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Nov. 13, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:19:06
"FIGHTING MY FATHER'S GHOST!" Freedomain Call In
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I have a one-year-old and a three-year-old and I just find myself in distractions a lot and not connecting with them as much as I would like to, not being as good of a father as I'd like to.
And I had a father who was kind of a ghost in the family where he was there, but he wasn't really there.
And I don't want to reproduce that for my kids.
Right, right.
Can you tell me a little bit about your dad as a whole?
Yeah. Let's see.
Where to start?
There were four kids in my family.
He's kind of passive until he gets beyond his pushing point and then he gets explosively Angry.
Good stories.
We had cable TV growing up and then got into an argument with a cable TV rep and just blew it and canceled the cable and got into a big argument.
That's the pattern with my dad.
He's kind of easygoing until he's nuts.
And my mother is kind of a control freak.
She ran the family.
We all walked around on eggshells in my house.
She would do everything for you, but you wouldn't want to get her upset.
And how would her anger manifest?
Rage. She would scream.
She'd have like an explosive fit and then we'd be all walking around in eggshells for a couple of days and then everything would be fine until the next time.
And when she would raise her voice or yell or scream, what would she say?
Would it be like insults or abuse or like how would it happen?
Things like, I brought you into this world.
I can take you out.
What else? I took karate when we were younger.
Anything... I only get hit by my father once, like, putting me over his knee.
They weren't very physically violent.
Lots of threats like, oh, I've got eyes in the back of my head, that type of thing.
So, I mean, death threats, right?
Yeah, that's true.
Absolutely. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of the old Bill Cosby routine, you know, back before he was disgraced and sent to jail.
You know, he'd be talking about the physical abuse from his father and his father saying, I brought you into this world, I can take you out.
I mean, that's, you know, because people are like, ha, ha, ha, that's funny.
And it's like, no, that's a death threat.
You try that with an adult.
You try that with an adult and say, if you don't do what I want, I will kill you.
You go to jail. Yeah, and the difference between how they treated the children and how they treated adults was pretty stark, especially when we weren't in public.
There was a different atmosphere, home, alone, away from everybody else.
And then if we'd have Thanksgiving over at our house, everything's happening, and everything's great.
Just don't piss off mom.
Good. I'm sorry, just if you can back off a little bit from the mic, I think that might help in terms of clarity.
I can just turn my volume up and fix it after, but it might be that you're a bit too close.
And what would your father say when he got angry?
Um...
Um...
Don't try that shit with me, buddy.
He would... I think it was more about the tone of the voice.
Things would start coming off as a threat, and you could hear the anger when it boiled over.
But again, that wasn't very often.
And what are your positive memories?
We do family vacations down to Florida.
Two happiest memories, happiest I've seen my father were the day I went off to college and then the day I graduated college.
And the joy in his face kind of seeing me hit those milestones, but also I think a big part of it is just kind of being out of the house.
And as soon as I graduated college, I moved to the other side of the country and had very little contact with them.
And now I have no contact with them at all.
Right. I'm sorry.
I'm really sorry to hear that. I mean, I think it's incredibly destructive for parents to, you know, they have kids and they then keep the kids in the house.
And they then seem to quite often indicate to the children that they don't enjoy their children's company.
It's kind of weird. It's like kidnapping someone because you want them around so much and then treating them like crap.
Of course, you're kidnapping, you're treating them like crap anyway, but it's just kind of a strange...
And I think it's really destructive in a way that's not often...
Understood. That if you are a parent and you make it clear to your kids that you don't enjoy their company or that they're too much trouble, you see this with marriages too, where the women all get together and complain about their husbands, which is just about the most retarded thing you can think of.
Because, I mean, you chose these men.
You chose these men.
And... When women and women will often this is sort of the insecurity vanity Two sides of the coin with regards to women, but they'll often sit around and, you know, complain that their husbands are kind of half children and they roll their eyes and they put up with them and all this kind of stuff.
And all of that is a cheap emotional ploy to retain dominance in the relationship.
So when you really love someone and you need someone and you care for someone, I mean, that's a vulnerable position to be in because they could leave you and they could break your heart and And so a lot of people try to avoid that vulnerability of caring and needing and loving in the sort of belief that it's going to keep them safe from rejection.
But of course it doesn't. It doesn't keep them safe from rejection at all because they're rejecting everyone and being rejected by those people just to have and maintain power In the relationship.
And it's pretty tragic.
So, I mean, I've heard this quite a bit and I've seen it at times in my life and, you know, now hearing of it from you, I mean, it's really tragic because, of course, when you're a kid, you judge yourself by how other people judge you.
You don't have some independent objective oracle floating around you like the rings of Saturn telling you the truth.
All you can do is judge yourself by how your parents or your teachers or preachers or whatever, some combination of all, how they judge you.
And society as a whole generally sees children as It's annoyingly exploitable inconveniences, right?
The teachers are like, well, I guess in order to get my summers off and my pension and my healthcare, I guess I have to spend time with these kids.
And the parents grudgingly provide for their kids, but the kids are generally perceived as a big hassle.
And the whole point of this, of course, is to keep children from feeling the kind of security that they might feel and which they need in order to challenge existing social structures.
You have to have a lot of confidence and a lot of faith in your own ability to think and reason and communicate in order to take on existing social structures.
And those social structures don't want people growing up and challenging them.
So what they do is they train parents to view children as annoying inconveniences, and that way the children grow up without a bond and with a feeling of insecurity and imminent rejection, and that gives the mob or the crowd much greater control over those children when they get older.
Like I look at these sort of social justice mobs and all this kind of stuff, and to me it's all like, okay, so...
You have merged with the group because you were not loved as children.
And so you're very susceptible to rejection, which gives nasty people great control over the population.
It's all sort of part of a whole thing.
So I don't sort of want to abstract your individual or personal suffering into a general social or political malaise.
But what I do want to say is it's not personal.
It wasn't like your parents were assigned...
You, as bunkmates, you know, like in boarding school, when I was there at the age of six, we all slept in a big dormitory.
I don't know, like 30 kids to the room or something like that.
And I had a kid to my left.
I had a kid to my right. I didn't choose those kids.
I didn't choose to go to boarding school.
I didn't choose... I think we were assigned alphabetically or something like that.
So I didn't choose any of those people.
And... Yet somehow, as a whole, parents who choose to have children and who are responsible for the shaping of those children, I mean, you can do quite a bit to shape or harm children.
It's not all just genetics, right?
I mean, there's a lot of environmental factors that go into the formation of a personality.
And unfortunately, just as a result of political power and the anti-rational arguments of those in power, Parents have to be trained to not bond with their children, right? This is why women are told, you've got to go have a career, right?
