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Feb. 4, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:17:05

631 Call In Show Feb 4 2007

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	All right, so let's get started.
	It's six minutes past four.
	Thanks so much, everyone, for taking the time to cease worshipping at the church or at the television set to join in an exciting and challenging philosophical conversation.
	This is Stefan Molyneux, host of Free Domain Radio, which you can find down on their web at www.freedomainradio.com or on YouTube at youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio.
	So I'm going to do me three short little wee topics and then throw it wide open to anybody who's got any questions, comments, issues, problems, or grammar corrections, which I've had a few of this week.
	So the first thing that I think is interesting, I'm going to start with, I get some of this stuff from Maclean's magazine, which is, it's like Time Light.
	It is the sort of national politics and economics magazine of Canada.
	And the cover story on February the 12th show, which of course is the February the 12th issue, which as a child I always thought came from the future, which confused me.
	Yes, they call this the Great University Cheating Scandal.
	And the tagline or the subtitle is this.
	With more than 50% of students cheating, university degrees are losing their value.
	Many are worried about long-term consequences.
	So why don't the schools put a stop to it?
	So, let's see here.
	I'll just throw out some statistics, give you a couple of thoughts, and then we'll move on.
	Let's see here. The 12th report puts the percentage of Canadian students engaging in serious cheating on written work at 53%.
	In the U.S., according to some studies, 70% of students admit to cheating in one form or another.
	Universities apparently not convinced that cheating has reached crisis proportions offer little but token anti-plagiarism policies and ineffective ethics campaigns to assuage critics.
	Professors, meanwhile, are not effective at policing their classroom.
	In one U.S. survey, 44% of profs said they had not reported a student court cheating to officials during the three years prior to participating in the study.
	So the theme is moral blindness, the theme of these sorts of questions today.
	Excuse me. And I don't mean moral blindness from any sort of omniscient standpoint.
	Pardon me. I just mean moral blindness in the way that I've had it before, but just sort of pointing out some challenges that people have making sort of basic ethical connections.
	So they say the great university cheating scandal, and they consider it very bad that students are cheating on their tests, right?
	Now, I don't know how it is in the States, but here in Canada, about 90% of a student's education is funded by the state, which means funded by taxpayers.
	Now, when you get a university education, in general, on average, assuming you're smarter than me and didn't get an arts degree, or a history degree at least, on average, your income goes up quite considerably.
	So, when you go to university, you end up making more money than if you didn't go to university.
	So, basically, the people who don't go to university are ending up subsidizing those people who do go to university pretty considerably.
	So, those who are less privileged or less educated end up subsidizing through their taxes.
	Those who do go to university.
	So that's sort of one aspect of it.
	Now the other thing, of course, is that because this is the way that the system works, Professors are not directly answerable to their students.
	Professors are not ranked, pretty much not ranked, on the basis of their ability to be good teachers.
	They are ranked on the basis of their ability to pull in funding, to get published, to make a name for themselves, and to work the system so that tax dollars or donation dollars of some alumni kind or whatever keep plugging along.
	So they're looking to make big sort of inroads in terms of research and publishing and so on.
	So you have a whole herd of people who are forced to pay for the university education of those who are more privileged, or more intelligent, or more able, or whatever, or have more opportunity.
	And that's not considered to be any kind of scandal, right?
	The great university cheating scandal is about students cheating on tests.
	So that's sort of the layer one.
	That the tax dollars used to fund university education are not considered to be a problem.
	Now, the second aspect that I think is kind of funny is that the professors, they don't care whether they're good teachers or not.
	And as somebody who had...
	I went to three different universities.
	I did two years of an undergraduate degree at York University in Canada.
	I did two years to finish up my degree.
	I switched to history at McGill, University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
	And then I finished at the sort of third great triumvirate of Canadian higher education, what we would consider the Ivy League, which is I did a master's at the University of Toronto.
	So I went to, yes, just a few schools, and found that the teaching was almost universally abysmal.
	Just desperately bad.
	And I think maybe once or twice did I get to fill out a form which said how well did I think that the teachers were teaching.
	So really, the students are pretty unconsequential to the whole higher education.
	And of course, let's not even talk about public school.
	Let's talk about higher education.
	The students are sort of an annoying requirement in order to be able to get grant money and tax money.
	So they're funded through the use of violence in that tax money is taken from people at gunpoint, or with the implicit threat of gunpoint, herded over to universities.
	The professors are fighting like cats and dogs.
	To get tenure, and tenure is basically you can't get fired as long as you continue to show up and publish from time to time.
	Now tenure, of course, is one of these interesting reversals in cause and effect, in that professors said, well, we don't want to get fired if we're unpopular, if we're radical, if we're unusual, if we're different.
	So we want to have rigorous intellectual freedom, academic freedom, so we want tenure, we can't get fired.
	And this, of course, produced the exact opposite of what was intended, as all these kinds of forceful government programs do.
	What happened, of course, was that when you could no longer get fired for being radical or for being unusual or creative or different or disagreeing with people in any significant way, what happened?
	Well, all that happened was that nobody who was original ever got hired again, because you can't get rid of them, right?
	So it's fine for the radicals who were in there, but when you look at the kind of conformity that goes on in academics throughout Canada, for sure, and good parts of the U.S. and other places in the Western world as well, there's almost nobody who's right of center, let alone libertarian. There's some, but they're very much in the minority.
	Particularly in the softer sciences, there's a little bit more of the Austrian school in economics, but if you look at the sort of chilling conformity and uniformity of opinion that occurs in academia, it really is quite chilling just how much they are alike and how whenever I would go to a new school or get a new professor,
	I'd have always exactly the same arguments over and over and again, over and over and over again about logic and reality and the scientific method and And all this kind of stuff and all our subjectivity and so on.
	So I think it's kind of interesting that the great scandal in universities is not the enforced uniformity of opinion at the professorial level.
	It's not the funding of higher educated, higher opportunity kids through poorer people who are paying taxes.
	It's not that the whole system is 90% funded through the use of state coercion.
	And it's not even that the professors don't report the crime.
	Because the professors are very clear in saying, look, I'm not here to teach.
	I'm here to publish and keep my tenure.
	I mean, I'm here to teach. I've got to go and show up and teach.
	But I'm not judged on that.
	I'm judged on whether I get published and so on.
	Because the students aren't the consumers.
	And just as when you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, you are not treated with a great deal of respect and customer service, in the same way when you go to university, that's not how things are.
	Put forward. So I just thought it was kind of interesting.
	It's a good article to read just how prevalent the cheating has become and how the children are being blamed.
	The children are always blamed and everybody has this incredible blindness to much more obvious moral issues.
	So I'll touch on two more very brief ones here and then I'll open the board to whatever people have to ask.
	So, the second one that I found particularly interesting, I was flipping through a book by James Garbarino and Claire Bedard called Parents Under Siege, Why You Are the Solution Not to the Problem in Your Child's Life.
	And of course, I picked this up because I'm fairly sure that Christine is starting to use some toddler management techniques on me, so I wanted to learn a little bit more about them so that I could try and block them.
	Of course, I haven't really had any luck yet, But what I found was interesting was that as I started to dig into the book, it became fairly obvious That these authors were Buddhists of some form or another, right? So they keep quoting these Buddhist guys about compassion and nonviolence and pacifism and so on, and I think that's all particularly interesting.
	And they go into an examination of a movie that I barely remember.
	I saw it on a plane once, and I think I dozed through half of it.
	Because I had a seat where the screen was like at a 40 degree angle, twisted and so on.
	And the movie was Seven Years in Tibet.
	Now apparently, if these guys are right, and I'm sure that they are, In the movie, Brad Pitt's character has to make, or decides to make, a movie house, I think it is.
	So what he does is he goes down on the hill, and he starts digging up the foundations for the movie house.
	And all the monks come flying down the hill and say, Brad, or whatever the hell his name is.
	What are you doing? And he says, well, I'm digging this hole so I can build a movie theater.
	He's like, but what about the worms, they say?
	What about the worms in the ground and blah, blah, blah.
	So he's shocked and stunned and appalled at this kind of stuff.
	Why would people even think I'm digging here?
	Why would they even think about me cutting a worm in two and so on?
	And they speak very glowingly and very positively.
	about the compassion and the wisdom and the pacifism of these Buddhist monks in not wanting to hurt any of these poor little worms.
	So what they end up doing is they end up digging gently with their hands and picking up the worms and moving them to another place where they're more safe so that the digging can continue.
	They speak very glowingly and very positively about this kind of compassion for all living things and so on.
	Amazing, you know? I mean, to me, that's amazing.
	We talk about good or bad, but it's an amazing perspective.
	And you think, wow, these people are really committed to pacifism, right?
	So next what happens is that somebody's just called this seven hours in a theater, which actually is a pretty wretched, it's a pretty apt description of a wretchedly long film.
	But these Buddhists who talk about their desire to be pacifistic, even towards worms, in the very next page start talking about all the government programs that need to be implemented to save children from Hamana, Hamana, Hamana.
	These authors came to prominence after the Columbine shootings when they had a book called Lost Boys that happened to come out about youth violence just at this particular time, so they spent weeks or months on the interview circuit and so on.
	So literally, they're talking about a pacifism that extends to include earthworms, and then in the very next page, they talk about government programs and how those government programs should help the youth.
	And that's really amazing when you think about it.
	Such an extraordinary capacity or dedication to the principle of pacifism, followed by taxes should be taken from people at gunpoint to fund particular social programs.
	It's just amazing.
	Just amazing that there's no connection to this.
	It is absolutely and completely and totally, for me, the sort of moral equivalent of somebody saying, well, we should be really compassionate and try and liberate All forms of animal life from any kind of enslavement.
	We should turn the zoos open.
	We should ban hunting.
	We should ban any kind of experimentation on animals because animals should be perfectly free.
	And then, because freedom for life and a lack of enslavement is absolutely essential.
	And then what they do is they get into a chariot that is drawn by a glistening phalanx of slaves.
	And that really is the most astounding thing.
	They want freedom for earthworms, and they want the duck-billed platypus to be set free from the local zoo, and then they travel around in a rickshaw pulled by a group of slaves that they own.
	This is the focus totally on the minor pacifism and this kind of thing, and I've noticed this with Buddhists before.
	They're very big on pacifism, but very much enslaved to the state, right?
	So that's the old Protestant thing.
	Pacifism is for the subjects.
	Pacifism is for the citizens.
	War and violence and herding people around at the point of a gun and taking their taxes and ordering them to do this, that, and the other, that is for the rulers.
	But pacifism is for the slaves.
	So that, and let me just sort of mention one last thing here before I turn the mic open, in the theme of the day, which is moral blindness.
	Now, in the St. McLean's article, It's a rather fascinating article called, Fall of a Super Cop.
	And the subtitle is, For years, Vancouver's top anti-gang cop was on a private hunt for $100 million in terrorist cash.
	Was Bill Chu a hero, a scam artist, or just plain crazy?
	So to boil it down, it's well worth a read to get a sense into the psychology of these police forces.
	But this guy was an undercover cop who went around getting a hold of all of the lowlifes, sort of quote lowlifes, who were in the Asian gang community out in Vancouver, British Columbia.
	And he had the stellar reputation of handling his informants, of getting all this information, of building all these cases, and so on.
	Now, as it turned out, he was completely insane.
	And he believed that through an associate that he was going to be able to dig up $100 million that had been buried off the coast of Florida by some Chinese gangs who were done running for the IRA. Just completely Nazi kind of stuff.
	So, basically what happened was...
	This is sort of just finding the place here.
	Here's what happened. So this guy gets arrested, who's a friend of this Chu, who's this super cop, right?
	And it says here, by the time of this guy's arrest, the internal investigation into Chu's sideline activity was in full swing.
	This is the hundred million dollars.
	And it would not have been illogical for the Vancouver Police Department to assume that if Chu's long business partnership with Chung, this is the guy who told him about the 100 million, persisted and became public, many of the convictions the gangbuster had been instrumental in obtaining might have to be reviewed, hence his reputation as an, quote, embarrassment to the department.
	And that's really an amazing thing when you think about it.
	There's this long, long article on how crazy this guy is that he tries to go around diving for a hundred million dollars worth of money that's buried off the coast of Florida in sacks or something like that and borrows all this money and gets involved with all these seedy people and so on.
	And this is, you know, fall of a super cop.
	This guy was hot to trot.
	He was the center of all things great in this police department.
	And when he's found out very obviously to be crazy and mentally unstable, what happens?
	Well, they quietly retire him.
	And despite the fact that he is a compulsive liar, that he is chronically borrowing money and in the thrall of some pretty criminal people, none of the arrests that his information was instrumental in securing and convictions are reviewed.
	They just want to make this guy go away.
	They want to flush him out into retirement, right?
	He doesn't go into jail for providing false testimony.
	None of the people who he put in jail get released.
	What happens is that they simply sort of make him go away quietly to avoid scandal, right?
	So the amazing thing is that you can read this article, I think it's available online, The Fall of a Supercop.
	The only time that the...
	I mean, this guy is considered to be a deviation from the police force as a whole, but when it turned out that this guy was psychotic and delusional and crazy...
	They wanted to get rid of him so that none of the convictions that his testimony had secured would be reviewed.
