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March 11, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:45:38
677 Call In Show March 11, 2007

Public servants, sibling abuse and adoption!

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Who was not joined with me.
So, now that we're waiting for me and we have waited for me, we can't stop.
Somebody's asked me if I'm hosting the program at home.
No, it's in a studio on top of my garage.
So that's very different, you see.
All right. Well, let's get on with our topic to start with.
We are starting with La Belle Provence, which is Quebec.
Now, why should you care about a French-speaking section Well, that's an excellent question.
And I would say that you should care about it because it's a good example of what can happen when the government gets its violent, grubby little hands all over the population and how it corrupts not just the government and society as a whole, of course, but the population itself as well.
So I'm going to start with some sort of statistics and then you can let me know what you think after that.
So there is a film called L'Allusion Tranquille, which I believe is the Tranquil Illusion, and what it is is an attack on Quebec's state intervention, statist socialist interventionary policies.
Quebec is to the rest of Canada as Canada is to the United States in terms of its pursuit of violent state solutions to social problems.
So let's have a look and see how it all looks with this.
and how it all comes together.
So Quebec is burdened with the highest taxes, the largest provincial debt and one of the oldest populations in North America.
Quebec is on the road to economic ruin.
So let's have a look at some of the statistics.
This is after about 40 years of state intervention.
The provincial debt, and Quebec is a large province, sort of equivalent I guess to something like, not exactly California, maybe Florida or something like that.
The debt is $127 billion.
$127 billion.
Now, that's $17,000 for every Quebecer.
That's every Quebecer. That's not the people who have jobs.
It's not the people who are old enough to vote but young enough not to need walkers.
This includes children.
This includes old people.
This includes people in a coma.
There is $17,000 of debt for every Quebecer.
Let's have a look at some of the other things that they offer.
This is the cost, right?
Quebec's GDP, gross domestic product, ranks 54th out of 60 provinces and states in North America, behind many with a fraction of its population and resources.
Quebec, which is a huge province with tons of natural resources and not a big barrier in terms of speaking English, Quebec trails Montana and Arkansas and is only slightly ahead of Mississippi.
GDP is routinely 20% below that of Ontario where I live, its closest geographical and economic cousin.
In Quebec, The wealth of a family of four is $21,000 less than that of a similar family in the state of Maine.
And there is a question, he says, how is it that an economy such as Quebec's, which is fully capable, doesn't transform into wealth?
Well, of course, the simple answer is that there are lots of guns pointed at people.
And we'll get to that in a minute or two so that you can sort of see and understand it.
So there is a hefty transfer of payments to Quebec.
Which already gets $2.2 billion a year more from the federal government than it contributes.
So that sounds good. We're getting more than we're losing.
But of course what it does is it corrupts society completely and we'll look at that as we go a little further.
As an economics professor at the University of Montreal says, we have a large amount of money coming from the rest of Canada and also a pass to spend a lot of money on social programs that others pay in large part for us.
He says, so why do we have to change until we hit the wall?
That's an excellent question.
Well, one of the things you might want to do is that it's like saying, well, I can keep hitting the gas as I drive off a cliff because I haven't hit the cliff yet.
However, it's usually a good idea to hit the brakes before you go off the cliff.
So this is quite lovely.
They have $5 a day daycare program.
A $5 a day daycare program is wildly expensive.
It costs about $1.4 billion a year, and it has 43% of Canada's regulated childcare spaces, though it has only 23% of the country's children under the age of 13.
And it is really, really quite remarkable.
In five years, the total cost of the daycare system has increased by 140%, and that's all that's been reported.
Since 1994, the Quebec government has frozen university tuition at $1,668.
And I graduated just before 1994, and I paid pretty much the same amount, $1,600 to go to school for a year at university.
Isn't that remarkable?
And, of course, what that does is it lures A lot of people into the education system where they fritter and waste their time away as I did doing foolish arts degrees.
Well, actually I can end up turning it into a profession, but most people who went in doesn't.
So that's all pretty wretched.
And as you can imagine with this kind of statism, the public sector is huge.
In January, a polling firm asked 1,000 people across the province about cutbacks to government services.
The results showed 60% of those polled want the government to continue to be a big player in Quebec society.
But the system is becoming increasingly unsustainable.
12 cents of each dollar raised by the Quebec government now goes to servicing the province's Debt, even as spending, continues to outpace revenue.
So this is really quite a lot of fun to watch.
I actually spent four years living in Quebec when I went to school.
I did two years at the National Theatre School and two years at McGill, and it is really an enormously entitled province.
Here is an example, and we'll get to the guns in a moment.
But dozens of protesters clashed with police in late February in Montreal's North End.
They weren't there to fight homelessness and poverty or even to oppose the war on terror.
No. The activists punching the air with their fists were car salesmen.
Car salesmen. One of their own, the pinnerf Dodge Chrysler dealership, had dared to sell cars on the weekend.
They were selling cars on the weekend.
And there were clashes with police.
Um... The move was a direct slap in the face to a 35-year-old agreement barring any new car dealer from doing business on Saturdays and Sundays in the city.
A week earlier, one rival salesman had hurled a chunk of ice at Sam Hajar, the offending dealership's manager.
This time he was prepared with police, private security personnel and muzzled guard dogs at the ready.
A few customers managed to dodge the seething mob, but not before someone scratched the paint off two of Hajar's demonstration models.
Now here's another interesting statistic.
Part of the problem in Quebec is that 44% of Quebecers hold a steady full-time year-round job compared to 57% in Ontario.
So less than half the people, and this is of course including the civil servants, less than half of the people in Quebec have full-time work.
They take an enormous number of days off.
Full-time employees in Quebec miss an average of 11.2 days of work in 2005.
It's a day off a month.
It's an extra day off a month, compared to 8.6 in Ontario.
Civil servants called in sick an average of 14.14 times in 2005, double the national average.
The report stated that Quebec government lost nearly 170 million to absenteeism.
Well, that's not actually quite true.
The fewer government workers that come in, the better it is for all of us.
But I thought that was quite lovely.
So, why is it that this situation is impossible to solve?
Well, this is part of the beauty and the logic of statism, right?
The chilling internal logic of statism and how it manages to maintain and sustain itself in the face of all rational opposition.
So, one or two more stats here.
Quebec's share of the foreign and domestic investment flowing into Canada is below 18%, a surprisingly low figure given the province's large population strong reputation for research.
There was another survey that was done, surveyed the perceptions of multinational companies operating in Quebec, duplicating a study it carried out in 1994.
Back then, when asked whether the province was becoming more globally competitive, 70% said yes.
In 2006, that figure plummeted to just 33%.
So, of course, what would you expect?
You would expect a massive flight from young people, and that's exactly what does occur.
Quebecers are voting with their feet.
Between 81 and 05, the province was the only one to be on the losing end of net interprovincial migration every single year.
The national population has dropped to 24% from 28% a few decades before.
So why is it that this doesn't change?
Why is it that nothing can be done?
Well, this is the beauty of it.
There are sort of three ingredients that you need in order to get a state to get the sort of perfect trifecta of self-destruction.
And you can review your own local political situation to see if this is the case for you as well.
But the way that things work from that standpoint is quite interesting.
First of all, you need, of course, to have a socialized police force, right?
A government-run police force.
You can do a search up in here.
A government-run police force is essential.
Now, the second thing that you need is a large number of citizen-facing services that are government monopolies.
Citizen-facing services that are government monopolies.
These are things like schools and garbage collection and road clearance for snow, which is obviously important here in Canada, and all these other sorts of things.
These you absolutely need to have facing the citizens obvious and up and around and open.
And the third thing that you need is for the government workers to have the right to strike.
So I sort of run through the scenario very briefly and then we shall keep my part of the conversation relatively short so that y'all can get in a certain number of questions if you like or comments or alternate perspectives.
But the way it works is this.
If you vault yourself into the leadership, let's say that I become the magical leader of Quebec tomorrow, what would happen?
Well, I would say, let's cut government spending or let's cut back on the number of government employees or something like that.
And what would happen?
Well, the garbage collection would stop, the schools would close down, the public transit would stop, there would be a massive paralyzing strike.
That would occur in the public sector, which would immediately cause the citizens to revolt, right?
Because what would happen is, when the schools close in particular, the teachers go home, and this means, of course, that the parents can't leave home, right?
So all of those who have jobs, unless they have relatives that they can force the kids on, End up having to stay home, so what happens?
There's a huge hit on economic productivity, which of course is going to have a net negative effect on my taxes, and it's going to create disruptions in the business world, and it's going to lower all of the things.
People are going to shop less and make less, so there's going to be a big negative hit to the economy.
It's not like you can snap your fingers and have new schools show up the next day.
So that's not particularly appealing, and of course when the citizens see the disruption, Right?
What happens? What happens?
Well, this is sort of natural and this is what we've been talking a little bit about in terms of siblings.
It's sort of a related matter to what we were talking about this week.
In any conflict between two people where a third party is dependent on the resolution of that conflict, the third party has one of two choices, right, basically.
Well, three, I guess. One, they can sort of give up on the dispute and walk away.
The second is that they can stick by principle And try and figure out the objective right and wrong of the situation, then side with whoever is the most right, or if neither of them are right, introduce that as a third position, stick by principle and work that way from a philosophical standpoint.
That almost never happens.
The other thing that can happen is you can pick on the weaker of the two people and nag at them until they change.
You can pick on the weaker of the two people And we'll sort of look at how that plays out whenever this sort of stuff happens.
And it happened recently in France.
It happened when I was a kid in England.
And it's happening in Quebec at the moment.
And it's going to start happening in the U.S. relatively quickly, I would say.
So let's say that we've cut our government spending and the public servants, the civil servants, have gone on strike.
Essential services have ground to a halt.
We have this here in Canada, in Toronto.
This happened a year or two ago.
Three? No more. Four or five.
The garbage was not being picked up about five years.
The whole city began to stink.
Right? So, of course, the thing you would do is you'd try and pull a Ronald Reagan with the air traffic controllers and you would just outsource everything, right?
