Nov. 21, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:57:38
5313 IZZY ROASTS ME - LIVE!
4 November 2023 LivestreamIzzy roasts me live!Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!Get access to the audiobook for my new book 'Peaceful Parenting,' StefBOT-AI, private livestreams, premium call in shows, and the 22 Part History of Philosophers series!See you soon!https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022
Now, if I stand up here, I could have hair, right?
Yeah.
Hello.
Has it started?
Is that my conscience?
No, that's me.
It kind of is.
Izzy.
Wait, wait.
Hi.
Oh yeah, the hair.
The hair.
There you go.
There you go.
Yes, you hear Izzy, I'm here.
Hang on.
Should we try?
What?
Oh, wait, wait, wait, we can do it, we can do it.
Do you think we could?
Hang on, let's stay in focus here.
Come on, you can do it.
There we go, there we go, here we go.
Oh, youth of youthiness!
Oh, that looks disgusting.
Booster.
Tentacles.
We tried, we tried.
It didn't quite work.
So, we're going to start off the show, and Izzy kindly, graciously, eagerly, I will say, we're going to start off the show with the question, oh, what was it?
What lies do you tell yourself?
What lies do you tell yourself?
Now, she didn't want to talk about the lies she tells herself, although we'll get to that.
I will get to that.
What is it that you most wanted to talk about?
Okay, well, it wasn't me exactly.
So just before the show, my mom, we'd got some candy and my mom brought it out because she was going to have a bit.
And in my dad's little, like, Ziploc baggie, he has a bunch of, like, chocolate stuff.
And some of the chocolate, chocolate covered almonds, peanut butter, chocolate, chocolate.
You get the idea.
It's chocolate.
So, you know, he goes and he takes it.
And we've had this really, really long ongoing debate.
Wait, sorry, just before you get to that.
Yeah.
How long ago was Halloween?
How long ago with Halloween?
It is the third.
Yes.
So Halloween was three or so days ago, four days ago.
And where did we go last night?
A sugar place.
A candy store.
Because it's like, hey, it's been a few days.
We were right there.
We didn't get very good Halloween candy.
And yeah, I did go trick or treating even at the age of 14.
Don't judge me.
But you're in a social group where kids do it up to 17 or 18, right?
Yeah, we had an 18 year old with us, the older brother.
But anyways.
We were just, you know, at the area and the candy store, it was calling to us, so obviously we had to go because we have no self-control.
Right.
So, one of the lies, and we're going to ask you guys what your lies are, what do you tell yourself is a total lie.
So, one of the lies I tell myself is... You think that chocolate-covered almonds are healthy.
No, no, no, not chocolate, let's be fair.
Dark.
No, you left off that!
Dark chocolate!
Dark chocolate is a magical thing that erases all the negatives of the potential sugar that could be in the amalgam.
Yeah, but the calories are still there.
Absolutely, but so one lie I tell myself is that dark chocolate covered almonds or raisins, you know, it's just dried grapes, right?
Raisins do often have some added sugar and preservatives.
I was actually just telling my show, I was telling the audience about my all dried grapes diet.
My diet of all dried grapes.
Just raising awareness.
In general.
Okay, so one of the things, another thing is that, why am I wearing this shirt?
Why?
Because mom said what?
Oh yeah, you can't wear your gym shirt on a livestream.
Take off my gym shirt.
I agree with this, okay?
It's a gym shirt.
It's like a $5 tank top looking thing.
It does not look suitable for a livestream.
But why did I have this shirt on?
Because you think that when you wear the shirt, it'll make you
I'll work out.
In the morning, I wake up and I put on my shorts and my workout shirt because I'm like, I'm absolutely, I'll get round to working out today.
Sure you will.
And lies, lies, lies.
Now, I don't know if you guys have kids, but one of the things that's a real joy, and it's really payback for crying and being up when they're young, is tricking them by repeatedly saying things that drive them fairly mental.
Peanut butter, yes, it contains protein.
But I'm pretty sure last I checked, for like one tablespoon of peanut butter, there's like 120 calories.
Obviously this varies on which brand you use.
And like four or five grams of protein.
And okay, yes, it has protein in it.
But for the protein to calorie ratio, it does not have enough protein in it to make it protein worthy.
If you want protein, go eat some steak.
Yes, almonds have protein, but like almost no protein.
That's... Now, you guys may hear something.
I hear like this vague buzzing sound in my ear because it goes against what I tell myself.
So it just goes... It's like, listen to Charlie Brown's teacher play the tuba.
See, that's what I hear when you talk.
You're welcome.
Another lie I tell myself is my daughter is listening.
It's another lie.
What else?
Okay, because I said, would you like to tell the audience things I lie about?
Myself too, and you said, oh yes.
And then I said, how long would the show be?
About three hours.
About three hours.
Well, then again, that would also be if I said things I lie about, because I lie about a lot of stuff.
Wait, but to yourself, not to anyone else.
Well, yeah, yeah, totally, totally.
That was a lie.
All right, so what else?
What else do you find that
Oh, I know.
For you?
I don't really need to follow the story on Baldur's Gate.
He'll ask, like, oh, I need help getting to this area when he plays Baldur's Gate, right?
Just give me the circles to hit with fireballs.
Sorry, go ahead.
I will go up and, you know, he's here on his laptop maybe playing some Baldur's Gate, and I'll be like, oh, okay, so, you know, did you decide to take the deal with, like, Gortash and Orin and, you know, Raphael and stuff?
And he's like, what deal?
And he's like, wait, where's the Orphic Sword?
And I'm like, check your inventories.
And he's like- Orphic Hammer!
Orphic Hammer.
And he's like, but who has it?
And I'm like, I don't know!
It's your game!
Yeah, I don't know.
So Izzy's finished the game?
Yes, a while ago.
And what happens is I get lost and I don't know what to do next.
And one of the things that Izzy did somewhat recently was she just gave me... I said, can you look something up for me?
And what did you hand me?
The introduction to Baldur's Gate.
No, it wasn't the introduction.
It was like a subsection of a Baldur's Gate 3 guide to a certain quest.
Okay, the other lie you tell yourself is, oh, I only drink two cups of coffee a day.
We're not counting the four lattes.
No, no, the decafs don't really count.
Yeah, it's still an addiction though.
I'm on the fence about that one.
Yeah.
I'm on the fence about it.
I mean, you need to be hydrated.
So you drink water!
You don't drink, like, the orange, like, coffee water with protein.
But water doesn't taste like coffee, so that's the problem.
I just wanted to mention that.
Coffee-flavored water.
Alright.
That is what coffee is!
It's coffee-flavored water.
Okay, one thing I definitely lie about myself, too, is about protein drinks.
Oh, I don't need to, you know, I'm not a huge fan of, like, you know, like, I don't know, steak and chicken and stuff.
I mean, I ate, I had... Food.
Like, food that people eat, not astronauts.
No, it's...
Like, I'll eat it.
I had a sandwich today and it had lamb in it, so I definitely do eat, like, meat and stuff, but it's just, I don't really like it, so I don't eat it often, so I do have to find a way to get my protein, so I think... And I say peanut butter!
No!
I'm just kidding.
The protein drinks with 30 grams of protein in it and highly processed are really good for you.
Yes.
And, you know, protein.
Well, and that's an addiction too, because every time we pass, like if we're driving and we pass by a convenience store, you will literally try and chew your way out the window to try and get to the convenience store because there could be something with more protein in it that's magical.
I see one of the comments that says, Stevia soft drinks.
Yeah, Stevia isn't too bad.
I just, you know, don't really like consuming too much like artificial sweeteners and stuff.
But yeah, no, I love Stevia.
I know it's not good for me, but I eat it anyways.
Uh, what else?
What else do I have that I... I don't have too many computers, I don't have too many microphones.
I can count at least, like, way too many in this room.
There's a lot.
What have we got here?
I've got...
I have this microphone, I have two down there, I have one upstairs, I have this one, two headsets down there, and yeah.
Way too much!
I like to say that I used them all, and at some point I'm sure I did, or do.
On the plus side, I'm getting another microphone delivered tomorrow.
But anyway, that's just fact of life.
I mean, that's just labor, man, that's work.
What else?
Anything else?
Oh, I know!
I'm going to sit on the couch and listen to music.
And then I hear snoring.
Right.
And that's because I'm often listening to musicians who fall asleep and you can just hear that through my headset.
How loud are you listening to your music?
Not loud enough to keep me awake.
Never mind.
Yes, I'm going to... Do you lull yourself?
I've got an important podcast I need to listen to.
So yeah, there's definitely that.
There's definitely that.
What else?
Anything else?
I'm not sure.
Oh, we're gonna go to the grocery store without Mom and just get a couple of things.
Oh yeah, but that never happens.
And then Mom will be like, oh, it's okay Izzy, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna take you out to the store or whatever, and then on the back we'll just, you know, I have to go to the grocery store, we'll grab a couple, like, items, and then we're there for an hour.
So that's a big thing.
It's a couple things.
Let's see what people have here.
I once fell asleep once while catching up on a past show.
Obviously not mine.
Probably Metallica.
Probably Metallica.
Peanut butter is only good with chocolate.
That is pretty good.
We should get these sweets in the house because we won't eat them too fast.
Do you think?
Yeah.
We're not too bad with that.
For me, I don't eat, like, too much, I don't know, sugar and stuff.
I mean, I do kind of, but I mean, I try not to.
And it'll be like, I don't eat any sugar for a week, and then we'll get, like, I don't know, a little packet of chocolates, and then the chocolate's gone in like two days.
So I just, I don't eat any, and then I get all of my weak sugar consumption in a day.
So it's really not very healthy.
I'm trying to work on that.
Dark chocolate is the dark side.
Yogurt coated is evil Jedi.
I can't eat yogurt coated stuff.
It just makes me pass out.
I don't know if it's too sugary or something like that.
Yeah.
Oh, I eat the protein yogurt as well.
It's not just the protein.
Protein yogurt?
There's like this, I don't know, Chobani, Oikos, stuff like that.
I cannot pronounce any of these things, but it'll be like, oh, you know, it's low calorie protein yogurt.
I'm like, healthy.
It's not, you know, preservatives and artificial sweeteners and stuff.
It's healthy.
It has protein in it.
Emma says, I definitely tell myself the darker the chocolate, the better it is for you.
And any added nuts into it is a bonus.
Do you know why the nuts are helpful?
That's the protein.
They're not protein.