	And none of the people who I'm sure unjustly, unjustly were thrown in prison for 10 or 20 years, none of that would ever come out.
	And there's no comment on any of this whatsoever.
	There's this long description of how crazy he is and all this kind of stuff.
	There's no mention of how absolutely sick and psychotic it is for a cop who obviously becomes insane in a more obvious way than most cops do, that there is an utter and total resistance of the police force to open up any of the investigations over the last 20 years that this guy was involved in while he was obviously psychotic and delusional.
	Not only did he last for quite a long time being psychotic and delusional, and they hid it, And there's complete moral blindness.
	This is Canada. This is the nice country where everybody's supposed to be wonderful and helpful and this and that.
	No mention that this is at all strange.
	Many of the convictions the gangbuster had been instrumental in obtaining might have to be reviewed, hence his reputation was an embarrassment and he was pushed into early retirement.
	That is really just astounding, that nobody even notices that there is a lot...
	Because, of course, it's like, well, there are lowlifes anyway.
	I'm sure they were guilty of something, which is the basis of totalitarianism, right?
	Guilty until proven innocent and so on.
	So I just wanted to point out these three instances of moral blindness that I think are really quite fascinating, and they're everywhere.
	I mean, you don't have to go into it as deep as I do, maybe, but I will absolutely guarantee you that when you really begin to get into this stuff and to see it, that people have no problem pointing guns at unarmed citizens but are absolutely enthralled with the idea of respecting the personage rights of earthworms that a system founded on coercion and which takes almost no regard to the needs of the students that the only thing that's really considered to be wrong there is that the students are cheating not that the system is founded on violence or the professors don't care about the students or the professors don't prosecute anyone And this crazy cop is considered to be an aberration without anybody noticing that his entire testimony over the last 20 years is suspect,
	to say the least. And also that this guy was lauded as an amazing, wonderful, incredible cop at the same time, That he was going into insane psychotic delusions, which he never recovered from, stealing money from his family, getting involved in lowlifes and so on, and supporting people who were clear criminals.
	Nobody ever notices that.
	Can you imagine if this was the case in a medical board?
	Can you imagine if the AMA or the CMA found that there was a fraudulent doctor who'd been killing people, or paralyzing them, let's say, And their first reaction was to push him into early retirement and not say a thing.
	Can you imagine that a reporter would not be shocked and appalled?
	But we're all just so terrified of the police, of course.
	And, of course, reporters need a lot of information from the police if they're going to make it as reporters.
	So there's that exact same kind of slavishness, right?
	So this is an interesting story.
	And in a way, of course, the police don't mind it coming out because it makes them sound sane.
	Hey, we found this crazy guy. We got rid of him.
	But the deeper questions are not really important.
	They were not really mentioned at all.
	Alright, so I'm perfectly happy to talk about the more recent podcast.
	Somebody has said, does anyone get the feeling we're ignoring the elephant in the room?
	I'm more than happy to discuss the recent podcast that I put out about the fork in the road, let's just say, or the fork in my heart, so to speak.
	I am more than happy to talk about that.
	The last thing that I want to do is to put out something where I'm quite passionate or emotional about a particular topic.
	And then to sort of ignore it, but I was quite struck by some of this sort of stuff that was occurring recently.
	I certainly do appreciate the energy and the effort which people have put into responding to this most recent podcast where I talked about my goal of transitioning to Free Domain Radio as a full-time occupation.
	I've had some wonderful responses.
	I really do appreciate that.
	Everybody's been kind to the most part, and that's heartwarming and a beautiful thing, and I thank you all for it greatly.
	I just sort of clarify one or two things about that podcast, which is not anything that anybody misinterpreted.
	It's entirely my sort of doing in that I was trying to communicate quite a lot, and it's hard to push that watermelon through the keyhole, so to speak.
	But... It's not that I feel obligated to do it.
	It's not at all that I feel obligated to do it.
	It's not that I feel that I'll be a bad person if I don't try and make this philosophy thing work full-time.
	It's not that I feel like I'm enslaved to the future virtue or benevolence of the planet.
	It's none of those things that is causing me to have this hesitation in terms of doing it.
	And this is not the finances and so on.
	It is what I want to do.
	As I wrote on the board, the degree of fear is the degree of the desire.
	If you really want to ask out a girl that you find incredibly attractive and think that you might want to make the beast with two backs with, or even to marry and live a life of passion and paradise forever, if you really do want to ask this woman out, then you're going to feel particular trepidation.
	Upon approaching her, right?
	I mean, the degree of fear is the degree of desire.
	And that's, of course, the great challenge in life, right?
	When you really want something, it's easy to get frightened, right?
	Especially when what you want is a hard thing to achieve.
	So that has something to do with it as well.
	I would love nothing more than to be able to do this full-time.
	It's not that I feel that it's a sacrificial...
	that I'm a sacrificial lamb upon the irrationality of the species or anything.
	So I just sort of wanted to clear that point up because I did get...
	A fair plethora of emails and messages to tell me that I should not sacrifice myself by pursuing philosophy.
	But, of course, since I have put out 630 podcasts over the past year and a bit, it could be understood that I do love to do it, right?
	It's just a hard thing to do emotionally because of what I talked about in the 628 podcast, really around these two factors of feeling that to have the goal of trying to do something positive in the world is hard for me.
	I'm not particularly a vainglorious kind of fellow, and I'm not particularly arrogant in that sense.
	I try to... and it's not even a try.
	I mean, sort of my default position is quite a bit of humility and a deep understanding of my own limitations and ignorance.
	And so it's quite a shift for me to set a goal that high.
	And there has been some discussion on the board About are goals good or bad?
	You can't sort of tie your happiness to achieving a goal or to not achieving a goal and so on.
	And I find all of that, while pleasant, kind of nonsensical.
	And that doesn't mean that it is.
	It just sort of means that's how I find it.
	Insofar as it's impossible to live life without a goal.
	I mean, you just can't. If your goal is just to type on the board, or if your goal is to go to the washroom, or if your goal is to get a job, or if your goal is to eat or sleep, and we all have to look forward and try to achieve goals, I don't think that giving up on goals is a rational possibility.
	Other than, you know, maybe throwing yourself off a cliff.
	So that part, I don't feel like I'm enslaving my happiness to whether or not the world sort of listens to what it is that we have to say in this conversation or what it is that I have to say.
	It's not that I feel that my happiness is entirely dependent upon whether or not I save the world or try to or whatever it is.
	But it's really the goal, right?
	I want to make it a big goal so that I can really activate whatever resources I have internally.
	And to me, why not have a big goal?
	Go big or go home, as some people used to say.
	Why not have a big goal?
	It wasn't like when I married Christina that I proposed to her by saying, look, I'm hungry and I'm unemployed.
	Oh, no, wait, that was it, wasn't it?
	Sorry. Let's just pretend that I wasn't.
	It wasn't like when I sat down with Christina and proposed to her.
	It wasn't like I said, hey, you know, I don't want a really happy marriage.
	I don't want to really get along.
	I don't want to really become intimate and close.
	It's nice to have someone to chat with.
	You're looking to settle down.
	I'm looking to settle down.
	We seem to be vaguely compatible.
	Let's just Get married and see what happens.
	I mean, that may not be the most inspiring speech.
	In fact, it might have got me a glass of wine in the face even earlier than otherwise expected.
	And of course, when I sat down to do the podcasts and sort of planned out the general shape and all of that kind of stuff, it wasn't that I said, Well, you know, I'm going to just talk a little bit about truth, or I'm going to just do a little bit of stuff about philosophy.
	I mean, no, I was like, let's hit the gas.
	Let's put some real traction into these things.
	Let's see how far I can go until I can't do it well, right?
	And so far, I think things have been fairly okay that way.
	So the history of what I've been doing has been one of...
	A fairly extensive and strong desire to achieve something beyond the ordinary, right?
	I mean, we've taken on a lot of topics.
	We've taken on a lot of not just philosophical discussions, but, you know, pretty intense personal issues.
	So I would say that the ambition of what it is that I've been up to, at least, is fairly extensive.
	But to go into it full-time is still quite another leap for me entirely.
	So it's not that I feel obligated.
	It's just that the size of the goal, which is what would make it really interesting for me, the size of the goal to try and have a philosophical conversation with the species.
	You know that? That song, I can't remember, some Bob Marley song where at the end he sings, I'm playing for mankind.
	You know, and I've always kind of liked that.
	You know, he's like, I'm not playing for the guy on the front row.
	I'm not playing for the groupies.
	I'm not singing this for X, Y, or Z, or some guy or the record executives or my fans.
	I'm playing to mankind, right?
	That's sort of what I've sort of liked as an idea, that you can sort of set your sights high, but that's tough for me, because I don't I'm sort of not naturally that exuberant in my ambitions, I guess.
	But in this particular area, the traction has been fairly intense for me, and the abilities that I've been able to bring to the table have been more than I expected.
	So it's been a challenge for me to scale up the expectations of what it is that I want to do.
	And so I know that...
	If you're going to only try and shoot an arrow 10 feet, well, guess what, right?
	The arrow will go somewhere close to 10 feet.
	Now, if you're going to try and shoot an arrow 100 feet, then it's going to be somewhere around 100 feet, right?
	Obviously, you don't want to say, I'm going to shoot the arrow a mile, because then you're just going to fail, right?
	But finding the right goal relative to what you can do and what needs to be done, what I think needs to be done, It's a tough thing, but I know that if I set my sights too low, then I will achieve less than I can.
	If I set my sights too high, then I'm going to fail, right?
	I would say, well, if there's no anarcho-capitalism worldwide by next year, then I'm going to jump off a bridge.
	Well, actually, that would be a pretty good motivation.
	I should probably take that out of the business plan.
	But I do know that setting your sites high is important.
	Setting them ludicrously high is not productive, but trying to find that balance is a challenge for me, because it's a bigger goal than I'm used to, let's say.
	And I do, of course, I had some pretty big goals with my art as well, which worked out at least for me in terms of what I produced, but didn't work out for me in terms of what was accepted.
	as valid art in the outside world.
	So anyway, enough about sort of my rambles.
	Steph, why the fear? I don't get it.
	You've already got FDR enough from running.
	You've had the interviews, the debates, etc.
	What would change?
	We're all in this with you. Well, I really appreciate that.
	You're already doing something positive.
	Be that guy! The elite ninja squad of truth-tellers.
	Yeah, that's going to be our tattoo, I think.
	I think I've only got the room for that on my forehead, but I think other people might not be.
	Save the world is not just a big goal, it's a sliding one.
	What does it mean to save the world?
	Well, there's two aspects for me.
	If you don't mind, I'm sort of spending a minute or two more answering this.
	There's two aspects of what I mean by saving the world.
	And of course, I'm fully aware that the whole statement is ludicrous, right?
	I mean, so save the world.
	So am I the hall of justice superhero cadre or something?
	I mean, they know that that's a ludicrous goal to have.
	But for me there's two aspects to saving the world that are important.
	The one, of course, is the content.
	And the other, of course, is the confidence.
	And not the blind messianistic confidence or whatever, right?
	Like, I will prevail no matter what, right?
	Like, you know, some four-year-old in the ring with Mike Tyson, I'm going to go down fighting!
	I mean, that's not what I'm talking about.
	But to sort of validate the ideas, and of course the ideas that have been germinating and developing here in this conversation are directly contrary To a very large amount and a very large and established and embedded amount of the power structures throughout the world, all the way from mercantilist corporatism to hegemonic state power to church power to family power to school power to all of this kind of stuff.
	There is quite a set of windmills that we're going to be tilting at, and I need to, for myself, emotionally process that I'm going to go at that full bore, not as a sideline, not as a hobby, but that's going to be what I set my sights on.
	That's pretty daunting, and that's a frightening thing to do.
	Not because I think anything bad's going to happen, I don't think anyone's listening from the government, or I don't think anything like that.
	It's just that that is a daunting thing to look at, right?
	10,000 years of religious history, 10,000 years of state-based societies, wars around the world, welfare states, national, all the stuff that we know about, right?
	To kind of look that dragon in the eye and say, let's rumble!
	I mean, That's a little nerve-wracking for me.
	I mean, maybe everyone else feels fine about it, but for me, that's quite a bulrog, let's say, for those who don't mind their geeky metaphors.
	So I really do want to sort of stare that down, but that's a big beast, you know?
	It's a big beast. Maybe it'll feel like a smaller beast in time, but right now, it feels pretty frickin' monstrous.
	So that's sort of the fear that I have around that.
	Is there anything else?
	All right.
	So, okay, I will...
	We've had some people who are waiting to chat.
	Thank you so much for your patience.
	We're going to start with Mr.
	N. I do believe that you're on.
	I don't have a headset yet, so I keep having to mute it every time.
	Life's not easy on the front here.
	Well, I could afford one, I just have been too lazy to go get one.
	I had a question, and it was about Ayn Rand.
	Okay, what did she do for a living while she was being a novelist and philosopher?
	Was that all she was, or do you think the vanity you were fearing so much, that whole vanity thing might have been what affected her?
	In a bad way, to where she kind of got all...
	Or was it her general philosophy that was kind of somewhat contradictory in some areas?
	Well, I do know a little bit about her history.
	She was a waitress.
