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June 3, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:22:12

781 Sunday Call In Show June 3 2007

The role of passion in truth, are politicians evil, and warding off corruption with lawsuits!

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	Alright, everyone, thank you so much for joining Freedom and Radio live chat, June the 3rd, 2007, Sunday, 4.07 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time. And I wanted to start just with a...
	I actually recorded this as a short podcast, but it was a 12-minute podcast, which means I can probably do it again in only about 38.
	But... It is the idea about how to approach conflict in your life when it seems to be escalating, and it's something that I've used and found to be quite helpful, so this might be something that will be of use to you as well.
	There was a conflict that was going on with regards to, I think it started around the realm of Muslims and enemies and free will and being raised in dictatorships and so on, and it escalated pretty rapidly.
	To the point where one guy was saying, you know, oh, so now you're calling me somebody who advocates murder and you're a liar and this and that.
	And it sort of escalated in that way.
	And I certainly think that that was really quite close to becoming abusive.
	So I sort of threw something in there, which I'll expand upon briefly here.
	And you can let me know what you think about this or any other topic as we move forward.
	When you feel...
	If you put yourself in the position where you feel...
	that somebody is either misunderstanding in an involuntary way or mischaracterizing either in an unconscious or a conscious manner your position there's a suggestion that I sort of like to put out there which if you try I can almost guarantee is going to be more positive than the kind of escalation that occasionally occurs on the boards And what I would suggest is something like this,
	right? So if basically somebody says something to you that you feel is either a misunderstanding or a mischaracterization, and it's important that you don't know, if you're absolutely sure that the person is just mischaracterizing your perspective,
	your argument... In other words, if I say to someone, I don't believe in the initiation of the use of force and give them an explanation of that, and then they say, oh, so if somebody were to invade your house, you'd just hand over your wife and you'd roll over and go back to sleep?
	Well, clearly, that's somebody who's not really interested in pursuing a rational debate.
	And I know it's taunting and I know it's irritating and so on, but that feeling of irritation is very, very helpful.
	So in that case, you simply say, well, I don't think that we're going to be on the same page with regards to this discussion, so I'm going to bow out, right?
	And just don't go back, right?
	I mean, that's not somebody who's interested in truth.
	That's somebody who's just interested in stirring up trouble and having an impact on you because...
	They feel invisible and empty unless they're making people angry because they themselves were hurt, but they don't know it, and all that kind of stuff, right?
	So this has nothing to do with the pursuit of truth.
	You need a certain amount of emotional maturity and a not inconsiderable amount of emotional maturity to really try to pursue the truth.
	So if somebody is willfully mischaracterizing your perspective, then just don't engage, right?
	Don't engage, don't get involved.
	In the debate at all, because that's clear, right?
	But if you're not sure whether the person is mischaracterizing, consciously or unconsciously, or whether they're just misunderstanding or whatever, then what you can do is you can say the following.
	And I don't think this is manipulative.
	You can certainly tell me if you think it is.
	The spelling, actual correct spelling, is na-na-na-na-boo-boo, and I'm not sure exactly how that is spelled.
	Some of it's hieroglyphics, and I think there's a little finger at the end.
	If you were to translate that into regular old debate speak, it would be something like this.
	I'm going to withdraw from this debate, you can say, because I feel that my arguments are either being mischaracterized, misinterpreted or misunderstood or something like that.
	So I'm going to withdraw from the debate.
	And if the person has just genuinely misunderstood your position, Then it's very likely that the person is going to say, oh, I'm so sorry, I really did think that you meant X, Y, and Z. You're going to get a polite, civilized, tempered response, measured response to that particular situation.
	If you say, look, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to withdraw from this debate because I kind of feel like my position is being mischaracterized or misrepresented or misunderstood and so on, and I don't know how to make it more clear, if the person then comes back And says, well,
	screw you, good riddance, or only a dumb hick wouldn't understand what it is that I'm saying, blah, blah, blah, rather than a polite, measured, civilized response, then what you've done is you've proven the point, right? We always want to work with empirical evidence, not with our own thoughts alone.
	We want to work with empirical evidence.
	So if you say to somebody, I feel this, I don't know, mischaracterized or misunderstood or whatever, so I don't want to continue in this debate.
	Well, that's true, right? Because certainly you don't in the current sort of escalation of emotional volatility.
	And what happens is, in the face of that, somebody's either going to come back with a reasonable response or is going to come back with an attack.
	If they have abandonment issues, or if they have rejection issues, or if they have anger issues, or if they have mommy issues, or daddy issues, or llama issues, I don't know, then the moment that you say, I'm not going to participate, like I'm not going to play with you, then the odds are very high that they're going to attack you.
	Which means you now have evidence that saves you time.
	So if you don't know, I mean, if you know, just withdraw.
	But if you don't know, just be honest and say, I don't really want to continue this because of X, Y, and Z. If they then say, gee, I'm so sorry, I didn't blah, blah, blah, then yeah, maybe you can continue.
	Maybe you can't, but at least you're not doing something unjust by just sort of leaving the debate.
	But if the person responds in an angry fashion and then blames you or attacks you, then You have confirmed that it is the right thing to do.
	You're now working with empirical evidence that it's the right thing to do.
	Now, of course, then people will say, oh, so you're trying to trap me, you didn't really mean it, and blah, blah, blah.
	Well, that's just another good reason to be even further away from that person, right?
	I mean, those kinds of defensive holes have no bottom, right?
	So, I just sort of wanted to put that out there, that when you find things are escalating, Don't dig in.
	Don't engage. Don't grab.
	Don't go down with the ship.
	Just be open and be honest.
	And there's a certain kind of vulnerability in that.
	Say, well, I feel that this debate is becoming confusing.
	I don't exactly know what's going on, but I'm not really enjoying it.
	I'm not really enjoying it.
	Debates should be enjoyable.
	I mean, few if any of us are getting paid for this, right?
	So this debate is supposed to be enjoyable.
	It's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be stimulating.
	And I've got to tell you, I've had a great time on the board this last week, and I really, really do appreciate the intense good humor and positivity that people have brought to board conversations this week.
	So I just wanted to point that out as a positive.
	But, you know, if you're not enjoying it, you just say, uh, hey.
	Me, enjoyment, not so much.
	Not even in the same hemisphere.
	And it's just honesty, right? Just saying, I'm not enjoying it.
	You're not blaming somebody, you're not attacking them, you're not saying it's their fault, and see how they respond to that.
	And that's the important thing about being honest and vulnerable, is you get to see how people respond to it.
	If you get testy, if you start name calling, if you escalate, then you don't know if you're the problem or the other person is the problem.
	You don't really learn anything from it.
	You have to reduce the variables, right?
	Which means if somebody's going to be a jerk, it shouldn't be you first, right?
	Because that complicates the variables, then you don't know what's going on.
	So I just sort of wanted to put that out there as a very brief possible way of looking at dealing with conflicts.
	It's worthwhile doing on the board, of course, but even more importantly, just to sort of do it in your real life.
	That would be very helpful, right? Honesty is, you know, most times the best policy, and the first virtue is generally honesty, which always involves vulnerability.
	And that's why you say, I feel that I'm not enjoying it, or I'm not enjoying it.
	Because nobody can debate you on that, right?
	Nobody can tell you you are enjoying something that you're not.
	I just wanted to point that out as a possibility.
	And did we have questions from the question people?
	Moral culpability and choice.
	Yes.
	Voters versus politicians.
	The ignorant versus the recalcitrant.
	Right, right. I mean, I think that's a very interesting topic.
	If anybody has a question that they wanted to ask beforehand, I would be certainly happy to debate that or to answer any questions that you might have if you want to click on request mic.
	Okay.
	Steph, care to chat about the animus mess with the child abuse?
	I certainly would be happy to do that.
	I was thinking of doing a podcast as a whole on that, but I certainly would be happy to if there is.
	But I think I'd rather do that with the text in front of me just so I'm not mischaracterizing what this person said.
	said, so I think I'll do that as a podcast, and I may also do that as a videocast as well so that I can hit the UbiVon UbiTubers as well.
	In a discussion with my brother last night, getting the bad people out of your life is no more difficult than shifting your time and effort to putting good people in your life.
	Thank you.
	That's so very true. But what does he mean?
	No, really, I don't know. Well, I think he said he was having a discussion with his brother last night and this was a conversation that they were having and perhaps we may have some comments about that.
	But I still don't know what that means.
	I really don't understand it.
	Oh, because I could just make up stuff around that, too.
	And I agree with you, Rod.
	The anima stuff was truly disturbing.
	It was the most corrupt and vicious kind of subjectivism in action that I have certainly seen for quite a long time.
	And, you know, good riddance to that person.
	Ah, okay. This could be...
	I'm just watching this great types up here.
	This could be some of the issue that's going around around the question of defooing, which is to get...
	If your family of origin is not adding pleasure to your life and you've tried to talk about your needs and they've been rejected and you can't make it work in a happy way, then you drop them.
	Kick them to the curb. Drop them like a bad habit and...
	A lot of people then say, well, but we're social animals, and I'm going to get rid of everyone in my life, and blah, blah, blah, and there's a certain amount of fear at that.
	But as I talked about in How Not to Take Your Issues Out on Others Part 2, and again, thanks to the very brave listener who subjected themselves to my death psychology approach, that's not the future that you're afraid of, right?
	I mean, it's very important to reorient yourself.
	If you are getting bad people out of your life, and you are very frightened of being alone, well, you know, we're not really that frightened of the unknown.
	We're frightened of the unknown when we project past fears and past unpleasantness onto it.
	So, when we look at getting the bad people out of our life, and we feel like, oh my god, that's going to be so solitary, we're social animals, I have to, I'm going to be lonely, blah, blah, blah.
	Well, that's the past.
	That's not the future.
	That's not the future.
	You do know that when you have bad people in your life, That you're lonely.
	You do know, deep down, that the illusion of companionship is worse than being alone.
	You've experienced that for decades.
	You know what that solitary life is like with the added emptiness of faking it.
	Having no one in your life, let's just say.
	At least you yourself. Having bad people in your life who reject, scorn, belittle, diminish who you are, you don't get them and you don't get you.
	That's emptiness. And that's real loneliness.
	That's non-existence. So when people talk about, well, if I get the bad people out of my life, I'll be alone, they say, well, that's not the future.
	You've been worse than alone.
	You've been empty. You've been worse than alone.
	You've been empty. And once you get how horrifying it is to fake it with people and have to bite back your tongue and have to grit your teeth and have to pretend not to yawn if they're boring and have to nod and smile tightly to opinions that you know are nonsense because you're afraid of being attacked and having to empty out your mind and flush out your heart,
	as if it were a piece of wood so that you don't accidentally say anything that might be true or deep or revealing or important or spontaneous about you once you're in that empty straitjacket of fearful and bullied conformity once you get how awful that is the fears of the future mean nothing they won't mean anything to you there will be no fear of the future You will then feel a fear of the future equivalent to a man trapped in a burning building who finally claws his way out,
	runs across a field and maybe trips a little.
	You don't stay in the burning house because you might trip on exiting.
	And once you get that the house is burning, the urge to run, the urge to get out, to survive, to flee, will be so intense That nothing will stop you.
	That you will not take a million dollars for one more dinner with these people.
	There is no amount of money that would put me back across the dinner table with my mother.
	None! Unless donations dry up.
	Then 50 bucks.
	But no more, no less, no less.
	Right, so when people say, well I'm afraid of leaving the bad people behind because I'll be lonely, I just know that they don't know that they're bad people yet.
	To take a ridiculously extreme example, if you're a hitman and you say, well, I don't know if I want to quit being a hitman because I don't know if I'm going to get a really good job after I quit being a hitman.
	Like, I'm going to know that you don't really get the ethics of the situation and the reality of the situation.
	Once you say, I am going to throw up if I pick up a gun again, I'm going to vomit.
	I'm going to have a panic attack and I'm going to faint.
	If I pick up a gun again, I'm going to shoot myself.
	Then there really isn't going to be a whole lot of worry about what your career is going to be after you stop being a hitman.
	Right? So it's an excuse.
	And there's nothing wrong with it as an excuse.
	I don't mean this to be any sort of, right, attacker.
	It just is. Once you get what it's costing you to have bad people in your life, once you get how much it empties out your heart and crushes your capacity for love and self-respect and self-esteem, and once you realize if you have children, what having bad grandparents around does to your relationship to your children and their respect for you,
	and their respect for your ability to protect them, which is your job, Once your inner self, your vulnerable self, once you get how you look to your inner child when you continue to expose it to abuse and what harm that does to your personality.
	Once you continue to expose it to emptiness, boredom, frustration, inhibition.
	Once you really get what it costs you to have bad people in your life, I could not pay you any money to spend time with them.
	Any more than I can talk a man into running back for no reason into a burning building.