So that they don't bond with their kids, because kids without a bond with their parents are very easy to control.
Because they fear rejection so enormously that all that has to happen is...
The mob has to threaten to reject them, and they'll join the mob, right?
It gives the mob great power.
And, of course, the mob is the attack arm of sophists, right?
The sophists create family breakdown and...
Taunt and encourage and shame parents into abandoning their children so that sophists can manipulate the mob and gain weaponized unbonding against their enemies, right?
So I just want to point out that while the suffering in your case and, you know, my case, and this is certainly very powerful and very individual, it's really important to recognize that your parents didn't judge you objectively and find you wanting.
I mean, that would be crazy anyway.
It would be like me doing a bad show if such a thing could be conceived of.
Like me doing a bad show and then railing as a third party against this bad show as if I had nothing to do with it.
It would be kind of weird. It would be kind of schizo, right?
So your parents didn't sort of judge you and say, oh, well, you know, the way that I would judge my bunkie mate in boarding school, like I didn't have anything to do with this guy's formation and I didn't have anything to do with why he was in my life.
So I can judge him without having...
Like I can judge the meal since I didn't cook it or order it.
I can judge the meal and I don't have anything to do with the fact that it's in front of me and I have to eat it.
But... Parents, they didn't judge you, right?
They didn't evaluate you in some independent manner and find you wanting.
And they themselves, if they're not particularly smart, and this, you know, the moment I hear some parents say, I brought you into this world, I could take you out.
The moment I hear that, I think, well, that's, not only is that cruel and malicious and violent, the threat of violence, but it's also profoundly unoriginal.
You know, it's one thing, you know, I'm not putting razor fist or someone like, someone with that kind of acidic verbal fluidity, you know, they may say some pretty harsh things, though I'm not putting him in the category, of course, of child abusers.
He's a very entertaining guy. But that verbal fluidity, it may be harsh, but at least it has, it's creative as hell.
You know, his verbal fluidity is extraordinary.
And So when people are both cruel and they use that cruelty or that cruelty is deployed through the repetition of mindless cliches they stole from other people, I'm like, oh, that's not a good sign in terms of parental acuity or intelligence.
And so, you know, I guess the important thing is, you know, you don't take it personally.
It's important not to take it personally, like it was some kind of judgment of you In some kind of objective fashion.
Now, as a kid, you kind of have to believe that.
But as an adult, you've got to say, okay, you know, I once believed in Santa Claus.
I once believed in the Easter Bunny.
I once believed that the tooth fairy came and gave me $5 when I lost a tooth.
And I also once believed that my parents' judgment of me had anything to do with me.
And that is, you know, we all outgrow Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, but that other one?
That other one's a bit more of a step, right?
Because we do have to believe for our own self-protection that our parents are judging us objectively.
Otherwise, they're just crazy dangerous people who have control over us for the next 15 years or 20 years or whatever.
That's a lot to take, and I don't think kids can take that.
But... I guess the long like at the end of that lengthy speech is to ask you how much you think you have been judged objectively by your parents or how much of your personality is founded on this judgment somehow being accurate.
I understand definitely intellectually that it's not Me, that they were judging.
I think maybe emotionally that's harder to believe all the time, especially because they had four kids and they treated us all quite a bit differently and I think I got the harshest of it from them.
So, yes, I believe that They weren't judging me as a, you know, eight-year-old kid, objectively.
Ah, okay. Sorry to interrupt.
So there's a very, very interesting question, right?
And I'm sorry, it sounds kind of like Spock-like, oh, fascinating question, right?
But it really is a powerful and deep question.
So you say the four kids, right?
And you were treated...
The worst? Is that fair to say?
I mean, maybe if you went to your siblings and say, well, I was treated the worst.
They say, no, I was treated the worst.
But is it kind of accepted that you were treated the worst among your siblings?
Yeah. I'm not a black sheep among my siblings, but I'm not as close as the rest of them are.
Sorry, as close to each other or to your parents or both?
Both. I kind of think of it like we're in the same...
We survived the same prison, so we have that bond, but we're not very close as siblings, especially me to the other three.
Right. Okay, so why were you treated worse?
That's a big question, right?
Why were you treated worse?
What do you think? I think I was the oldest.
I was the most rebellious.
I don't know. I was born six months after my parents got married, so maybe there's some resentment about forcing them together.
My younger brother was always kind of the smartest, most compliant, and my two sisters worked nearly as rebellious.
My youngest sister Definitely had some spats with my mother, but now they're all kind of dependent.
My two sisters are more dependent on my parents.
My brother is out on his own, but my youngest sisters live in the house that my parents own.
So they can't be terribly objective.
Yeah, I think I just wanted to Get out of there and be done with it.
And what you say, you said that your younger brother is smarter than you, is that what you were saying?
Yeah, he's a PhD in physics, so I think it's fair to say he's smarter than you.
He's certainly smarter than both of us in physics, probably combined.
Just kidding, right. Okay, so do you know why, then, To me, the answer is pretty clear.
Now listen, just as you know, and I'll say this to remind people, right?
So just because something is clear to me does not mean that it's true because I'm talking about your experience and your family, right?
So something that is blindingly obvious to me could be completely and totally incorrect, right?
So if it doesn't mesh or merge with your experience, I will only take offense if you pretend to agree with me.
I will never take offense if you disagree with me and tell me I'm wrong.
That's because the last thing I want to do is have my certainty override your actual experience, right?
Nonetheless, that caveat having been said, I feel completely certain as to why you were treated the harshest.
And I'll give you the very brief thought, and then you can tell me if it's right or wrong, according to your experience, which is what counts.
So, if you have a bunch of kids...
You want to treat the eldest child the harshest for the simple reason that your harshness on the eldest serves as a very clear warning to all the other children.
They see you being treated incredibly harshly or very harshly by your parents and seeing and absorbing, internalizing that example, that lesson, It means that they're not going to try any of the stuff you tried.
Tell me if that makes any sense to you.
Yeah, I cut down the tall poppy, right?
It makes sense. I've never thought about my family dynamics that way, but that makes sense.
I mean, it's a whole lot easier to have a smoking cradle where the eldest child is and then say to the To the younger kids, do you feel like doing what he did?
No! No, I really don't, right?
Because they've seen what happened to you.
Yeah. I definitely don't think they did that consciously or intentionally, but it certainly worked out that way.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I want to do a tangent here.
I'll keep it brief. So the conscious thing doesn't matter.
The conscious thing doesn't matter.
So, when people say, you know, it wasn't like my parents had some sort of Venn diagram about how they were going to control their four kids by being very harsh on the eldest, as an example, and blah, blah, blah.
