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April 29, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:53:53

736 Call In Show Apr 29 2007 4pm EST

Friends who say foolish things, a listener's professional triumph, love, and more apologies to Queen...

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	I think he just farted at me.
	But I actually have the mic.
	Oh, wait! Let's wait for the maturity to hit in just a moment.
	So, thanks so much for joining this Sunday afternoon, the 29th, is it?
	30th? 29th today of April 2007.
	I'm going to start with a huge and massive thank you to a donator who sent a very nice donation this morning, which enormously helps, and I really, really can't tell you how much I appreciate that.
	I actually did do a little bit of a ping to check the email.
	And that actually made some sense of the content of the email.
	It's a surprisingly large donation, but actually it's not that surprising when you realize who it came from.
	It actually came from the estate of Freddie Mercury, and the content of the message was, Freddie didn't try to be a philosopher.
	What the hell do you think you're doing?
	And I think I can sort of understand what they mean by that.
	If you listen to Podcast 700, you might have some sense of where they're coming from.
	I can't really say that I blame them.
	So anyway, that was very nice, and I certainly do appreciate that.
	They said that they're not going to pursue legal action, but they do believe that if I attempt another Queen song for this show, that Freddie Mercury will come back from, I guess, the gay Hades that he currently resides in and strangle me.
	So I think I could sell that on YouTube for a good amount of money.
	So I guess if I experience that, you'll know.
	Hopefully it won't happen While I'm actually podcasting.
	Although, as I say, that would be pretty good publicity for the show.
	No, Queen song every 100 podcasts, baby.
	Yeah, I don't know that it's good to tempt the undead.
	Plus, if you'll notice, I had to change the key because I'm certainly far from Freddie Mercury.
	So basically it sounded like I'd already assembled an undead zombie backup choir that was helping me on the song.
	I think we're already tempting the past on a little too much already, so perhaps not.
	All right. I'm not at all connected to pop culture.
	Pop culture? Dude!
	It's one of the greatest gospel songs of all time, sung by a gay Arab from Zanzibar.
	So it's really quite a multicultural experience.
	You know, there's this... I can't remember.
	Some comedian talks about this, and I'm certainly no stand-up, but some comedian talks about this.
	I think it's David Spade, who's like, yeah, you know, I was really surprised when I found out that Elton John was gay, and Freddie Mercury was gay, and it's like...
	Not like they weren't hinting, you know, the name of the band, say, Queen.
	That was pretty funny. Anyway, so enough trash-talking the dead and talented.
	I wonder if, yes, if you could drag those guys into the chat window.
	We just had a request to ask if the show has started.
	Thank you for your patience.
	It's one of my favorite songs, and I appreciate the chance to be able to give it my own special, exquisite form of butchering.
	I appreciate those who had some kind comments, mostly about Christina singing rather than mine, but that's entirely understandable.
	Anyway, let's start right away with anybody who has questions or issues or problems or comments, either for myself or for the lovely and talented Christina.
	If you have any sort of questions that you would maybe submit to Ask a Therapist or whatever that you would like to ask Christina, I'm sure she'd be more than happy to take the mic.
	Now that she's broken into song live on the internet, you just can't get that mic away from her cold dead hands.
	So if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
	Just click on Request Mike or Ask for Mike.
	Oh, now she has stage fright.
	It's okay. You can take the Freddie Mercury cure, which appears to be copious amounts of cocaine and penis.
	Anyway, so if you have any questions or issues, just click on Ask for Mike.
	If you just want to throw a few laughs in at my cheesy jokes, then feel free to request Mike, have a short laugh, and I'll cut you off.
	So, that's also possible.
	If people don't have anything to start with, no problem.
	I do have a backup topic for the silent crew, the silent crowd.
	Ah, alright.
	Excellent. Franklin commented that UPB was just a repackaged Kantian categorical imperative.
	Any comments? I don't know.
	Steph, could I get an FDR email address?
	I'm not sure what that means.
	So while we're trying to figure that one out, if you'd like to give our good friend Sephetus the mic.
	You're live, baby.
	Hey. How's it going?
	How's it going? Oh, um...
	Pretty good. Pretty good.
	What you mean is bad for you, but then when I put a few cheesy jokes out there, your whole life turned around.
	Is that what you're trying to tell me?
	No, I'm afraid not.
	Oh. Well, okay.
	If it's not the power of my bad jokes to cure, then why don't you tell us what's going on, and we'll see if we can't do something about it.
	Well, I just wanted to go over the issue of, you know, those people that I get this all the time when I talk to some of my best friend's friends at the pub, down the street, and I tell them, they like to say that, they kind of figure out that I'm an atheist, and then they figure out that, you know, well, that means you don't believe in anything.
	I was like, well, I believe in what's real.
	I believe in this table we're sitting at.
	I believe in gravity that I'm being held down to the table and stuff like that.
	They always want to say, what about something more?
	It's always this something more than yourself, something greater than yourself.
	They want to try and explain what can be easily explained by psychology How did we know?
	I guessed at what a friend was thinking or something like that.
	We came up with the same words at the same time or the coincidence thing.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that.
	And it's just like, well, there may be some unconscious communication going on that you don't realize, you know, there's little signals and hints, you know, there's 90% of language is body language, and they always want to insist that there's something where they want to jump from the empirical to the supernatural right away.
	I mean, they don't want to, they want to leave it all behind and sort of jump into the supernatural and When you haven't even examined the empirical first.
	Right, right.
	Well, I mean, I can sort of give you some of my thoughts on this, and then I'll turn it back to you and let me know what you think.
	First of all, I think it's very important not to sort of perform overtly atheistic behavior.
	Like you said, they figure out that you're an atheist.
	So don't drink the beer with your fingertip, because that's a real clue for a lot of people that you're an atheist, right?
	Don't levitate. Don't turn yourself inside out, particularly when people are eating spaghetti bolognese.
	It's kind of gross. So don't do any of the sort of wild magical tricks that identify you as an atheist.
	That's sort of one thing that can help.
	But it is very interesting that people do look at reality and say, there's got to be something more, there's got to be something deeper, there's got to be something richer, there's got to be something more wonderful.
	And I find that perfectly understandable given people's premises, right?
	So if you believed that there was a magic spell that allowed you to teleport from place to place, then anyone who took three buses to get to work would look like a mundane idiot.
	I mean, if you really genuinely believed that you had this magic ability to fly and travel through time and all this sort of stuff, then anybody who was simply interested in mundane reality, like anybody who was stressed about being late for something, you'd just say, dude, travel back in time 15 minutes, you know? I don't understand why you're so hung up on this being on time thing.
	Just use your time travel, you know?
	That would be okay. Do that, right?
	And so given that they believe that there's magic in the world, and I mean literal magic, literal superstition, literal voodoo, which is what religion and this sort of banal psychic phenomenon is, Given that they believe that all of this magical stuff exists that you can levitate and travel through time, I know that they don't believe that necessarily, expressly.
	It always ends up being something completely mundane.
	I had a dream that my mother was sick and then my mother was sick.
	People always remember that.
	It's partly a psychological phenomenon.
	We don't remember the thousand dreams that don't have anything to do with what happens the next day, but the one time that we have a dream about an elephant and then we see a television show about an elephant, we go, ooh, ooh, right?
	Because, you know, people aren't trained to think critically and are not trained to think scientifically, so that stuff sticks in our head, whereas the other thousand dreams that have nothing to do with our day, And of course, all the times that you pick up the phone to call someone and they're not home or they don't call you, but if you pick up the phone to call someone and they just happen to be picking up the phone to call you, well, that stands out in your mind, right?
	The other two years that that never happened don't stick out in your mind.
	And of course, because people aren't thought to think statistically or critically or according to the law of probability, they ascribe all sorts of wonderful magical things to mere mundane physical reality.
	They genuinely believe that they're in Hogwarts, right?
	They genuinely believe that they're in Harry Potter school.
	They genuinely believe that they have these magic wands...called magical thinking that they can wave around and just turn reality into whatever Walt Disney coke-headed pixie dust they want.
	I mean, they can make up anything that they want.
	So when you have the ability to travel through time and to teleport yourself from place to place, then when someone says, well, I think we have to go across town, so let's take two buses or a cab, they're going to say, well...
	That's just narrow-minded ignorance.
	Just use your special powers.
	Everybody loves these ideas of these special powers.
	So the first thing that I would do is say, if they say, well, there's got to be something more, it's like, what, more than the truth?
	Isn't more than the truth a fiction?
	Or something more than what?
	Something more real than reality?
	Something greater than reality?
	Well, isn't that just fantasy?
	I mean, it's got to be something more than fact.
	Well, that's fiction.
	Or it's exaggeration, right?
	It's hyperbole. It's, you know, most of my podcasts.
	But we actually have to sort of say more than what, right?
	It's got to be something more.
	Well, compared to what? Compared to what?
	And if people come up with all this kind of stuff about coincidence, could they say, well, I, you know, I had this dream and it came true and I had this dream or I had this thought about someone and then they called me and so on, right?
	Then they'd say, you could say, well, that's very interesting.
	Clearly, you must be very well versed in statistics to be able to differentiate coincidence from a higher realm that has some sort of magical existence that's never been discovered by science or anything like that.
	So tell me about the statistics that you used to figure out that this wasn't just coincidence.
	And then, of course, what you get is, oh, they roll their eyes, they have to do this.
	You empiricists, you always want proof, right?
	It's like, well, it's not that I always want proof.
	I don't want proof from people who don't put forward crazy theories to me because I don't know that they have crazy theories.
	If someone puts forward that there's a god or that the government is good or the war in Iraq is morally justified, if somebody puts forward a proposition, then they should damn well have something to stand behind it.
	And if they don't, then they should drop the proposition.
	But nobody's putting a gun to people's heads and say that they have to put forward these propositions.
	But the moment you put forward the proposition, why then?
	You really should have something to back it up.
	But I guess the more fundamental question is, what are you doing with these people?
	Drinking beer. But you can drink beer alone, right?
	Well, that would be boring.
	Well, how interesting is this?
	Well, I think it would be more interesting if I kind of had a clue about what What I was doing.
	Well, that's a bit of an open-ended statement.
	Would you like to narrow that down just a tad?
	Well, I always feel stumped as to how to respond to that without sounding mean or insulting.
	I'm still struggling with the curiosity thing.
	I'm trying to get this down, Pat, I think.
	You seem to have a much better...
	Well, I pray to the right fairies, clearly.
	But the question is, I don't know if you listened to last week's show, but we were talking about what if you're totally right?
	What if you're totally right?
	You are being put in a position because you're being manipulated by passive-aggressive people.