	Assuming he wants to live.
	That's the perspective from the other side of it.
	That's what you get when you've seen it clearly.
	And it just means that your cost-benefit, you've still got to keep working on it.
	You've still got to keep working out the cost-benefit.
	The last thing I'll say about that is it's not your loneliness that you fear.
	There's two projections that are occurring.
	You're projecting the past emptiness onto the future and When those around us don't feel stuff, we feel it double or triple or ten times.
	The loneliness and the sadness and the emptiness and the fear that you feel if you're thinking of getting rid of your parents is not yours.
	It's theirs.
	It's their feeling.
	It's their fear.
	It's their emptiness. You have everything to gain from getting bad people out of...
	As a good person, you have everything to gain from getting bad people out of your life.
	As a bad person, it is hell on earth when good people leave you behind.
	Because it confirms all your worst fears and suspicions.
	It provokes your conscience.
	What we do is we lie like a stupid band-aid across the sucking chest wound of our parents' conscience.
	That's our job. To prop up the dead.
	We hold up mannequins, move their arms, and pretend that they walk, and that's our sentence.
	It's not our job.
	It's not our destiny.
	It's not our purpose.
	Brings us no pleasure.
	Enslaves us to the empty.
	Costs us love. Costs us self-respect.
	Costs us the respect of our children.
	Costs us efficacy in our life and in our career.
	And for what? Right?
	There is no reward. There is no reward other than the avoidance of short-term pain, which is not even ours to begin with.
	Every day that we have dinner with people we despise, we do not get that back later.
	You're just setting fire to the days of your life, one by one.
	They don't stack up at the end.
	You don't get an eternal reward.
	Every hour of your finite and shrinking lifespan that you spend with people you don't love and respect and admire is simply evacuated from reality, never comes back.
	In fact, I would suggest, since I think joy is essential for health, that it shortens your life.
	To be unhappy. It's lose, lose, lose, lose, lose for everyone except the false self of the bad people.
	And that's the gods we kneel before, and it's time to stop.
	Were there any other questions about this?
	Thank you.
	Oh, the YouTube topic was around this user that we had named Animus, who came in and talked about child abuse that he knew of and the resulting debacle, which was fairly inevitable.
	There was nothing that could be done to avert it, but I'm glad that it got lanced pretty quickly.
	That was the topic that came up a little bit earlier.
	Oh, thank you. As far as responsibility and this and that goes, we've talked about it before.
	I'll just touch on it very briefly, and then if anybody has any questions, just click on Request Mike, and the lovely and talented wife will cut me off.
	She is one, two. Well, in the absence of knowledge, there's not much responsibility, in my view.
	I'm not going to say this is all syllogistically proven, but...
	We don't say that somebody is ignorant in the Dark Ages because they thought the world was flat.
	This is not ignorance because you can't expect somebody to be Archimedes and Kepler and Galileo and Copernicus all rolled into one and reinvent science and planetary motion and understand that problems in the Ptolemaic system and Scan and figure out retrograde motion from Mars.
	You can't expect somebody to do all of that in one lifetime.
	They're not ignorant if they don't know that.
	Because the knowledge doesn't exist if they can't invent it themselves.
	But somebody now who thinks that the world is flat, who's part of the flat Earth society, is ignorant.
	This is just ignorant.
	So when the knowledge doesn't exist, I don't think that people are morally culpable myself.
	The very first libertarian who tried a political solution, who thought that the best way to reduce the power of religion, so to speak, was to become a priest or to vote for a priest.
	Well, I mean, you could say that there was a failure in principle, but certainly it's not something that you could chastise for not understanding the effect of this kind of nonsense.
	Somebody who thought that you can cripple the power of the state by begging someone to set you free Can be excused, at least not for understanding that it doesn't work.
	You know what Ron Paul, just by the by, what Ron Paul is suggesting is still a far larger government than even somebody like Herbert Hoover was suggesting.
	In many ways, it's still a far larger government than what Richard Nixon was proposing.
	Richard Nixon brought the EPA and OSHA and all that into existence.
	I don't know that Ron Paul has specifically addressed eliminating that.
	And boy, you just can't find any suggestions from Ron Paul about healthcare on his website.
	But nonetheless, what Ron Paul is suggesting as actionable items to reduce the government will not even roll it back 30 years.
	And Richard Nixon was...
	Unable to restrain government.
	Herbert Hoover, we all know this, right?
	So now that there's evidence, though, I think that there's more responsibility to do this, to understand this, to know this.
	That's why I would never have attacked Christians as vociferously as I do 30 years ago.
	And I didn't 20 years ago.
	I didn't. Because it took time to find a book which listed all the contradictions in the Bible and all the inaccuracies and so on.
	And people didn't have time.
	It was hard. It was complicated.
	It took a lot of reading to a lot of time.
	You know, go to Google, type in Bible or biblical inaccuracies.
	You get six million sites.
	Right? How long does it take to find evilbible.com?
	This information is so available now that it has wildly expanded the moral responsibility of people.
	Now, you have to hide from the truth.
	You have to actively avoid it.
	It is so instantaneously available.
	I mean, if we say that a Christian in the 12th century, when there was no Bible in the Vulgate, in the common tongue, before Luther, When you went to the Masses, and it was all done in Latin, which you didn't understand.
	You couldn't read ancient Aramaic.
	You couldn't read ancient Greek.
	So you didn't know what the hell was in the Bible other than what people told you.
	And you faced getting burned at the stake if you questioned a damn thing.
	Well, those people have all the sympathy in the world for me.
	What a nightmare existence that would have been.
	Can't get the facts. Can't get the truth.
	Don't speak the language.
	You get killed for even asking a question.
	That's pretty bad, right?
	That's a pretty bad existence.
	And I don't hold a single non-priest Christian there culpable for professing faith.
	I would. I would be the first on my knees, right?
	Oh, burned at the stake?
	Hallelujah, praise Jesus, I'm in.
	Take me down for an even dozen.
	Any more gods? Stack them up.
	Put them on the tray. I'll take them.
	But now, but now, knowledge is there, instantly available, clearly laid out, well backed up, easily understood, and no punishments, no punishments for Understanding and expressing the truth.
	I'm not in jail. You're not in jail.
	No punishments.
	So Christians now are willfully ignorant.
	Christians now have moved way beyond a state of nature.
	Christians are actively, willfully, malevolently, cowardly ignorant.
	And I can tell you this with great authority based on the I don't know how many emails I get from Christians asking me to prove that the Bible and Jesus says that I should be put to death.
	And I send it back and I never hear from them again.
	I have not once since I was 20 ever heard an apology from a Christian for his or her believing in a book that wants me dead.
	Not once! So, yeah.
	That is...
	And I couldn't even imagine how many people that is.
	Not once. Not one apology.
	Not one recantation.
	Not one doubt.
	They ask the questions, you give them the answers, they will it away.
	Well... That's different.
	Now they're a doctor that knows what you're supposed to prescribe for a certain illness and they continue to prescribe what is dangerous and they've been given the proof and they've seen the tests and they've had the double-blind experiments and they've seen the numbers and they even know the numbers of the cure that they prescribe and what it does to people.
	You don't have to be a good doctor.
	You don't have to prescribe penicillin in the 14th century to be a good doctor because it didn't exist.
	But now If you don't prescribe penicillin for an infection, then antibiotics, then you're a killer, right?
	You're a killer. So, yeah, I mean, that's why I try and spread knowledge, right?
	And the first time I'm as positive as possible, and then after that, after that, as we saw with the animus thing, right, I'll get pretty angry and pretty steadfast pretty quickly because once I get that people are jerking me around with the truth and just making stuff up to...
	Justify themselves and that they understand morality because they use it, but the moment that they're asked to be consistent, they attack or run away.
	I have no mercy.
	I have no mercy.
	I am out to get these people.
	I am out to get these people.
	There are enemies in the world and I don't want to sound apocalyptic and I don't want to sound like it's us versus them, but you know what?
	It's us versus them.
	And once people reveal themselves, to me at least, and everyone has their own choice about how to deal with this, but once people reveal themselves to me, as people who are trying to use philosophy to dominate as people who are trying to use philosophy to dominate others, I feel as vengeful as six million harpies on cocaine.
	And I want to get them, and I want to attack them, and I want to drive them away.
	Philosophers have been attacked for thousands of years.
	And I think that the Gandhi, Zen, Socrates, rise above it thing, I'm sick of it.
	I'm tired of it. It's not going to work for me.
	And I don't think it's going to work for the world.
	I think it's time that we were stronger, more comfortable with being angry, not abusive, because that's weak.
	Right? We want to punch, not spit.
	But we want to aim first.
	So yeah, I think that there is real moral responsibility, but it doesn't occur until somebody has access to the truth.
	And then, you see, when they reject the truth, it's because they see the truth.
	If I come up to you and I create some nonsense multiplication in my mind, 6,224,422 times 6 million is 8 million, whatever, and it's incorrect, you're not going to attack it.
	Because you're not even going to know whether it's the truth or not.
	Maybe you work it out or whatever, right?
	If I walk up to some pygmy in the Amazon and say, the square root of 9 is 3, the person's not going to attack it.
	He's not going to attack it because he doesn't know what you're talking about, right?
	But when someone attacks the truth, it's because they see the truth.
	Or rather, they see how the truth sees them, and it feels like an attack.
	That's the tidal wave that I talked about in the past.
	And if somebody attacks the truth, which is the greatest treasure of mankind, which is the greatest treasure, there is no happiness without the truth.
	There is no love without the truth.
	There is no joy. There is no connection.
	There is no life without the truth.
	And if somebody sees the truth and attacks the truth, they are, to me, a cancer.
	And I will not abuse them.
	And I will not humiliate them.
	But I will not stand for it.
	Because I care about the truth.
	Somebody comes up and spits in my wife's face, I'm going to be in their face.
	And I love the truth even more than I love my wife.
	Because I don't get the love that I have for my wife without the truth.
	Somebody walks up to my wife and spits at her in the face.
	I am going to be all over them.
	And I care more about the truth than my wife.
	Just as she cares more about the truth than me.
	Because that's the necessary but not sufficient component to love.
	And if you really love the truth, this is back to the first part about, well, won't I be lonely if I get the bad people out of my life?
	If you have a treasured CD collection and your parents smash up your CD collection, would you not be angry?
	If you have a treasured pet, a wonderful dog, and your parents shoot the dog, would you not be upset?
	And should we not love the truth more than we love a CD collection?
	And should we not love the truth more than we love a dog?
	and when our parents attack the truth, should we not be more angry?
	Yes, the truth, too, can turn you into a rageaholic.
	But that's my particular perspective.
	I'm certainly willing to take any sort of questions or issues about that.
	Let me just have yet another espresso.
	Ooh, new FDR strogan, truth first.
	Yeah, that could be it.
	But again, that's not something that means much to people.
	Plus, in their minds, it could be the appearance of truth first, lies second.
	I don't know. It could be.
	FDR slogans, I don't know.
	I've racked my brain off and on over the past year and a half.
	I mean, I can't come up with anything better than the logic of personal and political freedom.
	But, um... I also still like one person at a time.
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	But that's also a slogan for OrgiesRUs.com.
	At least for the men. So...
	My favorite is...
	Freedom in radio run with rage ah Absolutely, there's um, I think we need Actually, I have a bunch of surveys that have been filled out, which I'm going to try and post this week, which are very interesting, the profiles of listeners and so on.
	I certainly don't believe what Rod said about penis size.
	And I don't know why I have to buy a bigger monitor.
	But anyway, I just sort of wanted to mention that.
	Do we have anybody who wants to talk to me, or am I alienating everyone with my anger?
	Ha ha! Rod, you see?
	If you don't pay attention for a moment, I will zing you.
	I can see. I can smell you.
	Not paying attention. I can smell you.
	And so I zing you and you come back.
	And then you have to wait for the replay.
	All right.
	Do we have any questions from people?
	I've had a nice 40-minute rant, which is almost like a podcast in a bit.
	So I just have to close my eyes and pretend that I'm driving.
	Nobody wants to talk to me.
	You can talk to Christina, too.
	She's right here. More fun, less angry.
	You did make me decaf, right?
	Because I don't know why my heart's pounding like this.
	I think it's re-caf, where you take the grinds, extract the caffeine, and put it in the new one.
	So the difference between a voter and a candidate, what happened to that?
	Put him on.
	I don't know what that means.
	Yes, go ahead.
	Right, so...
	All that stuff about the truth and moral culpability, that was...
	Wait, wait, I've got a new slogan.
	I love that. Three Domain Radio, all that stuff.
	All that stuff and more.
	Oh, and much more.
	But that was all great, but...
	What I'm trying to clarify is there have been times when we've been kind of back and forth, up and down,
	round and round on whether a voter is actually a contributor to the If he's just sort of approving of it but not participating in it by voting and therefore not necessarily morally culpable but certainly reprehensible,
	Well, and I think it's confusing because there's two views, right?