Say, well, if they didn't do it consciously, it's not relevant.
It's not relevant, and I'll tell you why.
Because when you become a parent...
You are morally responsible to maintain the best treatment of your children.
Right? So, you said that your parents treated you and your siblings very differently in public.
Did I get that right? In public versus in private, yes.
Right. So, to return to my rather hackneyed example of speaking Japanese...
If I say to you, man, hey, I don't really speak Japanese and I can't help you with your Japanese homework, and then what happens is we meet some Japanese person and I break out in fluent Japanese and have a very pleasant chat with that person, then clearly I'm lying about not speaking Japanese, right? And every time I said to you, well, I don't speak Japanese and I can't help you, I was just lying and it was destructive, right?
So speaking Japanese translates into the best treatment you receive from your parents.
So if in public your parents treated you well, then they speak Japanese.
They know how to treat children well.
They're perfectly aware, A, of how to treat people well, and B, how to actually practically achieve it.
Absolutely. Because they're very fluent in good parenting.
Because every time they're in public or every time somebody comes to the house or every time somebody with power is around, it's like the thief, right?
The thief who says, man, I just feel compelled to steal.
It's like, okay, so let's say you're about to steal something and there's a cop standing next to you.
Do you refrain from stealing? Well, yeah, okay, then you're not compelled to steal.
Because you know precisely how to respect property rights because you do it every single time there's a cop around or a security guard or a camera.
So your parents, you say, oh, well, I don't know if it was conscious in terms of the...
But as a parent, you are responsible for the very best treatment that you can...
or the very best that you can act as a parent.
So my mother... She was really great when we were in public.
She was good-humored.
She was highly forgiving.
I mean, I remember once she came to visit me in boarding school and I spent the day with her and I was in my boarding school uniform and I was running around a fountain.
I guess I was six or so.
I was running around a fountain and I fell into the fountain.
Now, if we had been alone in some scenario, I would have had the living crap beaten out of me.
But, thank heavens, and bewilderingly to me, there was a large number of people in the park.
And so what did she do?
She laughed. She pulled me out.
She said, we'll go and get you some other clothes.
Are you okay? Give me a hug.
Despite that it made her wet, she was great.
She was great. So she knew exactly how to be great.
There's no question of it.
She knew exactly how to speak fluent Japanese.
But, you see, if we were in private, and I say, as I've mentioned before, put a cup down on a side table, or I think it was a cabinet...
And it left a little white ring.
I could be beaten half to death.
And it's funny too because it's not funny, right?
But even now, like I'm reading my audio book and I've got a whole separate system from my podcast system for my audio book because things always drift.
Some application will come and change the volume levels and I don't want anything to drift.
So I've got a completely sealed away system for recording my audio book and I will bring a cup of Decaf coffee or something to wet my throat because it's quite a strain doing some of these voices for an extended period of time like Churchill and Anthony Eden and even Reginald can be kind of rough.
And so what I do is I take my coffee and I put it down on a side table.
Not every time but you know at least once a week I remember that time with my mother.
And so when we were alone My mother was dangerously violent, right?
To the point where I could have been seriously injured, lost an eye, I could have been killed.
Just dangerously violent, murderous.
Right? I mean, I'm not saying this to overshadow.
I'm just, what I'm saying is that my mother, like, why do I hold my mother responsible?
Now, if my mother had beaten me up, In front of a policeman?
Then clearly she was just morally insane.
And I would not hold her morally responsible if the crimes had been discovered.
And that's one of the ways in which the law, I mean what my mother did, was criminal.
She's a criminal.
People say, oh, you should hang with your mother.
You should forgive your mother. But she's an unrepentant child abuser.
And I would not hold her morally responsible if she had abused me in public, but nobody ever knew.
Well, I shouldn't say nobody ever knew because there was lots of screams and shouts and thumps and beatings in apartment buildings because I never lived in a house other than when I was too young to remember.
So, tons of people knew, but my mom understood the world a whole lot better than I did when we were both younger because she knew that she could beat the hell out of her child and nobody would call the police, nobody would do anything, nobody would knock on the door.
She understood the world a lot better than I did.
When we were younger.
And so when you say, well, they weren't conscious, what you're doing is you're trying to take away responsibility from your parents.
And listen, I'm perfectly fine taking away responsibility from people who genuinely don't have responsibility.
You know, like if you're a critic of mass migration or mass immigration, I don't know that you can reasonably go to your parents and say, well, you know, what did you do about it?
They don't control these levers, right?
They don't control the honeypot of the welfare state.
They don't control whether the borders are open or closed.
They don't. They don't control this.
So you wouldn't want to... I 100% blame you, mom and dad, for whatever political policy I don't like.
Or, you know, I can't believe that you allowed George Bush to invade Iraq.
Or I can't believe that you allowed the Federal Reserve to print that much money.
That would be wrong, because your parents are not solely responsible.
And their level of responsibility in these geopolitical matters is virtually zero, right?
I mean, there's a tiny bit that they can do, right?
They can talk to people, they can vote, or whatever, if there's anyone to vote for, which, after the brief flash of Trump, which is still not over yet, seems kind of pointless again, but...
So, I don't...
I wouldn't support you blaming your parents for things that were not under their control, but...
Saying that it was unconscious for your parents in terms of how they treated you, relatives as an example to this, that, or the other.
As a parent, not knowing something is not an excuse.
So people say, and I think this is where you're coming from, you say, well, things were unconscious as a way of saying, well, I mean, it wasn't like they consciously plotted and had diagrams and knew.
And you think that that makes it better, but it actually makes it worse.
And I'll tell you why.
If you decide to fake being a doctor, and you go into a hospital, and, I don't know, let's just say you're the twin of some surgeon, and you've stolen his ID, and you've stolen his uniform, and you walk into...
An operating room and you start cutting people up or you start cutting someone up.
And then that person dies because you don't know what you're doing.
You're basically playing fruit ninja with their innards.
And then people say, well, but he didn't know anything about surgery.
How on earth was he supposed to not kill that person?
What would you say? He shouldn't be in the operating room.
That's right. If you consciously put yourself in a situation where you have control over others, then you don't have the excuse of saying, well, I lack knowledge.
It was unconscious.
Because the act of becoming a parent and keeping a child and raising a child is a lot more complicated than faking being a surgeon.
It takes a lot more forethought, a lot more planning.
You've got nine months of warning.
And so, A, your parents knew how to treat you guys well and did so consistently when you were in public.
And B, they voluntarily put themselves in the position where they had control over you.
Now, you can make up a ghost called the unconscious and try and remove responsibility from them.
