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Aug. 1, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:06:03
THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN, SEX, MARRIAGE AND FAMILY!
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Welcome to the show, Stefan.
Oh, thanks. A great pleasure to be back.
It's been a while. It's so nice to see you again.
It's been too long.
It was a great conversation last time.
I can't remember what we talked about.
It must have been marriage-related or parenting or something, right?
My favorite topics. So nice to see you again.
So I would like to start by assuming that the people who are listening to this don't know who you are and have you tell them about you, who you are, and how you ended up getting deplatformed after providing all this great content on the media with people like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan.
What happened? I don't even know that story.
Well, first of all, I'd like to extend my condolences to anybody who doesn't know me yet because, boy, have you missed out on a lot.
There's really great material.
So as far as why, you know, I'm sort of pivoting a little here, right?
So you can say deplatformed, but of course I'm talking to you.
I'm on BitChute. I'm on Minds.
I'm on Rumble.
I'm all over the place now.
In fact, I'm on more platforms now than I was before.
Before, so it's replatforming.
That's all. You know, like if your house burns down, or rather in this case, if arsonists burn your house down, you don't just go and live on the street, you go find a new place to live.
And that's sort of where I've landed.
As to the... Sorry, let me just try that again.
I just bumped my... As to the why I got the platform, Suzanne, I mean, they never tell you, right?
I mean, it's like being ghosted by someone.
I guess you had – with YouTube, I had a relationship that went – I was like user number three or something like that back in 2006.
And so I had like a 13-year relationship.
Relationship with YouTube, but never had any particular issues.
And then, you know, there's supposed to be this whole process that you go through.
Oh, you said something bad.
There's a strike and then you can appeal.
But it was just a complete, like total Maoist erasure of the person, like those guys in the Stalin pictures in the Soviet Union who just vanish.
I just woke up to that and then it was a week or two later it was Twitter.
So the fact that it was shortly before the election I'm sure is not entirely a coincidence because I did a lot of work in 2015-2016 pushing back against the media lies about Donald Trump.
And I did that because I don't like it when people lie and also because the media had lied so much about me that, you know, but nobody's going to particularly care if they lie about me.
Donald Trump having a slight smidge of a profile higher than I do, I wanted to push back so that people could see, yeah, the media lies about Donald Trump.
Therefore, they lie in general.
Therefore, when you read what the media says about me, you can take it with a grain of salt big enough to make Utah look like a salt lick.
So I did a lot of work on that.
You know, Trump won by a small 70,000 votes.
And I, you know, my pushbacks against the lies about Donald Trump hit millions and millions and millions of views.
So maybe they felt there was some influence on I think that they were just kind of cleaning house.
I was pushing back a lot against the George Floyd narrative and trying to get all the facts out about that.
And of course, every single year that there's a major election in the U.S., they try and gin up this race hatred, these racial conflicts by lying about particular issues.
You know, Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, I did a very popular video pushing back on that stuff.
I was also doing a wide variety of other sort of pushing back against these race hatred narratives, which may win you election, but in the long run, it's going to lose you the absolute damn republic as a whole.
So it's just a little bit of pay me now or pay me later.
So I think there was a lot of pushback coming from people about that.
I wasn't dealing with any particularly new topics.
I was pushing back a lot against some of the lies around coronavirus.
And I had also, shortly before it emerged in China, I was in Hong Kong.
I went out to Hong Kong to shoot a documentary in the fall of 2019.
And if I do say so myself, I think it was a great documentary.
I interviewed the guy who wrote Hong Kong's Constitution.
I showed up on TV there and just had a lot of great interviews and also marched with the anti-communist protesters, took a couple of facefuls of tear gas.
It was all very exciting and a lot of powerful footage and a lot of really great stuff.
And that, before I got deplatformed from YouTube, that whole documentary just vanished.
Like you couldn't find, even if you search for the name of it directly, it all just vanished.
So, of course, that's pro-China stuff.
It's protecting the CCP stuff.
And, of course, I was pushing back against this.
This weird bat virus just emerged spontaneously in the Wuhan fish market.
It only happens to be 300 meters from the only level four bioweapons lab in all of China.
And so now, of course, you can say that Anthony Fauci says he doesn't think necessarily that it's of natural origin.
So, you know, I was just, I guess, annoying a lot of people with regards to telling the truth and following the facts wherever they led.
And so they cordially invited me to find more productive outlets for my work, I suppose you could say.
Oh, I'm probably not far behind you at some point.
It's just... The closest I ever come is when I touch upon anything feminist that's really striking, and then all of a sudden Facebook has like...
You know, normally there'll be hundreds and hundreds of, you know, shares or likes or comments and then boom, zero, like nada, nothing.
Like it makes no sense whatsoever.
And then it's always the same topic, technically.
So that's my small little way of identifying with what you're saying.
Although I've dealt with it my whole career, too, within mainstream media, for sure, in a larger way.
Well, and of course, I was in the academic world.
Who will cover what? Yeah, I was in the academic world earlier, and I didn't even get the chance to get deplatformed because there was so much hostility in opposition to the anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-fascist, anti-totalitarianism.
to what it is that I talk about that I guess I should consider myself lucky to have even had a platform to be kicked off because, you know, prior to the internet, that wouldn't have happened much at all, which is why I spend so much time in the business world where if you do a good job, you get rewarded.
Whereas, of course, in the social media world, if you do a good job, you tend to get punished.
Yeah.
I had one experience being disinvited from a college and I decided I was not interested whatsoever in the whole college scene.
I I wasn't really interested in it before, but I thought, I told my husband, I'll just try it.
I'll just see how I feel about it.
It barely didn't even get that far because I was disinvited at last minute.
Well, it's a really sad thing, too.
It's a really sad thing, I mean, all seriousness, because there are lots of people I disagree with in the world.
they're wrong.
They may have a really good argument I haven't thought of.
They may have really good data that I wasn't aware of.
And I don't find myself frightened by or wishing to tear out the tongues of people who say things I disagree with.
They might have a great point.
They also, through dialogue with me, might have their arguments improved.
I might have my arguments And that whole spark and friction, you know, how you sharpen a sword on that whetstone, all that spark and friction, that's what free speech is all about.
If you have an idea that's bad and you just try and crush it and destroy it and drive it from the public square...
It radicalizes people, which I think is a real shame because then they – if you're kind of jumpy and paranoid and think that the mainstream culture is kind of toxic and anti-whatever category you're in and then people making that case using data and evidence get driven out of the public square, attacked, slandered, lied about, suppressed and so on, it doesn't calm the – Waters of human discourse to drive people underwater.
It just means that their ideas no longer can be engaged with.
They can't be talked out of things.
And it really does confirm whatever people are saying, critical of the mainstream.
If the mainstream really tries to destroy people's lives, it tends to fragment and create oppositional camps where we should all be coming together under the umbrella of reason and evidence.
We should all be coming together and trying to Find the way forward.
The truth is a very slippery and difficult thing to get a hold of.
And it's even tougher to keep with new data.
And when you get people out of the conversation, you just fragment society.
And then you can see this happening on Twitter, for instance.
You can see very clearly that the left follows people on the left.
The right follow people on the right.
The people who were into QAnon follow only QAnon.
