Video: https://dai.ly/k3tZ91p8MbAITYApxcY
Chapters
0:00 Introduction and Peaceful Parenting Book Update
1:43 The Data on Child Abuse Risks
3:20 Child Abuse Risks Compared to Other Dangers
6:36 Impact of Neglect and Psychological Abuse
33:58 Parenting Styles and Trust
56:00 Uncovering Family Secrets
59:49 Importance of Sharing Essential Information
1:06:48 Overcoming Fear of Confrontation
1:14:05 Sister's Rejection by Baptist Friend
1:30:23 Investigating Family Dysfunction
1:37:54 Internalizing Mother's Fear
1:59:44 Invalidating Experiences
2:03:08 Ideal Outcomes and Responsibility
2:08:09 Reflections on Restitution vs. Responsibility
2:11:28 Negative Consequences of Child Abuse
2:15:10 Unpacking Society's Treatment of Children
2:26:27 Protecting Children from Abuse
2:28:21 Power Dynamics in Society
2:31:56 Remembering the Pandemic
2:34:56 Society's Acceptance of Evil
2:38:16 Society's Willingness to Break Laws
2:40:36 Coping Mechanisms and Society
2:45:30 Focus on Child Abuse Prevention
2:47:31 Society's Contradictory Standards
2:49:39 Wrapping Up the Conversation
Stefan begins the conversation by expressing his apologies for his delayed arrival and dives into the topic of Peaceful Parenting, drawing attention to the compelling data that convincingly supports its efficacy. He elaborates on the dangers of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), likening them to the risks associated with smoking and asbestos, underscoring the critical role of therapy in mitigating their impact. The discussion then shifts towards a reflection on childhood experiences, noting the prevalence of neglect during the '70s and '80s, contrasting it with the increased incidence of psychological abuse in contemporary times. Stefan reminisces about the laissez-faire parenting style of the past, sharing anecdotes of his own childhood and the minimal parental involvement in ensuring safety. As the conversation progresses, Stefan delves into personal experiences of neglect and the emotional ramifications of feeling overlooked and burdensome as a child. Callers chime in with their own stories of parental neglect due to work prioritization, highlighting the profound impact it had on their emotional well-being. They engage in a poignant exploration of the communication dynamics within families, delving into the complexities of parental responsibilities amidst financial stress and the essential role of open dialogue in addressing neglect's effects on children. The discussion takes a profound turn as they unpack the emotional and psychological factors influencing individuals' responses to challenges, citing the caller's father's reluctance to confront business performance issues as a case in point. They explore themes of fear, self-criticism, and avoidance of change, positing that these behaviors may stem from childhood experiences and ingrained fears of self-critique. Stefan underscores the significance of self-awareness and adaptability in navigating life's adversities and embracing necessary transformations for personal growth and success. In a poignant segment, Stefan draws parallels between navigating success and thriving in high altitudes, urging listeners to confront their comfort zones and the inherent discomfort that accompanies progress. A caller shares deeply personal revelations about familial challenges, including past abuse and addiction struggles, prompting a discussion on the importance of truth-sharing within families for understanding dynamics and safeguarding future generations. Despite the caller's apprehensions, Stefan encourages them to confront their mother with the information, emphasizing the significance of transparency in fostering familial understanding and healing. The conversation extends to exploring complex family dynamics surrounding the caller's struggles with self-worth and their sister's rebellious phase, with Stefan emphasizing the need for empathy, curiosity, and deeper exploration of emotional root causes. They delve into the impact of parenting styles on self-esteem and challenge conventional narratives of attributing emotional struggles to misplaced blame, advocating for a nuanced understanding of familial dynamics and their long-lasting effects on individuals' self-worth and relationships.
Stefan:
[0:00] Well, hi everybody. Got a little bit of time this afternoon.
Sorry for being a little late.
This is a chat on the Discord channel and, I mean, of course, it's your show.
So if you have questions, comments, issues, challenges, problems, you know the generic list.
You just want to unmute yourself and go for it. I'm all here to be all ears.
Yeah, just while everyone's waiting, one of the reasons I was a little late was I was working on the Peaceful Parenting book, away from home and i'm a general kind of guy like i'm always looking for every tiny little bit of microscopic efficiency that i humanly can and so one of the things i do is i say okay how long is it going to take for me to make food to sort of eat food and then sort of to tidy up at this that and the other and so what i do is i say okay well if it's you know i don't know let's say it's 25 25 minutes, but it's, you know, I can get to a place to work in like 10 minutes.
It's like, I've just saved five minutes and so on, right?
So, I went and had a little lunch and was working on the Peaceful Parenting book while my daughter was doing some work on her own.
Stefan:
[1:09] And I was just running through some of the data and we have a giant intergalactic galaxy's worth of data, mostly thanks to Jared.
And it's really great because, of course, one of the reasons that I I held off on writing the peaceful parenting book for so long was that I really wanted the data, make the data case, right? So that it's kind of irrefutable.
So it's not just moral philosophy, because moral philosophy, you can deploy arguments of utilitarianism against it and say, well, you might say that it's immoral to say physically discipline your children, but it's the only practical solution to childhood malfeasance,
Stefan:
[1:42] you know, this, that, and the other, right?
All this sort of nonsense that goes on and so i wanted to be able to push back hard on the empirical arguments or the pragmatic arguments that are used as a support for abusive parenting, practices so we've got all of this data and it's uh there's the theory then there's the practice and then there's the data right there's the three general the theory is the morality the practices, how you implement peaceful parenting, and the data is.
And here's all of the empirical reasons why you absolutely have to if you care about your children at all.
And so I've been sort of running through some of the data scenarios, and I was just working on one.
Stefan:
[2:29] To do with asbestos. I know, that's a bit of a... So, what I'm generally doing in the book is I'm saying, okay, so, do you know about the risks of smoking?
Yes, yes, I know about the risks of smoking. Oh, that's interesting.
Okay, do you know about the risks of, say, asbestos, right?
Is asbestos bad for you and so on? Do you know about all of these sort of various risks in the world and how much they've been focused on?
And, of course, people will say, do you know the risks risks of drunk driving and so on, do you?
So, and of course, since I was a kid, and of course this is going back a ways now, there have been constant public service campaigns about how bad smoking is, how dangerous asbestos is, and dangers of drunk driving and so on, right?
Obesity used to be talked about more, but it's talked about less for a variety of reasons.
Stefan:
[3:21] And so what I'm doing is I'm comparing the risks that you know about with the risks of child abuse.
So the physical risks of child abuse and one of the data points, a couple of the data points I'll mention that I was sort of working on recently.
One is, if you compare smoking to, say, four or more ACEs, well, twice as many people have four or more ACEs as are smokers.
Stefan:
[3:52] And having four or more ACEs can be, again, absent sort of therapy and self-reflection and self-knowledge and so on.
So I don't, this is not like a doom thing, right? There's no amount of therapy that will undo the damages of smoking, but there certainly is therapy that will undo the damages of adverse childhood experiences.
And the data seems pretty clear that...
Stefan:
[4:14] Untreated ACEs, four or more, which is a significant portion of the population, is twice as dangerous as smoking.
It's twice as dangerous as smoking. Of course, everybody knows all about the dangers of smoking.
How many people know that four or more ACEs, which is a significant portion of the population, about a fifth of people, I think, is twice as dangerous as smoking.
Stefan:
[4:36] Now, if you look at another scenario, which is asbestos, I was just working on that today, Well, if you are like a worker who's regularly exposed to asbestos, like you're working with asbestos, you know, full time for decades, then you have a tenfold increase in the chance of cancer.
I'm sorry, a fivefold increase in the chance of cancer. You have a 500% increase.
And if you are a smoker with certain types of cancers, you have a 10 times risk, right?
So 500%, 1,000%, five times risk for asbestos, working with it daily for like decades, and a 10 times risk for chronic smokers to develop certain kinds, obviously lung cancer and so on.
And yet, if you look at the data of the risks of childhood sexual and physical abuse, neglect, and murder, it's not twice, which is ACEs are twice as bad as smoking, It's not five times asbestos is five times more dangerous than not being exposed to asbestos. It's not smoking as a whole, which is 10 times.
No, no. It's 40 times.
40 times the risk of childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, and murder.
Caller:
[5:57] That's all kinds of abuse? Yes. If you had this ACE, you'd just pick your flavor.
Stefan:
[6:04] Basically? Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by that. Go ahead.
Caller:
[6:07] Well like so if you were neglect it, For example, you're more likely to abuse in that vein when you're an adult.
Stefan:
[6:16] Well, no, that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is the risks.
I mean, I think you're right, but what I'm talking about is your risks of being abused as a child are 40 times higher in a single mother household with a non-related adult male living with you, right?
Stefan:
[6:33] So it's the boyfriend, the battering boyfriend kind of syndrome.
so if you're you have a single mother and she brings a man into the house your risk of being abused as a child is 40 times higher than if she was married or or with a with living with your father right so as far as what happens after that well that's a sort of free will issue how do you deal with the abuse that you've suffered you go to therapy and so on and a 40 a 40 times risk is is really one of the worst situations that you can be in.
It's hard for me to think of any other kind of situation where you've got a 40 times, not 40%, but a 40 times, a 4,000% increase.
Stefan:
[7:19] I mean, the relationship between loneliness and illness is greater than the risk of median moderate smoking and illness, but it's not 40x.
40 X is just like staggering in the realm of social sciences.
And I basically just want to point out that, you know, if we did care about our children, this would all be common knowledge.
But of course, single mothers tend to vote for larger government.
So the power mongers hide this fact.
Caller:
[7:48] See, 40x is so staggering a number, that just proves to me the existence of evil.
Like, you can't ignore something that huge.
And if you are, it's got to be willful.
Stefan:
[8:02] Well, yes. I mean, and this is the dual layer of evil that I'm talking about in the ACE section.
And it is actually quite good because, of course, I mean, it's funny.
I was just looking up Chris Doyce, I think his name was, was a researcher that I talked with in 2009, like 15 years ago.
I talked about him with regards to the value of therapy that he'd done a big research paper from the University of Warwick in England, which was that getting therapy is up to 40 times, between 32 and 40 times better for you than getting money, right?
So if you just put a thousand bucks and change into therapy, that's worth the equivalent of 32 to 40,000 pounds extra money in terms of your sort of overall happiness and well-being.
So I sort of talk about in this ACE section saying there's three layers in which we process the ACEs. One is the personal ACEs that we may have experienced.
The other is understanding the data of how dangerous adverse childhood experiences are for our health and for our future, for our sleep, our well-being, our pair bonding, all of that kind of stuff.
That's the second. And then the third level is how well all this data is hidden.
Stefan:
[9:20] How well society steps over these bodies in the pursuit of power and free stuff that we simply won't talk about what's best for children and then that leads to a whole section well it comes out of a whole section i've got in the book about let's look at the empirical evidence uh society claims to love its children and so let's look at the empirical evidence and one of the things that jared had you know lots of brain brain flashes on this one and he went to chat gpt4 and he said He said, okay, give me an exhaustive list of the top priorities that need to be addressed in order to make society better or happier.
What are the top priorities that society has in its moral focus?
Because, of course, number one, racial inequity and so on.
Anyone want to put any guesses as to where child abuse lay in that list? 43. Sorry?
Caller:
[10:13] Probably not on the list.
Stefan:
[10:14] It did creep in at 19.
Caller:
[10:17] Ooh, 19. Wow.
Stefan:
[10:19] Yeah, it did creep in at 19. Magnificent, of course.
And so society that claims so much to care about its children, it's 19 out of 20.
Caller:
[10:33] What do you think is the most common adverse childhood experience?
Stefan:
[10:38] Well, I mean, I think that's changed from when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I think the most common childhood experience, the most adverse experience was neglect.
The sort of 70s and 80s kids were famously left to raise themselves.
Latchkey kids, and somebody posted on X the other day, it was a bunch of celebrities, like a bizarre list of celebrities, A real scatterbag of celebrities.
There was, who was there? Grace Jones.
There was Andy Warhol. There was Linda Carter.
There was some baseball guy, I don't know, Reggie Jackson. And it was just a list of all of these celebrities. And this used to come on TV.
And it came on at different hours. And this one was, it's 10 o'clock.
Do you know where your children are?
and i think there was a buffalo station the buffalo was sort of famous for cheek to waga a ton of wanga or whatever it was and it was sort of famous and it was kind of a cliche and a joke among us kids because we were tv kids right the screens is not a new thing and it was always you know terrible fire and it was always like these um we've turned the buffalo auditorium into a mud pit because there'd be these giant truck rallies which actually went to once with my my brother.
It was actually quite interesting to see. But on the.
Stefan:
[11:56] WNBC. I can't remember what it was, but it was a Buffalo station, which we could get even over the air.
Stefan:
[12:02] And for them, you know, to hell with 10 o'clock. It's 11 o'clock.
Do you know where your children are? It's like 11 o'clock.
Stefan:
[12:09] Do you know where? And nobody knew. Like I was famously roaming around the neighborhood.
You know, I would cross train tracks in the middle of the night up in high trestle bridges and we'd go camping.
And I mean, I get that there's a certain amount of glorious anarchy in childhood that's kind of cool and fun but this was just too much like it was just there was too unstructured there was no particular safety and security and the amount of child injuries around me when i was a kid was just legion i mean hugely hugely legion my brother got into a car and disengaged the brake when he was very little and rolled down the hill and of course could have died a friend of his got out of a car into traffic got creamed there were lots of injuries around when i was a kid one guy in my apartment building had been playing on the train tracks and lost both his legs and like it was just way way too uh too laissez-faire and you know for reasons that are lots of big and complicated but i think neglect was real big in the past i think now uh psychological abuse is the big one for kids because of all of the you know global warming and you're gonna die and all of this end of the world nihilism that's being hit with kids the toxic masculinity stuff, the Schrodinger's feminism, which is you're either massively empowered or a helpless victim of the patriarchy, like all of that psychological abuse, I think, is the real big harm on kids at the moment.
So I don't know. It sounds like a downgrade from the neglect because the neglect was just indifference.
This is like focused on twisting the brains of kids. So that would be my first guess. Sorry, go ahead.
Caller:
[13:35] I was going to say, like, I remember vividly, because I was a kid in the 90s and going to, There was a park in my town, and you would hardly ever see parents there.
Stefan:
[13:47] Yeah.
Caller:
[13:48] And taking my kid, my kid's turning six this year, going to just a normal park, it's filled with parents everywhere nowadays.
Completely different.
Stefan:
[14:01] Yeah, and I'm not sure why exactly parenting was so indifferent when I was a kid.
I mean, there was a certain amount of, you know, well, single mothers and working and so on.
But the interesting thing for me was that it didn't matter whether my mother was working or not.
Like, that didn't fundamentally matter. When she was working, yeah, I mean, there would be latchkey kids and all of that. And I remember, you know, I was constantly losing my keys, right?
You know how it is. You've got some key, and it was just like a little key.
It wasn't even on a chain. I have some little key, and, you know, you put it in your pocket. You go roaming around.
You're jumping. You're doing somersaults. You're swinging on trees.
And then your key's gone.
Stefan:
[14:40] And, you know, I could never really tell my mother that I'd lost my key because she had this bizarre belief that somehow somebody would know whose key it was.
You know, some key in the woods, you know, you pick it up and scan, scan, scan, aha, it's to that Molineux apartment door.
And so she had this, because, you know, I mean, a new key was like a buck.
It was not very expensive to make a new key.
but i i couldn't tell my mother that i i had lost my key because she just kind of freak out and violence and paranoia and all this kind of stuff and so a lot of times uh i would come home and i would talk to the superintendent now the superintendent didn't have a master key but he would bring out his ladder and i would climb to we lived on the second floor i would climb to the second floor up a ladder and get in that way because the windows were often unlatched, That is seriously epic.
Caller:
[15:36] I cannot see that happening today.
Stefan:
[15:38] No, this is from when I was like, you know, eight years old or whatever, right?
And I distinctly remember roaming around the neighborhood at the age of four, because I remember my brother went with a babysitter downtown and I didn't want to go, but I was not even left at home. I was just left to roam around the neighborhood.
And I remember thinking, man, I should have gone downtown.
I really, I should have gone downtown. Just roaming the neighborhood, you know, kind of hungry and thirsty a lot of times as well.
I actually, as a kid, this is also true in Canada, you would find water that you could drink, right? I mean, like dousing.
I remember that I found a spring in the woods in Darmels where there was pretty fresh bubbling water.
It tasted a little iron-like, as this stuff tends to do, but I would...
Stefan:
[16:26] Be able to go and get water. Because, I mean, there weren't a lot of drinking fountains around if the school was closed and so on. It was just, it was tough to get, it was tough to get water.
And so I would do that kind of stuff. And I couldn't do it in Canada because we lived in Canada.
We moved in the same apartment building we moved three times for various reasons of sort of rent and money.
But we were always above the fifth floor, fourth floor. We were on the ninth floor, the fifth floor, and the fourth floor. So I couldn't take any ladders up there.
Stefan:
[16:57] And occasionally I would go and knock on the person saying, can I climb from your balcony to my balcony, which was a ridiculous thing to do when you're five stories up, just climb around the balcony and get from one to the next.
Or I would, in the morning, I would leave the door unlocked and hope that my mom would not lock it before she left wherever she was going.
And, you know, I would just generally go and hang out at friends' places after school and hope that maybe they'd give me some dinner or something.
thing but yeah there really was this neglect thing and it didn't matter whether my mother was working or not so it wasn't fundamentally whether somebody was working or not but, certainly down in the sort of lower echelons of trash planet where i emerged from there was just this kind of indifference to children children you know this is the old thing children are just to be seen and not heard right or you know my mother's famous statement you might be a pain but you're not a windowpane if i was between her and the tv or something but children were just an irritant they were an intrusion they were an annoyance and this is very very sorry go ahead i.
Caller:
[18:03] Was gonna say there's a lot of needling growing up just.
Stefan:
[18:06] Is that what you experienced or are you talking about mine what i experienced yeah what did you get you're.
Caller:
[18:12] You're a burden you know you have no idea how much you're costing me it's kind of like they're self-centered parents and we're We're just this entity that has to be managed, you know?
Stefan:
[18:25] Yeah, it's like, you know, it's like, I don't know, some sort of recurring facial lesion, you know, like, I don't know, herpes or something. It's like, oh man, you know, it's back.
It's like, oh, your kids are home and all of that. I remember going hiking in my mid-teens. I went hiking with two friends in Algonquin.
And for various reasons, one guy got sick, we separated.
We just did everything pretty much wrong that you could imagine.