	You're being put into a position where you can't say anything without provoking a negative response.
	When you're in an impossible situation, it means that you're in the grip of somebody else's false self.
	Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
	Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
	When you're in a situation where you can't have a rational and positive response, my question is, why do you want to be in that situation and why do you assume that there's a responsibility that you have to come up with some way of escaping this net wherein you can't have a response without it being perceived as hostile?
	Maybe that's the whole point, is to paralyze your capacity to reason.
	Right. Maybe.
	I don't know. I don't think these people would totally object to...
	If I didn't sit there and say, you know, duh...
	Do you feel that when you and I talk, that you just can't formulate anything and that you feel, whatever, hostile or nervous?
	Sometimes. And I think that's really more me than you.
	I don't think it's you. Has it happened in this conversation?
	Kind of. Okay, well, let's have a look at that, because that's a live example of what happened, right?
	So, was it something that I was saying that caused you to feel that way?
	No. It's just something that I was...
	I guess it's a matter of trying to formulate speech and get it from my brain into words and then out of my mouth.
	Right, but you said that you were feeling sort of, were you feeling sort of frustrated or upset when I was talking or when we were talking just now?
	No, I wouldn't call it frustrated or upset.
	Not in the same way that when you talk to these kind of people that want something more and are being at least curious in that they're asking me is like, don't you think this or that?
	And I don't know how to respond.
	Well, you know, first of all, I'm not sure that your response is incorrect.
	I mean, that's the first thing that I would suggest, that your existing response, which is paralysis, let's just say, for want of a better word, I'm not sure that your existing response is incorrect at all.
	And I mean, how long have you known these people?
	Oh, one of them is my best friend, but she wasn't really in on the conversation.
	She's kind of sitting there on the side, chatting away, and...
	These are all her buddies and friends.
	These conversations happen in a lot of places, like with my other friend Mark and his friends and stuff like that.
	So you've known them for a little while?
	Yeah, some of them for maybe several months and the others for several years.
	Well, so you know exactly how this conversation is going to go.
	Kind of. No, no.
	I would say just possibly, possibly, right?
	Just try this on. That you have a deep and infinite well of wisdom within you and you know exactly how this conversation is going to go when you start to talk to these people about the mindless irrationalities that they call deep and abiding truths.
	I don't understand. There's no nice way to say to somebody that you're a hypocritical idiot.
	There's just no nice way to do that, right?
	Right. So when someone puts forward a truth proposition that is based on a complete lack of thinking, but they're trying to pass it off as if it is some scientific or empirical fact or some logically derived conclusion, there's no way to confront someone on that Without hostility erupting.
	There's no way to do it. I can't do it.
	Socrates couldn't do it.
	Nobody, at least that I've ever heard of, can call somebody a hypocritical fool without there being some resulting form of either passive or active aggression.
	I see. So the best thing is to say, so how about the Mets?
	Well, My question is, sort of more fundamentally, is that you obviously think that there is a dichotomy here between, like you said, I'm having a beer with these people, right? But that's not true, right?
	You're socializing with these people.
	Right. Right?
	So you're chatting about things with these people.
	And I mean, of course, there's nothing wrong with that.
	And I have people that I chat with who don't agree with me philosophically.
	But I don't talk about philosophy with those people, right?
	So if I'm at work or whatever, I'm chatting with this and that, then, yeah, we talk about the Mets.
	We talk about, I don't because I don't follow sports.
	But, you know, whatever it is that people are talking about, it's like, oh, yeah, a funny thing happened to me on vacation, too, or whatever, right?
	That's totally fine. I guess what I'm trying to sort of figure out is you have a social situation that is superficial and connected to drinking beer.
	Nothing wrong with that. And I'm not sure what it is you're trying to do in terms of bringing values or philosophical discussion into this conversation when you know that it's only going to provoke his hostility.
	Yeah. Yeah, I guess that'd be kind of pointless if it's just going to keep provoking hostility.
	I just thought maybe there was another approach a person can take to start from maybe further back, start from first principles, stuff like that.
	Well, sure there is, for sure, but you have to have an audience who wants to participate in that conversation.
	You can't inflict philosophy on people.
	I mean, you can try, but it's never going to work, right?
	Right. And if you were in a group that was interested in philosophy, like genuinely interested in philosophy and wanted to sort of ask the right questions and pursue those topics, then you would have a fantastic time and you would forget to drink your beer with your finger.
	With my finger? Never mind.
	Is that a Mork and Mindy thing?
	Sort of, yeah. Just another joke to help date myself.
	But no, if you were sitting with a crew, I don't know, from Freedom Aid Radioites or whatever, or other people who love philosophy and had a rational approach to it, Then you would have a great time.
	There'd be lots of laughter. There'd be jokes.
	There'd be fun stuff. There'd be questions.
	There'd be back and forth. And that would be like an electrically fun social environment, right?
	Like you just wouldn't want to leave.
	It'd be too much fun for words.
	And you wouldn't be sitting there going, oh my god, I can't think of anything to say or I can't think of how to bring up that these people are hypocritical fools without there being any resulting temper.
	You'd think, oh my god, I can't believe I put up with social interactions that were inferior to this for the rest of my life.
	Or before. So you think this paralysis is more about a fear of how they might react than a desire to try and make a point or try and come up with something to say?
	Well, that's close. What it is that I am saying is that it's not that you have a fear of how they're going to react, it's that you know exactly how they're going to react.
	They're going to roll their eyes and they're going to attack you.
	I absolutely guarantee you.
	There's lots of things that are mysterious in this world and lots of things that takes a lot of depth to get to in terms of philosophy.
	But when people put forward knowledge statements that are completely false and they have no knowledge behind them, when you confront them on that, they will get angry.
	I mean, that's not a mystery.
	I mean, that's as, you know, you stick a fork into a live electrical socket, you're going to get a shock.
	I mean, this is a sort of ABC cause and effect, hit the ball and it goes somewhere, throw a rock off a cliff and it falls.
	This is a complete, and you know this, right?
	This is nothing that you don't know, right?
	You know this completely and totally, that if you start to confront these people who are making these absurd and false knowledge statements or claims, With the fact that they don't know what they're talking about, they're going to get very hostile because you're going to expose their false self.
	Their false, pompous, know-it-all self that just makes up bullshit, spouts it forward in a self-congratulatory manner and puts down and attacks you for having some criteria for truth.
	These are not healthy people.
	These are not happy people and they will react with anger Hostility, condemnation, and abuse if you confront them on it.
	There's no question of that whatsoever.
	And you know this is why your body isn't letting you talk and you keep fighting it and saying, well, I'm going to turn these bad people into good people with the force of my words.
	And that's never going to happen.
	Why do they get so angry, though?
	Why do they get so angry?
	Is it just pure insecurity?
	No, it's because they know that they're lying.
	Right? I mean, it's like saying when a salesman is trying to sell a car that is broken, and you come on that lot, and they're just about to close the sale, right?
	They're just about to make $10,000 off a car that's barely going to make it off the lot.
	And you come up and you say, oh, that car is broken.
	I wouldn't buy it. And then you say, I can't imagine why the salesperson is getting angry at me.
	Hmm. I know there's something more.
	And they're saying it's something more, something greater, when, of course, just making something up is ridiculous, right?
	As far as a knowledge claim goes.
	You just make stuff up, and you don't go down to science conferences and they just make stuff up.
	Oh, here's a paper I put of numbers that I made up.
	What do you think, guys? They'd be like, why are you wasting your time with stuff you just made up?
	What we'd like is some logic and empirical evidence, right?
	When you have a math test, write some numbers down or some symbol, some wingding symbol down.
	This is a language I made up and in it the answer is correct, right?
	When you expose somebody who's fraudulent, they're going to get angry.
	And it's very hypocritical to say, I am putting forward a knowledge claim statement or a claim of fact so that you get all of the accolades or all of the approval of putting forward a knowledge statement when in fact you're destroying knowledge by putting forward mere opinion as if it is knowledge.
	So when you expose somebody as a hypocritical fraud, they're going to get angry.
	I mean, that's...
	And you know this.
	I mean, you know this. You don't want to know it because this is like a world that you don't...
	You're not comfortable with yet, right?
	But I absolutely...
	You know exactly what's going to happen.
	And that's why I sort of asked, why are you with these people?
	Well, why am I with these people?
	Well, they're not...
	Oh, no...
	I guess in the area of philosophy, they're basically, you know, full of shit.
	But in the area of everywhere else, I mean, they aren't mean people.
	They never really raised their voice with me or insulted me that I felt.
	I guess except, you know, I guess except when I don't know if they've really ever raged.
	I couldn't tell exactly what I was paralyzed about other than what you said.
	Well, I mean, I'll tell you this for sure.
	And look, I mean, don't take my word for it.
	Go and try this out for yourself.
	Obviously, empiricism is much more important than my opinions.
	But I'll tell you why they've never abused you, if you like.
	All right. Because you don't exist around them, right?
	Your values, what it is that you consider to be true and important, which is the pursuit of truth, knowledge, self-knowledge, knowledge about reality, philosophy, ethics, right?
	The stuff that has kept you grinding through these freaking endless series of podcasts and listening to my catawalling into a mic.
	This value that you have that is in some ways the greatest treasure of your life.
	And of course I don't mean that. I don't mean these podcasts.
	I mean this pursuit of truth.
	This is who you are.
	And this of course is who everybody is deep down.
	I mean philosophers are just those who figured that out or accepted it.
	Even these people have an explanation for the world.
	They just prefer to make something up rather than actually study something.
	But the reason that you've never been yelled at or abused is because you hide yourself.
	I see. So, because I get paralyzed, they're not abusing me.
	Yeah, it's your false self trying to save the relationship, or the quote, relationship.
	Yeah, well, I wouldn't say I'm really close friends with these people.
	I mean, you know, there's only one there that I'm actually close with, which is my best friend, Daisy, and she doesn't...
	I mean, we get into the conversations...
	I get into conversations with her, and she just kind of...
	I guess she listens, and she doesn't take much interest in philosophy, as most girls don't, but she's never really attacked me about it, and I say things, and she seems to just sort of accept them.
	I don't know. She just sort of gives you that thousand-yard stare, like, that's nice, I'm planning what I'm going to be eating later.
	Right, right, kind of like that.
	Right, okay. So I can't speak to your relationship with her, of course.
	I mean, obviously, that's...
	But I totally guarantee you that you know exactly what's going to happen if you start pushing the issues with these people.
	Because what they're doing, to anyone who's a philosopher, what they're doing is highly provocative, is highly, highly provocative.
	I mean, if I am a doctor fighting AIDS in Africa, And I hear people talking to each other saying with absolute certainty that they know that sunlight causes AIDS and the only way to cure it is to have unprotected sex.