And the common language, the Esperanto of reason that we're supposed to be communicating with is all being Tower of Babel fragmented.
And this is especially hard for philosophers.
I'm not a philosopher the way you are, but I loved philosophy in college.
I mean, my favorite class was philosophy, but I just remember thinking, what the heck would I do with that?
But I could have sat there for four years and discussed it.
That's how much I love it. And that Being into philosophy requires, obviously, I don't even want to say duking it out, but just discussion.
Discussion. And if the person's agreeing with you the entire time, it's not really much of a discussion.
No, and it's the humility to know that other people might be in as great a possession or more possession of truth than you are.
And that humility is really what drives forward the conversation.
But you see, the problem is, this is why philosophers tend to get attacked so much, is that all power is based on a series of lies.
And if you begin to unravel those lies, you begin to unravel power itself.
And of course, the people who are surfing on the bloody waves of power don't particularly like it when you take the current out of their momentum.
And so they all claim, this is all the way back to Socrates and the sophists, right?
All the sophists claim to be in possession of the truth, of knowledge, of virtue, of wisdom.
And they say, well, no, we're not interested in power.
We're only interested in doing good.
And of course, the big question that Socrates had is, well, how do you know that exactly?
Can you be sure of that?
Do you really know what justice and truth and wisdom and virtue are?
Because then you claim that to be the seat of your power.
This is why you get to order people around with the force of law, because you're just so virtuous and know so much about goodness.
So then, of course, Socrates and myself, we begin to ask questions.
Do I really know what virtue is?
Do I really know what the truth is?
Do I really know... What morality is.
And then after you examine those questions in yourself, you then begin to examine other people.
And if the people in power are revealed as using the appearance of virtue in order to dominate and control you, well, that dominance and control becomes visible and people will recoil.
They don't want to obey a fist.
They don't want to obey a gun.
They will obey virtue.
And so the pretense of virtue is the foundation of power.
And when philosophers come along asking those inconvenient and uncomfortable questions about How it is that you know that you're right and good and virtuous and noble?
Well, it really just began to unravel the smokescreen that covers the mailed fist of power.
And they're no likey, I think, if I can quote the ancient Roman phrase.
Well, I guess they're no likey. I guess I should brace myself then, because interestingly enough, my book that's coming out in August, it's in two parts.
And part one is Four Lies the Culture Tells.
And then it names the four lies.
And then this part two is a 12-step program for young women for them to actually follow a path that will lead them to success in the personal domain rather than following the culture's lies.
So it's going to be interesting.
Well, and these lies, I mean, I'm sure this may be one of the ones that you talk about or maybe it's related, but these really contradictory lies, they invite people into a mentally ill state of mind, into almost like a psychosis situation.
Like, if someone were to come along to me and say, Steph, you can have it all.
You can have a monogamous relationship but still date anyone you want.
You can spend all your time at work and all of your time with your children.
It would be like...
You can split yourself into 12 dimensions, each of which operates a separate tunnel of time.
And just know you're inviting me to a psychotic view of life that doesn't exist.
And you're guaranteeing me absolute misery because I'm not going to be able to fulfill any of these particular ideals.
And the you can have it all mentality is you don't need to make compromises.
You can both save and spend at the same time.
You can get older and wiser but still get more youthful and limber as time goes forward.
It's like you're just inviting people to be mentally ill and not process reality.
How is this going to help?
I know.
And then 10 years later, they're calling me for coaching because their lives are a mess.
Right. It's all gone awry because they followed this crap that they were fed.
And it's so overwhelming to deal with it every day that I finally just said, oh, okay, we've got to have something for these women that they don't end up in this boat.
But anyway, I don't want to talk about me.
So I have a question for you.
So how do people hear the interviews that they used to watch on YouTube, or I don't know if they found them via Twitter, now?
So, my website, freedomain.com, is still running.
You can go to freedomain.com forward slash connect, and it lists all of the platforms that I'm...
It's like, I don't know, 15 or 17 platforms that I'm currently on.
Some of them are like Twitter, some of them are like Facebook, some of them are like YouTube, and so on.
So, yeah, there's lots of different ways that people can still get what I'm doing.
And, you know, if you haven't listened to me for a while, the one thing that...
I'm pretty good in adversity.
And so when I get deplatformed, I'm like, I'm just going to do even better.
My shows are going to be even better, more concise, more impassioned, more powerful, more useful.
And so I switch to live streams to get more audience feedback as I go along.
And I'm working on a book at the moment.
Sorry, it's kind of a segue.
So I'm working on a book.
I actually... So I have an acting background and acting training, and I was originally a novelist and a playwright, so I took one of my novels and read it as a free audiobook.
It's a really great novel.
It's very long, but it's very good.
It's about an English family and a German family, which is the two sides of my family history.
One on the English side, of course, one on the German side and how their lives intertwine and intersect.
And it's a very good novel about the rise of political violence.
I wrote it over 20 years ago.
But when I was rereading, I'm like, wow, I really did kind of nail this, didn't I?
Because, you know, we can see that happening now.
If people want to get that, it's totally free.
You can get freedomain.com forward slash almost.
The name of the book is Almost.
But the new book I'm working on is about parenting.
I've been a stay-at-home dad for 12 and a half years.
Right. And how old is she? You have a daughter, right?
Yeah, yeah. Well, she'll be 13 this year.
Oh, just 13. Okay. Just 13.
By my account, she's still young. Yeah, you tell her that and see if you get out of the room alive.
Oh, you're only 13. I used to teach her age.
How cute, Pat, Pat, Pat.
Yeah. No, because you're close to empty nester now, right?
Uh-huh. Just through August.
Yep. So, yeah, the philosophical principles, you know, in starting this book, Suzanne, I looked back over...
Philosophers that I knew, and I mostly read philosophers for like metaphysics, epistemology, like nature of reality, nature of knowledge, and so on, and some to do with morals.
You know, it's really tragic.
Almost no philosophers talk about parenting or childhood really as a whole.
all.
It's an incredibly rare topic.
And, you know, in some of the ancient Greek philosophers, well, because they were a bit sausage focused, it was sort of clear to understand why they wouldn't necessarily be too keen on parenting as a whole.
But, you know, philosophers really don't talk about parenting.
And yet, yeah, the child is the father of the man.
How do you take philosophical principles and apply them to the most important job that we have, which is parenting?
And so I've been working on this book.
I call it peaceful parenting.
It's the non-aggression principle applied to parenting.
No initiation of force, no threats.
And we have this weird belief that, you know, for relationships we choose, like getting married or boyfriend-girlfriend or friends or whatever, If the person is like really mean to us, then we should just leave.
We should just get out. We should just go and do our own thing.
But somehow when it comes to parent-child relationship, the child doesn't choose.
They don't choose to be there. They don't choose you as a parent and they can't leave.
They're really trapped there for like 20 years.
So this should be the relationship that you have the highest I'm married now.
I've been for almost 20 years. But if my wife had been assigned to me by some village elder and she had no choice in the relationship and I wanted her to love me, I'd need to treat her the very best of all my relationships because I'd have to overcome the involuntary aspect of our relationship.
You know, if you were currently conducting this interview with me and I was blinking Morse code hand signals because you had me locked in the basement, you know, that would be kind of tough because I wouldn't be here by choice.
