?
	Or do I know anyone now?
	So it's a big uncomfortable topic for everyone.
	But here's the thing. You were beaten and now you...
	I think sometimes or occasionally spank your kids.
	That's huge progress. Listen, don't get me wrong.
	I'd like to set the flag to not hitting your children at all and all of that, but I think it's important to say just what you have achieved, right?
	You stood up for your children in a way that nobody stood up for you.
	You kept your children safe in a way that nobody kept you safe.
	I don't know if you get just how incredibly admirable that is.
	And how much you have achieved in the span of a single generation in moving towards the protection of children.
	You acted. I think you should be incredibly proud of that.
	I know you should be incredibly proud of that.
	But there's a battle, right?
	Because society doesn't want you to do what you're doing.
	Because if you save children, then other people could have done it too.
	They get mad at you deep down.
	And there's this kind of tug of war that goes on under the table kind of thing.
	So I think you have so much to be proud of.
	You came from a hellish background, and you have worked very hard to protect your children, and you're doing it.
	You've got them out of an environment where they were being beaten, it sounds like, right?
	So, holy crap, like, you could rest on that medal for the rest of your life, and now, of course, you're a restless spirit, and you want better for yourself and your kids going forward, so I'm sure you will continue to work to improve things.
	But I'm not sure if you really get just how amazing a job you have, like, what kind of amazing job you have done to protect your kids in a way that you weren't protected.
	Do you see that, what I'm saying?
	I see what you're saying, but that's not how I feel.
	Okay, so what's the feeling?
	You feel like you failed, right?
	Right. I feel like I failed.
	At the same time, I feel like I needed to be...
	I had to do what was necessary.
	You know, what was...
	It was necessary for me to, you know, pretty much step up, like, hey, you can't be doing this to my kids, you know.
	It was, for me, it was common sense, like, hey, this can't be going on.
	I'm not going to allow it, especially to my kids, you know.
	Yeah, okay, but look, you are wrestling with half decisions that were made when you were still a minor, right, in terms of pregnancy and all that, right?
	Right. So, listen, I don't think you can go back in time to before you were even an adult and say, well, that's just all failure, right?
	Look, you love your kids, obviously.
	You care about your kids. And I'm sure that you're happy that they're in your life.
	So, you know, the decisions you made when you were young, Or the lack of decisions you made when you were young.
	This is just stuff you have to live with now.
	But going back and saying, well, it's all just been a failure.
	Well, first of all, that's going to be tough.
	Because if you have that sense that you're a failure, and your failure involves your kids, what are your kids going to feel?
	That there's a product of?
	Failure. Right. You don't want them to feel that, right?
	No. I mean, it's perfectly fine to say in your heart of hearts...
	I wish I had chosen a different mother, but I'm incredibly happy with my children as they are.
	I mean, I know those things are kind of logically contrary.
	If you chose a different mom, you'd have different kids.
	But those two things, as far as moral stances, are perfectly valid.
	Okay. Right?
	You could say, I wish I'd chosen a different mom for my kids.
	But my kids are not the result of failure.
	They're not the result of bad decisions.
	I mean, but aren't they?
	No, because your children did not make those bad decisions.
	So they themselves, you can say, oh, biologically, blah, blah, blah.
	But your children did not make those bad decisions.
	So there's no failure in your children.
	Do you understand what I mean? Yeah, I understand, but from my end...
	No, you're a dad.
	Your end doesn't matter as much anymore.
	Because if you indulge in the I'm a failure, that's going to spread to your kids, right?
	Right. But your kids are not failures.
	And your kids, in terms of their nature, they are not the products of failures.
	They're the products of conception, which is a biological process.
	And I guess the only...
	Success they had was, you know, that they were viable pregnancies that came to term and they're healthy or whatever, right?
	So there's no failure in the nature or existence of your children.
	That makes sense.
	And the best way to teach them is to own long-ago mistakes.
	Yeah, it was a mistake. But listen, man, did you have any better example?
	Your father, unfortunately, I don't know if your parents opposed you getting together with this woman.
	They might have. But unfortunately, your parents had stripped their credibility from you because your dad beat you and your mom stood by.
	So you're not going to listen to them, right?
	Right. See, that's the problem.
	I remember I was saying earlier the problems with hitting your kids come up down the road.