But that means you will be absent from your own children.
Because you're saying there's an excuse, a ghost, a gypsy, voodoo, Aztec curse called the unconscious.
Which means that parents aren't responsible for bad parenting.
But if you give your parents that excuse, who else gets that excuse?
I see. You do.
Yes, seriously. Now, please understand, I'm not putting you in the same category as your parents.
I'm not saying you are a bad parent.
But to where your parenting is not meeting your standards, and, you know, congratulations to you for recognizing that, for asking for help, and I hope that I'm sure we can achieve something positive in this conversation.
So I'm not putting you in the same category, but there is a similar principle at work down in the guts of things.
Mm-hmm. Because your parents absolutely knew the difference between good and bad parenting.
They absolutely, 100%, completely and totally understood to the deepest level the difference between good and bad parenting.
And how do we know that? Because of how they acted when people were around us.
How they acted when nobody was around.
Right. Right. Just by the by, I don't know, you're a young guy, right?
So you probably don't remember there was a sitcom that ran for, I don't know, six or seven Stevens in the 80s called Family Ties.
Now, Family Ties, you could never do this sitcom now because Family Ties was about Democrat parents and a Republican son.
A very pro-Reagan...
Young, like explicit.
Parents were old hippies, now living in the suburbs, and the son was a straight-up Reagan-loving Republican.
And it was a young Michael J. Fox who played that role.
And in that, there were significant differences between the parents and the child.
And, of course, the child, in this case the teenager, Alex B. Keaton was his name, It's so funny because a friend of mine who is an objectivist and a very small government guy, I don't think he's made it all the way to anarchy yet, but I guess we could be patient.
It's only been 30 years. He's so identified with Alex P. Keaton that he said, Alex P. Keaton, this young Republican in the show, Quit the debate team because of...
I can't remember, X, Y, or Z reason.
And he said, I watched that episode and I got goosebumps because I quit the debate team for exactly the same reason.
Like, there was so much overlap, it was kind of funny, right?
Because to a large degree, Democrat and Republican, left versus right, conservative versus liberal, it's genetic.
And this is why when the liberals say don't hire conservatives, they are actually practicing genetic discrimination.
Your views on immigration are two-thirds genetic.
And... You're born that way, to a large degree.
So yeah, it is just a form of genetic discrimination.
So the reason I'm bringing up this show is I didn't watch it that much, but I watched, I don't know, probably 10 or 15 episodes.
And in it, the parents had massive differences with the son, and you could really argue that these are moral differences, and certainly they've become hysterical, cult-like narcissism of small divisions in modern world.
You could no longer have this kind of show because it humanized Republicans.
You simply couldn't have that in the modern media.
But the family, in family ties, and the reason it popped into my head is they just had a reunion.
So there's a group that is getting together, people who used to work together, particularly on old sitcoms or old movies, and they're having them all get together for Zoom calls and Q&As, and they're raising money for actors who are out of work because of the coronavirus and so on.
And so I was just reading a little article about This sitcom from the 80s.
And in this sitcom, as in all the other sitcoms from the 70s, from the 80s, I'm talking like 80s enough.
I mean, even back to Little House on the Prairie where there was some child hitting, but it was off screen.
And if you look at Full House and just a wide variety of other sitcoms, children never got hit.
They never got yelled at.
They never got called names. Everybody was reasonable.
In Full House, they had a talking stick where you couldn't speak unless you had the stick.
So it was all rational.
It was all reasonable. It was all peaceful parenting.
All of it. And if you had had a show where a child had been screamed at in the way that your parents yelled, if a child had been threatened, if a child had been assaulted, if a child had been spanked, I mean, as one, the parents across the West would rise up and condemn that and get that show taken off the air.
So when I was a kid, the media, and it's still, I think, the case even now, but the media was full of endless depictions of peaceful parenting.
Like 100%, virtually 100% accurate depictions of peaceful parenting.
Children were reasoned with, they were negotiated with.
And you said you, and the reason I bring this up too, is you said that, I mean, you guys had cable and your dad would threaten to cut it off, right?
Yeah, yeah, he blew up and cut it off.
Right. So your parents, I assume, watched television shows, may have watched the sitcoms, may have watched some of these kinds of shows or shows that were similar to it.
And... I mean, there's peaceful parenting in the show Friends because the Ross character has a son who kind of vanishes later because he becomes inconvenient.
But, you know, he reasons with his son and they don't yell and hit and doesn't call them names and so on, right?
Now, your parents were exposed probably to hundreds if not thousands of hours of training on peaceful parenting through the television.
And this is why...
I mean, you go all the way back to...
This is way back in the day.
My Three Sons. You go back to Leave It to Beaver.
Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, which is a show, a cartoon I watched when I was a kid.
And all of these shows, all the way back to the 50s.
Peaceful parenting, peaceful parenting, peaceful parenting, peaceful parenting.
Again, there was some minor exceptions, such as Little House on the Prairie, but Little House on the Prairie was...
Set in the fairly distant past.
So, for 60, 70 years, flowing from the television into the minds and hearts of parents is endless training on peaceful parenting, which they lapped up, enjoyed, laughed at, and would have been absolutely appalled if they had seen their own parenting practices Shown on the screen.
In other words, if your parents had switched on a sitcom or a TV show involving parenting, and someone had taken a transcript or a video and recreated it using actors of how they actually parented when they were alone and angry with their children, they would have been absolutely appalled.
And this is what's so weird about all of this stuff.
I just, I really want to get you get, because you've got to denormalize this in your mind.
It's so weird that abusive parents constantly consume material showing peaceful, wonderful parenting and would be absolutely appalled if their own behaviour showed up in that sitcom.
And yet, they don't change their own behavior with their children.
It's so weird when you think about it, right?
I mean, it's just completely bizarre.
So I'm fine with parents 100 years ago, 200 years ago.
I'm not fine with it, but I understand it, right?
They just didn't have any.
But your parents, they watched TV. They had hundreds or thousands of hours of training on peaceful parenting.
They knew exactly what peaceful parenting was.
They modeled the sitcom when they were with other people, right?
Yeah. Where did they learn how to do that?
From the TV! From movies!
Which were constantly telling and training them on how to be peaceful parents.
In public, they're a sitcom.
In private, they're a horror movie, right?
Exactly. So, once you have been exposed and lapped up and enjoyed and appreciated and supported hundreds or thousands of hours of training on peaceful parenting, don't try and tell me that anything they did was unconscious.
Once peaceful parenting got out into the world through the TV from the 1950s onwards, once that got out there, all parents are 100% responsible For abuse.
And your parents were completely conscious of how to be great parents.