So you'd just say, okay, well, anybody who's got two arms and two legs, I'm going to pay you 2,000 bucks a day to go and pick up the garbage.
And you would attempt to smash the union that way, right?
The union that has its stranglehold on the body politic.
Again, I have no problem with unions, but monopolistic state-enforced unions are just a bunch of criminal thugs and mafiosos, and so I don't have much patience with them from a moral standpoint.
But then, let's say that you start to bring in these what are called scabs, right?
The strike-breaking workers.
What happens, of course, is that the union workers will start to beat up and maim and hurt and sometimes even kill the replacement workers.
And that, of course, is a very difficult situation.
So what are you going to do? Well, you're going to call in the cops, right?
Oh dear, though, but the cops are socialized as well.
And you may be faced with cutting the budget of the cops as well.
The cops and the other unions all sort of work together in the public sector.
Cops, as unionized public sector employees, do not like pulling their guns out and pointing those guns at other unionized public sector employees.
So what happens is there's no principle really involved here.
There's some financial or fiscal panic that happens, which may cause a confrontation, but everybody who knows anything about politics understands exactly what happens, which is that the unions start causing violence, because the violence is supposed to be hidden.
You just kind of get screwed by the unions, by the public sector and by the government, but you're just supposed to bend over and take it without a whimper, right?
So the moment that anybody tries to do anything, the violence which is hidden comes to the forefront, right?
The violence which is implicit becomes explicit.
And basically the police are really revealed as servants of, not of the people, right?
Because if the police were servants of the people, then they would go in en masse and they would prevent any violence from occurring towards the strike-breaking workers.
Because they don't seem to have much trouble dispersing crowds when the government wants them to.
They don't seem to have much trouble protecting the leaders when the World Trade Organization swings into town.
And therefore we really can't think that there's much problem with protecting strike workers.
So the police, of course, are not revealed as servants of the people because it would be much to the benefit of the people for the public sector to shrink and for all of these state functions to be privatized, but they're revealed not as servants of the people, but as servants of those who have power.
And so they don't go and break up the strikes and they don't go and protect the strike breakers.
And why would they?
Because they know as well as everyone else that what human beings want to do, at least as human beings in our society, what they want to do Is they want to put the gun back in the bag, right?
So this is also some metaphor that's just popped into my head where there's a gun in a velvet bag, right?
And it's sort of pressed to everyone's ribs, but you're supposed to look down and see only a velvet bag, right?
It's the gun in the bag in the room, right?
To start layering our metaphors on quite a bit.
And so the moment that somebody pulls the bag off the gun, What do people do?
They say, oh my God, there's a gun there.
No, they say, for God's sake, put the bag back on the gun.
Just hide the gun again.
We don't mind that the gun's there.
We just don't want to look at it.
And so in Quebec, and this has happened a number of times, as it does whenever this kind of stuff occurs, what happens is...
Somebody tries to affect the power of the unions and the unions just go crazy and start pounding on people and causing strikes which disrupt the community.
Now, the community doesn't sit there and go, huh, okay, well, we do have a hell of a lot of debt.
There is a big problem.
I don't want my kids to inherit the same messed up social situation and therefore, I think we should really stand on principle here.
There's very strong reasons why people don't stand on principle.
It's because what is revealed about your fellow man when you stand on principle is usually pretty gross.
So people don't want to stand on principle.
Because the moment that somebody says there's a gun in the room and it's out of the velvet bag, it's visible, it's gleaming, and somebody's taken the safety off, people then...
People get very nervous and they get very unsettled because they don't want to look at the gun and then say, well, I'm good with the gun, right?
Because everybody likes to think they're a good guy.
So they don't want to do that.
So what they want to do is pretend like crazy that the gun isn't there.
And this perfect trifecta that occurs when you have state-run police, when you have the right to strike and you have essential services, right?
I mean, if Revenue Canada goes on strike, Is there really a big problem?
Does everyone go, well, I guess I have to find some other way to file my damn taxes because those essential workers have gone on strike.
No. You need to get the children into the schools.
You need to get the snow removal.
You need to get the roads. You need to get the public transit.
You need to get the garbage collection.
You need to get those essential services so that you can basically hold the citizens' convenience at knife point.
And this, of course, is something that is a forward-facing view of what's going to occur throughout the West, and we will live to see, for sure, a significant time of social conflict, wherein the money won't be there to pay people, and everybody will side with those who are initiating the violence, saying that the violence is caused by the victim.
The violence is caused by the victim.
Nobody's going to side on principle.
Because the moment you side on principle, what happens is you begin to see how everyone around you is not siding on principle, and that does quite a bit in terms of changing your perception of the society that you live in, and particularly the people around you that you know.
So, anyway, I'll stop there.
Thank you so much for having a listen to that little rant.
I do think it's a very interesting article.
I'm sure you can find it on mcleans.com, but I think it reveals quite a lot that violence, of course, is never mentioned in these contexts.
So somebody said, union mobs and police brutality against strikers was much more prevalent in the early part of the 20th century.
Why do you suppose it is not nearly as common now?
I don't know. I do know that earlier in the 20th century, there was quite a lot of violence against people who wanted violence.
To strike, right?
So what happened was there was a labor movement, as anybody who's sort of read Noam Chomsky is aware of it.
There was a labor movement in the early to mid part of the 20th century, wherein people who were factory workers and mine workers and so on were trying to get more union rights and more union powers.
And of course, there's nothing wrong with that at all.
I mean, free association is free association.
Do whatever you want, right? There's quite a threat.
To any employer if all of his employees quit at once.
So he's going to be bending towards demands that he can sustain.
If he can't sustain those demands, of course, he's going to not bend to them.
But in the early part of the 20th century, the workers wanted to form the unions.
And so what happened was...
The corporations teamed up with the government to break the unions, right?
So the police were sent in to various mines and factories when unions were trying to form and the corporations got the state to smash the unions, right?
So the corporations and the state were hand in hand and of course The number of state workers as a percentage of the working population was many, many times less in the early 20th century than it is now.
Here it ranges from, I don't know, 30% to 40% throughout most of the West.
Back then it would have been like 5% to 10% and it would have been much more like real essential services.
What happened was in the past there was more violence because the corporations could use the power of the state and the state was happy to do that because the corporations were paying lots of taxes and making lots of contributions.
Now, however, the government is held hostage, in a sense the government is held hostage by the public unions.
In a very different kind of way.
So in the past, you could beat up on the free market union people because nobody was hugely dependent on them.
Nowadays, you can't beat up on the public sector unions because they'll simply bring society to a standstill and whoever wishes to hang on to political power is going to just Cave to whatever the unions want.
There'll be little bits of fights here and there, and occasionally you'll get a Nixon going to China thing, where here we had a socialist, Bob Ray, who introduced days off without pay, called Ray Days.
So you'll get a little bit of that from time to time, but nobody who wants to survive in the political world is going to take on the public sector unions, so the power has really shifted quite a bit, and so I would say that's probably why it's much more prevalent, much less prevalent now.
But would it bring society to a standstill or just government to a standstill?
Oh yeah, the whole union thing.
Unions have been estimated in the U.S. economy alone to have taken $50 trillion of productivity out of the system.
They're just absolutely murderous and vile and disgusting organizations, as is any organization that relies on state power.
So it's not that unions are an intrinsically bad idea, it's just that you unite anything with the gloved gun of the state and it gets corrupted.
But... Yeah, it would bring society to a halt, I think.
Somebody's just asked that question.
Would it bring society or government to a halt?
No. That's the challenge, right?
That's the real challenge, which is that what happens to all of the people who've got two kids of school age and who both parents work when the school's shut down?
The problem is that it's a monopoly and there are all these essential services.
What happens here in Canada if the roads don't get cleared of snow after a snowfall?
Well, the whole city is going to shut down.
People aren't going to spend four hours trying to drive to work just to turn around and come home.
So people stay home.
It would be a snow day for everyone and that goes on for a while.
Let's say that goes on for a week, right?
You've just lost 1 40th of your GDP for the year, right?
Counting holidays and Christmas and so on.
So it's pretty significant the way in which public sector unions can hold everybody hostage.
To take a simple example, what happens if the toll booth operators in New York I just simply decide to lower their, to sort of park cars in their stalls, lock them in, you know, and chain themselves to them, right?
Everything just sort of comes to a complete and grinding standstill.
And that kind of stuff is inevitable, right?
Same thing's happening, right? What if there's going to be some problem with customs or the border guards or whatever they decide to just shut down?
Well, the whole thing is a complete mess, completely disrupted.
If no garbage is collected, then health issues become pretty significant, especially in the summer, if there's any problem with the water supply, the electricity supply.
I mean, we're so completely dependent on this sort of government services now, we really have been, you know, we're as dependent on the government in many ways as we were when we were children on our parents, and that, of course, is not accidental, I think.
No border guards, no problem, just go where you want.
Yeah, but that's of course, that's not how they would do it.
That's not how they would do it.
Here, when the farmers, for instance, did not get the subsidies that they wanted, what the farmers did was they simply took their tractors and drove at like five kilometers an hour down all of the major arteries at rush hour in Toronto, where the whole city came to a standstill.
Yeah, so they wanted to go down for a meeting with Queen's Park and they got onto their big wide tractors.
And, of course, what would happen, right?
Do you then call the police out and you slap all of these guys with unbelievable fines for destroying the city's economy and people's travel and having people sit in cars forever?
For the whole day? Well, millions of people's lives are completely inconvenienced.
No. You just cave and you give them their money, right?
Because they're just going to keep coming out and doing it unless you drag them all off in and go to jail and send them to jail and drag their tractors off and throw them all in jail.
And then what happens? Well, what happens is you've got nightly news images of policemen grabbing, struggling, and kicking farmers and dragging them off to jail.
And that, again, people don't want the gun to come out of the glove, right?
They don't want to see it. They just don't want to see it.
And that, of course, is, I mean, they do it in such a way, if the border were to shut down, they do it in such a way that nobody could get across, right?
So that would be how that would work.
All right, so I'm going to throw the show open to questions if you have questions or comments or issues or problems.