	The view is the voter who may be saying, well, I want to get rid of government, so I'm voting for the guy who wants to make government smaller, right?
	So that's his view. But on the politician's side, every vote is an endorsement of the system and of his policies, right?
	Sure, but... There's no way that says, well, everybody's voting so I can get rid of the government, right?
	He's saying, they're voting because they really like my policies and they want me to deport these people and build a wall and blah, blah, blah.
	Oh, sure, sure, absolutely.
	I mean, a vote is a vote for the whole man, not just for certain things, because he can't tell the difference, right?
	No, there's no conceivable way that he could tell the difference, and also there's no conceivable way that we know what he's going to do in the future.
	I mean, I know that, say, the past behavior, he's 70, blah, blah, blah, but we just don't know, right?
	I mean, Reagan seemed like a pretty good deal in terms of shrinking government.
	Guy added $1.5 trillion to the national debt in the first four years and increased military spending by, what was it, a third in three years?
	Over three years? But that's not what he said going in, right?
	So there's plenty of people who talk a good talk and they get in and do the complete opposite, right?
	So I think that in a way it's really kind of fair to say that politicians really are aggressors in the sense that They're kind of perpetrating a fraud on voters in that most voters don't go to the polls and pull the lever for the whole package.
	They pull it for one specific issue they're really interested in.
	And they're either willfully ignorant of the rest or they actually genuinely don't care.
	Well, sure, if you're not a farmer, you don't care about farm policy, really.
	I mean, other than if you're a geeky economist buff like me, but if you're not a farmer, you don't care about farm policy, right?
	If you, I don't know, if you're frightened of our brown-skinned friends from the South, then you're going to be very keen on Ron Paul's immigration policy or whatever, right?
	That's going to be important to you.
	But you're not going to care about his farm policy, right?
	But you're voting for the whole package, for sure.
	Right, and the fact that he hasn't been...
	I mean completely explicitly clear on exactly everything he's going to do.
	In a sense then you could say he's perpetrating fraud and therefore is an aggressor and so candidates and elected officials are actually aggressing.
	Well, I mean, to me, it's like if you vote for Ron Paul, what you're doing is you're saying, I'm going to surrender this power to this person, and I hope that he's going to use it wisely, and I hope he's not going to aggress against other people too much, and I hope he's going to do the right thing.
	And I'm also surrendering the principle that government should exist, and maybe Ron Paul will be in for a couple of years, and maybe he'll even shrink.
	Maybe, maybe, I'm just saying not really, but maybe he could even shrink government.
	By whatever percentage, right?
	But then some other guy comes along.
	Ron Paul is the only guy who's really talked about this in, you know, what, two generations?
	So how long is it going to be before the next guy comes along?
	It's not like the population is getting smarter in regards to these things.
	Actually, I think the younger people are, but the people who are the bulk of the voters still remain not.
	And all I would say is, well, let's apply that principle to everything if it's reasonable, right?
	So when you want to go and buy a car, You are going to just vote for a car salesman who's going to pick out the car that he thinks you want, and he's going to charge you whatever he feels like afterwards.
	And that's how you're going to get your car.
	And if people say, well, I'd never do that, well, then be consistent.
	So then it would be accurate then to label voters as corrupt, but not necessarily evil.
	Well, no, I mean, of course, they're not the ones pulling the trigger, right?
	And neither is Ron Paul, obviously, right?
	So, I mean, not anymore.
	He was in the army at one point, which, not so good.
	But, flight surgeon, I don't know, whatever that is.
	He operates on planes, I don't know.
	But, no, I mean, what the voter is doing is simply providing sanctions, right, and saying that there is a political solution, that the way that we get rid of religion is to vote in a priest who wants religion to become smaller, Which is a total contradiction, as I talked about.
	Either God exists or He doesn't.
	If He doesn't exist, throwing your support behind someone who says God exists, but is less powerful than the other people think He is, you're reinforcing the concept of God.
	And somebody said, I'm a very strong believer in you get what you settle for.
	Consciously or unconsciously, you get what you settle for.
	And somebody was sort of saying, you know, I'd rather have one ass rape than two ass rapes, right?
	Well, sure. I mean, I can believe that.
	But why stop there, right?
	I mean, if you can go from two to one, go from one to zero.
	Because if you're going to settle for one, you're going to get one.
	And if you settle for none, you don't have a chance of getting none if you're going to settle for one, right?
	Right. You don't get more freedom by agitating for more freedom.
	You get more freedom by agitating for...
	Total freedom. Yeah, I think that's right.
	I don't think people say that I'm going to be more in love with my wife if she only has one affair a year rather than two.
	Well, that's an interesting way to put it.
	So, the voter then is just...
	He's just corrupt since he is...
	Well, I would say the voter is in error, but it's usually in an unconscious state, right?
	Usually it's in an unconscious state.
	I mean, there are lots of people who are yearning under the oppression of the government.
	I mean, it was as recently as the 1970s that like 75% of Americans thought that the government would generally do the right thing.
	Now, I think it's below 20%.
	20% of the people involved in the military industrial complex or on welfare or public school teachers, it's pretty much zero.
	If you're not actively bribed, you have no faith in government.
	And even if you are bribed, you just say that you do.
	Right, you're disingenuous, sure.
	Yeah, I mean, people hate their governments.
	Like, openly and wildly, they hate their governments.
	Anybody that you talk to has no respect for government.
	They will still mouth a few of the empty platitudes, like, well, you know, I guess it's nice that kids get educated.
	But everybody knows it's a complete disaster, and everybody knows it can't last.
	I mean, I don't meet anybody these days who is like, we need more government programs, right?
	I mean, nobody says that anymore.
	People are just kind of huddling.
	I mean, it's like the raft is sinking and they're saying, well, Christ, I hope that we get rescued before the raft sinks.
	But nobody says, let's get more people on the raft.
	Is it that they hate government or that they hate their government?
	Well, they hate their government.
	I mean, people are at a much more perceptual level.
	They're not conceptual beings.
	Why would they be? It's a pretty specialized thing to do.
	But they totally hate their governments, right?
	They totally feel out of control.
	I mean, here it's just ridiculous.
	I mean, up here in Canada, I mean, the city council just keeps voting to increase taxes and they keep going on these junkets and there's lots of corruption.
	I mean, everybody gets that they're just a bunch of assholes in government.
	I mean, yes, America's got a little bit more of this sort of fading old glory kind of stuff.
	But what they miss is the old government, right?
	What they miss is the government that they fantasize about.
	As if the old government is pro-slavery and stuff.
	Right. They don't reject government.
	They just reject this one.
	But that's a start, right?
	Because if you don't, that's a sufficient but not necessary step, right?
	I mean, if a woman's being beaten up by her husband, you want her to hate her husband first, because she's not going to hate abuse in general.
	That's too abstract. But you want her to at least start to hate her husband.
	And then when she can leave or whatever, you talk to her about leaving, then you can talk to her about abuse and principles.
	But you've got to have her at least hate her own husband first.
	Right. But if she never gets past that, then she goes on to another abuser and then another one and then another one.
	Well, sure. So then she says, look, I've made great progress.
	The guy only beats me up once a week rather than every day.
	But no psychologist would say, that's great progress.
	Right. You're just changing your circumstances.
	You're not really changing the underlying pathology.
	Right. And that's what I'm saying.
	So what that they hate this government?
	Everybody in every time hates their government.
	The French, except for Napoleon, hated their government.
	There are times when the English hated their governments, and there are times when the Germans hated their governments, and so what?
	They just keep replacing them with new ones, right?
	Well, sure, but that's because people aren't talking about the principles that underlie it, right?
	At least not, I think, as vociferously as they could be.
	To me, it's just a matter of education from that standpoint.
	So fundamentally, the voter is corrupt, but The question is, is the candidate for the political official not only corrupt but also evil for participating in it?
	Well, no, I wouldn't say evil.
	It's not pulling the trigger, right? But I would say that, like Ron Paul, for instance, again, just to pick on this guy because I haven't studied really anybody else's campaign, but I'm sure the other guys are even worse in some ways.
	Ron Paul says that the initiation of the use of force is always wrong.
	Always wrong. Always immoral.
	So I want to reduce taxes.
	Right? I mean, of all of them, he's the worst, in a sense.
	Of all of them, he's the worst, in a sense, because he's explicit about the values which he betrays in his next sentence.
	Rudolf Giuliani doesn't even have the brain cells to put together that the initiation of the use of force is wrong, and he can't even say that, because it doesn't include the words 9-11.
	Right, and some of them, they explicitly reject that standard.
	Sure, preemptive strikes, you know, aggressive war for the sake of defense, get them before they get us, torture them in case...
	I mean, absolutely, those guys are totally for the initiation of the use of force.
	And if those were the only people in the ring, it'd be a whole lot easier to get people to hate their governments, right?
	Yeah, that's true. Whereas the Ron Paul thing is like, no, you don't have to go to the dentist because I got this chewing gum that will numb your pain.
	It's like, no, no, no, no, I want to feel the pain, so I go to the dentist.
	Right, that sort of makes him perhaps the most, Ron Paul, the most...
	Corrupt and disingenuous of the whole panel of candidates.
	Well, sure. He accepts the principle of the non-initiation of the use of force, and then he wants to deport 10 million peaceful immigrants.
	So if you state the principle, the knowledge is responsibility.
	He states the principle and then wildly violates it.
	Those are the guys who are not even stating the principle.
	Right, and in a case where let's say in some imaginary freaky world he does get elected and he does manage to pass some legislation that makes it possible to deport 10 million immigrants, at no point along that process is he at all culpable in that because he's just signing pieces of paper Well, I can sign all the pieces of paper.
	An immoral action should be immoral regardless of circumstances.
	There's no circumstance under which rape is good.
	There's just no conceivables.
	But if I sit here writing orders and handing them to Christina, as I sometimes want to do, usually around Steph, I guess I need to go to the grocery store.
	But if I sit here and write orders, I could sit here and say, I think that You know, Billy Joe Bob should be put to death.
	And I can hand it to Christina, right?
	That's not an evil action.
	I mean, it's a bit deranged, but it's certainly not evil, right?
	So, the chain of causality, I don't view...
	You have to look at acts in isolation, otherwise the causal chain becomes too complex.
	Morality becomes, you know, more art than science, but...
	No, it's the guy at the end of the row of the piece of paper who pulls the trigger.
	He's the guy who's initiating the use of force.
	Everybody else is just writing stuff down.
	And he's in a state of nature, as far as ethics go, until he's educated.
	Once the policeman says the initiation of the use of force is wrong, and then he goes to collect your taxes, well then he's morally culpable.
	But if he's never heard that idea, we can't expect him to invent philosophy, moral philosophy, from the ground up, particularly with the skewed self-interest that he has, where if he accepts this philosophy, he's out of a job, right?
	I philosophize myself into a job, not out of a job.
	I guess I did out of a job as well, but it's a little different, right?
	Into a different job.
	Right. But in that case, though...
	If he's in a state of nature, if he understands the non-aggression principle and he has to act against it anyways in order to keep his job,
	in order to keep food on his table, Like you say, he's in a state of nature where he's doing whatever he has to do to survive, right?
	Because if he doesn't, then he's going to starve to death.
	Well, I don't think cops starve to death.
	I mean, get a security guard job or patrol the high school dances or whatever.
	I mean, if you're not a cop, you're not going to starve to death.
	I mean, there's lots of other jobs that you can get, right?
	Sure, sure. Soldier.
	I'm just kidding. Sure.
	So, well, I guess what I'm trying to determine here then is... I guess what I'm trying to determine here then is...
	Who's responsible, right?
	Right. I mean...
	Well, nobody. Who is?
	Nobody. That's the whole problem with statism, right?
	Nobody's responsible. Everybody's responsible.
	Nobody's responsible. The reason that I'm so aggressive, you could say, towards the anarcho-capitalists who want to vote for Ron Paul is that they know the principle.
	They know the principle of the non-initiation of the use of force.
	They also, most of the educated ones, know that it's never worked in the past and things have got continually worse.
	They also know that they're legitimizing the principle, right?
	You have to argue, I mean, if you're arguing a doctorate in mathematics, you can't pick someone out of the monkey bars, right?
	I mean, you have to pick people who really know mathematics.
	So, once you know, right, once you crack a book of Rothbard or Mises or whoever, right, once you crack a book of, you know!
	Now you know! That's why I keep saying it's not a hobby.
	This is life-altering.
	Knowledge creates an unbelievable burden of responsibility and incredible wings to fly above it once you get the hang of it, but it's an incredible burden of responsibility.
	You don't just learn the non-aggression principle and then go, huh, well, that's interesting.