It's not protein.
Also, did you know, I don't know if you knew this, this is actually scientifically true, that if you have salt in your caramel, the salt takes out and removes and destroys all of the calories that are in the caramel.
Not many people know that.
Yeah.
Yeah, totally.
I'm totally.
Take off the gym shirt.
Do you see what they try to lure me to do?
It's just appalling.
Gym shirt plus healthy eating.
Chocolate covered almonds is a workout.
That's right.
Yeah, basically.
That's right.
Almonds have protein.
Ah, the Dread Pirate is absolutely right.
Peanut butter does create protein, says Manuel.
I'm just scrolling past Manuel.
Hey, but a really poor quality.
Oh no, that's in Spanish.
That just means the exact opposite in English.
He just flips between the two.
Yeah, totally.
Mmm, steak.
All right.
Good advice on the steak.
What was your advice on the steak?
I'd say, I have no idea.
I think I said it's better to eat steak than have protein drinks but I really don't do that because protein drinks are tastier.
I eat spinach steaks.
What vegan nonsense is that?
I have no idea.
I just finished The Death of Reason.
From the bomb in the brain, can't help but think it's applicable to chocolate-covered almonds.
No!
Yes, that's fair.
No, it's you.
It's you there.
Anything else?
I'm sure there's more.
I'm sure there's a ton more.
There's nothing that's popping into your head at the moment.
I feel like those are the biggest things.
Those are the biggest ones?
Yeah.
I have my suspicions regarding Stefan's coffee consumption.
You should.
He drinks a lot.
Honestly, I mean, I drink a lot of tea.
He drinks a lot of coffee.
That's kind of our thing.
What's fair to say, though, is sometimes I don't hugely, occasionally, I don't hugely feel like doing a show, but I say, but I can have coffee while doing it, so it's fine.
It's not an addiction, though.
We promise.
It's not an addiction.
Oh, yeah.
So also, if you and mom are heading out, like you headed out today, and I say, no, no, no, I'm going to try and find some time to relax and all of that.
I know I'm not going to.
I just know I'm not going to.
Either it's that or you relax, but for like the whole time.
That's what I've noticed.
And honestly, I do the same thing, so.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm getting, let's see here.
Potatoes are healthy before deep-frying.
I've heard both things.
Have you heard much?
Potatoes are super-carby, right?
For me, I guess I haven't looked too much into the health of carbs.
I think it kind of matters how you're getting your carbs, but I eat potatoes.
It's just that all the oil and nonsense from the deep-fry is really high in calories and not great for you, but yeah, definitely I eat potatoes.
Mashed potatoes are good, but very
Like, you know, a lot of cream and milk and stuff.
My brother was like absolute king of mashed potatoes.
Oh yeah?
He would make these things, like mayonnaise and butter and sour cream and... See, no, that's good.
It's tasty because it doesn't have any potatoes in it by the end of it.
Update.
Steph drinks too much coffee, eats too many chocolate-covered almonds, and Izzy thinks protein drinks are real food.
I mean, real liquid that can replace food because it's better.
You go to the grocery store?
You know, I gotta tell you, somebody asked me today, what is the best vacation for kids?
And I was talking about how you just like catching lizards rather than going to like Disney World and stuff.
And I think some of the best times we've ever had have been in grocery stores.
Oh, it's hilarious.
It's a lot of fun.
Actually, I really like going to the grocery store.
I love
You know, dragging either one of my parents through aisles, like looking at every single item, or I just run through and then complain when my mom does the same thing.
So a little bit hypocritical, but you know, it's what I do.
Do I ever say that I'm not particularly impatient?
Yeah, I've heard that.
You probably said it in an impatient tone, but...
Because when we're scrolling through social media posts and there's something that takes more than eight to ten seconds, what happens?
You scroll past.
Well, I'm just like, oh, let's fast forward this and you literally will grab my arm.
Look, if we're watching, like, I don't know, a funny video and they give us a five second pop-up saying, like, subscribe, I tell you not to skip ahead ten seconds because then we miss ten, like, five seconds of the next clip afterwards.
Yeah.
Probably six or seven because it takes us a couple moments to get to the skip.
It's no point.
It's like three seconds by the end of it that you're skipping and then you lose like so much
It's just not good.
But there is a principle involved, which is quite complicated, which I'll explain to you when you get older.
What?
Later.
You can't just say that!
No, it's complicated.
It involves a lot of gravitational pull, some vector calculus, and geography.
I probably know it better than you do, since I'm currently working on that stuff in homework.
What else?
Anything else?
No, I think that's good.
Not bad.
Now, any other things that, you know, you lie to yourself about?
I'm sure there are.
But nothing really.
I can't think of anything.
It's usually just little stuff like, oh, I'll just have one gummy.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
For sure.
Grocery shopping getting a different vibe with inflation.
Boy, isn't that true?
Oh, it really is.
Isn't that true?
The new dopamine hit I get is when I find a sale.
And a sale is just what it was six months ago.
I know, right?
But I'll go and I'll be like, I don't know, in the vegetable section, it'll be like, oh, half off price on apples.
And I'm like, oh, I'm going to get 20 apples.
Another lie is I will measure and control my kombucha intake.
No, you won't.
Yeah, that's pretty much not it.
We go through way too many of those.
That's a lot of kombucha.
It's not bad for you, probiotics and stuff.
I'm actually sweating carbonation.
My sweat is carbonated.
Your sweat just turned red with kombucha.
Yeah, can I just tell you about, I mentioned this to mom, so I ordered a, this is being in your 50s, you've got something to look forward to in 40 years, so I ordered and I put together my sit-up bar today, so I put up my sit-up bar today and then had a nap.
Putting it together was the exercise.
Oh no!
I put together my sit-up bar.
There was some real turning with the screws.
I'm good to go listen to some music.
Anyway, that is, that is my, that is my, a good couch is my kryptonite, which is why mom didn't buy any good couches.
That's why we basically have, we basically have Barbie furniture in the house.
It's fine for mom who's like five foot one and a bit, but for normal human beings, it's just like.
It works for me.
They're just not like soft and comfortable, which is, you know, probably better for me that they aren't.
Yeah, it is a velour womb to nestle in.
It's very nice.
Oh, it really is.
McDonald's is now $40 or $50 for the family.
Oh, that's crazy.
It is.
Yeah, we were at a little diner today or something, and we were just there to use the washroom, so we had to get a drink as well.
But I got a Diet Coke, and it was $2.50.
Like, that's $2.50 for, like, a small Diet Coke with, like, ice filling up the whole cup, pretty much.
Are you insane?
Which is just absolutely ridiculous.
No, no, you can't.
I can't what?
No, no, no, you can't tell this audience that you speak the Voldemort beverage that has no name.
If you ever say the Voldemort beverage that has no name to this audience, what will happen?
The audience will go, oh my god, the cola, the aspartame, the burpees, you'll be giving birth to the devil through your armpit if you... Okay, I just wanted to mention... No, I get that.
You very rarely have it.
I have that with my friends.
They were drinking a whole bottle of the normal Coke, and I'm like...
I'm like, this has so much sugar in it.
I'd rather have a bit of aspartame and stuff than a whole thing.
And I know Diet Coke as a whole is not great with all the dye and the carbonation.
It's the aspartame.
But it's every now and then.
But I'll say that to them and they're like, well, I don't want to get cancer from the aspartame.
And I'm like, yeah, and I don't want to get diabetes from the sugar.
So.
I just wanted to mention as well, and we won't go into any details about your friends, but I just wanted for the people out here who are enjoying the endless dieting that happens after the age of
Forever.
A lot of people that Izzy knows are teenage boys who are struggling to gain weight.
At one point, I weighed more than them.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, they literally, they're lean as like saplings.
And I was talking with Ronnie, he's like, you know, I eat like 2,000 a day.
I cannot gain weight.
Can't gain any weight?
No, no.
No, they're really not.
They eat steak, they eat vegetables, they work out.
They are not soy boys, but they just, they literally cannot gain weight.
They have the craziest metabolism.
Like we were out, we were at Burger King once and they, they usually try and eat healthier than that, but they did all get like these 1200 calorie burgers.
Yeah, yeah.
And they do this like every time we go out, they just get the craziest food and they cannot gain weight.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
They're also growing like, I don't know, five inches a year or so.
If I was reaching for one of those burgers, my arteries would harden to the point where I couldn't move my arm.
That would be my body's way to try and save me, but...
Somebody says, I remember being a teen, two pizzas a meal, two meals a day.
Oh, yeah.
If you've got teenage boys, you might as well just take groceries and throw them down a well.
Like, that's about it.
One of their moms was saying, like, oh, yeah, it was an hour till dinner.
He wanted rice.
He wanted cereal.
I can't make it till dinner.
He's, like, revving pizza, and he's, like, I can't make it an hour.
Mitch says, I was eating one and a half pounds of beef and tons of rice as a teenager, 3,500 calories a day and wasn't gaining any weight.
It's wild.
I mean, they're certainly not putting it into massive amounts of foresight, but hey, that's just jealousy of them being four decades back in time.
Yeah.
I remember eating a supersonic double cheeseburger with a large strawberry shake every day for lunch and weighed 120 pounds.
Those are my friends.
Before I lost some weight, I was 125 or so.
Oh, that's a woman.
Oh, wow.
And again, they were like 115 and it's like, okay, maybe if I weigh more than teenage boys, I should lose a bit of weight.
So, but yeah, it was just, it's crazy.
Like they eat everything and they can't gain weight.
I remember one guy ordered a pizza and he had like three quarters of it in just an hour before he had like a whole pretzel and
Oh, I mean, especially with inflation, the moms must be looking at their teenage boys and thinking, like, you'd be better if I could just sell you for parts.
Be like, make some money.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Good morning from Australia.
Yes, welcome back.
Early teens, I was the typical bottomless stomach.
My metabolism stalled out at 16.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
That happens.
All right.
Shall we continue?
Yes.
Thank you.
High five.
I appreciate it.
That was fun.
That was fun.
Hi to everyone.
We'll get on with the regularly scheduled show, but I thought that was kind of fun.
All right.
All right.
Bye.
Bye.
All right.
Well, uh, good evening everybody.
Bye Izzy.
They say bye, bye, bye.
Hi, bye.
All righty.
Questions, comments, issues.
I am all yours.
I've been dropping weight recently by eating every other day, being real strict with carbs and eating whole foods.
I took the wrong road.