Are you logged in? Yeah, if you do have any questions or issues or comments or problems, feel free.
Now would be a good time to bring them up, and I would be more than happy to listen away and to respond to anything that I can.
If you want to, you can just ask for the microphone, and I would be more than happy to change that over.
Yes. Now, you don't have it on too loud.
Do you? I'm about to switch it over. Okay, I should do it for you.
and we do have somebody who wishes to talk which would be more than excellent yes you're on Sunny. Hello.
You can talk if you want to.
Anything? Yes, no?
Oh, he's just teasing.
He's just teasing us.
All right. He's around.
You in? He's got a message here.
Let me just see if he's around. He said, thanks for stopping your malloc.
Give people the right to talk.
More than happy to. But nothing.
Somebody's asked, what percentage of Quebec's GDP is public versus private?
I think it's around 40%, but I'm not entirely sure.
I'm not entirely sure.
Oh, dear. Well, we've lost our sonny.
So we'll have to put him back to listening.
Yeah, the farmer image is unimpeachable.
It really, this whole farmer thing is, it's just people's natural pig ignorance about economics and there's no reason why they would be knowledgeable about economics.
It's something that of course would never ever be taught in public schools.
to empowering the citizenry, but economics is an absolutely essential science and we'd be a huge amount closer to at least some sort of rational conception of the benefits of freedom if we were taught this stuff.
But the amount of nonsense that you hear, and it's all very calculated nonsense that people are fed with, right?
So I remember having arguments with people about farm subsidies and people would say, well, you know, but if we let our farmers die, if we let our farmers no longer be able to farm because they can't compete with subsidized stuff from overseas, Then what's going to happen is that we're then going to be dependent upon foreign food, and therefore if another country decides to stop shipping food to us, we're all going to starve to death.
I think that's just hilarious.
Oh man, the amount of nonsense that people come up with, staggering.
Because, of course, so instead of being held hostage by foreign farmers who may not sell to us, we're going to be held hostage by domestic farmers who are going to strip us of our incomes so that we can continue to subsidize their poor practices.
So, rather than foreigners trading with us voluntarily, we're going to have domestic guns pointed at our throats, and that's how we're going to achieve freedom.
I mean, the amount of nonsense that people come up with to justify and put, you know, put the bag over the gun all the time.
Put the bag over the gun. That's all people come up with.
And, of course, I would much rather rely on foreigners trading with me voluntarily than domestic, quote, citizens saying stuff like pointing guns at me and forcing me to do X, Y, and Z. But, of course, you know, somehow the morality changes where the borders occur.
All right, we have somebody else.
Oh, I tend to talk. Maybe it's somebody from Quebec.
Skippy? I don't think that's a very big Quebec name.
But you're on.
Okay, I don't know if you can hear me.
Yes, I can. Hello?
Hello? Can you hear me?
Yes. No? You can?
Yes, I can. Well, I'm using a laptop microphone.
Not too bad.
So it will not be very loud.
Well, it was very loud until it wasn't. .
Oh, is he left? Wow.
Well, I mean, I'm more than happy to help people test their microphones.
It's an excellent use of this technology.
All right.
Let's just see here.
Is anyone else waiting? No?
Well, we can have a short show today, people.
I have no problem with that.
So if you don't have any questions, that's fine, too.
Oh, is he back? He's back.
All right. Let's see if he wants to come in.
Do, do, do, do, do, do, do.
All right.
You're in.
If you have a mic and you wish to talk, you may talk.
Right.
I do believe that it's my brother.
Anyway. Well, the solution, there's somebody who's asked, what is the solution?
Right. Well, the solution is really what we've been talking about in these many hundreds of podcasts, which is that you simply keep pointing out the gun in the room, you keep taking the velvet cloth off the gun so people can see the gun, and you live your life with virtue and integrity and kindness and generosity and charity and beauty and a love of virtue and all those kinds of good things,
because the only way that freedom is going to, I think, really occur is if If we elevate the image of the soul of man, the problem is, one of the fundamental issues I think that is occurring in the fight for freedom is that the soul of man is stained with filth for the most part in people's perceptions at the moment.
So the problem is that there's just such an enormous amount of mistrust and terror with regards to our fellow human beings that I think that we need to be trustworthy and courageous and show a nobility of spirit to the world to begin to fight this horrible, horrible viewpoint that most people have of the human soul, right?
So when you...
You can see this very clearly when you start talking about a really free society, like a market anarchy society, a DRO-based society.
You can immediately see when you pull the lid of violence off society, then what happens is people begin to very quickly make up and show you their true view of human nature, their true view of human nature.
So the moment that you say, well, We're going to get rid of the government.
People say, well, but everyone would just start cheating and killing and lying.
And then they're saying, well, the human spirit, the human soul, is kind of like a cornered, rabid wolf.
And you can't take the leash off it for a moment or it's going to jump up and savage you and this and that.
that, because this terror of the human soul, this terror of our fellow man, this rage and fear and horror at what is perceived to be the true nature of the human soul is the central reason why we don't have freedom.
So with regards to the farmers, it's like, well, we'll become dependent on all these foreign farmers and then they'll just starve us to death.
Well, what kind of lunatic answer is that?
If we become dependent on foreign farmers, they're also dependent on us.
It's mutually beneficial.
Right? So we may as well say, well, we don't want to buy food from foreign farmers because they're going to become dependent on us and then one day we're just going to decide to stop buying from them and they're going to starve to death.
What sense does that make?
Why would we stop buying from people who are selling us good products at a good price?
I mean, why would they stop selling to us?
They say, well, oh, because it's the government.
It's like, but then you're justifying the government because there are other governments, right?
You're justifying. It's like saying, well, Everyone on my street beats their children within an inch of their life every night.
And so if my kids are going to survive in that world, then I need to beat my own children within an inch of their life every night.
Well, I don't really see how you're adding to the virtue of the world because other people are doing bad things, then you must also do evil things.
That, of course, there's a hole with no bottom, right?
That simply is a war of all against all.
And, of course, it continues.
To add to the terror and fear that is at the root of state power and religious power.
So you have to live courageously.
You have to show, I think, at least this is certainly what I try to work out, you have to show a nobility of soul and a capacity for joy and a real one, not like sort of a put-on-Christian-fix-smile nonsense, but I think you have to show as much nobility as you can and as much joy as you can, as much positive optimism as you can.
I mean, you really got to work to achieve that, or at least I did.
And what you do is it's a disinfectant.
It's a disinfectant against This view that people have of the human soul as a greedy, vile, avaricious, cheating, lying, blackmailing, violent, evil entity, right?
And of course, that is pure nonsense, as we've talked about before, that if everybody was that evil, the last thing you'd ever want is a gun.
It's a government. What you'd need is to arm everyone and have armed neutrality, right?
That would be the best that you could.
Mutually assured destruction would be the only way that any kind of Peace could be achieved in a society where everybody is evil.
But the solution, it's slow.
It's incremental. And it has a lot more to do with achieving personal virtue than making political arguments.
Does virtue wash away corruption?
Or does corruption stain virtue?
Well, I mean, that's an excellent question.
I'm so glad that you're with us again, Greg.
That's an excellent question.
And having come off my fraternal podcast this week, I would say that it's well worth asking.
The only thing that I've sort of been able to figure out...
In any battle between virtue and corruption, corruption will always win, right?
It's like if you have somebody who goes into a boxing ring who knows all the Queensbury rules and is going to be an upfront boxer, and then you've got somebody else in who's got little spikes in his shoes and kicks in the balls and then also has a club, then the fighter who plays by the rules isn't going to do that well.
So I wouldn't say that going in to do battle with corrupt people absolutely stains the soul.
At least that's been my experience and I've had some in this area.
But you can show courage in the face of that kind of stuff as well.
And what that does is it shows virtuous and positive behavior to people who are undecided or to people who have retained the capacity to admire a human being.
If you've retained the capacity for hero worship, Then you are going to be somebody who's capable of, and I certainly have worshipped an enormous number of people in my life and found that that's a very positive and sustaining thing to do, to retain the capacity to love heroism and courage and beauty and so on.
You show these things not because you're going to change corrupt people.
I've never seen a corrupt person change in any fundamental manner, right?
You can destroy your soul and then you just become a virus against all that is true and beautiful in the world.
But you show this beacon of light as best as you can so that you can sway the people who have the capacity to achieve joy and virtue and beauty and truth and courage.
You don't do it because you'll change the minds of corrupt people, but rather because you will influence the lives of people who have retained the ability to hope and trust and feel positive about the world and people.
What do you say to people who say, oh, stop being so negative all the time when pointing out the gun in the room?
Well, again, I can answer it.
You're not going to like the answer.
You're not going to like the answer.
Do you want to say something? Well, let's say that you're getting this from a woman, let's just say.
Let's theoretically say that you're getting this question from a woman.
Well, I would say that if a woman has been raped, Is the problem that she was raped or that she's pointing out that she was raped?
Is it worse to be violent or to point out violence?
Is it worse to be violent or is it worse to point out violence?
Is it worse to shoot a man or to see somebody shoot a man?
And then say, hey, this guy shot a man.
So if the identification of social ills is considered to be negative, then I have a very tough time understanding where positive sits on that hierarchy of values.
If it is negative to point out that there are great evils in the world, then how are you going to characterize Those great evils, are they more negative than pointing them out?
Are they about the same, or are they more positive?
And also, what is it negative compared to, right?
This is the old question, compared to what?
So if somebody says, well, it's really negative for you to keep pointing out that there's evil in the world, then you say, well, is it negative compared to what?
Is it negative compared to ignoring that there is evil in the world?
Is it negative to actively reversing reality and saying there is nothing but good in the world?
Is it negative compared to doing evil in the world?
Like, negative compared to what?
I mean, just think about it mathematically, right?
There are absolute negatives, right?
Stuff below zero. But there's also negatives like numbers that are lower than, right?
A billion is negative relative to a billion and one.
So negative, I would just say, well, compared to what?