	She was, I think, a short-order cook.
	She was a typist.
	Obviously, writers have that one skill, right?
	Always good at typing. And she had a number of menial jobs.
	Her husband, Frank O'Connor, was an actor who was spectacularly not successful.
	I mean, he had sort of bit roles in a couple of movies, but as far as the larger picture went, good-looking guy, not very successful.
	She met him, and there were some, of course, rumors.
	Who knows what the truth is? There were some rumors that they married for naturalization reasons, so she'd become a U.S. citizen and so on.
	But what happened was it kind of by accident.
	She met Cecil B. DeMille, a great sort of filmmaker, and she was an extra on one of his sets while her husband was there.
	He got to sort of talking with her and so on, and she said, oh, I'm a writer and this and that.
	So that was sort of what occurred.
	She did not have any kind of professional job, at least at the sort of level that I would understand it.
	Before she became a writer, she was supported by her husband, and there were some other kinds of support that occurs, some money from back home in Russia and other people and so on.
	But she did work, I think, for a couple of years in an architect's office while she was doing research for the Fountainhead.
	But she certainly didn't have an option, given her intelligence.
	And of course, she was learning English, and there was all those challenges.
	But she didn't really have much of an option to find a fulfilling or satisfying life in the creative sense.
	So I don't, I mean, that obviously was a bit of a spur for her ambition.
	But, um, uh, there, there is a kind of humility that I've often found to be missing in that kind of stuff.
	So, um, uh, so, so Steph could never have this ego problems Ayn Rand had.
	She was an author, a philosopher, and her spouse was a psychologist.
	Oh, my God! Actually, um, she never got married to Nathaniel Brandon.
	That was her, her, uh, young male Adonis-like lover.
	So, um, Yeah, I think that the challenge, I think, for Ayn Rand was that she never delved into the personal.
	She herself said, I don't understand psychology at all.
	And you can see that in her novels, right?
	There's this crystalline brilliance in the ideas, a bit of sort of, for me at least, overworked plottingness to a lot of the metaphors and the psychological insights A kind of laborious.
	They're brilliant, in my opinion, but they're not particularly organic.
	She never describes any children.
	She never describes any dreams.
	She doesn't really describe the inner life of her characters, except insofar as they debate abstracts within and among themselves.
	So... I mean, she does obviously have some psychological abilities in that she gets the connection between one's sexuality and one's values and so on, but there was a kind of monstrous selfishness, I think, and not in a positive way, at the root of the woman, right?
	So this collectivism, if she had allowed her growing popularity to temper her humanity, then I think she would have gotten a lot further rather than being What, to me, is a very instructive and a very spectacular failure.
	I mean, she as an artist was magnificent, as a philosopher.
	I mean, there's almost nobody more stimulating to read as far as ideas go, for me.
	But as far as her achievement in the world, Her stated goals versus what she actually achieved, objectivism shrank to a shrieky cult, and her books and her ideas never received any respect.
	She didn't tend to win over people who weren't already on their way or who had the same sort of mindset, and she's never had any really strong effect on popular culture, despite the fact that the New York Times review of books about a decade ago said that Atlas Shrugged was second only in Effect to the Bible, but there's a disconnectedness from real life in her novels, right?
	So if you are running a steel mill, then maybe you feel that she's got some good instructions for you, but because I don't think she delved much into family matters, although there's, of course, Hank Reardon's family and Atlas Shrugged, and she didn't delve into psychological history and the power of the family and our natural desire for conformity that arises out of children's desire to survive.
	Because of that absence, I think that it remained a bit technical and a bit cold.
	And either the combination of the Russian communist history or the sort of Judaic culty side of her history culturally, she was just never able to break out of that slightly dictatorial approach.
	So it's been very...
	It's been very instructive for me and was quite a blow when I first found out about the history, especially the things like the affairs and so on.
	I mean, it's just, you know, coldly announcing to your spouses that you're going to have affairs and that they better get out of the house on Thursday night so she can bang a groupie.
	Not something that I could really look at with a whole lot of respect.
	So, yeah, I think that, to me, what I got out of it was the danger of ideas disconnected from the real emotions, the real passions, the real deep psychology, and a lack of respect for the instincts, right?
	She's very anti-instinctual in a lot of ways, right?
	It's all got to be coldly reasoned out.
	there's not a whole lot of spontaneity either in her art, I would say in her life, or in her philosophy.
	Well, also, I think I commented on the board It was just more in the lines of what you were wanting somebody else to do it.
	And I kind of made the metaphor that when the cable goes out, everybody thinks the neighbor will call type of thing.
	Right. And they never do.
	So I always end up making the call because I know that everybody else will think somebody else is making the call.
	Right, right. And, sorry, the other thing that I mentioned which has been pointed out, which is absolutely worth discussing, though I won't be able to add too much to it, is that in each of her novels she has usually at least one spectacular rape scene.
	And that, again...
	A little bit of a, at least the kindest and most charitable way that I can approach this fetish that she has for watching her heroines get raped by men that they eventually fall for is that her true self was a little bit, you know, to use the crude metaphor, right, her true self was a little bit Raped by her intellect, right?
	So she didn't find a cohesive way to unite the disparate parts of the human experience, the reason, emotion, instinct, passion, fear, all that kind of stuff, right?
	She's just like... There's a real dominance of her intellect over her instinctual life, a real control, right?
	I mean, it takes 13 years to write Atlas Shrugged.
	She could explain to you why every word was in every place in that book.
	Every single metaphor is plotted out almost on a piece of graph paper.
	And... So there's a dictatorial element within her own personality that I think is very heady and exciting, and I'm not going to complain that she lived and wrote, because it really did awaken me to some real powerful joys of philosophy.
	But this rape aspect has always been disturbing to a lot of people, and that she didn't have the judgment to question that or sort of figure it out.
	And of course, I never heard any of her The associates or the people who were the member of what was jokingly called the collective, you would think that Nathaniel Brandon would say, so Ein, you know, this whole rape thing, we really better talk about that because this is a pretty strong indication of a kind of coldness in part of your soul,
	right? This is kind of a, but of course she would have lots of explanations and she did make lots of explanations as to Why the rape scenes were necessary and positive and spoke some great truth about human nature, particularly a woman's nature.
	And I don't think she was someone that you could really, because she was so smart, right?
	And I don't think this is someone that you could criticize without there being quite a lot of rage on the other side.
	So I think that as far as freedom goes, I don't think she achieved it in the way that I would understand it.
	No, I don't think so. Or gave it to others, if that makes sense.
	No, that whole rape scene to me was extremely shocking and I almost was like, no, no, no, no, you're not going this direction with this whole thing.
	Pull up! Pull up!
	And she went through it and then I get this feeling that Dominique Francon was Ayn Rand, in a sense, was like a projection of her own personality.
	I don't think that she ever...
	I mean, this is all hypothesis, so I apologize for rambling on about nonsense that I don't know about, but I think that she never...
	I mean, I think she genuinely did want to find somebody who was as good as she was or better, as far as the intellect and so on went.
	And I think she was a pretty intimidating personality.
	Obviously, when people want acolytes around who don't question them, that's because they're kind of insecure, right?
	And of course, she has all of these incredibly heroic novels, and she was very much in charge of her own group.
	In a way that I've struggled but never been able to achieve.
	I'm just kidding. But that speaks to a pretty strong degree of insecurity.
	I think that if you look at something like the rape, anyone who was confident and a competent psychologist who came into her orbit would sit down with her and would grab onto that psychological leg like a manic terrier and not let go until she fessed up what the hell was going on.
	But she never met anyone like that.
	Because a lot of the people that she met were very much intellectuals, right?
	Not very much sort of soulful or passionate people.
	There certainly weren't other artists I don't think that she had a whole lot to do with.
	So, to me, this is a cry for help, right?
	Somebody writes about rape scenes all the time.
	It's like, hey, you know what we should talk about?
	This whole rape thing, right?
	I mean, I don't mean to zero in on this, but this is a pretty obvious cry to help, a cry for help.
	But I don't think anyone really listened to that and confronted her on it, right?
	And that, I think, would have been a very kind thing to do to Ayn Rand, though it certainly would have been very tricky to have that succeed.
	So you think maybe that avoiding rape scenes and forming groups and calling it a collective might help you avoid the same fate as Ayn Rand?
	Yeah, I'm hoping for it not to be quite as formulaic as that, but I'm certainly trying to understand why things failed before, right?
	I mean, again, I hate to sort of put myself in any of these kinds of categories, but I try to, I've really been mulling over what the hell happened with Socrates and why did he fail so spectacularly?
	What happened with the Enlightenment?
	What happened with John Locke?
	What happened with Hume?
	What happened with Kant?
	What happened with Nietzsche? Why did all of these people fail so spectacularly?
	Because if I'm going to give it a shot to try and claw my way up to anywhere remotely resembling this pantheon, Then I don't want to do the same thing that everyone else did.
	I don't want to fail. I want to have my own reasons for failing.
	I guess I don't want to fail because I didn't learn somebody else's lesson.
	I want to have my own spectacular kind of failure that somebody else can learn from, I guess.
	However, I think I failed to elicit a response.
	Are you back? Oh, yes.
	Yeah, sorry. I was reading the chat window.
	Oh, I'm sorry. Did I lose your attention for a moment?
	Did I throw your name in from time to time?
	Greg threw me on a tangent, I think.
	Well, yeah, and there's a point that's put in on the chat window that's entirely accurate and appropriate, which is that we have the Internet, right?
	I have yet to even still really do anything more than do a cursory processing of what this has all meant to us, right?
	But the fact that we can have conversations without middlemen or middlewomen is absolutely essential and crucial to what it is that we're trying to do here.
	We don't need public space to have a meeting.
	We don't need to give up everything else in our lives to have meetings.
	We can have an incredibly powerful conversation while we're continuing to live our lives, which allows things to germinate and things to flourish and grow in a more organic way.
	This is absolutely unprecedented.
	Obviously, I could not even contemplate doing what I want to do, what I'm planning to do in the absence of this technology.
	And this technology has enabled this conversation in a way that has never been possible before in history.
	And the amazing thing about it for me is that, and I truly believe this, and rightly or wrongly, We're all having these conversations, and we're going to get old and we're going to die.
	These conversations now exist in an easily consumable format, you know, from here until the end of time, or at least until the end of computers, which, you know, for me would be the end of time anyway.
	So that's really a remarkable thing, that this stuff all exists now, in perpetuity, in, I think, a pretty accessible format, and in an easily consumable format that, frankly, people don't have to pay for.
	I mean, that's a really remarkable thing.
	Yeah, I worry about, like, I keep thinking maybe I should add all the podcasts to a hard drive and maybe bury it in the backyard just in case somebody loses it.
	But then, you know, like, if 100,000 years in the future, if things never turn out the way we hope it will, then maybe somebody will dig it up, but then how will they read it?
	And so, I don't know, it's kind of not easy.
	No, this stuff's going to last.
	I mean, we've already got a couple of thousand listeners.
	It's already out there. I mean, this stuff's going to last.
	I mean, people... I really do believe that people are going to have this conversation or play this conversation or have some element of this conversation when their kids get older.
	This is going to get passed around.
	I mean, we got, what, 10% of the people who visited our site who came from China last month.
	I mean, that's remarkable.
	It really is. So...
	What was that last...
	Oh, I have no idea. I just, you know, I'm going with the old cliche that you're supposed to sound vaguely constipated and cold when you're trying to imitate Chinese.
	All right, that's all the questions I can think of.
	All right, well, thanks, man. I appreciate it.
	All right, no problem. And hi, are there any American girl who want to chat with me?
	So I'm going to put this out to all our male listeners who may want to have some fun with that.
	Okay, Erdell54045, you are on the air.
	Oh, I can hear a hiss.
	Hello? Hello?
	Hello? Who is this?
	Alright, so he has not responded, so next up we have Mohar Gema David.
	I think that's the Scottish name, but I could be wrong.
	Can you hear me?
	Can you hear me now?
	No? Okay, boogie88N.
	We shall try this. Can you hear me?
	Are you on? Can anybody hear me?
	All right. So, we have a little bit of room on the chat if anybody has any sort of other questions.
	I'm certainly willing to answer whatever I can.
	So, yeah, I guess people, what they've probably gone is they've probably gone to rewind their loop mixtape, which most people seem to use Skypecast as a methodology, as the root of their conversations.
	So, no biggie.
	I'm just going to move these people to listening.
	If they are not feeling particularly chatty, And if you have questions, you are more than willing, this is a participatory chat, unlike all the other dictatorial in-car monologues.
	So you can just click on Ask for Mike, and it will give me the signal to put you on.
	So if you had any sort of questions, issues, or comments...
	I would be more than happy to hear from them, or to hear from you.
	So, let me just see here if anyone else is coming in.
	Sorry that we haven't done an Ask a Therapist, but, of course, we actually only got one other than, I think, was it this week that we got the criticism of the last week one with a listener who was rather unhappy with our comments, which is fine.
	That's okay. Sometimes it can take seeds a little while to germinate and grow.
	While I'm waiting, I just wanted to mention two things while we're waiting for other people who wish to chat.
	The first is that if you get a chance, and this is like the gayest thing that I'll ever say, and I absolutely guarantee you that that's a fairly high standard.