I wanted to have some, so today I got up and I had to, I don't know, you talk to a lot of accountants on this planet, right?
So I just had a conference call and then I did a Q&A solo show and then I had to do some
Excel-based paperwork, exciting stuff.
And then I did part three of the French Revolution.
And then I was like, oh, I went, then I went for a walk with my wife.
And then I was like, oh, I should, I'm kind of a little bit low on energy.
And I mean, I had a morning meeting.
Can you believe it?
A morning meeting.
My entire life is scheduled around never having morning meetings, but I had one and it was fine.
But I was like, oh, you know, you have that fork in the road and you know, it's like, I should work out.
That'll give me energy.
But what if it doesn't?
I need to bring my best for the audience.
So anyway, I lay down and listen to some music.
And when you listen to music, it's really important you don't put on Dark Side of the Moon.
Do you know why?
If you put on Dark Side of the Moon, it's kind of a mellow album, at least after the first Money song, right?
Do you know why?
You can never ever rest with Dream of the Wizard of Oz.
No, if you rest with Dark Side of the Moon playing,
That's right, you got it.
There is a song called Time which starts off with every alarm clock in the planet.
ringing it's uh it's not good i can't tell you that because i was a huge pink floyd fan in my teens and i can't tell you the number of times i was just like hey man listening to dark side of the moon and it's got the heartbeat and it's got the droney gilmore vocals and it's got the thumping relaxing bass and you're basically back in a dysfunctional lsd lace womb of the 60s and then
All of those clocks start going off and it's like, soul rejoins body from astral plane with deep thud of Arizona crater impact.
What do you say to those who think time is an illusion?
I would ask them why they arranged their words in a sequence in time that made sense.
Can anyone see these messages?
Yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
So anyway, I did have a short nap and
All right, let's see here.
Thank you for your tips.
Tips are massively, massively welcome.
Steph, I have a Halloween-themed question.
Well, more of a comment, but I'd like your thoughts on it.
I've noticed the usual people putting out bowls of candy and my kids following the rules and leaving some for others.
However, I saw, as expected, the results of those who did not, where the candy is pillaged by the parents who encourage their kids to take everything.
My question is, why would the parents do this when they know it's wrong?
I'm almost unable to believe that they really don't know what the results would be.
Right.
Have you seen... Hit me with a why if you saw those videos.
Did you see any fathers doing it at all?
It's not scientific, but it was the moms, right?
The moms were just grabbing and pillaging and so on, right?
It's not smart behavior, obviously, right?
We know why, right?
It's the old thing, it's like, well, you can get a lot of candy now,
But, you'll get much less candy in the future.
Like, if everyone stole all the candy, there would be no Halloween, right?
So you get a lot of candy now, and you get less candy in the future.
So.
Yeah, when it comes to shoplifting and things like that, it's a little bit more of a female pursuit, in the same way that poisoning rather than shooting is a female murder pursuit.
So.
It's a lot of single moms.
Single moms, well, you can look up the general stats about them, but yeah.
Yeah, it's... I mean, it's the usual, like, the looting and just everybody going into the store and taking stuff.
Well, welcome to the world where you have to take three buses to pick up a bag of milk, right?
So, I mean, it's just, yeah, it's just not... People who aren't particularly smart and they just... They can't defer gratification and they just want things in the here and now and they don't care what happens to the future.
They don't even really think about what happens to the future.
Like something's right there in front of me, and I will take it, and I will take all of it, and they don't, right?
So.
Yeah, it is.
And then, of course, what people will do is they will complain about food deserts, and it's just terrible how we have to go so far to get, I mean, they, you know, can't put it together, right?
Steph, do you remember Bitcoin not working like the banks did in the US today?
Yeah, well, I don't remember Bitcoin being ever used to fund a war.
What do you think of the Lightning Network?
I think it's a great idea.
I think it's interesting.
You know, somebody's going to solve it.
I don't know.
To me, it's all kinds of funny.
It's like, yeah, you know, crypto, you know, it's not particularly friendly when it comes to buying a cup of coffee and it's like,
So the alternative is to have your kids born a million dollars in debt, to have 180 trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities, war, depredation, degradation, and migration.
But you know, balanced on that, it might be tricky to buy a cup of coffee!
I just think that's just so funny.
I mean there's
NPC speak, right, is when you hear the same thing that you've heard a million times before, right?
You know, all the people who are saying that Bitcoin mining is not energy efficient don't seem to be too fussed about all the wars going on.
Wars are very energy efficient, right?
It's still cheaper to transact with fees than with inflation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you want to see something painful, you look at
The house prices in the 1960s compared to salary, right?
You paid about 30% more than your annual salary to buy a comfortable house.
Also, of course, inflation promotes spending in the here and now, right, because your money's worth less in the future, so it's more of nature's scarce resources.
So, yeah, so, I mean, I've said this before, but I remember talking to an old teacher many years ago, and he said, yeah, I got a house for $12,000 downtown Toronto in the 1960s, and I was making $9,000 a year as a teacher.
Teachers now get paid 70-80k, which means that houses, you know, even with that level of inflation, should be no more than 140 to 150.
Right?
140 or 150, right?
I mean, that's migration, right?
You can't build houses fast enough for the population.
30-year mortgages, I think they're even longer now.
I mean, I don't mean to rip off any Band-Aids, but I was talking a lot about Bitcoin when it was $2.
Car loans of five or six years now.
Well, yeah, and I mean, inflation leads you to the leases, right?
But you don't actually really own much of the car when all is said and done.
25 years is the max in Canada.
Yes, sad but true.
Sorry, let me just see if I can get a little piece of info here that was pretty wild, I thought.
She keeps a Moet Echandon in her pretty cabinet.
The top 1% in America pays what percentage of all taxes?
The top 1% of earners pay what percent of all taxes in America?
It is 43%.
The top 1% pays 43%, and people literally, they literally have the math and literacy to say the rich should pay 42.3%.
Yeah, it's pretty wild.
They don't pay their fair share.
They just don't pay their fair share.
Couples who pray together,
What percentage of couples who pray together daily get divorced?
It's 1%.
About 1% of couples who pray together daily get divorced.
Isn't that interesting?
Less than 1% of couples.
In the beware free gifts, everything's free.
So in 1945 Soviet schoolchildren presented the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Avril Harriman, with a carved US seal as a gesture of friendship.
It hung in his office for seven years before... Before what?
Before what happened with the free Soviet gift?
What happened?
Yes, that's right.
That's right.
They discovered that there was a listening device.
It's a passive covert listening device developed in the Soviet Union.
It was called a passive device as it did not have its own power source.
It was activated by a strong electromagnetic signal from outside.
The bug was finally discovered by the U.S.
State Department in 1952, three ambassadors later, during the tenure of Ambassador George F. Kennan.
Isn't that great?
Oh, that's great.
It's all just a bunch of nonsense, all of this government stuff.
So this great meme where this woman says, honey, please go wake up her son.
And the dad is grabbing the son by the collar saying, drop out of grade five, get a job and buy Bitcoin.
All right, let me ask you, this is for the men, right?
I'm going to save this.
Let's just do a couple of memes.
What the heck, right?
Uh, let me just, uh, I'm going to do a couple of memes.
I will tell you which, I'm sure you guys will know, but I'll tell you which one I based my personality on.
It says, men will turn four and base their whole personality off of one of these.
Uh, their whole personality off of one of these.
And it's coming in the chat here.
Your whole personality.
And now, just for those who are listening, we have a giant truck, a dinosaur, a medieval knight, a tractor, a pirate, a GI, a train, an astronaut, and a cowboy.
Well, come on, tell me what you got.
You guys know which one I am, right?
It's accurate, right?
Your whole personality as a man.
What do we got here?
Load a tractor, yes.
Where's the ice cream man?
Sorry, he's at the gay parade.
My son is currently in the tractor stage, yes, yes.
Dinosaur, train, tractor, absolutely.
I was a knight, a witch, men, minus dinosaur.
I was the knight, accurate, samurai, guns, Godzilla.
I was an astronaut.
Yeah, yeah.
It's kind of funny, right?
I, of course, was the knight paladin.
I had a cousin who was a dinosaur.
I went through a train phase for a while.
I had a model train set.
I actually slept under it in my early teens.
I had a model train set and did the papier-mâché and the wireframe and all of that.
And I slept under it because I had no room in my room.
But all pirate all the time?
That's the way.
Soldier?
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
HO scale?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Superhero guy?
All right.
Let's do another couple of memes.
Let's do another couple of memes.
Oh boy, here's a story.
All right.
Eric Abramovitz, 24, applied to study at the Colburn Conservatory in Los Angeles in 2014.
He was accepted and was offered full scholarship including room and board in an email.
But he never saw the email because his then girlfriend Jennifer Lee intercepted it.
She posed as him and turned the offer down in a reply then deleted the correspondence.
Lee then sent a fake email posing as a school administrator telling Abramowitz he'd been turned down.
She offered a $5,000 scholarship to a different school, which she knew he could not afford instead, then consoled him as he lamented the rejection.
The pair broke up six months later and he carried on studying music.
He discovered the deceit years later when he applied to the same school and was asked why he had turned it down previously.
And he sued her and won $260,000, which I'm sure he never got to see.
But that was, uh, that was kind of brutal.
That was, and of course, you know why.
Do you know why she, uh, she would have done this?
Do you know why?
I mean, I don't, doesn't say so.
No, not just afraid.
So yeah.
So he wouldn't go somewhere else and, uh, I assume be successful and, oh yeah, maybe he was paying the bills or something like that, but, uh, she didn't want him to improve or get there.
Right.
Do you know that there's a film that was made in 2016?
It was 10 hours and 7 minutes.
And the film was called Paint Drying.
The 2016 British feature film about paint on a wall drying.
10 hours and 7 minutes.
The film was created by Charles Lyon in order to force the British Board of Film Classification to watch all 10 hours to give the film an age rating classification.
That is some seriously excellent trollery.
I just wanted to mention that.
That's really something.
Here's an exchange that was pretty funny.
This person says, you telling me Julius Caesar, who's been dead for well over 70 years, made this salad?
And the person, somebody replied, technically you aren't wrong with that number, but I just hate it.
It's true.
It is well over 70 years.
Okay.
This is kind of heartwarming.
And listen, I'm happy to do your questions, but
Here we go.
In 1981, Dr. Michael Shannon worked tirelessly through the night to successfully rescue a premature baby boy.