	It's so important to maintain your moral authority with your children, and you do that by not hitting them.
	Because once you hit them, you don't have any moral authority because you're just pointing out that you're bigger and stronger and have the legal right to do so, which is not a moral position, but a position of strength, of power, of bullying.
	So you want your children not to make the mistakes that you made, and the best way to do that Is to raise them as peacefully as humanly possible so that when you give them advice when they're older, they don't sit there and say, hey man, you hit me.
	Why on earth would I listen to you? And then they just go off and make the same mistakes.
	That's really going to hurt, right?
	I mean, that's really going to be painful because then you get to see the same mistakes playing out and that's how you get.
	You really, really want to avoid that, right?
	Yeah, and that's pretty much what happened to me once I hit my teens.
	Yeah, I went pretty loose.
	I went pretty wild.
	Well, sure, because you've got hormones, you've got newfound physical strength, you've got sexual desire, you've got physical maturity, and you have no one that you respect enough to listen to them with regards to caution and self-restraint and saving yourself and so on, right? Yeah, you turn wild.
	I turned wild. I mean, that's natural and inevitable, right?
	And it's not like the culture is helping out that much.
	It's not like the movies or TV or teachers or music or anything.
	It's all glorifying a lot of that garbage, right?
	Right. So it's like only a mistake if you had someone in your life you really respected who sat down and told you all of the dangers you were courting and really warned you and so on.
	I mean, you'd still have some excuse because you'd be a young man or a kid, right?
	But you didn't have anything like that.
	You tell me one positive moral influence when you were younger that you really wanted to listen to and seek out the advisor.
	I can't think of one.
	Right.
	Thank you.
	Right. So, man, cut yourself a break.
	It's like expecting to know Japanese if no one's around to teach you Japanese.
	No, listen, I'm serious.
	Cut yourself a break. Yeah, it makes total sense.
	Cut yourself a break. You were doing the best you could with the knowledge you had and you were still a kid and a traumatized kid in a pretty twisted culture.
	There's no big magic, I should have known better.
	That's a crazy standard to have.
	Everything in your life was pointing a particular way And we conform to our communities.
	That's what we do as human beings.
	We're, I think, biologically kind of programmed that way, because if we don't conform to our communities, we don't have kids.
	So all the total rebels ended up being outbred, so to speak, by the conformists, right?
	So this is why the shallows outnumber the deeps and all that.
	So, you know, man, yeah, you can look back, there were warning signs, but that's what you know now.
	But you didn't have knowledge back then that you ignored.
	You simply didn't have the knowledge, right?
	And you can't be blamed as a child.
	Now, parents who have kids, yeah, you should read the parenting books.
	That's different, right? But it's like you were a 10-year-old kid and you woke up in a car rolling down a hill and you're like, well, I didn't steer it too well.
	It's like, well, no shit, right? Yeah.
	Yeah. So cut yourself some slack with regards to that, all of that stuff, and look at how you've acted in a noble, moral, mature, and responsible manner to protect your children, even though that was not modeled for you, because the moment you got the knowledge, you pursued it like crazy, right?
	You said you listened to this other YouTuber, you listened to me, you probably read a whole bunch of stuff, and...
	You know, taking the right pill in the right way, right?
	So the moment you got access to knowledge or the moment you had irrational certainties punctured, I mean, you pursued that stuff like, I don't know if you have been to the races, but, you know, like they've got that artificial rabbit or hare that goes around the track and the greyhounds all chase it.
	I mean, that's you after knowledge.
	The moment that the dull certainty of conformity gets cracked, you're clawing your way out.
	Do you know how admirable that is and how unfortunately rare that is?
	Man, that's incredible.
	And you are breaking the cycle with your kids.
	You're calling me. You're looking up other resources.
	You're considering anti-spanking.
	I mean, you got them out of an abusive environment.
	You're breaking the cycle.
	That's heroic.
	That is, you know, I sort of made a joke earlier about superheroes.
	That is being a superhero.
	that's the cape that counts we should be proud of this You should be damn proud of that. Thank you.
	Your kids will not grow up to make your mistakes.
	I'm sure they'll make other mistakes, you know, and that they won't be as bad, but that's the greatest gift, right?
	That's my main goal, you know, so they don't make the same mistakes that I did, you know, and the mistakes that I'm currently making.