And the answer is going to come back something like, well, if you spend your whole life dwelling on the negatives, you're never going to be happy and you're never going to be positive and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And that's just basically what people are saying to you when they say that is, please stop talking about evil because you're making me feel anxious.
Please stop talking about the problems of corruption in the world because you're making me feel anxious.
And the reason that you're making me feel anxious is Is that if I recognize that there are evils in the world, then I'm going to be obligated to do something to fix them.
Or I'm going to have to say that I'm not really a very good person.
I don't want to get to that crossroads.
I don't want to get to that crossroads.
I don't want to have to look in the mirror and say, I've seen evil, I'm doing nothing.
I just don't want to see it.
That's why people want to keep the glove on the gun.
Keep the gun in the velvet. People will do anything, anything to hang on to the fantasy that they're good, noble, courageous creatures.
So I would say, well, it's negative compared to what?
And if they say, well, if you spend all of your time talking about the negative things or dwelling on the negative, it's always dwelling, right?
Always dwelling on the negative things.
Then another response you could have is to say, okay, well, that's very interesting.
So you say that 100% of my time That to spend 100% of my time dwelling on the negative things is wrong.
And they say, yes. Okay.
Then you say, well, what percentage is appropriate?
They must have worked it out.
Assuming they're not being petty, defensive, and destructive, then they must have really worked it out.
And they must have said, okay, well, I've got it that spending 28.6% of your time thinking about problems and how to solve them is the optimal percentage.
And here's my research, and here's the control group, and here's the blind study, and here's the double-blind experiments that I did to get my ultra-master's PhD of all time of psychosociology.
I have figured out that it's 28.9% of looking at negative things that is the productive time.
And you say, wow, well that's fantastic, so tell me how you achieved that and why.
And of course they're not going to have a clue.
Right? They're not going to have a clue.
They're not going to be able to say zero.
You shouldn't spend even a remote tiny bit of time thinking about any problems or anything that is sort of quote negative.
Right? So it's somewhere between zero and a hundred.
Right? So they should be able to tell you.
They should be able to tell you what that answer is.
Because obviously they've got an answer because they're telling you you need to change your behavior.
But if they don't have an answer, then you can become relentlessly curious about why they're telling you to do something when they don't have a clue what they're talking about.
Don't be negative. Don't dwell on the negative things.
Okay, well compared to what?
What percentage is appropriate? How do you know these things?
Why are you giving me advice on this?
How can you claim to have the right to know all of these things to tell me how it is I should focus my time and moral energies in this short life?
And very quickly you're going to find out that they don't have a clue what they're talking about.
And if you stay relentlessly curious and relentlessly positive, you might, if they have a decent bone in their body, you might get them to understand that you, focusing on the fact that there is evil in the world and the world should be a better place and we should really focus on trying to achieve that, that that simply creates anxiety for that person.
Because they don't want to be faced with the choice, because they know that they're going to choose wrong, and they don't want to know that about themselves.
Or rather, they already totally know that about themselves, but they don't want it revealed.
Topic change. You recently commented about children being held accountable for their corruption and abuse towards others in your defue communique.
Can you elaborate? My wife is refusing to speak.
Well, I guess it's up to me. Well, sure.
I mean, children are responsible for what they do.
And children aren't responsible for understanding all of the economic ramifications of the national debt and how it is that foreign policy causes enormous amounts of destruction and violence in the world and where the proliferation of arms really comes from.
I mean, of course they're not expected to know these kinds of things.
But where anybody openly admits that something is wrong but does it anyway, then...
They're responsible. They're responsible.
Right? The moment that somebody hides something, the moment that somebody lies about something, the moment that somebody diminishes whatever they're doing or blames somebody else or whatever, then they automatically know that it's wrong.
It's the old question, same thing we talk about with our parents, right?
My brother did not say hit me in front of a police officer.
He did not hit me in front of the principal at school, right?
It was always when we were alone.
So he knew that it was wrong. He knew that he was going to get punished for it if he was found out, right?
But he'd always do this sort of physical or emotional violence in ways that I could not.
He'd kick me under the table.
He'd always kick me under the table if I did or said anything that embarrassed him or made him feel bad.
It would always be, boom, under the table, right?
But why wouldn't he slap me across the table, right?
Even as a kid, even as a little kid, even a seven or eight year old kid, why would he not reach over and slap me across the table?
And then people say, well, why are you hitting your brother?
He's like, oh, he's saying stuff that's embarrassing me.
So he knew it had to be hidden.
He knew even at that age.
So yeah, he's responsible.
Is a four year old really capable of empathy in the sense that they understand fully that what they don't like, nobody else would like too?
Well, I don't know. I mean, at some age, I mean, babies aren't responsible for defecating on the rug, but apparently, as we found out yesterday, I am.
So there is definitely a line there which is somewhere between zero and 40 that this transition occurs.
So... What did we get?
Did we get an ewe? Yes, we got an ewe!
Excellent. It's just never a successful show unless I make somebody's stomach turn at least twice.
Well... A four-year-old, if you, and again, this is sort of based on, I spent a couple of years teaching daycare, as I've mentioned before.
My kids started around the age of five or six.
I had a room full of 30 of them.
It was quite an adventure. And yeah, absolutely, the kids know right from wrong.
I don't know about four, but I can definitely tell you five and six, the kids know right from wrong.
Absolutely. For sure, if some kid wanted to shake down another kid for his lunch money, They didn't do it when the parents were picking them up.
They didn't do it when I was in the room, because then they'd have to give me my cut, right?
I was looking for that cut.
So yeah, I mean, kids are totally aware of what's right or wrong, what's approved of or disapproved.
So if they try and hide it and so on, absolutely.
I mean, we're born with a moral sense.
We're born with consistency.
We're born with that.
And even human beings who've grown up, who've been severely abused...
They still have some capacity for empathy.
I mean, unless you're completely schizophrenic or in a coma, right?
It's just that you don't want to get caught, and not wanting to get caught is very different.
So when I went through a brief period of shoplifting when I was sort of 12 or 13, yeah, I knew that it was wrong.
Yes, I knew I was going to get punished if I was caught.
And if somebody had asked me, is stealing right or wrong, I would have said it's wrong.
I was responsible for that, for what it is that I was doing.
And I think children are responsible.
Now, from that standpoint, though, there are lots of things that you can put in a child's way to make it much harder for that child to be a good child, right?
So I have empathy and sympathy for my brother insofar as it was a real mess where he was, right, when he was born in Africa and my parents' marriage was dissolving, there was lots of acrimony and recriminations and hostility and so on.
Very tough, very tough.
Very tough. But my brother doesn't like to be humiliated.
In fact, it's one of the worst things in the world for my brother, right?
But he likes to humiliate other people.
I mean, this is true sort of even now, right?
So he's responsible now, clearly, right?
I mean, at the age of 42 or 43, he's responsible now for his behavior.
But he knew enough about humiliation that he didn't like it, but he liked to inflict it.
So he knew enough about what would humiliate me, right?
And this, of course, is the problem with sadism.
or being around somebody who likes to do this sort of stick the knife in and twist it is that he knew enough about me to know where my weak spots were to know what I was vulnerable to do to know what would hurt me the most so obviously he did have empathy right obviously he did have empathy because he knew what my weak spots were so he was very aware of my personality and how it worked he just you know chose to use that knowledge for the power of evil So there are certain kinds of people,
of course, who are not sadistic, just kind of narcissistic, right?
And they'll just go and do their thing.
And if you have some sister like this and there's some big party that you're dying to go to, she gets an invite.
And she's so busy getting ready to go and she just doesn't invite you.
But she's not doing that because she wants to hurt you.
She's just selfish or narcissistic or whatever.
But it's about her. It's not about hurting you.
Whereas somebody like my brother would be very keen on not inviting me because he'd know how much it would hurt me.
So there's two kinds of different personality structures or problems.
So, yeah, I think people are responsible.
I think that the sadist is more responsible than the narcissist because the narcissist genuinely forgets about other people, but the sadist knows them, knows their weak spots, empathizes with them, knows exactly where the armor's the weakest so that he can stick the shiv in.
Was my brother responsible for treating me like crap when we were both stuck in the same cage?
Was I responsible for fighting back?
No. And again, this may be subjective, this may be just my perspective, so take it for what it's worth.
But no, you can't fight back.
You can't fight back.
And the reason that you can't fight back is that when your sibling is abusing you, your parents are intimately involved in that.
When your sibling is abusing you, your parents are intimately involved with that.
So there's nobody you can go to.
There's nobody who's going to give you help.
That's already been established.
Right? I mean, my mother would deal with my...
I mean, this would be my sort of early to mid-teenage years.
My brother would sort of be brutal and violent and weird and twisted and I'd go out and I'd go with friends but I'd have to come home eventually and I'd end up like upset or crying or angry or whatever and then my mom would come home and I'd be faced with this question.
She'd say, what's wrong? Right?
My... The question was always, do I say, this is what my brother did to me?
Because then she'll scream at my brother and she might throw things at him or might go, and it's scary for me when she does that.
And then all that happens is she goes back to work and then I'm stuck with my brother again.
So what's going to happen? He's going to take it all out on me.
Right? So the system that allows for usually the youngest child to get abused is very dense and complicated.
The ecosystem that allows for this abuse and encourages this abuse, it does more than permit it.
It accelerates it. How was my mother conceivably going to say, you shouldn't do this to your brother, to my brother?
Well, she did it all too.
I mean, my mother wasn't sadistic in that sense, just kind of crazy and narcissistic, but How is she going to say that?
It's a system. It's a system.
There's no one you can appeal to.
Because if there was, you would have done something about it.
Right? The fact that you didn't fight back is much more of an indication of your family's pathology than it is of your courage or not.
Was I responsible for fighting back?
Yeah, I mean, if you did fight back, you were responsible for fighting back.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
I mean, I don't know. You can give me more details if you like, but...
But that issue of hidden might not be an acknowledgement of the morality, but simply an attempt at avoiding another negative.
Well, sure. Well, sure.
My brother was kicking me under the table because he was attempting to avoid a negative, right?