And I finally came home after having to spend a night or two on my own in the middle of the woods with bears around.
And my mother was like, oh, you smell! And I was like, well, excuse me, it didn't rain, I couldn't bathe.
And there was just this general annoyance.
Stefan:
[19:05] Of being home. But here's the funny thing too, is that there was always these contradictions. I don't know if you had this as well.
One was, it's annoying that you're home.
And the other one was, well, you just treat this place like a hotel.
You just come home, you get food, and then you go out.
Stefan:
[19:21] And so on, right? My famous rejoinder was, well, no, a hotel has clean towels.
So it's not really like a hotel for me.
But yeah, there was this like, it's annoying if you're home and it's annoying if you're out. And I don't know what people had in their minds, but it was something, I don't know what it is for others.
I think for my mother, I think it was something like this great life I could have had if it wasn't for these meddling kids.
You know, if it wasn't for these kids, man, I'd just be right in the red carpet. I'd be a movie star.
I'd be, you know, like, I'm sure that I could be a movie star if I could get out of this place. I think there was this life on the other side of kids that kids were constantly interfering with.
And of course, it's a way of making sure your kids don't have any demands is to continually communicate to them that they're irritants and they're extraneous and they're sort of hanging by a thread and you don't really care and they're annoying.
That really does minimize the demands that kids are going to place upon you, with the downside being that it puts them at great risk of external predation because there's no particular bond with parents that's going to protect them.
So yeah, the indifference and the hostility to kids, I think it may have swung a little too far the other way, but I think that was the big thing when I was a kid. What about you guys?
What was your experience of this kind of stuff? You can just unmute and yammer as you see fit.
Caller:
[20:43] So I kind of had the experience. Hopefully the mic is awful.
I had the experience where I had similar neglect, but it wasn't due to malice, but it was due to the prioritization of the business and creating money and wealth for themselves over me.
and one image that i steer into my mind is i was five or six showed mom painting and she's like yeah whatever and and she went back to her work where she was grinding away for 10 12 hours a day for years and sorry was it was it necessary.
Stefan:
[21:19] Wealth like food food and shelter wealth or was it like extraneous wealth like second car or some sort of upgrade wealth.
Caller:
[21:27] At the start it was necessary wealth but they were fortunate enough to create a niche in the market where it then went to we can afford a multi-million dollar house and this never changed and i always got the comment that man you were such a quiet kid and you didn't really bother or badger me i'm like well now after listening to you quite obvious because you would never listen my need, yeah i.
Stefan:
[21:57] Have that still even with my daughter like i was working today on some pretty complicated data wrangling and she's like, dad, I want to show you something or dad, look at this.
I just got, oh dad, you know, and it's like, part of me is like, and I sort of still have the old, you know, the old paradigm.
And so of course it's like, yes, please interrupt me because I'm enthusiastic.
I want to be enthusiastic about the stuff that you're going through or thinking or experiencing.
But the other heart is, can't you see that I'm working, you know, I need to concentrate. And I still have that, you know, that vague shadow from like 50 years ago.
Caller:
[22:33] I second the experience. Very similar.
Stefan:
[22:36] You mean the neglect or the hostility? Or both?
Caller:
[22:40] Yeah, 100%. Parents were both focused on maintaining. It was mainly out of sustenance, though not out of luxury.
Stefan:
[22:47] How did that kind of stuff show up for you?
Caller:
[22:50] I just wouldn't do anything with children.
Children's needs were not a factor. It was you.
I was really into baseball. ball i could never get my dad to play ball with me to train or do any of that stuff so what i needed was not important because i pay the mortgage now did you.
Stefan:
[23:11] Did you try much i'm not saying whether you should obviously or shouldn't have but you said you couldn't get you did you ask a lot i don't remember my asking my mom to play because you know chronic irritation just seemed to be everywhere when i was a kid just this chronic irritation and so i just i don't remember even even asking her i.
Caller:
[23:31] Remember my mom was the one who actually got my debt to leave the desk for like 15 minutes go play with the kids kind of thing yeah right right because i had a very similar experience you know i didn't want to bother them and they were you know always busy trying to make ends meet.
Stefan:
[23:52] Right. Now, was that the story or was that, I mean, nobody works, you know, 16 hours a day, right?
So they've got some time to play with you. Was this story just, well, no, for heaven's sakes, we have to work for ever and ever, amen, and you're always an interruption?
Because, of course, when we were younger, also, I mean, the 24-7 email and text availability at work wasn't really a thing.
Caller:
[24:16] Yeah, it's hard to pinpoint in childhood because the world was so different.
I remember my dad had a lot of contract work.
So he was legitimately busy.
And I remember even in the evenings, he would still choose to work.
But it was definitely an active choice on his part to just not participate in the family.
so and when i got older i would just interrupt him and he wouldn't mind so it was kind of like his default status was working but he would then make time to have an adult conversation he just wouldn't make time to have a child conversation.
Stefan:
[24:52] So sort of as an adult so like what age would you start interrupting him and he'd be okay 17 18 yeah i think a lot of i mean there's a lot of of dysfunction that shows up in the world around social awkwardness like just not knowing how to have conversations with people and for for men in particular i think a lot of this stuff is to do with um it just i don't know how to talk to people.
Caller:
[25:20] Well my dad did not have that problem he uh he was very good at communicating with people.
Stefan:
[25:27] But he was on you.
Caller:
[25:32] He was good.
Stefan:
[25:34] So you're not in the category called people, if I understand this correctly.
Caller:
[25:38] No, no, I'm in the category. I just think he wouldn't actively pursue it with me. I would have to come to him.
Stefan:
[25:46] So what did you see i'm not obviously disagreeing with you but what did you see with your father that would have you say he was really good interacting with people.
Caller:
[25:55] Oh yeah high charisma you know if you want to go dnd for.
Stefan:
[25:59] Yeah no i get that but like how would you see that as a kid.
Caller:
[26:03] How would i see that he was on the phone he was pleasant he was smiling happy people reciprocated so all the positive signs of a good communicator.
Stefan:
[26:13] And was he sort of uh uh you know charming to to waiters and waitresses, I guess, in particular?
Was he like a friend to all and brings a joy to everyone's heart except his kids, right?
Caller:
[26:25] Absolutely, a friend to everyone. Always had a joke. I remember he had a notepad of just jokes that he would just refer to.
Stefan:
[26:35] Oh, so these weren't spontaneous jokes? I mean, I guess they were sometimes.
Caller:
[26:39] No, they were. He would practice them. This is kind of like a Mr.
Collins reference from Pride and Prejudice. Do you come up with these on the fly, or do you practice them?
He would practice them.
Stefan:
[26:51] So maybe not totally charismatic if he's not spontaneous in that way.
Caller:
[26:57] Well, it was more for timing and delivery.
Stefan:
[27:00] Right, okay.
Caller:
[27:01] Honing a craft.
Stefan:
[27:03] And how was he with your mom?
Caller:
[27:07] In regards to communication?
Stefan:
[27:09] Yeah, yeah.
Caller:
[27:12] I mean, they seemed okay-ish. they were pretty volatile i mean just because there was a lot of financial stress.
Stefan:
[27:22] So that's interesting it's interesting to me that how long have you listened to this show for.
Caller:
[27:28] Uh probably about a year maybe.
Stefan:
[27:32] Okay so they were volatile and then what did you give me.
Caller:
[27:39] They were stressed because of financial stress.
Stefan:
[27:42] How do you.
Caller:
[27:43] Know maybe.
Stefan:
[27:43] They had financial stress because they were volatile.
Caller:
[27:46] Well you've got cause and.
Stefan:
[27:49] Effect really clear here and you give problem followed by immediate excuse as if that's empirically verifiable.
Caller:
[27:54] Well my mom was stressed out she was the one always raising the alarm bells that we were going to be homeless thrown down the street that sort of uh my dad was like no it's not as bad as you think we haven't missed to meal you know that was his main line well.
Stefan:
[28:11] I mean were they poor.
Caller:
[28:16] I mean poor in a sense that i mean we had everything couldn't pay the bills.
Stefan:
[28:20] Right i mean poor doesn't mean like it's not you can be a doctor and be poor.
Caller:
[28:23] Right pay your bills right the the the when my dad died we discovered how much robbing peter to pay paul was going on and And it wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great.
It was kind of like, oh, he's got about a couple grand. He's been floating around.
Stefan:
[28:41] Oh, that's it? Yeah. Your last name isn't Bankman Freed, is it?
Is that what I'm talking about?
Caller:
[28:47] No, no, no.
Stefan:
[28:48] Got it. Okay.
So was it a lifestyle thing? Were they spending with regards to their lifestyle?
Like, I mean, I think everyone's known someone who, hey, I got a raise, I can spend more.
And it's always like riding the edge of the numbers.
Caller:
[29:09] Oh, it was definitely because my dad ran his own business. What?
Yeah, he was just not a good business.
Stefan:
[29:17] Okay, so that's different from running your own business, right?
I mean, lots of people who run their own businesses make good money, right?
Caller:
[29:25] Right, right. My dad was not one of them.
Stefan:
[29:27] Mm-hmm.
Caller:
[29:28] It was a guy who ran his own business made next to no money.
Stefan:
[29:31] And why was that, do you think?
Caller:
[29:35] If I knew that magic answer, I would be doing much better.
Stefan:
[29:41] Oh, you'd be doing much better.
Caller:
[29:43] Right.
Stefan:
[29:43] Okay, well, let's get the answer. Unless anybody else has other topics, I find this one quite interesting.
Caller:
[29:49] Well, I don't think he did a good job putting in business processes.
so it was two loosey-goosey not data-driven decisions that kind of thing because i remember my dad was trying to argue for some sort of i forget what the specifics of a situation he wanted to get involved in and i said what are your books what do you make on a monthly basis and he just dodged the question couldn't answer it like just not even keeping any sort of admin admin organization going.
So when you try and run a business like that, you have no idea if you're doing anything good or bad.
Essentially, you're just, oh, I made some money. All right, go pay this bill.
Stefan:
[30:37] Okay, so why didn't he...
I mean, he must have had some tracking to do his taxes and stuff like that, right? So why didn't he track stuff on a consistent basis?
Caller:
[30:49] He did. The taxes are interesting because he has an accountant.
Actually, one of my clients now is the same accountant.
And she always found ways to get him a tax write-off because he had a lot of kids.
So he never owed taxes, but he always ended up collecting a refund.
And I'm like, how do you get a refund? You don't pay into it.
Stefan:
[31:14] No, but hang on. So what I'm saying is that, I mean, he had to hand stuff over to his accountant, so he had to keep track of something.
Caller:
[31:20] Right, right. Yeah. I mean, he used QuickBooks, that sort of thing.
Stefan:
[31:23] Okay. So why wouldn't he track what he was doing?
Caller:
[31:27] I don't think he knew how to use QuickBooks properly.
Stefan:
[31:30] No, come on. Oh, my gosh. The excuses.
Caller:
[31:33] I'm going through the same thing now.
Stefan:
[31:34] Come on. Of course he knew. He could have just asked his accountant and paid his accountant 200 bucks for an hour of instruction.
I mean, let's not make the guy into a complete brain jellyfish.
Caller:
[31:45] No, I think he was a business brain jellyfish.
Stefan:
[31:48] I'm sorry, what?
Caller:
[31:49] I think he was a business brain jellyfish. I don't know.
Stefan:
[31:53] No, I don't think so. I mean, to even be an entrepreneur and make any money, you've got to be somewhat smart, right?
Caller:
[32:01] Yeah, I would agree with that.
Stefan:
[32:02] So, because you want to know why, and obviously, you know, your dad's dead, sympathies for that. But with regards to you, why did he not...
I mean, do you do this? Do you not track your costs and expenses?
Caller:
[32:14] I mean, I do on a monthly basis, yeah.
Stefan:
[32:18] Okay. So why did your dad not? I don't know.
It's not an intellectual thing, I can guarantee. I mean, I've been an entrepreneur for like 30 years, and I've done my sensible and not-so-sensible stuff.
I'm telling you, not tracking your business, that's not an intellectual thing, and it's not a knowledge thing at all.
Caller:
[32:39] I just think he was probably afraid of facing up to the fact that he's not making enough.
Stefan:
[32:46] Yeah, yeah, it's emotional. It's emotional. Yeah. It's emotional.
Caller:
[32:50] So he's going to focus, because he was very optimistic. He would refer to himself as what he used to say.
It was like blindingly optimistic, always going to focus on the positive versus being a pessimist.
My mom, of course, was the opposite. She was the quote-unquote realist.
Stefan:
[33:08] Well, and the fact that he was unreasonably optimistic would, I'm sure, mean that your mother would feel she had to be the counterweight.
like she had to be extra negative because he was so mindlessly positive so you know you you put the burden on other people if you're not realistic yourself like whatever realism you're lacking other people have to if they care about you or their fates are tied to you as married couples are, they have to overcompensate if everything's great you know and and it's not then other people have have to do the worrying for you like it's if you don't have concerns you know dum-de-dum and then they don't vanish from the world they just.
Caller:
[33:54] You know, maybe that's why my mom treated him kind of like a kid.
Stefan:
[33:58] Right.
Caller:
[33:59] She had to look out for him.
Stefan:
[34:00] Right. Because, I mean, when the toddlers. Right. They're constantly.
Caller:
[34:05] Got a lot of toddlers.
Stefan:
[34:06] Yeah. Well, you know, toddlers are like constantly acting in a way that's too risky. And you have to do the worrying for them.
Caller:
[34:15] Right.
Stefan:
[34:16] So if he's, you know, it's going to be great.
You know, like, I don't need to study for this test. I'm sure I've got it.
I put the book under my pillow, and I slept, so I'm sure I'm fine.
Well, other people then have to do all the worrying for you, right?
Caller:
[34:30] Right. What's interesting, though, about the business, now that me and my business partner have taken it over, it's started producing a lot more than when my dad was involved.
And we kind of like grimace and chuckle about the fact that we're kind of happy he's not involved in the business, even though that's like morbid and ghoulish.
Stefan:
[34:51] I'm sorry, why is that? I mean, we're just talking, I'm the business, right? If your dad was bad at running it, it's better that it's in your hands, isn't it?
Caller:
[34:59] It is, yeah.
Stefan:
[35:01] And how would your father feel looking at you doing much better with his business than he ever did?
Caller:
[35:07] I think he would have felt really proud because right before he died, for the first time in his life, he was actually letting go of it.
He was saying, you know what? I don't want to run it anymore.
I want Keith, my business partner, to do that.
And Keith is much, much better than my dad was. He's very much focused on the admin side.
Stefan:
[35:31] But was this when your dad was getting very old and dying or just dying?
Caller:
[35:36] Oh, no, no. No, he got, he got COVID at the hospital. I told you about it back in our.
Stefan:
[35:42] Oh gosh. Right, right, right. Okay. Right. Right.
So, why did your dad bump along in scant success?
Because that's some of your imprinting, right?
Caller:
[35:58] He said that he was a bad employee. He didn't get along with bosses, I guess.
Stefan:
[36:06] No, but then he worked for himself, right? He had his own business?
Caller:
[36:10] Yeah.
Stefan:
[36:11] So, why did that not take off? Now, of course, you can have a business that pays your bills and you don't want it to take off.
You don't want it to become huge because you want work-life balance and all that kind of stuff.
So I'm not saying it should have taken off, but if he was optimistic, I assume it's because he believed or wanted for the business to do better than it was. But why do you think he didn't take the steps to achieve that?
Caller:
[36:35] That it's a really great question i wish he was here because that no he doesn't need to be here no.
Stefan:
[36:43] You you absolutely you've got him in he is here i mean you had decades of experience with the guy he's he's he's in you we're just looking for the ghost of him in you to give us the answer which is going to be accurate.
Caller:
[36:52] Yeah yeah the ouija board.
Stefan:
[36:55] Called your nose hairs we just poke a poke around in there sorry go ahead.
Caller:
[36:58] Why why would he do why would he make the decisions that he made, presuming that he knows better yeah, don't know because like for example in my history in my work history i worked for myself similar to him did a similar terrible job at running a business and then i stopped and got a job because I needed the structure.
Like, I need the admin structure.
He wouldn't do that, refuse to.
I do remember him saying he couldn't get a job. No one would hire him. I mean, he was like 69.
No one was going to hire a 69-year-old.
So he felt kind of locked into that. Like, he's going to make more money doing what he's doing than trying to pursue employment.
Stefan:
[37:56] Well, okay, but that I mean, I kind of got locked into freedom back in the day.
It's like, you're an evil cult leader.
Well, I guess regular employment's kind of off the table, so I've got to really double down on this business, right?
So, you know, the fact that you have few alternatives doesn't mean that you're incompetent at the only alternative you have.
It means that you've got to become extra good at it, right?
Caller:
[38:23] Yeah. And I...
Don't know what the emotion hangups were.
he he just didn't want to i don't think he ever wanted to be employed.
Stefan:
[38:40] Sorry i'm gonna have to i mean i appreciate these the shallowest of shallow answers okay so i'll tell you my thoughts and you know this is your dad and your life so maybe they'll fit and this is a very important conversation for everyone here i think which is what are the barriers to success okay and now in this case we're just talking about material success now Now, obviously, success is a pretty loaded term, but what are the barriers to success?
So in general, the two barriers to success, and this is very generic, so we'll drill down a little deeper, and y'all can feel free to chime in and all that's a convo, but it's fear and hatred.
Fear and hatred. In general, if you don't track what you're doing, it's because you fear self-recrimination.
You fear getting mad at yourself. You fear...
self-criticism because tracking your metrics in real time is exposing yourself to uh you know some fairly significant self-criticism sorry go ahead yeah.
Caller:
[39:43] Gary's saying here i wonder if this man's dad was an addict i can tell you he was and we found some of that stuff out.
Stefan:
[39:50] And what was he addicted to um.
Caller:
[39:53] I still get the emails from random bots on the internet uh soliciting sex and i don't think he was cheating on my mom but he probably had a porn habit i would expect just based on the fact that after he died and i monitored his inbox you know it's like you're getting these messages.
Stefan:
[40:13] But why i mean if you watched pornography i'm not sure exactly why i'm certainly no expert on how modern sex internet machinery works but i'm not sure why he would get emails unless did he sign up for people's only fans or or some i don't know where you would provide an, email and a payment history yeah.
Caller:
[40:34] I i don't know that that rock has.
Stefan:
[40:37] Not where they're coming from.
Caller:
[40:39] Yeah but they're always random gmail addresses.
Stefan:
[40:41] Oh okay okay it's.
Caller:
[40:44] One of the i bet you they're i think they're real people.