	It's like if you don't get the seismic shift that that's going to put into your life, whether you like it or not, I mean, I think if those people knew where it was going, they'd be like the bold guy in The Matrix.
	You know, man, I wish I'd taken a blue pill.
	Right. No, that's true.
	You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.
	But then, no matter where you are in the hierarchical chain, if you know you're responsible...
	Well, sure, but you're still the guy pulling the trigger.
	Because pulling the trigger on somebody who's not initiating force against you, that's the moral evil that exists independently of everything that comes before or after, right?
	Because otherwise, soldiers say, well, I was just following orders, right?
	And then they're not morally responsible.
	And then the cops just say, well, I was just obeying the law.
	They're not morally responsible.
	So then moral responsibility lies with both the person who commits the actual Immoral act.
	And the person who knows that anything that condones the act is also...
	Well, no.
	The evil is only the guy pulling the trigger.
	That's the only thing which independent of causality is morally wrong.
	If I walk up to you and say, Greg, go shoot that guy, and you go shoot that guy, I'm not morally responsible.
	Unless there's some bizarre mental control that I have over you, right?
	But if I say, oh, I think that guy should be shot, and you go and shoot the guy, I'm not morally responsible.
	If I'm at some bar and I say, oh my god, this guy makes me so mad I could just strangle him, and some guy goes and strangles him, that's not my moral responsibility.
	I can't be censored because of the actions of others who may or may not take my word seriously.
	If somebody misinterprets my podcast and goes around blowing away politicians, I'm not morally responsible.
	But you yourself also...
	I mean, you put out...
	There was a podcast some months ago in which you basically...
	Absolved soldiers of their responsibility for the fact that they enlisted because they had no other choice.
	Well, there's the state of nature again, right?
	There's the state of nature, right?
	The whole point is to educate people, right?
	To inflict, and it is, as you know, right?
	To inflict philosophy on them, right?
	Whether they like it or not, so to speak.
	To inflict philosophy on people, which gives them a choice.
	Where people can't even fathom a choice, that's, in a sense, determinism.
	In the absence of knowledge, in the absence of even conceiving an option, It's to say, if I live to be 100, that seems really great.
	Like, that's fantastic. What a great long life.
	If, however, over the next 10 years, they develop technology which lets you live to be 1,000, well, 100 sucks.
	Then I'm the unhealthiest guy in the world.
	It's like I'm dying at the age of 8.
	Right. Let me ask you this, then.
	Is the...
	Is the perception of lack of choice the same thing as actual lack of choice?
	Well, but this is, yeah, and you're right.
	I mean, this is a perfectly brilliant question.
	I don't have an answer, right? Because anyone, like, that's why they say ignorance of the law is no excuse, because then everybody says, well, I didn't know.
	Right? That's why everyone just says, I didn't know.
	I'm not a lawyer. I didn't know until legal.
	And so, of course, that's what everyone's going to say, right?
	That's why it's got to become common knowledge, right?
	So the first three people to go, hey, slavery is wrong, well, everyone else can say, well, it never occurred to me, right?
	To say that slavery is wrong is like to say there being women is wrong, because it's just the natural order of things, right?
	That's just what people would think.
	They wouldn't imagine anything different.
	But now it's common knowledge, right?
	So now when people say slavery is great, they're a little bit different from some Aztec guy in the 10th century A.D., right?
	So you've got to spread it to common knowledge.
	Keep making the argument as strongly and as vociferously and as repetitively as possible so that people can't claim that they don't know.
	What, you've never heard?
	Some guy comes up and says slavery is wrong and you say, really?
	Because, you know, we thought this was sort of a settled argument.
	What about, you know, this, that, and the other?
	And he's like, oh, I had no idea it was anything to do with the history of slavery.
	I didn't know anything about the Civil War.
	I didn't know anything, right?
	You kind of claim to know that, right?
	And certainly what we want to do is We want to get UPB and all these kinds of things into as much of a general discussion as possible so that people can't claim that they don't know it.
	You go up to some professor at Harvard and you say, UPB, he'd be like, I don't know, I think you can get shots for that.
	I don't know what you're talking to me about.
	But if we can get the idea out, then people can't claim that they don't know, right?
	The same way that a lawyer can't claim that he's never heard of the common law, habeas corpus, right?
	It's just common knowledge.
	And that way, people are then responsible for not knowing it.
	But if they've never even heard of it, it's kind of tough to come down hard on them, I think.
	But you would agree that slavery was as wrong back then as it is now.
	Well sure, absolutely.
	And it was as possible, using the laws of physics, to launch a space shuttle in the 10th century as it is now.
	But it was effectively impossible, because they just didn't know how to.
	So how do you ensure that people don't confuse this effort as just simply trying to change the social zeitgeist, as Dawkins puts it?
	As if that's some sort of way of determining a moral standard, right?
	I mean, morals are morals regardless of how many people believe in them or what year it is, right?
	Sure. Oh, I see what you mean.
	Like just trying to shift the zeitgeist so that people are more civilized or more urbane or more whatever, whatever.
	It's sophisticated and this and that.
	Yeah, I mean, that's the Hitchens' argument and the Dawkins' argument and this and that, and it is about as powerful as a tepid glass of old tea, for sure.
	There's not a lot of fire in the belly with that, you know, I just wish people would become a little more civilized.
	I mean, that's just, like, that's great.
	Let's get that on a flag and go to the barricades, right?
	Yeah, for sure, and those guys aren't going to do a whole lot, right?
	Those guys aren't going to do a whole lot.
	In fact, by removing religious sentiment without providing a rational philosophy that is...
	We're going to get people back on track.
	People will act randomly in the absence of structure, usually.
	So these guys are working against, I think, what they want in the world.
	And Sam Harris as well, because they haven't got the philosophy and they don't have the ethics.
	And they just say, well, I'm going to assume that everybody understands that X, Y, and Z is immoral.
	That's sort of pointless, right?
	It's like somebody who wants to cure diabetes is going to say, well, I'm just going to assume that no one's ever going to eat too much sugar.
	Well, if that were the case, you wouldn't need to be a diabetic counselor, right?
	I mean, the fact is that people do act badly.
	The fact is that people are immoral, and the fact is that people are very susceptible to false moral arguments, right?
	So just knocking down existing moral arguments without building new ones, not a good idea, I think.
	Yeah, they seem to have like three competing systems actually.
	There's the biological determinism.
	Whatever human beings do is whatever human beings should do.
	Then there's the Singer argument, which is you're moral if you can feel pain.
	And then there's the Dawkins argument, which is whatever the majority says is good is good.
	Right. Or the Hitchens' argument, which says, well, you know, every decent human being feels a revulsion towards the abuse of children.
	Yeah, I got it.
	But how come so many billions of children are being abused?
	You know, that's like anybody who really knows nutrition knows that you shouldn't eat too much sugar.
	It's like, yeah, but then why does 90% of the population have diabetes?
	Like the whole point is those people don't know that, right?
	And so just saying that every – you're just preaching to the choir, right?
	Not doing anything other than taking away structure from people who, in the absence of structure, aren't going to behave better but worse.
	Right, since everybody knows this and you're eating candy anyway, then you deserve to die.
	Yeah, I don't think they really appeal to that that much.
	I think that they feel, in my view, I think that they feel that if you knock down this wall, there's a beautiful house underneath.
	If you get rid of illusion, people just get the truth.
	But that's not true. I mean, that's just simply not true, and you can see that historically over and over again.
	You get rid of one illusion, unless you get to the root cause, which is family, psychology, self, all that stuff, people just grab another illusion.
	You take away the heroin, they'll just go to crack.
	You take away the crack, they'll go to PCP. You take away the PCP, whatever, right?
	Right, because you reveal one set of lies as lies, then the tendency is to think that everything is always a lie, right?
	Right. Or, you know, the Bolsheviks were pretty good at getting rid of religion, right?
	Not so good, right?
	Descend into nihilism.
	Right. And then to totalitarianism, which is always where nihilism leads you to, right?
	So, yeah, I mean, it's just empirically.
	And empirically, they know all of this, right?
	They know all of this.
	And so the question is, why do such wildly intelligent and learned people keep making the same mistakes over and over again?
	And that's the mystery which we're trying to work on here, right?
	It's got to be something to do with very deep psychological defenses.
	It has to be, because you can't claim that they're not smart.
	They're brilliant. Right.
	I mean, they're immune to the logic because of their psychology in a lot of ways.
	You can argue logical syllogisms all day long, but if they're not paying attention to you, then it doesn't matter how true or how right you are because that's not what's changing their mind.
	Right, right. I mean, there's conscience, there's family, there's family fortunes that have come from status policies, there are scientists who've taken government money, there's a heavily embedded resistance to seeing the truth.
	Obviously, it's to do with families and so on, but it's also to do with their own personal histories and their relationship to this beast, to this predator of government.
	So there's a reason that they can't They can't see it, right?
	There's a reason that they can't see it.
	I think it has more to do with personal relationships, but I think that they like the notoriety, they like the publicity, and they like being famous, right?
	They like being in demand. And I've got to imagine that that would be a great thing, but, you know, the world is bad that you've got to be suspicious of anybody who gets a megaphone, right?
	Right. I think to a certain degree that's also why people cling to The popular libertarianism because there's a kind of counterculture camaraderie there.
	Whether or not they're right, they get to feel like they're in a family that thinks they've figured things out.
	Right, right. As Aristotle wrote, with regards to his critique of the Platonic forms, he said that we love our friends, but we must love the truth more than we love our friends.
	And that's why I have to critique this view.
	And there's lots of people who like the truth, but love their friends.
	And this uneasy tension renders them ineffectual in the long run.
	So then ultimately, what we're going after is not liars, but lies.
	Yeah, for sure. But certainly when people act on those lies, when you talk about the truth with them, when they act on those lies in defiance of the truth, then for me, they are as wounded swimmers in the water, and I am the prowling great white.
	I mean, there is no... No particular mercy for me in that particular situation, right?
	Because, I mean, if we're not going to fight for the truth and where we are and what we're doing is so completely and utterly without precedent, we are absolutely and totally trying to crack the ultimate mystery of the ages, right?
	Which is why is there violence and slavery in the world, right?
	And this is a new approach.
	It may work, it may not, but for sure it's never been tried before to the depth and comprehension that we're trying to do it.
	And so I think that given the enormity of the task, you know, rehabilitation of the corrupt is not really an option for us.
	So in the process of taking down lies, if we wind up taking down liars with it, it's no skin off our back.
	Well, I would go a little further and say that it's essential.
	I mean, most people are not going to look upon this and understand the truth, right?
	People, I think, don't understand.
	This is why you get a lot of either angry or bloodless libertarians, but either way, not particularly.
	In fact, people look upon this as a kind of interesting gladiatorial combat.
	They don't understand the issues, they don't understand the truth, but they do understand who is more passionate, and they do understand who is more certain.
	And that conviction is what we need to move this mountain.
	Oh, I see what you mean now.
	That's an interesting point.
	You had said something like that earlier about what matters more is the conviction than the truth.
	We know based on religion and based on statism and also based on the cult of the family that irrational certainty trumps Rational uncertainty every single time.
	If you can't at least muster the same passion that a preacher does, you're never going to beat a preacher.
	Never. Never, never, never, never.
	If you can't muster the same passion and certainty that George Bush does, maybe not the best example, but if you can't muster the same passion and certainty that our parents did when they were chastising us when we were children, we have no hope.
	We have no hope. Like, pack up, go home, go join the IRS and get a good pension, right?
	There's no possibility of us winning if we can't meet and exceed the passion and the certainty of those who have irrational arguments.
	The trick, though, is to not get swept away.
	Sorry, did you just get swept away?
	I missed that. I yanked my own head so often.
	You go, girl! Wait, no, sorry.
	The trick, though, is to not get swept away by your own passion and certainty and forget about the truth itself.
	Well, we don't need to worry about that, Greg.
	I mean, I know that you're concerned about that.
	We don't need to worry about that.
	Once you've trained for 20 years in a sport, you can just relax and enjoy the sport.
	Otherwise, what the hell is the point of training?
	Of all the stuff that we've read and all the debates we've had and all the podcasts and all the Sunday call-in shows and all the board work and so on, we can totally let ourselves go and know that we're not going to go off the rails.
	Because we've trained for 20 years.
	We don't have to be cautious now.
	And I know that if you've played a sport for 20 years, you can just go out and go full tilt.
	It doesn't mean you're going to get everything right.
	But if you continue to hesitate and second guess and doubt and this after 20 years of training...
	Then I think that's kind of holding on to something a little too long, if that makes sense.
	Like, at some point, we've got to be able to let ourselves go and trust ourselves.
	After this amount of training and this amount of knowledge and this amount of learning and this amount of conversation, I think we can let ourselves go and really fly.
	Practice like you play, right?