And so where we have relationships, like with our kids, they're not there by choice, so we should treat them the very best, but somehow we go...
Well, they're not here by choice.
They can't really leave.
They have to be with me forever so I can just treat them badly or indifferently or neglect them.
They're low on my list of priorities and I'm like making the case like, no, no, no, no.
You have to treat them the best because they didn't choose to be here and if you want a continued lifelong relationship with them, they should be Subject to your very highest moral standards.
And we've all seen this, you know, in families where the parents are, you know, snapping and snarling at the kids in the restaurant.
And then the waiter comes by and the waiter says, Oh, can I help you?
And they're like, Oh, very nice to see you.
Yes, we think we might.
It's like, why are you treating the waiter better than your own children?
That makes no sense at all.
The waiter is not going to be sitting there holding your hand while you slip into the eternal dark.
They're not going to be Wiping your butt when you can't find your keys at the age of 80.
The waiter's coming and going and you're treating that waiter really well.
And then you treat your kids badly.
I'm sorry. Even as a kid, I couldn't make sense of any of that stuff.
So I'm sort of outlining the theory and practice, like the theoretical philosophical principles of peaceful parenting and then like how you actually make it work in the real world.
So yeah, I've been working on that for a while.
When will you be finished with that?
When does that come out? Well, I'm about...
20% done, so it'll be at least another couple of months.
Okay. Okay, so I love how you now have, which I assume was in response to what happened with the d-platform, but maybe I'm wrong, a manifesto, I guess, of sorts, on what you believe.
Yes. That's on the homepage for anybody who's listening.
I mean, for anybody who wants to know where to find that, it's directly, I think, on the homepage of the Freedom Main site.
And I want to go through, you have various topics here, the ones that you've been covering, I guess, for years.
And I'm going to read basically what your statement is or your pronouncement about that thing and then let you kind of go and we can chat about it.
Sound good? Yeah. Okay.
Your first one is reality.
And the gist of it is that objective reality exists.
Explain what you mean by that.
Sounds kind of obvious. So, I mean, philosophically speaking, René Descartes was, of course, a philosopher back in the day a couple hundred years ago who was plagued by existential doubt.
Is it a simulation?
Is it real? Am I a brain in a tank being manipulated by some demon with electrodes?
You know, the matrix argument that we're in some other different plane of existence and our sense data is kind of implanted in us in some external way.
How do we know what's real?
Well, that's pretty important because we can only meet people in reality.
We can't meet people in fantasy.
You don't get married to people in your dreams.
You can't lend them money.
They can't cuddle with you in the real world.
And so knowing what is real is foundational to mental health because our brains are designed to deal with reality, but our brains have a great capacity for unreality.
And that's not a bad thing.
I mean, we learn a lot through our dreams and our dreams are not real.
And also there is like we understand gravity at a theoretical level and gravity exists in the real world, but the theory of gravity doesn't.
We understand you and I may be 100 kilometers apart, and the physical distance exists, but there's not like 100 markers in the world.
So we're always slicing and dicing up the world according to our conceptual absolutes.
Now, those conceptual absolutes don't exist.
In reality, now they should describe reality accurately, but they're unreal in a way.
Again, they should be accurate and objective, but our mental constructs like the scientific method or grammar or distance and so on, time even, Well, it's very abstract.
It's very unreal, but it's incredibly powerful when it actually aligns with the facts of reality.
Like, we can send a probe to Jupiter or even further out of the solar system if we understand the universals of gravity.
And again, gravity exists all over the universe, but our concepts, the mathematical formulas, those are mental constructs that don't exist in the same way in the universe.
So... How do we know that we're not just a brain in a tank?
Because, you know, you and I, we're having this conversation, we're looking at each other, we're listening to each other, but our brains aren't touching.
Our brains are very distant.
Even if we were in the same room, we could press four heads, I guess, if we wanted to do some Siamese twin example, but we can't merge our brains.
All that we can do is send, you know, sound and visual signals to each other through our ears and our eyes.
And so knowing that There are parts of your brain that are unreal, dreams and some of our concepts and so on.
And there are parts of your brain that are processing things that are very real and immediate.
Making sure that your concepts actually align with reality is really important.
There's no such thing as the physics of dreams.
Because, you know, when you're in dreams, you can fly, you can walk through fire, you can breathe underwater, you can do all kinds of cool things that don't actually work in the real world.
So the first job of philosophy is to teach you What is real and what is objective?
And there are ways to do that, right?
So what you look for is you look for consistency, right?
The one thing that happens in dreams is inconsistency is kind of the whole, that's how you know you're dreaming when you wake up.
And you look for consistency, you look for universality, you look for reproducibility.
And if there's a tree in your backyard, then you should be able to go there every day and see the tree.
And your eyes should guide your fingers to touch the tree.
And if you see the tree and you touch the tree and you smell the tree and you can peel back the bark, then you know that it's a real and objective thing.
Whereas, of course, if you're asleep in your bed at night and you dream that there's a tree in your backyard, then it turns into a soldier.
Then it bursts into flame.
Then it turns into a flock of seagulls and so on.
Then you know that it doesn't have the consistency that objective reality.
Okay.
So consistency is the theme.
Yeah, consistency, universality, reproducibility, all the stuff that's part of the scientific method.
And that's how we can really root our beliefs in the real and the objective and that which exists outside your mind.
And things also not subject to your whim.
I can choose to think of one thing.
I can choose to think of another thing.
I can close my eyes and imagine various creatures dancing in front of my orange vision.
But I can't walk through a tree in my backyard, no matter how much I will.
So some things we can control with our minds.
And some things we can't.
And that's one of the big dividing lines between what's objective and real and what is subjective and not.
Okay, and I'm going to name these topics before I continue really quick, so people know where I'm headed.
Virtue, the state, race, men and women.
And the family. And you know I want to get to men and women in the family most of all.
I know you know that. So let's go quicker through the other ones so we can get to that one.
Virtue. I love this because you...
Well, the way you put it is virtue is simply universally preferable behavior.
And within that context, you write morality must be universal.
And this made me think of...
This made me think of the 1960s when the universal moral order began to really be turned on its head in favor of moral relativity.
So if you could talk about this with respect to that, that would be great.
Well, of course, the Christian inheritance in Christianity is one of the only religions that has universal ethics.
Most of religions are in-group tribal preferences.
In other words, I owe morality to another follower of the same religion, but not to outsiders.
In fact, I may not care or even have negative moral obligations towards outsiders.
So Christianity is the true universal...
Philosophy, now, sorry, theology.
Now, philosophy, we can't just say, well, God said it therefore, right?
We have to have the reason and the evidence.
So I spent quite a long time early on.
I do. Not everybody does, I don't think.
But some people, I mean, some people, I guess, are good with just because God said so, but that's...
But not philosophy, right?
So philosophy is a different discipline than theology.
And so with philosophy, we have to find a way to justify universal moral standards.
And again, remember I was saying like the concepts in our mind don't necessarily exist in the world.
The scientific method is a great way for learning about reality, but the scientific method doesn't exist in the real world.
It's a mental construct and concept.
So morality doesn't exist in the world.
Now, if you say moral rules come from God and you accept and believe that, then you've got your morality right there.