Stefan:
[40:46] Well then it might actually be nothing to do with his internet habits i mean you know everyone gets these i assume everyone gets i've seen a bunch of people who've talked about these you know i have bad news for you in broken english you know several months months ago, I gained access to all of your devices and in your history and right?
Caller:
[41:06] It's possible, but it would, it wouldn't make sense. It wouldn't.
I would say it's probably more likely than.
Stefan:
[41:16] Okay. But so what, so in terms of, of, of fear, fear of, of self-criticism, what would that have to do? Let's say he had these addictions or this addiction, what would that have to do with fear of self-criticism?
Caller:
[41:32] Don't know like he would just feel exposed i i guess he didn't want to fail fear of failure.
Stefan:
[41:40] Well and fear of failure is kind of generic because we're kind of talking about well why is there a fear of failure so if you are monitoring things in real time, then your concern is self-criticism right so i mean i'm sort of looking at i look at the data pretty much daily on a free domain and you know sometimes it goes up and you know recently it's not been going up and i have to look at myself and say okay well what is it that i can do better or different or you know do i ascribe it to general economic conditions and inflation, and and and so on right so uh you you have to have the capacity for am i am i doing really good shows am i doing the best that i can am i taking risks am i uh engaging you know people People want more call-in shows, so I've been booking more call-in shows.
But then it takes a while, of course, for that to translate into donations and so on.
So you have to be self-critical. If you're avoiding the data, it's usually because you're avoiding the self-criticism.
Caller:
[42:40] Right.
Stefan:
[42:43] And the reason you avoid self-criticism is you're abusive to yourself.
That's why people avoid self-criticism. They're not really avoiding self-criticism.
They're avoiding abuse, right?
Caller:
[42:58] Abusive to yourself. Can you elaborate on that?
So he doesn't want to look at the books or he doesn't want to look at feedback to see a direction to take the business.
Stefan:
[43:10] Okay, so where does this, I don't know, blind idiot, sunny optimism, I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound overly harsh, but where does this Pollyanna stuff, it's great, the business is doing great, when it's not, where does that come from?
What's he fending off? Well, he's fending off self-attack.
And so my guess is that he himself was harshly criticized, abusively criticized as a child.
And therefore, when you're really harshly criticized as a child and you don't process it, you end up with a very weird relationship.
It's not weird based on history, but it's weird based on productivity.
A weird relationship of criticism to yourself.
and if you can't find a way to have healthy criticism of yourself you really can't improve in anything because you know the criticism is so overwhelming that you just kind of push it back or push it away you push away the data because you don't want to attack yourself and and you have a reaction formation to the harshness of your internal critic by constantly being this sunny blind optimist it's just a way of dealing with that that kind of self-attacking.
Caller:
[44:24] Do you think this would lead to something like procrastination.
Stefan:
[44:29] Uh, I, I certainly think that it could, I certainly think that it could.
And, and certainly your father, I'm, I'm sure was a huge procrastinator because not studying the metrics, not studying the data is kind of procrastinating because you're putting off the knowledge you need to have.
You know, it's like, if you're a pilot, you don't check the instruments once an hour, right? Right.
I mean, if you're continually checking the instruments, because you need to know, um, you need to know what's going on.
Like we've all had those long drives. I remember driving for two days straight, like, you know, 14 hours a day to get up north.
And it was like, this was before GPS, but I write these, like, you're now on the highway for 900 miles.
So, you know, you just kind of space out and, you know, look for the occasional gas station and that's about it.
And so, you know, but if you're flying a business, like, you have to be checking it pretty continually.
Like your investments. Like, if you're a buy-sell investment guy, you've got to keep tracking what's going on, like, several times a day, I assume, right?
So, I think that if you're not getting the data that you need to do a good job or to continuously improve, that is a kind of procrastination, if that makes sense.
Caller:
[45:38] Yeah, and he was very reluctant to pivot or evolve with, I mean, just because of that whole lack of data thing.
Stefan:
[45:48] Saying well no that the lack of the data but so why wouldn't he evolve because if you say i need to change something you're admitting that you're doing something wrong right and now you can say oh well the market has changed or the environment whatever it is right but if you say i need to change something you have to say there's something i'm doing that's not as good as something i could could be doing or should be doing.
So if you can't have a healthy relationship to self-criticism, and this is, of course, not just to do with business, right?
It's to do with everything, being good in bed or being a good friend or being good in business or whatever you want to say.
Can you pivot to doing something different? And what is your relationship to having to change?
change and a lot of people get stuck in this sort of groundhog day repetition sounds a little bit like your dad with this business they get stuck in this groundhog day repetition because they can't accept the implicit self-criticism of having to change, hmm.
Caller:
[47:01] And, and that, and the thing is the, the, the success that we're having now with him not here is because we're able to adapt.
We're looking ahead. We're trying to see where the market's going.
I mean, it's, it's an it business. So we're doing product development.
We're, we're doing all the things businesses do, you know? and it's paying dividends and it's like why did my dad not want to do any of that stuff.
Stefan:
[47:36] Right and you can see this with women who keep dating the wrong guy like they keep dating the wrong guys and one of the main reasons they do that is they can't accept the criticism of having dated the wrong guys, so they have to just keep dating the wrong guy because they can't admit that they're wrong Now, admitting that you're wrong doesn't mean that you did anything wrong before.
I mean, because it could just be the environment has changed, right? The things have changed, whatever. And so, yeah, that's, you know, that's fine.
But what is your relationship to saying what I'm doing is wrong, what I'm doing is suboptimal, what I'm doing needs to change.
But, of course, you guys are much more comfortable with that because that's what you're doing, right? right?
And your dad wasn't. But I would say that there may be a certain time where you hit a success metric that is going to be tough for you.
Caller:
[48:38] What do you mean?
Stefan:
[48:39] Well, if you have grown up with, would you say that, like, in terms of, people who survive in the business world, so, like, bottom 10% is, like, barely scraping by, my top 10% is making a fortune.
Where did your dad fit in that entrepreneurial? You're making money, but how much? What percentage would he be in?
Caller:
[49:03] Oh, definitely bottom 10.
Stefan:
[49:05] Okay, so bottom 10%. Right.
Caller:
[49:07] Yeah.
Stefan:
[49:08] So at some point, altitude is really tough.
At some point. And if you think of the people who, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg, when he started Facebook at the age of 21 or something like that.
And he's able to navigate himself up.
Now, Bill Gates, of course, started Microsoft very early on.
And I think he basically...
blew out of microsoft because of the doj investigation regarding internet explorer versus netscape navigator back in the 90s but he'd be he'd be the world's first trillionaire if he just hung on to his microsoft stock right so he there was a certain amount of altitude i would assume that he was not particularly comfortable with or maybe they just had stuff on him i don't know but there's a certain you can see this with people there's a certain altitude, above which they get dizzy because we're not really designed you know if i had to go live at a 5,000-foot altitude to the Andes or something, I mean, I'd be short of breath the whole time.
Whereas the people, it only took a couple of thousand years for the people who live in very high altitudes for their lungs to adapt to those high altitudes.
Caller:
[50:17] You know, what you're describing makes sense because basically you're saying people will not leave their comfort zone, particularly if that zone is providing something for them that they need.
Stefan:
[50:31] So yes for sure there's there's an altitude at which everyone gets dizzy like i think you we can all do this mind exercise right let's say somebody gave you a billion dollars tomorrow right i mean i suppose there'd be a certain level of excitement but wouldn't there also be a certain amount of oh my god what do i do now like like notch well what was his name the guy who invented minecraft uh he he sold it i think he became a billionaire or something out out of the sale of it and he kind of hated it no he did because he's like i'm home all my friends are working i'm home i got no one to hang out with i got nothing to do i think he got married divorced or something and of course then you worry oh every woman who's attracted to me is it's only the money you know i don't feel love for myself it's a great risk and danger and then you got to figure out how to manage the money and there's lots of people who will offer you great oh invest in this you'll make a fortune and lots of people who now want to be your best friend because you You've got all this money and so on.
There's a certain amount of altitude that makes people uneasy.
And everyone has, I assume, and if you guys want to chime in on this either in text or in voice, I'd certainly be happy to hear.
But isn't there a certain amount of altitude where you're like, oh, feeling a little uncomfortable here?
Stefan:
[51:53] And then maybe you adjust, maybe you don't and so on. and then the question is of course well what was your father's uh altitude what was he capable of.
Stefan:
[52:03] Exist what level was he capable of flourishing at.
Caller:
[52:05] Right see and i i think i think he did some self-sabotage in regard because i know his childhood was pretty bad from the snippets i I got from him.
And there was some like serious stuff that, uh, Like his, his dad was in the military and his mom was, I'm not sure.
I don't know how much, what, what he got. He was the first of eight kids.
Stefan:
[52:41] Right.
Caller:
[52:41] First born. And there was some sexual crap that he went through as a kid that he told me about right before he died.
Stefan:
[52:49] Oh gosh.
Caller:
[52:50] Yeah.
Stefan:
[52:50] Maybe that's where his creepy addictions came from or something.
Caller:
[52:53] I, he, he always told me, it's like, oh, we.
You know, our family has this like addictive sort of gene thing.
I don't know if he bought into that old gene stuff, but I never understood it because he never, you know, he never gave me the background until like last, what, four years ago?
And it was basically some sexual abuse and he was the abuser, but he was very young.
so it wasn't like what age i believe it was like 10 or 12 in that range and.
Stefan:
[53:34] It was against.
Caller:
[53:35] Younger children.
Stefan:
[53:36] Is that right.
Caller:
[53:36] Yeah his younger sibling oh gosh so but it explained why we never got invited to the family reunions but that's like the least.
Stefan:
[53:48] Hang on i mean that's a creepy laugh man all due respect that's.
Caller:
[53:51] Like the least funny shit.
Stefan:
[53:52] I've heard all day and i don't know what the hell you're laughing about because.
Caller:
[53:55] I remember as a kid growing up like why don't we ever go visit our aunts and uncles and i never knew because your father.
Stefan:
[54:02] Molested his younger siblings.
Caller:
[54:05] Yeah just i only heard about the one but i imagine that has played into his whole perspective so So if he's, if he has this overwhelming sense of guilt from that, just based on how he was, Because, I mean, I never had any abuse, if anything like that.
Stefan:
[54:30] Now, did he, was he like no sleepovers kind of dad? Or what did he do to keep you safe in this sort of situation?
Caller:
[54:38] Oh, no, there was nothing like that. He did nothing.
Stefan:
[54:42] Oh, he didn't do anything to protect you guys?
Caller:
[54:45] Right.
Stefan:
[54:45] I mean, did he at least street proof you and say, you know, this is what's not allowed and here's what happens if it happens?
Here's what you must do if it happens?
Caller:
[54:54] No. No, I was drinking by 16 on weekends with my buds.
Like, there was no boundaries.
Stefan:
[55:05] And did your, I guess you wouldn't know, maybe you've asked your mother, did she know about this side of your father?
Caller:
[55:12] I have not asked her about that.
Stefan:
[55:14] Four years? Why not?
Caller:
[55:16] I just didn't want to go there.
Stefan:
[55:21] Well, that's the tautology. Why haven't you done it? I didn't want to do it.
that answers nothing i mean you don't have to answer but i.
Caller:
[55:29] I i don't see the value in it particularly now with my mom i mean my mom just got remarried so saying hey mom did you know dad, molested his younger sister like.
Stefan:
[55:45] Very awkward.
Caller:
[55:48] I don't i don't know what the point would be at this at this what.
Stefan:
[55:53] You mean by the point what.
Caller:
[55:56] Value does it bring to our relationship bring that up.
Stefan:
[56:00] Well i think what it would do is it would tell you how close your parents were, that's true it would tell you how well your mother knew your father because it sounds like your mother had some significant criticisms of your father, yeah and if she knew about this, then the criticisms would be pretty unkind and if she didn't know about this then the criticisms are irrelevant because she didn't even know any foundational aspects of your father's history i.
Caller:
[56:40] Would bet she didn't know based on the nature of the conversation i had with him where he brought it up.
Stefan:
[56:47] No but why he may have told her on his deathbed as he told you.
Caller:
[56:55] Well he wasn't in the hospital when he told me this was before that and he had this kind of like deer in headlights look like i'm revealing something deep about my past that i it didn't seem like he had mentioned this to very many people if anyone else.
Stefan:
[57:14] Well that's a whole lot of fog He might have told your mom off to you Or if you say very many people Maybe it was just you and your mom I don't know I.
Caller:
[57:21] Don't know either.
Stefan:
[57:24] Right, Was he religious?
Caller:
[57:30] Oh, yeah.
Stefan:
[57:32] Okay, so he was, in a sense, making his peace with God at the confessional, right?
Caller:
[57:37] Maybe, yeah, could be.
I think he was trying to connect with me, based on the conversation.
Stefan:
[57:48] Sorry, go ahead.
Caller:
[57:49] Yeah, because from what I recall about the conversation, I was talking about some deep topic related to sexual abuse.
And that was the segue into him revealing that, because I believe he felt safe to reveal that to me.
Stefan:
[58:08] Now, what's interesting to me is that you have said, well, what's the point of my mom knowing, which of course begs the question, I'm sure that's a good answer, what's the point of you knowing?
Caller:
[58:22] I think the point of me knowing was that he needed to feel, accepted.
Stefan:
[58:31] Well that that's the point for him right what's the point of you knowing that's that's the benefit to him i don't because basically your question is well what's the value of my mother knowing right, right right and i mean the question is and maybe different answers or whatever but my question would then be well what's the point of you knowing i.
Caller:
[58:55] Never thought about it.
Stefan:
[59:01] But you see how you have this thing for your mom well i can't figure out the point it's like well but you didn't say my father told me this and i can't figure out the point it's only and the other reason too is that that if you have a secret, in general, isn't it kind of better to not have these kinds of secrets or to not hold them entirely yourself?
I mean, I could give you literally half a dozen reasons as to why it's a good thing to talk about, which doesn't mean you should or shouldn't.
I mean, there's other reasons you could make that it's not good to talk about. But sorry, go ahead.
Caller:
[59:36] Yeah, I would be of the mind that it's better to have this stuff fleshed out Well.
Stefan:
[59:43] Is your mother a grandmother?
Caller:
[59:45] Oh, yeah, yeah.
Stefan:
[59:46] Yeah. So she's around kids.
Caller:
[59:49] Right.
Stefan:
[59:49] I'm not saying she would do anything untoward.
Caller:
[59:52] Right.
Stefan:
[59:53] But if she chose a guy who was a child molesterer, then shouldn't she be alerted to her own blindness in this area so that she can keep more of an eye out on her grandkids?
Caller:
[1:00:11] Yeah, yeah. I don't know how much vetting went through.
I mean, the guy that she married, he's a pastor, so that could either be very good or very bad in that.
Stefan:
[1:00:27] And are you religious yourself?
Caller:
[1:00:29] Oh, yeah, yeah.
Stefan:
[1:00:30] Okay, so thou shalt not bear false witness if you're in possession of essential information that is important to the other person. Now, is it pleasant?
I don't know. I mean, I don't know what.
There's no asterisk on thou shalt not bear false witness, is there?
Unless it's unpleasant. Unless you can make up this what's the point excuse.
Caller:
[1:00:51] Yeah, but I'm not shying away from my dad. I'm not saying, oh, yeah, he was a super great guy. I'm not going to bear false witness about him.
Stefan:
[1:00:58] In no but your father has told you an essential fact about his life right and your mother is responsible for your father being in your life and so the fact that you have this information when the causal agent of you having this information doesn't have this information.
Caller:
[1:01:21] I don't know if she does or doesn't she I doubt she does but I guess my question is is keeping a secret bearing false witness at this point.
Stefan:
[1:01:36] Well does it help her be somewhat more alert to potential potential predation upon the children in her environment or her life to to know this.
Caller:
[1:01:54] I don't think so, because when it occurred to my father, like I said, he was probably between 10 and 12.
He became a Christian at 19 and essentially reversed his life.
Stefan:
[1:02:14] So, my mom and dad met when he was... Why did he tell you, do you think?
I know that there was this, you had talked about something to do with sexual abuse, but why did he tell you?
Caller:
[1:02:27] I think because he trusted me.
Stefan:
[1:02:29] So you don't trust your mother?
Because if revealing these secrets is based on trust and you don't want to share these secrets with your mother, wouldn't that mean you don't trust your mother?
Or it could be some other explanation, but that's what jumped into my head.
Caller:
[1:02:47] Yeah and the whole trust the whole trust thing it's like what is she going to do with this information beyond.
Stefan:
[1:02:56] What are you doing with this information I mean everything that you say about your mother could be applied to you right.
Caller:
[1:03:03] I don't follow.
Stefan:
[1:03:04] Well you're saying well I don't want to tell my mother because what's she going to do with this information well what do you consider it a positive or negative that you have this information.
Caller:
[1:03:16] I consider it a positive because it explains, it's a way for me to map my dad's behavior.
Stefan:
[1:03:25] So why would it not be a positive for your mother?
Caller:
[1:03:30] You know, when you put it like that, it would be a positive for your mom.
Stefan:
[1:03:34] And whether you tell her or not, I mean, obviously that's up to you, but don't make the decision not to tell her by avoiding things. That's all.
Because my concern would be, well, the reason I'm not telling my mother if, you know, maybe this would be the true or not, would be like, well, it's just, it's weird, it's uncomfortable, I feel odd about it, it might upset my mother. But those aren't good reasons, right?
Now, you may say, listen, I choose not to tell my mother, just don't avoid the topic in your head by ascribing it negative labels.
Like, well, what's the point or what's she going to do with this knowledge or this sort of paralysis of what's the outcome?
come i mean there's no so i think it is bearing false witness to some degree because it is essential information about the entire structure of the family your mother chose right right it is essential information do your siblings i don't know if you have do you can't remember do you siblings know oh.
Caller:
[1:04:29] Yeah yeah i got that.
Stefan:
[1:04:31] Oh so all the siblings know and the mom not all okay oh so So not all?
Caller:
[1:04:37] Not all the siblings, no.
Stefan:
[1:04:38] And why not? Oh, because it was your father who told other siblings or someone else?
Caller:
[1:04:44] No, no. As far as I know, my dad just told me.
Stefan:
[1:04:47] And then you told siblings?
Caller:
[1:04:50] They have mentioned it to two of my siblings.
Stefan:
[1:04:53] Okay, come on, man. Mentioned it?
Caller:
[1:04:56] Well, discussed it.
Stefan:
[1:04:57] You've told them?
Caller:
[1:04:59] Yes, I've told them.