	Yes, yes. And certainly at the beginning, right, the first time you hit a golf ball, you don't pretend that you're Tiger Woods, right?
	You're going to bend the club and pop your arm out of its socket, right?
	But at some point, right, after Tiger Woods has been practicing for, you know, 10 hours a day for 20 years, he can go out and just hit the ball with everything he's got.
	Sure. Yeah, I guess that makes sense.
	That makes total sense.
	And yeah, we're going to slice it from time to time.
	You know, but so what?
	These other people, they aren't even hitting the ball.
	The presumption is that we've got the fundamentals.
	And so the slight error here or there is inconsequential in comparison.
	Yeah, what happens for me is that it's sort of like this.
	You've got 10,000 people who are lining up to hit a golf ball towards a hole, right?
	And 9,999 of those people You know, the divot goes further than the ball, they break the club, they fall over, they twist their back, they pop out their spleen, they hit the guy next to them, or they fall asleep because they've got narcolepsy, or whatever, whatever.
	And then one guy comes along, hits the ball magnificently, and it lands three inches from the hole.
	Right? Now, if being close to the hole is important, who are you going to criticize?
	Right, right.
	If you pick the guy who's three inches from the hole, that's fucked up.
	That is messed up.
	Right? Oh, of all these 10,000 people who are missing everything, you are three inches from the hole, and you're the person that I'm going to criticize.
	Right? That's why I got mad at the people who were like three decimal places.
	That's a problem. Hey, if error is your problem, go talk to the goddamn priests and come back to me in 10,000 years.
	Yeah, that's a good point.
	That's a good point. But at the same time...
	Wait, can I just interrupt you for one second?
	Sure. I'm actually going to reach spiritual nirvana when you tell me something without the word but at the end of it.
	That to me, Greg, I'm just going to tell you I'm going to fucking levitate halfway around the planet.
	I'm just going to tell you I'm going to be drifting outside your window and knock.
	But sorry, go on, I'm just kidding.
	All right, sorry.
	Well, I guess that I'll be the doubt half of the team.
	How about that? You need certainty and you need doubt.
	Ladies and gentlemen, the Olympic swimmer and his partner, the undertow.
	No, No, I'm just saying that I'm not suggesting that we have any of the fundamentals wrong, but you can't be so certain that if somebody comes along but you can't be so certain that if somebody comes along and points out something that nobody noticed before, that you just mow them under, No, no. I mean, the methodology is all, right?
	The only thing I'm certain about is the methodology, is the scientific method, right?
	All the conclusions can go up in smoke.
	The methodology can't be argued.
	You can't argue against logic, right?
	That's true. So, yeah, my God, pile on.
	Tell us everything that's wrong.
	That's fantastic. But if you're going to critique conclusions, then you have to have a rational hierarchy, right?
	And that's why people got so mad at me when I pointed out the three decimal places problem, the nitpicky stuff.
	Because they know that it's fundamentally not rational to nitpick on the guy who's three inches from the hole when everyone else has just smashed up all the cars in the parking lot with their golf swings that went backwards.
	If you're interested in getting a ball close to the hole.
	You say to the one guy who got it three inches from the hole, that is unbelievable.
	And you turn to everyone else and you say, do you see how that guy did it?
	That's what you need to do. And then you spend the next 10,000 years training them.
	And then when everybody's three inches from the hole, you can go back to the guy who's three inches from the hole and say, now let's try and get you two inches from the hole.
	Oh, I see. Of course, you can put the ball in the hole with your head, with your mind.
	There's no catching up, right?
	I mean, you go train the...
	But that's why I was...
	That's why I don't care about the three decimal places.
	That's why I don't work out the math to the last degree.
	Because I want people to see that it's fear.
	It's fear. It's not a desire for correction.
	Because a desire for correction would lead you everywhere else on the planet and coming back to free domain radio last.
	Whoa, whoa, whoa. State that again?
	I didn't follow that.
	When people would sort of go, well, you're a decimal place off in the third decimal place on your calculation of the 9-11 of Iraq or whatever, right?
	Then I want to say to people, the reason that I don't correct all of that stuff down to the nth degree is that when people then criticize me for it, because they're very concerned with human error, then I can point out to them that if they're really concerned with human error, There's about 10,000 mosques and 20,000 churches and 10,000 government agencies that they need to visit first and then they can come back to Freedom Main Radio.
	But if they start here, it's not to do with accuracy.
	It's to do with fear. It's to do with fear of being attacked for being wrong because they don't want to use the same argument against others that I'm using against them.
	And the reason they don't want to do that is because they get very angry.
	So it's fear of the truth, is what you're saying?
	No, it's fear of being criticized, right?
	People feel like, well, I can't play golf until I can get a hole in one every time.
	Well, that's just the same as saying, I don't want to play golf.
	And then don't play golf. Right?
	Get off the golf course. That's what I'm saying, right?
	If you don't want to pick up a golf club until you can land a hole in one every single time, that's exactly the same as saying, I don't want to play golf.
	So essentially what you're saying is that perfectionism is sort of a way of avoiding your responsibility for living the truth.
	Well, sure. And that's fine, because there will be people, and I'm sure there have been already thousands of them, who've come to Free Domain Radio and who've said, well, Steph's made a little error here, and they leave.
	And that's fine. Good.
	Then we don't have to waste time training them to no effect.
	You don't want to waste time training somebody who's never going to pick up a golf club again and play a real game unless they get a hole in one.
	Because then you're wasting your time.
	You're never going to make a great golfer out of that person because they're too afraid.
	So that's fine. I don't want to say good riddance, but in a sense, good riddance.
	Thank you for not wasting my time trying to turn you into a great golfer when you won't go play a game if you can't get a hold of one every time.
	It's a huge waste of my...
	And I could have spent that time training somebody who could be a great golfer.
	So that's fine. The problem that I have is then when they try and infect me with that.
	That's when I get a little bit more assertive about it.
	Infect you with that.
	Explain that. What do you mean by that?
	Well, saying, Steph, you hit three inches from the hole.
	Nobody else is even hitting the ball.
	You hit three inches from the goal, and that's bad, Steph.
	You should get a hole in one.
	You shouldn't swing if you can't get a hole in one.
	That's their fear that they're trying to project into me to make me afraid to justify themselves.
	That's what I don't like. Okay, so you become fearful of talking about these things just because...
	What if I don't get a hole in one?
	And then you can't do anything.
	At least I'll get a hole in one once every hundred podcasts, just on the law of averages, right?
	I mean, a hundred golf swings, you'll get a hole in one, maybe, right?
	But if I get so freaked out about three decimal places and perfect accuracy and maybe a slip in this argument or maybe this metaphor doesn't work perfect, I'm not going to be able to hit the ball at all anymore.
	It's a paralytic.
	That's a more systemic problem than I think people realize.
	Well that's why that debate got so heated, right?
	And that's why people got so angry about these three decimal places, right?
	Because we're closer to the hole.
	I truly believe we're closer to the hole than anybody else in history has ever gotten.
	And that's not because we're so smart.
	It's just that we're the next thing.
	Everybody else did fantastic work before.
	We're just doing the next thing. The truck stalled.
	We fell off the front and we're three feet ahead.
	That's the way that I see it.
	It's not where the brain-spanning genius is.
	It's just that we happen to fall off the truck ahead of the truck and hit the end of its road.
	And somewhere in the gravel was a great idea.
	Right, right. And you pick yourself up and you go, well, that hurt like hell, but I guess I'm a little further ahead, right?
	So that's why it's so freaky to people, because there are errors out here, right?
	You can't sail smoothly when you're plowing through ice.
	You've got to keep turning, right?
	You've got to keep sort of backing up and turning, and it's messy.
	But it's pointless unless we're passionate, and if we're terrified of every possible error, or worried about it or fearful of it, then don't bother them.
	Why start? Yeah, you know, this kind of goes back to some of the stuff you were talking about with Jason, too, about how his parents, whether they did or didn't encourage his own interests and whatnot,
	I was thinking about that for myself and how my own parents would encourage us to pursue our own interests, but as soon as we chose something, then they would take every opportunity to make sure that we knew we weren't the best at it.
	Right, right. Basically, in a kind of subtle way, impressing you with the idea that if you can't be 100% perfect at it, then you shouldn't even bother trying.
	Yeah, if you can't be the best, don't bother, right?
	Right, exactly. Right, right, right.
	Yeah, I've never understood that.
	I've never understood that.
	You know, a good hunter is the guy who comes home with enough to eat.
	Is the best hunter the guy who brings home 20 antelope, 19 of which rot?
	The best thing.
	We've still got to do the best and the beautiful and all that kind of stuff.
	This is all a podcast coming up.
	The best, of course, is compared to what?
	Compared to what? If I'm only three inches from the golf hole and everyone else is hitting the wrong way, then I'm the best.
	If your standard is a hole in one every time, then go talk to all these other people who are hitting the wrong way.
	But if you focus... The best is that perfection is the enemy of the good.
	I would also suggest that let's say you're not the only one hitting it three inches from the hole.
	Say you're hitting it six inches from the hole and two other people are hitting it three inches from the hole.
	That doesn't make you necessarily any worse than them.
	Well, and again, I'm not saying that...
	I think we're doing the best myself.
	I mean, I don't know anything else that's out there that's doing this, but even if there's like three people and we're ten inches in the hole, two other people are two inches, there's still 9,998 people and 9,997 people hitting totally the wrong direction.
	Right. Right.
	And the people who really care about people hitting it close to the hole, even including the other people who are closer than we are, are going to go talk to those other 10,000 people, not to us.
	Because we may not have more than one every time, but we're still playing the game, and we can play the game.
	There's all these other people, the religious people, the culty people, the parental slaves, the statist people.
	Go talk to them.
	Six million cults throughout the world.
	Go talk to them. Now, of course, the minarchists are going to spin that...
	Metaphor around and say, well, why do you guys come down on us so hard?
	Because, after all, we're the ones that are six inches from the hole and you're three inches from the hole.
	Why don't you go after the status?
	That's where the metaphor doesn't work.
	The metaphor, I think, is accurate with the minarchists is the people are swinging the wrong way because they don't know where the hole is.
	They think the hole's in the parking lot.
	The hole's actually on the green.
	The minarchists know where the hole is and are still swinging into the parking lot.
	That's a good point. Then everybody else is saying, well, these guys seem to know and they're swinging into the parking lot and they've studied politics and golf for 20 years, so they must know what's going on.
	Let's do what they do. Right?
	Even the people who hate government are voting for Ron Paul.
	There's got to be a political solution.
	We don't need to get rid of government. We can go this way.
	That's a good point. That's a good way to put it.
	Yeah, somebody just posted here, I said, swinging towards the parking lot, but standing closer to the hole.
	Yeah, that's true, but they know where the hole is, right?
	Even Ron Paul knows where the hole is.
	And he's swinging into the parking lot and saying to people, that's where the hole is.
	But he says the hole is on the green, and he's swinging at the parking lot.
	I mean, that's why the minicus bugged me so much, because they confuse everyone else.
	I mean, if I come up to you and say, you need to take drug X, Y, and Z for your psoriasis, And I'm just some guy.
	You don't care. Thanks, I'll go ask a doctor.
	But if I'm a world-renowned doctor, a world-renowned dermatologist, say you need to take X, Y, and Z for your psoriasis, you're going to listen to me, because I'm an expert.
	And that's why the menarchists, they put themselves forward as an expert.
	They put themselves forward as golf teachers.
	And they know where the hole is, and they say the hole's on the green.
	And then every time they get a student, they say swing at the parking lot.
	It's bizarre. And it's family.
	It's family. Right.
	Right. Their family's swinging at the parking lot, and they can't confront them.
	So they just fall in line.
	Oh, let's swing at the parking lot.
	I'll pretend I don't know where the hole is, or I'll say that somehow this is going to go.
	going to go, I'm going to hit it so hard it's going to go all the way around the world and land in the hole.
	I think we just went one step too far with the metaphor, but I think it held up pretty It's like the space shuttle on the entry.
	Yeah. Yeah, there's 30 seconds of black out there somewhere.
	Well, then I guess...
	Well, see, then we're back to the idea that they're culpable in what they're doing, right?
	Yeah, I think so.
	And in some ways, they're the most culpable, in my view.
	Because they're not in a state of ignorance, as we took right at the beginning.
	They know where the whole is. So how could we say that someone like Ron Paul or any other minarchist candidate, especially the ones who subscribe to the NAP, are not evil?
	Because they're not hypocritical.
	Because then everybody who's hypocritical, whenever you say evil, as we talked about with the Sunday school teachers, whenever you say evil, you pull out a gun.
	So if rape is evil, therefore a woman can shoot a guy who's trying to rape her.
	So you pull out evil, you're pulling out self-defense, you're pulling out violence, you're pulling out coercion, you're taking the safety off and you're loading up the weapon.