But if you are a skeptic towards that epistemology, then you have to have a philosophical justification.
So people can check it out.
I won't go through all the arguments here, but universally preferable behavior is a book that I wrote 13 years ago, and I've debated it a whole bunch of times with a lot of skeptics.
It really holds true.
It really can't be overturned.
And it's a way of justifying morality without reference to divine commandments and without reference to secular laws, right?
Because that's just pointing a gun at people and saying that you're moral.
We're back to the Socrates versus the sophist argument.
So, yeah, morality has to be universal.
Otherwise, it's something else. You know, I like blue.
You might like the color red.
Okay, so that's aesthetics. That's not universal.
Because it's not like blue is objectively better than red.
Subjective taste in art, music, food, sex, whatever it is that's going on, that's something which everyone can have their own preferences because they're not imposed on others.
But morality is stuff we impose on other people.
If I believe in property rights and you steal something from me, I have the right to use force to get it back.
I can't violently impose my preference for the color blue on you because then I'm just a violent jerk.
But, you know, if a woman says, look, I have bodily autonomy.
I own my own body.
Then if you go and rape her or you want to go and rape her, she can use violence to enforce her belief.
And that's morality and violence go hand in hand.
And this is why we want to have a morality that's not initiating the use of force.
That's really self-defense in an extremity is fine, but you don't want to have a morality that initiates the use of force.
You want to have a morale. But we have to understand that morality and violence go hand in hand because morality is the stuff where we say, Yeah, if you violate this, we're going to lock your ass in prison for 10 years.
If you go beat someone up, if you go murder someone, if you rape someone, if you steal, you go to jail.
And if you resist going to jail, we get to shoot you.
If you violently resist being arrested and so on.
And so recognizing that morality is the other side, the flip side of the coin of violence, you have to be really careful how you define morality.
Like if you say, well, inequality is immoral, then you get to use violence until everyone's equal.
Well, nobody ever will be perfectly equal at all times.
So you've just given people a license for infinite violence.
And if you say, well, everybody has to have the same income and everybody has to have equal access to owning the means of production and so on.
Or, you know, I was reading your article about Melinda Gates who's like, you know, well, we've never achieved true equality and that's terrible.
And it's like, well, the moment that you have a morality that is impossible to achieve, you've just given people an infinite license to use violence.
And that's why these things are so dangerous.
And that's why it's so important to define morality in as narrow a set of circumstances as possible, because otherwise you've just given people license to kill.
That's what's happening right now with the BLM movement in America.
Yeah, yeah. They're saying, look, if we are unequal for whatever reason, right, then we get to use violence until we are.
That's not... I mean, that's communism as a whole, right?
Inequality always results from evil bigotry and therefore infinite violence is perfectly morally acceptable.
In fact, it's required.
It's required that you use violence to gain equality.
But the purpose of communism is simply to allow people to be violent.
It's not to gain equality because they never do gain equality, but they just keep going.
It's just a cover story for a pathological...
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, so this kind of leads somewhat, I guess, into the state.
You said this...
Let's see.
Well, you were talking about philosophy does not recognize geography or beliefs, and the law of physics do not change from one country to the next.
But what I have highlighted here is where you said people calling themselves the government claim the moral right to...
Oh no, it cut off. Initiate?
Yeah, to initiate the use of force against others.
Yeah, others, which is kind of what we're talking about.
They do not possess this right.
A moral society is a stateless society.
So the universal application of the non-aggression principle means like if I just put on a blue costume, I don't get to violate the laws of physics.
Like there's no blue costume that lets me breathe underwater or fly or anything like that.
So the non-initiation of the use of force is foundational to a universal morality.
And so people in the government, though, of course, they say, well, we live in this particular building.
Or we have this particular costume, or we've written on a piece of paper that we have this particular ability, and therefore they get to initiate the use of force against others.
Philosophy does not recognize the concept of a government that allows people to exempt themselves from universal moral rules.
It would literally be like saying, I have a flying club.
It's like, oh, do you have planes?
No. It's just we have a club called the Flying Club which allows us to fly.
It's like, well, no, you can't fly because you can't violate the laws of physics and you're heavier than air.
So this creation of concepts that allow for opposite moral standards is really the most dangerous and pathological aspect of modern philosophy, really philosophy throughout history.
I mean, that used to say, well, God has given me dominion over you as the king or as the aristocrat, and therefore I get to violate your property rights and take stuff from you and so on, or I get to sleep with your wife on our wedding day or something like that because I've got this magical category called aristocrat or king and so or I get to sleep with your wife on our wedding Well, we know that that's invalid, but then all we did was switch it to Congress and democracy and the politicians and so on.
And it's like, that's the purpose of power is to create some category that justifies everything you would deny to your subjects.
Like you and I, we can't say, oh, I'm kind of poor, so I'm just going to go around with a gun and take stuff from people.
Well, that would be theft, and being poor wouldn't justify it.
However, the welfare state, which is the government using force to transfer property from one group to another while keeping the lion's share for themselves, well, that would be barred for you and I, but somehow it's morally fine for people in the government to do it.
But philosophy is universal.
Morality is universal. You can't just create a category and say, well, I can now do the opposite.
Well, you can, of course, but it's not morally valid.
It's not justified. And of course, going back to what we were saying a second ago about BLM and this next category is race, that's exactly what's being done in the name of race as we speak.
I would say that BLM is much more in the name of Marxism than it is.
Race is kind of the excuse, but I mean the founders all tend to be on the Marxist side and some of them very explicitly so.
And of course a lot of people who are blacks or other racial or ethnic groups reject it because they don't like the Marxist element.
So yeah, race is kind of like it used to be class.
The feminists used gender, the Marxists used to use class, but of course Marxism predicted that there would only be rich and poor, no middle class, and that prediction got blown out of the water as the development of capitalism swelled the middle class most of all, so they had to switch to something other than class.
To create conflict.
And so they decided to switch to race.
This was in the 1923, 1924.
So they said that our future goal is not to antagonize classes or set classes against each other, but to set races against each other.
And so I think that that intersection is probably better at explaining BLM than most things.
Okay. Well, you wrote in here, which I think is really, I mean, it would be considered controversial in some circles, but to you and me, it's just dealing with objective truth, as you say.
You said, I do not believe that any race is superior or inferior.
I accept the biological facts that some racial differences exist because philosophy teaches us to accept facts, even if they make us uncomfortable.
So, and then you gave an example of, where was it?
Although there are many talented Chinese basketball players who would not expect the majority of those players to be Chinese.
I mean, wait, did I say that right?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good analogy.
Yeah, for sure. There are differences between the races.
And again, you never judge any individual by general racial characteristics, of course.
But when you zoom out enough...
If you make any generalization, that's what I'm getting at.
That's how we live. Your head chewed off.
Yeah. I mean, I love how you make a blank, not you, how one makes a blank, not a blank statement, makes a generalization.
And then someone said, oh, yeah, but my mom, or this happened, or I didn't have this experience, which completely...
I know a smoker who lived to be 100.
Yes, that's my favorite. Come on.
Yeah, we know, we get it.
That completely negates the generalization.
Yeah, you know, women tend to be shorter than men.
Wait a minute. I know a tall woman.
It's like, oh, you've just disqualified yourself from a rational conversation now, haven't you?
