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March 15, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:34
141 The Libertarian Love Doctor - Trusting Instincts Part 2
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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It's quarter past five on the 15th of March 2006.
You know, I used to wonder why it was that I talked about the date and time.
Now I know because I'm reorganizing all my podcasts.
I've had a number of requests from whiny slash very interested slash bandwidth-sucking iPod users who say, gee, you know, I got your whole 1.3 gigs worth of podcasts and I can't seem to put Play them in sequence!
So I've actually been doing a little bit of work, as I mentioned, to Fix up some of the old podcasts.
So I've taken some of the old ones, which I have in sort of one gig size WAV files, and I've converted them to a variable bitrate MP3s, 8 to 40k.
They sound better.
I think they sound not too bad.
Some of the sound quality of the early ones is a little spotty, especially that time I was in Washington and had to do it in a food court with the notebook's built-in microphone.
And it sounded a little bit like this.
So it's okay, just think that I'm beaming up from a bath escape, and I'm sure it'll all make sense.
And I discovered three!
Three lost podcasts!
It's like the Rosetta Stone of Freedom right there in my hands.
Three tragically lost early podcasts.
Which actually I think are pretty good, so I'll be resurrecting those.
I'll actually post where they are on the board, just in case you haven't got your daily dose of Tsunami Steph's conversational styles.
So...
The libertarian stylings of Steph, or aka Rap Name, still working on Big Chatty Forehead.
So I hope you're doing well.
Let's continue with this idea of instinctual understanding or instinctual knowledge.
I've thought about this quite a bit for some time, and I actually have been listening to an audiobook recently called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, I think the name is, wherein he has a number of experiments that I think are Kind of cutesy cutesy, but I think kind of useful.
I'll just mention a couple of them.
So it sort of reinforces what it is that I'm talking about when I talk about instinctual understanding and that you actually are not really alone when it comes to making decisions in your life that you have a large array of instincts and unconscious motivations and promptings to help you make those decisions and you don't have to overthink too much, right?
You want to make sure that you use the right engine for the right mechanism, right?
So you don't want to use your instincts I mentioned a couple of experiments that came up in this book, which I think is interesting.
It's not a bad book.
figure out a life problem, the kind that we were talking about this morning.
So using the right gear, in a sense, for the right incline is very important so that you don't wear yourself out applying the wrong methodology to the wrong circumstances.
So I mentioned a couple of experiments that came up in this book, which I think is interesting.
It's not a bad book.
It rambles a little, but hey, when you live in glass entire cities, you shouldn't even think about thinking about stones.
So I'm not going to complain too much.
Except, of course, he's edited, and I'm not.
But one of the experiments he came up with is somewhere in Idaho, they did this experiment where they got these people to start playing this card game.
And there was like a blue deck of cards, and there was a red deck of cards.
And it was sort of like community chest in Monopoly.
So you sort of picked up stuff, and you got sort of good or bad ones.
Now, one of the piles of cards had minor rewards, minor punishments, pretty consistent, steadily growing.
The other one was major rewards, major punishments, but generally slightly more on the negative side.
Now, interestingly enough, people after... I can't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like people after 50 cards began to feel that there was something awry, and after like 100 or 150 of these cards, they realized that, oh, I should be playing from the deck which has the mild rewards and the mild punishments, but overall gives me more than it's taking away, versus the other one.
So they actually began to hesitate around 50 cards and then they figured it out consciously at over a hundred cards.
Now the very interesting thing is that though their hands began to sweat after only 10 cards.
Sort of a very interesting thing when you think about it, that some part of their physiology, and at this point it was below their level of conscious understanding, was picking up Red Cod's bad.
Red Cod's bad.
Steph's Red Pill?
Very good.
But Red Cod's bad.
So, that's a very important thing to understand, that the physiology, the body, figured out what was going on, the unconscious, and gave them a stress indicator in terms of sweaty palms, five times quicker than they even began to feel uneasy consciously, and over ten times quicker than they figured it out consciously.
So that's very important to understand that you have a lot of body processing that's going on.
You have a lot of unconscious processing.
It's not mystical.
It's not freaky.