	And we can't shoot people being hypocrites.
	Oh, it's tempting. We can't.
	I mean, that's not right.
	That's thought crime. You can't have thought crime and be free, right?
	That's true. So then...
	So then there really is no defense against a hypocrite other than to avoid them?
	No! No, you attack them.
	See, if you avoid them, they'll just keep doing it.
	You have to expose them.
	This was the animus thing, right?
	So animus says there's no such thing as standards.
	Everything is subjective. I say that there are such things as standards, and then he says that what I'm saying is totally wrong.
	Right, by what standard?
	Well, then he's saying, okay, there is an absolute standard called telling me what I'm doing is wrong is really bad.
	Not as bad as, say, pedophilia, but it's really bad.
	Actually, no, he's saying it's worse than pedophilia.
	Right, so you expose these people.
	Okay, and then at that point...
	Whoever's listening has a choice.
	That's right. That's right. Philosophy is a show, right?
	I mean, that's why Plato wrote his stuff as a dialogue.
	Philosophy is, and I know people don't like this, right?
	I mean, that's the weird combination of things that I bring to the table, right?
	Is that I'm an artist and an actor as well, right?
	So I know the importance of the show, of the drama.
	And people that bugs people, I know that.
	But it's important. Because we're playing to an audience.
	Of people who don't know anything except about conviction, who can only read the emotions.
	They can't understand the thoughts.
	They can only read the emotions.
	I mean, if your doctor is shaking and sweating and stammering, you're probably going to feel a little less comfortable with him, right?
	Even though you don't know, he could be giving you exactly the same prescription as some other doctor.
	If your therapist gives you advice on how to deal with a panic attack while she herself is having a panic attack...
	You're probably going to trust her a little less, even though she may be saying exactly the same thing as some guy who's floating three feet above his desk in a lotus position.
	There is an aesthetic to argument.
	There is a form to the function that we need to master.
	I think we need to master this because they can't judge the thoughts any more than you and I can judge a doctor's prescription, but they can judge how we judge it.
	They can't judge the thoughts.
	They can judge our relationship to the thoughts.
	And if we're tentative and if we're hesitant and we don't engage and we back down or we just vanish at the first sign of confidence, then all they know is that we don't really believe it.
	And if we don't really believe it, why should they bother trying to investigate it?
	And that's why the passion and the conviction matters.
	Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
	And we know that it matters because you don't have stammering, tentative priests up in the pulpit.
	I mean, they're thundering away, right?
	And then I do it, and people are like, hey, you sound like a priest.
	I'm like, good! Good!
	Because this god is real.
	Sure. Sure.
	But why do you...
	You say people are uncomfortable with the theater, with the show.
	Why do you think that is?
	Well, because when you are passionate, you are vulnerable.
	Oh, and vulnerability makes people uncomfortable.
	Because they were attacked for it in the past, right?
	Every time that they showed any kind of passion or any kind of desire, the grim sociopaths around them would go, Ah, showing weakness.
	Excellent. Now I know where the chinks in the armor are.
	Let me get my poison javelin.
	Okay, but...
	Okay, you're only allowed 12 butts per call, so this is your last one.
	Yeah, I did do that again, didn't I? Yeah, well, you listen back.
	Go on. No, wouldn't...
	They would only be uncomfortable with their own vulnerability then, though, right?
	Not with somebody else's.
	I don't understand.
	Well, you're saying that people are uncomfortable with the theater, with the show aspect of philosophy, because the passion at theatrics is a kind of vulnerability in you.
	Right, and sorry, one other thing.
	They also associate that passion with abuse.
	They also associate passion and certainty with being abused by their priests, by their parents, by whatever, whatever, right?
	Alright, so to tie that all in then, how does that exposure of your vulnerability make them uncomfortable with their own vulnerability?
	Well, I mean, if you repress something in yourself, you're going to be led inevitably to repress it in other people.
	That's why the people criticize me about the three decimal places, because they're not comfortable with it.
	Universally preferable behavior works whether we like it or not.
	It operates within us.
	It's what is our conscience. Consistency.
	Because we're immersed in reality, which is objective and consistent and universal.
	So UPB operates whether we like it or not, just like gravity.
	You don't have to be a physicist to know that gravity is going to work, and you don't have to be a philosopher to know that UPB is going to work.
	So if somebody says, passion is bad, passion is bad, then they're going to naturally, because of UPB, they're going to have to repress it in other people.
	Because if they simply say, passion is only bad for me, then they have something they need to correct.
	But if they say passion is bad overall, then they themselves are off the hook for correcting it, but they then have to squelch it on other people.
	That's UPB. You can't avoid it.
	I mean, unless you see it as just sort of a preferential difference.
	Well, I think that's probably true, except that everybody also deeply gets that passion moves mountains.
	And we know that because everybody we argue with has nothing but certainty with no rationality, and they got that because people were certain and passionate or even just certain with them when they were growing up.
	We know that the world has been completely ruined by irrational certainty.
	By people who are just absolutely certain with no reason.
	So they know that certainty wins, right?
	They know that passion, conviction, certainty wins.
	So if they want to help the world, they know that this is required.
	They know that. There's nothing I need to tell them.
	Could it also be a case, though, where, like, say, for example, you see how horrifying the fist-waving of someone like Hitler or Stalin is, and then You decide because of that,
	that passion, of course, must be all sorts of displays like that must be evil since the two most prominent examples were evil people.
	Right, and there is the ideal of the Zen Socratic, you know, okay, I'll drink the hemlock if you guys really want me to, but I'm not that happy about it.
	You know, I mean, there is that as well.
	So for sure, the world is wrecked by irrational passion, by faith, by irrationality, and then people throw the baby out with the bathwater and they say, well, irrationality is passion.
	Passion is irrationality, and therefore anybody who's passionate is irrational.
	And irrationality manifests itself as passion, and that surrenders the world to the bad people who are not going to give up on their passion.
	The bad people aren't going to give up on their passion.
	You're not going to get a bunch of droning priests up there who are going to self-inflict religion into obscurity.
	Their passion is only going to increase.
	That kind of gets back to your whole point about how There's not necessarily a dichotomy between emotion and rationality either.
	Right. Now, it certainly is true that, you know, like a pickpocket will have someone bump into you to take your wallet, people will get very passionate when their arguments are ridiculous, right?
	I mean, for sure, passion can be a mask in a show for bad ideas.
	But so what, right?
	I mean, you can use a gun for self-defense or you can use a gun for murder.
	You can use food for nutrition or you can use food to kill yourself.
	I mean, it doesn't mean that food is good or evil.
	I mean, this is how you do it. It's how you use it.
	Right. Right, it's the difference between...
	I mean, physically it wouldn't appear different, but it's the difference between passion and vitriol.
	Yeah, it feels different.
	I don't know if you've seen a lot of those Christian preachers, but it feels kind of like they've got tentacles of slime going up your spine.
	Like, I think, and I think that's why the podcasts were so successful, I guess, right, is that there's passion and there's energy, but it's not like, hey, that guy's really passionate.
	Where's my watch? Right?
	I mean, it's not slimy.
	Do you know what I mean? Like, there's a kind of elemental health, I think, out of a feeling that is united with rationality.
	And I think that's why we're doing something that's kind of new, right?
	And we're getting some of that, right?
	Also, there's a reason why I have goofy pictures as the donation stuff, right?
	I mean, A, they're funny, but B, right, so newbies coming on realize that there's passion and there's rationality and there's humor.
	Right, we're willing to criticize ourselves.
	Right, right. That it's not about moralizing for the sake of superiority.
	That we're the first to make fun.
	I'm the first to make fun of my listeners because that's the twisted relationship I have with you all.
	But no, we're the first to make fun of ourselves because that way people understand that we have a self-critical capacity.
	That we're not over-serious in the way that Christians can never make fun of themselves.
	Christian humor is like the deadest thing on the planet, right?
	I don't know, right?
	But people who are very insecure, the false self can't take any self-criticism because it's a scar tissue created from too much criticism, right?
	So it doesn't have that capacity.
	But that's why we want to have the lightness.
	That's why the humor and the energy is there in the podcast, at least for me.
	Because if...
	If I'm right about everything that I'm talking about, just talk about me, everyone's part of the conversation.
	If I'm right, but I can't convince people to be passionate about it, then there's no point.
	I might as well be writing it on the surface of a lake, because it's never going to win.
	That's a good point. That's a very good point.
	I mean, it might as well be buried in a book in the Library of Congress somewhere that no one's ever read before, right?
	Yeah, for sure, for sure.
	I mean, if you can't motivate people, then all the truth in the world just kills some trees, right?
	So the trick is to make sure that you're motivating for the right reasons.
	Right, and once you study philosophy long enough, you can just let yourself go, right?
	And know that, yeah, you'll make mistakes, but compared to everyone else's mistakes, it doesn't really matter.
	Right. Compared to the scale of falseness going on right now, it's not even on the radar screen.
	Right. I mean, if we're the only people out on the boat during water rescuing people and we sometimes grab someone by the wrong arm or grab them by the...
	You know what? Are they going to complain, right?
	It's like, hey, if you want to wait for the next person to come along, you're more than welcome to, right?
	Right, right. Okay, well, I've run out of butts, so...
	Wow, I guess you're standing up.
	All right. Boom, boom.
	Alright, I think we pretty much whittled it down to the core believers.
	Is there anyone else who had another question?
	Thanks, Craig. That was excellent. I hope that was helpful.
	Excellent questions. Yeah, I've been known to use a metaphor or two.
	I never met a four. I didn't like.
	Alright, Rod has an Oscar therapist.
	Let's hand the mic over to the Sid person.
	I'm going to allow you to talk.
	It's a rare privilege. I don't get it very often.
	Actually, that's what the command says.
	It says, allow to talk.
	Grant the privilege. Hi, Rod.
	How are you? Doing quite well.
	Thank you, Christina. How are you? Well, thank you.
	So my question is this and it's something that's been on my mind quite a lot lately and it was actually just brought up in this conversation between Steph and Greg is this whole perfection thing standing in the way of accomplishment and the transition I've been going through over the last several weeks from being a full-time salaried guy to As a self-employed contractor,
	I've been having to do a lot of these things that take a lot of actions that almost every step along the way it feels like I've been climbing a mountain or trying to punch through a brick wall in order to do simple things like filing the paperwork for my business license and my fictional business name and things like that.
	And I know that I need to get these things done in order to reach my goal, but for some reason there's something that holds me back from doing this.
	It's definitely this, well, I don't know if I have every detail perfect and all that stuff like that.
	And, I mean, I'm still accomplishing these things, it's just that each time I do one of these things, it feels like it's about as hard as drilling a hole in my head, and I'm just wondering what kind of sources of Of this block should I be looking for?
	Because I'm trying to root out where this comes from in order to deal with it, but I'm not exactly sure where to start looking.
	Well, I think it sounds a little bit like perfectionism, and where there is perfectionism, there is anxiety.
	It sounds like you're paralyzed.
	You want to do something, and you know what your end goal needs to be, but you just can't get yourself there, or you really, really have to push yourself.
	So the first question I always ask is what are you telling yourself?
	So you're sitting in front of your computer and you're trying to prepare an invoice.
	What's going on in your mind?
	It always seems to be something along the lines of I don't know if I'm getting all these details right and if they're not right I don't want to hand this I don't want this form to anybody because I don't want them to see that I'm wrong.
	Or something like that.
	It's something along those lines.
	Like I'm terrified of doing something wrong, I think.
	Right. So there's a fear of making an error.
	So what happens if I make an error?
	Let's just sort of do a downward arrow technique.
	We follow that thought all the way to its end conclusion.
	So what happens if you make a mistake?
	So you make a mistake when you submit your invoice.
	What's going to happen then? Well, so far I haven't gotten to any invoices or anything like that.
	The main thing that's been blocking me so far is filing my fictitious business name.
	And even though I came up with a business name that I really like, there's something about it that I keep waffling over.
	Should I make it a different name?
	Should I make the name more explicit to what I do?
	Things like that and all these little goofy details It seemed to be keeping me from just filing the thing and getting on with it.
	So I've filled out the form now and I'm about to deliver it to the county recorder tomorrow.
	But it's amazing to me that it's taken me literally three weeks to get this thing filled out.
	It's a one-page form.
	It's just hilarious how insignificant it is and how much of a deal I've made out of it.
	Is this to register your business?
	Right. It's a DBA form which is called Doing Business As.
	It's a fictitious business name form.
	I'm creating a name for my business that isn't my own name.
	So I have to file a form and have that published in the newspaper and all that stuff.
	To make it legit or whatever, I guess.
	Right, and at some point if the business grows, you might want to incorporate.
	So this is going to be your business name.
	Sure. Yeah, okay.
	And you know, it's really interesting.
	You said how, it's amazing to me how long it's taken me to fill out this one-page form.