And then I want to say them without being insulting.
Like, do you really honestly believe that your one example negates the observation?
Or do you think they truly do believe that?
I mean, I just can't get my head around it.
Then I would just suggest to people that they start an insurance company and don't charge different rates for smokers versus non-smokers.
That's all you have to do. Because, hey, some smokers are going to outlive non-smokers.
So clearly you can't make any generalizations about the life expectancy of smokers versus non-smokers.
So you could just make a fortune by starting an insurance company and not differentiating between smokers and non-smokers and see how that goes.
There you go. There you go.
Love it. Okay.
So now we get to my favorite topic.
Sorry, that needed some dramatic music, I felt.
Okay. I'm going to read what you wrote here about men and women.
And now my ears of my listeners are perking up here since that's what we talk about all the time.
Okay, women and men have faced different evolutionary pressures.
Just as in the case of race, this does not mean men or women are superior.
One is superior or inferior.
They have evolved based on the preferences as mates, just as men have evolved based on preferences of women.
I oppose ideologies that strive to pit women against men.
Amen. But of course, I don't know how you feel about this or not.
I don't know. I mean, I don't know whether you agree with this or not, but I truly believe that is the overarching problem that we're dealing with today, unquestionably.
Because once you divide the two sexes, yes, the two sexes that exist, you've got a massive problem because the fallout for that is just enormous.
And so the The positive way, the appropriate way to handle it is, as you've written here, to understand that we each need to work together as a team and that we need each other and that that is the ultimate goal.
And if you are living in a culture that we're living in today where men and women are being pit against each other, That obviously means people aren't going to get together.
That obviously means families aren't going to be created.
We already know now the birth rate that just came out a couple weeks ago, right, is the lowest it's ever been in over a century.
This is massively, this is massive.
Oh, it really is.
I think you're right, Suzanne.
It's the most heartbreaking thing that's going on in the moment.
Because, you know, abstract considerations of statism and race and so on.
But I mean, we're talking about love.
We're talking about connection.
We're talking about comfort into your old age.
We're talking about the joys of raising children.
And a lot of people are facing, yeah, it's an overused cliche, an existential crisis.
They don't know what they're living for.
They don't know what the meaning of life is.
It's like, well, yeah, because women won't transmit cultural values anymore.
They simply won't as a collective, right?
I mean, Christian women will and other groups of women will and certainly Muslim women will.
But as a whole, all of the values that took, you know, thousands of years for the West to develop, you dump some kid in daycare so that you can go and run the customer support hotline at some big box store.
Your kid isn't learning those treasured, amazing values of tolerance, open-mindedness, free speech, personal responsibility, free will, all of these great things that took untold amounts of struggle, strife and war to create.
You can just snuff that out by just saying to women, well, you'll be more fulfilled at work.
So, you know, I worked in a daycare and all that we I worked in a daycare for years as a teenager.
Most of what we did was just try and have the kids not fight too much.
But we sure as heck weren't transmitting any particular values because the moment you did, some parent would get upset and all this kind of stuff.
So, of course, people men are feeling despair.
Women are feeling depressed and progressively unhappier because we got nothing to give to our kids.
We've got no kids to give them to.
So what's the point of accumulating wealth if you can't head it on?
What's the point of accumulating virtue if you can't instill it in your kids?
What's the point of gathering everything together?
Why would you bother saving anything if you knew it was all going to get stolen from you?
Why as a farmer, if you knew that there were horsemen coming to rob you of everything, would you sweat for months to produce the most crops?
Of course not. Everything is evaporating in our hands because we can't get women to transmit the cultural values we've accumulated because they get tempted by making $2 per hour after childcare costs.
So yeah, we're all pretty despairing about this, I think.
And so my argument has always been that so much of this is about, so gosh, if this was ever not proven last year with COVID, I don't know what has, but people are sheeple, right?
People are sheeple. And I actually don't mean that in as of a disparaging way that I just made it sound.
I truly just believe that people are most comfortable doing what the people around them are doing.
That's it. End of story.
That's just how human nature is.
So fewer people are going to stand out doing their own thing if nobody else around them is doing it.
It's just very difficult to do.
So that's always been sort of the basis of my argument for why things are working out as they are.
Because when you have that drumbeat coming from above every single day in every different arena that you should prioritize your career over marriage and family, as you can see, that's exactly what people will do.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm not a fatalist.
And of course, I have this book coming out this year, which is basically telling women to do the exact opposite.
So I'm hoping to have some effect there.
But I feel like with this birth rate and with the way things are going in the country right now, it can only go up.
And from here, and I don't know if that's just my mindless optimism or what, but it's either we literally die out or we get the message and recalibrate.
What do you think?
A glorious future awaits.
Exactly. I do. Am I just a Pollyanna?
No, no, no. Listen. Okay.
So, oh boy, where do we even begin?
So a lot of this, the feminism is driven by fiat currency, right?
So if you can just make up money and pretend that you're adding value, then you can subsidize a whole bunch of nonsense that you otherwise couldn't subsidize, right?
And so, and we saw this with COVID, right?
With COVID, a lot of women left the workforce and came home and enjoyed spending time with their kids.
And it kind of shook them out of their stupor.
And they were like, wow, you know, this is actually kind of nice.
It's relaxed. It's fun.
I get to spend time with my kids.
And then it's like, you now can go back into commuting for two hours a day and go sit in an office.
They're like, I'm enjoying homeschooling.
It's really great fun.
The family's running much better.
My husband's happy. My kids are happy.
My life is better. I'm actually shocked into a kind of happiness.
And women are writing about this like they've discovered the Rosetta Stone.
Like, Dear Lord, the lives that our grandparents had was great.
You know, like they've just made some amazing Indiana Jones discovery and run away under hail of poison blow dots from the natives or something.
And it's glorious because it's completely predictable.
When the fiat system runs out of steam, which is going to, and we've got some Bitcoin economy coming down the road for sure, then all of these weird subsidies Are just going to evaporate.
And when you can't get all these weird subsidies that prop up women's value in the workplace, then they will actually have to make a rational economic calculation about their value of working versus raising.
Kids. And when that happens, we'll simply revert to, yeah, women are going to need resources.
They're going to enjoy raising kids.
Men are going to go out and work.
And it's going to return to exactly how we evolved from that standpoint.
And I think everyone's going to be just about infinitely better off.
Oh, good. I feel so much better now that you've said that.
No, if we have to wait for politicians to do it, it's never going to happen.
Well, I know, but then what do you, so do you feel like what's happening right now with the, look, the administration we have in there right now is obviously wants women out of the home and into the workforce and all the kids in daycare.
care.
We know that he just put out that policy.
Okay.
And not policy, but proposal.
How much do you think that actually affects what goes on versus just a lot of hype and just a matter of turning off TV?
I mean, governments know what they're doing.
In terms of women's individual decisions, I mean.
Yeah, it absolutely affects individual decisions because governments know what they're doing.
And it's not, of course, just coming from governments.
It's coming from every single Every single piece of media you can get a hold of is women going up to college and having great lives and sleeping around and traveling around and being joyful and happy and satisfied with a life of loose morals, cheap sex, no kids, no responsibilities, lots of savings, sex in the city, wine on the patio.