	You can say...
	Right. Now listen, you can have meaningful conversations with your kids, it's just that they have to lead it, right?
	So you can ask them, like, how are you doing, or how's your life, or what do you think of this, and just listen.
	You'd be amazed at how deep kids can get when people actually listen to them.
	And if they're leading the conversation, whatever they want to talk about is fine.
	So you would be really surprised At the kind of conversations you can actually have with your children, if you're doing mostly listening, it can be very, very powerful, very deep, and it can help stave off the loneliness that I think that the alcohol is wrapped up in.
	I said to you earlier, and you agreed, I think, right?
	You'd rather have a deep conversation than a drink, but what if you can have a conversation with your kids?
	You know, you're not going to sit there and say, oh, your mom was sexually abused, right?
	Nothing like that, because that's, you know, they're kids, right?
	But if they lead the conversation, whatever they want to talk about, it's fine.
	And I think you might be really surprised at how much depth and complexity can come out of your kids.
	And that's going to beat the bar, I believe.
	Anytime. You know what, I'm I'm going to give that a try.
	I never thought of that.
	I've done it a couple times.
	They're going through it really emotionally, so they vent a lot about what they're going through.
	Yeah, and you want them to vent verbally, not act out, right?
	Right, right, right.
	So teach them, you know, words not deeds, right, so to speak.
	Yeah. And I think that that will, you know, you just listening to your kids as they talk, it's really great.
	I was having a conversation with a kid the other day, and just sort of out of nowhere, he launched into this, you know, he said, you know what really bugs me about adults?
	They never think a kid has anything important to say.
	You know, they ask you a question, you start to answer, and they'll just move on to another topic or ignore you, because it's like, well, I've done my bit, I asked the question, and it's like, I feel like I've just got to wait until I get older, and then people will listen to me.
	And this was a pretty young kid, and so I listened, right?
	Because it's important.
	Kids are full of a lot of words, a lot of thoughts, and they really, really want to communicate them in the same way that you did.
	Yeah, so.
	I'm trying to grasp all this together, you know.
	Well, of course you listen to this again, right?
	But that's fine. Now, let me ask you this...
	Again, I don't really know much about alcohol cessation.
	I don't know how in deep you are, how physically dependent you are.
	I'm not a doctor or a psychologist or anything.
	Is there any group or community that you could join, like, I don't know, Al-Anon or something like that, that could help you with this kind of stuff?
	Yeah. You know what?
	I've tried, but it's like going back to...
	Like when I go to the...
	How do I say this?
	They're really indoctrinated.
	They would say, oh, the reason why you're drinking is because it's in...
	You live in this type of neighborhood and they're out to get you kind of stuff.
	And it's like, you know, I don't want to deal with that kind of stuff.
	Does that make any sense? Yeah.
	So if they're offloading it entirely onto society, that's not the most empowering thing I've ever heard of.
	Correct. So it's...
	I've tried to stay away from those groups.
	I've tried to do research online, find other...
	Other aspects, I work out, so that really helps a lot.
	I'll go hit the weights, or I go to the gym, I'll go for a jog.
	I try to plan my day, so by the time I'm finished, I'm not around alcohol.
	Does that make any sense? Yeah, not being in the environment helps enormously, right?
	Just not being in that environment where there's alcohol flowing around and all that.
	I mean, it's the old thing like with food, right?
	Like I have a bit of a sweet tooth, so what do I have?
	I just can't have the sugary stuff in the house.
	If it's there, I'll just grab it and snack on it.
	But if it's not there, I'm not going to drive and get it, right?
	There is, yeah, this aspect of just keep temptation at bay and don't expose yourself to the situation.
	I mean, it's a real shame you live next door to a bar, man, that's, you know, move to the country or something.
	I don't know, but that's kind of rough.
	Yeah, it's really accessible because there's a liquor store on one corner and the bar is like right around the corner.
	It's more of a brewery.
	It's a brewery. It's not really a bar.
	So it's... So I have like two, three drinks within like 45 minutes and I'm already, you know, hammered because the drinks are like nine, ten percent.
	So if you get like a regular beer, it's probably like two and a half percent.
	So by the time I'm already like four or five drinks in, I'm already, you know, toasted and.
	And I try to structure my day, like I'll go hiking with my kids or we'll go out.