	That's a highly provocative statement.
	When you are a doctor and you hear a bunch of superstitious people talking the opposite of what causes health, as if they have perfect knowledge, when the information is completely available to them about what the truth is, and anybody who's interested in these sort of mystical phenomenon, I mean the internet has changed everything as far as philosophy goes, because the scientific proof or disproof is available to anybody who wants to look it up, In about 30 seconds, right?
	So as a philosopher, you are very interested in a logical and empirical approach to determining truth from falsehood.
	When you hear people spout off these nonsense opinions and attack philosophy and attack methodology, you're exactly the same as a doctor who's confronted with a witch doctor, and the witch doctor's actions cause people to fall sick a lot and add more to your load as a doctor.
	So, as a philosopher, when you hear people talking a bunch of nonsense, it's provoking.
	It's provocative. I mean, this is highly detrimental to the world.
	So, I guess it's the same as with the professors and the global warming theorists that are milking off the state and the environmentalists that know they're lying, and then when you present this video like that, Global warming swindle, they get all angry.
	Well sure, but your friends are even worse than that, because at least these people have Some science, right?
	I mean, they have some science behind what they're doing.
	And I'm no climatologist and I can't figure out what the hell the science means.
	I just know that there's a controversy and I also know that the amount of people who've talked a load of trash about the environmental disasters in the past have all been proven wrong, so I have a high degree of skepticism.
	But at least the global warming advocates have some science.
	They have people out there in the field measuring stuff, right?
	They're not just sitting there at a bar someplace saying, yeah, I think the ice flows are getting thicker.
	Right? With no knowledge at all.
	I mean, the environmentalists are way better off than your friends who are just making up pretty serious epistemological and metaphysical nonsense.
	Right. But aren't the global warming, like the environmentalists, aren't they coming up with counterfeit science, like you were saying in another podcast at one time, just kind of Yeah, sure.
	Sorry, are your friends even coming up with counterfeit science?
	No, of course not.
	They're not even making knowledge statements.
	Well, no, no, no, they are making knowledge statements for sure.
	They're saying there's something more.
	But they don't even put the time in to fake well, right?
	I mean, it's really bad when you don't even put a credible con job over.
	Right, but something more, you know, more compared to what?
	What is more? More what?
	How is that a knowledge statement?
	Well, but they're putting forward a knowledge statement that there has to be something more and then they provide evidence, but it's all just made up stuff, right?
	Right. And the moment that you point out that they're just making up knowledge claims with no training and no knowledge and no expertise, even though the internet makes it available to them in about 30 seconds, that they're total con artists when it comes to putting forward the truth.
	And people really don't like to hear that.
	So do you think maybe they're kind of nihilists?
	Oh, yeah. I mean, even a nihilist has a knowledge statement that nothing is true.
	I mean, they're nothingists.
	I mean, they're opinionists or whatever, right?
	They're, I don't know, atomists.
	There's no word to describe them.
	It's like saying, what kind of medicine does a witch doctor practice?
	Well, no medicine.
	It's not even medicine. It's just a bunch of culty, crazy opinions.
	I mean, it's nothing. It has no epistemological grounding.
	You can't judge it as anything.
	So when you start talking about empiricism and epistemology and stuff like that, and you start asking for proof and statistics and stuff like that, they roll your eyes and go, pshaw, or whatever that...
	But they get angry. They get angry.
	They get angry. They always like to attack science as not knowing enough, or, well, science doesn't know everything, or...
	Right, right. And that, of course, is a total true statement.
	But they then say, and therefore, there's something.
	But people, when they have mindless, stupid, ass-clown opinions, and frankly, I wouldn't have any more patience with these people than you would.
	People who just make statements of pure, abstract nonsense.
	But I'll tell you this, Nate, and this is the part that's really unpleasant.
	They know enough about the truth to attack it when it comes around.
	They know enough about the truth.
	They know enough about what they're doing that they're going to get angry at you if you start to point it out.
	And the reason that I'm spending such time on this, we've been on this for 40 minutes, I don't want to spend a huge amount of time on it, but it's very important, not just for you, but for other people who are out there who have this problem.
	I mean, go have beers with people who aren't philosophers by all means.
	Not that my opinion means anything, I'm just sort of pointing out some choices and consequences.
	But don't imagine that you're going to be able to talk philosophy with them because these are people who know enough about the truth, only enough about the truth, to recognize it as an enemy and to attack it when it shows up.
	That's really corrupt. And so if you want to have your buddies with the beers, don't talk philosophy.
	Don't even think about it.
	And what you want is to have your cake and eat it too, right?
	You want the socializing with people and you want to turn them into philosophers as well, despite their obvious hostility to any kind of empirical truth statement.
	I see. I see.
	Oh, boy. But don't trust me.
	Just bite the bullet and do it.
	Push the debate. Push the debate.
	You guys are my friends.
	I want to talk to you about something that's really been troubling me.
	I'm really interested in philosophy.
	You guys make these statements. I don't think that they're true.
	Then I feel really nervous about bringing it up.
	I'd like to because I don't agree with these statements.
	Just be honest with these people.
	If you want to spend time socializing with people and you don't want it to be just a total shallow thing, which again, I have no issues with.
	Not that my opinion means anything in this regard with relation to you.
	But talk to them and say, this is sort of what I think and this is what I feel and see how they react.
	Alright, alright.
	Yeah, I guess I could push it.
	Just as an experiment.
	You can push it as an experiment or, and I guarantee you, it's going to implode.
	It's going to totally explode.
	You will lose these people as friends if you push it.
	But if you don't get it consciously, and you're only getting it unconsciously to the point where you're paralyzing yourself, it's worth dumping these people in order to bring it to the fore.
	And I would say that you would lose these friends not just after this conversation, but it's the first seed.
	It's the first seed, right?
	I mean, you start having debates along these lines.
	They start to think, oh, this is interesting.
	This is a new part of our relationship.
	They don't like it. It makes them feel uncomfortable.
	And then over time, I think their relationship might cool down.
	Yeah, well, they'll leave, like, what the hell is Nate on?
	Like, they'll roll their eyes, they'll call each other, what the hell was he all on about?
	Like, is he high?
	Has he joined a cult?
	You know, what the hell's going on with Nate?
	They'll totally, like, whatever, right?
	But, I mean, that's something that you need to see, and it's worth casting this relationship to that you get the self-trust to know that when you're stuck for words, there's a good reason, and you should respect that.
	It just kind of seems awfully lonely.
	Well, how lonely does it feel when you feel silenced by the hostility or indifference of the people around you?
	That's also lonely.
	It's like you've got to get off the ship that's going down, right?
	I mean, you don't know if a new ship is going to come along and rescue you, right?
	You don't know for sure, but you know for sure if you stay on this ship you're going down, right?
	So if you stay in these relationships which oppose your deepest values, for sure these relationships are going to be frustrating and negative and difficult and we don't have a lot of time to live, so all of this stuff is just subtracted from your life.
	Now, if you let these relationships go, Then you're opening yourself up to new and better and deeper and richer relationships.
	And you keep all of these people from re-entering your life.
	Because they will smell these standards on you like six miles away and run.
	That you don't accept nonsense and you don't accept people who disrespect what you value.
	It's not like you value burning kittens or something.
	You value philosophy of the truth, which is not a bad thing to value.
	It's the most important thing to value.
	So you've got to let go of what is and so you can get to where you could be.
	But yeah, it seems lonely, and it's a leap of faith, I guess you could say.
	But, you know, this ship for sure, these relationships are never going to be satisfying to you.
	These relationships are never going to be productive, or you're never going to feel connected or warm and invited.
	You're going to feel torn, and should I say this, and should I say that?
	And I want to push this debate forward, but I don't want to piss people off.
	I mean, that's a lot of work.
	Relationships shouldn't be that much work.
	So I know it seems lonely, but the loneliness has already occurred for you, right?
	I mean, you've just got to recognize that.
	Well, yeah, I guess so.
	Maybe I need to move out of the Bible, though.
	Well, I mean, that's not a bad thing.
	That's not a bad thing at all.
	That's really not a bad idea, because you're going to face a lot of culty stuff, right, where you are.
	I mean, this evangelical stuff, this old Christian stuff, is heavily culty, so you're kind of in the heart of darkness.
	You know, it's like moving to Washington and wondering why there's so many politicians and aides around and so on.
	Right, right, or Austin or any of the state capitals.
	Right. All right.
	Well, listen, I'm going to move on.
	Thank you so much. And also, thank you so much for allowing us to release the recent podcast where we talked about yourself.
	And I really appreciate that.
	I know that that wasn't the easiest thing in the world, but I've had several comments about how helpful that podcast was to people.
	So I really do appreciate that.
	No problem. No problem.
	I'll talk to you later. All right.
	Thanks, man. Thanks. All right.
	Bring Mr. R in.
	He's got some good news for us to hear today.
	Hey! Hey.
	I was trying to do it in time to the song there.
	For the Greeks in the house?
	Oh, yeah. Christina's maiden name was?
	Papadopoulos. Oh, sorry.
	McPapadopoulos. She was Greek and Scottish.
	McPapadopoulos. That's Mac Papadopoulos, right?
	Exactly. If you're Scottish, it's Mac.
	Okay. So I am here to declare victory.
	And it was a very exciting week for me.
	Following our chat last week, where we discussed the finer points of dissatisfaction with your work and all that.
	And on Tuesday, I went into my boss's office bright and early in the morning and declared my intention to...
	Or I said, I'd like to open a dialogue on making me a contractor.
	And there's just a few brief, very assertive and not backing down type statements got him to realize that I was dead serious about it.
	So he agreed to set up a...
	A little chat with his supervisor.
	Fantastic! Yep, so Thursday was the chat with the supervisor, and I woke up that morning feeling absolutely no trepidation or fear or anything, and I couldn't figure out what was going on.
	I thought, I should be terrified right now, but I was lacing up my shoes in the morning, and It suddenly struck me why I wasn't scared because I realized that there was absolutely no way I could lose in this conversation.
	I would either find that I was going to get what I wanted or I was going to find out that I shouldn't be at that company and I would be completely certain that either outcome would be positive.
	Long story short, we got into the I'm sorry, I'm sorry, can I just interrupt you for a sec?
	Yep. I don't have a lot of blasphemy challenges or sort of accusations of heresy, but that phrase, long story short, is really the only blasphemous phrase at Free Domain Radio, so that's the only thing I wanted to warn you about.
	I wouldn't want to send out the talkamata to you.
	Okay. I'll be verbose then, how's that?
	Oh yeah, now we're talking, baby.