It's not otherworldly or anything like that.
It's just that when you think of all of the evidence coming in through the senses and that all of the evidence that is accumulated in your life, you have a lot of understanding that you just kind of got to tap into, right?
I mean, in my sort of general way of thinking, the conscious mind is like a laser.
Like it cuts through.
It's very singular.
It's very focused.
Whatever you're focusing on, you're not focusing on everything else.
So that is very important when you're doing sort of fine-up detail work.
You're coding something.
You're writing something.
You're focusing just on that.
You're not focusing on the sounds of the dishwasher or what position the sun is in or whether it's slightly cloudy or slightly sunny or whatever.
You're just focusing on whatever it is that you're doing, and you've got that laser which you want to use.
We like the laser.
The laser is good.
And on the other hand, though, I view the unconscious as kind of like sunlight.
So it doesn't sort of specifically light up one thing in particular, but it lights up kind of everything.
And I sort of, more in my own mind, I think of it like strong moonlight, because it doesn't give you a lot of details, but it gives you directions, right?
With really strong moonlight, you can actually navigate.
I've driven snowmobiles up north in strong moonlight, and you can actually navigate pretty well, once your eyes adjust.
So that gives you the big picture of the landscape, but it's not like a specific laser.
And those of us who are conceptual thinkers tend to focus a little bit too much on the laser and not quite enough on the moonlight, right?
Not on the big picture stuff where you can navigate by grabbing everything at once.
So that's what you have to trust within yourself, is the unconscious, to sort of give you the processing that's always occurring below your conscious mind.
I mean, we get this in dreams, and dreams can be quite useful to interpret.
If you're going through a challenging time psychologically, it's well worth analyzing dreams, because there's a lot of important information in dreams, or at least that's been the case with me, and it's certainly the case with Christina.
When we've gone through challenging times in our lives, never with each other, that's always wonderful, but challenging times in our lives, Dreams have been enormously helpful, and it's well worth having a look at that.
There's a lot of wisdom that goes on below the conscious mind that you've got to tap into, or you'll find your life a lot easier and more productive if you tap into.
Another experiment that these guys did was they got these couples to come in and sit down and they videotaped them and they put sort of fidgeometers on them to see how much they were fidgeting in their chest and they put biometric indicators on them to figure out what their bodies were doing and they asked them to sort of sit down for an hour or half an hour and then just talk about An issue that was contentious within their marriage.
So the issue they have in this book, the Blink book, is a couple fighting about whether they should keep their dog or not.
The guy doesn't like the dog, and the girl likes the dog, and so on.
Now, I won't get into all the technicalities, but basically the researcher had figured out a way that he was going to slice up their emotional reactions and objectively quantify them, or as objectively as they can be.
I mean, eye-rolling is never a sign of love, so there's some stuff which can definitely occur and that you can measure.
And he found that through assigning these measurements to their emotional reactions over a half-hour period, he found that by looking at a couple for only half an hour, he could figure out to a 95% accuracy Whether or not they would be married in 15 years.
In other words, whether they had been divorced.
He found that if he measured them, or had someone who was trained in measuring these observations, if he sat down and looked at this couple for 15 minutes, there was a 90% accuracy.
And I would submit, though it's not mentioned in the book, that it's actually 100% accuracy.
It's that some couples turn it around, go to counseling, figure things out.
But if the couples continue on their particular path where they have these negative characteristics, contempt, of course, is the worst one.
Once you have contempt for someone, your relationship with them is completely toast.
It never comes back.
So if you're around somebody who's rolling their eyes a lot, run!
Do not look back.
Do not take prisoners.
Run!
And of course, don't roll your eyes at other people unless you are going to suggest that they run.
So this is sort of interesting, a way of looking at how would you predict somebody's marriage.
You can do it.
You wouldn't need to look at them for months or figure them out.
You can just get trained on this methodology and look at them for 15 minutes and you can figure out whether or not that's successful.
Now, that's somebody who's looking at a third party if you yourself are in that situation.
So like in a blind date, right?
I would guess within five or ten minutes, maximum, in a blind date or a date with a woman who you don't know very much about, or a man, you can figure out, you know, right for me, not right for me?