	Go eat somewhere. I take my kids to the gym.
	They like going to the gym with me.
	It's something...
	It's like you said.
	I think it has to do a level with loneliness.
	Let me ask you this. What feels better?
	Like, so you go into the bar and you feel X, right?
	And then after a couple of drinks, you feel Y. What's the difference between the two?
	What's the difference between starting drinking and after you've had a couple of drinks?
	Once I had a couple of drinks, I feel isolated from society.
	We're to the point where it's like, alright, I don't have to worry about anything else.
	It's like my worries go away.
	I don't know if that makes any sense.
	They're still there. Listen, you've got some worries, right?
	I mean, it's not irrational. They're still there.
	Like, I still think...
	I do a lot of thinking when I'm drinking, so I think...
	And especially when I start getting drunk...
	I just sit back and I watch everything that's going on.
	And it's...
	I'm pretty saddened.
	I feel that society has failed me.
	Society is failing everyone else, but everyone doesn't see it.
	I don't know if that makes any sense.
	It does. So I'm just there...
	Drunk, you know, just watching everything deteriorate.
	And I'm just like, okay, you know, it doesn't feel as bad watching everything else crumble while I'm just, you know, drunk.
	And it's a little bit enjoyable, too, when I'm drunk.
	So when I'm drunk and I see everyone else, it's kind of a Machiavellian kind of thing where I'm just...
	That's interesting. What strikes me is it almost is like you're drinking away your misplaced empathy for society or something.
	Right. The relationship that thinking people have with empathy in society is really complex.
	How much do we care for a society that doesn't seem to care for us very much?
	It's all very complicated and it requires deep thinking and deep conversations to come to what is often a kind of moving goalposts because you get new evidence about society all the time and so on.
	It's interesting because we talked about isolation or loneliness, but in a sense it sounds like you're drinking in part to detach yourself from society.
	Yes. Like I said, I detach myself from society.
	I'll just sit there for two hours and I see how people are...
	I almost feel evil within me.
	If that makes any sense, where I enjoy how people destroy their lives based on the social...
	Indoctrination they've received.
	I just sit back and it's like I was talking to this feminist the other day at the brewery and she was trying to pretty much indoctrinate me.
	Tell me, oh, this is...
	And I'm just going along with her.
	I'm not going to sit there and say, oh, you're full of shit.
	But I was enjoying it because I knew that later in life She was going to regret everything from every choice that she has made.
	And when someone comes along and tells her, hey, you're wrong.
	Maybe you want to start a family.
	Maybe they go into this automatic mode where it's like, no, you're wrong.
	And they don't adhere to the facts.
	So I... So I just sit there.
	I don't know if that makes any sense.
	And I find it enjoyable.
	No, I get it. I mean, knowing that consequences are going to accrue to bad people, I don't think that's evil at all.
	I mean, that's a little thing we call justice, isn't it?
	Yeah, you could call it justice, but...
	I see it happen.
	I see it with my friends.
	Well, not friends. Acquaintances I had in the past.
	And I tried to explain to them.
	And they don't adhere to the facts.
	And I just sit there and I just watch it happen.
	And it's... To me, it's enjoyable.
	That's... That's what's kind of, like, weird about it, you know?
	It's not like... Listen, listen, I mean, I get, listen, I get where you're coming from, and it's not that you want these things to happen, but if they, like, if bad things are going to happen to people, and we've tried to talk them out of it, and they've attacked us, and scorned us, and smeared us, or insulted us, or whatever, you know, there is a basic part of us that is like, yeah, well, watch the show.
	Right. Watch the show.
	And I think it's an important thing too because, you know, the feminists and so on, they're going to be in a particularly bad position because, I mean, the money's going to run out.
	I mean, the government money is going to run out and it's not going to be that much longer either.
	Government money is going to run out and they won't have families and they won't probably have jobs if they work for the government.
	It's going to be massive cutbacks and so on and they won't have men to protect them and And suddenly there'll be all kinds of interested in the patriarchy coming around and taking care of them, right?
	And, you know, a lot of the men, I see these comments, you know, online.
	The men are like, you know, hey, you having a heart attack?
	I'm just stepping over you. Because you don't want men's help, right?
	You can do it by yourself.
	Yeah, and I saw this.