	Okay. You really are a role model, Steph.
	So I got into the meeting with my supervisor's supervisor.
	I'm going to call him Franck because he's French, actually, and that'll save some time.
	So we're in Franck's office with my supervisor and myself, and I started off the chat with Oops, I just closed something.
	I'm sorry. I started out the chat by just listing off a brief summary of what I thought both the company and I could get out of making me a contractor.
	It'd be positives all around.
	And then I put my list away and, you know, said, okay, have at it.
	And so immediately I was just barraged by this, Franck was saying, You know, there's no way we can do this.
	We don't make contracts.
	We don't do this. We don't do that.
	I don't understand what you're saying.
	All this stuff. And then my boss kind of jumped in on it and said, you know, you work in a pretty good company.
	You're lucky to get what you get.
	And all this stuff. And there was suddenly a sense of ultimate calm that fell over me.
	And this whole Your assignment to, for one week, allow myself to be absolutely right and everything, it worked like a charm.
	I mean, all of a sudden, I heard myself saying, almost like I was watching this happen.
	It was so great. It was like I was on autopilot.
	And I said that, you know, I understand what you're trying to say to me, but I just want to let you know that in...
	I honestly believe that in any measurement of subjective value, I have to be the final judge of that value.
	There's no other way. No one else can tell me what I value.
	Oh, dude, I'm levitating.
	Go on. Yeah, and so it caught him by surprise.
	And so then, you know, Franck started another kind of line of reasoning that was, well, we don't do this, and if you don't...
	Or I was saying that, you know, I would like to...
	So he said, I don't know how you would switch to a contractor.
	That means that you would have to resign.
	And if you resign, you resign.
	Then you're not coming back. So this was the second point.
	There's these very veiled threat type things that they're coming at me with.
	And this is the second one that I completely dodged.
	The way I said it was, You know, I've thought about this, and again, if my values, if my expectations are not lining up with the company's expectations, in other words, if I want more than the company is willing to give, then that's okay.
	That just means I can leave and no hard feelings.
	Right. I mean, it's sort of like if Christina's lactose intolerant, and if I were to say to Christina, oh, no, you're not lactose intolerant.
	I mean, that's me telling her what her values are, or what works for her or what doesn't.
	How can I tell her, oh, Christina, you really like fuchsia pink plaid, because that's my new tattoo or something.
	I mean, I can't tell her what she likes.
	I mean, I can try. It's not going to work.
	I mean, but people try this all the time, so good for you.
	What was really great about these things is I know deep down, somehow, that what was going on here was that they were playing into these little seeds of fear that were sown by my parents.
	The fear of abandonment, which was, you're lucky to be here, don't tread on thin ice because we could drop you.
	So it was like the When I saw this stuff happening, I instinctively knew now because I've been working so hard on resolving my feelings that I had from childhood and addressing them for what they were, that this became so transparent to me.
	I mean, these two types of arguments that they were trying to throw at me a couple of years ago would have worked perfectly.
	I would have walked out of that office probably apologizing to them.
	Right, right. Can I send you a little tube of oxygen for what I used up?
	I'm so sorry. Exactly.
	Okay, give me a pay cut, please.
	I'm sorry I ever came in here.
	So here it was for a whole hour this meeting went on, and the entire time I gave not one inch.
	I was not aggressive, but I was very assertive.
	And I... I've very rarely accomplished this kind of a thing where I can be so assertive without being kind of passively aggressive or even directly aggressive sometimes.
	Sorry to interrupt, but it's something that people who haven't been there don't understand, really, and they can't believe it when you say, it wasn't stressful for me.
	Like that hour in the office, I'm guaranteeing, I mean, I'm not guaranteeing, tell me, but I'm getting that it wasn't stressful for you.
	No, it was exhilarating.
	As I was in there, I was actually having to...
	I was concentrating on not grinning like a moron because I was having fun.
	It was just... It was ridiculous.
	I mean, I was facing down two guys who were, you know, two levels above me, and I was having a blast.
	I was just... I mean, it was so much fun.
	It was like I was playing a video game or something like that.
	So, um... Right.
	Now, tell us about the chainsaw.
	You are... I fired up the BFG and over the course of the conversation I actually gave Franck, the supervisor, I gave him a lesson in economics and international exchange rates because my company is actually based in France so they're doing their numbers in the Euro and stuff like that.
	So, I mean, it was just so much fun.
	And by the end of the meeting, and this was where I just, I knew that I had just accomplished something greater than anything I'd ever done in my professional life, was that by the end of the meeting, my boss was actually arguing for me.
	And saying that, you know, when Frank was saying, there is no, you know, there's no option here.
	I don't see how we can do this.
	My boss was saying, No, I think there is an option.
	In fact, I think there's probably about three options, and I think we should probably look into them.
	So the outcome was the next morning I spoke to my boss again briefly, and I thanked him for his support and all that.
	And he said that this Wednesday, this coming Wednesday, we're going to be going into HR, and we're going to be taking it to him, and we're going to see what we can do.
	One of the things that was really cool, though, is after During the meeting when Franck was saying that the company does not negotiate one-on-one contracts with people, I actually knew that was untrue.
	I knew that he either didn't know that it was possible or he was just flat out lying to me.
	Either way, I didn't seem to care at the time.
	I confirmed that again after that meeting.
	That evening I spoke with someone about it and I found out that, in fact, my company does, they have, in fact, the ink is fairly dry on one of these contracts with a person that is just between the company and that person directly.
	So I went into my boss's office the next morning during that when I was thinking about it and I said, oh, hey, and by the way, I did some checking and it turns out that we have another option, you know, it's that the The company does do direct contracts with people, and he said, oh, do you have an example of this?
	I was like, oh, yeah, it's this guy upstairs.
	In fact, he's getting this, this, this, this, and this, and the look on his face is one of, yeah, okay, you found us out.
	It was great.
	It was so empowering, and I have been absolutely on a high ever since Thursday.
	My friends have just been...
	Actually, I got one of my...
	One of my friends just subscribed to the FDR podcast over the weekend because of this conversation.
	Oh, that's fantastic. I mean, I'm just going to share a few thoughts, if you don't mind, and then I'll let you get back to it.
	First of all, I mean, I know that this is, of course, something that people hate me talking about, so I'll keep it very brief.
	You are the single biggest donator to Freedom Aid Radio, and I keep telling people it pays off, and they don't believe me.
	But... You know, here's an example, right?
	And the only reason that I know this, it's not, and I never tell people to do stuff that I haven't done, right?
	Is that I've invested I don't know, $30,000 in therapy and Christina's rates, I get some domestic cuts, but it's still pretty expensive.
	I know because I've invested the money, right?
	And because I've invested like $30,000 in therapy and of course my education and this and that, right?
	So I've already donated to lots of people, some of whom didn't really deserve it, right?
	So I'm not asking people to do something.
	And of course I donate my time and to this and so on, right?
	But I just sort of wanted to point out that I've really noticed, and the people who donate, and again, this town's totally self-interested, which is kind of a win-win thing.
	I get the money, which I can use to advertise to expand the conversation, the most important conversation, I think, in the world at the moment.
	So that's a win for me.
	I think it's a win for the world.
	And of course, it's a win all around, and we as capitalists should be, I think, for that.
	So I just mentioned that. I don't want to sort of jump on it too much, but I just sort of wanted to point that out, that it pays off, right?
	No, absolutely. Actually, I was putting together a big, long post about this whole thing that I was going to put on the board, and unfortunately I had a water pipe start leaking, so I wasn't able to finish it before the Skype cast here.
	But one of the main points of this post that I was trying to directly address was that this The donations that I've given to Free Domain Radio, even from the very, very beginning when I first gave like 50 bucks or something like that, just kind of a, oh yeah, okay, I've probably listened to about 100 of them now, it's probably worth 50 bucks.
	I always kind of thought of that as an investment in myself because it was aligning my actual, you know, my physical material costs, I was aligning that to the kind of thing that I really want in my life.
	And again, with the, I think, I did some Just kind of back of the napkin, or back in the envelope, sketching on this stuff.
	And I think I figured out that my total, if I get the rates on my contract that I'm expecting, and I think it's very reasonable, I might actually be a little bit conservative on this.
	But if I get the rate that I'm thinking I will, and I work just a regular 40 hours a week, which I'm sure I'll work far more than that, I'm actually going to be getting a rate of return or a return of investment on my FDR donations of around 1800% So what you're saying is you haven't donated enough.
	So I've been ripping you off.
	Absolutely, and I think that's wonderful.
	I mean, I love to be cheated in that way.
	Sorry, somebody just posted here, I've said $30,000 that I've invested.
	I was throwing some stuff in there for education, also all the self-help books that I've read, also seminars that I've attended.
	$20,000 I spent on personal therapy.
	I was in personal therapy for a little over two years.
	For three hours a week, and it was a team which included two therapists, one witch doctor, one psychologist, and a llama.
	I don't know how the hell that ended up.
	So I spent a little over 20 grand on personal therapy.
	I also went to the Landmark Forum.
	I went to the basic course.
	I went to the advanced course.
	The basic course is three days.
	The advanced course is five days, like literally 18 hours a day.
	And then I attended some classes after all of that.
	This was many years ago.
	And I got some useful stuff out of it.
	The landmark is not the worst thing in the world to go to.
	Sorry, when I talk about personal therapy, it was about 20 grand.
	I don't want people to get confused about, you know, oh, it's just making up numbers, right?
	No, I have lots of other stuff that I make up, but the numbers aren't so much that.
	So the other thing I mentioned, which I think is important to understand about your interaction with these people, I would sort of put forward, and this is fairly advanced, and maybe it'll make sense to you or not, and maybe I'm not making sense at all, but what I would theorize is that beforehand, you went into these interactions as a child facing abusive parents.
	Absolutely. And what you did in this situation is you went into this as a parent facing tricky children.
	Right, right.
	And the cool thing about it was that when I went in as a parent facing tricky children, I think I went in as a pretty darn good parent because I didn't just ignore what they were saying, I acknowledged what they were saying, and I explained to them why they might be wrong.
	And I think I actually convinced them, you know?
	Right, and that's why this assertiveness is so helpful, right?
	So that when you have children, you will never end up with tricky children because as they experiment, as children will always do so, with lying, with covering up, with manipulation, we all have that talent and children will always experiment with it and there's nothing wrong with that.
	You will be able to gently correct them and positively point out that that's not going to work, that you know better, and then they just won't do it anymore, right?
	So you will bypass this whole mess which most parents get into where they end up in a sort of horrible subterranean ethical and moralistic war with their children.
	So the assertiveness that you bring to your work environment is essential training for the assertiveness and the positivity that you'll bring and the certainty, of course, that you'll bring to your relationships with your children in the future.