So he felt that avoiding a negative was a good thing.
So why is he inflicting a negative on me, right?
I mean, there's just no way out of this logical conundrum, right?
If my brother wishes to avoid a negative, wishes to avoid being punished, then why is he punishing me?
Right? This is the same issue that occurs with parents, right?
I mean, it's the same issue, right?
Parents would say, I hit you because you were bad.
It's like, well, why didn't you ever hit me in front of the priest if I was so right?
if you were so right and I was so bad then the priest would have applauded you or the cop would have applauded you or the social worker would have applauded you or the principal or the teacher would have applauded you but you never did does this throw moral agent theory out the window uh I don't know.
Maybe. Maybe.
Tell me what you mean.
Yeah, best friends. Oh, sorry.
Okay. We do have somebody who's ahead.
Let me just see if I can let this person...
This might be another teaser. But we'll let's see if this person is around who wishes to talk.
AZN, a bunch of other letters.
You're in? Yes.
Were you talking about hitting people and applauding?
I'm sorry? You were talking about hitting people and applauding?
Hitting people and applauding.
Well, that may be a bit of a summary, but yeah, I think that's generally where we were.
Do you have a question? Why do you hit people?
Why do I hit people?
Why would you? Oh, why would I hit people?
Yes. Now, do you mean as an adult or as a child?
Okay. You know what?
I'm going to get to that question, but we have a couple of questions that are much more related to what we're talking about at the moment, which is the childhood stuff.
And there's quite a lot of feedback, so I'm so sorry.
I will get back to that question and try and do my best to answer it, but right now, I'm just going to finish up with the childhood stuff, and we have a gentleman who wants to, and then we'll get to how that translates into adult violence.
And who was it?
Rod? All right, there we go.
All right. Mr. P, anyone?
Yep. You hear me? You bet.
Okay. So I was the one that asked about the whole, if my brother and I are in the same cage, are we responsible for the treatment we give each other?
And I guess a little background on this would be my parents had a pretty, like a really crappy relationship.
They couldn't communicate with each other.
My dad was I think my dad has chemical imbalance issues.
He has rage problems.
He'll be in a good mood and then something will just throw him off the deep end.
He'll go into fits of screaming rage.
My mom was the consummate victim.
She had the murder complex going on.
Anyway, my brother used to, it was funny because when we were alone, like, we would take the bus home from school and we lived way out in the country, so if we're alone, we usually played together, you know, perfectly amicably, you know, we were nice to each other, we would,
you know, go out and play in the snowdrifts and stuff and everything was fine, but then when there were other people around, not necessarily right in front of us, but just in the general vicinity, you know, it would turn into a My brother would like to torment me until I would just completely lose my temper and just, I mean, I would try to resist it.
I would try to resist it, and then finally, like, he would just like to keep on prodding me until I finally snap.
And then I would fly off the handle and start whacking him and stuff.
And then, of course, he would tease me for, you know, hey, why are you freaking out?
Why, you know, what's going on?
Right. It almost seemed like what he was doing is he was provoking me into a state of this rage like our dad would get into, only so that he then, of course, being bigger and stronger than me, he could hold me down and then say that it seemed like it was his way of showing that he could fight back against this rage when he couldn't obviously do it with my dad.
And I guess one time around the time when I was 10, my dad was going to a psychiatrist, I think, because he was getting Some medication for this stuff.
And I actually requested, I asked my parents if I could go with one time and talk to the lady because I was starting to fear that I had some of the same issues that my dad did.
So I went in and talked to her for quite a while and it made me feel better and stuff.
And for some reason, I guess at the end of this, the message that my mom got back to me was that, oh, you're really smart and you're really fine.
You can see things that most other people can't see.
You'll be just fine. I think it would have really been nice to have gotten a little bit more than that, but that's all I got for a while.
The same feeling like I was in this cage just kept on going long after that.
Anyway, what do you think about my brother doing this stuff to me?
How much of that can I blame on him?
I know that you say that it was the environment that they set up for us, but I have a really difficult time trying to sort this out.
I understand.
Do you mind if I ask you a couple more questions?
Don't obviously answer anything that you don't want to, but was this something that occurred when your brother would tease you mercilessly?
It's funny, because the word teasing is one of these words that It's a fun word, right?
So somebody on the board recently was saying, well, isn't it sort of standard for brothers to take the mickey out of each other or take the mickey, which is like to sort of make fun of someone?
And I sort of replied back and said, well, I mean, Christina and I will tease each other.
But it's something that we both enjoy.
It's something that we both take pleasure in even when she's crying.
And so the question is, teasing is something that is worse.
I would rather be hit than teased.
I would rather be hit than teased.
Like my brother would hit me, which was rare, right, to his credit.
He was much more sort of verbal abuser.
But I would rather get hit because being hit is a physical injury that heals, right?
It's external and it's real.
It's valid. Like it's out there.
You look in the mirror, you've got a black eye or something.
Whereas the stuff that occurs in your soul is worse.
It's caustic, it's corrosive from the inside.
And so teasing is one of these things that is something that's highly, highly underrated in its destructive impact.
And so somebody on the board was saying, well, you know, we used to tease my sister and I don't think it was that bad.
And I said, well, what did you do? And he said, well, we, you know, for instance, here's something.
We pretended that one of my brother had died for about half an hour and she was completely in tears and I guess kind of hysterical.
And then we told her it was only a joke, right?
Well, you know, pretty much if you're a comedian and people in the audience are weeping, you're probably not going to do a very good job of making a full-time go at comedy because it's really supposed to be enjoyable for both parties, right?
This idea of the joke thing, and I know it's a bit of a tangent, but I just want to mention it.
This idea of like, oh, it was only a joke.
I was only kidding. What are you so upset about?
That's totally insane making, right?
That's totally crazy making.
Right? It's like somebody's carrying a big heavy box of books down a set of stairs and you trip them and then you say, good lord, you're accident prone.
You know, like it's like, oh my gosh, like how crazy are you trying to make me, right?
That's really destructive. So I guess the first question is, sorry, you go ahead.
I was just going to say that I think when you mentioned that you'd rather get a physical punch than the teasing, I think one of the reasons that I, you know, the way I understand it and I agree with you is that With the teasing, it's like I'm made into my own enemy because the rage that I feel is welling up from inside me.
And so that's the thing that I'm afraid of.
I'm not afraid so much of the teasing, I'm afraid of the rage.
Whereas if you get hit, you know, you can tell where the, you know, the thing that you're afraid of is external to you.
You can run away. But with the rage, it's like it is a part of you.
And of course, you know, seeing The way that the rage would take over my dad, I really didn't want to get lost like that.
And sometimes what was really strange about it is when I'd be just deep in these fits of rage, I'd come flying out of my bed and jump on my brother and really start trying to pound on him and stuff.
It's like this veil of red comes down over your eyes and you just kind of go into this berserker bloodlust.
But at the same time, there was this tiny little bit of me Right, right. And I mean that all makes perfect sense.
Did your brother do this in public or was it mostly private?
It was almost always in private when we were just out of earshot of other people so that when I would go completely bonkers, then other people could maybe hear it or something like that.
But up until then, you know, it was all sort of hidden.
And so it was sort of like, you know, let's get him now when no one can hear.
And then when all the commotion starts, then it looks like he's the nut job, you know?
Right, right. So my brother would grab my hand and start using it to hit me with and he would say, stop hitting yourself.
Stuff like this, right? And your brother would provoke you into a kind of crazed rage and then when you would get angry, he would withdraw and say, look how crazy my brother is.
That's sort of the situation, right?
Well, and I'm not going to get into the whole etymology of it.
It's quite complicated, but something that Christina and I have sort of worked out over the years is this understanding of putting you in an impossible situation.
So putting you in an impossible situation is fundamentally how people destroy and corrupt other people.
You put them in impossible situations.
And so for you in this situation, and it's a classic one, is to provoke rage and then mock the rage.
So you can't ignore the constant provocation and the teasing that is occurring and the amount of emotional and verbal abuse that is being poured upon you.
So you can't ignore that because if you ignore that, then you have no self-esteem.
You have to do something about it.
It's like you have to at least have sense to come in out of the rain when it's raining or if it's hailing if you don't like the rain.
And so if somebody comes up and slaps you and you just stand there grinning stupidly, I'm not saying you did, but then obviously you have no self-esteem.
So you have to do something about this provocation otherwise you have no self-esteem.
Now you can't point out the provocation because it's simply denied.
Right? So if you say, why is it that you're trying to make me so angry?
Then it's, well, I'm not trying to make you angry.
I don't know where you're getting all this from.
You must have issues. Right?
You must be screwed up. Right?
You can't point it out because it just gets denied.
You can't ignore it because it just escalates.
So when you finally react to it, then everything that you've experienced prior to then is denied and you are just randomly crazy.
Right? So you are absolutely and completely and totally in a completely impossible situation.
Also, I think, some complicity on my parents' part because when these things would come up sometimes, of course, the response was just, well, don't let it get to you.
That's nice to say, and I really wish I could achieve that amazing level of Zen concentration or peace and calm, but my gosh, what am I expected to do?
It was my fault that it was happening.
For some reason, it was my failure That he was doing this to me again.
It was really strange. Well, and again, I hate to tie it back to something that I was saying earlier, but as I said, when people are faced with a conflict that needs to be resolved, nobody will stand on principle.
What people do is they pick on the weakest party and screw them.
Whoever is the weakest is the person who just gets screwed, and you just side with whoever is the strongest.
Now, since your brother was more brutal and violent than you were, you were the person who had to be controlled, and you were the person who had to be told that you were wrong.
Because your brother was more scary to your parents, right?
So because you were the most virtuous and least scary and most rational person, you were the one who always had to give way.
You were the one who always had to give in, right?
The most rational people are always the ones who get fucked, excuse my French, but they always are the ones who get the most fucked.
And this is true in society, it's true in families, it's true in religion, it's true in war, it's true.
And this is why reality is constantly, sorry, rationality is constantly punished, constantly attacked.
Because the most reasonable people are the ones who aren't going around provoking their siblings to rages, right?