30 years later, in 2011, Dr. Shannon was trapped in his burning SUV following a collision with a semi-truck.
Miraculously, he was rescued from the blazing vehicle by Chris Troche, a paramedic with the Orange County Fire Authority.
Remarkably, it was revealed that Chris Troche was the same premature baby Dr. Shannon had delivered three decades earlier.
Isn't that wild?
When the guy was born, he was 10 weeks premature, weighed just 3 pounds 2 ounces.
He was given a 50-50 chance of survival.
So, you save a life, and the life saves you back.
I think that's actually quite, quite beautiful.
Quite beautiful.
All right, let's see here.
Okay, so my mom can hear me say, whatever, under my breath, but can't hear me scream, yeah, after calling my name ten times from the kitchen.
That's fairly true.
That's fairly true.
A study reveals that gratitude may buffer the negative physiological consequences of stress and overall improve cardiovascular outcomes.
In a sample of 912 participants, it was observed that the greater the predisposition to appreciate what is good in the world, the lower the likelihood of suffering an acute myocardial infarction.
Isn't that wild?
Gratitude is understood as the predisposition to notice and appreciate what is good in the world.
And give me a...
Give me your range, my friends.
What is your range?
Minus 10, only see the negative.
Plus 10, only see the positive.
What is your range in general?
In general?
I think I would be probably a plus six.
Whatever, I mean, there's no right answer to this.
All the minus 10s might be perfectly accurate.
Yeah, so we got a range.
Minus 10, 6, 4, 0, 3.
I got a 6.
Solid 5, says Alan.
Minus 3, plus 4, plus 6, plus 8.
Right.
3, plus 7, plus 5, plus 4, or 5, minus 4.
And again, I mean, obviously there's no right answer.
I mean, other than if you don't want your heart to explode in your chest like an alien giving birth from your esophagus, but having kids raises the number.
Yeah, well, it kind of has to, right?
Kind of has to.
So I find that I'm certainly able to see more of the positive.
Now I'm not doing politics.
That's my big blessing about not doing.
About not doing politics is, come on, unblur, is that.
Do you have, hit me with a Y if you've got student loans.
Do you have student loans?
No?
One person, yes.
Do you know that there was this woman, I was watching her video, and she says, I started with $80,000, I've been paying for 10 years, I've paid $120,000 and I still owe $76,000.
Let's just do that again, right?
I started with $80,000, I've been paying for 10 years, I've paid $120,000 and I still owe $76,000.
So she's 10 years in, and she has suddenly realized that she's only paid $4,000 of an $80,000 loan, even though she's paid $120,000.
Well, I think that there's, no, I think there's deferment, but isn't there something, I think this is in the States, isn't there something where you can not pay more than 10% of your income on your loans, and then you're just paying a portion of the interest that's accumulating?
Yeah, the degree obviously wasn't in math.
Yeah.
Compound interest is like per capita.
It just seems to be a threshold that a lot of people can't get past, right?
It's just, it's really, really rough.
Compound interest is either your greatest friend or your greatest enemy, Ed Swaff.
And I mean, I don't know, I obviously can't give anybody financial advice, but I will say this, that whatever you can pay over and above your interest, whatever you can pay down on the principal, no, interest, but Bitcoin is compound interest.
Bitcoin is the very definition of compound interest.
Not because Bitcoin accumulates, but because it accumulates relative to fiat in a manner similar to Bitcoin, right?
So yeah, whatever you can pay, in my humble opinion, it's not advice, it's just what I've tried to do with every loan, is I'll pay the interest and then I'll go hungry to pay the principal.
Because whatever you can do to chip away at that principal is like fantastic.
And here's a funny thing, right?
I remember I got into deep mounds of dinosaur doo-doo probably about 15 years ago by talking about what a scam college was.
I mean, I have a whole presentation on the scam of college.
And I had all these parents raging at me, convincing my kid not to go to college, he's going to fail.
Oh well, parents raging at me is my entire business plan apparently.
Hit me with a why if you got a degree and regretted it.
Did you get a degree and regret it?
No?
A few yeses, a lot of nos.
You got my MBA, never used it once?
No.
7% equals double in a decade.
Yeah, or half your value.
7% inflation is half your money gone in a decade, right?
You quit before the degree.
You can make almost $40 an hour cleaning houses.
Wow.
Cleaning windows is a great Van Morrison song I used to listen to in college.
Well, I, of course, I ended up as a computer programmer.
I never took a computer programming course.
And I mean, I took some philosophy in university, but the philosophy that I apply here is original.
And, oh gosh, I mean, I guess I used some historiography, some technical historical stuff from my history degree, but I did, yeah, I did take some logic, for sure.
They hated me in theatre school, and we kind of parted ways pretty quickly.
Well, I was sort of in my second year, and all that.
Hard science degrees force you to learn to complete hard stuff, yeah.
Yeah, it's rough, man.
I mean, you know, you just have to, I mean, isn't this the basic question that every kid asks, which is, they go to their parents and they say, what do you use from your school?
What do you use from your education?
What do you still use from what you studied for 12 years in school?
What do you?
But boy, I had a lot of fun in college.
I'll tell you that, I had a lot of fun in college.
And I do think, see I think that the voice training and the acting training that I took
In theater school has helped me a lot with my voice.
I mean, my voice, obviously I'm, you know, it's the old, you got a perfect face for radio, right?
Uh, my voice is kind of my gig and having a pleasant voice that I don't strain, that I have a lot of flexibility with and so on.
I think that the voice training helped quite a lot, quite a lot.
Would you recommend going into debt to pay $150 an hour for therapy?
Does that make you a better writer, partner, or business owner?
What I would say... I mean, I can't give you any advice, but I found that... I think I dropped about $20,000 on therapy.
And this is back when $20,000, no, I think, and this was what, about 25 years ago, I dropped about $20,000 on therapy.
I went for almost two years, three hours a week.
And I mean, with some breaks.
It was certainly some of the best money I've ever spent.
I mean, some of the best money I've ever, I've ever spent, so.
Don't be too hard on yourself, Steph.
You're no Tom Likus.
The fact that that guy pulled girls is just astonishing to me.
Just astonishing to me.
Before therapists were pushing drugs?
No, I don't think therapists can prescribe.
That's a psychiatrist thing.
Mitch says, I spent several thousand on therapy over the course of about six months.
Definitely worth it.
How many therapists did you use?
Well, I went to one therapist when we just didn't click at all.
In fact, I'm pretty sure I saw him composing a grocery list while I was telling him about my childhood.
And then I went to another therapist, and I think it was better for me to go to a female therapist because my issues had to some degree to do with women.
And I stayed with her for the duration.
I did try couples therapy once with a girlfriend.
It was absolutely appallingly wretchedly terrible.
I mean absolutely appallingly wretchedly terrible.
I'd love to pay someone to agree with my girlfriend about everything.
This sounds great!
Oh yeah, that was just terrible.
Not even the pretense of objectivity.
That's what couples therapy in general should be called with some acceptance.
Not even the pretense of objectivity!
Does she know about your philosophy life online?
I have no idea.
I haven't talked to her since therapy ended.
Couples therapy made my life worse and the divorce harder.
Somebody says, oh yeah, when looking for a therapist, I went to three or four sessions.
He tells me about the show where families of murder victims forgive the murderers.
It's like, okay, you've correctly identified my family, but holy crap, your advice is horrible.
I went to a couple of therapists at the request of a girlfriend once.
She said, we're never going back after he told her to lighten up.
Yeah.
I, yeah, I mean, I'm sure there are good couples therapists out there, but a lot of them are, uh, I mean, maybe there's truth therapy as a whole.
I mean, maybe I just got lucky.
Maybe I just got lucky.
All right.
But yeah, I think college is pretty, is really, really wretched.
So your home that was worth $450,000 at 2.7% mortgage rates is now worth $252,000 at 8% mortgage rates.
So people forget about the effect that mortgage rates have on
The value of the house, because to pay $18.50 a month for your mortgage, at 2.7% you can get a $450,000 house, at 8% you can get a $250,000 house.
So people who can afford to pay that much, it's going to cut the value of your house almost in half.
Just wanted to mention that.
Earth is the only planet not named after a god.
At least until they rename Earth Steff Ball.
That's really what they should be doing, is renaming Earth Steff Ball.
Hit me with a Y if you remember Steff Orb.
Steff Egg.
Hit me with a Y if you remember the Concord.
Do you remember the Concord?
The specs are wild.
Of course, I never flew one.
It was like $11,000 to fly on the Concorde, but I was just curious about the Concorde, and I found out a little bit more about it.
So, the Concorde was this old airliner.
It was an incredible-looking plane.
You should really look it up.
It operated from 1976 to 2003, and I remember being so hungry to fly on the Concorde when I was a kid.
It would fly from London to New York in three and a half hours.
Which is about half the time of a normal airliner.
It flew as high as how many miles?
This is too amazing to me.
Do you know how many miles up the Concorde would sometimes fly at?
This just blew my mind.
No? 15?
No, this seems too high.
It got as high as 10,000 miles.
That can't be right.
I mean, that's space, isn't it?
10,000, I mean, 10,000 miles high?
It flew around the earth in 30 hours.
Its Mach speed was 2.04, so it was more than twice the speed of sound.
And it arrived in New York at an earlier time than it left London, which of course the bankers loved.
And it had delta wings and a nose tip that could point down so pilots could see the runway because it had to land at a specific angle.
There were only ever 14 Concords put to work.
They flew 50,000 total flights.
So why did it go tits up?
Well, I remember at our wits end, the writer I had on the show was saying that people just weren't smart enough to maintain it, which I think is probably true, but
Because it was so thin, it could only seat 109 people, which I always think of BF-109E, the Messerschmitt plane from the Second World War.
It could only seat 109, so the tickets were very expensive.
So a Boeing 747 can do more than 800 passengers, but the Concorde could only do 109.
And planes got so hot at the maximum height, 110 degrees, that they expanded 30 centimeters and the sealant for the fuel hardened, so it took 28 hours to turn around the plane.
A normal plane can be turned around in less than two hours.
The fuel needs were, of course, completely insane.
Each flight required 28,000 litres, just for 109 passengers maximum.
Commercial planes needed four times less fuel on a per-passenger basis.
And, of course, many cities wouldn't allow the Concorde to fly because of how glass-shatteringly long it is on take-off, which limited destinations.
Now, development of the Concorde
Is 10,000 meters not miles?