Am I interested in talking?
Does the conversation flow?
Do we seem to have the same values?
Does she have a good sense of humor?
All of these things you can figure out very, very, very quickly.
This is why the speed dating thing is sort of taking off, right?
It's not just, you know, overworked yuppies looking to breed, but it's also sort of sensible, right?
You know pretty quickly, either in a job interview or a date, whether it's going to work out.
But, you know, you can't get out for a while.
You can't be that rude, right?
So it actually sort of makes sense.
Now, another experiment that was done, which was interesting, was they asked students who had not actually taken a course from a particular professor.
to rate whether that professor was a good or a bad teacher.
So, of course, they have a null hypothesis or a sort of a control group, which is the students who actually took a course from this professor for a semester or two and rated the professor in their course evals at the end of the semesters.
So they have that group.
That group has turned in their work.
It's all been annotated so they figured out, at least for students who take the course for a semester or two, whether that professor was rated as good.
Hunky-dory.
Now, what they did was they played 30 seconds of this professor talking and they found an extraordinarily high correlation between Students who'd looked at this professor talking for 30 seconds and the students who had taken that course for a semester or two and had marked that professor.
Very, very high correlation.
So you need a semester, not so much.
You need 30 seconds.
But they went even further.
They wanted to find out To what degree could they remove information from this and still get the correlation?
And I won't go through all the gradations, but let me just surmise by saying... Oh, surmise!
Surmise!
Podcast 140 and I'm surmising!
Oh, there's hope for me yet!
Suffice to say that when they got down to a two-second video clip without sound of the professor teaching, they still had a high correlation.
Between those who saw a two-second video clip with no sound, and the professor, those who'd taken the course for the whole semester, or two semesters.
I think that's quite interesting.
I'll give you one more.
I'm not going to give them all, because you should buy the book if you're interested in this kind of stuff.
I'll give you one more, though.
So, those who are the doctors, doctors who get sued, and doctors who do not get sued...
It's got very little to do with the amount of errors that they make.
What it has a lot to do with is how they communicate to the patients.
So there's been tons of examples of doctors who've made egregious or grievous error and nobody sues them because they're really nice people.
And there are other doctors who make the same errors or less significant errors who get the stethoscope sued right off their chest because, you know, they're kind of like Doofus is when it comes to communicating with patients.
So again, I'm not going to go through all the gradations, though they are quite fascinating.
Have a look at the book if you can.
But what they finally got down to when it came to figuring out how people could differentiate doctors who'd been sued from doctors who hadn't been sued, it was a two or five second Audio with all the high frequencies taken out so that you couldn't understand the actual words.
In other words, it was a few seconds of tone of that doctor talking to a patient.
Patients who listen to that, or just lay people who listen to those tapes, could very easily differentiate between the doctors who got sued and the doctors who did not, simply based on a few seconds of audio only with no words that were distinguishable.
I mean, that's pretty remarkable when you think about it.
And I don't believe that we're all autistic and can do all of this fantastic math and levitate or anything like that in that sort of, there was some, what, John Travolta film about that, where he was just some genius turned out to be.
Oh, I'm not going to give away the ending.
But I don't believe that's possible.
We can't make things levitate and we can't do polynomial five-digit mathematical calculations in our head.
But I do believe that when it comes to people, that we can read people very, very quickly.
I've always had this discussion with Christina, and I think she's slowly coming over to my way of thinking, because it seems only fair that after I've come over to her way of thinking on just about everything else, she, you know, throws me a bone.
I think that's nice.
I think that's very sweet.
And I've always said, people, everybody knows everything.
Everybody knows everything.
So I used to bug her a little bit when we were talking about her family, and I'd say, well, why does this person do this?
Or why are they like that?
And she'd say, I don't know.
And I would say, well, of course you know.
I mean, you've known them for 30 years, although she is only 26.
You've known them for 30 years.
Of course you know!
What do I not know about my brother?
There's nothing that I don't know about my brother.
There's nothing I don't know about my boss.
There's nothing I don't know about my employees.
They're all perfect open books to me.