But it's interesting to me that your family would say, don't let it get to you, because how was your dad at that practice?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's an important question, right?
How is it that you, at the age of eight or nine, are supposed to not let virulent, violent, invasive, corrosive, destructive verbal abuse not get to you?
What was the kind of stuff that your dad was getting angry about?
You would get angry at anything.
I mean, it would be to the point where we'd be watching the A-team and Dad would get pissed off if the VA wasn't beating people up fast enough.
It was crazy.
So you're supposed to not get angry about violent emotional abuse, but your dad gets angry about the A-team.
The type A team, I think, yeah.
So obviously it's completely hypocritical, right?
It's completely hypocritical.
But the problem is, and this is where the amount of destruction within families is just mind-blowing, that your parents had as a standard that you should not react with anger to provocation, right?
So that was their moral standard, which they completely rejected in their own life.
Yeah, and another thing that's interesting about this is that, you know, mom used to make mention of how, you know, she wanted to somehow, I don't know, influence us so that we wouldn't grow up to be like our dad.
But at the same time, she had a 40-year marriage with the guy.
So it's like, how do you say then that it's, you know, it's wrong to be like that, but I'll completely accept being stuck with this guy for 40 years?
Right. I don't want you to grow up being like your dad, so I'm going to expose you to growing up around your dad for all of your formative years and thereafter.
But this is another impossible situation, right?
This is another impossible situation.
And once you get the hang of this whole impossible situation thing, when you look around the world, that's all you will ever see.
That's all you will ever see is impossible situations.
Just think of Catholicism, right?
Saying to a teenage boy, you can't think about sex and you can't masturbate and you can't get married and you can't have sex until you're married.
It's completely an impossible situation.
And using people's biology against themselves in this kind of way is enormously common.
And these kinds of impossible situations, wherever you see them coming up, as I was talking about in a much more abstract level with Quebec and these public unions, these impossible situations, nothing can be fixed, nothing can be solved.
This is all just people recreating the amount of abuse and destruction they had within their families.
Our minds are designed to solve problems.
And the way that you totally fuck up people is you keep presenting them with problems that they can't solve.
It's the old yes means no and no means yes.
Do you want me to hit you? Well, there's no way to solve that problem without getting hit.
And you say, maybe.
And you say, oh, well, maybe means hit me twice.
So what you're trying to do is you're trying to say to people, thinking equals self-destruction.
Now, we don't have a soul unless we're thinking.
I don't mean actively thinking, but I mean unless we process reality in a rational kind of way, we don't really have an identity.
Our identity is our capacity to think and to reason and to come to conclusions about reality and to be effective within reality.
That is our personality.
So what is really being communicated when you're put in these impossible situations is existence is destruction.
Life is death.
Thought is self-destruction.
Existence is pain.
Life is horror.
Interaction is destruction.
Intimacy is evil.
Identity is death.
It is an absolute and total opposition to everything that is positive and benevolent and noble and efficacious and virtuous in the human soul.
That's why I still get comments sometimes about the podcast I did a while back on humiliation.
But this is exactly what goes on.
People want to destroy your capacity to think because existence and personalities and life offends them fundamentally because they're anti-life.
I think Ayn Rand got it pretty right in this area, though I don't think she connected it as well as she did or should have or could have to the whole childhood thing.
But were you responsible for fighting back?
There's a self-defense element to this.
If you had been Picking on your peaceful brother in this kind of manner, then I would say you'd have some pretty difficult issues to deal with, but you were responding to provocation.
You can't ignore it, and you have to fight back, and I think you walked that really fine line very well.
Let me ask you one last question, if you don't mind.
Do you think that your brother had the little voice that you talk of?
Gosh, I don't know.
I mean, it's... There must have been some kind of rationality back there somewhere because, again, he would pick, he would choose the location, you know, the time and location pretty carefully, it seems.
So there must have been some ability to...
I don't know if that means that he was just good at his craft of tormenting or if it was, you know, actually a conscience in...
I'm sure there must be something there.
He's actually a very sensitive guy, I mean, which...
Which is really strange because normally he's the one that's kind of the bumbling oaf that people pick on type thing.
He was actually quite tormented, I think, when he was young.
He had a bit of a weight issue.
He was a little bit overweight. I guess my mom would have the school counselor take him out of class to talk about why he was fat or whatever.
Just awful things like that.
I've got a Gordian knot in my head and I'm sure he's got one just as bad.
Right. What I meant was the little voice that you had which said, this is not the way to be.
This is not the way to do things.
So you could call it a conscience and I think that would be a fairly good term for it, right?
The part of you that even in the state of your provoked, maddened rages, which of course are perfectly understandable and I think actually quite healthy, Again, I went through the same phase of having great degrees of rage, so I can understand that, but I may not be objective about it because I went through it and I found it to be enormous because the alternative to that was soul-crushing depression that you'd never get out of, where it's not even worth raising your hand to protect your head from a blow.
That's just completely inert and dead.
The rage is actually like the chest paddles.
It's like the defibrillator to keep your soul alive.
You do have to have Some degree of self-defense, some degree of return attack.
This is just to keep your sanity, to keep yourself, right?
I think if you get beaten up and you don't even lift your arms, I think that's really a difficult thing to live with.
That's a real self-erasure that I don't know is easy to recover from.
Fighting back, even if you get the crap pounded out of you, I think is a good idea.
I do. I mean, I really do.
I mean, the problem is, of course, that we all risk significant physical problems.
I mean, I don't know about you, I certainly did, right?
I mean, my mother's rage and my brother's, my brother's more cold and calculated, but my mother's rage in particular, I mean, it was a cage match, right?
I mean, it was really a dangerous environment, right?
There were real predators in the house, right?
And I didn't want to get injured, right?
I mean, I didn't mind the black eye.
But I didn't want to have an arm broken.
I didn't want to get injured or killed.
And that's not insignificant.
That's a danger that an enormous number of children face in the world.
I mean, even if you don't like thinking about it in the West, just think of those kids and what happens if they say, but I don't want to go and study the Koran today, right?
Or if the daughters say, well, I don't want to marry your uncle, right?
I mean, they get killed. Or they get severely beaten to the point where they're in, you know, grave danger of permanent injury.
So, I mean, this is how society functions, right?
It's just terrorizing and brutalizing children that way.
But what I meant was, like, you had this sort of third eye that said, okay, I'm doing this, but I'm the observing ego, right?
Like, I'm doing this, and it's okay that I'm doing this, but I have to intervene at some point.
This is not going to be my life strategy.
This is a strategy for now, not forever, if that makes sense.
Yeah, and it was usually, I think, when I... When that voice got to a certain level of, okay, enough, enough, stop, that's when I, you know, the rage would kind of subside and then it would just be the flood of tears, you know, like I would just collapse and start, you know, almost like start sobbing.
But it was just, it seemed like it was the, you know, the rage drove me first and then the observing ego was like, whoa, easy there, killer, you know, and then when that finally, you know, And the weeping is essential, right? Even at the age of 40, it's so ridiculous, but it's still the way that I feel.
I still at the age of 40 don't like to say that my brother made me cry.
It makes me feel like a Barbie doll or something.
But what I do sort of look back and really respect the decisions that I made at that time was that I would say that if you retain the ability to cry when you're in pain, then you don't end up being sadistic.
Because the people who are sadistic don't have the ability to feel their pain anymore.
They've made the choice and said, I'm not going to feel pain anymore.
But the pain is still there.
So what happens to it? Hitler counting the blows.
Exactly. That's from the Alice Miller book.
So if you lose the ability...
To feel pain, to cry, then what happens to all of your personal agony?
Well, you have to inflict it on other people.
It's still there. It's still real.
The truth will out.
Reality will always reassert itself emotionally as well as economically or whatever, right?
But if you lose the ability, right?
So I still dislike saying my brother made me cry.
You know, when I was 14, because I thought I should have, you know, I should have been handling it better or whatever, whatever, right?
But I still had a couple of years to go in my prison sentence with these crazy dangerous people, so I'm very glad that I retained the ability to cry, because without that, I might have turned into this kind of beast.
In fact, I'm fairly, I'm sure I would have, because that seems to be one of the, if you can feel the pain, then you don't have to inflict the pain.
And it's denying the pain and normalizing the pain that causes you to inflict it because you have to.
If you say, like your brother obviously felt humiliated by your mother and put in these impossible situations.
So one of the things that families do in terms of putting you in an impossible situation is they say, we must be normal but we are not normal.
So we must appear normal.
We must appear happy.
We must be the smiling family portrait.
We must go to church and we must smile and you must dress up and you must press your pants and you must kiss grandmother on the cheek and you must smile.
But I'm going to treat you like shit when we're alone.
So this is completely deranged.
The appearance of other people, the appearance of the family to other people is one thing and then how you're actually treated They know what virtue is because they want to appear that way.
They want to appear happy and loving and productive and positive to everyone else.
But within the household, while nobody's watching, they treat everyone like shit.
That's a totally impossible situation to be in.
It completely disrupts your capacity to easily process normal emotions and basic reality.
And of course, it's very humiliating.
It's extraordinarily humiliating to think.
To think, right? And this humiliation is so important to understand.
You go for a family portrait and your parents treat you well in the studio.
They don't hit you. They don't scream at you.
They don't cuff you.
Your brother is not emotionally abusing you when the cameras are rolling.
So what is it that makes your parents act well?
A complete stranger. It's not enough that you're the child.
That's not enough of a motivation for them to treat you well.
But a random stranger with a camera turns them into little gods, little golden angels.
Right? That's incredibly humiliating and it's a real mindfuck.
It's so funny that you mention that example specifically because I think it was about a year and a half or two years ago or something like that, I got a copy of an old family portrait from when I think it was one of the last family portraits that we took where we would go into the church.
I guess it was for the church directory.
And this was long after my confirmation, so I'd stopped going to church or anything like that.
So of course, this was just the, you know, we've got to get the picture in the church directory so that we're not evens and all that crap.
But we were in the car just before the picture, and it was a four-way just rumble.