Stefan:
[1:05:00] And am I minimizing this? Well, I mentioned it, you know, in passing, like you do when your father has confessed to molesting children that's.
Caller:
[1:05:06] Fair i i sat down i said this happened to my dad.
Stefan:
[1:05:12] Okay so you can understand my mild annoyance at this point right because with regards and doesn't mean you're you're annoying i'm just telling you my mild annoyance is this because i got this long run around for like 15 minutes about well what's the point of telling and and what what's she going to do with this information and and it turns out you already told other people.
Caller:
[1:05:34] Yeah, why can't I tell my mom?
Stefan:
[1:05:36] Oh my God. Like you've got already, you've got the answers to these things.
And yet you're asking me like this. There's no answer to these questions.
Why does she need to know? What's she going to do with the information? What does it matter?
She's now remarried. It's like, well, why did you tell your siblings then?
If all of these, if it doesn't matter, and what's the point?
And what are they going to do?
Did you tell only brothers or sisters Or maybe that's not an option.
Caller:
[1:06:07] Um just well Just my brothers.
Stefan:
[1:06:11] My one.
Caller:
[1:06:12] Sister's out in Colorado I don't talk to her.
Stefan:
[1:06:14] Okay, So What's the real reason You're not telling your mother And again, none of this is to do with should you tell her or not, right?
Don't bear false witness about yourself.
That's my big, don't bear false witness isn't to others, it's to the self.
Why aren't you telling? Why wouldn't you tell? If you've already told family members, then you've already answered these questions of what's the point and what are they going to do, right?
Caller:
[1:06:42] I'm afraid to stand up to my mom.
Stefan:
[1:06:44] But that's not the end. What do you mean, what's standing up to her?
You're just giving her information.
Caller:
[1:06:49] Giving her information that's going to make her feel better.
Stefan:
[1:06:51] He's going to make her feel bad. Okay.
And what's wrong with that?
Caller:
[1:07:10] What's wrong with that is...
Stefan:
[1:07:17] Are you saying that she shouldn't feel bad because she took a big risk in not understanding more about your father before giving him a bunch of kids because it could have gone quite the other way right if your father was a child molester as a child right then he could could have been particularly dangerous for the children she gave him, right?
Caller:
[1:07:40] Right.
Stefan:
[1:07:42] So she rolled a big freaking dice here, right?
Caller:
[1:07:46] Yeah. Herio is nailed it here.
Stefan:
[1:07:49] I'm sorry?
Caller:
[1:07:49] Your mom has trained you not to displease her. That's 100% true.
Stefan:
[1:07:54] Your mom has trained you not to displease her?
Caller:
[1:07:56] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:07:57] Okay.
Caller:
[1:07:59] Yeah, because that's the big thing in my penis.
Stefan:
[1:08:06] And what is the negative scenario that's in your head if you tell her this?
Caller:
[1:08:13] She's going to get upset.
Stefan:
[1:08:15] No, I get that. So I understand that. But what does that look like?
How does that play out in reality?
Caller:
[1:08:20] Well, she'll get hysterical.
She'll...
I gotta give my mom a little bit of credit because I did just stand up to her about the child abuse and she didn't react poorly to it.
Stefan:
[1:08:39] Gosh, what happened there?
Caller:
[1:08:42] Well, I talked to her about a particular instance in my past where she had beaten me for watching my little brother. properly.
And if you want to talk about training, it was a very vivid memory because she, smacked me for letting my brother get in the front yard because he could have got run over by a car, I kind of think.
And I remember feeling incredibly guilty, about that even though i was nine or ten at the time huh so interesting because that's a similar age.
Stefan:
[1:09:36] To your father when he.
Caller:
[1:09:37] Anyway yeah my little brother was three or four right we're six years apart and thinking about it i told my mom i said my little brother is not my responsibility responsibility.
And what she did with the whole beating, because she was in a rage, like she was not measured.
So it was like, you got to keep mom happy to me.
Stefan:
[1:10:15] She was in a rage. What do you mean? She out of control?
Caller:
[1:10:18] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:10:19] That's not true at all. Not even close to true. I don't need to know any more details to know that's entirely false.
that's a total lie i'm sorry i'm not saying you're lying i'm just saying this is not true not even close to true she.
Caller:
[1:10:33] Was in full control she was just taking out her emotions on me.
Stefan:
[1:10:37] Well i i you know whether she was in full i mean did she ever beat you up in in front of other people oh yeah this.
Caller:
[1:10:46] Was in front of other people.
Stefan:
[1:10:47] Sorry this.
Caller:
[1:10:49] Was in front of other people.
Stefan:
[1:10:50] I mean sorry um other people who might have power over her did you ever beat you up in front of a pastor or a policeman or a teacher or a social worker or in public with strangers who might call and report or right no never okay so she wasn't out of control here's the other thing too she was probably quite upset when you brought this up with her more recently right yeah and yet she managed to retain her control right she.
Caller:
[1:11:17] Got a little upset she got yeah.
Stefan:
[1:11:19] Yeah but she managed of shit right she was she was okay with it so she wasn't in a rage she just self-indulged, she indulged her rage because she could get away with it she let herself, go to the extreme of beating because she faced no negative consequences but now as an adult if she's going to face negative consequences i'm sure she's aware you've cut contact with your sister so she knows you're capable of doing that so now as an adult she might face negative consequences.
Oh, looky-la, she's just magically able to control her rage.
Caller:
[1:11:59] Yeah.
That's a true statement, Karyos, by the way.
Stefan:
[1:12:10] What did he say?
Caller:
[1:12:12] So she hit you for not keeping your brother safe while hitting you, which is unsafe, and married a sexual predator.
Stefan:
[1:12:18] Well, yes, concerned about children's safety. And yeah, the question, of course, is why not just build a fence in the front yard?
Caller:
[1:12:25] Great question.
Stefan:
[1:12:27] I mean, the idea that you are so concerned with your children's safety that you put your three-year-old under the care of a nine-year-old, that's extremely dangerous.
A nine-year-old cannot take care of a three-year-old in a potentially hazardous situation like that, right?
Caller:
[1:12:44] Right.
Stefan:
[1:12:45] So that's why you build a fence, right?
Caller:
[1:12:48] Mm-hmm.
Stefan:
[1:12:49] And building a fence costs like i don't know you you can do it yourself for virtually nothing or you can spend a couple hundred bucks too i'm glad they didn't build.
Caller:
[1:12:57] The fence i would have probably ended up building the fence actually.
Stefan:
[1:13:01] Okay but you wouldn't have been beaten it's.
Caller:
[1:13:05] True yeah true and.
Stefan:
[1:13:08] How many siblings do you have i.
Caller:
[1:13:11] Have seven all.
Stefan:
[1:13:12] Right, What happened with your sister?
Caller:
[1:13:18] Oh, my sister. She's the next sibling down. She's number three.
She had a whole little rebellious phase when she was a teenager.
Stefan:
[1:13:32] Ooh, listen to that framing.
Caller:
[1:13:34] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:13:35] Oh, that's not your framing. I guarantee it. Oh, my gosh. I think we just met one of your parents.
Caller:
[1:13:41] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:13:41] A whole little, little rebellious phase. That's three pejoratives.
That's three pejoratives all in one.
Whole little rebellious phase. Little rebellious phase. Oh, that's delicious minimizing.
Wow.
Caller:
[1:13:59] So my sister had a friend. She had a very close friend. Her name was
Caller:
[1:14:06] And mom was very Baptist.
And my sister, much like the rest of us, suffered through the same neglect that we all experienced.
And her and were good friends until mom discovered that my sister was, you know, not a good influence.
according to her Baptist ideals. So she had her friend banned from her, and my sister took that really hard.
I think it was evil, like, straight up.
Because my sister at that point was just a Star Wars nerd.
She would have been about 12 when that happened.
so she had her best friend ripped from her, so how does this become.
Stefan:
[1:15:20] A little rebellious phase.
Caller:
[1:15:22] Well after that, he he kind of spiraled which which I don't blame her for.
Because it's kind of like having your friend die, but she's not dead.
Stefan:
[1:15:42] No, it's worse in a way for you because it's a rejection based upon morals, right?
Caller:
[1:15:47] Right.
Stefan:
[1:15:48] The death would be something you could grieve. This is something you also feel horribly ashamed of, I assume.
Caller:
[1:15:57] So she's had a hatred for Christianity ever since, And I don't blame her for it because if I'd experienced that, I probably would hate Christianity too.
Stefan:
[1:16:14] So where does the little rebellious phrase come in? I mean, it sounds like you're quite sympathetic to her.
Caller:
[1:16:18] Well, from my parents' perspective.
Stefan:
[1:16:20] Okay, but that's not what you said, though. All right.
Caller:
[1:16:22] Well, she started just basically rebelling against everything that she was taught from that point forward.
Stefan:
[1:16:31] And what was her thinking about that, do you think? I mean, I know you said rebellious and all of that, but what is her thinking?
Caller:
[1:16:38] He would, I would think she would say, I'm just doing what I think is best and what I want and what I would say was probably coping because she's, you know, she got into drugs, alcohol, uh, had lots of boyfriends.
Stefan:
[1:17:01] Because her friend was banished from her.
Caller:
[1:17:06] I make the claim that that is the...
Stefan:
[1:17:09] What does your sister say, if anything, if you talk to her about it?
Caller:
[1:17:14] I haven't talked to her about it. That's just my outside analysis.
Me and her have had it. It's kind of a history.
Because she's got a little bit woke with her beliefs. We don't really align.
But I did see her at my mom's wedding.
and we did get along because I've kind of gotten over a lot of my own issues, basically we had a fog with, with the whole woke stuff.
Stefan:
[1:17:55] And do you know.
Caller:
[1:17:55] Where she got.
Stefan:
[1:17:56] The woke stuff from?
Caller:
[1:18:02] I'm going to guess friends and lovers because she is very much into that culture.
Stefan:
[1:18:12] And you said that she had drug addiction and promiscuity?
Caller:
[1:18:16] Yep.
Stefan:
[1:18:18] That doesn't come off losing a friend.
Caller:
[1:18:23] I would assume it's the neglect.
Stefan:
[1:18:25] Well, you were all neglected. it well.
Caller:
[1:18:29] I mean i i started drinking at 16.
Stefan:
[1:18:35] Like and were you promiscuous as well it's obviously a little tougher for men.
Caller:
[1:18:39] No i was specifically not even though my friends were.
Stefan:
[1:18:44] Okay and has your sister ever talked about why that might have happened or does she not really reflect that much or does Does she not even view it as a problem?
Caller:
[1:18:56] She wouldn't view it as a problem.
Stefan:
[1:18:58] Okay. And I assume you've not asked her, right?
Caller:
[1:19:01] No.
Stefan:
[1:19:06] And if you had to guess now?
Caller:
[1:19:12] I would say it's wrecked her life.
Stefan:
[1:19:15] No, no, but if you were to say the causality of it.
Caller:
[1:19:19] I would say the causality is the child neglect.
Just the emotional neglect. because my mom and, My mom didn't really raise her daughters at all.
Stefan:
[1:19:39] Okay. Now, was she into hard drugs or just marijuana or?
Caller:
[1:19:44] Pot and mushrooms.
Stefan:
[1:19:45] Okay.
Caller:
[1:19:46] I don't think she did anything like cocaine or anything like that.
Stefan:
[1:19:49] And did she drink as well?
Caller:
[1:19:51] Oh, yeah.
Stefan:
[1:19:52] So drinking drugs and promiscuity.
Caller:
[1:19:56] Mm-hmm.
Stefan:
[1:19:58] I mean, I've just been doing all this research. Do you know what that's most associated with?
Caller:
[1:20:06] No.
Stefan:
[1:20:07] Well, sexual abuse.
Caller:
[1:20:09] Oh, shit. So I need to ask her about that.
Stefan:
[1:20:14] Well, I mean, I don't know. I don't know. And of course, none of this is proof, right?
Of anything. I'm just saying that, I mean, so you were neglected and you turned to drinking, but not drugs and not promiscuity.
and she turned to drinking and drugs and promiscuity and woke culture woke culture is characterized by a hatred of the patriarchy a hatred of of masculine of men of masculine authority and so on so that that's a the triple addiction i mean maybe there were other addictions i don't know if she was addicted to food or or whatever it was but if she's got a triple addiction Addiction, that's a lot of self-medication, right?
And drinking, drugs, promiscuity, that's a lot of self-medication.
Caller:
[1:21:04] I remember there was one time where we were in the kitchen, and I think it was when she lost her virginity. She was very upset because I think the guy just basically ditched her.
Stefan:
[1:21:19] How old was she?
Caller:
[1:21:21] She would have been...
Stefan:
[1:21:27] Sorry, I meant her, not him.
Caller:
[1:21:29] Yeah, yeah. She would have been about 17 or 18 in that frame.
Stefan:
[1:21:35] Okay. I mean, obviously, if she was 18 and, I guess, a legal adult, she didn't lose her virginity, right?
Because she gave it up, right?
Caller:
[1:21:47] Right.
Stefan:
[1:21:47] I mean, you lose your virginity if you're raped, right? Because it's not your choice.
Caller:
[1:21:51] Right. It's just, you know, using the colloquialism.
Stefan:
[1:21:55] Right, right. Yeah.
Caller:
[1:21:56] Uh and that she was really affected by it because she felt worthless she felt used and i remember giving her a hug and telling her that she wasn't she wasn't used no she wasn't worthless right.
Stefan:
[1:22:15] I mean she was used though right.
Caller:
[1:22:18] Right right.
Stefan:
[1:22:20] And you told her she wasn't worthless and what did she say?
Caller:
[1:22:29] She just cried.
Stefan:
[1:22:31] Right. Do you think you comforted her?
Caller:
[1:22:36] I hope so.
Stefan:
[1:22:37] Do you think you comforted her?
Caller:
[1:22:39] I think so.
Stefan:
[1:22:40] Okay. Okay.
Because we have this, I don't know if this is a male-female thing, I think it is, to some degree, obviously not 100%, but the female response to suffering is to try and talk the person out of it, which is, you know, some guy says, oh, you know, I feel over, some woman says, I feel fat, and other women, what do they say?
Caller:
[1:23:23] Oh, no, you're not.
Stefan:
[1:23:24] Yeah you look great no they're just you know they're shrinking their clothes to save on fabric it's capitalism patriarchy blah blah blah right and you know that meme like guy says to another guy am i fat he's the other guy's like bro i know i know like fat five guy i know five fat guys and you're four of them right so she feels worthless and your response which strikes me as a little bit on the more female side is, no, you're not worthless.
As opposed to what?
Caller:
[1:24:05] Hey, you're a slut.
Stefan:
[1:24:07] No. No, that's abusive.
Caller:
[1:24:12] Ugh.
I don't know.
Stefan:
[1:24:21] Because your father was a bad businessman, and he just kept saying to himself, I'm a good businessman.
What's the other response if somebody says, I feel worthless?
Of course, you know, I mean, the genuine, the general response for a lot of people is, no, absolutely not. You're worth so much, blah, blah, blah, right?
What's the other? I mean, I guess your really harsh Old Testament one is, yes, you are a slut, What's the other?
Caller:
[1:24:57] I don't know.
Stefan:
[1:25:00] Tell me more. You feel worthless. Let me hear about it. I want to hear about it.
Caller:
[1:25:06] Oh, curiosity.
Stefan:
[1:25:07] Yeah. As opposed to, you're wrong.
Because if somebody says, I feel worthless, and then you say, you're not worthless, you're telling them that their opinion about themselves being worthless is worthless.
You're crazy. You're believing things that just aren't true.
Your thinking is distorted. You're wrong about this most foundational judgment of yourself.
Your opinion is worthless. And that's how I'm going to make you feel better.
Caller:
[1:25:35] I guess that's why it doesn't work.
Stefan:
[1:25:37] It doesn't work. And it hasn't, right?
Caller:
[1:25:40] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:25:44] Now, the reason why, why are we not curious?
And listen, we've all been there. I'm not trying to throw you under the bus here. We've all been there. I'm still there.
I still didn't call the shows. I have to fight to be curious, especially when people are annoying me. And I'm talking about now.
I'm just like other call the shows.
So why is curiosity? Why do we want to? She's opening this wound.
She says, I feel worthless, right?
She's opening this wound and you're like, close it up.
Caller:
[1:26:13] Right.
Stefan:
[1:26:14] Ah, wound is not there. Wound is wrong. Wound doesn't exist. Why?
I mean, you're an intelligent guy. You're emotionally very sensitive, and that's a good thing, in my opinion.
So why? I feel worthless, and she's just wretched. And you're like, well, no, you're wrong. You're totally wrong.
Caller:
[1:26:33] Because if I admit that, if I'm curious to her, I have to be curious about myself.
Stefan:
[1:26:38] No, you're not that selfish. You're not that selfish.
I don't believe that for a moment. and you're quite a bit older than her right you said you were the first of seven no.
Caller:
[1:26:47] I'm number two so i'm four years old four.
Stefan:
[1:26:49] Years older okay so she's in her late teens you're in your early to mid-20s so no it's not not selfish if you say to her tell me more about feeling worthless, what happens, Like, why is it so hard in families that are dysfunctional to be curious?
who is responsible for giving your sister a sense of value about herself?
Caller:
[1:27:54] My parents.
Stefan:
[1:27:55] Right. So if you're curious, you're going to uncover what?
What is at the root of her lack of value?
Caller:
[1:28:05] Bad parenting.
Stefan:
[1:28:07] Bad parenting. So we stitch up the wound so we don't see the wounder.
We stitch up the injury, we cover up the injury, so that we don't have to examine who injured her.
Your parents are saying, don't be curious, because curiosity leads to us.
So you say, well, the reason, the root, sister, of your feelings of a lack of worth is your distorted thinking.
In other words, you convict the wrong, quote, criminal.
now if there's a criminal out there and the police pick up the wrong guy and ascertain that it's him what does the criminal say it.
Caller:
[1:28:57] Pleads his innocence.
Stefan:
[1:28:58] Yeah no the criminal says good job yeah yeah like thank goodness i'm not gonna go and say you got the wrong guy right so you wanted to in a sense convict the wrong person whether it was your sister's distorted thinking or this guy who had had sex with her for the first time, took her virginity and then fled or vanished or ghosted her.
So you, in a sense, encouraged by your inner parents, would be wanting to convict the wrong person.
Because if you don't convict the wrong person, you keep looking, right?
Caller:
[1:29:32] Right.
Stefan:
[1:29:33] So yeah, in crime and punishment, right? The painter is picked up for the murder and confesses to the murder and Raskolnikov feels waves of relief.
and then the police chief, Porfiry, comes and says, it's not him.