	But there's a lot of importance in this one-page form.
	The name of a company, and I don't mean to feed your fears, but the name of a company.
	Thank you! I just chewed through my last fingernail.
	Thanks. Right.
	I mean, it is an important thing.
	You're going to name...
	I mean, assuming it's being called Epicus Consulting, right?
	Oh, boy.
	You guys are killing me.
	I'll see you next time.
	Health family? I think I am.
	Thanks for all your help, Christina.
	Bye. Laughter is the best memory.
	I'm crying right now.
	Realism is the right thing.
	It is important.
	I mean, this piece of paper does have some weight and importance to it.
	It is going to be the name of the business.
	Now, that doesn't mean that at some point you wouldn't be able to change the name of the business, but you don't want to go through all that hassle and all that trouble.
	So one of the things that I just want to emphasize is sometimes we minimize things that we shouldn't minimize.
	So you're thinking, oh, this should be really easy.
	I should get this in really quickly.
	What's taking me so long?
	Oh, come on, it's just a sheet of paper.
	And you know what? There is some value in this sheet of paper.
	This is going to be your business.
	You can actually take this from the day you quit your job to 20, 30 years from now when you're a multimillionaire doing this thing.
	Yeah, that's what I like to hear.
	There you go.
	Now you should have a lot of anxiety.
	So don't, sometimes the self-talk, you know, we talk ourselves into thinking it should be easier or it should be less meaningful than it is, and that also provokes anxiety.
	You know what? It is meaningful.
	This is going to be your business.
	Spend a little bit of time. Find the right name.
	If you found something that you like, run it by a few people.
	Ask them what their thoughts are.
	Get some feedback. But if it speaks to you, then it's the right name.
	Right. Okay.
	That's good. I actually have run it past several people, and they all think it's a pretty cool idea.
	It's very playful, actually.
	Do you want to give us a name?
	Yeah, it's actually the name that you all know me by.
	It's called Rodzilla Design.
	Oh, nice. And my website name is gogorodzilla.com.
	Very nice. It's kind of a play on that old song, Go Go Godzilla.
	Sorry, I'm not cool enough for that.
	I just want to ask, Christina, let's say that Rob's Sorry, that Rod's deep pathologies here are excusable, right?
	In the current circumstance, right?
	That his deep mania and perfectionism is...
	Like, he gets out an OCD pass free, right?
	One pass. How will he know if this is not just...
	Like, this is important, but he's telling himself it's not.
	How will he know if...
	Like, the next thing? What would be another thing where he might then know that he does have a minor problem with perfectionism or whatever, whatever, right?
	Because maybe it's okay for this time, but if he's going to go and start a business, there may be more.
	Like, how would he know when he might need to deal with this more proactively?
	If this could be just, it's important and it's scary, if the next thing, right?
	Does that make sense? Like, how would he know?
	You know, actually, before you answer that, Christine, I have another scenario here that has been It's like a monkey on my back that's been there for four years now.
	My first job out of college was with a small startup company out here in California.
	It was a fantastic place to work.
	It was so much fun and so exciting, all kinds of great people around me.
	It looked to be a wonderful opportunity for financial gain as well because it was a small company that was going to be making it big, we all thought.
	The CEO of the company was one of those really poor businessmen who really loved to mix his personal finances up with the business finances.
	He ended up running the place out of money, not out of business, but out of money.
	I had to leave there after several months of no paychecks and they still owe me quite a lot of money.
	Around $20,000, and for some reason, for four years, I pursued the case through the, what do you call it, the Labor Commission, the local government Labor Commission here, and I received a judgment saying, yeah, you're right, they owe you all kinds of money, but of course, being the government and having absolutely no incentive to help me, they did nothing about it.
	I've been delaying Getting a lawyer on this.
	It's like I have this horrible fear of facing this thing again and being rejected again, I think.
	This is just another example of the things where I know exactly what I should be doing.
	I should be taking action on this.
	But for some reason, it's like I'm terrified to do so.
	Yeah, that's very interesting.
	What kind of a relationship did you have with the owner of the company?
	It was... It was like a mentor relationship.
	He was a brilliant designer and engineer and he was very good at motivating people who were creative, technically creative.
	I'm a very creative person myself.
	I'm a pretty good product designer.
	That's why I'm confident I can do this contracting gig on my own.
	But he was the type of person who really understood the creative mind and he would allow me To stretch into different areas and he would push me to achieve new things just by...
	He would say, here's an impossible thing I want you to do and by the way the deadline is three days from now and I need you to go out and do all this stuff and get it done for me and I would go and do it and everything would turn out wonderfully because he just never gave me the option to think.
	He just said, go and do it, I know you can do it.
	And so I felt really empowered by the guy in that way but at the same time he was a very He used that same kind of Tony Robbins, you can do it stuff to manipulate people into doing things that ended up harming them in the end, which was, for the most part, it was staying with a company that was not paying them.
	He was very charismatic and very capable of manipulating people like that.
	Right, and it sounds like you liked him.
	I did in a lot of ways, but there is...
	He has a lot of very positive qualities, but at the same time, I think he has that potential to just seriously harm people.
	Right. And when you think about him, do you feel angry?
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	I feel betrayed and angry, and I sometimes think there's no punishment harsh enough for the guy.
	Right, and so if he were to file a lawsuit, would it affect him directly, or would it just affect his business assets?
	Like you said, I think you said he didn't split his personal from his business assets.
	Yeah, he's the type of guy who likes to start up companies.
	He's like a habitual company starter, I think.
	He seems to love the idea of something new all the time, and then he just can't figure out how to I guess execute on it in the end.
	I think he always has this dream of starting up a company and then selling it for billions of dollars or something like that, but he can never unload the thing at the end.
	He can build it up to a certain point and then that's as far as he can get.
	Well, I just had a thought, now it's gone.
	If you go after this guy, what are your feelings?
	I mean, do you think you're going to be hurting him?
	Do you think you're going to be betraying him?
	Are you afraid that he's going to come back and he's going to try to manipulate you and say, you know, you're doing the wrong thing, you've got me all wrong?
	Do you feel like he's going to come in and try and manipulate you?
	No. I don't think it's so much that.
	In fact, when I think of And this might be something I need to examine as well, but sometimes I feel like when I think of him being exposed or something as a shyster and a fraud or whatever, it kind of gives me a sense of pleasure.
	I think the biggest fear that I have is trying again, sticking my neck out again to ask for what is mine.
	And then just be shut down again because this experience that I had with the government department, the labor commission, I went after it.
	It actually took me a whole year to do that.
	After I left, I said, you know, I'd like my money.
	And then they said, yeah, sure, we'll get it to you as soon as we can.
	And then a whole year later, I finally filed my petition with the Labor Commission and that was difficult to do.
	And then when I went through all that experience and I got a sheet of paper saying, yes, you're right, they owe you all kinds of money and we're not going to do anything to help you.
	It was, you know, another devastating thing where I reached out for help and Received nothing.
	It was almost insulting.
	And again, I just feel like if I go to a lawyer, if I spend a thousand bucks or whatever, you know, pursuing this again and then it turns up again as another failure, it's just going to crush me again.
	It's like I don't want to risk that pain again, but at the same time, not risking it is painful too.
	So it's like I'm going to catch 22.
	Oh, I just wanted to ask a quick question just because he sounds similar to a guy I was in business with.
	We have no control over whether we get what we want.
	You're not responsible for whether you get this money.
	You're not a success if you get this money, and you're not a failure if you don't get this money.
	Assuming you're not going to go and rob the guy's house if you're not going to take the law into your own hands, which of course is not a good idea.
	You're not morally or emotionally or ethically or philosophically responsible for getting this money back.
	You have to rely on other people to do their job.
	There's just no way that you can get this money back.
	Right? Yeah, and that's a good point.
	There's a powerlessness in that, I think.
	But there is. But that's true no matter what.
	That's true in a free society.
	You just might have a bad DRO. Who knows, right?
	Right. Or there may be some funky law that the company owed you the money and now the company's out of business so you just can't get the money or whatever, right?
	But you are not responsible for whether you get this money or not.
	And I know that that feels like there's helplessness in it, but what it also does is it lowers the stakes, right?
	Ah, yeah. Because you feel like, if I don't get this money, I'm a failure.
	I'm rejected. I'm powerless.
	There's really bad, negative consequences to you within your own...
	You're trying to avoid those feelings, right?
	But those feelings are to do with your past, not to do with this lawsuit.
	This lawsuit is rolling the dice.
	Is it worth spending a grand to find out if you can get the money back?
	I mean, you can make that decision.
	I think it is for you, right?
	Because this may not be the last time you have to deal with this.
	Maybe you're going to have a customer who's not going to pay you.
	Now that you're self-employed, this is stuff you're all going to have to deal with.
	So I think it's worth spending the money.
	And you think of it like I'm going to go down to Vegas, I'm going to take 20 bucks and I'm going to put it on Red 23.
	You're not a bad person if you don't win and you're not a good person if you do win.
	You're just playing a game. And the game is called, I wonder if I can get my money back?
	And you're not good if you do, and you're not bad if you don't.
	You don't have any control over the outcome of it because it's the law, it's lawyers, it's this guy's reaction, it's this, that, and the other, right?
	And you won't have to spend a thousand bucks, right?
	Most lawyers will give you a free or cheap consultation to begin with.
	The fact that you've already got this ruling from the labor board is probably going to help you accelerate the case, right?
	Sure. But it's rolling the dice, right?
	It's just going to see if you can get the money back.
	It's not, if I don't get this money back, I'm a failure.
	Because you have no control over that, and you don't want to surrender that power to a random system.
	You don't want to surrender the power of whether you are a good or bad person to a badly designed government system.
	Right. You know, something else just popped into my head and this is...
	I've thought of this a couple times before and let me just run it by you.
	When I was having my last phone conversation with my mom and it was pretty much my defooing experience, I was asking her about why she was married to my dad for 40 years and during the last 20 years of that, she had children in the marriage with her.
	It was a little more than 20 years.
	I guess about 25 years.
	Anyway, soon after my brother and I had left the house, I was in college away.
	She separated from my dad and then divorced him.
	Of course, what that says to me is that my brother and I were built to be blast shields for her.
	As soon as she lost her blast shield, she bugged out.
	She got out of there because she couldn't handle the direct stress of living with my dad.
	I asked her, why would you live with this guy for so long and why would you live with this guy with children?
	Why would you bring children into this thing?
	She was saying that she couldn't leave because there was There's no support for people who left back then or whatever and she didn't know what it was going to be.
	It seemed like her reasoning for not leaving my dad sooner, it almost rhymes with my reasoning for not doing the things that I know I should do and that I can't bring myself to do for some reason.
	It almost feels to me like For all those years I had to play that game with her to say that yes, the unknown is terrifying and therefore we should avoid it.
	And now I keep playing the game with myself even though I know it's killing me to do it.
	So, forgive me, I just want to make sure I've got this right.
	When you were living at home with your mother and your brother, and your mom was still married to your dad, you played the game with your mom about, I mean, sorry, you colluded with your mom in her staying?
	Well, I don't think so much that it was an explicitly known thing like that, but my mom always played the victim of an irrational and, you know, Kind of crazy man.
	My dad suffers, I think, from quite a lot of...
	I mean, his own childhood was, from what I've heard of it, I've heard very little of his childhood, but from what I've heard, it was pretty insane, I think.
	His mom used to beat his dad, and I guess when he was a very young boy, she used to dress him as a girl and things like that.
	It was just horribly damaging type stuff.
	He has rage issues.
	For a while, he was seeing a psychiatrist that was at him on certain medication.
	And so, you know, my mom, her excuse for staying, I don't know what the excuse was.
	It was just, you know, it was always for us boys.
	It was, oh, I did it for you boys.
	I didn't want you to grow up without a father.
	Well, you know, it wouldn't be so bad to grow up without a crazy father, you know?
	Anyway, but And she would describe how awful it was for her to live with him even before we were born and stuff.
	It was just, oh, it was just always awful and always terrible, and she was the victim, she was the victim.
	And I said, well, if you were such a victim, why would you bring two fresh new victims into the world with you?
	And it was that...
	And I really always did feel like I was...
	When I was a little kid, I always had this feeling like I had to...
	And again, it wasn't really an explicit thing, but it just seemed like I was always being the, it's okay, mom, you know, I know you feel bad, but it's okay type thing.
	And I always felt like I was having to be too big of a person as a little kid, you know?
	Like a pacifier?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	It was kind of, I mean, when my mom would do something, I mean, there was one time when My mom had pressured me into being in the marching band for the city parade.
	I didn't really want to do it.
	This was during junior high or something like that.
	I couldn't possibly care less about this kind of thing.
	I really didn't like the whole marching down the street playing this stupid Batman theme over and over again.
	But she pressured me into doing it.