They got that through the TV and they modeled that in public.
And it's hard, man.
It's hard to give your parents 100% responsibility.
My mother knew how to be a great mother.
But she indulged in violence.
She knew exactly how to not be violent, and more so, she knew exactly how to be positive and peaceful as a parent, how to be reasonable, how to be discussed, how to find the good humor in ill effects, right? So the other day, I was hiking with my wife, and we were coming down a very steep hill.
And I was zigzagging a little because I was like, the ground's kind of uneven.
It's a little wet and it was a fun hike and all of that.
And I was also getting kind of tired because it had been like two hours of we climbed to the top of a mountain and back down again.
And my wife turned and said, I don't find it that slip.
And then what happened? Oh no.
She slipped and she fell in the mud, right?
Now, I mean, it's not a particularly important moment in life, but what did she do?
She laughed. She said, I can't believe I was just about to say that it wasn't that slippery, and I slipped.
Right? Right. And I, of course, wasn't sitting there saying, I told you it was slippery and you just didn't listen.
Because, you know, I mean, I sympathize, right?
I mean, we've all done that.
We've all said, we've all gone out, you know, and our wife says, you should take a jacket.
And we've all said, no, I don't need a jacket.
And then what happens? We freeze our tits off, right?
We've all done that.
We've all made those decisions, which turn out to be a bad decision.
And so what am I going to do and sit there and say, you shouldn't be more careful.
Now you're muddy and blah, right?
It's no big deal. It's no big deal.
We went and got another pair of pants and continued with our day.
So... Your parents are 100% responsible.
100% responsible for treating you badly.
They knew exactly how to treat you well.
Just as my mother did. I agree.
So that's the first thing.
Because if you give your parents 100% responsibility...
I mean, the dominoes that go down are very briefly—I'm sorry for talking so much, but I want to sort of get this stuff cleared away for you and for the listeners because I haven't delved into this topic for quite some time.
But when you've done wrong—and listen, you haven't done much wrong, I mean, as far as parenting goes, right?
I mean, it's all solvable, and that's why it's so great for you to call— But it's really hard for those of us who haven't done much wrong in our lives, it's really hard to know what it actually feels like to have a bad conscience and to be vulnerable to the truth.
So the truth, the honesty, the facts, reality, the history, your vocalization of what went wrong in your family, that's like a constant predator in your life.
It's a constant predator in your life.
And you and I don't really know what it's like to have a constant predator in our life.
You know, people dependent on the government have a constant predator in their life, which is the taxpayers getting kind of pissed off at supporting their...
Sorry, go ahead. I see.
All right. So we don't know what it's like to have a constant predator in our life and to have to manage and control and manipulate everyone to keep that predator at bay.
We don't know what that's like.
But it's important to figure out what that's like.
Now, the people who've done wrong They did wrong by abusing their power.
And then what they want to say later on is, oh, I was powerless.
It's like, no, no. Your parents hit you.
In a way, they couldn't go and hit other adults.
They couldn't go and hit other people's children.
They couldn't go and hit a policeman or a security guard or whatever, right?
Because they'd go to jail, right?
But they hit you. So they abused their power, the power that they voluntarily sought over you by having children.
So they created the conditions where they had that power, they abused that power, and then if and when you confront them about their abuse of power, do you know what they say?
The excuse I got was, did the best I could with the knowledge I had at the time.
Yeah, I was powerless. Like if you say to me, Steph, you're a total fool because you didn't predict the exact number of votes.
That Trump was going to get or Joe Biden was going to get or whatever, right?
My reply would be to say, look, a standard of omniscience is not a rational standard, right?
And so I would say, listen, I did the best I could, but the knowledge I had in the predictions that I made.
And then if you said, ah, yes, but you didn't come down with the actual number, it's like, but that number wasn't available and I couldn't have known it.
So your parents are saying that If you say to your parents...
I'm just rebooting here to make sure that the flow goes well.
Sorry. Sometimes building the plane while it's flying is a little awkward.
So you go to your parents and you say you acted badly.
And they said, well, we did the best we could with the knowledge we had.
They're saying that they didn't know how to be better parents.
And of course, the reply to that is, hey, let's do it.
Let's do it. You know what? Rather than me, right?
Like, why don't you roleplay your dad and I'll roleplay you.
How's that? Okay, you dropped out there for the last 10 seconds, though.
Oh, I dropped? What do you want to roleplay?
I got an incoming call, so...
Oh, you got an incoming call? Are you okay now?
Yes. Okay. So, let's roleplay you being your dad and me being you talking about the past.
Okay. Because I need to know what their excuses are, because those excuses are also excusing your parenting at the moment.
Okay. So I come up and I say, Dad, oh man, we've got to talk.
Man, we've got to talk.
I've really, really been thinking about what happened when I was a child.
And I've got to tell you, it's, you know, I've got some good memories.
It's not all bad. I get all that.
It's some fun vacations and all of that.
But, you know, this yelling, this abuse, this...
You know, I brought you into this world.
I can take you out. But, you know, as a kid, it was kind of like a death threat to me.
Well, it's all pretty bad stuff.
And I guess I'm noticing some things showing up in my own parenting, and I think that they're related.
So I just... I'd really like to talk about this stuff.
Sure. What's going on?
Well, I just...
I mean, you do remember making these threats against me, right?
Um... Yeah, I mean, we said a lot of stuff to help you kids grow up, but I think we did a great job.
Look at how you and your siblings turned out.
Okay, but if you did a great job, then why was what you did so different when we were with other people from when we were home?
What do you mean? Well, so when we were home, you'd yell at us.
Call us names, kind of insult us, and threaten us.
That never happened when we were in public, ever.
And so I guess that's my question.
It's like, okay, if you believe that you did such a good job, then why was your job so different, whether we were in public or in private?
Which was the good job?
Not yelling at us? Not threatening us?
Not calling us names?
Or Yelling, threatening, and calling names.
Because they're opposite behaviors, right?
So which one was the good parenting?
Well, you know, sometimes being a parent is hard, and when you're raising four kids, sometimes things get stressful, but you do the best you can with the knowledge you have with time, and I think things did great.
I mean, my dad used to yell and hit me, and And, you know, your mother's father was an alcoholic.
I think you guys had it pretty good.
I guess that's nice to hear in a weird way, but you didn't actually answer my question.
Do you remember what the question was?
What's wrong? What's all this all about?
No, I'm just asking you, do you remember what my question was?
Saying we somehow treat you different when you were in public versus private?
So can you just be honest with me and tell me that you don't even remember the question I asked you like 30 seconds ago?
What I'm saying there is I kind of need you to listen at the moment to me.