It's not him. And Raskolnikov feels dread, because he thought he was off the hook. And then they keep looking.
So if you were to sit down and say to your sister, or had at that point, now, I don't want you to feel bad about this because this is a lot to ask of a guy in his early 20s, but if you'd have said to your sister, wow, you know, how do you think this came about?
Tell me more about, and you didn't allow her to self attack and you didn't allow
Stefan:
[1:30:20] her like, just tell me more. And, and how's this going on?
Like what's going on? And right. Then you would have continued in hot pursuit of the people who gave her the injury that was exploited by the guy who slept with her and ghosted her. If that makes sense.
Caller:
[1:30:38] Yeah, it makes total sense. It's, Thank you.
Stefan:
[1:30:50] And then, this is why I was really struck.
She went through her little rebellious phase, the contempt and dismissal of that, right?
Caller:
[1:31:01] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:31:02] She was protesting a massive wound and injustice, I assume. Was she doing it well? Absolutely not.
But then she also has access to what men in general don't have access to.
Right, so I assume that she was pretty as a teenager?
Caller:
[1:31:21] Oh yeah.
Stefan:
[1:31:22] Yeah, so very pretty. So she has access to enablers, also called simps, right?
She has access to enablers because of her physical attractiveness that men in general don't.
Caller:
[1:31:35] Right.
Stefan:
[1:31:35] Which is why it's really important to root out family dysfunction for young women in particular, because otherwise the dysfunction is going to be a wound exploited by others to their significant detriment, right?
To the woman's significant, the girl's significant detriment.
Caller:
[1:31:52] Mm-hmm. We have no...
Stefan:
[1:31:58] Now, if you say to your mother that your father was a child molester, child squared molester, That will cause unhappiness to your mother.
Caller:
[1:32:12] Right.
Stefan:
[1:32:17] And that's scary, of course. And again, I completely understand that.
I mean, I was in my late 20s, I think, when I first started confronting my mother. It was pretty alarming.
Alarm bells everywhere, right? Because confronting people in power usually did not go very well in human history, to put it mildly.
"'So you caused discomfort to your mother?', But I hope you understand that one of you is going to suffer with this knowledge.
It's either you or your mother.
Now, again, whether you tell your mother or not is, to me, immaterial.
But the suffering is the falsehoods you need to tell to yourself as to why you're not doing it.
That's the suffering. That's the false witness, right?
Whether you should or shouldn't tell your mother, I don't know.
I mean, in general, I'm a big one for airing the dirty laundry, but whatever, right?
But the problem is, it's what you tell yourself, and in a sense, what you told me. That's where the false witness is.
Oh, what's the point? And it's all in the past, and what would she do with this knowledge, this, that, and the other, right?
Now, you can say, I choose not to tell my mother because I'm too frightened and she might get too upset.
That's an honest statement, isn't it?
Caller:
[1:33:40] Right. Right. And, well, it's not an honest statement. I can't tell her this.
Stefan:
[1:33:46] No, no, no. I said I choose not to tell my mother.
Caller:
[1:33:49] Right. Right.
Stefan:
[1:33:50] So if you say, I choose not to tell my mother because X, Y, and Z, right?
Right. If there's some unjust law, you may say, I choose to obey this unjust law.
Caller:
[1:34:03] Right.
Stefan:
[1:34:05] Because I'm frightened of the consequences. I don't want to go to jail or whatever it is, right? Right? Okay.
But if you say, this is not an unjust law, it's a good law, it's a sensible law, right?
That's the false witness, right? If you know that it's an unjust law, right?
Caller:
[1:34:28] Yeah, it's really interesting, and it all comes back to standing up to mom again.
Stefan:
[1:34:34] Standing up to mom? No, that's not what it comes down to. No, it's not.
Caller:
[1:34:40] Not lying to myself?
Stefan:
[1:34:41] Yeah, telling the truth to yourself.
Caller:
[1:34:42] Okay.
Stefan:
[1:34:43] That's what it comes down to. Because you can choose to lie to your mother.
Caller:
[1:34:51] I don't want to do that.
Stefan:
[1:34:52] But don't lie to yourself about why or that you're lying because you're saying well you know what's the point it's kind of diplomatic it's it's going to hurt her there serves no purpose she can't what you're going to do with this knowledge like it's some judicious and wise decision to not tell your mother right so.
Caller:
[1:35:10] What compels me to lie to myself.
Stefan:
[1:35:14] Well it's to avoid humiliation, if you say i'm not going to tell mom the truth even though i've told other family members the truth because i'm frightened of her then it's kind of tough to picture this decent relationship it's kind of tough to feel like an adult it's mature and it's kind of tough you're a father do i have that right yeah yeah so it's kind of tough to feel like an authority figure if you're you're still scared of mommy.
It's kind of tough to say to your kids, well, you should really listen to me because I'm an authority figure.
Oh, I can't tell mom this because it's scary. Do you know what I mean?
So there's a lot of implications that come rolling out if you tell the truth to yourself.
Caller:
[1:36:02] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:36:06] So, if you have this sense that not telling your mother is a wise and judicious and healthy and wonderful and great and magical and perfect and diplomatic decision, then you can just avoid the fact that you're scared of her.
Whereas if you say, oh no, I'm really terrified of my mother's reaction, then it's kind of tough to go and break bread. It's kind of tough to say, hey, mom, how's it going? What's new? You know, when she calls or whatever.
Caller:
[1:36:38] We have no desire to be over it.
Stefan:
[1:36:41] Right. So here's the thing.
You think that you don't tell your mother. This is the foundational truth.
In my opinion, I could be wrong, right? This is your life, not mine.
So I'm just skirting around the edges here.
The foundational decision is, sorry, don't mean to laugh because I just said earlier, this is not funny stuff, but I think you'll get the kind of black comedy of it in a second if this fits.
You're merged with your mother to the point where you think it's you that's scared of you telling the truth to your mother, but it's not.
It's not.
It's not.
It's your mother who's scared of you telling the truth to your mother.
Not you.
Stefan:
[1:37:32] Because your mother doesn't want the fear that's at the heart and the manipulation, which is why the fear is there, is to manipulate and to control your behavior.
Your mother doesn't want you to see the truth about the relationship because she wants to gain the benefits of being a good mother while at the same time frightening you to the point where you lie to yourself and others.
Stefan:
[1:37:55] It's your mother who doesn't want you to tell the truth.
Now, I mean, we say, of course, I mean, that the mechanism is quite simple, but deep.
And the mechanism is, if you tell the truth to your mother as a child, she might beat you, she might abandon you, she might scream at you, she might yell at you, she might call your name, she might, you know, it's frightening.
So what you have is you develop an inner mother that says, don't tell the truth to your mother.
And the inner mother inflicts fear on you so that you don't tell the truth to your mother because you can survive the inner mother but you might not survive the outer mother at least that's the sort of the evolutionary concern i'm not sort of trying to say that your mother would kill you or something but that's the evolutionary that's how we evolved was children were pretty pretty damn disposable which is kind of what we talked about at the beginning of this convo with regards to neglect so you internalize the external mother and the internal mother is your friend because because she's there to protect you from the external mother.
Stefan:
[1:38:53] Now, the internal mother says, you must be afraid of your external mother.
I'm going to provoke fear in you if you even think about telling the truth to your external mother, because she will attack or abandon you if you tell her the truth.
And that's, you know, that could get us, that could be very, very harmful or bad to us in sort of whatever stage or level we want to picture it.
But it's your mother's fear of being asked these questions that you're internalizing.
Because your mother's aggression, how does your mother handle fear?
She was very afraid that your three-year-old brother would get creamed by a car.
Caller:
[1:39:34] He gets hysterical.
Stefan:
[1:39:36] Right. No, not just hysterical, violent.
Caller:
[1:39:40] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:39:40] Right? She beats children.
Caller:
[1:39:43] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:39:44] And this is, so again, I don't want to overhype the male-female difference, but men generally, do we respond to fear with aggression? Not usually.
Not usually, because we, let's say, some big guy at a bar starts pushing us around and we're scared, right?
Do we just immediately start physically attacking him?
Caller:
[1:40:12] That would be ill-advised, typically.
Stefan:
[1:40:15] Right, because, you know, he's probably superior to us. Otherwise, he wouldn't be pushing us around, right?
Like, he probably has lots of experience with fights, and he's very strong, and he works out.
Or maybe he knows some martial art, or he's been a boxer in his youth.
like there's something that's dangerous right level.
Caller:
[1:40:32] Of intoxication can play in there as a factor because.
Stefan:
[1:40:35] You can't play in the factor also also he's there with a bunch of buddies.
Caller:
[1:40:40] Well i usually go with buddies.
Stefan:
[1:40:42] Right so if we if we fight him even if somehow we win what happens.
Caller:
[1:40:47] We all get charged with assault and banned from the bar.
Stefan:
[1:40:50] Well what happens before that you're with a guy he's with three of his friends he's belligerent with you you pop him one he goes down, what do his friends do?
Caller:
[1:40:59] They pop me back.
Stefan:
[1:41:00] Yeah, they attack you.
Caller:
[1:41:01] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:41:02] So as a male, in general, when we're aggressed against, if you've got any common sense, I think, you try to de-escalate, right?
Caller:
[1:41:14] Typically, yeah.
Stefan:
[1:41:15] Right. But that's because we're in danger.
Now, that's not the case with women, because who do women have authority over?
Caller:
[1:41:26] Children.
Stefan:
[1:41:27] That's right. That's right.
So women can escalate and transfer from fear to rage because they're in charge of helpless and dependent children.
Caller:
[1:41:40] Mm-hmm.
Stefan:
[1:42:04] And so knowing that your mother transforms fear into violence, which is quite common for women, especially women with regards to children.
Now, women in society, what they do is they set up, they vote for legal systems that allow them to act against men, right?
whether it's a family court system or the weaponized, quote, justice system where all accusations are met with aggression against men or reputational destruction or working with other beta males to encircle and harm the male.
So women will transfer fear into aggression, either in institutional, reputational, or a social manner, or with children with direct violence or threats of abandonment, which is sort of two sides of the same coin.
Now, of course, this is not all women, and some men will always escalate no matter what, but they don't tend to last very long in one way or another.
Stefan:
[1:43:05] So your fear with regards to your mother is important to know, right?
Because I wouldn't say the fear is good or bad.
I think it was necessary for you to survive because we don't act randomly.
but this is why i say i don't know whether you should tell your mother or not because you need to further examine your fear of the consequences like what's the worst case scenario well the worst case scenario i don't know does she accuse you of something terrible does she try to destroy your reputation in the family does she call your customers i don't like i mean not saying she would right but she wouldn't do it right the the you as a i mean as a father as a provider as a man, You have to measure and gauge these risks, right? The risk-reward.
Caller:
[1:43:55] Right, right. I don't think my mom would do something terrible.
Stefan:
[1:44:06] Well, that's something to think about, but you're afraid of something.
Now, obviously, you're not afraid that she's going to beat you, right? Because you're an adult, right?
But you're afraid of something. And I wouldn't just say, you've got nothing to be scared of, right?
Because that's like, if you say to me, Steph, I'm afraid, right?
And I say, you've got nothing to be scared of.
That's basically the same as your sister saying, I'm worthless.
And you say, no, you're not.
Caller:
[1:44:30] Right?
Stefan:
[1:44:31] So what is it? at the root, and you don't, you know, whether you can get this or not, I mean, this is a big, deep topic, but if you're scared of your mother, what is the fear? What is the nature of that fear? What is the source and manifestation of that fear?
Why be afraid, which is not to say that you're wrong, but what are you afraid of?
Caller:
[1:44:55] The best, I mean, the best that I've uncovered so far is just fear of rejection.
because my I say that just because my personality is very, it's like the me plus situation you know like I have to be funny I have to be providing value I'm not valuable by myself, that's as deep as I've gotten on this, well Well.
Stefan:
[1:45:30] It's not super deep. Sorry to be annoying. Sorry, I really could be wrong.
Caller:
[1:45:36] It's fine, dude. It's a result.
Stefan:
[1:45:38] No, no, I get where we're coming from, but you understand that not telling the truth to your mother can't be out of a fear of rejection, just logically.
Okay. This is a bit squidgy and squirrely, so it's hard to pin down.
Do you have any idea why?
it can't be a fear of rejection in general that would cause you to not tell the truth to your mother.
Caller:
[1:46:11] I'm going to blank.
Stefan:
[1:46:13] Well, who do you have to reject in order to lie to your mother?
Caller:
[1:46:23] I have to reject her?
Stefan:
[1:46:27] No. You have to reject yourself.
Caller:
[1:46:32] Okay.
Stefan:
[1:46:34] Right, because earlier you basically were spinning a web or a story that it was wise to not tell your mother, which meant that you rejected your own fear.
So if you decide to lie or to withhold important information, rejection has already happened.
You've simply rejected your own sense of honesty or integrity or directness or self-knowledge, right?
Caller:
[1:47:06] Okay.
Stefan:
[1:47:08] Sorry, this sounds like I'm either way too far ahead or way too far behind.
Caller:
[1:47:13] Yeah, I'm trying to track it here.
because I don't view lying as good. I try not to lie.
Stefan:
[1:47:24] Okay, so if we go back, not now what we're talking about, but, you know, like half an hour ago, if we go back to when I said, why don't you tell your mother and you gave me all of this?
I mean, honestly, just a kind of malarkey about what's the purpose and what's the point and what she's supposed to do with this knowledge and this and that and the other, as opposed to just saying, oh, no, I'm terrified.
Caller:
[1:47:45] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:47:45] So you've already rejected yourself.
by spinning a web of it's wise diplomatic and virtuous to not tell my mother rather than i'm scared to tell my mother like you've already rejected yourself so.
Caller:
[1:47:58] Yeah so i lie to myself because i'm making an excuse like.
Stefan:
[1:48:01] Right right right so i mean that's obviously very very advanced stuff but no i mean obviously you can handle it as a very smart fellow so the rejection is a constant if you have something that you're lying to someone about saying well i'm afraid of rejection is not true because you already are rejecting yourself.
So it can't be a fear of rejection.
Caller:
[1:48:28] So why do you reject yourself?
Stefan:
[1:48:32] Well, that's the question, right? So then it's not just a fear of rejection that's too broad because you already are rejecting yourself.
Like a guy who uses counterfeit money can't claim to be terrified of counterfeit money, right?
Caller:
[1:48:43] Right, exactly. You can't be afraid of what you're doing already to yourself. Okay, got it.
So why would I do that?
Stefan:
[1:48:54] That's the question.
Caller:
[1:48:56] How do you find the answer.
Stefan:
[1:48:58] Well in empiricism as you always do right, so when you had a conflict with your mother right in the past right when you were nine and your brother was three and you were supposed to protect him from going into the front yard and you very much said to your mother i'm not responsible for your child right i.
Caller:
[1:49:18] Said that That later.
Stefan:
[1:49:19] Oh, later.
Caller:
[1:49:20] At the time, I felt very guilty. Like it was my responsibility.
Stefan:
[1:49:26] Well, that's because your mother told you it was your responsibility, right?
Caller:
[1:49:29] Correct.
Stefan:
[1:49:30] Okay. Now, your mother made a mistake, right?
I mean, we can assume that a nine-year-old who's not taking super great care of his three-year-old brother is not primarily at fault, right?
Caller:
[1:49:43] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:49:44] So, your mother made a mistake. Is that fair to say?
Caller:
[1:49:49] Yes.
Stefan:
[1:49:50] Okay. She made a mistake in not preparing you. She made a mistake in putting the wrong person in charge. She made a mistake in not being in charge herself.
She made a mistake in not building a fence and all of that, right?
Caller:
[1:50:02] Right, right, right.
Stefan:
[1:50:03] So your mother made a mistake.
Caller:
[1:50:07] Right.
Stefan:
[1:50:07] And who got punished?
Caller:
[1:50:09] I did.
Stefan:
[1:50:10] Your mother made a mistake and who got blamed?
Caller:
[1:50:14] I did.
Stefan:
[1:50:15] Right. Your mother and your father are incapable of self-criticism.
Your father in the business world, your mother in the parenting world.
Incapable of self-criticism. So she attacked herself because she, not you, put the three-year-old at risk.
Caller:
[1:50:43] Right.
Stefan:
[1:50:43] She attacked herself and she couldn't take ownership. She couldn't take responsibility.
So who did she have to blame?
Caller:
[1:50:56] One of her children.
Stefan:
[1:50:58] Right. So if you put responsibility, if something bad, sorry, this is a really terrible way of putting it. I'm trying to take you another run at that.
Your mother makes a mistake. Who pays the price? You.
so when you try to hold your mother accountable who is she going to attack me, Now, a lot of times when parents get older and kids get older, particularly when the kids become adults and the parents don't have the hold that they used to have over their children, what happens is the parents will take pretend responsibility.
So they'll say, yeah, you know, that wasn't optimal.
There was a lot of stress, right? And this is partly what you said at the beginning of the conversations that my parents fought, but there was a lot of financial stress, it's like no that's not right that's not why they fight lots of people have financial stress and don't fight in fact lots of people lots of couples under hardship get closer they become close yes.
Caller:
[1:52:06] Yeah i've never experienced that.
Stefan:
[1:52:08] Right so so it's not causal right yeah so what happens is your a parent will if you confront them as adults on the wrongs they did they will make apologies and excuses, and will only reveal the aggression if you take away the excuses.
Caller:
[1:52:32] So I probably didn't take away enough excuses.
Stefan:
[1:52:35] So with regard, this is why I'm sort of going back to the question you had when you talked to your mother about her beating you when you were nine about your brother, and you said, I guess later at some point you said that you weren't responsible did she.
Caller:
[1:52:50] Make excuses.
Stefan:
[1:52:51] As to why she did what she did.
Caller:
[1:52:53] So well i told her that you know this was two weeks ago now i told her that you know this is what happened you beat me for this, i was not responsible her excuse was i don't remember and i was you know i was really calm about it. I wasn't upset at her.
I was trying to for my own sake get this as a factor out of my life.
I'm trying to...
Stefan:
[1:53:32] Sorry, what do you mean? Get what as a factor?
Caller:
[1:53:35] I'm trying to get rid of this resentment.
Stefan:
[1:53:41] Resentment? What do you mean?
Caller:
[1:53:43] Well, I have this, I have this resentment toward women in general, and I'm trying to get rid of it. I don't want it.
Stefan:
[1:54:00] Right. Okay.
Caller:
[1:54:03] And I'm thinking back, and I'm looking at this instance where I feel like this is massively unjust.