	But if you get a chance to watch The Secret Life of Plants, it is really, really cool.
	I actually got it for Christina because she likes the plants because they remind her of my mobility on the weekends.
	Although, actually, no, the plants do move.
	But it's really a fantastic, fantastic...
	We've only watched two of them so far.
	Actually, only one and a half.
	Absolutely gripping. The other thing, too, is that for high-quality dialogue and really good acting, you may want to, if you don't mind holding your nose about all the status nonsense, I've actually found The West Wing to be quite enjoyable.
	We're on sort of season three.
	We watched season one and two about two years ago, was it, when we first moved in the house?
	And we're on season three, although it's all a complete fantasy nonsense.
	It's basically, you know, how wonderful and intelligent and beatific slave owners are, but as far as dialogue and characterization goes, it's really quite stellar.
	So if you don't mind holding your nose, it can be really...
	It can really be good.
	Sorry, we have a technical issue.
	Which screen? I wonder if you've lost, like, if you're not on the show at all.
	One sec?
	Oh, yes, you are. You are.
	You are, you are, you are.
	So maybe you can, uh, sorry.
	Just type Christina Underbaum all in you.
	Maybe you can join again and it will show up.
	Oh, you can, you know what, you can watch it from this one if you want.
	Alright, so that's sort of another show that would be quite good.
	We're also watching Prison Break, which is, it's a shame it's a little bit too much over the top, you know, like it's got to be the president and it's got to be all this and that, and I'm not doing any spoilers here.
	But it really is quite fascinating how clear it is that the legal system is often used by the government and, of course, it's often used by corporate interests who are in cahoots with the government to punish people that they wish to just manufacture evidence, right? It's the old nightmare that the cop pulls you over and plants a joint in your glove compartment or whatever.
	And it's your word against his, and then you just get sucked into that great grisly machine of state injustice.
	And I think that the show is very interesting from that standpoint.
	It's quite cynical, obviously, and quite fantastical in a lot of ways, and it's not like the criminals are portrayed as good guys themselves.
	But it really is quite interesting how cynical it is of the government and how this sort of cold, calculating, mercantilist state has this pious front.
	And it is quite wonderful, of course, to watch the president do all these wonderful speeches at the same time as ordering all these deaths and murders and so on.
	It would be far more gripping, I think, to have this kind of stuff talk a little bit more about war and a little bit less about this kind of stuff.
	stuff, but it is quite fascinating from that standpoint.
	So if you do get a chance to watch that, it can be a little stressful at times, but it's really, really good.
	Sorry, let me just try it this way.
	I'm just trying to get...
	Christina can't see the Skype thing anymore.
	That wasn't it, right? It was the one that had everyone who was in, right?
	All right, no problem. As we're waiting for people who want to come by, we shall put it on.
	Oh, I also wanted to mention that Freedomain Radio has an eGold account now as well for those who wanted to donate.
	I had some requests for that. Might as well bury it in here.
	So the http colon forward slash forward slash 4058818.e-gold.com.
	You can donate there. Really appreciate that.
	Got a lovely donation of pure gold this morning, which I'm currently rubbing all over my calves.
	Very nice. So that's why we don't have the video on today.
	My little gold finger routine here is not quite as gripping as it could be.
	So let's see here. This should do it.
	Alright, well listen, I'm not going to drag this out.
	Oh, we have somebody who's waiting to chat, so...
	Alright, Chris, you're on.
	Okay, hi. Yeah, just a question about party funding.
	Sorry, about what? About party funding for political parties.
	OK, I know we don't really believe in the state, but it's just something I was thinking.
	You know, if there are no...
	OK, if we take the United States as an example, sorry, and there are no ballot access or campaign finance laws, then how do you think that parties should be funded?
	Or what do you think the rules should be about party funding?
	Well, you might be asking the wrong guy.
	It's sort of like saying, if I'm an abolitionist, it's like, how do I think that people pay for slaves?
	They shouldn't, as far as I'm concerned.
	For me, there's no reform that's possible from the inside.
	The purpose of the two-party system within the United States is not...
	I mean, it's like two sports teams that both get paid whether they win or lose, right?
	I mean, the goal obviously is power and people would prefer to be in power rather than, say, just, you know, having a slim minority in Congress and this kind of stuff.
	But, you know, there's an enormous amount of pickings and an enormous amount of money that sloshes around in the government that's far beyond what you and I can see from the outside, right?
	So, you know, we've got this grinning, vaguely incoherent puppet of George Bush and And the Dick Cheney's and the Rumsfeld's and the other sorts of people, the Condoleezza Rice's and all these, they're all up there and we think, ooh, that's power, right? And then we think, oh, well, the Democrats don't have as much power and so on.
	But even the lowliest Democrat in the House or in the Senate has far more power than you and I could dream of in 20 lifetimes, right?
	So to be the loser in politics relative to everyone else is to be an extraordinary winner if you don't count the sort of Moral evil of it all.
	So the campaign finance laws, the ballot access laws, and so on, they're obviously specifically put in there to ensure that no contenders come up.
	If you raise the barrier to entry, the price of entry into politics, then no one can come into politics Who isn't already either independently wealthy or who people think are going to have a chance to win.
	So if you can raise the price of running for office to a couple of million bucks, then you ensure that nobody is ever going to get funded unless they're independently wealthy, unless somebody thinks that they're going to win and be able to give them some favors in return.
	So, of course, they want it to be neck and neck, right?
	Because if it's not neck and neck, then people don't get funded, right?
	Whatever policy the Republicans come up with that's popular, the Democrats will simply adopt.
	Whatever policies the Democrats come up with that are popular, the Republicans will simply adopt.
	They need it to be neck and neck, right?
	If the Republicans were getting 80% of the vote, And the Democrats were getting 20% of the vote.
	The Democrats would simply take on whatever policies were making the Republicans so popular, which is why you have the Republicans putting in socialized medicine, and you have the Democrats voting for the war.
	I mean, this is how it works.
	It needs to be close, because if it's not close, then the desire to fund each party is lower, right?
	So... You know, for me, how should these things be financed?
	Well, there's just no possibility that they could ever be financed in a way that would be beneficial to the taxpayer.
	Okay, I'm sorry.
	I didn't want to dismiss your question.
	Can you tell me what you were looking for in terms of knowledge?
	I mean, maybe I can share something with you.
	I didn't want to completely detonate your question.
	What is it that you were asking for?
	What were you looking for? Well, I was just saying in Britain recently there's been an issue about cash for questions and...
	Brit scandals too, right?
	Yeah, yeah. So that's just why I was asking.
	There's just something that popped into my mind.
	Right. No, I mean, it's funny, right?
	Because the mafia, in a sense, would love for you to focus on the fact that they're speeding, right?
	The lesser crimes obscure the greater crimes, right?
	Which is why, during the Iraq War, which is an absolute genocidal Hitlerish invasion of Poland in 1939 war crime, the Iraq invasion...
	This is why they want you to focus on, did Karl Rove know or reveal the identity of this guy who went to Nigeria looking for the yellow cake that his wife, Valerie Plume, was a secret agent and outed and this and that?
	That's what they want you to focus on, is the small, shiny shit on the ground rather than the massive dump coming down skyward, to take a metaphor far too far.
	The Mafia would really like you to focus on the fact that they can be, that they cuss, right?
	That they use bad language.
	Because if you're focusing on the fact that the Mafia uses bad language, then you're not so much focusing on the fact that, you know, they're out there getting a lot of people murdered, right?
	Murdering a lot of people. So the peerage scandal is interesting, right?
	Because what it says is, this is for those who don't know, right?
	Tony Blair is under investigation because He didn't pay someone off or didn't do someone the right.
	It's all this kind of stuff that happens in Russia as well because he's accused of taking money to give peerages, right?
	So nobody questions that he should have the right to give peerages or that peerages are at the taxpayers' expense or that it's a whole bunch of nonsense.
	As somebody in the movie The Queen says about the royals, that they're a bunch of freeloading, emotionally retarded nutters.
	Nobody questions that.
	Nobody asks about, is the scandal that's going on in England that people have paged to be called Sir, or Lady, or Knight, or whatever, or Lord, or the fact that England has participated in a war crime invasion of a sovereign country overseas and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people?
	The media wants you to focus on the little possible scandals so that you avoid the big crimes, right?
	So it becomes inconceivable for you then to vault over that tiny little fence into the great chasm beyond.
	So I think, for me it's a distraction, but tell me what you think of it.
	Well, my opinion regarding the issue is basically, well, Well, yeah, I suppose I agree with what you say, but no one is asking why there should be any peers or why there should be any government, but I suppose the media here is quite status, so I won't expect much else.
	Well, sure. I mean, the salvation is not going to come from the media.
	The truth about the church is not going to come from the priests.
	The truth always comes from outsiders.
	It comes from people who don't have a stake in the system, who don't have anything to lose.
	Somebody wrote me an email who's an academic who said, I could never say what you say because the shit would hit the fan.
	Because I don't have any ties into any political system.
	I don't have any ties into any academic system.
	My job doesn't depend on it.
	At least not yet. So I have a kind of freedom.
	It's not just because I'm so elementally free.
	It's just because I don't have any particular stake.
	So that's why it tends to be people on the outside, people on the fringe, people without as much investment in society who tend to be the ones who start telling the truth.
	The media, of course, are highly embedded into confirming people's prejudices, into avoiding uncomfortable truths, both because of their listeners and also because they rely on the government for enormous amounts of information in order to be able to sell papers.
	So, yeah, there's no possibility that any salvation or truth is going to come from the media.
	I mean, I'm not saying you're saying that, but that's inevitable.
	I mean, picking up the newspaper is just going to be like reading, I mean, it's going to be like reading Pravda in the 1950s under Stalin, right?
	The sort of communist mouthpiece.
	There's just going to be no truth that comes from that at all.
	Yeah, I can't forgive anything else.
	Well, thanks very much. It was a very interesting question, and I hope I wasn't at all dismissive.
	How do libertarians cope with news?
	One word, baby.
	Medication. And not just a little bit of it, but medication that could pretty much fell at least half a herd of wildebeest.
	That would be the approach that I would take.
	So get yourself somebody who works in a hospital.
	That's really all I can say. Look, just don't consume it.
	It's not news, right?
	It's not news. The stuff that has shown up in the newspaper, I went through the newspaper this weekend.
	It's not news. It's fantasy, fairy tales, distractions, nonsense.
	I'm not even going to get into it.
	There's no point even talking about it.
	It's not news. It's just a bunch of opinions that are designed to keep people in line.
	It's not conscious. There's no big plot or plan.
	It's just inevitable. Your family don't sit there and plot together and say, let's not talk about the past with anyone.
	Let's try and bury our dirty laundry.
	Let's try and hide the skeletons in the closet.
	Nobody sits there and plots that.
	That's just an inevitable human reaction when you've done wrong and you've compromised everything that's valuable and decent in your nature and you've lied to people, whether it's your children or your readers, It's just naturally and inevitably that your defense is going to kick in and you're going to obscure the truth and you're going to turn angrily on anybody who probes you.
	You're going to be distant, you're going to be negative, you're going to be dismissive, you're going to be insulting, you're going to be pejorative.
	These are just natural human reactions that occur when people have compromised themselves and can't handle it.
	So, not that anyone can handle that kind of compromise.
	I don't consume it anymore.
	I haven't read a newspaper regularly in years.
	It's just, why would I, right?
	I mean, I don't need to go, as I said before, I don't need to go and learn Russian and read the back issues of Pravda to know that Russia was a bad and corrupt and evil system, right?
	I don't need to do that, because once you achieve certainty, you don't need to keep inflicting that nonsense on you.
	But, of course, everyone has their own I mean, I do have this, Maclean's magazine is pretty funny, right?
	I mean, I don't find this to be particularly offensive.
	It's just an example of just how amazingly blind people are and how everybody has to use these ethical judgments while having no clue what they're talking about.
	But that's pretty common as well.
	All righty.
	Did we have somebody else who was looking for?
	Ah, yes.
	Hello. Hi.
	I'm interested in this Skypecast because it says it's about science, philosophy and atheism.
	And that sounds quite interesting.
	My background, I'm interested in those issues, especially to do with where people find meaning in life when they haven't got a religious crutch to stand on.
	What would you advise as, like, the best alternative sources of, like, meaning?
	Well, I mean, that's an excellent question.
	Could you tell me a little bit about your own history?
	Were you brought up religious?
	What's your relationship to the gods of your childhood, I guess?
	My dad was an atheist, and my mom was a spiritualist.
	And I was, like, brought up not really knowing it, you know, either way.
	So I kind of was always interested in searching for the answers for that.
	Right, okay. And have you had any exposure to philosophy or courses or books or anything like that?
	Yeah, I did do courses in philosophy at college and I read a bit.
	I studied it to a sort of level of a college course, so qualified.
	But I didn't do a degree in it or anything.
	No, that's good. That probably is why you still have the capacity to reason.
	Sometimes the modern philosophy in school can be a little bit baffling, but...
	I mean, the question of meaning, I'm not going to be able to give you, you know, particularly anything other than a very general sense of it that occurs within sort of the godless and nihilistic void of post-religion or anything, but for me at least, I believe in virtue.