	Absolutely. With the assertiveness, I know that I... My gosh, I think I must have earned an enormous amount of respect from my direct supervisor because in the next conversation I had with him, he started telling me about all the places that he was going to recommend that I go to look for further contract work.
	There's a new...
	A whole new resource because this guy's been in the industry for a while.
	He knows a lot of names and things like that.
	I'm going to have a brand new resource to mine here.
	It's going to be just pretty awesome, I think.
	Well, that's thrilling. I think that's wonderful.
	The hard work was yours, right?
	So, congratulations. I mean, it's really paid off.
	I think that's just beyond fantastic.
	I mean, I hate to say that I'm proud of people because that sounds paternalistic, but totally.
	I mean, totally. Hey, you can be proud of me because I'm proud of me.
	You should be.
	That was amazing. Anything to add to this?
	No, I think that's fantastic.
	Congratulations. You're a role model.
	Well, thank you both. I think what she meant by that was you're a role model to my deadbeat philosopher husband who's giving up his job.
	I think that's what she's trying to say.
	Okay, so yeah, the one last, the image that I kind of formulated on this that was It was just so very effective for me for visualizing what was going on.
	Way back in my childhood, there were seeds of fear and uncertainty and self-doubt that were sown in me.
	And they were growing and growing and growing for years until they became just a bumper crop of self-destruction.
	And when I found out where this field was, I just completely burned it to the ground.
	And these guys came in trying to reap something from that field, and they had nothing to fix.
	I mean, this conversation, especially about the family, has done more for me than any education that I've ever received in my life, and I've had quite a bit of it, so I have to thank you again.
	Oh, listen, it's my total pleasure.
	The other thing that's something that is true in mythology, and this is for our good Dutch friend who's interested in this stuff, it is a true and inevitable thing in mythology that Those who are the weakest, they do becometh the strongest, right? And you see this, right?
	There's a hero who is tentative and a hero who's uncertain, who then has a massive breakthrough and becomes incredibly strong, like this little Arthur pulls a sword out of the stone and Luke Skywalker, a sort of deadbeat, dead-end farmer guy on a lonely desert planet and so on, right?
	That those who are the weakest become the strongest is a very common theme in mythology, and the reason that I think it's there, obviously there's the dramatic turnaround and so on, but the reason that I think it's there, I think you showed very well in this meeting, which is that when we have corrupt or destructive or manipulative parents, we know manipulation down cold, like we have it carved into our very bone marrow, right?
	It's inscribed like tattoos on our bones.
	We know this stuff.
	Which means that once we master it, we can't be beaten by it because we know it so well.
	So when these guys tried to pull all their tricks, once you had mastered your past and you had understood the history that led you to be susceptible to these things, you gain this Superman bullet can't harm you Aspect with relation to manipulation because it's so clear what people are doing and it's so clear it's almost amusing.
	It's like watching a kid with chocolate cake all over his face saying, I didn't have any cake.
	It becomes almost amusing because you know it so well and that's why those of us who are the most ground down, once we understand our past and once we connect with all of that sort of stuff and bring it to life in the real world, we simply can't be stopped.
	Absolutely. Seriously, I'm feeling 10 feet tall and bulletproof right now.
	It's so much fun.
	That's great. That's great.
	Well, again, congratulations.
	It's fantastic. Thank you.
	All right. Well, thanks again.
	This is good stuff.
	As somebody pointed out on the chat window, soon all free-domain listener radios will be unemployed.
	And that really is the goal.
	We're at the moment. People always say, well, we shouldn't contribute to taxes.
	Well, I'm doing my part. Obviously, I've quit my job, so I'm not going to be contributing to taxes.
	And, of course, I'm basically detonating everyone else's career so that we don't end up contributing to taxes.
	It's all very good stuff.
	Of course, some of it's going to occur in stages.
	Alright, so we have a spot open if anybody wants to jump in with questions.
	I believe a lady who simply put in that she was in the Koran belt had a question which she, I think, wanted to ask Christina.
	So if she would like to jump in, she's more than welcome to.
	Is she in the chat window?
	Yes, she is. Well, I don't know.
	She was going to...
	Waiting, waiting, waiting.
	Let me just type this in and see if she has a question about that.
	Anyway, so yeah, if you have a question or issue a comment, I'm not going to ramble on about other things just at the moment.
	Oh, so she's just...
	Coming attractions. Yeah, I mean, this is something which we're still sort of fleshing out up here at Freedom Aid Radio, Head Space Quarters, Orbiting Satellite of Ultimate Philosophy, but it's a lot to do with this...
	Christina and I were talking about, you know, like there's 700 podcasts and you guys have been magnificent in absorbing and bringing this stuff to life and helping me, of course, improve the conversation with incredible questions and comments and so on.
	But to me, there's still a certain amount of traction that needs to occur.
	And this isn't just, I mean, this is in my life as it is in your life, right?
	I mean, six months ago, I was still thinking that I could have a corporate gig, right?
	And that was the most important thing for me to do with my time.
	And that's just because I hadn't worn Christina down to be my sugar mommy yet.
	So there was obviously some challenges there.
	But it's amazing what persistence and whining and pleading and not putting out will do.
	So, yeah, right.
	She laughs at that. It's like, not now we're at the mall.
	So yeah, it's really around to taking these ideas and putting them into real traction in real world situations.
	So we're talking about doing a U.S. tour of meet and greets with Free Domain Radio listeners.
	So sit down For a day or two, over a weekend maybe, and just shoot through stuff in the real world, stuff in real life that's going on for people.
	And it would not be me lecturing or Christina lecturing.
	We might break into two groups, those more interested in the psychology, those more interested in the philosophy, with Christina leading one and myself leading another.
	But we'd flip for them, of course.
	And then evening followed by rousing pole dance lessons from me.
	So, yeah, karaoke.
	Naturally! Karaoke, no question.
	Yeah, so we're sort of thinking of that, and what it would be is more like a listening situation where people sort of bring up their issues.
	I can sort of put my two cents in, other people can, and it's sort of a round-table kind of philosophical discussion about the best way to approach more particular life challenges that people are having rather than, you know, I now understand metaphysics, and that's great, but I'm having a problem with this, that, or the other in particular.
	Yeah, the FDR World Tour t-shirts.
	Coming soon to a stadium near you.
	Are you ready to think?
	You know, that kind of stuff. Yeah, so that's sort of the idea.
	There's no point in me coming and doing lectures because, Lord knows, it's not like you don't get enough of that in the podcast, right?
	So that would just be the same as a podcast but with slightly better audio quality.
	So that wouldn't be, I think, much of interest to anyone.
	It would be a way of engaging.
	I mean, philosophy fundamentally is a conversation.
	I mean, that's why this conversation is so amazing, because this is the first time that I know of where a philosophy has had a conversation that shapes and is shaped by continual feedback from the listeners.
	I mean, it wasn't literally 20 minutes after I posted FDR 700 where people said, what the hell were you thinking?
	You know, that kind of feedback, which is just so essential.
	It's never occurred before in history that you can get a conversation going with that degree of feedback, and that's, of course, one of the main reasons why the conversation is so powerful, at least to me.
	So I think that if we have that kind of more immediate visual feedback all in the same room, I just think that would be pretty cool.
	So that's That's sort of the real...
	That's one of the ideas.
	There's lots of other things that were sort of got cooking, but certainly that's the one that got Christina and I the most excited.
	All right. Okay, so we have somebody who's waiting, and this is, I guess, hiding from the imam's friends.
	Hello. Hello.
	Hi. How's it going?
	Hold on, you're kind of breaking up.
	Oh, how's that?
	I'll talk more slowly.
	Can you hear me?
	Okay, good, good.
	Okay, well, I have a question.
	I don't know if it's appropriate for the show or not, but I'm just going to ask.
	Anyways, basically, I'm a natural health practitioner.
	I help people With lots of different problems that they have in their life.
	I'm kind of like a therapist in a way.
	And I have this one client who is constantly talking about killing himself.
	And I actually became good friends with him because he lives on the same street as me.
	And he's always constantly talking about how much he hates his job and Every time his phone rings, he's like, oh, you know, shit, who's this?
	And everything's always negative, and he's always talking about wanting to kill himself.
	And his job is actually, he writes speeches for the king and for the prime minister, and he does strategies for them and things like that.
	And I was just wondering if you had any advice about what I could say to him, because he always says that He has no other choice in his job.
	He can't get out of it, and it's really depressing him, and I kind of just don't know what to say exactly, you know, to help him, to make him feel better.
	I tried introducing him to Freedom Inn, and he listened to some podcasts and stuff, but he still says that he has to keep doing his job, and I don't know.
	Hi, it's Christina. Yeah, hi.
	I assume you're in the Middle East right now?
	Yeah. So I don't know very much about, you know, if this guy is working for the government, for the king, and the prime minister, and all of that, I don't know if...
	Does he actually not have the freedom to leave his job?
	I mean, if he doesn't have the freedom to leave his job, we're talking about a different...
	No, he can. He can? Yeah, he just says that he can't.
	He just says that he can't.
	You said he was a client of yours and now you developed a friendship?
	Yeah. Yeah.
	I'd say because the, you know, that your friends at this particular point, you need to step out of your therapist role and you can't help them.
	I mean, the boundaries are too blurred at this particular point.
	That's what I would say. I would say that this is something that he, because he can't, I mean, you'll just end up taking this on and it will become your problem.
	And I would suggest very, very strongly that you recommend that he go and see a professional to talk about this very, very important issue.
	Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.
	Go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say, is there anything that as a friend I can do to any advice that I can say to him?
	You know, I feel like I've done everything that I can during my sessions with him and everything like that, but he's so like depressed and I don't know what your training and your background is, but this sounds like it's pretty serious stuff.
	This is something that he needs to see someone in the mental health field.
	Again, I don't know what your background is, but perhaps if he's very depressed, he may need to see a psychiatrist.
	He may need some medication.
	If he's actively suicidal, to be hospitalized for suicidality, for treatment.
	Again, I don't know what the situation is like where you are at right now, whether these things are actually available, but I would say that if you've stepped out of the client-patient role and you've sort of walked into a friendship role, that you need to step out of that sort of trying to help him and just support him in trying to find somebody.
	You can't take this on.
	You can't take this on.
	In a personal relationship, it's too much.
	It just becomes overbearing.
	It becomes overbearing and this isn't something that the ordinary individual would be able to handle.
	This is something that requires real clinical attention.
	Well, I've actually stopped working on him for the past two weeks because there was a bombing here a couple weeks ago and I've just felt totally overwhelmed that I can't handle helping him with his stuff and it's made him even more depressed.