	The big deal was that We were going to go to some, the school would take us to some fair or something down by the Twin Cities in Minnesota.
	And on the day that the bus was leaving to take us all to the Twin Cities, my mom overslept and didn't wake me up in time to get me there.
	So she thought that the, you know, the reward that she was holding out there for me to do this, she had, you know, caused me not to get that reward.
	And she completely flipped out and she was just bawling and sobbing and like, Hitting herself in the head and stuff, lying across my legs on the bed, going completely insane about this stuff.
	I felt like it's okay, Mom.
	I was trying to comfort her and stuff like that.
	I was thinking to myself at the time, this is such a completely overblown reaction to this.
	I really don't care. I didn't even care about going to the fair thing.
	It's over. Don't worry about it type thing.
	And so it seemed like when she would do something that she knew to be wrong, it was like just completely overblow the apology type thing and to the point where it made me feel guilty if I didn't forgive her or whatever.
	So she does something wrong for you and you end up comforting her, right?
	Yeah, exactly. It was such an imposition, it felt like, on me.
	I didn't care about missing the bus.
	I cared more about the, man, I feel like crap now because my mom's completely just melting down over me here.
	Right, and it's interesting that you bring this up while you're talking about a potential lawsuit against a man that you kind of admired or respected in some ways.
	And I was just curious, I asked the question before, but it didn't seem to ring a bell for you at all about, you know, if you were to sue this man, would you be managing his feelings?
	Is that part of your discomfort and not pursuing it because you think he's going to get upset with you or he's going to be upset and then you have to comfort him?
	Is there a connection there?
	You know, there's something about it.
	Like, I feel almost as if this guy, he definitely has a vindictive streak.
	And, you know, before when I described how I admired him, I admire him for certain reasons, not as a whole, though.
	I mean, there are aspects of his personality, his abilities that I admire, yes.
	But as a whole, I really have little or no respect for the guy.
	One of the things about him that I really despise is that he is the very vindictive type of person.
	I used to have a friend like this growing up all the way from kindergarten through high school who was really good at teasing other people, but as soon as someone teased him it was just like you just completely crossed a line that could not be crossed.
	It was ten times the abuse then after that if you teased him back.
	And that's the kind of guy that this guy is.
	So I feel like if I show this vulnerability again, if I show this vulnerability by saying, you've taken from me something that is mine, please give it back to me.
	And if he is then able to once again say, no I won't, and I'm going to go through all these legal loopholes and shenanigans to prevent you from having what is yours, I'll feel like I'm giving him that pleasure again to be able to twist the knife one more time.
	Right, right. And that's the thing that I can't abide by.
	It's almost worth the $20,000 just to not risk letting him have that pleasure again.
	Right. And I think that that's exactly what you have to face because, you know, in standing up to him, you're saying, you know, your manipulations don't mean anything.
	You can try and manipulate me and maybe you'll actually win, but I know what's right in this situation and you owe me money.
	I worked and I deserve the money that I earned.
	And it's going to be tougher. I mean, you throw a lawsuit at him, he's going to be tied up in courts and costs and this and that.
	I mean, it's not going to be a piece of cake for him either.
	Right. Right?
	I think you need to look at that fear.
	I mean, this guy, the fear that you have is that he's going to come after you and he's going to make you pay.
	And, you know, you need to fight back and need to stand up for that.
	And Steph's right. Whether you win or lose isn't the issue here.
	The issue is that you have to go through with this so that you can prove to yourself, for yourself, that you're doing the right thing, you earned this money, you deserve this money, and you're going to fight for what's rightfully yours.
	And if you don't go for this guy, Rod, then that's exactly what he wants.
	This is his defense, right?
	In the same way that your mom would overreact when she did you wrong, and you'd end up getting doubly screwed, right?
	Like, in this sense, right, with the marching band, you got triply screwed, right?
	So, first of all, you ended up with this stupid band that you didn't want to be in, right?
	And then your mom didn't even wake you up, To go to the band, right?
	To the march. And then she's like freaking out all over your bed.
	Right? Well, it wasn't that she didn't wake me up for the march.
	I actually did do the marching band thing.
	It was the reward that they were giving us for that was a free trip to some fair.
	It was like an amusement park.
	Right, right. So you didn't get that either, right?
	So you went to this band that you didn't want to be in.
	You didn't get the amusement park ride.
	And then you got triple screwed here, right?
	Like you didn't even want the band thing to begin with.
	But then you did that, you didn't get the reward, and then your mom melts down.
	So in a situation where you should be the one who receives an apology, you end up having to do all the comforting.
	And that's what your mom's defense was.
	Whenever your mom was in a situation where she could be legitimately criticized, she had such a weak ego that she couldn't handle it, and so she had to divert any potential criticism through self-laceration.
	Through attacking herself so violently that she would defuse you from attacking her.
	It's really sick stuff, but that's what was going on for her.
	She could never be in a situation where she could be criticized.
	You're trained emotionally that when you have been wronged by someone, you must empathize with them, not with you.
	Right. So this guy who's wronged you, you're empathizing with him, right?
	Not with you. And so you feel, well, I don't want him to win, and I'm angry, but he's the one who doesn't want you to pursue this lawsuit.
	So anything that leads you to not pursue this lawsuit is his desire.
	So you're empathizing with him because of your mom, because that's what you were trained to do, to empathize with people who'd hurt you, to comfort people who'd hurt you.
	Now, you're attacking, in a sense.
	You're reversing the whole paradigm.
	This is called breaking free and it hurts like hell.
	But you're saying, I'm not going to comfort this guy.
	I'm not going to phone him and tell him it's alright.
	I'm not going to put it off. I'm not going to listen to his lies.
	I'm not going to let him distract me.
	I'm owed what's mine, dammit.
	And if this guy doesn't like it, to hell with him.
	Then he should have paid me four years ago.
	And your lawyer can make it worth his while to settle.
	Because your lawyer can say, and we're going to go for interest for four years, and we're going to go for damages, and we're going to go for the time that this guy has wasted, billed at $150 an hour on this lawsuit.
	Or you could just pay the $20K right now, or it's going to be like $40K plus my legal fees, $50K or whatever, right?
	Your lawyer can make it productive for this guy to settle.
	So it doesn't have to be long and drawn out.
	But the fact is that you were wronged, and you have a habit of identifying with the needs of the person who's wronged you, and this is a habit that was inflicted on you, right?
	So you have to pursue this, and you have to be free of the consequences which you can't control.
	The only thing that you can control is breaking the cycle of having sympathy for the people who do you wrong, which was something that was inflicted on you.
	Right, yeah. So somehow, when people throw up the smokescreen, I focus on the smoke screen, and it's...
	Yeah, I get it.
	He doesn't want you to sue him, so you sympathize with his desire to not sue him, but you also hate him for that manipulation as well.
	He's just cashing in on the brutality that your parents inflicted on you, both of them.
	Yeah, it's interesting. I've even had these fantasies of, yeah, well if this going after him with a legal notice doesn't work, well then I'll just go to the local newspaper and maybe they'd like to do a big expose on the guy because one of the things that he likes to do is he pretends to be a, you know, kind of a local captain of industry by donating large amounts of stuff to the fire departments and things like that until he gets the keys to the city and all that junk like that.
	I have this wild fantasy of just being able to really hit him where it hurts because he puts so much of his ego into this stuff, you know?
	Right. I mean, you don't want to get consumed with vengeance, but you could certainly put a page on your website if you don't get the money back, right?
	Saying, this is my guy, right?
	By the way, just, you know, friend to friend, don't do business with this guy because of X, Y, and Z. But, yeah, I think you have to focus on your own needs, right?
	This guy definitely shafted you.
	He's definitely a bad guy in this realm.
	And you can't ego-identify with his need to not have you sue him, right?
	Because you've got to get what's yours, right?
	I mean, that's totally reasonable.
	It's totally valid.
	Just because, I mean, nobody's going to want you to sue them, right?
	But this guy, you're striking a blow for good here, right?
	Because if nobody sues this guy, he's just going to keep doing it.
	Yeah. That's true.
	Yeah, I'm Alright, on my list of things to do this week.
	Go to the lawyer. Wait, wait.
	Sorry, let me just bring in Greg, because I'm sure there's a but here.
	Was there anything there that we wanted to chime in with?
	Yeah.
	Baseball. Okay. Is there anything else that you wanted to ask about?
	For me? I don't think so.
	These are the... Just that perfectionism as an excuse to not act type thing was on my mind, but then I think underneath it all was this thing that's been, like I said, this has just been a monkey on my back for over three years now, or four years now, and it's just been bugging the heck out of me.
	It's actually one of the things that, as I've been going through all this progress of defooing and getting bad people out and good people in, This thing keeps on popping up in the back of my mind saying, you know, you still haven't addressed me.
	You still haven't dealt with me.
	When are you going to get to me?
	I think once you do this, you're going to be so liberated.
	I think it will inspire more creativity for you and help you move forward with your own...
	Yeah, moving forward with your new business venture.
	Yeah, whether you win or lose.
	I agree. Yeah, I agree.
	There's somehow...
	There is a connection, almost...
	Almost imperceptible connection between this old job thing and my new business.
	It feels like the closer I get to this new business, the more these old feelings from this old job thing have been popping up.
	Well, I'll tell you this, just from having been an entrepreneur for many years myself, that there's going to be an unconscious communication between you and your clients.
	This is very, very important for your future.
	It's not about 20 grand.
	It's immaterial relative to how much money you can get from your new business.
	There's going to be an unconscious communication between you and your clients that if you feel that you can't ask your clients for things or you can't make your needs known or you can't get them to pay you, If that's something that you bring into your business, that is going to define your business.
	And your business is going to be a whole lot less fun and a whole lot less profitable than it could be otherwise.
	Whereas if you go into your business just knowing that although it's difficult at times, you can ask for what you want, you can tell people what you want, with firmness, knowing you only have to know that you're going to back it up with action.
	And that communicates itself to other people, if that makes sense.
	Absolutely. If you do the right thing and prepare your confidence level going in, you can avoid this kind of stuff in the future.
	But the more you avoid things in the present, the more you create them in the future.
	Yeah, totally. I'm sure that's why that just below the surface connection is there because, like I say, the closer I get to...
	I mean, I'm just about to file the paperwork on this new business.
	I've already lined up a couple of clients.
	I mean, it's like, as this thing really takes shape and achieves a material form, this old beast is somehow being resurrected right alongside it.
	It's like it is in exactly the same area of my mind.
	Like, as I'm chipping away at this new endeavor, I'm finding that I'm also digging up this old monster.
	Yeah, for sure. It's just like getting bad people out of my life.
	Everyone else I meet, somehow they get this subconscious chemical signal or whatever.
	If it's pheromones or whatever it is, they just know that I'm not going to put up with bad people.
	Right. Absolutely. This is the invisible, powerful, philosophical self-esteem shield that just keeps bad people out of her life and attracts and draws good people into her life.
	There is. You're right. Let's call it the...
	Let's call it the virtue musk.
	Right, right.
	Absolutely. And you're spraying, baby.
	No, this is essential.
	You will save such an enormous amount of heartache and grief in your life by dealing with this now rather than having it come back.
	And then you're really trapped, right?
	Because the amazing thing is you say that your...
	This is the last thing I sort of wanted to mention about this.
	You say that your mom used you as a human shield.
	And I'm not for a moment advocating any sympathy for your mom.
	But if you look at the reality of it, You weren't a human shield.
	You were a cage.
	I mean, yes, you were a human shield, but you were a cage for her.
	Because if she didn't have kids, when would she have left your dad?
	Probably right around the time that she was about to have kids.
	In fact, when my brother was conceived, he's two years older than me, the story goes that my dad was out, you know, having affairs and stuff, so...
	Right, so the fact that your mom had kids and that she used you as a way of avoiding the pain of her marriage meant that she got another 20 years of the same shit, right?
	So avoidance just recreates that which we're trying to avoid, right?
	That's why it just doesn't work.
	You get immediate short-term relief, but it's like taking drugs if you're unhappy, you know, short-term relief, but the problems just get exacerbated in the future, which is why it becomes cyclical, so you can break that now for sure.
	Yeah, so she...
	She built a cage around herself that was made of my brother and me.
	That makes absolute sense.
	Thank you so, so much.
	That was an excellent, excellent set of questions.
	Thank you. Thank you very much.
	Yes, Daniel, you had a question about which way is out of the lion's den.
	Tell you what, wash off as much marinade as you can, and we'll get back to you next week, for sure, about dreams.
	But we're just going to have to appreciate that.
	Yeah, we can have a look at that next week, but it's been a long show, and we'll stop it here.
	Thank you so, so much for dropping by.
	Really do appreciate it.
	Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful week, and we will try and get...
	Thank you so much, everyone, and best of luck, Rod and Greg.

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