	I had a really close experience where one of my teachers...
	I think I was in middle school.
	That's really when I saw this feminist thing really emerge itself when I was growing up.
	So I know it's been going around since like the 60s.
	But when I saw it firsthand was one of my teachers, she was in her 50s.
	She got pregnant and she gave birth to the baby and everyone was like, oh my God, see women can do it all.
	She's not too old. They were praising her, right?
	And something didn't really sit right with me.
	I didn't know how to explain it.
	A few years later, the baby died.
	Like three years later.
	Due to health problems.
	It was sad.
	But... This woman had subscribed to this...
	I would even call it a religion where...
	Yeah, you can party, you know, in your 20s, 30s, you know, you can do whatever you want, and if you're 50, you can have a kid, and that's not what reality is based upon.
	So... And I just see stuff like that, where it's just like, okay, you know, go on with your life, and I'm wrong.
	I'm the sexist, racist, or whatever you want to...
	ism you want to throw at me, you know?
	So... And I think that has a lot to do with my loneliness because not that many people, especially where I live, I think I told you in the email where I live, and it's a pretty liberal, far-leftist place where I live.
	If you say anything, you're ostracized and A lot of bad stuff can happen, you know?
	Right. And any chance to...
	I mean, just something to consider, like changing locations or something, is something to...
	You know, we can't change people, but we can sure change our environment sometimes, right?
	Yeah, and that makes it tough on me, too, because I really can't move here because due to mother has to have supervised visits and all that, if...
	If I could move, you know, I would move.
	I stay, you know.
	Right. So let me ask you this.
	Let me ask you this. Because I find that thoughts generally evaporate from my brain once I've reached a conclusion.
	Like, if I haven't reached a conclusion, you know, you just go round and round, right?
	But once you reach a conclusion, then you can move on, right?
	So the people who are nasty and entitled and vicious and verbally abusive and call you racist or, I don't know, you're probably like, I don't know, three days away from being called a white supremacist or something like that, right?
	So the people who kind of insult you and put you down and all of that, if bad things happen to them, not because of any particular individual, but just because of the consequences, you Like this woman, let's say you meet her 10 years from now and she's kind of bitter and lonely and complaining that men don't pay attention to her anymore and all that, right?
	How do you...
	What do you think is the rational way to feel?
	Not like the should and everyone should be forgiven and we should be nice, but what do you think is the rational way to feel about these kinds of situations, that people who do bad things and bad things happen to them, not because of human agency, just because of consequences?
	I think...
	I think is...
	I see it as, like, you got what you asked for, you know, that's what you wanted.
	That's what you got now that you have it.
	Now that you see for what it really is, it's kind of...
	How do I say that?
	To me, it's just enjoyable, you know?
	I don't know if this phrase is used in your community, but when I was growing up as a kid in England, it was called getting your comeuppance.
	You know, like the girl who was like, I'm too pretty to settle down with any boy.
	Like, I'm just going to wait for this multimillionaire to come along and so on, right?
	And so she breaks the hearts of a lot of boys.
	She dates them, but she won't settle down with them and she hurts a lot of people.
	And then, you know, she hits 30, her looks start to fade and she can't get anyone.
	And this is called getting your comeuppance.
	It's like, okay, well, you hurt a lot of people.
	You didn't listen to people who tell you, listen, this isn't going to last.
	Your youthful beauty is going to fade.
	And now you're stuck in a declining sexual market and guys don't want to be with you.
	And you've also hurt a lot of people, so you've lost your capacity to love.
	And it's like, yeah, like, I'm sorry, you've got another 50 years.
	It's like sorry, not sorry.
	That's the complexity of it, right?
	Like, I'm sorry you got another 50 years of loneliness where you get to bitterly regret all the people, like the dumb mistakes you made when you were in your 20s or whatever.
	But, you know, that's what happens.
	Like, that's what happens if you don't listen to people and you're too vain to, right?
	I mean, you listen to people, right?
	I mean, you listen to people, you listen to me, you listen to others, and you read, and so you're out of this equation.
	But it's called getting your comeuppance.
	And it was like, yeah, you know, it sucks.
	It sucks. So how do you feel?
	Because that's going to happen to a whole lot of people in society, certainly within our lifetimes, I believe.
	And how are we?
	Because they're going to try and manipulate the hell out of us, right?