	So I have stepped back a bit.
	Right, right. And, you know, I mean, again, here in North America, the first step is always the family physician.
	I don't know what the situation is like over there, whether it's a family physician or a physician that he can go to as a sort of triage person.
	But I would definitely say get him or direct him to some kind of a mental health clinic or a mental health professional where he can really focus on these things.
	And you need to be clear with your boundaries with him.
	I mean, If you've opened the door and he started to come to you, it's going to be a lot harder to sort of set a limit with what, you know, with what you're willing to take on.
	But you have to be very clear because this sounds like the kind of thing that you could get overwhelmed with.
	Not just, not because I know you or anything, but because I know the kind of personality he is, that can become overwhelming.
	And so very clear boundaries are really needed here.
	Yeah. How would I say to him, you know, like, I don't know.
	Just because I have become good friends with him, to say, you know, sorry.
	Just be frank. Listen, I really care about you.
	I'm sorry to see that you're really struggling with all of this.
	It breaks my heart to see this.
	I'm not the right person to try and help you through this.
	You need some real clinical attention.
	It's because I care about you that I think you need to see someone for these issues.
	I don't want to steer you in the wrong direction.
	I don't have the mental strength or the inner resources to help you through this.
	Or the training, I guess.
	I assume that you don't. I don't know what kind of training you have.
	But even if you have the right kind of training, if he's a friend, you shouldn't be dealing with this.
	You shouldn't be dealing with this issue with him.
	This is definitely something that he needs to see a clinical specialist about.
	Okay. Yeah.
	That's great. The other thing that I would mention is that suicidality is like the cancer of the personality, right?
	And, I mean, if Christina gets a cold or whatever, then I can pamper her and, you know, my training as a nurse, or rather somebody who played a nurse in certain videos, my training as a nurse, whatever, right, like just being a compassionate here, I can bring her, you know, soup, I can, you know, I can bring her something to drink or whatever, right?
	And so friends can help other friends with, you know, minor complaints or problems or whatever, right?
	But suicidality is as complex and as difficult to treat as cancer.
	I mean, it requires strong medication, strong intervention, hospitalization.
	And, you know, if somebody comes to you and, you know, your friend comes to you and says, I've got cancer, you immediately say, He says, I've got cancer and I want you to cure it.
	You'd say, well, I'm not a specialist.
	And I would say that, but I don't know.
	This is not my job. It's not my training.
	You need a team. You need medication.
	He may need physical evaluations.
	He may need MRIs.
	He may need nutrition analysis.
	He may need... Family history.
	There may be biological causes.
	There's just no way to know, as a friend, what's going on.
	I think it's important when it comes to mental health issues that we recognize what we can help people with, which is a pretty minor subset of things.
	When people are displaying severe forms of erratic behavior, possible schizophrenia, sociopathy, suicidality, And abusive behavior, of course, right?
	I mean, if somebody comes to you and says, my husband is beating me, it's like, well, that's kind of like cancer, so you better go see a specialist because I can't help you with that, right?
	I mean, I can't solve that problem for you.
	And you can't get sucked in, right?
	Because one of the dangers of people who have these kinds of mental illnesses, which doesn't so much occur, of course, with people who've got mere physical ailments, is that they can totally suck you dry.
	They can invade your life.
	They can make you obsessive.
	They're very, very difficult and dangerous people to treat, and that's why you kind of need a professional environment.
	You need training. The other thing, of course, is that it may be worth you looking into this kind of stuff, and you can buy, I'm sure, books on establishing boundaries when you're in a helping profession, because this may not be the last time that this occurs for you.
	Of course, prevention is far better than cure in this sort of situation.
	If somebody comes to you and says, I'm suicidal.
	Then, of course, you can treat that exactly as if somebody comes to you and says, I think I have heart disease.
	You say, well, that's tough.
	You should really go and see a specialist about that.
	I'm certainly no specialist, so I can't help you with that.
	But I think that it's very important to respect the intransigent, difficult, and manipulative nature of certain forms of mental illness so that you don't get into this kind of situation again.
	Okay. Thanks.
	You're very welcome. Let us know what happens.
	Yeah, definitely. Thanks a lot.
	All right. Well, thanks so much.
	I appreciate that. If somebody else has other questions, certainly happy to take any other questions, issues, comments, problems, complaints, song suggestions.
	All of Les Mis is coming up for Podcast 1000.
	Whatever it is that we...
	Whatever...
	Somebody says, boy, am I glad my parents got horny in North America.
	You know, I think you can actually get Hallmark cards which have that exact same sentiment.
	Thank you for banging each other in the West.
	I think that's a beautiful sentiment.
	Just looking to see if anybody else, we don't have to have a crushingly long show today.
	No problem. We can have a shorter one if people don't have any other sort of questions.
	It's not like people are short of free-domain radio material, so that's not such a big problem.
	Let me know. I think that we do not have new people who are dying to talk.
	Have I listened to this Queen song?
	Hey, if it's a Queen song, baby, I've already probably have like 16 million versions of it, both album and live.
	Oh, I love that song.
	Well, we actually went to see the musical We Will Rock You.
	I went to see it. Christina was more dragged in a burlap sack.
	Actually, she did buy the ticket.
	She's the best wife ever. The new lead singer of Queen, oh yeah, Paul Rogers.
	I saw them on tour as well. It was just fantastic.
	It's a Kind of Magic is a wonderful song and they do a great job of it.
	I think it was this huge black woman with this incredible mohawk orange afro that I was instantly jealous of.
	Just did a magnificent version of that song.
	It's a very, very tough song to sing.
	Freddie Mercury Of course, to me, don't get me started, Freddie Mercury has the most astounding voice that I've ever heard.
	The man can sing absolutely anything with the most astonishing purity and brilliance, and the range is just astounding.
	There's a great line that says, this rage that lasts a thousand years will soon be gone.
	As we talked about recently in the podcast, I am not interested in setting my sights anywhere but on the highest and greatest prize, which is an alteration of the Course of the planet to a more benevolent and helpful future.
	Why not? You know, why not?
	Life is short. Let's live it while we can and aim our sights as high as we can.
	Because I think the higher the aim, the greater the achievement.
	I mean, in a sense, if you think you can jump six inches, you can jump six inches.
	But if you think you can jump to Alpha Centauri, you probably end up in Betelgeuse.
	So there's my minor knowledge of astronomy floating around there.
	All right. Let's put Mr.
	G on. Do you have a mic there?
	I think he's running some non-Windows operating system, which probably doesn't actually allow him to have a mic.
	Sure. Pick on the Mac, guys.
	Take pot shots at the Mac, guys.
	That's fine. Yeah, the Apple.
	I've had already three comments.
	Greg was very kind to donate my video.
	My notebook fell off the computer desk while it was recording free domain radio.
	So it died in the service of a noble cause.
	And Greg very kindly sent me one that he wasn't using where he's taped a big Apple over the Dell symbol.
	So I look. I think it's, I mean, other than Christina, it's the thing that adds most to my cool factor, which starts mostly negative around Kelvin.
	So go ahead. Well, this actually came up on the boards this week.
	There's a poster asking about a comment you had made in a podcast about how if you hate somebody, you're just naturally not going to want to confront them.
	He kind of objected to that saying that it seemed to him that those were the people he most wanted to confront and it occurred to me that maybe hatred doesn't necessarily have to include something like rage or anger Which to me is what drives you to want to confront people.
	It's either rage or anger that does that, right?
	And so if you hate somebody, why would you get angry at them, right?
	Why would you rage at them if they did something you didn't like, right?
	Because it would be kind of expected, right?
	Whereas if, say, you're talking to a friend that you really like or something like that, or you're out with a friend or whatever, and he does something you really don't like, you're going to get angry at him Because you like him, right?
	So I thought maybe, well then, hate doesn't necessarily have to include anger and rage the same way that love doesn't necessarily have to include passion, right? You could love ice cream, but you don't have to love it passionately, right?
	Right, what's that line from some Janine Garofalo movie?
	It's okay to love your pets, just don't love your pets.
	Truth about cats and dogs, that's right.
	That's the only funny bit in that whole damn film.
	That's a complicated set of questions, damn you.
	I'll spend just a second clarifying my point about that.
	If someone's doing something that's self-destructive and you have some relationship with them, if you I'm sorry, I'm trying to work a metaphor in here, but I don't think it's going to work, so I'll just try and sort of say it without a metaphor, much to the relief of everyone.
	God forbid. Right?
	No kidding. You know what not having a metaphor is like?
	It's like, no, I'm just kidding. But, um, desert, dry, anyway, ow, I'm goosed.
	But, um, uh, if, uh, if you have a friend, uh, or you have somebody you have a relationship with who's, who's, um, doing some self-destructive behavior of some kind, Clearly, you care about them more if you confront them and try to intervene with them in that behavior than if you don't.
	If you stage an intervention because they're going nuts on drugs and whatever, some sort of bad stuff.
	We've watched a little bit of the show Weeds and there's this suburban mom who gets She's sort of sucked into this underworld, not sucked into, racist after with both feet.
	She's obviously going into this sort of self-destructive behavior.
	She's confronting drug dealers who are aggressing against her and so on, right?
	So she's going down this really dangerous road.
	And of course, I mean, just because it's all illegal and she's not illegal and so on.
	If you care about somebody and you think, if somebody starts doing self-destructive behavior, then you say, well, one of two things is occurring.
	Either they don't really get that it's self-destructive, right?
	Like, you know, if Christina's not drinking again, then she'd either not know how detractive it was...
	What would happen is she would know that it was destructive and she'd just do it out of spite or whatever, right?
	Like when I don't get my cappuccino in the morning.
	Anyway, we don't have to get into all of that.
	It's a whole different discussion with real rage.
	But if Christina started drinking, then what I would do is I sort of, because I care about her, and of course I care about myself, my marriage, I'd sit down and say, not so much with the drinking maybe, let's talk about it, right?
	Whatever you need to do. And then one of two things would occur.
	Either Christina would say, well, yes, I love and trust you, BCF, and I appreciate you doing what you're doing, and I know it's going to be tough, but clearly I've slipped off the wagon a little here, and I should probably do something about it that's positive, right? So then that's good, right?
	But if she then sort of hurls the half...
	Drunken bottle of vodka, you know, at 7 o'clock in the morning at my head and something is, you bastard, you never want me to have any fun.
	Get out of here and take this Spanish guy's clothes with you or something like that, right?
	Then clearly, me helping her would, there's no way to help her, right?
	I mean, somebody has to sort of say that they want, that they recognize that there's something that's wrong that's going on and that they're willing to change and so on.