	I believe in ethics that are universal and absolute, but not particularly extensive, like, you know, don't kill, don't steal, don't rape, you know, that kind of stuff.
	Don't defraud people. Outside of just avoiding those negatives, the positives for me really sort of goes along these lines.
	There's a lot of bad ideas in the world, a lot of bad thoughts, a lot of bad ideas, and as a consequence, nothing innate to human nature, because people are taught really bad ideas when they're growing up, and it sounds like you avoided some of the worst, which is great.
	They tend to do bad things when they get older, right?
	I mean, to take the obvious example, right?
	The people who detonate bombs in subways or who invade Iraq tend to end up doing very bad things because their heads are full of bad and irrational ideas.
	So the first thing to do for me is make a commitment, and I don't think this is going to be a particularly tricky one.
	You sound like a very pleasant fellow.
	You know, you make a commitment not to do the bad things, right?
	So... And so I'm not going to join the army and go and kill people in foreign countries.
	Whatever, right? I'm not going to go and do those bad things.
	That would be the first thing. The second thing I found to be very helpful when it comes to creating the capacity for meaning in my life is that I found it to be quite essential to really heavily challenge the irrational things that I believed, the irrational thoughts and ideas.
	That was a very, very challenging process, and that goes a lot beyond rejecting things like the idea of the existence of God and so on, and sort of in recognizing in a scientific approach to the world that what exists in the world?
	Well, people exist.
	Trees, they exist.
	Clouds exist. The water exists.
	Fishes, and so on, right?
	Material things exist.
	But the ideas within our head don't exist objectively, right?
	So it's the old thing like you look at the Earth from space.
	There are no countries, right?
	Countries don't exist in the real world.
	They're just ideas in people's heads, right?
	Governments don't exist in the real world.
	They're just ideas in people's heads.
	So Tony Blair exists, right?
	A whole bunch of people who'll throw you in jail if you don't do what Tony Blair says, they exist, and the guns that they'll pull on you if you don't obey, they all exist too.
	But this thing called the government and the Labour Party and the monarchy and this, all of this stuff is just nonsense.
	It doesn't exist in the real world.
	But because people are taught that it exists in the real world and that it demands some kind of moral allegiance from them, they end up doing some pretty wretchedly bad things, right?
	So the first thing I think that for me, you know, just don't do the bad things, and I don't think that's a really big issue for most people, But the second thing is to really challenge within your own mind and compare the thoughts that are within your own mind in a rigorous way to what actually exists out there in the real world.
	And it's actually kind of amazing when you go through that process and you realize just how little Within our own minds that we believe in, that we have allegiance to, that we think exists, doesn't actually exist.
	And it's clearing away, for me, all of that rubble and all of that mess and all of that fog and all of that nonsense and all that propaganda and all that, ugh, you know, just whatever, right?
	You know, in England, the class thing, Cockney, this, that doesn't exist in the real world, right?
	There's people who speak slightly differently or whatever, but, you know, sports teams, I mean, it's just a bunch of guys, right, in uniform.
	There's no team that you have allegiance to, so to speak.
	So for me, it's getting rid of all of these really cluttered and messy concepts that just crowd out reality from view.
	And just going back to the simple things, you know, what exists in the real world, what's valid, what's universal, what's true.
	And from there, for me at least, again, everyone has their own choices.
	What happens for me after that is that the meaning that I get in my life, this is going to sound kind of weird and it's going to sound kind of negative, but it's not for me.
	The meaning that I get in my own life is stripping away the false meaning that other people believe in.
	To clear away the rubble both within my own mind and also within other people's mind, I get meaning out of destroying false meaning, if that makes any sense.
	That's my speech.
	What are you going to do tonight?
	Yes, I like that.
	It's an interesting way of looking at finding meaning by stripping away what isn't there to find what is there.
	That's really interesting.
	Well, you know, there's this old quote from Michelangelo, right?
	So he was supposed to carve an angel and someone walked up to him and said, Mike, I don't know what his name was, Michelangelo, how do you create such a beautiful angel out of a big block of wood?
	And Michelangelo said, well, you know, it's pretty simple.
	What I do is, I take this big block of wood, and everything that doesn't look like an angel, I just get rid of it.
	Yes, I think science follows the same path by applying the principle of falsification so that they can disprove what's wrong and leave what's right behind.
	Well, yeah, that's entirely correct, of course, right?
	I mean, if there's no null hypothesis, if something can't be disproved, which is the whole issue with God, then there's nothing that can be said about it that has any coherence.
	And science is a lot getting rid of bad ideas, right, before you can have good ideas.
	So if you're able to figure out the center of the solar system, you first of all have to get clear that God created the whole world and that you look to the Bible for your physics and stuff.
	You have to get rid of all of that junk so you can get some clear things.
	Yeah, it's like Some of my friends often proceed like that by taking away what's false to leave what's true behind.
	They're quite critical.
	Sometimes it's quite hard to create a new system when the other people take it apart so quickly, take apart while it's still growing.
	Right, right. No, and this is absolutely right.
	This is the great danger when, and I'm not going to presume to guess what you think, but when a particular belief in society is like the Leaning Tower of Pisa in like 50 years, right, just kind of goes down, and it goes down in kind of a rush, right?
	So we don't really believe that.
	That we should serve the government anymore, right?
	We don't really believe in God anymore.
	We don't really believe that those who are older know better and have all of our best interests at heart.
	We don't really believe that soldiers are only about defending our freedoms and not necessarily about anything to do with war profiteering or a bunch of people who want to go kill people.
	So there's a lot of things that used to be considered really true, right?
	Like if you look back at The myth of the British Empire and so on that It was very popular when Churchill was a young man and when Rudyard Kipling was writing and so on, this idea of civilizing the world.
	We don't believe in this stuff as much anymore, and so there's a lot of beliefs in society that have kind of fallen over.
	Now, the problem is that that can lead a lot of people to become very cynical and nihilistic and say, well, if all of this stuff isn't true, then nothing is true, right?
	Because everybody believed all this stuff for a long time.
	God, country... And none of it was true.
	So that means that any belief that anyone puts forward is going to be revealed as follows.
	Therefore we shouldn't believe anything.
	That's like saying, well, because it doesn't exist, I'm not going to study science.
	Yeah. It's like people are kind of wary of taking on board new beliefs when the old ones have proved to be too shaky.
	Right. No, that's quite right.
	And then anyone who puts forward any kind of new belief is considered to be naive or foolish or culty or, you know, riding for a fall.
	And there is this great danger of nihilism.
	And it's a pretty, you know, nihilism sure as heck like the belief that nothing is true.
	That's not going to give anybody any meaning.
	It's okay to go through that process.
	But stop cutting when the infection is out.
	You don't just take cutting, right?
	So now that we've gotten rid of a whole bunch of bad ideas, we now have to start figuring out what the good ideas are and not just keep cutting into pure belief in nothing.
	I don't think that really helps, right?
	Yeah, it's difficult.
	I personally found it a bit hard to feel happy when I had that view, where everything seemed pretty meaningless and nihilistic.
	Well, the funny thing is that, I don't know what it was like for you, but it's kind of cool in a way, right?
	And you get to do a whole lot of drinking, right?
	Because it's like, yeah, I could stop drinking, but what's the point?
	There's no meaning. Or whatever, right?
	I mean, there's a kind of loose, procrastinating kind of No discipline in that kind of lifestyle.
	And I think that it's a phase, right?
	And it's definitely important. During the phase of getting rid of bad ideas, you get very dangerously close to the cliff edge of nothing being true.
	But I think it's very important to remember that reality exists, science works, freedom is important, virtue is possible.
	It's just a very tough fight, right?
	Because now we have to not only fight the people who believe in all this nonsense, like God and country and even the virtue of their own families, as a real basic axiomatic concept.
	We don't just have to fight the people who believe all this nonsense, religion and so on, but we also have to fight the people who believe in nothing, who are kind of cool and nihilistic and so on.
	So it's a two-front war that's a very exciting challenge, and it gives me some meaning anyway, for sure.
	Yeah, sometimes it's easier for the people who don't believe in anything because they've got nothing to defend, so in a sense they've got that extra strength of not being, you can't really attack their position because they're not defending anything.
	Right, right. That gives them a sort of appearance of strength.
	Yeah, it's like the indifference, right?
	But of course, the fundamental challenge with the people who are nihilists is that very basic axiom that I'm sure you're aware of, where they say, nothing is true, nothing is valid.
	And then you can say, well, is it true that nothing is true?
	When they say, yes, it's true that nothing is true.
	It's like, but then something's true, right?
	Which is that nothing is true.
	And if something's true, maybe something else is true, right?
	So the nihilistic position doesn't work, logically, at a very elemental level.
	But it certainly looks cool.
	It smokes a lot of French cigarettes.
	And it drinks a lot of lager.
	Yeah. Well, thanks very much.
	It's been really interesting to hear from you.
	If you'd like, there's more, sorry to interrupt, but there's more of this conversation that goes on at freedomainradio.com.
	It's a website where I run some podcasts, which if you can't find meaning in those podcasts, I would suggest that you need to go and get your meaning replaced at a good hospital.
	So I've certainly tried to pour as much as I can into dealing with this problem of nihilism and with false beliefs.
	So if you'd like to go and listen to some of those podcasts, I think you'd find them quite stimulating.
	And I think that they would maybe help you with this challenge, right, of nihilism or believing.
	Like, believe in nothing or believe in false things is not a very important thing, right?
	Yeah, definitely visit their website.
	I really appreciate, you know, your answers as well.
	It's really good. My pleasure, my pleasure.
	Keep in touch. Let us know what you think.
	Thank you very much. Alright, take care.
	Thank you. Let's not do that too much, shall we?
	Just so I can continue to talk.
	Yes, we have another gentleman who wishes to have a chat.
	Oh Rama, please go ahead.
	I think he's buzzing at me.
	Let me see if I can pass this out.
	Oh, Steph, you are so very wise.
	S-M-E-S-P-O-I-R You have requested the microphone.
	I have given you the microphone.
	You must now use the microphone.
	Ah, he's located in two boxes, comma, South Korea.
	So, we shall leave him off, and the next topic of the DMZ shall remain unexpressed.
	So, um...
	Ah, okay.
	Greg requests the mic.
	Let me just check his donation schedule and see if he gets it.
	Oh, he is so very supercilious to some of the kindest people in the universe.
	Are you on? Can you hear me?
	You bet. Okay.
	Some of us were...
	Gonna have to move on to somebody else?
	No, I'm just kidding. Go on. You wasted crucial seconds!
	Well, some of us were thinking, and I don't know if John wants me to cite him as my source here or not.
	He may kill me for this, but...
	Some of us were thinking about 628 and wondering if maybe, just maybe, if we could turn the psych mirror around for a moment.
	The fear you expressed in that podcast of having to live in a world where this is necessary, it was completely false self.
	I'm totally open to that.
	Let's hear it. So, we were thinking that maybe...
	That you might be dismissing, at least consciously anyways, the real risks involved in giving up a fairly lucrative career and going with this full time.
	To some extent, the fear you're expressing is actually a kind of How can I put this?
	A little more personal than philosophical?
	Delicately. Well, I'll put it the way it was...
	Don't worry about delicate.
	Good Lord, I'm the last person to demand delicate.
	I'll put it the way it was described to me, and I'll let you hit me over the head if I'm wrong.
	Could this be the ten-year-old boy and stuff...
	Wanting to prove to himself that Christina will support him.
	I don't know what to say to that.
	When Steph and I first were married, he was unemployed and had been for two years, so I was supporting him.
	Maybe he liked it.
	I see. Really, these last three and a half years have been far too much of a straight for me.
	It's really out of my comfort zone to actually produce and consume.
	No, I mean, I think that's a very interesting insight.
	Christina and I were talking last night about the question of support.
	And it was a long, complicated topic, which we don't have to get into in great detail here.
	But suffice to say that if, when I had left my last job, if Christina had sort of cornered me with a broom handle, as she's wont to do, and had said to me, Steph, if you don't do free domain radio, I will never Ever have sex with you again.
	No, I will never respect you, right?
	You have to do free-domain radio because it's good and we can live without the big income and so on, right?
	If she had sort of got me up in a half-Nelson against the wall, I would have reluctantly acquiesced to do free-domain radio full-time, right?
	That would have been the approach.
	Okay, maybe not reluctantly.
	But what happened was we didn't feel, well, at the time, let's just say, we didn't feel that donations were steady enough, that the growth was enough.
	Of course, we'd only had donations for a couple of months, maybe sort of five months at that point, so we didn't really know what the trend was and so on.
	And to be frank, right, the salary that was being offered was big enough that it was pretty tempting to us, right?
	But if Christina had said, Relative to going to do some more software work versus if you have this pretty neat ability to be able to discuss philosophy with people and the technology exists to make it even remotely a viable proposition from a financial standpoint.
	Then that would be the thing to do that would give you the most meaning, right?
	It's the old thing like, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail, right?
	That's usually a good place to start in terms of figuring out what some goals would be worth achieving.
	So, I mean, it's interesting that you bring this up.
	I think that there's some real truth in what it is that you're saying.
	And there may be a whole lot more truth than I think, right?