Doesn't mean I can predict everything that they're going to do under all situations, but the basic characters are perfectly clear to me.
I liked my boss the moment I started chatting with him.
And, you know, we go for lunch a couple of times a week and have a great chat.
He's very smart and very engaging and a warm guy and I really like him.
There was two employees when I first joined this company about three years ago.
There were two employees of the, I don't know, 25 or so who were reporting to me at that time.
There were two.
The very first moment I met them, I came home to Christina that night and I said, oh my goodness, am I going to have problems with employee A and employee B?
And sure enough, I had to get them out of my... well, one guy I had to fire, and another guy I had to get out of my department very quickly.
They were just emotionally monstrous.
I won't get into any details, but you can pick these things up very quickly.
The moment that Christina and I began talking, it was a real pleasure, and I feel like we haven't stopped.
And it's just wonderful.
It's always been a pleasure.
It always is a pleasure.
I have not learned anything about her personality after the first day.
That is a shock to me, other than just how wonderful she is in all dimensions.
So, you know, think back on these podcasts.
I mean, this is podcast 12 million.
Something kept you going along this route.
I've taken you on some pretty weird journeys in these podcasts, and I don't just mean the tangents.
I mean things like there's no God, there's no government, people who teach their children religion are evil or abusive, you don't need police, the military are indistinguishable from hitmen.
Agree or not, you gotta accept or you gotta know that I've taken you on some pretty trippy journeys in these podcasts.
And why have you stayed?
Why have you stayed?
I don't have anything over you.
I mean, I'm not even charging you.
You're not even saving any money if you stop.
So why have you stayed?
And I would suggest that you stayed, A, to listen to me loosen up a little, because I've got to tell you, some of those early podcasts, it's like Mr. Roboto goes libertarian.
You've stayed because there was something about what it is that I was saying that you trust.
And that doesn't mean you trust me.
It means that you trust my unconscious, that you trust my language skills, my reasoning skills, my process.
I'm not saying you'd lend me money.
Maybe you would.
But in terms of the philosophy that I'm espousing or that we're talking about here, You've trusted me, and you've trusted me pretty much from the beginning.
I don't think I've had anybody write to me who said, I agreed with you up to this point, but once you started getting into living in the biblical sense with lamas, I couldn't follow you there.
I tried, but I could only get a hold of a goat.
Nobody's written to me and said, I believed in you for a while, I believed in what you were saying, but then you went completely off the rails, and you're just full of nonsense.
Now, I have had people say, well, this seems to contradict with that, and so on, and we've sort of had discussions, and sometimes I've been able to explain it to them, and sometimes they've needed to explain myself to me, and I've learned something from it.
But for the most part, you've continued to listen because there's kind of like a consistency in what I'm saying.
And although I'm leading you far away from the herd, it's like I'm the Pied Piper, right?
But we're going up to the mountaintop, not off a cliff.
And I'm leading you away.
I'm like singing my little song, saying, you know, let's get free, brothers and sisters.
Let's get libertarian.
Let's get objectivist.
Let's get anarcho-capitalist, baby.
Let's just do it.
And you're coming along because you trust something about this conversation.
And I mean, not just me.
This is a back and forth, and I'm getting lots of feedback, and I'm sort of synthesizing it for everyone.
And why would you trust some crazy lunatic up in Mississauga, Ontario, who's telling you all of these crazy things?
Well, you trust me, and I just sort of say me, but you trust your own mind, right?
You trust your own perceptions of me.
Because you sense that, I'm guessing, right?
You can tell me if I'm wrong, but you sense that I'm not going to lead you astray.
And I don't mean this in any kind of self-aggrandizing way.
I don't mean like I'm leading everyone to the promised land.
That's next podcast.
But what I mean is that because I'm leading people in directions that they probably have not been before, at least not as far, there has to be a pretty strong trust relationship.
I take that pretty seriously.
I mean, for all jokes aside, I take that trust relationship very seriously.
And I do my best to retain the trust of people to whom I am leaving so far away from the herd because it's kind of scary out here in the sort of interstellar space of thought away from the general cozy conventions of culture.