There's never any mention of unwanted pregnancies or STDs or stalkers.
And then what happens is there's this great ghosting of women over 40.
Boom! They're gone, baby!
I mean, maybe you'll drag out a semi-mummified Elizabeth Hurley to star in some nonsense about British royalty and so on.
But these women, they're just, they're gone.
They evaporate. They're like nuclear shadows scrubbed off the walls because you can't show women what happens on the downsides of 40.
It's another reason I got yeeted off Twitter was I was sort of pointing out, hey, ladies, you're going to live to be 80.
You don't have any kids after 40.
You're going to lose a lot of male attention.
What are you going to do with those four decades?
That's a long time.
That's a long time. And all these women are saying, oh, but I turned 40 and I became invisible.
Not if you had kids, you didn't.
Not if you had a husband.
Not if you had... You'd be a beloved matriarch.
You'd have companionship all the way through to your old age.
But guess what? Dating and sex is about fertility and children.
And if you can't provide fertility and children, men aren't going to be as interested in you unless it's like really low-rent men that you're going to feel like you have to really lower your standards.
Any high quality, high value man is going to settle for a younger woman, less baggage, fewer, less damage, less debt.
And so, yeah, you've got to hide all of these broken women sailing off the lemming cliff of feminism.
And you've got to propagandize people like crazy.
And, oh, yeah, it's rough.
I have a question for you.
This is more of a philosophical end of this then.
So what, in your opinion, I kind of said what I think when I opened it by saying people are sheeple and they're most comfortable with that.
I think that's the reason.
To me, that's what I think.
But there's nothing that could happen in the government or in the country that would affect me against what I wanted to do.
And I could say the same thing about my daughter.
And I wonder now, is that solely because of the way I raised her?
We raised her, I should say.
Because we specifically counteracted the messages that are coming at her every single year for her entire, she's 21 now, for her entire life with us.
And my argument has been to parents, that is the only recourse you have, right?
Now, it doesn't mean they're going to necessarily agree with you or listen or follow suit, but at least you've done what you can do.
Do you agree that that's what's necessary because there's always going to be a smaller component of women who are going to not be affected by that, like me, who I just went and did my thing anyway?
Or what is that that makes some people affected by that and others not, I guess is my question.
So, as far as childbirth goes, you know, there's this kind of meme about the IQ bell curve, right?
Which is like people on the very left of the IQ bell curve say, you know, Bitcoin has value because people want it, right?
And then people at the really smart end of the bell curve say, you know, Bitcoin has value because it's the convenience of digital, but it's also scarce and it's going to replace fiat.
And people in the middle will say, well, Bitcoin doesn't have value because it's just an electronic piece of puffery or something.
The same thing is true of birth rates, right?
So I think people at the very low end of the IQ spectrum, because of the welfare state, they have a better life and make more money by having children than going to get a job.
Because, you know, they may not be able to get a great job and they have a bad boss and they don't have much to move up because they don't have a lot of cognitive ability.
It's not an insult.
It's just like saying somebody's short.
It's not an insult.
It's just kind of a fact, right?
And so at the lower end of the IQ spectrum, you're going to have a lot of kids.
Now, at the high end of the IQ spectrum, I mean, I think I'm kind of up there.
I think you're kind of up there. I mean, parenting is a great joy.
You get to see the—it's like watching Atlantis rise from the ocean, watching personalities and minds develop from these little blobs of nothing that get born.
It's a beautiful, amazing—you know, the first time your kid corrects you or catches you out in a hypocrisy, it's just like, ooh— Good!
That's incredible, because you know where they came from, right?
And so there's that great joy as well.
But you know what? What I find tragic is all the people in the middle, all the people in the middle.
They're not smart enough to really overcome the propaganda, but they have too much potential to just...
Is it smart, Stefan, or is it confidence?
I mean... Go on.
Well, I always thought about it with respect to just knowing yourself and what you want and not being weighed by others, which I never really associated with IQ per se, but just street smarts.
I don't know. I don't know.
Just confidence. That's all I ever thought about.
Like I've always been a very confident person and it runs in my family.
And we're not really affected by what people think.
And I think that's unusual, but I never understood why it's unusual for me or my family.
Yeah, I mean, the difference that I've seen, Suzanne, is that people who believe that society is basically good, like government and the politicians, they're basically good and looking out for your best interests.
Those people tend to be kind of dragged along by the sort of lemming-like flow.
The people who were like, I don't know, historically, governments have not really been super into the long-term welfare of their own people, right?
Yeah. So I remember being in grade 7.
I was in grade 7, and there was some teacher who was talking about old-age pensions, right?
Old-age pensions. And, oh, you kids, you know, you're going to grow up and you're going to get your old-age pensions.
And half the class just burst out in laughter.
Like, of course we're not going to get our old-age pensions.
We knew that the government was crazy in debt.
Even at that age, it was all over the newspapers.
Every time you flipped on the news...
It was, oh, man, new levels of government debt, new levels of blah, blah, blah, 40 cents on the dollar going to pay interest on the national debt.
Like, you knew that.
And we were just kind of laughing at the guy.
Like, we know it's a scam.
We know it's for the boomers to get rich, and we're going to end up taking it in the shorts.
They're going to take money from us, and there's no money being set aside for our retirement.
It's all being used to buy votes in the here and now and all that.
So if you have that kind of view, which is, yeah, you know, politicians kind of looking out for themselves, and they'll tell you that they care about you, but, you know, it's their own money and power and prestige that they're really into.
And so if you have that filter, when the politicians say, oh, you should do this, or here's the way society as a whole, it's like, eh, I don't really buy it.
But of course, the people who think, you know, the welfare state is just society's manifestation of the charitable impulse to help the less fortunate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they'll go with it.
Yeah, and I think that ultimately, and again, you might feel differently, but I think that ultimately gets passed around the dinner table.
It's like whatever your parents, not that every child agrees with their parents on these things, but in general, I find that Democrats come from Democrats, for example, or conservatives, liberals from liberals, and that the mindset is passed on, which, of course, plenty of people do reject it and go the other way, but in general, it's sort of like what your parents raised you with is kind of where your head is.
That's what I see in my...
Oh, I was just talking about this with a friend of mine the other day.
Like, it's actually kind of terrifying how much power over your child's development you have as a parent.
You know, and I'm constantly aware.
I don't want to teach my daughter any conclusions that I have.
I just want to teach her the process of thinking.
Yes, yep. And I was going to pause you there really quickly because I'm constantly saying, we always said to our kids, because my husband and I feel so strongly, but we always...
I counteracted it with, but you don't have to agree with them.
You can think what you want, but it's really hard not to agree with us because we're so emphatic about it, but we always wanted to make sure they had their own mind.
Anyway, go ahead. No, it's a big thing.
You have so much influence over the information, the arguments, the exposure that your kids have.
That you really, really have to be careful that you're not just trying to rubber stamp your own brain onto a new being because that's completely unfair to their individuation.
And it also says, well, I'm right and your new perspectives can't be wrong.
And I was, you know, born and propagandized like everyone else.
And then in my mid-teens, I began to discover philosophy, began to undo the damage that propaganda had given me.
I like to think that my daughter has been raised without 15 years of, you know, mental bludgeoning so she can hopefully be a little sharper.