I mean, there was bickering about this and that and, you know, this jacket doesn't fit and my hair is not right, you know.
Everything was going wrong, and we walk into the church, and all of a sudden, it's just like, you know, we're the family picture, everything's great, you know, mom's keeping everyone in check with her, these icy little stairs, you know, and stuff like that, just to make sure that the photographer thinks we're fine.
And of course, as soon as we're out of that place again, it's just a total meltdown, and it's like, When I got this picture, I looked at it and I was thinking, wasn't this just a perfect example of this as a symbol for the whole thing, the whole story?
Right, and that's the billion dollar proposition, right?
So your parents can treat you well, right?
They're not schizophrenic, right?
And the schizophrenic guy can't tell you from a can of beans, right?
But your parents can treat you well and your brother can treat you well and that's where the responsibility comes in, right?
Yeah. They'll only do it for strangers.
They won't do it for you. So where do you sit in the hierarchy of their values?
Well, way below some anonymous photographer or some priest that you see once.
I mean, you're nowhere on that hierarchy.
Everyone else is more important.
The appearance is more important.
Looking good for others. The photograph is more important.
You, not so much.
Everything else, totally important.
Well, what does that make you feel? It makes you feel like dirt under their shoe, right?
Yeah. We were just as much a prop as the backdrop in the picture.
Oh, sure, yeah, no, I mean, of course, and the question which has been posed on the board from time to time, which is an excellent question, why do people have children?
It's like saying, why do vain women buy Prada handbags, right?
It's a good accessory, and that answers questions, right?
I'm a mom, I'm a dad, we have children, here's our family picture, I'm a family person, right?
It just answers a lot of questions, right?
Couples in their 40s or whatever, right, who don't have children, there are questions, right?
What's going on? Why are they this?
Why are they that? This just answers a whole bunch of questions.
So children are, for the most part, just an accessory.
This is what you're supposed to do. And of course, they're pressured by the grandparents to keep up appearances.
They're pressured by the church because it's easier to breed converts than to make converts.
And so, yeah, I mean, I'm not saying this is true for all parents, but for a lot of parents, I mean, it's just what you do.
It's an accessory. And if you don't do it, you're going to get questioned and criticized, right?
And of course, since you don't have any inner life to begin with, you might as well busy yourself with a family.
Yeah, exactly. So...
One other thing that I wanted to mention.
Remember earlier when you were talking about how you and Christina, you know, kind of have this playful teasing thing.
Remember several months back, I wrote that it was the good husband or good wife, bad husband thing.
And you and Christina did a fantastic podcast on this over dinner.
And you're kind of exploring the, okay, are my quick little jabs, are they aggressive or are they harmless type thing?
And I remember the reason...
I don't know if this is the reason, but I remember being, when I was younger, I had, you know, kind of much like you, I have a really kind of a quick mind and I can shoot out little jabs really quick and just nice little laser precision sometimes.
And I would do that sometimes to sort of, you know, keep my brother in check or to get at him or something like that.
And this was my You know, this is kind of my horrible, guilty secret from when I was young and I would always think, so I associated this teasing with aggression, you know, this teasing with my guilty, you know, aggression myself.
And so I think when I would observe you and Christina doing this and it didn't seem to provoke an issue, I don't know, maybe that brought up some kind of a Darn it, why isn't she getting mad at him type thing?
I don't know. Right, because yours was self-defense, right?
Yours was... It probably served a two-fold purpose.
One, it was to say, I'm not dead.
You haven't won, right?
I've got some fight in me.
I've got some spirit in me, right?
Which is important. And the other, of course, is that it keeps your brother a little bit off guard, which might be helpful in terms of keeping him off your back a little bit.
So yeah, without a doubt, there was aggression in that.
And I found that people can be, I mean, there can be a lot of aggression in humor, right?
Just watch Eddie Murphy's Delirious, and you can get a foreshadow of some of his adult aspects, but...
There can be a lot of aggression in this kind of stuff, but I think that the interesting aspect about this is that there is still an issue for you wherein you feel a moral equation between self-defense and aggression, which is the only reason it can be that you would feel guilty about the verbal jabs that you gave which is the only reason it can be that you would feel guilty
And this is understandable because you have empathy and you say, well, my brother had it tough and he was overweight and he was humiliated for that and then here I was sticking the fork in a little bit too and I feel bad about that.
Is that sort of how it goes for you?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, that's Matt.
No, I'd like to get more technical and I totally understand it.
I do. My brother can still break my heart even certain times thinking about it as can other people who've harmed me in my life.
And even now and then when I think about my mother rotting away in this fetid little apartment where they're going to dig her out under 15 pounds of garbage at the end of her life.
I feel sad about that too, but the real focus thing to work on here is that self-defense is not even in the same category as aggression.
Ayn Rand writes beautifully about this, and I'm not going to go into too much detail about it, You were not initiating the use of force.
You were reacting to the use of force.
If you're going to get raped in prison and you clock some guy and he loses his two front teeth, you're probably not going to feel too guilty every time you see him with that gap-toothed grin because it's going to make sure that he's going to at least leave you alone or treat you with some respect.
I think it's important to recognize and to understand that you were in an incredibly dangerous and difficult situation.
And I think, just based on what you've told me and the person that you've become and the fact that you're in this conversation, I think indicates that you came through it with flying colors.
And I would give you one possibility.
I mean, this is highly advanced stuff, so I hope that you'll use it for the power of good, and I'm sure you will.
But here's a possibility.
Here's something I would like you to try on, just to see how it fits.
And try sitting with this for like a week or so.
Try this on.
Try saying to yourself, this is not an affirmation, this is not cheesy, this is something that's been enormously helpful for Christina and I in our lives as we've been working through some challenging stuff obviously with my career, with getting her business started and so on.
How's this? Everything you did was right.
Everything you did was exactly the right thing to do.
That you did not put one step wrong, one foot wrong When you were dancing through this minefield with people blowing up left, right and center that you got through this minefield with all your limbs without a scratch and that is an incredible feat of navigation and you did not put a foot wrong and you did everything exactly the right way To sustain your own identity in the face of extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
I mean, it sounds pretty brutal.
I mean, you had three.
I only had two. I had a mother and a brother.
You had three. You got a crazy dad, you got a crazy mom, and you got a mildly sadistic brother, right?
So you got a triple whammy here, right?
So I would suggest that the rage was exactly the healthiest thing to do at the time.
That keeping that third, that little voice, the third eye, the observing ego going was exactly the right thing to do.
Firing some warning shots across the bow of your brother was exactly the right thing to do.
And I would like, just try it.
It's not going to kill you, right? And if it turns out to be wrong, what if you spent a week without guilt and how bad is that, right?
But what if, what if everything that you did was perfectly correct?
Not even relative to the knowledge you had.
Not even relative to some lower standard.
I mean, you could not have done anything better.
And the way that you can mull through that, if you like, and you can answer this now if you want, you can mull it over more, is to say, okay, well let's say that with all the knowledge that I have now, and I think you're in your early thirties, with all the knowledge I have now, if I were able to phone myself at the age of eight, what would I tell myself to do differently?
I'd say keep it up, buddy.
Yeah, of course. I'd say, you're fucked, but you're doing magnificently.
I mean, you're totally screwed.
But man, you're doing a fantastic job.
I wouldn't say, oh, don't do this and do that and do a little bit of that and do another and then do a shimmy and then do a jig and then learn how to do the Macarena.
I wouldn't say to do anything differently because, frankly, I wouldn't have any better advice to give myself at the age of 8 or 10 or 14 or 18 than I had.
What would I say?
I mean, that guy is a hell of a lot smarter than me in some ways because I'm not sure if I were thinking through it all as an adult that I could have made all those great decisions that I made and navigated this sniping alley of geyser eruptions and landmines and strafing and bombs and come through it.
I feel like one of those weird action heroes from the 1930s who goes through these jungle.
Their hair is perfect when they come out.
They make fun of that with Leslie Nielsen in the airplane movies where he stands up and he's just perfectly coiffed again.
But it feels like that.
How could I conceivably say to myself, I should have done things better or worse or differently.
I still don't even know exactly how I got through it all and ended up being the person that I am.
So I'm not really in much of a position to judge my younger self because I couldn't really give any better advice than what I did back then, which means that everything I did was right, or at least it's as right as I could conceive of it, and that's as right as it can be, right?
Yeah. I wish you could see the...
The huge grin that's splitting my face right now.
It feels great. Really think about it.
You know, when you doubt, like you say, and I do this at work, right?
So I say, oh, well, I should have done this, or maybe I should have done that, or I should have prepared more for this.
It's like, no, maybe I did everything absolutely perfectly.
Maybe. And I found sort of like, just, I mean, I don't want to trivialize what happened to you, but, you know, with this job that I have right now, I did a good job.
I didn't do a great job. Now, if I had done a great job, they wouldn't have wanted to move me to part-time.
I want to go to part-time and then if I had done a much better job, I wouldn't be as easy about quitting.
But now that I've done a good job but not a great job, I'm able to leave and yet they want me to stay and they're going to pay me a lot of money for the next two months which gives me another year of Free Domain Radio.
So even the quality of the work that I was doing, say, well, could I have done better in the job?
Well, sure I could have. Would that have been better for Free Domain Radio?
No. It would have been worse.
So even stuff like that where I could have done a better job but it turns out it was better that I didn't do a better job, what if everything we do is just right?
Because my question, and I've asked this of Christina, we worked through this, when do we get to be confident?
When do we get to say that we're efficacious and we're confident and we do things right?
Is it when we're 60, when we're 80, when we're 40?
When do we cross that threshold where we say, I do things right?
I mean, how much studying, how much virtue, how much learning, how much philosophy?
Do we have to be perfect?
Do we have to be beings of pure thought, able to traverse dimensions at a mental swagger?
No. At what point do we get to say, I do things right?
I'd sort of say, do it now.
Do it now. I mean, you'll find out if it doesn't work, and I think for you it'll work perfectly because it sounds like we went through the same kind of landmine, though it sounds like yours was worse than mine.