But you judged me, and I would guess that you judged me in terms of what it is that I was saying Within the first 10 seconds.
You sort of think back way back to the early days of my podcasting.
And I was still learning how to do it.
The sound is terrible in parts and so on.
But there was something in what I was saying and the way in which I was saying it that gave you some level of trust to say, yeah, agree, don't agree.
It's interesting.
This guy seems kind of together.
He's not ranting.
He's not bitter.
He's not whatever, right?
I mean, he's telling me to think for myself as if I need to tell you that.
You know, everything that he says is subject to judgment.
He tries to sort of point out when he's theorizing versus when he thinks something is true.
But all of that sort of came later.
I would guess that within the first 10 or 15 seconds of listening to me do a podcast, you got a lot about who I was.
And I bet you, you could tell a lot.
If you only heard 10 seconds of one of my podcasts, you could tell a lot about who I was.
And that's something that's very important when it comes to your human relationships, right?
The trust relationships that you have with others in business, in love, familial, with friends.
It's very important to understand that you know exactly what to do, you know exactly when to do it, and you know exactly whom to do it with.
And you just have to trust that.
You have to not live in your head only.
You've got to live in your gut.
You've got to live in your heart.
You've got to live with your passions.
There is an enormous amount of wisdom that we are sitting on.
Our conscious mind is like the top pyramid stone on a huge pyramid.
And it is the most powerful and focused.
area of our minds in some ways, but it's very hard to get the big picture just with your conscious mind, because it's that laser, right?
It's like trying to find your way through the woods with a laser pointer.
You can kind of do it, but it's a lot of work relative to it just being kind of bright out, like a sunset or whatever.
And that's sort of what it is when I'm talking as this libertarian love doctor guy.
I was reminded of that guy that Tim Meadows plays on Saturday Night Live.
I can't even remember the character's name.
I'm sure somebody will post it.
That's when I talk about sort of the libertarian love doctor approach.
What I'm talking about is trusting your instincts.
Trusting your instincts to find the right person.
And the reason that we want to be as authentic as possible with people is A. because it's less strain, but B. because it allows their unconscious to process who we are effectively.
So if you come across, and I'm thinking back to my 20s, right?
If you come across like Yo, I'm too cool for you know, I lived in Africa, and I lived in the woods, and I was a gold panner, you know, I did some stand-up, like all this sort of self-advertising nonsense, then all that the other person's unconscious get is, ahem, shit.
It's probably slightly less coffee than that, but I'm sure you get the word.
Their unconscious is simply going to process you as somebody who's not presenting a true self, who's fake, who's whatever, right?
You just want to talk openly about what you're passionate about and what makes you happy.
That's pretty good, right?
That's a pretty good way to introduce yourself to someone.
And that way, if you come across honestly and openly and, you know, not too luxury and not frightened that they're not going to be a libertarian too, then their unconscious is going to slice you up pretty nicely and figure you out pretty quickly, and that way you're not going to have to waste a lot of time.
And that's very important when it comes to romance.
Don't waste time.
Don't waste time.
Because every moment that you spend in a relationship that's not going to lead to what you want, assuming that I think it's true for most of us, that we want a long-term love relationship that's gonna, well, hopefully last our whole lives, because I can't tell you that there's, I can tell you, there's not, having tried just about every configuration, nothing beats marriage to a great woman.
I mean, nothing in the world beats marriage.
I mean, it just, my head explodes with joy.
And if that's what you're looking for, every moment that you spend in pursuit of a relationship based on other considerations is a waste of time and is drawing you away, is drawing you away from your central goal.
I've always sort of maintained, and this is very true in business as well, If you make a mistake, it's not like you don't get where you're going.
You actually go the opposite direction.
So, as I mentioned earlier, if I want to go to Vancouver from Toronto and I start heading eastward, not only am I not getting closer to Toronto, I'm actually getting further away.
Closer to Vancouver.
I'm actually getting further away.
So, that's very important.
Let's just say that I think the COBOL is the next big thing and I get my coders, guys, to start rewriting our software in COBOL.
Well, let's just say that I have made a mistake.
Oh, maybe, whatever, right?