And not just fog out and not just give me these platitudes.
I really need you to listen to me.
It's really important to me because, you know, you say you did a better job than your own parents.
Great. I want to do a better job than you.
I just don't understand where all this is coming from.
But that's not the point.
The point is for you to listen. Is there something wrong with you?
Are you doing okay? No.
Okay, the point is for you to listen to me, not to try and figure out why I'm saying what I'm saying.
I've already told you why. I want to be an even better parent than you were, right?
I'm sure you would support me in that endeavor.
You certainly weren't a perfect parent, right?
I think I was a pretty damn good father.
But not perfect. Well, of course.
I mean, if you want perfect, then, you know, go to the moon.
This is crazy.
What's going on? Okay, so let's go back to the question.
That I asked, okay?
Because you said that you were a good parent, but when we were in public, if there was conflict, you were reasonable, you were peaceful, you didn't yell, you didn't hit, you didn't call us names, you didn't threaten.
But in private, you did the opposite behavior.
Now, I think you can understand...
That, for a child, that's really confusing, right?
Because, okay, which is the good parenting?
Is it the yelling, the name-calling, the insulting, the threatening?
Or is it the opposite of those things?
And that's my question, is which was the better parenting?
what you did in public or what happened in private?
I think we were great parents.
I mean, obviously, we didn't do everything perfectly, but...
But, I mean, come on.
You got it pretty good.
Are you just really dedicated to not answering my question?
Is that right? Can you at least acknowledge that you're not going to answer my question, rather than just completely ignoring what the hell I'm saying?
Look, if you want to have a good conversation, just call me when you're ready.
Write me a letter telling me how you feel.
This is great. No, but I am telling you how I feel.
Let me ask you something else.
We can drop that one because, I mean, obviously you're not going to answer, which that kind of is my answer.
Okay, so you say that, you know, in the times, listen, I as a parent, dad, I as a parent, I as a dad, dad, act imperfectly, right?
I'm not a perfect parent and so all of that, right?
So I'm not trying to put myself in some massively different category from you, right?
You're a dad and you made mistakes.
I'm a dad. I make mistakes and so on, right?
Now, what you say, though, is that you say, well, I did the best I could, but the knowledge I had.
Now, my question is, I can't remember a time when that excuse was ever good enough for me when I was a child.
So when I was, you know, 8 or 10 or 12 or whatever, if I did badly on a test at school, you'd get mad at me.
And if I said, hey, Dad, I did the best I could with the knowledge I had, what would you have said to me?
You should have studied harder.
You could have done a lot better at school.
Right. So why didn't I have that excuse at 8, but you had that excuse at 30?
Why did I not have that excuse when it was a pretty meaningless test, but you have that excuse when it comes to actually raising children?
I tried to guide you as a father and help you become the best person you could be, and I think we did a pretty damn good job.
Does my opinion about your parenting matter at all, or is it only your opinion about your parenting matter?
Your other siblings don't have this complaint.
That's why, but I'm not talking about them or for them.
I'm talking about me. I'm just curious, like, if my opinion about your parenting, and I gave you some praise and some compliments about the good times we had, so you did some things well, but are you saying that, like, you provided a service called parenting to me as a child,
are you saying that my perception of things that weren't always great With you as a parent, that my perception doesn't matter, that only your perception matters about the service you are providing to me.
I'm your father.
I was a great father to you when you were a little boy.
I put you through school and made sure you were lacking for nothing.
I helped you get into college and look at what you've become.
You're an engineer, you're Got a family of your own.
Just do what you think is best for your family.
Okay, let me ask you this. So, if I didn't study for an exam, and I didn't do very well on the exam, What would you have said to me as a child?
You would have said you should have studied harder, you should have cracked the books, you should have been more disciplined, you shouldn't have played video games, you shouldn't have gone to play with your friends, right?
You wouldn't say, well, you just didn't have the knowledge and that's fine, right?
So my question is that you had a test, right?
I guess a test that goes on for decades called parenting, being a dad, right?
And you said, of course, that you had problems with your dad and your dad was not as good a parent as you were And listen, I appreciate that.
I really do appreciate the fact that you did better than your dad.
I think that's great. But you had a test called being a parent.
And I, when I was eight, was expected to study for tests that were completely unimportant relative to...
Being a parent. I guess my question is, can you just tell me, like, you were going to become a parent.
You had lots of warning. You knew that you didn't want to be a parent the way that your dad was a parent.
So I guess I just need to know what books did you study?
What courses did you take?
What theories did you pursue in order to take on this responsibility?
Because, you know, I'm eight years old.
I've got to study for a math test or a spelling test.
As far as being a parent goes, what...
What did you learn? What did you train yourself on?
What did you study to become a better parent than your dad?
I didn't read any books, but I moved out from the city to the suburb to get you guys into a better environment than I had growing up.
Why do you think you didn't read any books about how to be a parent?
Just... Busy.
Trying to provide for new kids.
Well, no, but I'm talking about before.
Hang on, Dad. Hang on.
I'm talking about before. Before you became a father, right?
I mean, you had nine months of warning.
Are you saying that you didn't have time to crack a book that whole time or any time before?
Well, I wasn't planning on being a father when you came around.
Yeah, but if I know I have a test in nine months, doesn't that give me at least some time to study?
I don't know what you want me to say.
It is what it is.
I'm sorry, that's not an answer.
Could you just try that again?
Can you tell me why? Because, you know, you watch TV a lot, you know, when we were growing up and you could have taken, you know, a couple of hours out of that TV watching schedule, which, you know, to read a book or two or on parenting or anything like that.
I want to just write this stuff down and send me a letter.
This isn't being very productive.
Well, it's not being very productive because you just won't answer any of my questions.
And I have a right to ask these questions, right?
I mean, you were my father and there's good in what you did and there was some not so good in what you did and I want to improve my parenting.
You understand, I have a perfect right to ask these questions of you.
You chose to become a father.
I didn't choose to be born and I didn't choose you as a father.
So I have a right to ask these questions of you, right?
I guess. I mean, I don't know.
I don't understand where this is coming from, why this is coming up all of a sudden.
What do you mean all of a sudden?
You've been my father for decades, right?
And I told you I want to become a better father myself, which means trying to figure out where things were not ideal in the past.
And I mean, you always told me as a kid, right?
You always told me as a kid, you got to take responsibility.
You got to take responsibility, right?
But now I come to you and talk to you about your parenting and you're not taking any responsibility at all.
And you know what that does to me, Dad?
It makes me pretty fucking pissed off.
Because you lecturing me about taking responsibility, own your decisions, own your life, be responsible.