It says cruising height was 60,000 feet.
Yeah, okay.
Well, that would be 20,000 meters.
It can't be 10,000 miles.
That's way higher than the atmosphere, isn't it?
Yeah, that's got to be crazy.
So, development of the Concorde was paid for by the UK and French governments.
The airlines were able to fly profitably for a number of years, but the economics were warped because the planes were given to them for free, and the airlines didn't have to capitalize costs.
And, of course, the business shuttered in 2003.
There was a tragic crash in 2000, and, of course, an industry-wide slowdown post-9-11.
So, it was beautiful.
It was a beautiful, beautiful plane, and wouldn't it be very cool to do that?
But, yeah, it's like when I remember looking up the data behind
The development of nuclear power, and governments just gave the people immunity from liability, and that's the only sort of reason it got that way.
All right.
Questions, comments, issues?
I mean, I can keep social media-ing?
Media-ing?
Media-ing?
Media-ing?
Media-ing?
Media-ing?
Media-ing?
The average 30-year mortgage interest rate is 8.5%.
That was as of October 30th.
The average 30-year mortgage interest rate is 8.5%.
For an average home price in the US of $430,000, you would pay $760,000 in interest.
When rates were 2.5%, you would have paid $181,000, right?
So you get this from 2.5% to 8.5%, you go from $181,000 in interest to $760,000 in interest.
Thus the difference in interest paid now versus two years ago is more than the price of the entire house.
Isn't that wild?
More than the price of the entire house.
I will share with you
One of my favorite memes because it is just shockingly true and appropriate to this time of year.
How many parts do you think the truth about the French Revolution will be?
It's going to be at least an eight hour presentation.
At least.
All right.
I can't remember if I shared this before, but this is one of my favorite memes on the planet.
It just combines everything perfectly.
My kids after Halloween, where are all our peanut butter cups, me?
And it's that Leonardo DiCaprio laughing character, but totally bloated up.
I just think that's too funny.
It's kind of true.
Let me introduce you to the dad tax.
The dad tax.
While most puns make me feel numb, math puns make me feel number.
Me.
I have a headache.
WebMD.
And it'll be your last.
Do you ever look up physical symptoms on the web?
If the community were to pool their tips and vote for particular albums for you to analyse, would you be interested?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Have you ever looked up things on the internet?
My ear is itchy.
It's cancer.
WebMD will get you killed.
Here's something funny I read.
I still think my favorite thing that's ever happened to me on the internet is the time a guy said, people change their minds when you show them facts.
And I said, actually studies show that's not true and linked to two studies.
And he said, yeah, well, I still think it works.
That's delightful.
And very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very true.
All right.
The sun is large enough that how many earths could fit inside it?
The sun is how big that how many earths would fit inside it if it was sort of squished?
1.3 million Earths if they were squished.
960,000 if they retained their spherical shape.
Of course, I just did that math in my head.
One thing I'm good at is sphere math, because the math occurs within my sphere.
More than 90% of the total Bitcoin supply is mined, which represents 19 million Bitcoin, 10 to 15% of which seem to be lost.
It will take 119 years to complete the Bitcoin mining process and reach the 21 million coin cap.
The Bitcoin ETF isn't priced in yet.
The halving isn't priced in yet.
The FASB changes aren't priced in yet.
The Fed pivot isn't priced in yet.
Quantitative easing isn't priced in yet.
So, anyway, has it got room?
Yeah, maybe.
Ah, for our lovely Canadian friends, over 60% of all Canadian mortgages will come up for renewal in the next three years.
Monthly mortgage payments will increase by 50%, and thus interest rates go down significantly
RBC believes that credit losses at banks will rise massively.
Did you also know October 30th, Taiwan is going to make Bitcoin legal tender.
Legal tender.
This is a girl and a boy.
She says, we ain't splittin' any bills, sir.
He says, oh, so what did you have in mind, ma'am?
She says, you got this, Mr. Tech Startup.
I struggle to pay rent.
And he says, so what are you offering me if I were to pay?
She says, yikes, I provide good company.
He says, so do I. I've worked hard to get where I am in life.
Shame on you for trying to take advantage.
I suggest the value menu at Burger King.
Nice.
Nice.
25% of Iceland's population went on strike.
All the women went on strike in Iceland.
What do you think happened to the infrastructure in Iceland?
What do you think happened to the general stuff that makes things work in Iceland when 25% of the entire workforce went on strike?
I assume it worked better because there's just fewer bureaucrats and all of that kind of stuff, right?
Divorce rate and oral contraceptive use track incredibly close together.
Divorce rate and oral contraception use track incredibly close together.
I'm just pointing it out.
This woman posted a picture of herself half crying.
Me when my ex and I broke up and he came into my house to say bye and thank you to my parents and my mom started crying and said, I'm so sorry you deserve so much better than her.
Like she wasn't lying, but what the fuck mom?
Why'd you have to say that?
How can you possibly not know that?
Picture of sad woman lying on a couch.
When I want a boyfriend at 19 to be married by 28 and have a kid by 30, but I'm about to be 33 next month and have no guy interested in me.
Oh god, I can't tell you how much this velcro tears my heart into a thousand different pieces.
First of all, boyfriend at 19, married by 28?
What on earth are you doing for nine years between 19 and 28?
I don't know, it's bizarre.
Just bizarre.
What opinion about marriage will have you attacked?
And this woman said, we had to identify my dad's body at the hospital.
Hours later, we arrived home and there were his dirty clothes on the floor next to the hamper.
My mother began to sob.
Through the hyperventilating, she squeaked out, I'd give anything.
Isn't that, that's a hell of a story, isn't it?
Isn't that a story?
I'm aware, I don't know if you guys have this, I'm aware of how little I want to regret pettiness.
No, imagine, you know, I used to call my wife Heidi because I'd put something down and she'd tidy it.
Tidy Heidi has been here and she's hiding things, right?
Hidden things.
And of course, you know, it's all in good fun and I love her madly and my gosh,
You get mad at people and then you think if they're gone just how much you'd give to have them back and not put their clothes in the right place, right?
Just please remember that.
Please remember that.
Love people now.
Rates of divorce, alcohol and drug use, sickness, absence and even suicide are higher in psychiatrists than in the general public or other medical specialties.
Oh my gosh.
The rates of divorce, alcohol and drug use, sickness, absence and even suicide are higher in psychiatrists than in the general public or other medical specialties.
And don't even start looking into the mental health of reporters.
Don't even imagine the mental health of reporters.
A recent paper investigated the old truism that science advances one funeral at a time.
There's kind of something to it.
Check out what happens to publication counts by different groups after a superstar scholar in their field passed away.
And it really does.
It really does change.
Meta-analysis of people's happiness.
In this meta-analysis we synthesize the available longitudinal data on mean level change in three subjective well-being components.
Life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect.
Our results showed that life satisfaction decreased from age 9 to 16, increased slightly until age 70, and then decreased again until age 96, the oldest data.
Positive affect declined from age 9 for almost the entire time
Until age 94, negative affect showed small ups and downs between ages 9 and 22.
After age 22, negative affect declined until age 60, after which again it increased until age 87.
Average changes in positive and negative affect were stronger than in life satisfaction.
In sum, we found a favorable development trajectory of subjective well-being over large parts of life for life satisfaction
A negative affect then decreases from childhood until later adult for positive effect.
So basically, positive feelings decline steadily from the age of nine for the rest of your life, on average.
Nine.
You peak at nine.
You peak at nine.
If that doesn't make you wonder what is going wrong with our world, I don't know what will.
Oh my gosh.
Measured intelligence by student academic subfield.
I think we all know, right?
This is sort of measured intelligence.
At the top and the bottom are pH.
pH wise, at the top is physics and at the bottom is physical education.
So at the top is Physics, then History of Science, Classical Language, Astrophysics, Mathematics, Atomic Physics, Solid State Physics, Biophysics, Classics, Planetary Science, Physics, Other, Philosophy!
Oh, coming in right near the top!
Philosophy!
And then near the bottom...
Business administration, nursing, communication, nutrition, elementary education, counseling, psychology, community psychology, special education, early childhood education, social work, criminal justice, criminology, and physical education.
There's not any innies and outies differences in between those two, is there?
Isn't that something?
And the less intelligent people we give the most control over our children.
Isn't that wild?
Alright.
0% surprise.
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't, teach, teach.
If you haven't heard that one before.
Yeah, it's really sad.
And you know, this is why people, why universities in particular got mad at me for talking about IQ, right?
Because if IQ is accepted as a measure, you don't need universities.
Like it was a direct competitor and way cheaper to just spend a couple of hundred bucks on an IQ test than a hundred thousand dollars on a four-year degree, which is a proxy for IQ.
Of course they're going to attack, right?
I mean, I can understand that.
I don't agree with it, but
I can understand why they'd get mad at somebody talking about IQ.
I mean, can you imagine if IQ was allowed to be a test for jobs?
You wouldn't need to waste all this time, effort, and money on degrees, right?
Inevitable.
Alright!
Physics to understand matter.
Philosophy to understand what matters.
All right.
Hit me with the questions, comments, issues.
I, uh... I didn't come in with a lot, I guess, other than my daughter.
People are obsessed with pets.
It's insane.
I knew it already, but it really struck me when I became a parent.
I've had a pet for many years, but now I catch myself asking, why is this animal in my home?
My wife says that too.
My instincts have radically changed.
Now cleaning up after pets seems bizarre.
I'll maybe have a guard dog if I own a house with a backyard, but no more pets for me.
Yeah.
What's with the polyamory curse lately?
Well, just porn addicts acting out what they think are going to be fantasy and turn out to be hell on earth, right?
Sex is a bonding mechanism so that husbands and wives stay together and protect children, right?
Not a personal plaything, right?
Pets are
Two relationships as heroin is to happiness, right?
It's a form of fantasy play that you have a relationship and all you have is a biochemical pair bond, right?
What caused the lack of passing down basic life skills to your children?
I'm not sure what you mean.
Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Hi Steph, if most people don't change their minds when presented with reason and evidence, what gives you motivation for your work?
Well, you glorious beautiful people, of course.
The fact that I think better socially.
Yes, I think better with you.
Together we are greater than the sum of our parts.
No, I think better socially when I get great comments and questions.
I think better in conversation.
Philosophy is not a guy in a room scratching away on a piece of parchment with a quill, right?
Philosophy is conversational.