If I've made a mistake and I've spent six months learning COBOL and recoding everything in COBOL, well, what does that mean?
What it means is that not only have I lost six months, but now my coders have six months less experience in whatever technology we're going to use.
Let's say .NET 2.0 or Java, whatever.
So if I switch January to June, we work on COBOL.
And June I go, you know what?
I'm going to go .NET 2.0.
All right.
Well, not only have we lost six months in terms of that, but we could be six months further ahead into learning .NET.
So it's a double whammy.
And that's sort of very important to understand because, you know, your productivity goes up asymptotically as you learn a new language and a new programming environment.
And that would be all gone.
So every time that you spend in pursuit of a love relationship that's not going to lead you to where you want to be, not only are you not getting what you want, but you're going away from what you want.
You're getting further away from what you want.
Your heart is becoming cynical.
Your heart is becoming bruised.
Your defenses are going up.
Your level of trust is going down.
So when it comes to when should you... I know this is a long answer and I'm sorry if it does seem long or if you know this stuff already, but I think it's important.
When should you tell the woman that you're going out with that you're a libertarian?
You know, I don't mean to sound all, you know, snatch this pebble grasshopper from my hand, but if you have to ask the question, you're dating the wrong woman.
That's sort of important.
And the corollary of that is, you know, there are all these movies about, oh, I want to ask this girl out, and I'm so terrified, and I'm so nervous, and I don't know if I want to.
If you're really nervous about asking the girl out, like you're literally terrified, then you're asking the wrong girl out.
Because it really shouldn't be that scary.
So in relationships, if you're having torturous questions, should I, shouldn't I, this, that, the other, when, how, with what, you are dating the wrong person, then you should stop doing that.
So it's one of these questions that can't be answered, because if you have to ask it, you're in the wrong relationship.
I have no idea what I told Christina about my political beliefs.
I honestly can't remember.
I do remember when I was wanting to ask a girl out and I was really nervous, one of two things happened.
Either she would go out with me and it would be a disaster.
You know, usually because, you know, I don't put out.
You know, until later on.
I'm just kidding.
I was in my teens, twenties.
What are you, crazy?
But it would either be a disaster or She just wouldn't go out with me.
Wouldn't want to.
Make some lame excuse, right?
I remember, oh, I don't know, who wants to hear painful teenage things, right?
But you, maybe.
We're not alone in all of this.
I was very interested in the teen queen of my junior high school, who had the same initials as I did, and so of course, naturally, we were acronymically destined to be together.
We also, because we're alphabetic, we're lockers together next to each other, so I ask her out and, you know, I'm 13 or whatever, I'm 12 or something like that.
Oh, it's horrible even now.
And I say, you know, with that classic 12-year-old voice, would you like to go swimming on Friday?
And she turns to me and glances up, and I've been screwing my courage up for this for days, right?
And she turns to me and she says, with who?
And it's like, Mayday!
Mayday!
We've lost engines two and three!
We're going down!
And then you have to sort of get out of the situation, right?
But it's not what you want to hear.
With who?
And it's like, with me!
Oh, I'll be busy.
And I met her years later, and I said I had a laugh about it, but, you know, she had not turned into a person that I really would have wanted to go out with.
And that's sort of important.
You want to trust your instincts with people, especially when it comes to romantic things.
Because we're, you know, and this is nothing to do with capitalism or anything like that, but we are, of course, heavily overexposed to a particular kind of body image and a particular kind of look and, you know, men are programmed to be sort of like glossy skin pursuers and whatever, high cheekbone pursuers and so on.
So we can get a little bit sort of distracted by the hourglass, so to speak.
And that's really not a good way to pick a mate.
I was lucky with Christina, but she was not a woman that I would have looked at across the room and said, I have to talk to her.
And she was the same way with me.
I wasn't the guy who she said, oh, if I don't talk to this hunkasaurus, I'm just going to die.
So, we fortunately got to know each other and it's fantastic and wonderful, but that's sort of an important thing too, right?
You don't sort of date someone just because they look a particular kind of way.
I mean, that's obviously shallow and unproductive.