I mean, was that all just a giant lie?
Because now I'm saying, hey, you've got to take some responsibility for some not great things you did as a dad from time to time.
And you won't take any responsibility at all.
So what the hell was the point of lecturing me about responsibility in the past when you won't take any responsibility in the present?
I provided for you guys.
I mean, I got up at the crack of dawn every day and went to work and even worked a second job to help you guys get through school.
I think I did a damn good job as a father.
Do you remember, Dad, Saying to me, I brought you into this world, I can take you out?
Your mother would say that a lot, yeah.
Yeah, did you ever? I'm sorry, it was mom.
Did you ever tell her that was wrong?
That you shouldn't threaten your kids with killing them, in a way?
Because, you know, when you're a kid, you take things pretty literally, right?
Did you ever say to her, that's not good?
Do you think that was great parenting?
Your mother and I are a team, and we tried to present a united front to you guys, and I don't agree with everything she did, but she was a great mom.
She took you all around to your sports, and she made your Halloween costumes.
She's a super mom.
I'm going to talk to mom next, of course, but if I talk to mom and I say, did dad ever ask you to stop threatening us with killing us or abandoning us?
Would she say, oh yeah, your dad really, really tried to get me to stop doing that, but I just didn't?
Or would she say, oh no, he never brought it up.
He was fine with him. I think your mom and I are on the same page with a lot of stuff, and I think she did what's best for you.
So, for you, it is good parenting to threaten your children.
In that way. Like, you couldn't do that with an adult, right?
You couldn't say to someone, if you don't obey me, I'm going to kill you.
Right? That would land you in prison, right?
I mean, so you think that's...
So you're of the opinion that that's good parenting.
Like, if you're around my kids, dad, and they do something you don't like or they don't do something you want them to do, are you going to say the same thing to them?
Are you going to say, oh, yeah, you know, I could kill you for that.
Oh, that was just a joke.
You know, she wasn't serious.
And if you let us around your kids, we'd be great grandparents.
What about the yelling and the name-calling?
Oh, we were younger back then.
We were stressed out, trying to make ends meet.
And, you know, we weren't perfect all the time, but we did a great job.
Okay, so listen, that's all I'm trying to...
I get that you guys did a lot of great stuff, right?
But you said we weren't perfect all the time.
That's all I want to talk about.
It doesn't mean I'm going to throw you under the bus or I hate you or anything like that, but if I want to get better, I have to look at things that weren't ideal.
You won't be a perfect parent either.
You're going to make mistakes.
Okay, so tell me where you fell short of your ideals in your parenting.
Tell me, like you said, we didn't do the right thing all the time or we weren't perfect or we did things that were mistakes.
Tell me what those mistakes were because it will really help me.
Like I'm begging you here, not because I want you to feel bad or I want to punish you, but because it will help me with my parenting.
It will help me be an even better parent.
So tell me about the things that you regret.
I wish I had given you guys a better work ethic.
Sometimes you look kind of lazy.
Your regret is that your children turned out lazy?
That's not really a self-critical statement though, is it?
Oh, you asked me what we could have done better.
Okay, so you should have done something to make your children less lazy.
What else do you wish you'd done differently?
What else would have done better?
I don't know. All those times we drove into the city together or took the train into the city together, I wish we spent more time talking to each other than just listening to the radio or sitting there in silence.
And that's kind of funny, right, Dad?
And I mean this with all warmth and affection, but it's kind of funny that you wish you'd spent more time actually talking with your kids, but now I'm trying to talk about something important.
You've spent like an hour blowing me off, right?
I'm not sure that mistake is totally in the past with all due love and respect.
There it is.
You asked me for something.
There's something. Okay.
Anything else? So you wish your kids hadn't been so lazy and you wish you'd talked more sometimes when we were on the train.
Anything else? No.
I wish I'd given you a little bit more respect for your family, for your parents.
It feels like...
A little more respect for the folks that raised you would be nice.
I mean, we gave you so much, and now it feels like you're just throwing insults in my face.
Oh, so for you, insulting family members is bad?
You should treat your father with some respect.
Well, I am. Do you think that I should not be honest with you?
Do you think it would be treating you with respect to not tell you what I'm thinking and feeling and to lie to you?
I thought, I mean, didn't you raise me to tell the truth?
I mean, didn't you say that telling the truth was important and I shouldn't lie?
And I don't see how lying at the moment would be treating you with respect.
And it certainly wouldn't be treating the lessons you taught me with respect.
I think a lot of the stuff you're saying just isn't grounded in reality.
I haven't heard anything like this from Any one of your siblings.
Something's going on with you.
So now it's bad that I'm telling you what I feel is the truth.
So the truth is a good thing to say unless it's upsetting to you then it's bad?
I don't think it's the truth.
And see, that's – I mean, I'm just going to break out of the role play because that's kind of the end of the road, right?
Man, he's brutal. Yeah, it's...
He's a zero-responsibility person.
And everything that he said that he wished he'd done better was actually...
Well, most of what he said that he wished he'd done better was kind of like an insult to his kids, right?
Yeah. I wish I had raised you to treat your father better.
Who deserves it? I wish I'd raised my kids not to be so lazy.
Come on, man. I wish that conversation was...
It was a lot further away from reality than it was.
No, I'm glad it wasn't. It is amazing to me.
You're an engineer.
You don't have any acting training, right?
No. You were brilliant in that scene.
Everybody can do it. It's chilling, right?
His level of evasion and he was constantly jumping out of the conversation to try and mind-read you or to try and figure out, well, if I can frame this as to why this conversation is coming up that I don't have to deal with the content, right?
Exactly. Exactly. Oh man, I'm so sorry.
But that's someone with a bad conscience, in my opinion.
That's someone who's got a predator in the room called the honesty of his child.
And man, that is, that's rough.
I'm so sorry. So I can completely see why you're having trouble sometimes remaining present with your own children because your dad vanishes the moment you show up.
Exactly, yeah. I mean, you either believe his version of events or you don't exist for him, right?
He can just, in a sense, erase you from the conversation if you say something that displeases him, right?
Exactly. That's tough, man.
And then he complains that there weren't more real conversations.
And he complains that insulting family members, which you didn't do, right?
I mean, I don't know how you would do it, but I tried to roleplay with you with like, okay, there was some anger there.
I swore a little, but I was also saying, you know, here's the pluses, here's the positives, and you did do a lot of good stuff.
And I say this with all love and respect.
And right, so I wasn't just insulting the guy.
But it's kind of tough for him to say, well, insulting family members is bad when he He called you guys' names when you were growing up and kind of insulted you, even in the conversation where he said, well, my kids are lazy, right?