Yeah. Thank you.
So yeah, that amount of influence that you have.
And this is why, again, you dump your kids in daycare, they're just not gonna get that.
They're not gonna get that.
They're gonna get pulled off each other, being told to share, be nice 50,000 times a day, but no actual sharpening of the mind, no engaging in debate, no processing of rational concepts, nothing like that.
It's just wrangling.
It's all you can do is manage the lowest common denominator from beating up everyone else.
And that gets into the family, which is the next category because, gosh, it is scary what you just said.
It is true about the influence.
The way I've always felt is that I'm on a stage.
I've been on a stage for 20 years where every move I make, especially in my relationship with their dad, is being absorbed.
And I guess that's a good thing in a way, if you're conscientious enough to be aware of that and make sure that you do what's best, but I'm not sure that that is common.
I think we get just carried away when our relationships are not really thinking about how it's affecting our children, but literally they have a front row seat to your marriage.
Yeah, or sorry, I know we want to get up, but one thing I wanted to mention here is what you do is you generally, most people would generally neglect relationships.
in particular, the moral education of their children, and then be utterly shocked when the peer group takes over at the age of 13.
It's like, no, no, no, no.
The whole point of parenting is to prepare them for the onslaught of the peer group.
Because nature points them horizontal.
When they get to be teens, nature's pointing them horizontal because they need to find someone to have a baby with over time.
They don't care about the parents.
We're at a stage that gets jettisoned like some old rocket on an Elon Musk penis substitute, right?
So it's, you know, this idea that- I think there's a lot of genuine confusion, Stefan, maybe in your book that you have coming out that corrects it or something.
But there's a lot of confusion about when, like, I don't think people realize, parents realize how much influence they have when their kids start to pull away, for example, you're Yes, you're right, the kids come, their friends become front and center.
But that doesn't mean you just back off for eight years because nothing you say matters.
That's not the point at all. You know, that kind of thing.
So hopefully, I just think there's a lot of misinformation there when it comes to parenting.
Everything that you're doing is preparing for the teen storms.
You know, the hormones, the height, the passion, the peer.
You've got to have a strong foundation so that your kids have some backup against the onslaught of peer subjugation, which is perfectly natural in our evolution.
And so many people who haven't parented deliberately and consciously and created those bonds and those relationships are like, the peers are stealing my kids.
It's like, no, you gave them away, man.
Yeah. Bingo. I mean, whatever you did in those early years, either...
Embolden what you're going to do in later years or it will weaken it.
Or if you don't resist peer pressure as a parent, how on earth are your kids supposed to resist peer pressure as a kid?
Well, mom had to go to work because that's what everyone did.
It's like, oh, so we just do what everyone does?
I guess I'll go with my peer group then down some horrible tunnel.
Right, right.
Or you do drugs and then you wonder what your kids do or whatever, right?
You are setting the model.
That's it. That's just how it works.
You know, I didn't make the rules.
It's just how it is.
We're imprinting species.
Maybe it's, I mean, it's designed, I think.
I mean, I think in my existential mind, I guess, that that's why, that's what makes us as parents, that's what makes the job harder, but then maybe keeps us in line.
Right? Like if we're, in other words, if we know we're being watched, as opposed to not being watched, wouldn't that potentially make us better people?
Make us try to be better people for their sake?
Oh, there's nothing that cures hypocrisy like being a parent and having your kids catch you out on stuff?
Yeah, right. Oh, it's rough, man.
But, you know, that's where the growth comes from.
And this is why a lot of people want to postpone it, because you can keep your own self-image pretty intact until you have kids around there just with their big hammer smashing at your glass edifice of self-worship.
So, yeah, it's pretty instructive.
I was playing this online game.
Just yesterday, I was playing this online game with my daughter.
And I was kind of annoyed because the other team was just beating us senseless and just kept scoring and kept scoring.
It's like, dude, we get it. You know, you're good, right?
So then a couple of games later, we were doing the same thing to some other team and I was like, yeah, right?
We're winning! And my daughter was like, well, wait a minute.
When they were thrashing us...
That was a negative thing, and it was annoying, but now we're thrashing them, suddenly this is a great thing, and it's like, ooh, busted.
That's exactly what I mean.
Exactly. And that's, you know, it's a reciprocal relationship, I guess, right?
Yeah. Wait till they get even older.
Wait till they're even older. Wait till they're 20, Stefan.
Well, this is the thing. You know, my daughter is now better than me at some video games, Suzanne, which basically just reminds me that she's here.
She's not here as a joyful gift to my life, at least not only.
She's here to replace me because I'm going to be fading off and she's going to need to be here because I won't be.
And it's like, oh yeah, there's that part of things too.
Oh my gosh. Okay.
And then we're going to close it out then, Stefan, with the last one, which is free will.
And free will, you write, is our ability to compare proposed actions to ideal standards such as science or morality or truth.
But let's just talk about this in a very simple way.
A simple way that people can understand.
And for me, free will is just we all have free will at the end of the day, right?
We have free will. Yeah, but see, in philosophy, that's called the tautology.
What is free will? Something we all have.
What do we all have? Free will.
So I'm afraid while that may be satisfying for you emotionally, intellectually, I'm afraid I got to Zorro that thing up a little bit, I'm afraid.
But yeah, so you have to, yeah, comparing, we have to have some ideal standard, which is why I, you know, when people don't give you any kind of moral standard or ideal standard, you really don't have free will.
Like when I think when I was younger, before I got philosophy, I was in this like haze of like, what do I do?
Well, I guess I want to conform to my peers, but at the same time, I want to have my own thoughts, but I want to pursue this particular pleasure and avoid that particular.
I was just like an animal, like a mammal just bouncing around from conformity to pleasure to pain avoidance to...
You know, you get philosophy, then you can say, okay, now I got truth, universality, consistency.
I got these things to aim for.
And then I can compare something I want to do to an ideal standard.
Without the ideal standard, we've got nothing to compare to.
Because the big question in philosophy, it comes from an old story about a philosophy professor.
Someone came and said, how's your wife?
And he said, compared to what?
And it's like, that's a good question, right?
Compared to Angelina Jolie?
Well, she's less pretty but has more boobs.
I don't know. Whatever the comparison would be, right?
So compared to what is important.
So I'm going to make a choice.
Compared to what? Compared to...
Someone else's preference, what my hormones are telling me, compared to what?
Now, if you have an ideal standard, now the ideal standard could be we have all these great values as a society.
I happen to have flourished in large part because these values and standards like free speech and free markets and so on were maintained for hundreds of years at great expense to people.
So because I've benefited from these standards, I should do my part to pay them forward, right?
And people got really mad at me.
There's another thing that happened on Twitter.
Where I would say, you know, what are you going to do with all of this time if you don't have kids, right?
And the women would write back, you know, well, I'm going to get two PhDs and I'm going to study Mandarin and I'm going to make love to my husband and I'm going to travel.
Okay, well, great till COVID hits, right?
But here's the thing. So I would write back and I would say, so you have a great life.
You're planning on having a wonderful, great, exciting, sensual life.
And you're too selfish to give that forward to someone else.
It ends with you. Your parents raised you to have this wonderful life and you're not going to raise anyone else to enjoy it because it just is going to interfere with your enjoyment.