It's interactional.
Philosophy is bouncing ideas back and forth.
I am far smarter and more insightful over the course of call-in shows, interviews, these kinds of things.
So it helps me, for sure, be an infinitely better philosopher to talk to people.
So that's helpful, and that's helpful into the future.
And of course, some people change their minds based on reason and evidence.
Yeah, everyone claims to, in the same way everyone claims to care about their children.
Some people do change their minds according to reason and evidence, and those are the people I have in my life, and those are the people I have conversations with.
People my age had to teach themselves how to cook, keep a house, basic life skills, parenting, etc.
Yeah, well, I mean that's because of the career woman, right?
Go make money for your boss, go drive down the wages of your husband, and don't have anything to offer your children.
Can you give us a spicy, peaceful parenting quote?
Can I?
Can I?
Let me see.
I'll, uh, have a quick look.
I'll have a quick, a quick look.
I'll have a quick look.
Sean Connery style.
Sean Connery style.
All right.
Before I swallow my own esophagus, let's see if I can find a nice esposito.
Pick up where you left off.
Oh, no, that's not where I left off.
Oh, well.
Oh well.
If you could also send messages to Izzy asking her why she's not helping more and more in Baldur's Gate and why she doesn't give me as much peanut butter because apparently I need protein, that would just be fantastic.
Alright!
Alright, we'll do a little spicy bit of the Peaceful Parenting book.
Hit me with if you've ever had this, you know, kind of conflict, right?
We say... Clean your room, kids!
Kids, you gotta clean your room!
Why can't you keep your room clean?
Oh, what happened to my stream there?
There we go.
Yes!
Did you ever have me, uh...
Did you ever have this?
Your mom wants you to clean your room, you don't want to clean your room, and there's this conflict, fight, can't find anything here, it's like a pigsty in here, you gotta clean your room.
You ever have that?
My mother all the time, while the house was a disaster.
Yeah, that's quite often the case, right?
All right.
So, one of the most common questions asked by parents who wish to take the peaceful approach is, how do I get my kids to clean their room?
It's a fine question, and I, for one, am not a big fan of a big mess.
So, what is the answer?
Peaceful Parenting takes the following approach to all parent-child conflicts.
Why is it important?
Kind of an important question, don't you think?
Why do you want your child's room to be clean?
A lot of times parents set up a rule and then demand that their children obey it.
And the stage is set for grueling, multi-year, grinding battles.
And for what?
Of course I understand that parents need to teach their children responsibility and self-care and tidiness and all other sorts of nice and wonderful things.
That is exactly why it is so important to ask how essential is the rule?
Let's take a typical example.
Mom wants her son's room to be clean.
Initially mom goes in and cleans up her son's room.
As her son gets older he wants privacy and so he begins to make demands that his mother not enter his room.
His mother agrees in principle but says that he needs to keep his room clean otherwise she will have to go in and tidy everything up.
Her son
does not keep his room very tidy.
His mother marches in, tidies up, and cleans, and then he can't find anything, and he feels violated.
And then his mother again reiterates her demand that he keep his room clean, otherwise she'll be forced to come in and tidy because he lives in a shared space, and she doesn't want to think that there is food or other items that might attract bugs and mice somewhere in his room, and it smells, and she can't do anything if she needs something, and how on earth can someone live like that?
And so on.
Neither person is getting what they want.
Both people are escalating and hardening their positions and the stage is set for endless, useless, pointless conflict.
The mother feels that she is going to lose her position, good sense, and any authority if she gives up her demand for a clean room.
Her son fights back against what he perceives as maternal bullying and both parties very quickly find themselves utterly unable to give up their positions or demands.
Sound familiar?
It is a common pattern in a wide variety of scenarios.
What is the solution?
The mother wants a clean room.
The son doesn't want to be ordered around and also wants his privacy.
Here is the most essential message.
Don't lie to your children!
In most of these cases, the mother is lying to her son about why she wants a clean room.
She wants him to clean his room because she feels anxious and unhappy if his room is messy.
She wants him to clean his room because she likes exercising power over him under the pretense of keeping things in good order.
She has unresolved conflicts or hostilities with her son and uses the clean room pretext as an excuse to act aggressively against him.
She is afraid of others coming into the house and judging her by the messiness of her son's room.
She is frustrated at her life in general, feels powerless and out of control, and so seeks to wield control over her son in order to counteract her feelings of chaos and submission.
This list can go on and on, but in general, it is not about the room, or the tidiness, or the privacy, or the intrusion, or anything like that.
What is really going on?
If the mother feels anxious, helpless, frustrated, and angry if her son's room is messy, then what does it mean to tell her son the truth?
Well, it means that she has to tell her son that his messy room makes her feel anxious, helpless, frustrated, and angry.
But she doesn't do that, right?
Why not?
Well, for two main reasons.
The first reason is that she prefers to be aggressive towards him rather than ask for a favor from a state of vulnerability.
Asking someone for a favor does not allow you to bully him.
And that person can always say no, which might reveal how little they care about your negative emotional states.
The second reason is that it is an utterly indefensible position to ask your son to clean up his room because you feel bad when he doesn't.
Why?
Because we are untrained in philosophy.
That's why.
Let us extract a simple principle from the mother's demand that the son clean his room to make her feel better.
What do we get?
Well, we get the principle that we should change our behavior to make other people feel better.
It's a universal principle, remember?
Since it is a universal principle, it doesn't just apply from the mother to the son, it also applies in reverse.
If the mother says, I really need you to keep your room clean because I feel really bad when you don't.
Well, the sun can equally reply.
I really need you to stop asking me to keep my room clean because I feel really bad when you do that.
Do you see?
You see how hard it is to ask someone to change his behavior in order to help you feel better?
Now, it's far easier, at least in the short run, to make up some moral nonsense about respecting the shared environment, having some respect for yourself, some sense of self-care, honoring your mother, doing the right thing.
It's far easier to bring out the moral club and, in a sense, beat your child's will into groveling submission rather than asking for a favor that can easily be reversed.
Children are incredibly good at sensing hypocrisy, particularly in their parents.
If the mother inflicts a moral narrative on her son about keeping his room tidy, rather than be honest about her own emotional anxieties, then her son will fight very hard to avoid submitting to her.
She doesn't have any credibility because she's not being honest about her demand.
If she demands that her son manage her emotions by obeying her commands,
then he will lose all respect for her.
In particular because he is a male, and that's not how males work at all!
It will also be difficult when she commands her daughter, but her daughter will more likely mirror her mother's habits in her own relationship with others, thus reducing the demand that everyone else change their behaviors in order to manage the daughter's and the mother's emotions.
If the son has to change his behavior to manage his mother's emotions, but she lies about that and claims some sort of moral high ground, then he is setting himself up for a life of enslavement to women if he submits to his mother.
In general, women aren't very attracted to doormats, enablers, and submissive males.
So his mother's demand that he subjugate himself to her emotional immaturity inflicts potentially irreversible harm to his future romantic prospects.
Would you rather your son tidy his room or get married and have children?
I'm not kidding about this.
I'm sure there are countless mothers out there reading this and shaking their heads, but I promise you this is all true.
And if you ask your sons honestly, they will agree with me, I'm sure.
A boy who submits to his mother's emotional manipulations is no fit husband or father to be.
A woman who absorbs and reproduces her mother's emotional manipulations is no fit wife or mother to be.
If, say, a teenage boy submits to his mother for no good reason, or because she is lying, which is to say the same thing, then he's substantially low as the quality of woman he can attract in the future.
He becomes ground-down, submissive, an appeaser and groveler, which is a real turn-off to strong, independent women later on.
A mother who demands that her son submit to her emotional... This is why audiobooks take a while.
A mother who demands that her son submit to her emotional and moral bullying is undermining and destroying his chances of attracting and keeping a quality mate down the road.
By fighting the mother... Don't do the last two sentences again.
A mother who demands that her son submit to her emotional and moral bullying is undermining and destroying his chances of attracting and keeping a quality mate down the road.
By fighting his mother, the son is fighting for his own genetic survival.
To put it another way,
Sons who gave up the ghost and submitted to their mothers either didn't reproduce or reproduced with very dominant, low-quality women, either of which is a disaster.
So that's why the son fights so hard.
What about the mother?
Why does she fight so hard to control the son?
Well, that one should be obvious, I'm sure.
A woman who gets to middle age, or later, who still retains the habit of bullying others to appease her own negative emotions.
Well, that woman doesn't just confine what happens to her own son.
That happened.
That habit should be habit.
Sorry, that's a homonym from the voice recognition.
Let's try it again.
We'll get there.
A woman who gets to middle age, or later, who still retains the habit of bullying others to appease her own negative emotions?
Well, that woman doesn't just confine that habit to her own son, now does she?
Oh no!
If she is still married, then for sure she has a husband who has bowed down before her emotional manipulations and bullying.
What happens to her relationship with her husband if her son mounts a successful resistance and defense against her bullying?
I would assume that by the time a woman hits 40 or 50, her retained emotional habits are the foundation of all of her relationships, with the exception possibly of her own parents, of course.
In other words, all of relationships are based on the premise that other people are responsible for managing her own negative emotions.
And thus, if she gets upset, other people have failed her and can be aggressed against for their betrayal of love and loyalty and responsibility and morality and so on.
If she feels bad, other people must be bad.
If she feels bad and asks for another person to make her feel better and that other person refuses, then that other person is mean and thoughtless and callous and just doesn't care about her and is a very bad and selfish person.
And she has to punish that person in order to lead him away from the darkness and back towards the soft light of eternal compliance to her emotional demands.
If a mother is like this, and her son successfully resists her bullying, oh well, that successful resistance might very well spread to her other children, her husband, who knows?
Probably her friends are just like she is, but what if her son's successful rebellion spreads to her friends, husbands, and children as well?
Well, it ain't so much fun when the rabbit gets a gun, is it?
The son is desperate to avoid submitting, especially to a woman, for fear of ending up alone or in a terrible marriage.
At the same time, the mother is desperate for him to submit, for fear that any successful rebellion against her dominance could spread to other people in her life, which would reveal her weakness and aggression.
Furthermore, imagine if the son successfully resists the will of his mother.
What happens then?
Well, over time, he ends up dating and marrying a very healthy, assertive, and moral woman.
And how will she react to his hypocritical and manipulative mother?
Ouch!
How does peaceful parenting resolve this?
As Socrates said, know thyself.