	So if you intervene with someone, so I would be angry at Christina's behavior.
	That doesn't mean that I'd sort of yell at her or anything, but anger would be like, this is not good for me.
	Anger is like the immune system of the mind.
	Anger is like, this is not good for me.
	Anger is sort of very helpful that way.
	And then that leads you to do something that is an intervention or a confrontation or whatever, because you care about the person, right?
	I don't go and stage confrontations with George Bush because I'd get shot, and also because what do I care really that much about George Bush compared to other people in my life?
	So if you confront someone on their bad behavior, then you're acting on caring for them.
	If you don't, sorry, if they then become hostile and aggressive, then you can kind of hate that person, I think.
	I mean, that sort of would seem to be a natural response because they're now attacking you for trying to help them or trying to do the right thing, trying to do the good thing by them.
	And that would seem to me to lead to a kind of hatred.
	Now, If you don't, and so when people attack you for trying to help them, then you don't try to help them anymore, and that is really the ultimate form of aggression, in a way.
	It's like, I'm no longer going to help you, right?
	Like, if you go to your doctor and he says, you're going to get sick if you keep smoking, you keep smoking, you keep smoking, at some point he's going to say, I'm not treating you anymore.
	Like, I'm not treating you for this emphysema and these problems you're getting from the smoking.
	That's kind of like, that's it, right?
	He's done, right?
	That's when you totally give up on someone.
	And that is kind of like the ultimate vengeance in a way, is not trying to help that person anymore.
	So I think, I mean, I know that's a bit of a sort of confused ramble about it, but that's sort of where I would say that you can get angry about it, someone.
	If someone reacts to the help that you generate out of that anger with rage, then you can end up hating that person.
	And then what you've got to do is get that person out of your life so that you don't get consumed With hatred and get stuck in that hatred.
	Hatred is like, anger is like, this is bad for me.
	Hatred is like, you are bad for me and you are bad for everyone.
	Get out of my life. And that's how we manage anger.
	We manage anger by acting to reduce the symptoms by confronting people.
	And then if they react to rage with us trying to help them, we manage our hatred in a positive way by getting the people who are attacking us out of our life.
	So we end up with less anger and less hatred.
	Right. It just seemed to me that, at least from that post on the board, that there seemed to be kind of a confusion between what exactly anger or rage is, What hatred is.
	There's the Yosemite Sam hatred, and then there's the icy cold kind of hatred, right?
	Russian hatred, yeah. Making me very angry!
	Right, and that's just it.
	That's not really hatred, that's anger.
	It's a completely different emotion.
	Right, right. I think, I mean, this is just my working definition and whatever, you can tell me what you think.
	Anchor is, you know, when your sort of interests, your rights, your whatever, whatever is important to you is violated, that's anger and that can be accidental and that can be on purpose and you don't know the difference until you confront or investigate or whatever, right? If an employee is stealing from you, or every time the employee leaves there's 50 bucks missing from the till, you're going to get angry, right?
	But if then the employee says, no, your wife said that I was going to get a raise and I could just take it from the till, and you go to your wife and she says, oh yes, I forgot to tell you, then you're not going to be angry.
	You might be angry at your wife or whatever, but the employee's behavior then becomes meaningful, right?
	But if you didn't feel anger at the fact that money was missing from your till, you wouldn't be motivated to confront and investigate and find out what was going on.
	So the anger there seems like, hey, I don't want money to be missing from my till.
	That's against my interests, right?
	That's not good for me, so I'm going to get angry about it.
	I'm going to go investigate it, right?
	Now, if your employee is stealing from you and your employee reacts by calling you an MF asshole or whatever, then he's reacting with rage.
	Rage is usually a false self-reaction to being confronted because rage is a hysterical overreaction when you feel bad or feel guilty and you're just trying to cover it up.
	There's always a too muchness in those kinds of reactions.
	Anger is a reaction to something that is harmful to your interests That is justly harmful to your interest.
	Rage is a hysterical reaction to being caught doing something wrong.
	Usually that's the rage that comes out.
	And I think it's perfectly just to feel hatred towards people who react with rage to being confronted in a just and appropriate manner.
	I was just trying to work this out in my head.
	I think hatred is a preference.
	You like something, you don't like something, you really like something, you really don't like something, you love something, you really hate something.
	It's a preference. Not you, darling.
	Oh, I love the color red.
	I hate the color green.
	I mean, very simple things, but I love cold weather.
	I hate the hot weather.
	So I think hatred is a preference, and anger is an emotion, and I think there's a distinction there between hatred and anger.
	And I haven't worked it out any further than that, so give me a few seconds and I'll see what I come up with.
	Oh, honey, just keep talking.
	I mean, that's what I do.
	And eventually people just sort of get tired of listening and say, fine, whatever.
	Maybe that's right. I don't know.
	I got to pee. Sometimes Greg even moves away from the desk when he has to do that.
	If you listen carefully.
	Sorry, go on. Greg, sorry to interrupt you for just one second.
	Sure. What kind of freaky-ass control-shift-escape thing is on this notebook that you sent me?
	Why am I not getting the Windows Task Manager but some freaky thing with way too many columns that looks like it's populated by shifting Egyptian hieroglyphics?
	What? Well, you know, like when you hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete in Windows, you get this Task Manager, or you hit Ctrl-Alt, sorry, Shift-Control-Escape, you get this Task Manager with a list of all the running processes.
	I'm used to, like, a nice, simple idiot interface from Windows, and this is, like, a 10-dimensional...
	I forgot to remove that.
	That's an advanced task manager.
	Did you hear how he used the word advanced there?
	What you mean is advanced from sheer computer illiteracy.
	That's what you mean. It doesn't have any pretty colors.
	Actually, it has a lot of colors. Well, it has a bunch of pretty colors, actually.
	Okay, just wondering. It's just an advanced task manager.
	It gives you more in-depth view of all the tasks running on your system and all the threads that are open and the dynamic libraries that are being accessed and the files that are open and all that kind of stuff.
	So you can... It's a way of fixing problems without having to hit control alt delete all the time.
	That's all. Excellent.
	Now I'm completely lost.
	Excellent. Hate as a preference.
	If that... If that works out, then you could say the same thing about love and passion, right?
	Passion would be the emotion, but love would be the preference.
	Right, and I think this goes back to what Steph says about love.
	Love is something that we can't will.
	I mean, it's a preference.
	I mean, you love someone for their virtues, but you can't...
	I mean, it's not an emotion, per se, like happiness.
	Happiness is the effect of love.
	That makes perfect sense, then.
	So, once you know...
	We're making too concise to Cordington's down.
	Come on, you get a milk bag for 20 minutes.
	It's easy. You got 12 podcasts out of that.
	You have a week.
	So, essentially, once you have kind of worked out what your...
	What your preferences are in terms of virtues, what it is that you like and don't like, honesty versus lying, that sort of thing, then it's just a natural step to go from there to assigning that to an individual Who displays those characteristics.
	So you prefer honesty, then you're going to prefer honest people.
	Correct. Okay.
	That makes sense.
	So then to feel either rage or anger or, on the other end of the spectrum, passion, those emotions would have to come from somewhere else then?
	I think the emotions are the effect of the...
	The preference?
	Yeah, of the preference.
	So, you know, when you're...
	See, and then anger is something different.
	Again, I mean, using the cognitive therapy model, the emotion is the effect of the interpretation of the situation.
	So if somebody does something or you're in a situation where something is occurring, how you interpret that situation will determine what your feeling is.
	Like the guy who steals the money for the film, he said that someone gave him a raise and didn't tell me.
	That I wasn't listening to.
	I don't know.
	But yeah, so I mean, anger, I think, again, it's an effect, and it's based on the interpretation that you have of a situation that's going on, and sometimes the interpretation is based on misinformation or misinterpretation, so that's where a rational appraisal of a situation is really, really important.
	Because the rational appraisal will help you identify what the appropriate emotions should be.
	They won't give you the right emotions.
	It will help you identify them as they should be.
	Yeah, and the other thing I'd mention is I don't think that you can choose, like in a totally voluntary way, like I'll flip a coin and it's honesty versus dishonesty.
	Like any more than you can say, I can eat, you know, this granola bar or this piece of wood, you know, flip a coin either way, right?
	I mean, I think that there are, like you can't love dishonesty.
	You can only value dishonesty because you're a liar yourself.
	Like, you know, then it's just like a sickness that's spreading like a virus.
	I think that there are rational values, like honesty, integrity, courage, whatever, that if we ourselves display them, we will attract others who display them.
	We will then be able to love other people in a stable and productive and positive way without enmeshment or fusion or addiction or all this kind of codependency or whatever, without two people hiding out, pretending to love each other, but it's just kind of like low self-esteem or a form of attachment disorder.
	So I would just, I think you seem to imply, I don't think that you really think this, but I think you seem to sort of mention that, you know, if I choose honesty versus not, but it's not a choice, right?
	We don't get to choose those attributes which will result in love or the potential for love for us any more than we get to choose what is healthy or not healthy for us to eat.
	So then, following that logic backward, are you saying then that You can't love dishonesty because it's impossible not to love reality or something like that.
	Well, yeah, there's that. There's that for sure.
	But even if I say to you, Greg, I love dishonesty, am I telling the truth?
	Good point. It's a basic logical contradiction.
	It's all back to the universally preferable behavior thing that we've been working with.
	If you say to you, I love you because you're dishonest, it's like, well, either I'm lying, in which case I don't love you, or I'm telling the truth, in which case dishonesty is not a value.
	But I would say that you can prefer dishonesty.
	But it's not love, no.
	I prefer dishonesty because it gets me some desirable end.
	So you're dishonest and I like that quality in you.
	Right, right. Absolutely.
	Absolutely. The way that a smoker likes a cigarette or, you know, whatever drug addict likes the drug or prefers the drug, but that's not the same as love, right?
	Love has to have... And I'm sort of working on a series of podcasts about this.
	I don't want to, you know, go...
	It's symmetry and unity and so on and all that kind of...
	There's some attributes that sort of...
	But basic logic is something that has to be involved in love, right?
	I mean, in the same way that basic logic has to be involved in nutrition.
	The same would have to be true then with hatred.
	In what way? As the opposite side of that coin, right?
	Sure. If you love honesty, you're going to dislike or hate dishonesty.
	Right. I mean, there is this, and I don't know where it comes from, probably from religion, right?
	Religion divides the psyche into God and devil, right?
	And there's man sort of as the ego in the middle, right?
	The superego is God and it is devil and man is like the sort of pathetic ego in the middle.
	But what religion does, and parents do this too, right?
	They divide the emotions into good and bad, right?
	Which is as crazy as a doctor saying pain is bad and lack of pain is good.