	They're going to be crying and, you know, and they pretend that they never did anything wrong.
	And they're going to try all the manipulative tricks to get resources out of us when there aren't enough resources to go around.
	How should we feel? I think we should feel...
	We shouldn't feel remorseful.
	I can say that.
	If we've tried to give good advice, I think we're excused from feeling guilt.
	Correct. You know, I've...
	But it's crazy because the social norms, from what I see...
	It's like that example that you gave from the 30-year-old, right?
	Or let's say she's a single mother, right?
	Oh, yeah. That's another way you could toast your market value, right?
	So she becomes a single mom and then suddenly all the guys who want to take her to Cabo for the weekend, they'll go, right?
	They'll vanish. Right.
	So, but then how society is structured today is, you know, I see it where it's like, oh, if you don't, if you don't Yeah, but listen, man, you know as well as I do, I'm sure, that that's all nonsense based upon the government just printing and borrowing money.
	Right. That's because, you know, single moms now come with a whole bunch of resources which lazy men can prey upon and just go live with them and have the government pay both people's bills, right?
	So that is not, you know, I'm talking about like when the resources run out, And it's, you know, this is the brutal part about the society that we have is the resources are going to run out.
	And it's bad.
	And what is going to be our response?
	Because I think you have a sense about that and you're ambivalent about it because you have sympathy.
	But at the same time, there's a little thing called justice and also a little bit of vengeance, right?
	Like people who've slandered and insulted and abused you and all of that.
	when bad things happen to them, how do we feel?
	I think we should feel good about it.
	Thank you.
	Because all things come to an end.
	Whether it's good or bad.
	I feel that anyone that is aware of what's going on and tries to help out before any of this goes up Before the resources run out,
	if you pretty much try to help someone and say, hey, what you're doing is wrong, and when it all comes crashing down, you should feel, I would even say, proud of yourself, you know, that you didn't fall for this.
	Or if you did fall for this social indoctrination, that you came out of it, you know, before it was too late.
	I don't know if that makes any sense.
	A little bit of...
	I mean, it does make sense to me, and I think it comes back to this grasshopper and the ant story.
	I know you know it, but I'm sure you know it, but for others, right?
	So this is a real...
	I think it's an old Aesop fairy tale.
	You know, the ant is winter, right?
	The ant is gathering together all of the food it's going to need to survive the winter, and the grasshopper just sits around strumming guitar and Doesn't, like, sings and plays and doesn't gather anything together for the winter.
	And then the ant is kind of nestled in its little ant home in the winter.
	It's got all the food it needs. And the grasshopper is freezing its little ass off outside.
	And the grasshopper comes and scratches on the window of the ant home and says, I'm dying out here.
	I'm going to freeze to death.
	I'm going to starve to death. This is tough, because the ant all summer was saying, listen, man, you've got to get some food for the winter.
	This is bad. The winter's going to come, and you're going to be near us, hungry and cold.
	Now, of course, in the fairy tale, there aren't any kids involved, and the ant has...
	You know, twice the food it needs so it can invite the grasshopper in and they can spend the winter together and everything's fine, right?
	So it's not a really very harsh fairy tale and of course it's designed to get people to remember that winter is coming and all that.
	But what does the ant do if the ant has like 400,000 kids.
	I don't know how many ants. How many kids ants have?
	Let's assume it's like 10 kids or 5 kids or whatever.
	And he only has enough food for himself and his children.
	Himself, his little ant wife and his ant kids.
	And the grasshopper comes in and wants the food and there's not enough.
	I mean, that's a tough situation, man.
	For those of us who have empathy, who care about the world, who care about people, that is a tough situation.
	And history is pretty clear that everyone who gives up their resources to everyone who failed to plan, well, none of them make it, right?
	A time of hard decisions is probably coming.
	It's like that Game of Thrones thing.
	Summer lasts for 14 years and then winter lasts for 14 years.
	We've had a lot of summer. We've had a lot of not having to make tough decisions.
	Just borrow money, print money, and all that.
	It doesn't get rid of the tough decisions.
	It just postpones them and makes them worse.
	I think that you're probably getting deep down that we're going to have a complicated relationship with people who just didn't listen.
	And you might need to sort of practice toughening up, if that makes sense, or practice being kind of harsh, if that makes sense, because I mean, I think that time could be coming.