As a mother, it is your job to know deeply, authentically, why you want your son to keep his room clean.
Is it even fair, or just, or right, for you to make this demand?
Far too often we, as parents, assume that our demands are automatically legitimate, and any resistance or rebellion by our children is illegitimate.
Well, how do you know?
How do you know that your demand that your son keep his room clean is legitimate, while his resistance to your demand is illegitimate?
How do you know that you are in the right?
The question of what is good and noble and just and moral and right is very deep, very complicated, and has been struggled with by philosophers for thousands of years.
We all treasure the idea that people accused of wrongdoing are innocent until proven guilty.
This is a foundational principle of justice.
If your child disagrees with you, assume that he or she is right and moral and just and good to do so.
In this way, you can ask him why he disagrees with you and really genuinely and deeply listen to his answer.
Maybe he has a really good point.
If you listen without prejudice, without tension, without anger or frustration, well, what a gift that is to your child, to anyone for that matter.
Children should be listened to.
We all should be
Don't assume that you are in the right.
Have the humility to accept that you might be wrong.
For two reasons.
The first is that you might be wrong, of course.
And the second is that you want to model humility to your children.
So that they can also question if they are in the right.
Don't expect your children to be humble if all you do is model arrogance.
Which brings me to... Have I modeled the behavior I want in my children?
So that's the start of the next chapter.
I thought that was fairly spicy.
Let me just get back to your comments, sorry.
Let's see here.
Clothes need to be up for laundry.
Food attracts bugs.
What else needs to be cleaned?
Males have lower standards on average.
Nope.
Not at all true.
Not at all true.
Males have higher standards for some things.
Women have higher standards for some things.
Sounds familiar for me needing to be a good speller, yeah?
I only remember being told to clean up the Legos.
It does not come to mind that my parents ever told me to clean.
And yet I remember our childhood home being immaculate nearly all the time.
I assume someone cleaned then.
So the mom should change her behavior to make your son feel better.
Yeah, that's right.
That would have been a great way to get hit.
Yeah.
Your free speech offends me, so shut up!
That's how we got here.
Yeah, yeah.
This was totally me until I was 21.
You mean on the receiving end or the providing end?
The Peaceful Parenting book has been phenomenal so far.
I appreciate that.
Thank you.
You're describing my ex-best friend's mom who got drunk at a toddler's birthday party and slapped me.
Now he's a drunk and has a fat wife who screams at their children.
Bet you don't, bet you don't, bet you don't like your life.
That's a Listen Without Prejudice George Michael song.
You got two fat children, you got two something children and a drunken wife or something like that.
Describing my mother to a T, sadly.
Same.
Even in preschool I had to manage my mother's volatile emotions.
One of the major things I had to work on in therapy in my 30s was that I'm not the keeper of other people's emotions.
This shit sticks.
This is my mom.
My brother married a crazy woman, divorced her, and came out as gay.
Wow.
That chapter was amazing.
I'm gonna send a donation later tonight.
Here's your room, but keep it the way I want.
Yeah, yeah.
This is amazing.
Can't wait for the rest of the Peaceful Parenting book.
Thank you.
My parents were near hoarders, but still complained about things being a pigsty.
It took me a while to learn how to be tidy.
It was my scarcity mindset.
Much more thoughtful than Peterson's clean your room.
He is good enough.
Yours was awesome.
Your theatre skills are most definitely on fire.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
I appreciate that.
Christians, Michelle says, Christians continually cite the Bible about discipline and punishment, but I'm coming to the conclusion that these are opposite terms.
Since discipline means to educate, if the child fails to learn, it is the educator's fault.
At the very least, the educator cannot objectively assess whether it is their or the child's failure.
Right.
Children learn from seeing, not hearing.
The child's primary learning mechanism is eyes, not ears, in terms of behavior.
You have to ask, are you modeling the behavior that you want in your children?
Now, the mother might say, well, I keep my space clear, clean, but that's not the issue, right?
Why do you want your child to keep her room clean?
Why do you want your child to keep his room clean?
Are you modeling that behavior of being curious about other people's thoughts and feelings, right?
If you're just ordering him around, he's going to fight back.
Of course he's going to fight back.
God.
This is something I wish moms understood, my God.
I mean, you know that children raised by single fathers end up much better off than children raised by single mothers.
And I think one of the reasons is this fundamental inability for women to understand that boys will half-fight them to the death to not be bullied and controlled by a mother.
Like, it's a wild thing, man.
It's a wild thing.
We're like cornered animals.
We fight to the death to not be bullied by a woman.
Now, it is, of course, in our genes.
If we're broken by a mother, we can't win a quality wife.
She's literally ending the quality, any potential quality in her entire bloodline, is the sons who fail to rebel against dominating mothers, particularly single mothers, right?
I mean, am I wrong about this?
I just, I was a pretty mild mannered kid, but man, when I hit a teenager, man, I just, I came out swinging, man.
I was just like, you do not push me around anymore.
I'm yelling back.
I'm, I ended up hitting back to just try and get her to stop hitting me.
And it worked like, fuck no, absolutely in no way shape.
In no way, shape, or form am I just going to submit and do what you want because you're upset.
It's literally like when I was in the Dominican Republic many years ago, decades ago now, I was snorkeling and swam into a shipwreck, and then when I tried to come back out,
The current was coming in so hard it was really hard to get out of the hole.
I kind of got sucked in and then I would have died in there because I was only snorkeling, not scuba diving.
I'd only had my lungfuls of air and I gouged the hell out of my arm.
I had to scar for a long time.
I gouged the hell out of my arm getting back out of that ship and back up to the air.
This was like it was me fighting with my mother's dominance.
Like, oh my god, this is... Yeah, mom was a shouter until I got good at shouting.
Nothing more I wanted than to move out, I remember, yeah?
Yeah, my brother and I packed our mom into a bus and sent her to the opposite side of the continent when I was 15.
We used sarcasm to battle my mom because it was the only way to fight back against that control freak.
She hated the sarcasm, but it felt so good to roast her.
My brother can't rebel against our mother and he's childless, smokes and plays video games non-stop.
I mean, it's tragic.
If moms understood how horrible it was to break their children, to force their children, to bully their children, to get their children.
They seem to, the dysfunctional moms, right?
They seem to want to just get their children to obey, particularly their sons.
And it's like, be careful what you wish for, honey.
If you get that, if you get your son to obey you, he's done in the dating world.
He's done in the dating world.
Like he, he's not going to be able to attract any kind of quality.
Uh, somebody says my mom argued everything with me.
So frustrating.
I also punched, stopped to punch at 11 or so and told her no more.
I was finally bigger than her.
Yeah.
Somebody says, I think I eventually lost that battle with my mother of picking up marijuana as a habit for a few years recovering now.
Well, good for you.
It's awful.
To break the spine of your son is to break the line of your family.
And I remember really feeling like I fought back as hard as someone who's holding you underwater.
Like, zero fucking way I was going to be ground down by that.
Do you know what I mean?
I'm not saying, like, maybe this didn't happen to you.
Is there a cure for a broken son?
Yeah.
Get in touch with the anger, for sure.
Don't act on it, but get in touch with it.
Yeah, I completely understand the cornered rat phenomenon.
It doesn't feel like you're ever going to win and society supports her, not you.
And nobody notices the fight.
You're kind of alone in the fight, but it is a desperate, desperate battle.
And I wrote about this in Just Poor with the character, Lady Barbara and Kay about how debilitating it is to have a soul murdering maternal unit.
It's just astonishing.
How hard you have to fight, and how desperate the battle is, how solitary it is, and how unsupported you are.
It's crazy.
And you felt like you could never win?
Well, that's because you probably drew back from escalation.
I honestly, I was like, there's nothing I won't do to win.
I mean, there's, I will not be grounded.
Like whatever I have to do, whatever escalation I have to go to, I will escalate to not be destroyed in this way.
Like, no, absolutely not.
I had to do it when I was a kid.
I had to comply when I was a kid.
I don't have to do it now.
Does that make sense?
Need that fighting spirit.
It's not violence.
It's not violence.
But it is.
If I'm able to get in touch with that anger, will that lead to better partners?
If yes, can you explain?
That probably would be a call-in show.
I don't want to talk too much about people getting in touch with their anger because you should be in therapy or at least have a close circle of friends who can help you with that kind of stuff.
My mom gave me an option.
Between not going out with friends or getting a spanking.
16 years of age, I chose spanking and I'm so happy.
I did, even though it was breaking me at least.
I still escaped.
Yeah, I remember when I was in grade 8, I was in a grade 13 writing class.
And at the end of the writing class, we went out for drinks at a place called The Edge.
And I remember, I mentioned this before, I remember many years later, that the headline, I still remember it to this day, Rock Takes a Blow as The Edge Closes Doors.
And it was my first time in a bar.
Gosh, grade eight.
What was I, 13?
It was my first time in a bar.
I don't know how I got into the bar, but I did.
I didn't, I think I even just had a Sprite or something.
And I got home and my mother just slapped me across the face because I had worried her or whatever it is.
And it's like, it's worth it.
Hey, I got to go chat with girls at a bar at 13.
It's totally worth it.
Yeah.
Go, go for it.
Yeah.
I'd do it again.
I'd do it again.
You know, my mother's like, you didn't tell me where you were, and it's like, hey honey, you flew off to Houston for two weeks, I didn't know when you were coming back, so don't talk to me about, like, and I was 12 or whatever, right?
So, yeah, don't talk to me about didn't know where you were, didn't know what was happening.
Right.
My mom went away for a weekend and didn't come back for over a year.
But no, it's really important that I keep her informed about me going to a bar.
Seth, I'd appreciate some guidance as to what to do with the anger.
I feel so angry most of the time, I don't know how to express it.
Do you know what you're angry at?
Sympathies, of course.
But do you know what you're angry at?
Or about?
Man, I was terrified of making my parents angry, felt like a moral crime to disobey.
Sure, sure.
And the moral crime aspect of it is very important, right?
I think I kind of sensed, and this is nothing better or worse, my mother was just more obvious with this kind of stuff, plus when she got institutionalized she lost a fair amount of credibility with me, so it was easier for me.
I'm not trying to say like I got it and you should have, it was just easier for me because, I mean, when you're
Mom gets thrown into a lunatic asylum for quite a long time.
You kind of get that maybe things aren't too well.
But yeah, if they can get you to convince that it's a moral crime, then yeah, they're gonna, then it's like, hey man, you're not, I'm not trying to control you.