	It's like, no, they're both essential to health, right?
	Are you... You need pain to tell you that something's wrong, so you've got to get fixed, whatever, right?
	But religion sort of says, well, God's emotions, whatever they're ascribed as, and it depends whether you're an Old Testament nutjob or a New Testament nutjob, which sort of emotions you ascribe, whether it's that dewy-eyed, weeping-on-your-shoulder, compassionate, hippie Jesus, or whether it's like that raging sociopath in the sky from the Old Testament.
	But there are those good emotions, right?
	And then there are those bad emotions.
	And that is something that people get really messed up in.
	They think they can have the good emotions, like love, without having what they call the bad emotions, like hatred.
	Which is crazy. I mean, you can't have a feeling of well-being without a feeling of pain.
	Because if you don't have a feeling of pain, you'd never make it to be an adult.
	You'd die, right? Because you wouldn't know you had a toothache.
	You wouldn't know. You'd just die.
	You'd never make it to a feeling of good health, right?
	So you can't slice and dice the emotions into the good and bad.
	And people always say, well, I want to rise above hatred.
	Like, I want to be filled with love in this Buddhist sort of, I've amputated myself below the waist and now I can dance the ballet kind of thing.
	They just want to get involved in this Buddhist stuff or rise above it, you know, take the high road, only feel love, never feel hatred.
	And that's just deranged and it's completely mentally unhealthy.
	Right. I'm still kind of I'm stuck on whether that's actually a preference or an emotion or whether that's involuntary or voluntary.
	I'm not sure where you were going with that.
	I'm sorry, and I'm not sure when you say it, what you're referring to, Greg.
	Well, love and hate. Because you say love and hate are a preference.
	And your emotions arise as an effect from those preferences.
	He says love and hate are emotions.
	I'm trying to determine what...
	Okay, so what are you trying to determine?
	So how can I clarify?
	I guess I'm trying to figure out...
	I'm just trying to sort out that confusion.
	If they are emotions, then could other emotions still be an effect of them?
	But if their preference is like you just naturally prefer warm weather to cold weather or chocolate to vanilla or what have you, and your emotions arise from that as an effect, like somebody's trying to make me eat chocolate ice cream and it's making me very upset, right?
	Right. So, the end result of that is, though, well, actually, now that I think of it, then...
	Honey, don't say anything.
	He's about to fix it himself.
	Shh. Well, and actually, that's kind of a...
	If we look at the podcast that you and Steph did about your reluctance to join in the podcast, then your reaction maybe could actually have been completely justified.
	If you prefer vanilla and he's trying to make you eat chocolate, you're going to get upset.
	That could very well be right, but there may have been other factors which I wasn't aware of or which, you know, when I said you have to have a rational appraisal of the situation before you can come to a conclusion, maybe there were factors that I wasn't considering.
	Okay. So my conclusion may not have been correct.
	So there are times when we should prefer chocolate over vanilla.
	We should always be rational.
	Okay. You know, if you've evaluated all the facts and you just don't like chocolate, and you've tried bittersweet chocolate, and you've tried dark chocolate, and mint chocolate, and orange-flavored chocolate, and you're not allergic or whatever, and you just don't like that damn cocoa, then you don't like chocolate.
	And anyone trying to make you eat chocolate, you're going to get upset at it.
	Right. But that wouldn't be rational because you haven't actually tried it.
	You're just making an assumption.
	Yeah, exactly. That's irrational.
	Now, just because you dislike chocolate doesn't mean that you have anger.
	You just don't like chocolate.
	And you can dislike it a lot.
	You can just say, you know what? It just makes me want to puke whenever I eat it.
	And that could be an extreme form of dislike.
	Maybe even I hate it. I just absolutely hate it.
	Now, does that mean that you're angry at it?
	No. Not at the chocolate.
	No, certainly not. Right.
	But just to return it slightly from food talk that's making me hungry to the realm of ethics, right?
	Because, you know, I'm going to have to eat my own foot here.
	I tell you, there's no better exercise, just by the by, no better exercise than these shows because I pace back and forth.
	It's like that line from Will and Grace, you know, like my calf looks like my knee ate a grapefruit.
	But the difference is that chocolate is not malevolent, right?
	Chocolate is sort of inert, right?
	So... We can ascribe motives to people irrationally.
	If our doctor says, you've got to quit smoking the crack, you've got to say, that honky asshole, he's just mean to me.
	He just doesn't want me to have any fun.
	Then you're going to feel angry at him, or maybe you'll even hate him.
	But if you sort of get that your doctor is just saying, if you want to live and be healthy, you should stop smoking the crack, then you may sort of be upset, but you're not going to be angry at the doctor.
	It's all around your interpretation, right?
	And when we're kids, you know, like if her mom says, no more cookies, right?
	You'd be like, man, she never lets me have any fun.
	You know, every time I try and have any fun, she just like takes it away.
	She's so mean and this and that, right?
	which is much more appropriate to marriage than it is to stuff with parents.
	But, I mean, that's an immature interpretation, and kids do have that, right?
	Because they take everything personally, right, in a lot of ways.
	Sure.
	So, you know, it's like if your kid wants to run outside, and it's like a blazing hot day, and it's the first day, and you're like, I need to put some sunscreen on you.
	It's like, oh, man, Mom, she's such a worrywart.
	She never wants me to have any fun, blah, blah, blah.
	She's making me wait for five minutes before I go out.
	She's so mean and this and that, right?
	But as you get older, you're like, well, I'm glad not to be dead of skin cancer or something like that, right?
	By the by, look into this vitamin D stuff.
	There was an interesting article in the paper this weekend about how vitamin D is four times more important for preventing cancer than quitting smoking.
	But anyway, we're going to get some sunshine, right?
	Apparently, it's good for you again. It depends on your interpretation of people's motives.
	This is why I keep saying to people that the way out of the cage of false relationships is through the middle.
	To go back to the earlier conversation we had about the gentleman who's having drinks with his friends and feels very inhibited and fearful about talking about philosophy, the reason that he doesn't want to bring it up is he knows their motives deep down, which is they're anti-thought, anti-reality, anti-truth, Anti-him, right?
	Anti-his values, right?
	So he wants to obscure their motives by not talking, right?
	Because he really knows their motives.
	So he knows enough to avoid the topic because he doesn't want to find out what they're really like, right?
	I mean, that to me is perfectly clear.
	But of course, I'll totally bow to empirical evidence and maybe when he gets through to them, they'll become the biggest philosophy club in the world.
	But I think based on your experiences with philosophy, my friend, and philosophy clubs...
	That doesn't really seem to happen.
	People just like to talk about it.
	They don't actually want to examine it in any rational detail.
	It really just has a lot to do with understanding people's motives.
	People say, well, I have great friends.
	I just can't talk about what I really love with them.
	It's like, well, then you need to talk about what you really love with them.
	You can figure out their motives.
	You can eliminate One, uncertainty from your evaluation, right?
	So people say, oh, I'm not that close to my dad, but I think we're really close deep down or whatever.
	It's like, well, then go talk to him about what's important to you and find out.
	People don't just, that's all I do with the family is be empirical, right?
	I mean, if you say that you have a great family, then tell me about your family history.
	And if it's full of, you know, abuse and violence or neglect or indifference or rejection of your values, then there's empirical evidence to the contrary, right?
	Yeah. And so this is what philosophy and particularly the psychological approach that Christina has graced us with, which is just go find out the facts, right?
	And once you find out the facts, if you don't confront people, you never find out the facts, right?
	Like if you think that your employee is stealing from you and you seethe and you never confront him, then you're going to get stuck in that seething and you're never going to trust the guy and then you're going to hate yourself and not confront him.
	It's all just a mess, right?
	Just go get the facts and then you can make a rational decision and then you can hate with informed consent, I guess, Well, then I guess maybe love and hate actually do qualify as emotions, just as maybe in a different category than something like anger or passion.
	I think that passion is just a strong emotion.
	Emotions is not a definition we have to make up.
	Emotion is simply a thought state that results in a biochemical change.
	Emotions are just biological stuff.
	You can simulate emotions in people by injecting the right Biochemical hormones and, you know, various things in them, right?
	You can make people angry by giving them lots of steroids, right?
	You can make people feel loved by stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain.
	So, I mean, emotions are just biochemical responses but they're biochemical responses to particular thought patterns and it's important that we get as much evidence to validate those thought patterns so that we know we're bouncing off reality and not just thought patterns that were inflicted upon us when we were children.
	Okay. I think I can live with that for now.
	I'm still not quite sure how at all.
	Another victory through mutual exhaustion.
	Yay! You know, it's like we're carrying this 80-pound pack, and it's like, you know what?
	I can't take another frickin' step forward.
	It's like, hey, this looks like a great site for a campground.
	Let's stay here.
	Let's pretend it's a choice.
	Once a week, pack it all up and try to carry it another foot.
	Exactly. All right. Well, let's just cast it back out there.
	Thanks so much. That was excellent, excellent questions.
	Let's just pass it back out there.
	If anybody else has any other questions, we can close it off now, or we can take one more question if anyone has any.
	Silence greets the opportunity.
	No problem. Listen, thanks everyone so much for coming by this beautiful, beautiful Sunday afternoon.
	I just want to mention as well that we may have some downtime with the Free Domain Radio server.
	We're still looking at it. For some reason, this cheap pass, although it wasn't actually that cheap, this server that we've got has only 384 megs of RAM. With asking it to run all the podcast downloads, hundreds of thousands of those, plus the board, plus the website, plus the Free Domain Radio email server, and so on, especially with all these additional people who've come by from StumbleUpon.
	It's proving to be a bit of a challenge, so I'm going to have to lay out some cashola for a dedicated server rather than having one of these virtual servers that's capped out at 384 megs of RAM with operating system.
	Not so good. Anyway, just want to mention that.
	Donations would be welcome, and also that I'm going to work an extra couple of days to generate some cash for that as well.
	No problemo.
	Steph, I have a proposition for you about that, by the way.
	Oh yes, actually, Greg, thanks so much for the email.
	Greg has actually offered to be a wetware server for Free Domain Radio.
	Electrodes directly up the nose, and Greg's brain is going to actually operate everything, which I think is going to be pretty trippy for all of us.
	Johnny Menomik, yeah, that's right.
	Okay, yes, we will chat after the show about the future.
	So yes, thank you so much everybody for coming by and for listening.
	Thank you again for the generous donations that have come in.
	Lo, these last three weeks, I guess, since we came back from vacation.
	And I really, really appreciate it.
	And we will talk to you all next Sunday where I will be doing the entire show in an entirely liberated, highly gay falsetto.
	So thanks so much again.

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