	Yeah, and I see it too, you know, and I've already I've already tried to prepare myself.
	There's a you know, I've read a couple books, you know, here and there where You pretty much gotta stick your ground and it's like, no.
	You know, it's like...
	Like, I'm not gonna...
	I'm not gonna bend over backwards because...
	all the signs were there.
	You decided to do whatever it was that you decided to do.
	We all try to help you.
	You guys pretty much...
	ostracized us and...
	If this has to happen for you guys to be able to understand that this isn't sustainable and all the resources are going to run out, so be it.
	You can call me evil for it, but this can't be going on any more further than it's already gone.
	And if we allow ourselves to keep helping, and I don't even consider it helping, it's just...
	Giving the alcoholic another drink, then you're not going to solve the main issue, if that makes any sense.
	And this is a perspective that is more particular for those of us who have young kids.
	And maybe it's a male thing, I don't know.
	But we're kind of good at looking over the horizon and figuring out when resources are going to run out.
	You know, there's this, you've probably seen the movie The Godfather, right?
	There's this, you know, women and children can make mistakes, men can't, right?
	And that's, you know, sexist and harsh and so on.
	But I think that there's a tiny grain of truth in that, in that, you know, if it's winter and you have three kids and you're running out of food, it's usually not the mom who goes out hunting, right?
	I mean, it's the man who's got to go out and deal with that.
	So I think we're a little bit better at looking over the horizon and seeing when resources are going to run out.
	And, you know, man, it can get pretty harsh in those situations.
	Yeah, and that's how I look at it.
	I think I've already prepared myself for something like that.
	And we care about people, which is why we keep warning them and why we keep trying to wake them up and why we kind of shake them out of their complacency and all of that.
	So it's, you know, we care about people, but, you know, I guess my concern sometimes is that caring about people, like when resources run kind of thin, that caring about people is going to be kind of used against us.
	Like, oh, you've got to share everything now.
	And it's like... I don't know.
	It's a complicated thing.
	Obviously, alcohol is not going to help you solve that, but if we can kind of figure out what's going down deep in your brain, if maybe you're looking over the horizon saying resources are going to get kind of thin, then you care about people.
	You want to help people. You care about your children, obviously.
	You want them to have a great life.
	But we've got to have that duality of both caring about people and knowing when caring about people gets dangerous for us and for our futures.
	Yeah, that's true. I see it, you know.
	And I think it's...
	I feel like we care too much, too, because it's...
	Where I live, people care too much.
	You know, there's just a severe homeless problem.
	And people care too much to the point where the homeless...
	Don't even care about themselves.
	They have an abundance of resources where I'm at.
	Someone that's...
	You pretty much can't starve to death.
	It's over an abundance of resources to the point where people are getting fed up.
	We have so many resources and And these people still don't understand.
	So what's going to happen when all the resources run out and people really do need the help?
	We've tried to warn them.
	But they can't get the help.
	That's the whole point, is that the resources simply aren't there.
	Right. I mean, so we can be as empathetic as we want, but if the resources aren't there, the resources aren't there.
	And, you know, that's, I mean, any sane human being desperately wants to try and avoid this kind of situation.
	But, you know, should it come to that, and again, fingers and toes crossed that it doesn't, but should it come to that, I mean, it's really not a matter.
	Like, empathy doesn't create resources.
	It doesn't, you know, just because you sympathize with people doesn't mean that You know, gold and food and electricity magically fall from the sky.
	We need the right environment and conditions like a free market and all that to produce those resources.
	You know, feelings don't produce material goods.
	They're important for life, but they're not like magic manufacturing machines.
	Yeah, you can't just wave a magic wand and then out of nowhere you're going to have an abundance of resources, which that's what it seems like it's What people think, that you just create a bill and resources come out of nowhere.
	Oh yeah, like AOC with a $94 trillion green energy plan and Elizabeth Warren with her $50 billion or trillion or whatever it is, plus a Medicare plan.
	I mean, come on. It's signatures on a piece of paper.
	It doesn't magically create doctors out of nothing.
	Right, right, right. And it's...
	It's amusing to me. Sometimes I laugh.
	I almost feel like they're comedians, you know, and people take them serious.
	And I'm just like, okay, all right.