What if just everything you did was right and there was nothing that you could have done that was any better?
I mean, how liberating and how wonderful is that?
Yeah, you're right.
And this is interesting because one of the things that's always seemed to plague me is I have a tendency to not pull the triggers.
It's like I'm ready but I'm not ready.
It's always like, well, I just need one more thing, one more thing.
I need to learn more about it.
I need to do this. I need to do that.
I never have the ability to...
Well, I shouldn't say never, but I rarely have the ability to leap.
It's always kind of too much hemming and hawing.
Yeah, it's the hemlet thing of overthinking, right?
But to me, it's amazing. My mother doesn't look back and say, I should have done things differently.
My mother doesn't look back and say, I should have done things differently.
And if she can look back and feel totally confident about A completely screwed up life full of all of the worst decisions that you could imagine.
If she can look back with pure confidence after having made every mistake conceivable, why is it impossible for me to do it, right?
If people who've made just decisions that you would never even conceive of in your worst nightmares can look back and say, yeah, that was pretty good.
That was great. I couldn't have done it.
Why is it that you and I can't do that?
Why is it we can't be confident when all the crazy, stupid, evil, corrupt idiots in the world are swaggering along with pure confidence?
George Bush is so confident he can go and lie to the freaking UN and go and cause a war that gets hundreds of thousands of people killed and he has a big smile and a swagger and he's the decider and he gets to be so incredibly confident, I mean obviously he's not but he appears that way.
So why is it that we can't do it?
Why is it that the rational people get fucked the most within our own minds as well as within reality, right?
That just doesn't seem quite right.
And so I've sort of got this thing going and I've been basically doing it for the last year and a half, which is like, you know what, everything I do is right.
I'm sick and tired of analyzing everything because if I got through my childhood unscathed and with the capacity to love and feel joy and think and reason and be correct, if I got through that Then nothing else is going to be that tough again in my life.
And so if I was able to do that, then everything else I do is just fine and there's no reason.
And that's why, you know, even now, like, oh, did I do a good podcast today or was I too strong?
I'm like, you know what? Every podcast I do is just exactly what it needs to be.
Every show that I do is just right.
I mean, I've been thinking about this topic for the last year about when to bring it up.
The impulse struck me now. This is the total right time to bring it up.
I hope people get through this show to listen to this incredibly important stuff.
Everything you do is right.
Just try it on. Yeah.
That's awesome. I'm digging it.
I'm having a sudden desire to donate a lot of money.
Now, of all the feelings you have that are right, that's the most right one.
Embrace that feeling.
Hug it. I would even say molest that feeling.
But, you know, buy it some flowers afterwards.
Thanks a lot, Seth. Hey, no problem.
I'll talk to you soon. Alright, we have a few more people waiting.
All right.
Alien Unit, I do believe you are up if you would like to have a comment or a question.
Oh dear, we have a mic that is not working as well as it should.
We shall move to the next person.
Pinky! I hear background noise.
Hello? Hello?
Hello. Hi.
Hi. How's it going?
Okay. What can I do for you?
What can I do for you?
Oh, I'm sorry.
Are you using a notebook microphone?
It's not. Hold on.
Oh dear. I'm so sorry.
And that was a lady. We love hearing from the ladies, but it was not to be.
Or a child. Yeah, but I'm so sorry.
I could barely hear what you were saying, so I couldn't get in at all.
All right. Do we have any other questions or issues or questions?
Oh, Pinky Sian is back, but I can't hear what you're saying, so...
Steph, did you ever have an invisible friend?
It's a serious question. I did not, in fact, have an invisible friend.
I'm trying to think.
No, I don't think I... I don't ever...
I never did have an invisible friend.
I sort of... I mean, I do have this sort of fairly relentless reality processor cooking around in my brain, which I don't seem to be able to get away from.
Oh, Pinky Sien, you're in the chat, in the chat window...
So, if you would like to type your question in, you can hear there.
We do have somebody else wanting to chat.
Steph, only had invisible friends, saith someone, composed of pure rationality.
Did you have any toys which were really special?
Yeah, I did, actually.
I had a glider. My father's company used to, this is back in the heyday of less state-run capitalism, used to send toys to the children of senior employees.
My dad was a PhD geologist, so...
His company, Anglo-American, sent us this massive glider which I just loved until my brother smashed it in a fit of rage.
Inevitable, right? I did have some toys which I loved and I was a big model train guy.
I slept under my model train board.
I had a pretty small room. And I had a 4x6 model train that I built all the papier-mâché and I had the tracks and I had the towns and I had the tunnels and it was great.
I loved building that world.
And I slept under it because there was just no other place, right?
And I cut a hole in it so that I could stick my head up and all that kind of stuff.
I loved the model train stuff when I was a kid.
It was just wonderful. Yeah, miniature stuff is a great deal of fun.
It's wonderful to feel big.
Can we have somebody zoom in and zoom out?
Questions? No? We had somebody waiting now?
Yeah, I did the World War II aircraft as well.
I was, like all the kids who grew up in England in the...
I guess, 70s, we were all war-obsessed, and I used to build all of these planes, and we would hang these threads from one end of the room to the other at an angle.
We'd melt curtain hooks and put them on top of the planes, and then we'd fly the planes from one end of the room to the other, and we had these incredible spider web stuff.
One plane would go down, and it would lower the thread so another plane could pass overhead, and we got it all really synchronized, and it was a great deal of fun.
I had an interesting toy, too, which, looking back on it, wasn't that much fun, but sort of amused me for a time.
Wherein we had the same kind of thread device and you had to land a plane on an aircraft carrier.
And that was quite a lot of fun.
Oh, she was asking if you have any children, Steph.
No, I don't have any children.
Me, no children.
Oh, did she? No.
Have you got any children? Am I sure?
I'm fairly sure. I'm fairly sure.
How old are you?
I am 40 years old.
Woo.
In fact, woo is good. You know, I'm past the threshold of medieval longevity, so every day is a gift of the free market and I couldn't be happier.
Alright. Do we have any other questions or people who wish to speak or listeners who have comments or issues or questions?
Are you married? I am joyfully married, in fact.
And so you'll have to go flirt to one of the other.
If Jared is in, try him.
Do you want any children? I want lots of children.
I would, in fact, be happy with a baker's dozen.
Thirteen would be great.
So that's something which we're plugging away on, so to speak.
Ouch. Oh, don't be so worried about it.
Why haven't you got any children?
Well, we are relatively newly married, and I'm just about to switch my career to something like this, talking for a living.
And so we don't have any children just now, but better check with the baby oven first.
Baker's doesn't. Yes, I think that would be an excellent idea.
What was that? What do I think about adoption?
Oh, I couldn't be happier.
I mean, I think the fact that Christina adopted me is just beyond wonderful.
I mean, it's taken a lot of responsibility off my shoulders and allowed me to ramble for a living.
I think adoption is great.
It's not for me. It's not for me if, whatever, heaven forbid, Christina and I would have turned out not to be able to have children of her own.
then I would have no issues with adoption for other people, but it's not for me.
It's not for me.
Just because, I mean, this is going to sound vain and I apologize for it in advance, but pretty much because for me, as a very smart fellow, and Christina, of course, is the real brains of the family, if we had a kid who was average, we wouldn't be good parents.
We wouldn't be good parents.
If for whatever reason our bright genes cancel each other out, then at least we took a good shot at it and we had a good chance of having a smart kid.
But I think that the problem is that, and this is really controversial, this is a total nonsense opinion, so just discard it if you see fit, but I would say that people who are sort of organized in their lives don't usually end up giving up kids for adoption.
People who are given up for adoption, almost by definition, are not coming from married professors or anything like that.
I mean, they're coming usually from people who are...
Not very well organized, who are younger mothers, who are not ready, who got pregnant because they didn't use birth control or didn't plan for something or whatever.
Those are usually the kids who end up being available for adoption.
And I'm not talking about the kids in China or Russia or anything like that.
That's totally different. But there you get the problem if you adopt a kid from China or Russia that you don't know what their early life has been like.
And if they've experienced extraordinary neglect or abuse in their early life...
Sorry? Yeah, or trauma, then you could be setting yourself up for a lifetime of dealing with some pretty Thank you.
I can have a happy life if I have kids.
I can have a happy life if I don't have kids.
But I'm pretty sure I'm not going to have a happy life if I end up with a kid that is not going to be a real joy in that sense, right?
So that's my opinion, and this has nothing to do with right or wrong.
This is just my perfect opinion.
So, all right.
Any other questions or issues?
So we can...
Sorry?
Who? Oh, how much do you get a week?
I don't think she's talking money.
So... Oh, and money.
How much do you get a week in money? I think she might be talking about donations.
Well, that is going to be a secret I will take with me to the grave.
But let's just say that I make some pretty good coin as a software executive, and I will be making pretty good coin, although it will be going from the plural to the singular, as a philosopher.
So it's going to be quite a bit different.
That's right. All right.
Any other questions or issues or comments or problems?
If you have a last question, you can click on the request mic.
I certainly do appreciate everyone.
Oh, I was going to talk about why people hit each other, but I'm going to wait for that for next week.
So I'm sorry we didn't get to your question, but it's been just almost two hours now.
Actually, no, a little less. We started late, but seven o'clock is my wind-down time, regardless of when we start, it would seem.
All right. Well, thank you everyone so much for listening.
I appreciate you, everyone, who dropped by.
I'm sorry about the technical issues again.
I did actually give myself quite a bit of time to get set up today, but there was just mess after mess.
So, of course, I advertised this on the front page of Free Domain Radio.
I did some tweaks to the website, which you can have a look at if you like.
And so, naturally, there were 50 people in, which is one of the larger groups that we've had here, and I couldn't start the show.
So, you know, what the heck, Grace Under Pressure, it's what we live.
Well, I appreciate that, everyone.
Have yourself a great week, and I will talk to you guys next week.
And to our new friend who has joined us, where are you going?
Oh, just because the show's been running for close to two hours now, so that's when we do.
But the chat window will stay open if you wish to keep talking.
And I will talk to everyone soon.
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