Yeah. That's insulting, right?
Or that you somehow weren't paying the due respect that you owe him.
Yeah. I think the only thing that maybe I wish he would have said that he wouldn't really have said is I wish we had spent more time talking together.
I don't think those words would actually come out of smoke, but...
And if you pressed him on it, he would somehow make it your fault anyway.
Ah, you kids are always buried in your comic books or video games and, you know.
Exactly. It'd be your fault anyway, right?
Turn around on me.
Right. Right.
I'm sorry, man. That's really rough.
I mean, it really was.
It was quite a combat there, right?
Of reality versus fog.
Of truth versus reality. Evasion.
And he's good at that.
He's really good at that. He's really good at that, right?
And that's painful, right?
That's very painful. And to me, I don't know for you, but to me what bothers me the most about that kind of stuff is just the unbelievable hypocrisy of it all.
Yeah. You know, like you got to study for your damn test when you're eight, but I don't have to read a book about how to be a parent at all.
That's a question I actually asked him in the past.
Did he read any parenting books?
And he really said no.
Yeah. And then he says, well, I just didn't know what I didn't know.
It's like, but you're responsible for not knowing it.
Exactly. Like the guys, I don't know how to cut someone open.
It's like, yeah, but you're posing as a surgeon.
You're getting a knife. You're opening people up.
You're responsible for not knowing that stuff and responsible for putting yourself in that situation, right?
Mm-hmm. Oh man, that's rough.
That's rough. That level of evasion and avoidance is really rough.
And it's painful. It's painful as well because at least what I got from that conversation, which is certainly not to tell you your experience, but what I got from that was a lot of anger just around the moral hypocrisy.
You know, you got to be prepared for tests.
I didn't read any book on parenting.
You got to be honest. Oh, don't tell me this truth.
You got to take responsibility.
Oh, it wasn't nothing I did was wrong.
So people who have these big moral instructions to their kids, and then when their kids turn those moral rules, in a sense, back on the parents, and the parents completely dismiss those moral rules, that is a kind of agony.
It really is a kind of agony because all those moral rules were just control.
They weren't meant to be followed, right?
It's like the Democrats saying, well, How could Donald Trump not accept the outcome of an election?
It's like, first of all, the election's not over.
And secondly, you all just spent four years doing just that.
Exactly. So that is really rough.
And I think dealing with that kind of pain, I mean, that's a fall from grace, right?
That's a flame out of a god.
If you look at your dad and you say these moral rules that he was so high and mighty about, we're just there to bully and control me.
There was nothing about actual adherence to those moral rules.
He doesn't respect those moral rules.
He just used them to bully us.
That's painful as hell.
It hurts, yeah.
Yeah, it's really – it's like my mom would say – would scream, you will treat me with respect, like after beating me up.
It's like, what? You just beat me up.
I'm a little kid. You just beat me up.
And now you say, you demand that I treat you with respect.
It's like, I'll fear you because I'm not an idiot and I want to survive this childhood.
But respect? No.
No. Never.
So that's rough, right?
Yeah. So with regards to your own kids, connecting with them is going to make you cry.
Because you can't connect with your father.
And so you're not avoiding your kids, you're avoiding the pain of not connecting with your father, right?
Exactly. You process that pain, your heart will be an open book with your kids, and you will connect.
Like a plug in a socket!
But that's the barrier, in my opinion.
Sorry, go ahead. I'm doing everything I can to avoid feeling this pain.
To avoid the pain? Yeah, of course.
I mean, to walk towards the fire.
Let me try that again, but in English.
To walk towards the fire is very counterintuitive, right?
To say, oh, this thing really hurts and I've got to walk towards it.
That's, I mean, that's kind of counter to how our whole brains work, right?
Put your hand back in the fire.
No, I don't want to put my hand back in the fire.
It will give you an unbreakable fist.
I don't think that's true. So, yeah, I think that's the barrier.
If you can just sort of meditate on that and realize that if you don't connect with your children, then your dad wins.
Right? Then the past wins.
Then he's trained you so well in avoidance that you will reproduce this.
Now, not as badly, but we don't want incremental improvements, right?
We don't want Apple to say, well, in 30 years, we'll release an iPhone that's 10% faster.
We want double the speed next year, thank you very much.
And it's the same with parenting.
We don't have the time, and we don't want and we should not accept.
Well, my dad was a 20% better dad than his dad was, and I'll be 20% better.
Okay, so in 60 years, you gain 40-odd percent, right?
Yeah, that's no good. I mean, if you had a business plan...
If Tim Cook came out of the business plan and said, well, in 60 years, we're going to release an iPhone that's 40% faster, I don't think he'd remain CEO for very long, right?
We want quantum leaps, right?
And I don't have forever to feel the pain and connect with my kids.
I mean, there's a time limit on it.
Yeah, you want to do it sooner rather than later because every day that you don't connect is a day they drift further away, right?
To the point where you end up on the other side of the universe like this roleplay with your dad, right?
Yeah, it's just in the moment it's a lot easier to get that distraction than to make that connection.
That's where I'm struggling.
Right, right.
Absolutely. And you want to prepare for it.
I don't know that you necessarily want to dive into it straight in the moment.
But you want to force yourself to, you know, eye contact and ask questions and, you know, I mean, your kids may be old enough to indicate what they feel positive or negative about with regards to their home life, you, your parenting, whatever, right?
What do you like? What do you not like? What's good?
What's bad? And, you know, they're your customers, man.
And they're your captive customers.
You have to have the highest standards, right?
They can't go anywhere else. There's no competition for dad, right?
Yeah, we deserve the best.
I deserve the best. And listen, you are great at this.
You know, this is emotional work, which for an engineer, it's not necessarily the most easy thing to do.
Next, you'll do a call where you try and teach me statistics and you'll see just what I'm talking about as far as that goes, but from my side.
But no, you're doing really, really well at this stuff.
You've identified where the gap is, and you've reached out for help, and you did a great job in this conversation.
But yeah, you can write down.
You can talk about things with your wife.
There's John Gray, Nathaniel Brandon.
Other people have these exercise books with sentence completions and other things that can help blow this dam open and get these feelings flowing, and your kids will be very grateful and positive about it, I think.
Yeah, I've read one of Brandon's books.
Will you keep me posted about how it's going?
I will. Thank you, Stefan.
And how was the convo for you as a whole?
It was great. It put me in touch a little bit more.
I appreciate it. Good.
But keep me posted, and thanks again.
I really, really appreciate your time today, and well done.
It was a great, great job. Okay.
Thank you for your time. Bye.
Bye-bye. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain Show on Philosophy.
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