	I've kind of learned to, you know, just keep my mouth shut.
	And, you know, I'll throw a hint here and there to anyone that wants to adhere to, I would say, A common sense, but if they're a little bit reluctant to it, then I'm like, okay, you don't want to listen, that's fine.
	You can go join everyone else.
	So, yeah.
	That's how I see it.
	So, I mean, knowing all of this complexity, right?
	Like, drinking is not going to resolve this in your mind, right?
	Right. It's not, but...
	But that's where the temptation may lie.
	So listen, let me ask you this.
	I mean, listen, I know what a money hole, what a money pit legal action can be with regards to, I mean, I don't know personally, I've never been divorced, but I've certainly heard the stories and seen some of the numbers.
	Would you consider like talk therapy or anything like that for these kinds of issues?
	Would I consider talk therapy for any...
	In what sense do you mean by that?
	Well, I mean, like a good therapist and, you know, you sit there and you talk about what's going on in your mind and, you know, a good therapist can give you great feedback and help clarify where your thoughts are coming from and so on.
	I mean, would you consider something like that?
	I mean, it'd be better to spend money on that if it helps with your drinking than spend money on more booze, right?
	Yes. You know what?
	It's funny because where I live, it's...
	It's like I said before, they have an overabundance of resources.
	I would be open to that, but the problem is that where I live, I almost see it as a way for these people to be employed.
	The government is willing to pay for it.
	You have a problem. They find any little niche or whatever.
	You might not have a problem.
	And they say, oh, we want to help you.
	We want to help you. It's not like they really want to help.
	I don't know if that makes any sense. No, no, it's not.
	I get all of that. But, I mean, you don't necessarily...
	I think some people will do it over Skype or over the Internet now.
	So you don't necessarily have to do it directly within.
	And, listen, the reason I'm asking for this is I hope that you would consider...
	I'd be happy to help you with this.
	I'd be happy to help you out financially with this and pay for a bunch of sessions because, I mean, your commitment to being a better parent is so admirable and I would really like to help you out.
	So if you can find a good therapist, and it doesn't have to be someone local, but if you can find someone like that, and again, I know that the finances are really tough when you deal with this kind of legal stuff, I would really be happy to pay for a couple of sessions and sort of get you started and see if it's helpful.
	That's something that, yeah, I would, yes.
	Good. Because, listen, I mean, because you're, you know, a very smart and deep and complex person, there's not like one big giant lever that you pull and say, aha, now your problem is solved, right?
	I mean, that's usually not particularly common anyway, but it's less common now.
	I think we've talked about a lot of important issues, and I think that they're all kind of in there in the machinery that's driving some of the addiction.
	But I think that it's time to talk to somebody who's got real competence in this and understands where you're coming from and is not a blue-pilled therapist, which is probably not going to be too helpful in the main factor.
	Be less helpful. But, you know, someone who kind of really, really gets it.
	And listen, I hope that you will.
	I appreciate so much your trust in talking to me about these issues that I would be, like, overjoyed if you took some help with regards to this and let me help you get that process started financially.
	Thank you very much.
	Yes, I'm going to look into that.
	I'm going to do a little bit of research, you know.
	Like you said, I don't want to get someone that's...
	Blue-pilled because I don't want to cause more damage than...
	Right. You don't want to pay to...
	But I'm sure that there are people out there or groups out there that have lists of people who've been effective in these kinds of situations, particularly for men's issues.
	And I think that would be great.
	And it's certainly easier if you can do it online.
	I've never tried that, but I'm sure it's fine.
	So all you have to do is just book a couple.
	Tell me how much it is.
	I'll get the money to you and get that process started.
	Because what you've achieved is incredible.
	I think that what you can achieve is even greater.
	And again, I feel enormous gratitude and honor and respect for you in this conversation.
	So whatever I can do to help, just please, please let me know.
	Thank you very much.
	I have someone in mind that...
	That I've been listening to.
	I'm going to contact that person and see how it goes.
	Thank you very much. Will you keep me posted about how things are going?
	Yes, definitely. Will you give a big hug to your kids for me?
	Thank you. Keep me posted, man.
	Stay in touch. Let me know anything and everything I can do to help.
	I look forward to hearing how this plays out.
	Okay. Thanks so much.
	Take care. Okay, you too.

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