	Just because we just had this conversation last night.
	But the question of support is important, right?
	I mean, obviously, when I was a 10-year-old kid and we hit the wall financially as a family and we were getting eviction notices and so on, it left me with a fair amount of conservatism when it comes to making money, right, and not wanting to sort of take big risks.
	But I also have found that taking big risks generally does pay off as long as you work hard.
	So I think you're right that there is a certain kind of question around, because I'm very much aware that I simply cannot succeed in this as a full-time occupation, obviously in the absence of Interested and, you know, somewhat financially generous listeners.
	I can't make it work.
	But much more fundamentally, if Christina doesn't wholeheartedly and fully and enthusiastically support what it is that I'm doing, then I simply won't be able to succeed.
	And I think that that had not occurred within our marriage as yet until I learned to flip the half-Nelson thing.
	And then last night, she agreed.
	No. Did you want to mention anything about that?
	I think you're right.
	I think that there was more in terms of the support.
	I mean, obviously you and other people have been extraordinarily generous with time and with some donations, and it's been fantastic.
	But it really came down to, I think, was I going to be doing it with the full support of Christina?
	She very much believes in what it is that I'm doing, but she's also quite conservative when it comes to, more conservative than I am when it comes to risks, I think.
	So I think you're right.
	I think that definitely there was a sort of universal aspect to it that it was hard for me to swallow, but I think that there was a lot more personal stuff going on there than I was aware of during the actual podcast, right?
	Because I was just sort of working that stuff out on the fly.
	But I think that's an excellent point.
	Is that sort of close to what you meant, or was there something else?
	Yeah, to a certain extent.
	And that's pretty much what we're thinking.
	Just the whole idea that what you were raised against in the podcast was kind of just a sort of surface excuse.
	I like to call it surface depth, but I know what you mean.
	Well, yeah, I would say, I mean, just to sort of vaguely come to my own defense, I wouldn't necessarily say that I experienced this as an excuse.
	Like, I try to be rigorously honest when I'm podcasting and when I'm not.
	I didn't experience it as, well, I guess I'm really thinking about Christina, but let me sideline it over to this other abstract topic.
	So no, for me, it may have felt that way to the listeners.
	I didn't experience it as an excuse.
	I mean, it genuinely did feel that that was the issue.
	And there's some aspect of it that I think is.
	But certainly in talking about it last night, when it came up sort of out of the blue during a general pursuit of, you know, let's look over the last six to 12 months of our life and marriage and figure out what we've done right and wrong.
	That it definitely did come up, but it took quite a long time, I think, for that to come out as an issue, like an hour or so of pretty steady conversation.
	So it certainly wasn't at the surface for me as something that was occurring, but I'm extraordinarily thrilled that you guys picked up on something that I was missing.
	Because, I mean, I certainly was asking for that feedback quite explicitly, like, I can't solve all of this on my own.
	It's like trying to analyze your own dreams.
	There's a reason I haven't picked up one of my own dreams and analyzed it on air, because I'd sound like a retarded Reese monkey.
	So, no, look, I mean, I certainly hope that you wouldn't feel at all hesitant after I've been, you know, quite happy, slap happily analyzing everybody else and their dreams and so on that I certainly always welcome those kind of questions and that mirror being held up to myself because, good Lord, I mean, it's real easy to see other people and it's very hard to see yourself, so I massively appreciate that kind of feedback.
	Well, I mean, there's the fact that, you know, none of Some of us, at least not that I'm aware of, have any kind of real experience in that sort of subject matter.
	Going in that direction, you don't want to be unfair, right?
	We don't know what you're talking about behind the mic and off air or whatever.
	And so, you know, you ask the question and it maybe seems like I'm giving, you know, enough, I guess, what's the word?
	Is it right just to presume that you already thought of that, right?
	Or did it kind of... Well, but I mean, I certainly haven't...
	I mean, I haven't expressed that to anyone who had thought of it, right?
	It's perfectly valid, but that very assumption, that very fear of crossing over and telling somebody else what may be going on for them that they're not aware of, that fear that you felt, that's part of what I feel about doing it full-time as well.
	It is a scary thing to go over and say, I know you better than you know yourself because that opens you up to all sorts of accusations, right?
	I mean, and hostility, right?
	How well does that work when we try that, say, with our families?
	So, I mean, I certainly do understand that it's a scary thing to do, but I hugely appreciate it and I hope that, you know, whoever's listening to this, I mean...
	You know, feel free to call me on anything that you feel is not a complete story or anything that feels false selfie or anything that feels, you know, you've got to trust your own instincts, right?
	I mean, and what's the worst that can happen is I say, well, I don't really feel that that's the case and so on, but let me think about it.
	Whereas if I just get mad and say, how dare you presume this is a one-way analysis?
	Nobody else gets to analyze the big chatty forehead or anything then.
	You can find some other one, some more sane person to chat with.
	No, I think that people's instincts are bang on.
	I certainly would enormously encourage people that if they ever hear anything, like it's rare, but if you hear something, should it ever conceivably come to pass that I'm not perfectly 100% self-aware at all times, then I hope that people would do me the honor of trusting me to the point where they say, Bullshit! Or something like that, right?
	In a passive-aggressive manner, right?
	But, you know, just to say that, you know, this rang false or there was something that's missing here because, I mean, particularly in that, I mean, it was a pretty vulnerable spot and I, you know, was, you know, driving through space, so to speak, you know, gravity-free.
	So it definitely, that kind of feedback is hugely, hugely welcome.
	Right, and that's the other...
	The thing that kind of makes you hesitant, too.
	You know it's a vulnerable spot, so you don't want to just go rushing in with the stick and jabbing it, right?
	Right. Yeah, right, right.
	Right, right. Yeah, listen, sobby boy, it's not about what you think about, right?
	It's something like, yeah, you don't want to be cold.
	I understand. Right, right.
	But I did think that John's question was pretty fair, so that's why I thought it was worth asking.
	Right, and I mean, if I am blindfolded and I'm running off a cliff, I hope that people would at least try and trip me up before I went too far.
	I mean, that would be a kind thing to do, right?
	You might want to slow down there.
	See you in the fall!
	Well, that was... That was it.
	It was just trying to unravel the meaning there in that podcast.
	I think you pretty much answered it.
	Yeah, I mean, it certainly was not the easiest podcast to unravel, I mean, for either of us.
	And, you know, for Christina, I think she saw it a little bit more clearly, but definitely it was raw, not just in terms of the emotion, but in terms of, like, it was not a polished conclusion, right?
	Normally I have some idea where the hell I'm going when I start podcasting, but this was definitely, hey, where are we now?
	Let's look around. It's hard to tell in a lot of them.
	Right, that's it. I'm coming right over.
	Oh, but I just thought it was all part of the plan.
	Let me just check the big bubble chart on the wall here.
	Where are we? Oh, yes, it is part of the plan.
	Absolutely. You were just supposed to say that.
	Exactly. Who has a question?
	All right. Did you have another question or comment?
	No, that's basically it.
	Well, thanks very much. I appreciate that.
	And do you think... Was it John who had the...
	Yeah, freebies. Yeah, thanks as well, right?
	And never hesitate around that kind of stuff.
	All right. Rod the D-Fu Ninja, I think that you're...
	Hey, what's up?
	Can you hear me? Okay.
	Okay. Well, first of all, I just wanted to congratulate you on this decision.
	I know it's terrifying you and all that stuff, but I think it's awesome.
	Kudos. One thing I was wondering about was how do you think that or have you thought much about or have you discussed it with Christina about how this decision might affect your future children?
	Well, obviously they're going to have to go to work considerably earlier than Christina wants them to.
	Yes, no, we definitely have talked about that at length, and when I say we...
	It's an excellent question.
	I... I mean, it's a significant salary drop, let's just say, to say the least, right, to give this a shot.
	So it's not that I'm saying, hey, you know, if the donations stay at X amount of dollars per month, then this is going to be, well, we're good for the next 25 years until I retire, right?
	That's fine. And Christina's saying, sure, absolutely, I love to do nothing but work.
	So it is definitely an issue that we're not putting any plans for kids on hold based on this.
	But for me, it's not like I'm being shot into space and hope that I can figure out how to steer this thing.
	If it doesn't work out, what's the worst that could happen?
	Well, I go and get another job.
	So for me, it's not like, oh God, this is a one-way ticket.
	I'm never going to be able to back into the workforce.
	For me, as I was saying to Christina last night, I said, it's kind of funny.
	When I was In 19, I got the acting bug, and I auditioned for the National Theatre School of Canada.
	They take like 1% of applicants.
	I went through three sets of auditions, wrote a little play, and blah, blah, blah.
	So I got in, and after about a year, I realized that it wasn't for me.
	Actually, about a year and a half.
	So I left and went on with academics.
	So I invested sort of a year and a half into the theatre world, Then I acted and I directed and I wrote plays and so on.
	It was a very enjoyable experience in a lot of ways, but it wasn't the life for me.
	Just too unstable.
	And I frankly lacked the kind of raw talent that I think would have made it a no-brainer, right?
	I think it would have been quite a lot of work and not particularly as satisfying, I think, as I've found since my own capacity to generate language is more highly developed than my ability to imitate other people's language emotionally effectively.
	I think that it was the right decision.
	But I don't look back. I don't sit there gnawing my nails now saying, oh my god, I should have been an actor.
	It's very important for me at least to jettison the things that you think you want to do.
	Explore them, try them out, and find whether they work for you or not.
	That way you can keep moving forward without accumulating regrets or what ifs or if onlys or whatever.
	Now, the next thing that, of course, that I did was I went into academics, and I spent a couple of years doing academics and getting a grad degree and so on, and hated it.
	I loved the studying, and I loved the writing, and I loved the thinking, but the environment was just, man, it was just like constantly swimming up a waterfall.
	It was just exhausting to try and sort of make any headway in a fundamentally statist and irrational environment.
	It was no good. So then I went into business and I enjoyed that.
	I worked in business for seven years, founded a company and grew it, and that was great.
	And then I took almost two years off and I pursued writing because, you know, I always enjoyed novels and plays, writing novels and plays and so on.
	And poems. So I wrote like four books in the space of 18 months.
	There was C. Jane Run, C. Spot Jump, and then two pop-up books.
	They were pretty cool. Sort of an origami thing.
	So then, and of course I took writing courses and I got an agent and I got the most amazing reviews of one of my novels and so on.
	And then it all just dried up, right?
	Nothing ever happened, right?
	So... Now, I don't sit there and say to Christina, oh, God, I should have been a novelist.
	What am I doing in the business world?
	And so on, right? Like, I gave it a really big shot.
	And afterwards, there's no regrets.
	I don't look back and say, well, you know, I should have spent 10 years, not two years, doing it, right?
	So what we were talking about last night was saying...
	I invested years of my life and lost significant amounts of income, if you want to look at it that way, to pursue other dreams where I had far less tangible evidence of success.
	Because I never thought, I'll be a babbling head philosopher and that's how it's going to work for me.
	Because, of course, no one could predict podcasting and all of this opportunity that we have now.
	So I said, you know, if I already gave up years of my life and hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to pursue these other dreams and feel free of regret about my status with regards to those dreams, now that I've finally tripped over something that really works and has had an enormous amount of success relative to everything else I've tried, why would this not be the one that I pursue?
	I already pursued all these other things that ran off a cliff.
	Now I'm in a car with a straight road ahead of me and I got some gas.
	Why would I not do this, right?
	So I think that was sort of the approach that I took.
	I think that I can make it work.
	Obviously, Christina and I were talking on Saturday over lunch.
	I sort of spilled my guts about all of the various ideas that I've had and about how to sort of make this work culturally, financially, artistically, spiritually, you know, and all that kind of stuff.
	And, of course, I'm going to lean on the kindness, brilliance, and generosity, not just financial, but I mean generosity in terms of creativity and ideas of the people who've been part of this conversation or who are going to join it in the future to sort of help me along.
	People have lots of technical skills, lots of business skills, lots of ideas and experience so that I don't have to reinvent the wheel.
	So I think that it can work.
	We're not going to put on hold our plans for having children because I'm going to give this a shot.
	Because, man, I mean, if it could work, I mean, just before I let you actually continue with your conversation, I mean, if it could work, my God, how much better could you get it?
	I mean, you couldn't get a better life for me.
	Christina's working from home.
	I'm working from home. We can have lunch every day together if we have kids.
	One of us can be home or both of us can be home with those kids.
	There's going to be income rolling in as she builds her business into something that's more independent of her.
	I'm going to have income rolling in through Free Domain Radio, which is not going to require me to put in two hours of commuting and eight hours of work a day plus travel or whatever.
	So for me, like, if we could make it work, I mean, I miss my wife all day, 10 hours away.
	I spend away from her, it's terrible, right?
	So if we could make it work so that we could have kids without me having to drive and be away from home and travel, oh man, it just doesn't get much better than that.
	I think kids is also partly why.
	It's partly because of the kids that I want to do it as well.
	So sorry, that was a long answer, but I hope that makes some sense.
	Yeah, that's cool. I was just wondering if you wanted a live-in man nanny that could be your Charles in Charge.
	Yeah, I think we got your resume.
	Generally, the thong shot is not what you would include with a resume for that kind of stuff.