Stefan:
[1:54:16] You mean when your mother hit you when you were nine?
Caller:
[1:54:20] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:54:20] Okay.
Caller:
[1:54:23] And I'm not saying that like that's the source of everything.
It's just an instance that I recall that's really vivid in my past that, and I just, I hate, hate the injustice of it.
Like, so I'm trying to go over there to stand up to it and say, I call it out and say, this is what happened, and it was wrong.
For my own sake, really.
Stefan:
[1:55:01] And what is the ideal out of that conversation do you think that would have been the best for you?
What was your mother's reaction to the conversation that would have instituted?
Caller:
[1:55:12] Ideally, I would have wanted her to take full responsibility.
own it and say that was horrible it was evil I repent of that.
Stefan:
[1:55:28] That's impossible just so you know.
Caller:
[1:55:33] Thank you for the optimistic no.
Stefan:
[1:55:35] No it's tautologically impossible it's like sorry by definition like praxeologically that's impossible, Can the criminal take full responsibility if they only confess when caught with irrefutable evidence?
Caller:
[1:55:53] Right, right. I get what you're doing. Yeah, she cannot make restitution.
Stefan:
[1:55:58] No, no, no. No, forget the restitution. That wasn't what I said. I said responsibility.
Caller:
[1:56:05] Can she take full responsibility? Why? Sure. Why couldn't she?
Stefan:
[1:56:09] Because she's only confessing when caught with irrefutable evidence.
Caller:
[1:56:16] So the only way to take full responsibility is for her to come to me that's right but even so how would she even make restitution so honestly.
Stefan:
[1:56:27] You keep going to restitution let's do the first.
Caller:
[1:56:30] R before.
Stefan:
[1:56:30] The second R let's do responsibility.
Caller:
[1:56:36] I'm sure sorry go ahead I was going to say like I thought with the whole like healing process you have to have the restitution piece too and it's not possible Well.
Stefan:
[1:56:52] The restitution, generally, the ideal scenario is your parent sits you down and says, you know, man, I've really been thinking about your childhood.
And now that I'm a grandmother, I see your beautiful children and I think about the things that I've done. And boy, it was just so wrong.
And I've really been thinking about it. And I'm going into therapy.
And I really did wrong by you. And I've got no excuse.
And I need to understand what was going on for me to make sure I don't repeat it. and this is going to be a huge load off your mind because I know I blamed you for what happened when you were a kid. I don't want you to blame yourself anymore.
It was 100% on me. I was the parent. I was the adult.
You were just a little kid and I want to hear about the things that I did that were wrong.
That would be, I mean, a very sort of brief introduction as to taking responsibility.
Caller:
[1:57:42] Right, right.
Stefan:
[1:57:45] If you confront the parent, then the parent is being reactive.
Caller:
[1:57:54] Right.
Stefan:
[1:57:55] Which means they haven't taken responsibility they're simply reacting to stimuli.
It's a difference between I decide to go running in the woods, and I end up running because a bear is chasing me.
Caller:
[1:58:17] Correct, yeah.
Stefan:
[1:58:18] One is exercise, the other is survival. I remember doing a show in the woods and I came across a beast to run away from the bees or something like that.
That was not me deciding to go jogging in the middle of a...
That's just reactive, right?
Caller:
[1:58:33] Yeah, yeah.
Stefan:
[1:58:35] Stimulus response.
Caller:
[1:58:42] So what purpose does it serve confronting?
Stefan:
[1:58:48] The purpose that it serves in confronting is as varied as the interaction.
But I can tell you what it was for me. Maybe this fits for you. So let me ask you this.
The excuse, I forgot, I don't remember, I never... Like if it's a kid, right?
You're nine years old and you're told to take care of your younger brother.
He ends up in the front yard. Your mom gets mad at you.
If you were to say, oh, I completely forgot I was supposed to take care of him, what would have happened?
Caller:
[1:59:19] Probably the same elk.
Stefan:
[1:59:22] Right So The phrase, I don't remember Was never an excuse for you At the age of nine Right So why is your mom trying it?
Caller:
[1:59:44] He's trying to invalidate what I'm experiencing or what I'm trying to do.
Stefan:
[1:59:55] Sorry, you said to invalidate?
Caller:
[1:59:57] Yeah.
Stefan:
[1:59:58] Yeah, tell me what you mean, if you could. I understand the general sense, but I want to make sure I understand what it means to you. Sorry, go ahead.
Caller:
[2:00:06] If he's trying to basically say it's in the past, why does it matter?
You know, I don't remember it. It must not have been a big deal.
Stefan:
[2:00:13] Right. So then she's saying, I don't remember beating my child.
Which means it's not at all important to her that she beat you. Doesn't matter.
That make sense?
Caller:
[2:00:30] Yeah. Well, there's a reason she doesn't get the babysit.
Stefan:
[2:00:33] Do you think that it's better or worse, if a parent genuinely doesn't remember beating their child? Like it's, so unimportant.
It's just like, you know, like if somebody were to say to me, you know, what were you doing, I don't know, you know, 19 Thursdays ago, I'd be like, well, you know, I'd probably text some notes or whatever, but nothing memorable happened that I would remember.
If somebody says, you know, where were you on 9-11 or whatever, right, I would remember that because that's sort of very vivid and compelling.
Caller:
[2:01:05] 10th grade history. It was 10th grade history, 9-11 maybe.
Sorry, I didn't quite follow. i was answering the where were you on 9-11 question.
Stefan:
[2:01:16] Right right right yeah you and i different places for sure but yeah remember that my mom is saying i don't remember that's a big deal sorry go ahead exactly.
Caller:
[2:01:24] So if it's inconsequential to her that she beats me so that just means she's it's a it's an average tuesday.
Stefan:
[2:01:34] Right beating.
Caller:
[2:01:35] Children which is evil.
Stefan:
[2:01:37] Right so it doesn't it doesn't strike her as anything out of the ordinary and it's not memorable at all so she doesn't remember that's number one one one possibility is she genuinely doesn't remember which is you know obviously pretty chilling right, i mean unless it happens so often that she couldn't remember because it was so common.
Caller:
[2:01:59] I was not beat often i remember it happening twice in my life.
Stefan:
[2:02:05] So then she would remember, I mean, if it's that rare, right? That would be like asking a woman, do you remember your wedding day? And she's like, no, I don't.
Like it just happened once in your life. Of course you remember, right?
Caller:
[2:02:21] Right.
Stefan:
[2:02:22] If this only happened, let's say a woman gets married twice and you say, do you remember your wedding day? She'd say, well, yeah. I mean, because it's very singular, right?
Caller:
[2:02:30] Yeah.
Stefan:
[2:02:32] So, I mean, unless she's had some significant brain injury, which I assume she hasn't, then she would remember these things as being out of the ordinary.
and so either she does remember and she's claiming that she doesn't which is lying and manipulating right or she genuinely doesn't remember in which case um i don't know what to make of that like i don't know what to make of something so singular in someone's life that they don't remember they don't remember something that singular i i assume that she's just lying i mean that that's my i can't Obviously, no, for sure.
Stefan:
[2:03:08] But my mother also claimed to not remember things, right?
Yeah. Okay, well, of course. I mean, you know, you see this all the time in court cases, right? I don't remember.
I don't recall. I got no memory of anything at all, right? So that's just a very common defense.
Caller:
[2:03:25] What was that? The I don't recall is always the thing you say on the stand because it's unprovable.
Stefan:
[2:03:36] Now, again, if she's off the hook for beating you because she doesn't remember, then you should have been off the hook as a kid for claiming you don't remember.
And certainly at the age of nine, you can easily forget things.
And I'm sure, I mean, obviously you cared about your younger brother, right? The three-year-old.
So you didn't want him to get creamed by a car, right?
Caller:
[2:04:03] No.
Stefan:
[2:04:04] Right. Right. So what happened was you lost attention, you lost focus, you forgot your responsibilities at the time, right?
Caller:
[2:04:12] Yeah. And there was an element of me not really thinking that my mom's fear was substantiated.
Like our front yard was like 40 foot.
So there's a lot of space between, you know, the front of the house and the road.
And so I was dismissive of my mom's request.
Stefan:
[2:04:44] Right, right.
So that's the other question too. And I really appreciate this.
I know this sounds like we're really raking over this incident for many years ago, but it's really important, I think.
so the question is with regards to you and your mother so she says what's your kid brother i don't want to get hit by a car and your thought is that's not a real fear right right so what was wrong with your relationship with your mother that you couldn't say that, i don't think it's a real fear i'm not going to take it very seriously, it's 40 feet he's not going to wander he wants to stay close his toys are all by the house like whatever it was right he's not just going to go wander into traffic right so you were not concerned about what your mother was concerned about, and in an honest relationship, what would happen? In a good parent-child relationship?
Caller:
[2:05:54] I would say, oh, mom, it's not a big deal.
Stefan:
[2:05:58] Well, you'd say, I don't feel the same way, right?
Caller:
[2:06:01] Right.
Stefan:
[2:06:02] And here's why. And you'd have an interesting discussion about it, right?
Caller:
[2:06:07] Yeah.
Stefan:
[2:06:09] So one of the main reasons why your mother was hitting you, Was because she couldn't accept the degradation of your relationship that she was responsible for to the point where you couldn't just say, like, you know, earlier I said with my mother, like, I would lose my key from time to time, which is inevitable.
You're an eight-year-old kid doing somersaults in the woods.
You're going to lose your key.
And I couldn't go to my mom and say, I need a new key.
Caller:
[2:06:41] Right. Which should be.
Stefan:
[2:06:43] Yeah, it should be normal, right?
Caller:
[2:06:44] That should be just a, oh, you lost your key again. Let's go to the hardware store.
Stefan:
[2:06:50] Yeah, or maybe we can figure out, maybe I can get you a key chain that you can clip to your belt or I don't know, something, right?
Caller:
[2:06:56] Exactly. It becomes a problem you can solve and bond over. It's not supposed to be a major- No reason for it to be a big.
Stefan:
[2:07:03] Ugly, weird thing. And then, of course, so then I'm at risk because I'm climbing up rickety ladders at 45 degrees and trying to climb in through a window, you know, 20 feet off the ground, right?
Caller:
[2:07:14] That picture in my head, dude, it's like.
Stefan:
[2:07:17] Well, no. So if I had fallen, if I had fallen and hurt myself, which I usually could have done, could have broken an arm or a leg or died or whatever, he hit your head, falling down.
So if I had broken my arm, what would my mother have said? Why?
What would the causality be? Why would I have broken my arm?
Caller:
[2:07:34] Well, it would be because you lost your key.
Stefan:
[2:07:39] Right. I broke my arm. You broke your arm because you just don't take care of your key.
right it's not you broke your arm because I was being so batshit crazy that I wouldn't let you get a new key for a dollar for a dollar right, Now, of course, my mother did not at all believe that a stranger was going to find a key in the woods and automatically GPS it to our door.
Stefan:
[2:08:10] And I tried to explain, like, he's going to find a key. He's not going to know where it is from. Right.
And I remember saying this distinctly to my mother, even when I was in the single digits. I said, look, some guy is going to find a key. He's not going to know where it's going to go to.
Caller:
[2:08:25] Right.
Stefan:
[2:08:25] And even if he had some idea, let's say he thought it was on the fifth floor of this building somehow magically, is he going to go up and down the apartments trying the key because he wants to open the door and steal something from a shitty little rent-controlled apartment?
Caller:
[2:08:45] Yeah.
Stefan:
[2:08:47] Like, what do we have?
Caller:
[2:08:48] Not exactly target.
Stefan:
[2:08:49] Target yeah i mean we're not like we're not out here on the bridal path living next to getty lee from rush right i mean it's a shitty little i didn't say it's a crappy little rent control department we've got nothing to steal so this this genius of a cat burglar finds a key in the middle of the woods or somewhere in the neighborhood knows where it is goes checks the key opens things up assumes nobody's home assumes we don't have a little dog assumes we don't have it assume Assume we're not armed.
We don't have a cop. It's not a cop because some cops lived in the building.
And then what does he? He goes through this crappy little apartment that costs nothing to get what? What's he going to steal?
Caller:
[2:09:33] Right.
Stefan:
[2:09:33] Like none of it made any sense. And that didn't matter.
It didn't because it wasn't about the key. It was about punishment.
Caller:
[2:09:46] Yeah.
Stefan:
[2:09:49] And that's the level of truth that I could never get to with my mother.
She'd be just, oh, you're always forgetting your key. You're always losing your key.
Right. That's what kids lose stuff. Oh, hello, welcome. Kids lose stuff.
Caller:
[2:10:04] What is the obsession with punishment?
Why is it such a thing? Because I get into these conversations with people about children, and I tell them, I don't think I've ever punished my daughter.
Stefan:
[2:10:26] No, never happened.
Caller:
[2:10:27] Because there's never, first of all, she's five. She can't be criminal.
Stefan:
[2:10:32] Sorry, I don't mean to laugh, but of course not. Right, right.
Caller:
[2:10:35] Right but but these what is the obsession with the punishment stuff, is that just parents just taking out their frustration on children just because they, they they want control and they can't get it through their heads that you can't control a five-year-old or a four-year-old whatever however old well.
Stefan:
[2:10:57] It depends how dark we want to go here.
Caller:
[2:10:58] Sure let's go like look it's not empirical.
Stefan:
[2:11:01] I guarantee it's not empirical i was just working Looking on this study that's in the Peaceful Parenting book, which was the first real-time study of parents hitting their children, this research has attached a bunch of recorders to a bunch of moms, and they wanted to record X, Y, and Z.
What they actually found was that the kids were being smacked hit regularly, like 18 times an hour in some circumstances, and for nothing.
For turning the pages of a book too quickly, smack.
Stefan:
[2:11:28] Right. And so this was continual and objective because it wasn't self-reporting, and the kids went back to the, quote, misbehavior within 10 minutes.
So it's not because parents are trying to do something and it's working. It doesn't work.
I mean, what is it, 40% of kids in high school, if they're spanked when they're younger, are still being spanked. In other words, they've now been spanked for like 15 years, and they're still doing behavior which requires spanking. Right.
So, it's not to achieve anything, because it doesn't.
Stefan:
[2:12:09] It's not because the parents feel powerless, right? So one of the theories is, well, the parents feel powerless in their lives, so they exercise power over their children.
which is the usual cause and effect stuff that happens.
Like people say, well, the parents are feeling helpless and powerless, and therefore they take it out on their children.
It's wrong, but that's the causality, right? I don't believe that for a moment.
I think that the parents feel powerless because they keep abusing their children, and they surrender to this ugly, vicious, nasty, demonic abuse will on a regular basis.
and because they surrender to their addiction they then look powerless afterwards you know like somebody who's.
Caller:
[2:12:55] A drug addicts.
Stefan:
[2:12:56] They don't start.
Caller:
[2:12:56] Off the.
Stefan:
[2:12:57] Moment they touch the drug they're a total full-blown addict living under a bridge.
Caller:
[2:13:00] It's like no they keep taking.
Stefan:
[2:13:02] The drug and if.
Caller:
[2:13:03] They keep taking the drug.
Stefan:
[2:13:04] They keep digging and further and further into the hole called addiction and eventually they just can't get out.
Caller:
[2:13:08] Yeah so it's funny you mentioned addiction because that's I've been doing a lot of studying on that because, what's the book exiting the maze you did an interview with the author, did I yeah you did I believe you I listened to it so they're talking about how addiction is any behavior that has a negative consequence that you can't stop doing, right which i love that definition because it it basically broadens the whole spectrum okay pretty much anything you can't say no to is an addiction right any politics.
Stefan:
[2:13:52] National debt yeah.
Caller:
[2:13:54] War yeah yeah exactly so is beating your kids an addiction do you could you say no see i would take issue with that i would say you absolutely can decide not to beat your kid well.
Stefan:
[2:14:07] People do on a regular basis cases. Otherwise, they'd probably all be in jail or at least ostracized, right?
Caller:
[2:14:13] Yeah.
Stefan:
[2:14:14] Or investigated. Yeah, people say no to hitting their kids all the time.
But you could have, I don't know, you could have some pornography addiction that doesn't mean you're going to watch pornography at full volume on the bus, right?
So you can repress it, I suppose, if it's inappropriate or you're going to experience more direct negative consequences.
I mean, smokers won't smoke on a plane, even if they want to, right?
Caller:
[2:14:36] Right, right, right. So, and it kind of goes back to the whole, like, my mother never spanked me in front of a cop.
So, is that really an addiction? Because if you were truly addicted, you would spank in front of a cop.
Stefan:
[2:14:52] Right, right. Like, I mean, there are some people who will do drugs in front of a cop because they're that desperate to get a high, right?
Caller:
[2:14:58] Yeah.
Stefan:
[2:14:59] I think those people would be hardcore addicts, right?
Caller:
[2:15:02] So, if it's not an addiction, what is it?
Stefan:
[2:15:11] Right. Right. Now, I think that there would be some levels of addiction.
I mean, addiction is not just, it's not binary, right? There's certain levels of addiction. Some people play around with their addictions, like, you know, the social smokers.
You know, like they don't want to become full-blown smokers.
They don't really want to quit. So they'll just kind of manage it.
And, you know, I used to make jokes with my friends because, you know, every time you're at a party, some guy comes up and says, hey, do you have any cigarettes? You're like, well, I don't really smoke.
And they're like, no, me neither, man. I'm just a social smoker.
And they lie to themselves to the point where they're like, they want a cigarette.
they're at home alone but they're social smokers so what they do is they go outside and they just find some guy to chat with for five minutes while they smoke and they can continue to say no no no i'm just a social smoker right.
Caller:
[2:15:57] And like the inverse of that it would be i will smoke a cigar with my buddies playing poker because it's not really about the cigar it's about my buddies.
Stefan:
[2:16:09] Right right right so or social drinkers will also do the same thing but you know what's it like a A third of people who take up alcohol end up with this pretty serious drinking problem, and it's a big dice roll.
But there are some people who kind of play around with the edges of addiction, and they're kind of one foot in, one foot out, and all of that, and where there may not be significantly negative consequences.
I mean, just about everything has both positive and negative aspects to it. it.
But yeah, so, but with regards to the hitting, with regards to the hitting, yeah.
I mean, it certainly has negative consequences, although society does everything in its power, and its power is considerable.
Society does almost everything in its power to make sure that people don't experience the negative consequences of child abuse.
Caller:
[2:17:04] So can society then be addictive?
Stefan:
[2:17:09] What do you mean?
Caller:
[2:17:10] Can society be addictive?