I'm just telling you what the moral and right and good thing to do is and all that, right?
Somebody says, I remember my mom called the cops because I was gone for a few hours without telling her, so she said to Mrs. Tate, glad I escaped.
Yeah, well, does anybody know what percentage of policing is single mothers calling the cops on their sons?
I mean, my mom did that.
Single mothers calling the cops on their sons.
Do you know how much policing is that, is like bungee and fatherhood?
That's really, really sad.
It's really sad.
It's really sad.
Somebody says, oh sorry Michelle, I'm angry at my mother, especially after having a baby girl.
I hate that I spent my formative years being broken down and then my teenager tweens left alone and then pity partied about how horrible of a person I was.
Right.
Are you safe from your mother?
Are you safe from your mother?
And the way that you get safe from dysfunctional people is either they get less dysfunctional or you get gone.
And of course, if you would like, call in at freedomain.com.
Happy to help in any way that I can, of course, of course.
You guys are wonderful.
And if there's anything I can do to help, I would absolutely do that.
I am gone, but she's a bit stalky.
Yeah, that's rough.
That is very rough.
That's very rough.
Yeah, so she's just kind of hovering around like a shark in the middle distance, right?
Yeah.
I mean, I've heard the stories of this kind of stuff over the years, and I mean, there's no easy particular answers if you want to go the legal route, which is not even a particularly easy answer either, but it's very tough.
It would seem almost better to have her in sight.
Hmm.
Probably not.
Probably not.
I mean, you know, is it worth moving?
Is it worth changing numbers?
Is it worth... I don't know.
I mean, I don't know.
I got a P.O.
box and assist my mom not knowing my physical address even though thousands of miles away, says someone.
Yeah.
Yeah, and of course now it's different, right?
So if I'd have been, I don't know, a 13-year-old with a cell phone, my mom would have been calling me at that bar and yelling at me and I wouldn't have had any fun.
So, I mean, I'm glad that I was able to go and have fun at that bar.
I still remember there was one guy.
He was not a good guy.
I was talking about going to the prom and there was some 17-year-old girl and he was like, you should ask her!
And I'm like, I didn't.
And it was like, dude, don't tell the 13-year-old to ask a 17-year-old to his prom.
Like, what are you trying to do?
What are you trying to do?
I saw a screen grab from Instagram earlier today that literally said, I wish I could choose my baby daddy.
Yeah.
Not great that she knows people we know.
Well, uh, depends how hard you want to cut, man.
If, uh, if I was trying to escape someone and there were people informing her of my location, I would escape them too.
Just.
Right?
So there's no one... I mean, if people betray your trust and you're trying to hide from someone or escape someone and they tell that person where you are, I mean, they'd be off my list.
I can't tell you what to do, but they would be off my list.
Wow, this topic has really brought up a lot of perspectives.
Well, that's the peaceful parenting book as a whole.
As a whole.
Yeah, I'm not in touch with anyone who knows both me and my mother.
Like, I'm not in touch with anyone who knows both me and my mother.
My father's a little less complicated now that he's in the ground, but with regards to my mother, there's just no common point of contact.
Like, no thank you.
No thank you.
I mean, when you're controversial, you need to keep your secrets, right?
Uh, Steph, I decided to confront my abusive parents about my childhood.
Is there any advice you can give me?
What to expect and what to do to prepare?
Thank you.
I'm sorry that this is the situation.
I really am very sorry.
First of all, decide if it's worth it.
Decide it's safe.
If it's safe, then decide what it is that you want out of the interaction.
Do you want an acknowledgement?
Do you want to reveal how crazy they are?
Do you want restitution?
Like, what is it that you want out of the situation?
I mean, go in assuming it's safe.
Go in, be as honest as you can, and just don't back down.
Don't back down until you're emotionally satisfied.
And if you can't think of what to say next, but you're not emotionally satisfied, just say, I don't know what to say next, but I'm not emotionally satisfied.
Well, you should be.
We've apologized.
No, I'll know when I'm emotionally satisfied and it's not there.
Well, you're just withholding.
We've already apologized.
What else can we do?
Well, that's for you to figure out, but I'm not emotionally satisfied.
The fact that you're snarling at me after apologizing is not a good sign, right?
My mom used to hit me every day until I fought back.
My dad said I was bad and I should ask God for forgiveness.
I'm so sorry, man.
I'm so sorry.
I mean, that's the desert you have to cross to get from the bad people to the good people.
Really?
My psychologist's daughter killed herself via alcoholism.
Now her black and white picture looks down on us.
We haven't talked about it.
I found out because I looked up her name and saw a news article.
Psychologist's daughter killed herself?
So you are thinking about it, ask your psychologist, I would say.
If you're thinking about it and it's like, is this a red flag?
What happened?
And she may say, of course, I'm not going to talk about my private life.
And I understand that.
I understand that.
I would, if I were in your shoes again, I can't tell you what to say.
If I were in your shoes, I'd say, well, but your private life is staring down at us.
Like you brought your daughter's picture into the therapy room.
So.
I mean, you understand that my daughter is at the age, she's almost 15, right?
Where she's supposed to be the least friendly towards her parents, right?
That sort of snarky, snippy, negative, and all of that.
I mean, you listen to her, she's great fun, right?
As I said, all of parenting is for the teenage years.
All of parenting is for the teenage years.
Because that's where things really count and matter.
And again, I'm not trying to show her off.
I mean, I just want her to be her authentic self, but she's a great deal of fun.
And of course, she is more than welcome to notice my shortcomings and critique me.
Izzy did blow up your spot about your coffee problem.
Yeah, well, that's fair.
No, again, I'm not trying to parade her out like, oh look at this, but you know, we were making fun of this and I said, hey, do you want to talk about it on the show?
She's like, yeah, that would be fun.
And so we did, right?
It wasn't like, I gotta drag you out and show how cool you are.
I mean, I think she is cool, but you know, whatever, right?
By their fruits shall you know them, yo.
Yeah.
In my opinion, teens aren't unfriendly.
Their parents are just antagonistic towards them.
Your shows with Izzy are the only reason I ever changed my mind on having kids.
It would have been great to have more, but I guess I'll take round two with the grandkids as best I can.
Why wouldn't you show her off?
She's great and you're a great husband and parent.
Well, I appreciate that, but she's not there to prove a point.
She's not there to validate peaceful parenting.
She's, you know, she's there to be herself and all of that, so.
And she's going to have to be, you know, pretty tough in the world, right?
She's going to have to be pretty tough in the world.
Because of the way she's raised and all that, so.
All right, any other last questions, comments, or, or, or donations.
If you are a donor, then you get the, I just did part three of the French Revolution, and it's really good stuff.
It's really good stuff.
It's great getting back to the economics and politics that I used to do.
The truth about the French Revolution is now into its third hour, and it's going to be a long presentation, and that's why I'm doing it.
French Revolution stuff.
It's great, Dave, isn't it?
The French Revolution stuff is amazing, says Dave.
Thank you very much.
I've got to get on that.
The second one is great.
Yeah, there's a feed.
I created a feed.
Also, also, also, of course, I have a feed for Just Poor.
You can go to rss.com slash podcast slash just poor, one word, just poor.
I'll put it in here.
Man, if you haven't heard that book, that is, I don't even think I could write anything that good ever again.
Like, that was just fantastic.
And it's just one of my greatest, one of the greatest things I've ever done.
I absolutely love that book.
You mentioned in your Matthew Perry presentation you're a sucker for autobiographies.
Can you recommend some of your favorite autobiographies?
Let me think about that.
Let me think about that.
I'll do an autobiography on just about anything.
I'm kind of partial.
I did Jim Morrison.
I did...
I'm doing Charles Dickens at the moment because I'm reading Oliver Twist with Izzy and I did Led Zeppelin.
I tried Elon Musk.
I couldn't quite get into it.
I did about two-thirds of the Steve Jobs thing and I got kind of bored with it.
So I mean tech stuff is interesting, but usually not that interesting to me.
But artists in particular I find really quite fascinating.
Also really enjoyed the Matthew Perry stream.
Listened to it almost three times now.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I suggest Genghis Khan.
Yeah, all right.
I will make a note of that.
Thank you.
Genghis, of course, I've watched that Star Trek movie, so now it's always Genghis Khan!
All right.
Is it good to defoo without confronting your parents, or should you always at least inform them why you're leaving?
Can't tell you that.
I can't tell you that.
I can't tell you that.
Oh, Jared, you watched Kramer vs. Kramer?
Yeah.
I watched that again.
I paid to watch that three times when I was broke.
Somebody says, My dad deteriorated rapidly from cancer several years ago and died a month after his granddaughter was born.
I have a picture of him looking at her while holding her.
For the first time recently, I found out he took out the verbal abuse on my sister and called her a prostitute regularly when I left for the military.
I think he let himself go because he realized he once held his own daughter like this and ended up calling her such things.
He would rather die than live with facing it.
My family doesn't know my husband and I have our son.
They live eight minutes away.
I'm going to cut them off in 2021.
Never heard from them.
That's everything I need to know about my family.
Bets on Steph going carnaval after reading about Genghis Khan.
It's funny.
The wet-nose concept is so strange to me.
Yeah, the wet-nose stuff in history, and particularly in France, it's pretty wild.
The lack of attachment.
I did this whole thing about The Morning Show.
Like, the lack of attachment is just really terrifying.
I mean, have you had people in your life?
They just vanish.
They just go.
One little conflict, and it's like you never knew each other.
It's not even that raging or hostile.
Just gone.
Done.
The French, what can you say?
French and Hebophilia seem to be one and the same.
One and the same.
Did your dreams change when writing the Peaceful Parenting book?
Can you talk a little more about the emotional process and how you got through it?
Was it a form of therapy for you?
I think it probably got the last vestiges of my anger out about it, which you'll see in the book.
I've decided not to despise it too much.
Not despise it too much.
Germans, yeah, Germans were rough with parents as well.
A lot of that coldness coming out.
Can relate.
Any last tips or donations?
You can tip on the app as well.
Can relate to the person talking about issues with his parents.
After my parents apologized, I brought it up again in a separate instance.
They said to drop it.
I still feel unsatisfied.
I feel like I'm in the wrong for bringing up something they apologized for.
Yeah, there are some people who will not be emotionally satisfying.
And you won't be able to get emotional satisfaction from them.
Emotional satisfaction comes when people are honest with you.