	Please don't send it to my wife.
	Oh, sorry. I got that one crossed over with my other...
	I prefer to get those ones.
	Okay. Actually, I really do...
	When you describe the working from home thing, I really do...
	I mean, I envy that. That sounds like an awesome line.
	Yeah, man, who wouldn't want to do it if you could pull it off, right?
	I mean, talk about ideas all day and do what you can to make the world a better place, and oh, man, it'd be beautiful.
	All right, well, I think you answered my question extremely well, so I'm about done.
	Wow. Extremely well includes being succinct, or not so much?
	Actually, you answered more than I was even thinking to ask, so...
	You don't have anything to talk about what happened with you this week?
	You're such a tease. Well, I could if you like to, but it seems like everyone's really enjoying this subject.
	No, you talk.
	You talk. You've got much more important stuff, much more meaty stuff and much more immediate stuff than what I'm talking about.
	So if you don't mind sharing, I think people would love to hear.
	Sure. Actually, I... Let's see.
	It was last Monday. I was leaving work, and I think I just finally...
	The DFU momentum finally had built to the point where I couldn't hold it back anymore so I gave my mom a call and started talking to her about just the direction I want to go with my life and how I'm trying to heal myself in a lot of ways and I'm finding out that I can't heal much further without really starting to focus on my relationships with people in my family and Friends and things like that.
	I was trying to let her know that I'm starting to realize a lot of stuff about my childhood that I realized how messed up it was and that the people in my family are still unhealthy.
	I described some stuff about my cousin's family.
	I was trying to show her how this type of dynamic works and hopefully by talking about someone not directly related to her, Specifically, I could maybe break through a little defenses and stuff.
	But then, you know, when we were discussing our own family, a lot of the same old false self stuff started popping up with my mom.
	She was talking about how it was all, you know, she really does build the false self around being a victim and about how the The world is rough for her and she reacts the best that she can, but she has all these scars and stuff from all the bad things that have happened to her and there's nothing that she can do to heal it and all that stuff.
	She just refuses to acknowledge her choices that she's made and the complicity that she has and the abuse that she's experienced.
	The thing that was, you know, especially troubling me and I just wanted to ask her was that, you know, you were married to dad for 15 years before my older brother was conceived.
	Now, you know, how can you think that, you know, you were a victim for 15 years with, you know, why did you not leave after all this time?
	And, of course, it was all this stuff about, well, you know, the culture does this and, you know, parents expect this and that and everything else and I couldn't leave them because of that.
	What bugs me the most about it is that she brought kids into this miserable world of hers.
	That really bothered me.
	Her response to that was telling as well.
	She said, I'm glad that I didn't leave them because then I wouldn't have gotten you kids out of it.
	And I almost had this feeling like, you know, she was thinking of us as these little dolls that she puts on her shelf, you know?
	Like, I'm so glad I got you guys.
	But it's like she doesn't realize that we guys are, you know, living, breathing human beings.
	And for the first, you know, good 15, 20 years of our lives, we're living in, you know, kind of just mute terror all the time.
	It's not sinking into her, I don't think.
	The whole phone call was pretty much her...
	I think she was just kind of flinging a bunch of words together in various combinations to try to get me to keep communicating with her and stuff like that.
	I just kept on repeating that I need healthy people in my life.
	I need healthy relationships.
	I need to eliminate the unhealthy ones.
	She asked, well, what can I do?
	And I said, well, there's, you know, there's nothing I can ask you to do, really.
	I mean, I can't tell you what to do.
	I can only say that what I'm doing is I'm going to pursue therapy and I'm going to make sure that the choices that I make and the relationships that I have are going to be with positive people.
	So it's like, or, you know, with healthy people.
	So, I mean, you know, I didn't want to just flat out give her an answer and say, go to therapy and then we can talk because then she would just say, okay, I'll go to therapy so that you'll talk to me.
	I want her to think through what I'm saying and to say, he needs healthy relationships.
	If I want to be in a relationship with him, I should try to make myself healthy.
	And so far she's not doing that.
	Anyway, it's... I got a couple of emails from her, and then she's kind of gone silent, so I'm sure that it's just, you know, things are boiling under the surface.
	I'm planning to write a long letter because, you know, since I'm still stuck in the, you know, I still have plenty of scar tissue built up through, you know, my relationship with her, and since every time I talk to her, it's just, you know, the two TV sets talking to each other type thing.
	I mean, it's really difficult for me to both be, you know, listening to her at the same time that I'm trying to peel back the scar tissue to be able to talk to her, you know, and so I think I'm just going to draft up a letter and try to get all the honesty that I possibly can into it without,
	you know, trying to strike a delicate balance between being honest and trying not to tweak her false self, you know, reactions and stuff just to, like, Let her understand what's going on, you know, to let her understand that it's, you know, I'm not going nuts.
	I'm not going crazy. I'm actually going healthy, you know, for the first time.
	So anyway, it's terrifying and it's exciting.
	And one thing that's really just incredible to me about this is that I feel like the only difference between what was going on a few weeks ago when I was still in contact with her and what's going on now is that There's really not that much difference, you know? Like, I expected to feel like this humongous hole has been ripped out of my soul because my mom's gone, but I think it's probably felt like my mom's been gone for ages, and I've just finally started to acknowledge it.
	So, I don't know, do you have anything to say about that?
	Is that kind of a, is that a healthy response to this?
	Am I, is this empty, like, not empty, but is this, like, kind of non-event feeling about this?
	Is that normal, or is this Maybe not such a good thing.
	What do you think? No, I think it's entirely healthy.
	I mean, I certainly would.
	I mean, it's something that Christina and I talked about somewhat recently wherein I said to Christina, I said, you know, if we are apart for the day, you know, we really miss each other.
	And if I have to go away on a business trip, you know, we talk for an hour on the phone every night, you know, we really miss each other.
	And I said, you know, you haven't seen your parents in almost two years now.
	Do you miss them? Well, no.
	Like there wasn't a single time that I ever remember after Christina DeFood where she sort of, I would come home and she would say, you know, be in tears and say, oh my god, I miss my mom and my dad so much.
	I miss my sister so much.
	I never went through that experience where I said to anyone, well, you know, I really miss my parents or my brother or extended family, cousins, whatever.
	The simple reality is that you can't bond with narcissists.
	You can't have an emotional, spiritual, deep, intimate connection with fundamentally selfish, narcissistic, and cold people.
	You just can't. You might as well try and have a romantic affair with a steam oven.
	It's impossible.
	So the amazing thing that occurs in the defooing process is that you don't miss them.
	I mean, that's the great secret, right?
	And I've tried not to keep it too much of a secret, right?
	But you don't miss people.
	Because, of course, if you did feel, if you didn't see someone, like a huge piece of your heart had been ripped out, that would indicate That you had a bond with them and that you valued and wanted to see them.
	Most people who are in these kinds of situations, Rod, of course, they see their family out of guilt, out of obligation.
	They see them because people will get upset if they don't.
	That's negative economics, right?
	That's like, give me your wallet and I won't stab you.
	That's not, I want to give this person money because they provide value or whatever, right?
	So to me it would be utterly shocking and that would be I think cause for concern if you felt a tremendous amount of loneliness and sorrow.
	The fact that you feel no particular negative repercussions from defooing is to me an indication that defooing is exactly the right thing to do because there's no bond of value and based on your even brief descriptions of your mother I can't imagine how there could be something there that you would miss.
	No, I'm actually feeling a great deal of relief lately.
	I mean, this last week has been...
	I've actually surprised myself quite a bit.
	At work, I've tidied up my desk and I'm efficient.
	And at home, I've done some chores that I've been putting off for a while.
	Everything is nice and Everything's coming back into order the way that I like things.
	I'm so sorry. Can I interrupt you for just a second?
	Sure. Christina, could you maybe get me a coffee or something while Rod talks about all of this new tidiness?
	Sorry, I just need to get Christina out of the room for just a minute or two while you continue talking about this.
	Oh dear, I'm getting a list.
	Everything sparkles and shines now.
	Oh, God! Wait, disconnect!
	Disconnect! Male solidarity is breaking up, Captain!
	Eject, eject! No, but anyway, it's like, seriously, I've always been the type of person, I love cleanliness, I love order, I love neatness.
	The way I decorate my apartment is always clean lines, you know, Ikea and all, stuff like that, whatever.
	But lately, I've been, you know, things have been getting all cluttery and stuff, and I think it's because this Like, this logjam of the thing that I really needed to do most in life, this befooing, was just kind of holding back all this other stuff that I normally do naturally, you know? And getting the logjam unjammed has suddenly allowed me to be myself again and to be, you know, I'm really kind of falling back into my groove and I'm feeling good, you know?
	So it's nice.
	Like, there's so much tension release that Obviously, there's still plenty of work ahead of me as far as writing this letter and everything goes, but now that the ball is rolling, I really do feel like that endless inching up the roller coaster hill.
	I've finally gotten over that hill and I'm throwing my arms up in the air and screaming, It's just, it's feeling good.
	Like, I know I can't go back over that hill again because there's no tractor to wrench me back up that way.
	So, you know, I'm just going to enjoy the ride.
	It's going to go up, it's going to go down.
	Things are going to be hard in certain places, but now that it's rolling, I'm feeling great, you know?
	It's cool. Right.
	And I think that, you know, just to politicize it for just a moment, I mean, to sort of widen it out there to the anarchistic or market anarchist philosophy, the propaganda that we're fed about our family is that if we don't see them, we're going to be miserable, alone, we're going to, you know, we're going to miss them, and God, then when they die, and all these things that are unsaid, no, you know, whatever, whatever, right?
	Well, it's not just the most complete and errant nonsense.
	I mean, you can't manufacture value in someone by having DNA with them, right?
	I mean, that would just be racism in a sense, right?
	Well, then white people are better than black people because I'm white and we're closer in DNA. I mean, that kind of bigotry is nonsense.
	The amazing thing is that you simply don't miss bad people.
	The only way you miss bad people is if your self-esteem remains low and you feel like you can't get anything better.
	Then you'll miss bad people, but obviously your self-esteem is ratcheting up.
	I mean, your rollercoaster, you go down, but your self-esteem keeps ratcheting up, which is great.
	I also very strongly believe That all of the catastrophe stories that people tell you about your family, they also, of course, tell you about God, right?
	And if people stop believing in God, they'll just go nuts and kill everyone and steal and whatever, right?
	And they also say that about the state, right?
	Like, if we get rid of the state, then everything will be horrible, chaos will miss it so much.
	I absolutely am positive that...
	When we get rid of God finally, like the religion thing becomes a cult minority that nobody takes seriously, and when we get rid of the state, people will wake up the next day and say, I thought this would be a catastrophe, but I don't miss it at all.
	Right. No, I absolutely agree.
	It's kind of like the Soviet Union falls apart and everyone wakes up the next day and there's no Soviet Union, but hey, we're still here.
	It's not so bad. Yeah, we'll make it.
	Another thing that's really interesting about this whole process that I'm going through right now is there's a young lady at work that I really enjoy going to lunch with.
	It's not in a romantic way or anything.
	She's married and has a little child and everything like that.
	She's really cool and fun to talk to.
	I've been going to lunch with her and discussing this stuff with her for quite a while.
	She's been kind of giving me the You know, she listens intently, she asks questions, but she still always has the, well, yeah, but she's your mom, you know, that kind of a thing.
	And so, actually, I got, you know, after this Monday, you know, this development on Monday with the phone call of my mom and everything like that, I was talking to this girl at work, and I said, you know, I understand that what I'm saying to you is probably very difficult for you to hear because, you know, she's She has a pretty, I guess, involved relationship with her parents.
	It's not a great one, but it's still a big part of her life.
	Of course, she's just a child, so she's trying to sort out all these feelings herself.
	I asked her, do you value these things?
	When I talk about these things, is it valuable to you, or do you feel like I'm being just aggressive toward you by Just sticking all this stuff up in your face and saying, look what I'm doing and you're not doing.
	And she said, well, no, actually, I, you know, if I didn't like this, I would tell you to stop talking about her.
	I just wouldn't go to lunch with you.
	And she said, in fact, one thing, you know, that she struggled for a while to try to find the words for it, but she said, it's just incredible to me to see, to watch someone else doing this when I feel like I can.
	She said, it almost seems to me like you're a rock star.
	And I just started laughing. But it's like the same kind of feeling that I've had with listening to Greg and to Nate and to you and Christina talk about this stuff.
	It's like, yeah, you guys do seem like rock stars to me.
	But what's really great is I can actually get up on the stage and be a rock star too.
	Welcome to the band!
	It's like I've got my hairs growing out and I'm starting to hairspray it up way up in the air and stuff and it's just It's cool.
	It's a lot of fun.
	My sideways monk mohawk is coming in beautifully.
	Exactly. It's interesting.
	What's coming out of this conversation, this lunchtime conversation with this lady at work is that she has this brand new spanking kid that she...
	But she has this brand new kid that she's, you know, bringing into the world and trying to figure out what to do, you know, to give him a wonderful life.
	And I really do think that she's taking a lot of this stuff that I'm talking about to heart, you know, and she's, you know, she's saying, I want so much to give this to him, I just wish I could give it to myself type thing.