That's like inheriting a fortune that has lasted for, I don't know, four billion years and then just blowing it all on your own coke habit in one generation.
That's so selfish, right?
And so if you don't have a higher standard, yeah, I mean, it's, as you know, not always the most convenient thing to be a parent.
There's lots of things that you want to do other than watch Toy Story 2 for the 300th time that weekend, right?
But if you enjoy your life, then you should want to pay it forward because the only reason you and I are alive to enjoy our lives is because our parents sacrificed and stuff to have us.
Like why wouldn't you want to pass that joy of life forward to the next generation?
You just selfishly hoard it yourself.
But if you don't have that perspective, You're just going to look and say, well, you know, I have a baby.
My belly's going to sag.
My boobs are going to sag. I'm going to be up all night.
And, you know, of course, the media is very happy to give you all of these negative, crying babies, stress parents.
They never show the beautiful side of parenting.
That hasn't happened since, like, my three sons.
They always just show you screaming babies and exhausted parents and all the negative, negative, negatives and the stress and the money and...
So the media will be happy to talk you out of it.
You've got to have some standard that says, God, life is worth creating.
I can't create a rocket ship on my own.
I can't build a building on my own, but I can at least do 50% towards creating an actual human brain, and that's pretty cool.
That's an amazing thing to be able to do, but you've got to have some kind of standard that's going to give that to you as even a choice that means something.
As opposed to just following the hedonism of the everyday, which just leads to a very gray and ashen second half of your life.
I'm so depressed now.
No, no, because I think we made the right choice, didn't we?
No, I'm not depressed for myself.
But actually, that was a really good promo for my book that's coming out.
So the book, by the way, is How to Get Hitched and Stay Hitched.
And the subtitle is A 12-Step Program for Marriage-Minded Women.
So it's literally geared for young women who are caught in the crosshairs of this crap that they're being fed, and they're getting sucked into it, even though it's not at all what they want.
And they need a roadmap that is completely different, that will lead to success in the personal sphere.
So when you say it that way, it's like, oh, that gets me excited, actually, because I have something...
Oh, you've got to have a scare stories to sell stuff, too.
I mean, that's why global warming works, right?
I don't know if I should use that. No, it is.
And this is another thing, too.
I've had a number of women on my show who, you know, I became a lawyer.
You know, I became a lawyer or an engineer, and I was out in the workforce.
And, you know, I just found that I just didn't really enjoy it.
It was way too harsh, competitive, tough, annoying.
Hours were too long. I didn't like all the travel.
And then, you know, my sister had a baby, and I was like, oh, Oh, man, I love, we want to have a baby.
So, you know, my husband and I, we talked it over.
I decided to have a baby.
And after I had the baby, I thought, maybe I'll just have another one.
It was so great staying home, blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, I think that's wonderful.
I'm perfectly thrilled that you have kids.
But you realize you stole one engineer and one lawyer from society, right?
Because you trained in all of this.
Oh, yeah. And it's like, that's a little selfish, you know, if you don't mind me.
I've known a whole bunch of women who trained in engineering.
Do you know how many of them still work in engineering?
Zero, absolute zero.
just on that and what it has meant for the family unit and for men and for what most women ultimately find they want in pursuing the Lord, you know, those those careers that they end up not wanting.
And then they don't even have the man to depend on because you took it away from that That's a whole other thing. Well, and it's not like you end up with more money as a family because you flood all these women into the workforce.
All you do is drive down wages.
So now it takes two people to support.
As part of my parenting book, I've been watching a few old episodes of My Three Sons because my theory is that peaceful parenting has been around forever and he is very much a peaceful parent, right?
Yeah, it's an old 50s sitcom and the guy is very reasonable and peaceful, never yells, never hits, anything like that.
But what's fascinating is he's a worker, right?
He's just a guy who works pretty high level in an office.
And he's got, you know, three sons and his father-in-law lives with him.
They've got two cars, a lovely house in the suburbs on one salary and he's got four dependents.
And, you know, you can't...
Oh, great. We'll just get women out into the workforce so they can make more money.
But they won't because they just drive down the men's wages.
I know. So then when they complain that they can't survive and they can't stay home because they need two incomes, it's not that they're wrong, per se.
It's that it didn't have to be this way.
Here's why it happened.
And there's no connection made between your search...
For supposed identity, which is not what ends up happening at all, in the workplace, and what it ultimately did to you down the road when you cannot stay home with your kid.
Well, oh, the people who say, I just can't afford to raise my kids.
It's like... Have you ever heard of a little thing called the Middle Ages?
You know, they had approximately.0000001% of our wealth, and yet they managed to struggle through and have kids, which is why you exist.
If they had your standards, you wouldn't even be here.
I know. I know.
I know. It's maddening.
You know what I watch every day now?
Actually, my husband and I both watch.
You said you watch My Three Sons, because I have to zone out because of what's happening in the world.
For one hour every day, I watch The Waltons.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's old school stuff, right?
Yeah, that's old school stuff. Old school stuff.
But see, the beauty of it, and people listening to this won't laugh because they're smart and whatever, but other people would laugh, but they don't realize that the themes are universal and timeless.
Mm-hmm. That's what makes, it's not, it's not the scene of, yeah, the kids are all barefoot and they don't have enough money.
And I don't glorify that and think that's something to aspire to.
I'm just, the messages in it are absolutely timeless and more needed now more than ever.
Ah, but this is the interesting question for, I think everyone in the modern world to ask yourself is that how much money would you give up in order to have meaning?
How much money would you... Because you say, oh, the Walton's barefoot and so on.
But they knew their place in the universe.
They had a culture that was sustainable.
They knew right from wrong.
They knew good and evil.
They knew their moral mission in the world.
They had children. They had community.
They had family. They had everything in the world around them.
I mean, I'm looking at My Three Sons.
This is a sitcom set in the 1950s, made in the 1950s.
Everybody in the street know each other.
They all help each other out.
They all have a sense of community.
And you'd say, well, but they didn't have as much money as we do.
It's like, okay, but how much money would you give up in order to have meaning and community?
Because right now we've got people who've got lots of money who've been spending 14 months locked in a tiny condo under house arrest because they've got something on Doug Ford, I believe.
I don't know, whatever...
You know, you've got half of the world is opened up and, you know, Ontario is still locked down tighter than a nun's legs.
So it's completely...
How much money would you give up to have meaning, to have a sense of community, to have a sense of spirituality, to have a sense of why you're here and what the purpose of your life is?
Because that's the whole point of the devil will give you all of these material things, but will take away your meaning.
And after a while, the material things mean nothing and the absence of meaning just rots you from the inside out.
We're going to end it there because that's such a perfect ending.
I love it. Now we've elevated everyone.
You did. That was great.
They're going to be thinking now for a while.
I love it. This was really great, Stefan.
I really appreciate it. A real pleasure.
Let's not leave it so long next time.
And let me know when your book comes out.
I'd love to read it. Obviously, maybe we have you back on my show to talk more about it.
We can even do a call in if you like.
I'm going to be all ready to talk about it in just about two months.
So I'll take you up on that.
Sounds great. Beautiful. Have a great spring.
Great to chat with you. And take care.
Awesome. Thanks, Stefan. Bye.
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