I'm not saying don't do it, I mean, but do it and recognize what you're doing, right?
Doing this sort of very shallow thing and you have no right to complain about others for their lack of depth.
That's sort of all I would say about that.
But, you know, we know everything that we need to know about people.
We know everything we need to know about people within the first minute or two of meeting them.
There's absolutely no mystery.
Everything else is just exactly the same in variations of what you see at the beginning.
And this holds true for everybody and holds true with your children in terms of what it is that you need to do.
You know exactly what you need to do with your children.
You know exactly what you need to do when people get sick.
You know exactly how to comfort people.
You know exactly what to do in every situation.
You really, really, really do.
Now, we're told that we don't.
We're told that life is confusing and complicated.
I think about everything, and everything we do is wrong, or you know, whatever, right?
And sitcoms are all about misunderstandings, and all this sort of non-comedy is all about this kind of stuff.
And so we're told that we're wrong, and school is all about your instincts don't count, don't matter, what you feel like studying doesn't matter, get back in line, get back in your desk, and drone along with everybody else.
We're just not allowed to trust our instincts.
And our parents really don't like it, right?
So when Christina was a kid, she didn't want to go to church.
Too bad.
Sucks to be you.
Get into your little flowery dress and we'll put your hair up.
You've got to look pretty and so on.
And then she said at one point when she was in her teens, well, you know, so if Jesus Christ showed up in what he was dressed in, you know, or he just showed up dressed sort of as a poor guy, we wouldn't let him into the church.
And of course, nobody wanted to answer that because you're just not allowed to have instincts in modern society.
You're just not allowed to have instincts.
There's so much of modern society that is entirely wrapped up with eliminating or destroying or undermining the instincts.
That's really what society is all about.
And religion is very much in that corner, and the state is very much in the other corner.
And the family is in the third corner.
You can't have instincts.
I mean, how much of society would change if you knew exactly what to do in every situation and did it right?
How much of society would change?
Well, I gotta tell you, a whole messy chunk of it would change, and all those people have incomes, and all those people want their jobs, and all those people don't want to retrain.
And so, educators and priests and families and psychologists and all this kind of stuff, they would be kind of diminished, right, in terms of their income and their capacity to help people, because, well, gosh, everybody knows what they need to do.
So I submit to you that you do know exactly what you need to do.
Do you remember waking up one morning and saying, you know, I think I'm going to push the big puberty button because it's about time.
No, your body knows exactly what to do.
And you know, when you have a cold, you don't just sit there playing a video game to get rid of the bugs.
No, your body knows exactly what to do.
When it comes to empathy, when it comes to understanding people, we all have minds and that have been honed into developing their perception of other people and of the world to a very fine degree.
I mean, we know exactly what the gap is.
So my friend, whose mother just died, he's not so much with the dating, right?
And he was saying, well, you know, I'm sad about it, and I should get myself a girlfriend, and blah, blah, blah.
And he said, but, you know, I grew up without, my mom was single, I didn't get to see a romantic relationship, blah, blah, blah.
And I said, well, that's fine.
But if it were true that you were unable to date, you wouldn't feel depressed about it, right?
You feel depressed about it because you can date, but you won't!
So, you can make up all the excuses you want, but your unconscious knows better, right?
That's why it's making you sad, right?
Sadness is very important.
And depression, emptiness, sadness, anger, all these things are very important.
They're all part of your instincts, and you can choose to ignore them.
And the one thing that the mind will not do, the unconscious is absolutely insist, right?
It's like a gentle wind.
It's not like a tsunami that picks you up.
So you can ignore it, but it doesn't really matter.
The fact is that you know everything you need to know, and if you ignore it, it's definitely at your peril, and it makes your life that much harder, and you have to waste a lot of time like I did in my 20s, you know, dating the wrong people, being in business with the wrong people, and so on.
That's my suggestion to you to understand that you know everything already and that you don't need to ask questions like the questions that have been asked.
It's perfectly valid to ask them, of course, but understand that you know the answer and the answer is absolutely within you.
And if you get these kinds of questions floating up to you, it's because you're with the wrong people.
Thank you so much for listening.
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