	And I said, well, you know, you're going to find that it's going to be extremely difficult to maintain Your relationship with your parents at the same time you're trying to give him something better because it's like the metaphor that I came up with this week was if I've been plugging my ears my whole life to block out the shrieks of all the unhealthy people in my life,
	then when someone walks past me that's healthy and they speak in a soft whisper, I can't hear them.
	It's like they don't even exist. And as I'm pulling my hands away from my ears to listen for the whispers and the sweet, sweet lullabies of the healthy people, the shrieking of the unhealthy people is so much louder.
	It's like it drowns.
	It hurts, but what's great about it is that it's allowing me now to pull away from those people because I'm purposely pulling my hands away from my ears.
	I'm purposely opening myself up And I know that I'm doing this for the right reasons.
	So then when the pain comes from the shrieks, I know that that's a healthy indication that I need to go the other way.
	So it's really, you know, it's invigorating.
	It's really fun, you know? I mean, that's a great metaphor and it works on a whole number of levels.
	First of all, if the shrieking gets really bothersome, you can turn down the volume on the podcast.
	That's one possibility.
	But the other thing that's also embedded in that metaphor is that you don't get to get away from the unhealthy people if you keep covering your ears because it's not uncomfortable enough.
	That's why I've always told people Go and talk to your family.
	Open yourself up to them.
	See them for who they are. The way out of the cage is in the middle, not in the bars, right?
	Absolutely. And also, I think the reason the metaphor works is because the shrieking can not only...
	It works not only for, like, you know, shrieking anger, but shrieking pain, too.
	You know, people who are perpetually in pain but refuse to help themselves out of it, they're shrieking in anguish, and that still hurts now, too.
	Like, that's the shrieking of my mother is the shrieking of the pain.
	It's not that she's aggressive with the yelling or loud noises.
	It's the poor me type sounds that are really starting to hurt.
	Like Greg just said in the window here, passive aggressive.
	That's exactly what it is. It's like it's throwing at other people expecting them to deal with it.
	Right. And I mean, one of the things that I've tried to communicate, and it's been one of the toughest things that I've sort of had as a communicator, is to allow my emotions to be present when they come up and so on.
	If I do feel passionate or emotional about something, to be emotional in a way that doesn't come across As manipulative, right?
	And of course, I'm not trying to be manipulative, but I think that a lot of people, when they are around emotionally manipulative people, they begin to sort of fear emotions.
	And emotions always then feel manipulative.
	And emotions feel like people's guard goes up around emotions, right?
	And so I've always sort of tried to, if I feel important, like angry or sad or whatever about something, That I can express it, but in a way that is not an expectation for anyone else to do anything.
	And I think that, like, I've sort of tried to de-alarm people as far as emotions go.
	And that was some work for me as well, you know, when I was myself in therapy, to not be alarmed or to feel precious about my feelings.
	He's like, the world must stop because I'm crying, you know, or anything like that, right?
	I mean, so... I think that's quite right.
	I mean, the manipulative emotions can often warn people away or scare people off from the genuine emotions, right?
	Because if somebody's genuinely sad in your life and they're not self-pitying and it's not manipulative, we generally feel a good deal of tenderness towards that emotion, right?
	And it can be a very intimate and wonderful thing.
	When emotions are put forward as traps and nooses and lariats and lassoes and so on, then it is very hard to stay at all present to that.
	Absolutely. I agree 100%.
	I've had several...
	All of my relationships with women, my girlfriends and things like that, have all been examples of Emotional manipulation.
	I mean, emotion has never been there for celebration.
	It's been there for, you know, get something out of the other person.
	And that's, you know, I've been single now for quite a while.
	I've been taking a break from that whole thing because I realized I need to retool myself before I have at it again.
	But it's really, you know, it's amazing how This, you know, pulling away the scar tissue, pulling the hands away from the ears is, it's bringing forth a completely new tapestry of sound, you know what I mean? It's like the, yeah, the shrieking gets louder, but it's a good thing that I can hear it now.
	And because before I would just, I'd walk straight up to these shrieking people and, you know, Dance with them, you know?
	It was just... Hey, I can harmonize.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I was like, hey, you go tenor, I'll go bass, and let's see what we can do.
	I always have to be the tenor.
	I don't know. So, yeah, it's really opening up now.
	It's feeling good. So, again, just enormous thanks to you and Christina and Greg and Nate and all the other guys who are going before me.
	It's just... This is so great.
	And I'm looking forward to being a trailblazer for other people, too.
	You know, it's Well, you're doing a magnificent job of communicating it both to your cousin and his woman at work.
	It is amazing to me, and I've experienced this many, many times in my life, that It doesn't even seem like something like defooing or whatever with an unsatisfying or negative or hostile or difficult family relationship.
	It's not something where you say, gee, I want to, but it's too hard.
	It never occurred to me.
	The issue for me was once it became a possibility for me, Then I could deal with it.
	I could move forward and so on.
	But it's not that people think that defooing doesn't even exist as a concept within their minds.
	You might as well say to somebody, well, the way that you achieve personal freedom is you transform yourself into an armadillo.
	They'd say, well, what are you talking about?
	That's not even within the realm of possibility.
	You know, a puma, maybe.
	Armadillo, no, I've got to have fur.
	So when you talk about defooing, which is basically just living with integrity, living philosophically, living with values, It is an amazing thing what it does to people's conception of what is possible.
	Because all you have to do is make it possible for people and then that's the only chink that the true self needs to start burrowing its way out.
	Yeah, I think if there's one thing that I can maybe add to the conversation on defluing right now, it's just that I'm surprised at how good it feels.
	Like I was expecting, you know, for, I mean, I've been considering this for, gosh, Well over a year now, I think, just really seriously wondering if I should continue a relationship with my parents and stuff.
	And now that I've finally done it, and I was putting it off for so long because I thought it was going to just be so difficult and impossible and scary and hard and painful, but now that I'm doing it, it's actually feeling good.
	I mean, I'm sure there's going to be kind of echo Backlashes of emotion coming up in the future when certain events come around, birthdays and things like that.
	But still, I'm surprised at how positive it feels right now.
	The painful and scary part has always been the guilt associated with it.
	Are you doing the right thing?
	No, I have an attachment to these people and I should be there for them.
	Yeah, and they mean so much to me, and I mean so much to them.
	It's more the guilt, but in actual, yeah, the guilt is, you know, is the shoulds.
	I should be a part of that.
	I should be in their life.
	They gave so much to me.
	They did so much to me. But when you pull away from that, you recognize, as I've recognized, as Steph mentioned earlier, you know that you really don't miss these people.
	And then some people will have guilt about not missing them as well, but that's a whole other issue.
	Right. No, I think that's one of the things that's helped me enormously to, I guess, that really did prepare me for this was the, I've really started to, I think, take to heart this whole there's no positive obligation thing.
	And I think that helped me a lot about, you know, to deal with, because if I were to try to, or if I were to have had this conversation with my mom about a year ago, It would have been Guilt Fest, you know, 2007, or 2006, I guess, a year ago. But anyway, it would have been...
	She would have been pulling the strings, and I would have been completely collapsing.
	You know, I would have just absolutely folded.
	But this time, you know, after all of this development that I've had through listening to, you know, Free Domain Radio and just all this other stuff, it's just the...
	When she pulled on the strings, I was watching her do it, and I said, wow, this is exactly how I thought it was going to go down, and it's not affecting me.
	So I was able to just walk right through the fire, so to speak.
	Right, right, right.
	It's like in the Matrix, if you don't believe in the bullets, they don't hurt you.
	Yeah, that's exactly what it felt like, honestly.
	It really did feel like You know, I could just hold my hand out and the bullets stopped and fell to the ground.
	It was just amazing. That's fantastic.
	I mean, I think it's wonderful. I think it's wonderful.
	You know, there's that old phrase that says, no one can make you feel bad without your permission, and we all know that, and we say, oh yeah, that's true, sticks and stones, blah, blah, blah.
	But once you do actually move beyond the matrix, right, once you wake up in the pod and so on, and then really the bullets are just, they're not even, they don't even scratch, right?
	I mean, and that's the amazing thing, and that's of course the real power of philosophy and integrity, right, is that It's not like it puts a suit of armor on you, because that would be unwieldy.
	It just makes you impervious to fantasy bullets, and that's just a very powerful place to be.
	And that's sort of the rock star element, I think, that larger-than-life element, because everyone else is getting moaned out, and you're striding forward like Superman, right?
	The bullet's bouncing off your chest.
	It looks incredibly heroic, right?
	No, I think that's actually one thing that's really invigorating me right now, is I've actually...
	I had no idea that I had that ability.
	I had no idea that I had the strength in me to be able to withstand a full frontal barrage of mom's guilt trip, and it worked.
	I was like, wow, this is awesome.
	I mean, not awesome that shit was happening, but It was awesome that I came through it unscathed.
	No, it's great. You actually come up like, come on, give me some more guilt.
	I can handle it.
	I can touch this. I'm biting down on these bullets.
	I spit them back. I'm going to chew through some iron bars now.
	Absolutely. I mean, the first time you can walk on water, you go for a run, right?
	I mean, you don't want to walk anywhere else.
	No, it's cool. So, yeah, I mean, I think I'm just about exhausted what I had to say about it.
	But again, I'm just like, I'm thrilled.
	It's amazing. Fantastic.
	Well, listen, congratulations. Obviously, I hugely appreciate what you've done.
	I mean, just because it's good to have another guinea pig in the cage with us or out of the cage, you know, like wandering around a dinosaur.
	So I think it's great.
	I'm certainly glad that the time investment that you've put into this conversation and, of course, the other things that you've been doing in your life has paid off, right?
	I mean, because as you sort of look forward to the vista of your life, Yes, you've invested a certain amount of time in the podcast and in other things, but think of all the family functions you now get to bypass.
	Think of all the deathbeds you don't have to go to.
	Your mom could live for another 20 or 30 years.
	Over that time, I think it's an investment that pays off, I think, with considerable interest in terms of The investment in this learning curve versus what you get out on the other side, I think, is pretty significant.
	And that's the great thing about you communicating about this is that it's hard to convince people of that when they're starting, right?
	But when you get there, you look back and you go, well, this hugely paid off, right?
	Yeah, and that's one of the things that with my conversation with my cousin, she She said one time that, man, I can't believe that you're able to do this and you're feeling so good about it.
	I said, yeah, just listen to the excitement in my voice.
	I just said, this is real.
	It's thrilling. It's fantastic.
	It's awesome. She was like, wow, you're right.
	I said, if you can hear this, if you can hear the excitement, the joy in my voice, you should just go for it.
	Find it, you know, listen for it and find it.
	Right, right. But, you know, be careful and the only thing I'd say be careful about that is that, and this came up in another context on the boards, it is, you know, because it's now easy for you, don't imagine that it's going to be any easier for anyone else.
	Do you know what I mean? Like, you're a smart guy, you worked very hard at it and it took you a year.
	Now, of course, the more of us who do this and the more it becomes clearer to people, the more it becomes sort of validated in a sense.
	I think that's a good thing.
	It'll become more normal, right?
	But we're still very much out here on the perimeter, right?
	Out here on the frontier. And it's going to take other people.
	I like to think that everyone gets like 12 seconds shaved off their defu time.
	So everyone who's next, it'll be a year minus 12 seconds, next person a year minus 24 seconds, and so on.
	But it still is a big and lengthy and challenging process for people.
	And the other thing I say is that it may not happen.
	I don't know that you need to be worried about that you may crash or may crash back or something like that.
	What I found for myself was that there were certain stimuli that recreated some of the original pain, but that That was not painful in the present, that just merely, you know, like the old war wound when it rains, right?
	It just sort of awakened that sort of, which actually just reaffirmed my commitment to not be around these sort of unhealthy people.
	Yeah, I think the thing that, the biggest challenge that I'm going to have is with my nephews, and I know that you can very much, you know, identify with this feeling, is that, you know, it's going to be difficult for me to not see those guys again if this is part of it.
	That's going to be the trick for me.
	That's a feeling that I don't think I'll ever enjoy.
	Yeah, no, you can't.
	It's very hard. But, you know, there's later on.
	To me, it's certainly possible that my nieces may come knocking five years from now, right?
	Yeah, that's true. I agree.
	I mean, I'm not hard to find on the web, let's say, so from that standpoint, it's certainly possible.
	Right. Yeah, so anyway, thanks again, and again, congratulations because, hey, you know, hey, look, folks, here's another example of the success of the method, so it's working.
	Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for sharing.
	Yep. All right. Well, if we have any other questions, I'm certainly happy to entertain one or two more before the end of the show.
	So you can type it into the board, or if you wanted to request the mic, we can spend another minute or two on the show.
	But other than that, we can wind it up like an old clock.
	Sorry? Yeah, it's been two hours.
	Okay. Well, listen, thanks so much, everyone, for joining us this Sunday afternoon.
	The Super Bowl of integrity continues and we are getting more and more players on the field, which I think is beyond thrilling and fantastic.
	So I really appreciate, of course, everybody's time this afternoon.
	Thank you so much. I did do, I think, a podcast and a half this weekend in an article, so I'll try and get those posted before too long.
	Thanks so much again and have yourselves a fantastic week.
	I will talk to everyone soon.

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