Stefan:
[2:17:12] No, that would be enabling, right? So let's say if you're a woman and your husband is a drinker, and you call in sick for him, and then you go out and you do his work for him, and you do his taxes for him, and you're just covering up all of his addiction, and then you go and buy him more booze and whatever it is, right?
Caller:
[2:17:40] Right, right.
Stefan:
[2:17:41] So then you're an enabler. So society would be an enabler, because society does everything in its power to prevent the negative consequences of child abuse from accruing to the abusers.
I only understood this in hindsight, right? Because I'm just sailing into the public square like, well, yeah, if your parents are abusive, you don't have to see them. I mean, it's not an absolute.
It's not like gravity. It's not like because I was just like, yeah, I kind of believe everyone told me you don't have to be in abusive relationships.
And, you know, if you have an abusive husband, you don't have to.
You could divorce him, even if he's not abusive and you're just kind of unsatisfied or disappointed or whatever. You can divorce and that's totally fine.
And so I was always told it's really good to get out of abusive relationships.
relationships and so i was like oh okay so that's a principle so then obviously if a woman can leave an abusive husband that she chose and has children with who didn't choose to be there surely the adult children of unrepentant abusers can choose not to see their parents because they didn't even choose that relationship it would be like saying you can leave your husband if you chose him but you can't leave your abusive husband if it was an arranged marriage and you were forced to marry him like that would be like that would be completely mental right that would make no sense at all but that's It's kind of.
Stefan:
[2:18:51] So to prevent the negative consequences of abusing children from ever accruing to the abuser seems to be the primary business of society, which is why if a woman says, oh, you know, I had this abusive boyfriend, I finally left him, everyone's like, yeah, good, go, go, girl power, strong, empowered, trademark, whatever, right?
Yay, and they celebrate her and so on, right?
But if you or me, if I say to people, I don't see my mother.
She was very abusive and unrepentant, and I tried talking it out with her, and I went to therapy, blah, blah, blah.
People are still like, ooh, I don't know, man. That's, ooh.
Yeah. Right? Yeah. So the unchosen relationships must be defended to the death, but the chosen relationships can be abandoned virtually at a whim.
him like you know if a woman says you know i i left i left my i i left my husband because you know he just kind of worked too much and he was you know often kind of tired and and you know he just really wasn't there for me a lot and i just got kind of bored and right and and if a woman says i left like you know the number one reason why women leave marriages is dissatisfaction just you know just kind of dissatisfied well that's not a good reason to to leave a marriage at all right and so even those women are celebrated and you know you got to find yourself and don't settle for less and and know your worth and all of that kind of stuff so it is society.
Caller:
[2:20:17] As an enabler versus society as that thing that is pushing you to do something because i i was thinking of in the like the christian church context it's heavily taught that you know you don't spare the rod even though i think that's a gross misinterpretation of scripture yes You know, does the shepherd ever beat the sheep with the rod? No.
Stefan:
[2:20:41] Right, it's guidance, yeah.
Caller:
[2:20:43] So do you have society pushing you to say, all right, you have to spank your kids based on our false interpretation?
That to me is not enabling. That's like, no, I have to conform to society because if I don't, I'm going to lose something.
thing and are they using society as that substitute for love which is what you know exiting the maze kind of concludes with you like you get out of addiction when you fill that invisible void with love and it's provided from yourself but society.
Stefan:
[2:21:18] Doesn't even really seem to recognize how much it mistreats children which to.
Caller:
[2:21:23] Me is part of.
Stefan:
[2:21:24] Like the hatred right i mean so there is and there's not not even a word for childism, right?
We have misandry, we have misanthropy, we have misogyny, we have hatred of everyone, hatred of men, hatred of women, we've got racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, bigotry, but we don't have anything for the hostility.
Stefan:
[2:21:46] That society has a lot of times in general overall towards children that they can be beaten that they can be indoctrinated they have to be forced into school you don't listen to them you don't you right you don't you don't design schools around what's best for children you if they don't like the school system you you just drug them uh like this you use them as collateral to get free stuff in the here and now and you know screw their economic futures too bad kid uh you weren't voting like the the the exploitation and the hostility that so many people in society have towards their own children how dare you have an opinion that differs from mine how dare you complain about the society we're handing you how dare you have a problem with being trapped and indoctrinated by crazy blue-haired people right right this hostility is wild and this is like and And of course, it's kind of confusing, because when I grew up, everybody said, oh, children are our future, we all love our children, and children are everything to us, and we do anything for our kids, and there's all of this camouflaged language about how much society just loves and treasures its children, but then if you go past the language, it's.
Stefan:
[2:23:04] You know like at least at least some some bigot you know like some irrational bigot you know just says i hate x like whoever x is i'm race or something i just you know they're they're they don't claim to love and then undermine right that's that's the funny thing so go ahead like.
Caller:
[2:23:20] You told me like love is used as a word for manipulation most of the time.
Stefan:
[2:23:23] Right people.
Caller:
[2:23:25] Use they brandy that we're oh we love our kids you know yeah society does not love children.
Stefan:
[2:23:30] Well Well, and that's why I wrote in my novel, The Future, like, here's a society that is built around that which is best for children.
Caller:
[2:23:37] Right.
Stefan:
[2:23:38] Because, you know, if you were to say to people, should society focus on that which is best for children, everyone would say yes.
If you say to society, should parents sacrifice for their children that they chose to have and their children didn't choose to be there, everyone says, well, yeah, of course, right?
I mean, nobody would say, I think, nobody would say, well, a woman, yeah, she should be free to have children and have babies, but she shouldn't have to get up and feed them in the middle of the night when they're infants.
They'd say, well, that's the deal. You take the baby home from the hospital and the baby needs to be fed three times a night. You get up three times a night. That's what you do.
And so the idea, everybody says, yeah, well, of course, you should sacrifice for your children.
You shouldn't sacrifice your own children for your sake of, right?
But then in actual practice, what actually happens is this kind of documentary, I think it was called The War Against Kids, this attack on children.
Children, you can genitally mutilate the boys, you can beat them, you can neglect them, you can choose a career and dump them in daycare, you can dump them in these terrible schools, they could get bullied and nobody really does anything about it.
And you can exploit them financially by using their future earnings as collateral for your immediate democratic greed. Like you can do all of this terrible, terrible stuff.
Stefan:
[2:24:56] And that goes hand in hand with, you do for family, you do everything for your kids, you sacrifice for your kids.
But if some politician were to come along and say, listen, everyone, we have to accept a vastly reduced standard of living for at least a generation or two to try and do our best part to pay off the national debt.
Caller:
[2:25:16] Yeah, everyone would peddle.
Stefan:
[2:25:17] Well, and they're just like, no, screw you. Right? Forget it.
Caller:
[2:25:21] Right. So trying to unpack, why do people accept that? Because people know it's happening.
They know that this is happening.
Stefan:
[2:25:31] No but but there's that the biggest temptation to evil is the avoidance of its scope, right so for me my sort of way like if you look at something like covet right, it's like okay so what what if the the alphabet regulatory agencies are kind of corrupt what if the scientists are kind of corrupt what if the government money has corrupted people what if what if the media is kind of corrupt because they're reliant upon in in the states especially they're reliant on pharmaceutical money for their ants like what if it's so fucking big, right that i can't look at it well because if i look at it it's like the end of the movie the wall with bob gilbert like the whole thing just detonates and comes down like if evil becomes big enough people fall in rather than look at sorry go ahead i.
Caller:
[2:26:24] Say listen cult leader you can't You can't go down these conspiracy rabbit holes
Caller:
[2:26:27] like that. That's just...
Stefan:
[2:26:28] Right, right, right. Or, you know, like, this is sort of in the book, right?
As I said at the beginning of this, like, I'm pulling together all of this empirical evidence. Does society actually love its children?
So we hear, of course, everything about the Catholic child abuse scandals, right? Where like one or two percent of priests were abusing children.
And yes, the church in many cases was not great at dealing with this.
In fact, it was downright wretched and hellish at dealing with it, like moving these priests around rather than bringing charges and so on.
This is all absolutely terrible and reprehensible, right? Right. Okay.
So clearly that's driven by a desire to protect children from sexual abuse, in particular from authority figures, right?
Okay. So then is the rate of abuse higher in public school or in the Catholic Church?
Well, as it turns out, the rates of abuse are significantly higher in public school than they ever were in the Catholic Church, with the difference being, of course, that children and parents are forced to pay for the schools, children are forced to go in many places.
And so if it is what we wish to protect children, then the same people who were focusing on the Catholic Church should be focusing significantly more effort on public schools, but they don't.
Stefan:
[2:27:52] Right, we talked about the statistic that in a single mother household with a non-related man living there, the rates of child abuse are 40 times higher.
So why don't we talk about what's going on in government schools?
Why don't we talk about what's going on in single mother households? Well-
Stefan:
[2:28:10] Because the church is a competitor to state power, but single mothers vote for more state power, and government schools are used to indoctrinate children on the necessity and virtue of state power.
Stefan:
[2:28:22] So they're just power addicts opposing the church as a competitor to their power, while facilitating single mothers and government schools that tend to expand their capacity to exercise power.
Caller:
[2:28:35] So it's a factor of power.
Stefan:
[2:28:37] Yeah, it's a factor of power. it really doesn't have anything to do with protecting uh children as a whole because then you would right this is this is my sort of criticism with the libertarian movement right that the non-aggression principle is really important okay then we should focus on the widest violation of the non-aggression principle that we can do the most about that's child abuse and spanking but, right and it's funny because i remember like when i was sort of in the midst of that movement in in many ways i was starting to pull people towards that direction and then when i was yeeted out and sort of left by the wayside it's mostly dropped that topic it's going right back to oh the fed and oh foreign policy and oh foreign aid and it's like okay yeah.
Caller:
[2:29:18] Because all those all those other things all the isms you were bringing up earlier it's that's all coping to me i i see that as like oh you can just latch on to this and suck off of this bottle you know, don't look at the kids you know.
Stefan:
[2:29:35] Whatever we do now there's a survival thing too so most, certainly by modern standards, most societies in history and most societies well almost all societies throughout history and almost all, most societies across the world are kind of foundationally evil, right I mean they'd have slaves violence against women and children with endemic Like, child sacrifice in most societies was the norm until quite recently, right?
Caller:
[2:30:04] It's still going on in our society.
Stefan:
[2:30:06] Right. But, I mean, really explicit, like Aztecs carving open chests of hundreds of children, right?
So, we still have child sacrifice, but in a sense, we sacrifice their souls, not their bodies. We sacrifice their minds, not their flesh.
Caller:
[2:30:20] You can make a claim that abortion is child sacrifice.
Stefan:
[2:30:22] Well, that sounds very true. That's very true. That's very true. So...
If you wanted to survive an evil society, you could only do that by resolutely avoiding the sight of the evil.
Because if you see it and you process it, you recoil from it, and then the society, because it sees itself in what you're seeing, will attack you.
Caller:
[2:30:54] Rather than criticize itself.
Stefan:
[2:30:56] It will kill the critics.
Caller:
[2:30:57] Oh, this was all COVID all the time.
Stefan:
[2:31:01] Well, and your mother too, right? Who attacked you for her own mistakes as a parent.
Caller:
[2:31:05] Right.
Stefan:
[2:31:06] So if you see society and you say, holy shitballs, Batman, this is like kind of a hellscape of institutional and personal evils.
Caller:
[2:31:16] Right.
Stefan:
[2:31:17] People don't, I mean, isn't it wild? I mean, I know you have a much more vivid impact in terms of COVID than I do in terms of your father.
I mean, I didn't have the choice to go to my father's funeral because I couldn't go because I was unvaccinated and yeah, isn't it the wildest thing I mean to see the memory hole in real time is wild I don't know how it is where you are but for the most part for the most part, nobody's talking about what happened oh yeah it's just gone.
Caller:
[2:31:57] Yeah, and it's not gone for me. I remind people of the death camps, and I say, yeah, the hospital murdered people. It's fine. You know, you guys don't care.
Stefan:
[2:32:05] Yeah, people in old-age homes, as you know, dying, people weren't allowed to see them or visit them, and, you know, and what's the uptake on the latest boost?
This is like 5%, and it's like, so everybody knows that these claims weren't particularly valid, and everyone knows that, like, now it's like, oh, yeah, the masks, you know, Didn't do a lot, and the six-foot thing just came out of nowhere. It was some kid's science project.
Everybody was whipped into this frenzy of hatred and contempt, and families were torn apart, and people were called killers of the elderly, and the children were locked out of school for years.
And it's like, nobody's talking about it. We don't have any circling back. It's all just gone.
Caller:
[2:32:46] What's kind of interesting about that is, at my dad's funeral, my sister, the one we we were talking about earlier she pretty much got up and blamed us in a very you know subtle sort of way for you know him not being vaccinated because my mom was like who wants to speak at the funeral and i i told my mom i said you just make sure that i speak last because i knew what my sister was going to do because and even that it wasn't like my my sister's presenting basically basically, the leftist woke view of COVID.
And then I got up after her and basically said it was the hospital.
And there were so many other alternatives for treatment that were just not allowed because of protocol.
Stefan:
[2:33:32] Oh, and I remember reading, what's it, Robert F. Kennedy's book about how people had to bring endless lawsuits to get the hospitals to try and do stuff, which turned out to be quite helpful.
And now it's just horrible. And here's the funny thing too, Two, of course, now your sister would say, oh, but I very much care about our father and so on.
It's like, well, then what was with the drug addiction and the promiscuity?
I mean, that tortured your father and made his life hell.
And like, but now she's just cares so much.
Caller:
[2:33:58] Yeah it yeah that full thing was just it's such a such a wake-up call to the reality of the people around you and what people what lengths people are willing to go, for they're just maintaining i guess their level of comfort that's i.
Stefan:
[2:34:25] Don't know yeah i don't know i mean mean it is it's a wild thing because it's been the first big thing that i can remember i'm sure there've been others but it's the first massive thing where like this huge tear in the moral fabric of society we just opened up and we got a glimpse into hell itself and then it's just zip it up move on nothing to see here nobody's certainly back nobody a few people here and there but you know and this you see all of this stuff on social media it's like this is what they
Stefan:
[2:34:55] did this This is what they wanted.
This is what they, this is what they enacted. This is what they said.
Don't let them forget it. And it's like, but, but it does.
Caller:
[2:35:04] Well, and that's the thing. It's kind of, see there, there's a negative consequence in there. COVID has massive negative consequences.
And people are going to do it again, despite the negative consequence, even if you remind them like an addict.
Stefan:
[2:35:19] Yeah. Oh yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, everyone has in, you know, Everybody who went along with all of this craziness has put everyone else at risk.
I mean, that's the funny thing. If they say, well, you're putting us at risk, it's like, no, no, no.
You're putting everyone at risk because now they know the levels of compliance that people will perform.
Caller:
[2:35:37] So what are people addicted to, is the question. Is it just the comfort?
Stefan:
[2:35:43] No, I would say that society, they're addicted to survival.
And we couldn't survive alone. Like the ability to survive without social support, without familial or community support is incredibly new.
Like it's maybe 200 years old, maybe, and certainly not for everyone.
Caller:
[2:36:03] It's a post-industrialization phenomenon.
Stefan:
[2:36:06] Right. I mean, no, so in the past, right, so I'm thinking about like the enclosure movement, like the late 18th century, where people, young men in particular, got kicked off their ancestral lands or sold them or whatever, right?
and then they all flocked to the cities and started life anew and built their families up from there.
So it's really new that you can just go someplace and start over without your tribe, without your family, without the people you grew up with. So I think that, It takes a very strong stomach to look at society directly and not lose your mind, right?
To look at the machinery that, you know, I've sort of mentioned this before, like to realize that you're mostly surrounded by dangerous robots easily programmed by malevolent forces.
You know, like, you know, that meme of the NPC getting the chip taken out and the new chip put in, like, that's a very real phenomena.
Caller:
[2:37:00] Yeah.
Stefan:
[2:37:00] And so realizing that you're surrounded by a dangerous mob that can be programmed to turn on you at any time, that's really tough for people.
Caller:
[2:37:10] So what I learned post-COVID, because in my particular story, I was fired from my career for not masking.
Stefan:
[2:37:21] For not masking. Right. Right.
Caller:
[2:37:26] So, and I had a kind of a clever way of going about it, looking back about it.
I should have done it a little bit differently, but I basically said, I have a particular medical requirement that precludes me from wearing it.
And they still fired me for it.
Stefan:
[2:37:41] And they're not supposed to ask because of privacy laws, right?
Caller:
[2:37:44] Correct. HIPAA says no, but that doesn't matter.
And I actually pointed out to the HR people at my company, like, hey, this is all of the things, all the policies, everything that they were putting in place, I cited the statutes in my state saying, you guys can't actually do this.
It's violating laws that are on the books right now. And of course, they didn't care because, you know, hindsight, they were getting paid by the
Caller:
[2:38:12] federal government essentially to enact these protocols and programs.
Stefan:
[2:38:16] So, well, and sorry, the other thing, I don't want to interrupt your story, but also for them to admit that they were willing to do break the law because they're told to and they want social approval and all of that.
That's really tough. That puts people into a very uncomfortable company historically. Sorry, go ahead.
Caller:
[2:38:35] But that's the point. that's the crux it's like you actually don't care about the rules at all yeah they can go to hell yeah so what i learned from that scenario is you as an individual okay yay for america yay for uh you know rights whatever you actually need a community that's where the power, is and that was kind of my emphasis at the funeral it's like we as a community of people You know, all of you people sitting in this church knew my dad, but you guys didn't do anything about it.
He was getting murdered systematically at the hospital in your town where you all go.
Nothing. Crickets.
Stefan:
[2:39:22] So. But what would you have them do? That's the question.
Caller:
[2:39:26] I don't have the answer. We need to do something different.
Stefan:
[2:39:32] Maybe they do have the answer, which is there is no answer. So we can't fix it.
I mean, this is one of the fundamental questions of Christianity is like, why is it so hard for the world to get better? Why is it so hard for things to improve?
Why do things so often as they are now seem to be heading in exactly the wrong direction?
Caller:
[2:39:52] Sorry, Gary. Gary, are you spying on me or something?
I think it's crazy this gen is less afraid of the government than he is his mom.
That is just, bam.
Stefan:
[2:40:05] That's very funny. But of course, the two are related, right? right.
Caller:
[2:40:08] Yeah but he's absolutely right about that i am.
Stefan:
[2:40:12] Less afraid yeah no he has uh he is an x-ray mechanic like if i ever if i ever need to find out if i've got a weird lump in my bowels i'll just ask him to glance at my midriff and he'll just like scan it's like data data so anyway yeah he's he's got an x-ray vision that's uh superlative and uh also mildly alarming because i assume it has something to do with demonic possession but i could be wrong i.
Caller:
[2:40:34] Think he should be just a part of every conversation.
Stefan:
[2:40:36] Yeah yeah commentary absolutely like so i think i think that with regards to the the hitting of kids and i you know this is a big big question and i don't have any final answers and maybe maybe you do but i think it's something like people don't want to see the evils that they're surrounded by and so what are they going to do they have to then normalize those those evils, so they can live, so they can get out of bed, so they can go into society without feeling like they're in zombie land of, like, whatever, late Weimar hellscape.
And so what happens is I think people... That whining to yourself.
Caller:
[2:41:17] Sorry, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah.
Stefan:
[2:41:19] Sorry all.
Caller:
[2:41:20] Lying to yourself.
Stefan:
[2:41:21] Right but it's a survival mechanism can you can you reproduce if you know the evils of society right this is the whole question of like why why are there so many simps why do people have such a this is sort of um uh pearly things big question like why why are there so many simps who have trouble seeing the immorality of of women or women's potential immorality it's like because if you see that pretty clearly it can be kind of tough to choose a good bride if you don't have a lot of selection as most times we didn't throughout throughout throughout history judging.
Caller:
[2:41:48] By this chat i see one female avatar so can you reproduce.
Stefan:
[2:41:52] Right right right right i mean to me it's worth it i would rather not have reproduced than reproduce with you know gosh i mean see what's happening with stephen crowder or yeah terence so god was his name um don't gunslinger i can't remember his name but uh he's um i actually met him at a uh men's rights conference many years ago in detroit but uh a Terrence Stamp.
No, is that an actor? Anyway, he was talking about the Crowder thing.
And, you know, this is a guy whose wife killed his dog and he ended up living in a car for six months because his divorce was so bad and so on.
And, you know, I mean, obviously there's mess all around, but why is it that people have such a tough time identifying female evil?
Because if you identify it, and this is sort of your issue, but you said you have some challenges with women, right?
Because if you start to see this kind of manipulation and this is, you know, what Pearl is pointing out as far as I can see is, yeah, women are capable of, parental alienation and she's sort of making this case with regards to the Crowder situation and everybody just falls for it and simps and the women are worse sometimes than the men but the simps are definitely there.
Stefan:
[2:43:04] And, yeah, she's trying to wake people up to the possibility of female evil, and And it's really hard to get people to see this.
Now, we can either say, you know, original sin, corruption, right?
Or we can say...
Well, we evolved from evil.
We evolved from selfishness. We evolved from exploitation. And certainly we evolved from child abuse.
Like, obviously we evolved from child abuse.
And trying to tamp that down is really tough.
I mean, we all in this conversation, right? Because this is people who have been around for a while. And thank you again so much. Well, not even again.
I'm for the first time mentioning it on this call. all but thank you so much for your support that allows me to do this and have these kinds of conversations but it's pretty tough when you see the world for what it is it's pretty tough so.
Caller:
[2:44:04] From a survival standpoint what do you do after you figure this out after you don't wear the mask and 99 of the people around you want to mob at this point.
Stefan:
[2:44:17] Right you know well usually you just just get expelled expelled or killed i mean that was that was the danger that my ancestors were facing right and uh just the king was was after you and you just you i mean my ancestor fled with john lock to ireland and and just hid in bushes and under under bridges and you know just went went native went to the went to the ground went to went to the wind and uh you just tried your best to survive and hopefully things would turn around and things would cool off or people would forget or some other distraction would come along and you get to survive i guess that that's been mostly what what people can do yeah.
Caller:
[2:44:55] So just where do we run to now you know my my ancestors ran to america at 1635.
wow you know that after swearing allegiance to the king that's very important, right you had to do that to get on the boat.
Stefan:
[2:45:10] Well, that's the whole, and I don't have an answer to that other than I'm just going to keep talking about this child abuse stuff, because if we can't get that solved, I don't view that there's any particular solution other than, you know, there's no new virgin territory.
Like, you could start America on America, but there's no new America unless you get to Mars, which is a bit of a haul, to put it mildly.
Stefan:
[2:45:30] so i you know i think the only thing we can do is we're turned and cornered every prior solution has produced where we are now the only thing that's not been tried is talking about child abuse that's the only thing that's never been tried well.
Caller:
[2:45:43] And i believe that's that's why you are so censored because it is such a root of a bunch of bad behavior like just even in my own own personal experience just seeing how it's impacted me later on oh.
Stefan:
[2:46:02] You mean like in your own parenting in.
Caller:
[2:46:04] My own parenting in.
Stefan:
[2:46:05] My own.
Caller:
[2:46:05] Behavior patterns things that i want to stop that i can't stop or you know i'm fighting to i'm wrestling with so okay yeah it's it's probably the most important thing.
Stefan:
[2:46:20] Well i yeah i mean and every it's it's funny too because like everyone else is working on everything else right so surely i could be used to trying this other thing right do.
Caller:
[2:46:30] We need another protester.
Stefan:
[2:46:31] Yeah yeah yeah and and it's like um when i was in the business world you know you you'd have to develop r&d you'd have to develop new new software new things right, and everyone's just like completely mad they're like you just got to go back into politics it's It's like, okay, I did that for like 40 years. I think that's enough.
Stefan:
[2:46:51] And there's tons of other people working on it, so I think that's okay.
And yet, it's just terrible.
And the funny thing too, of course, we have an entirely punitive society at the moment, right? It's become really hysterical to the point where.
Stefan:
[2:47:04] And people can just make up things and then you get punished, right? So you should get punished for things you didn't even do.
And yet at the same time, parents who have abused their children for decades should totally be supported and rewarded, right?
So if somebody's identified as a racist or a homophobe or a sexist, they must be destroyed.
But, you know, people who've empirically and by their own admission abused children for decades, oh, you've got to support them and love them and forgive them.
And it's like, okay, this place is just crazy.
Stefan:
[2:47:31] You can't forgive people for things you make up about them, but you have to forgive people who actively did you harm when you were a helpless and dependent child.
And that's why I can only get so close to this weird, distorted, schizo heart of society.
I can only get so close because I feel if I get too close, it's going to infect my brain and turn it to mush.
It's so wildly contradictory and so wildly defensive.
defensive, like almost, you know, with your mother and my mother, where I don't remember, it's like this perfect defense that should never be questioned for what they did when they were 30 or 35 or 40, but you at the age of nine or me at the age of eight or whatever, where I genuinely did lose my keys or you genuinely did forget to take care of your brother, that's not an excuse and you have to get beaten.
So children are never allowed the excuse of, I forgot when we did it, in fact, forget.
But adults are perfectly allowed the excuse of I forgot when we damn well know they didn't.
Caller:
[2:48:29] It's the ultimate inversion.
Stefan:
[2:48:31] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Infinite moral responsibility for children, zero for abusive adults.
Caller:
[2:48:36] Right. And when I encounter something like that, I usually say that's how you can tell where Satan is.
Stefan:
[2:48:43] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Caller:
[2:48:44] It's completely opposite of what it should be.
Stefan:
[2:48:48] Right.
Caller:
[2:48:48] Completely.
Stefan:
[2:48:49] And do you think there ever will be any reckoning over the craziness of covet.
Caller:
[2:48:53] Um there's a lot of jokes in there but uh i'm not gonna go there, i don't think so because the only way there would be is if people got whipped up into a frenzy you know i relate it to the death camps in germany and there was a political advantage to whipping whipping people up into a frenzy.
So people now, you know, we have to remember it now forever and ever.
There's not going to be that for COVID, in my opinion.
I don't see the politics. I don't see the advantage.
Stefan:
[2:49:34] Right. And if it doesn't serve the power mongers, it usually doesn't.
Caller:
[2:49:38] Exactly.
Stefan:
[2:49:39] And if we can just open this up, I'm going to end this in a minute or two, but I'm happy to open it up to other people if there's anything that you wanted to mention or comment about. I appreciate the conversation, man. It's really great.
And I don't have a perfect, obviously, final answer for this why, but...
Caller:
[2:49:53] Come on, Steph.
Stefan:
[2:49:54] I think people avoid the corruption in their society, and by avoiding it, that's how it reproduces.
and this is why this is the old it's a himmler thing right from the nazis it's like you know the bigger the lie the um the easier it is to believe and so the bigger the corruption in society the harder it is for people to identify the corruption or see the corruption and that's the best way for the corruption to see to transmit you'd say you want to end.
Caller:
[2:50:22] And then you open up that whole thing of words.
Stefan:
[2:50:27] We were talking about how the corruption is so widespread that people can't process it in any real way.
Caller:
[2:50:34] The principle there of the bigger the lie, the more believable it is.
That, to me, is fascinating.
Stefan:
[2:50:40] That goes back to the noble lie of Plato, that you say things to the masses that aren't true but are believable so that they'll approximate doing the right thing.
Caller:
[2:50:49] Okay. But how does that have to do with like the believability of the lie.
Stefan:
[2:50:54] Well um if you know society is lying you're not part of society okay all right if your society is founded on falsehoods and we could go through these for you know half an hour it's still not be done but if society is founded on falsehoods, And this goes back to with your discussion of your motivations as to why you weren't telling your mother what your father told you as he was aging out of life, and you came up with these justifications, right?
Right, right. So if you say, well, I don't talk to my mother about the truth because she's terrifying, then you're not in a relationship with your mother, you're in a fear-based dependent attachment with your mother.
Caller:
[2:51:43] Right.
Stefan:
[2:51:43] So if you see how many lies society is founded on you're really not part of society anymore any more than an anthropologist who's studying the tribe is not in the tribe in fact you can only really study the tribe by being outside the tribe which is why i've got way more objectivity now after you know being deplatformed and being opposed to politics and so on i'm now studying studying without having any sort of fingers on the scale.
Exactly. Yeah, so you can't be, you can't see society and be in society, but you need to be in society to reproduce.
And therefore, those who see society tend to be selected out of the gene pool.
Caller:
[2:52:21] Sorry, go ahead. So don't forget, then, your family is your first society, which is why the whole defuse thing is probably the most important thing.
You can't actually be objective if you're still part of the tribe.
Stefan:
[2:52:33] Right. Survival or integrity. That's the two poles that philosophers and the masses rival or integrity. No.
Sorry?
Caller:
[2:52:43] Both. Don't choose. Both.
Stefan:
[2:52:44] No, no. You have to choose. No, no. You absolutely have to choose. No, no.
You have to choose. I mean, these days, and I think throughout almost all of human history and almost everywhere, you have to choose. You have to choose. You have to choose.
Because survival means swallowing the lies.
Integrity means seeing the truth and telling the truth.
And if seeing the truth and telling the truth kills your chances of reproduction or your your children's trans is a survival, even if you manage to reproduce, right?
Then most people, and we're only here because people chose survival over integrity.
If we were all perfectly, if we all had perfect integrity, we wouldn't be alive.
I mean, the subjects.
Caller:
[2:53:26] So really the only way out of this is to start our own society.
Stefan:
[2:53:30] No, the only way out of it is to keep talking about child abuse and pointing out the hypocrisies. yeah.
Caller:
[2:53:37] But at what point does the equation go away between survival and integrity because if you start your own survival or your own society based on integrity integrity is now the norm therefore it will survive.
Stefan:
[2:53:49] No but you're still seeing you're still you're still dealing with the same gene sets and habits that have evolved to reject integrity for the sake of survival you're talking about this sort of new soviet man like you can just create this new human being unmotivated by anything to do with evolution where they'll put their own interests aside and work hard tirelessly for the collective good and like the new Soviet man thing like we have to work with the clay that is not with the clay that would have evolved in a completely different situation but.
Caller:
[2:54:17] It can work because we're all here in this call talking.
Stefan:
[2:54:22] I'm sorry say again it.
Caller:
[2:54:24] Could work because we're all here in this call talking we have all figured it out.
Stefan:
[2:54:29] Right right and then we just work to try that's why I'm working on the piece of parenting book so then we work to try and to find a way to get the information out.
And this is really the first time that this information has been able to be shared without gatekeepers, right?
I mean, the gatekeepers, I guess, are the platformers and so on, but still, there is, the fire is dim, but it's still a light.
For the first time in history, it's not been able to be blown out by the powers that be.
So, you know, this carving of our thoughts into the very fabric of the universe, which is how I view it, like we're rearranging atoms based upon what we think, the atoms of the podcast and the videos and so on, and other people's minds get rearranged by what we... So we're rearranging atoms.
We're moving bits and bytes of brains around and all we can do is, I think, passionately make the case for truth, reason and virtue as often and as loudly as possible.
After that, there's that joyful free will thing where people are going to just have to make their decisions.
But at least we can help them make better decisions by giving them the reality of the alternatives.
Caller:
[2:55:34] Okay.
Stefan:
[2:55:34] All right. Anybody else wanted to jump in? I know it's been a long chat and I really do appreciate the time.
And it's a great, great convo. And thank you for opening up your life in this way.
Caller:
[2:55:44] Oh, always a pleasure. I'm an open book. Call me anytime.
Stefan:
[2:55:48] Comment, baby.
Caller:
[2:55:49] Quick question about the book stuff, if you don't mind.
Stefan:
[2:55:53] Yeah, go ahead.
Caller:
[2:55:53] I don't know if that was, okay. I'm sorry if you've already put like this kind of information out and I just missed it.
But the sources that you're using and compiling for your book, like the statistics and studies and stuff, have you posted that anywhere on this Discord or would you be willing to share that?
Stefan:
[2:56:10] Yeah, I think once it's organized, Jared did a, and to some degree based upon my notes, a giant research and brain dump.
And I've just spent the last couple of days doing an ungodly amount of labor, shuffling it all around and writing sort of flow throughs.
because it's interesting because the the core of the book really is of course the the, moral arguments and the examples of how to do things differently and then there's a bunch of data that's involved with that right so if i make a claim in the uh the theory then i need to back it up but then there's a whole section of just aces and the effects of of divorce and and all of the arguments as to why the empirical evidence is a site doesn't really care about its children, but in fact wants to exploit them.
So I think once, that's an interesting thing, maybe I can, I'll talk about that with Jared and James, because that's a really good question.
I'd appreciate you bringing it up.
It might be worth putting that data out to see if people want to either add to it or refine it in some way, or at least get a sense of where the data is coming from.
It's a really very good and interesting idea. I appreciate that.
Caller:
[2:57:20] Just really quick, if you do share that, I appreciate that you're coming from the, I guess, moral standpoint first.
The reason I'm looking for it is because I have a friend who wrote on the rational theory of the rights of children, and I have some minor disagreements with him.
And I want to show that definitively that it's a violation of the NAP if we can detect physiological changes or neurological changes in children's brains.
um from spanking and stuff and i know you've had that kind of information in previous podcasts but so many of them are so old and i i just figured you probably have much better stuff today yeah well i'll tell you.
Stefan:
[2:58:01] What just just for that i mean i'll certainly be happy to give you, that uh so just email me uh you can email support at free domain.com and we can get you that uh data i mean it's interesting because i don't know if it's going to be in the audiobook all of this data calculator because you know a lot of it's charts and tables and and all of this kind of stuff so, i'm not sure how much of it i'll be able to put into the audiobook i'm sort of still reviewing that i may do none of it and just say go to the this blob of of text i may go uh here's some selected parts of it um but yeah a lot of it is uh it's not something that you could really read uh as as an audiobook so um i'm still sort of working on that but yeah email i just mentioned this, reference this, and email that, and I'm sure we can get you at least the data that we have on the physiological effects of spanking.
Caller:
[2:58:54] Is email preferable, or may I send you a message here?
Stefan:
[2:58:58] You should go through Jared. So, Jared's running support at freedomain.com.
I try to have sort of one place where the requests are coming in through, because otherwise they tend to fall through the cracks. Certainly, if it just comes just to me, it might.
Caller:
[2:59:09] Got it. Thank you.
Stefan:
[2:59:10] Thank you. I appreciate that. All right. Anybody else?
Going once.
Caller:
[2:59:17] There was a great question by eduardo talking about addiction versus free will, what's even if even if you have horrible withdrawal symptoms i don't think addiction should be defined as something you can't decide not to do we have free will even if you have horrible withdrawals that's certainly true yeah.
Stefan:
[2:59:39] No that's certainly true and even if we say that that addiction diminishes free will, it's still free will.
Stefan:
[2:59:49] To go step by step further into addiction. So if I say, well, I can't run a marathon because I'm 300 pounds.
Okay, I don't have the free will to run a marathon at 300 pounds.
However, I had the free will, assuming I did this as an adult.
I had the free will for everything I put in my mouth to get to 300 pounds, if that makes any sense.
So even if we are to say that some addiction diminishes a free will, even if we were to make that case.
Stefan:
[3:00:19] Then and and certainly there are people like i remember this when the when covid hit and i was saying like good lord like the liquor stores are staying open and people were telling me and they were right to tell me you know there are a lot of addicts alcoholics if they don't get, their alcohol like they might die like the withdrawal can be that brutal now okay so i think we can say that if you're at risk of dying if you don't get the drug that your free will to to not take the drug is kind of diminished.
But again, you don't start off with your first drink in that situation.
You continue to drink, you continue to make those choices.
And some choices we make, well, I mean, every choice we make diminishes free will, like I've done this show for the last couple of hours, rather than anything else I might do with my time.
So every choice we make is an exercise of free will that eliminates all of our other choices.
And some choice we make regarding addiction will certainly diminish some of our future freedoms. but we're still responsible for that, if that makes sense.
Caller:
[3:01:21] Yeah.
Stefan:
[3:01:23] All right. Still going once, still going twice. I know people have been doing a lot of listening, so if they wanted to jump something in.
And of course, if you're listening to this later, freedomain.com slash donate, we'd really appreciate it.
But yeah, it's been a while since we did one of these kinds of calls, so I'm really glad we got a chance to. It's so much nicer sometimes.
The live streams are great, but it is just me. And the back and forth is really great, too.
all right i think we may be done i haven't checked the text um but thanks everyone so much of course freedom.com slash donate to help out the show and thank you everyone here who's been giving such great feedback uh hugely appreciate it and have yourselves a wonderful day i will talk to you guys uh wednesday and yeah just so you know like i'm not doing shows every day sometimes but the work is continuing a pace on the book so i hope that you'll trust that that's all chucking along and have yourselves a great day, everyone.
Take care. And obviously, feel free to keep chatting, but I will drop out at this point.
Thanks, Emil. Bye.
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