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Nov. 4, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:59:12

902 Sunday Call In Show Nov 4 2007

Surviving sadistic professors, the paralysis of depression - and how UPB and the Real Time Relationship relate!

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	Hello, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	It is the 4th of November, or is that the 11th of April?
	4th of November, 2007.
	It's 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time from, as Mark Stevens says, our fortified compound up here in Mississauga.
	This is Free Domain Radio Live.
	I would like to thank everybody first and foremost obviously for donating and shoring up my spirits at the end of last month.
	I did get a flurry of cash donations and three panties and a pair of boxer shorts.
	Thanks for the panties. But I don't wear boxers.
	So anyway, I really do appreciate that.
	That was great. And thank you to those who are thinking about a...
	Craig said my shorts made it.
	Yes. And let me tell you, they're riding pretty tight.
	But yeah, thanks so much for everyone there.
	Also, thank you to the people who are snapping up the copies of UPB, On Truth, and The God of Atheists, and to the people who wrote to me to tell me that they can't believe I ripped them off that much for such a short book called On Truth, but that they felt they got better value for the sort of pound of paper for the other books.
	So I hope that that continues to be satisfying to people.
	And last but not least, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, So much for the traffic that was driven.
	I just did a preliminary analysis yesterday and we leapt from 170,000 podcast downloads in September to 237,000.
	In October.
	And that's pretty good.
	So we should be pleased.
	Especially because I didn't do that many in October because there's quite a bit of work.
	So... So yeah, I really, really do appreciate that.
	And I haven't counted YouTube views in that.
	It's about 20,000 or 30,000 YouTube views.
	And this doesn't count some of the people who are still getting to the first couple of hundred podcasts through Christina's site.
	So there's more.
	And that doesn't count the...
	I do count as media views the people who go over to thefreedomain.blogspot.com and read a couple of articles.
	So I think we have had the biggest month ever.
	At Free Domain Radio in October, and that is very cool.
	I just wanted to let you know that I have, after a careful study and consideration, I have invested some money in ads, believe it or not, in the online version of USA Today.
	I think that pumping the number one philosophy show on the internet, which I do believe that we are, combined with the top ten finalists, in the 2007 Podcast Awards will start bringing people over.
	So I think that is great, and I got a good deal For those of you who are, I think it's Diamond Plus, got a chance to listen to an interview that one of the podcasting gurus, Paul Culligan, interviewed me a couple of months back, and he sent me an invite to this sort of a preview thing for how to advertise through USA Today, and I got a pretty good deal from that, so I thought I'd give it a shot.
	And just so you're aware, I'm going to start up the StumbleUpon ads again next week.
	Thanks so much to Charlie, the wonderful webmeister, who has done such a fantastic job of rescuing the website from what can only be charitably described as Steph's template hell.
	So I really do appreciate that and that was absolutely, everyone, fantastic.
	So that's good. I think that it's going to be very interesting to get a whole bunch of new people coming in, which I think will happen in November.
	And I also am going to spend a little bit of time this coming week Two, I recompile some of the earlier podcasts in higher quality audio, though I'm not going to up it too much.
	At the moment, some of them are 40k and not volume normalized.
	So, of course, the early podcasts were a little rough as compared to the later podcasts, which are only mostly rough.
	So, I'm going to be recompiling those up to at least 56 or 64, and also they will then play in the Flash Player without me sounding like chipmunks on cocaine.
	So, hopefully that will all work out very nicely.
	So, last but not least...
	Oh, you won't be able to do it that way.
	Sorry. Sorry, we just have a technical thing here.
	Are you going to add? Oh, yeah, that's right.
	Lost his connection. Alright, so I'd like to start with a topic that may be repeated a little bit in our podcast this week when I get around to compiling a chat that I had with a listener, but we were talking about this question of hatred.
	And hatred, you've always got to be suspicious of, at least my starting point, is to be suspicious of emotions that are generally derided or generally found to be difficult.
	There is a general power structure in the world, which we're all aware of, and which I talk about in UPB and the On Truth book, and a little bit, I guess, more fictionally in The God of Atheists.
	There is a huge power structure in the world, which is around you and I as beasts of burden who produce taxes and services for our lords and masters.
	This occurs in the religious realm, this occurs in the political realm, and as I have mentioned once or a million times, in the family realm.
	There is a strong mythology about certain types of emotions in the world.
	The emotions which threaten nobody are given their due praise.
	Always be suspicious of, you know, when a corrupt culture praises something, like, service to the fatherland, I mean, that's the kind of stuff you really have to be wary of, right?
	So we live in a kind of topsy-turvy, black-is-white, up-is-down kind of world.
	That which is praised is almost always subservience or causes subservience.
	That which is derided often causes individuality and those who are part of the Gold Plus Free Domain Radio book club who are going through Nietzsche's The Antichrist will notice that he points us out quite a bit.
	That which is good for man is derided by the rulers and that which is bad for man but good for the rulers is praised.
	And of course we have all the artists And philosophers and theologians and professors in the world jumping on that bandwagon to shore up whatever they can to help the leaders and so gain some scraps from the table of exploitation and destruction.
	So hatred is one of those emotions that is derided.
	And the way that you deride an emotion is you co-join it with its supposed opposite.
	So, the way that anarchy is derided is that it is put forward as if it would be some kind of war of all against all, unjust, endless violence, endless war.
	Of course, the exact opposite is true of anarchy, that anarchy would be a state of perpetual and almost universal peace, because you wouldn't be able to slough off the costs of war to your victims.
	So, in the same way, I just want to spend a few minutes talking about the relationship between hatred and rage.
	These two are completely opposite emotions, but they are almost always conflated together, and hatred is stacked up, blended in, mixed in with rage, and then you're supposed to reject both of them and go back to some sort of simpering ass-kissing to power that is considered to be virtue these days.
	So I'll just touch very briefly, relatively briefly, on the question of the differences between hatred and And the primary difference between hatred and rage is that hatred is anger towards a violation that is designed to repel whoever is violating you.
	Rage is anger against a violation that is designed to control Whoever is violating you.
	These two are very, very different situations.
	Very, very different situations.
	I'm just going to go over it again and then I'll spend a few minutes just teasing it out.
	Hatred is anger against a violation that is designed to repel the violator.
	Rage is anger towards a violation that is designed to control the violator.
	Let's look at two examples.
	We've got a married couple, the bickertons, the hostile-tons, the angry, bitter married people.
	And in a situation of hatred, like if you wake up one day and you say, man, I really hate my wife, then what you do is you get a divorce.
	That's hatred. It's designed to get that person out of your life.
	That having been done, your hatred subsides.
	You know, when you get a cold, your antibodies swarm all over it and try to kill it.
	And then when they've killed it, they stop trying to kill it.
	Why? Because it's dead. In the same way, when we hate someone, we get them out of our lives.
	Think of it as a big eject button.
	Big red flashing eject button.
	Boing! Away they go.
	And it's nice if you want to open the skylight before you repel them, but that, of course, is up to you.
	Now, on the other hand, you have a married couple where the husband wakes up and says, I hate my wife because she nags me all the time.
	I just hate her. So I'm not going to divorce her.
	What I'm going to do is I'm going to make her stop nagging me.
	And that is rage, because that is designed to control another human being.
	Rage is slavery. If you have a woman whose husband is a hound dog and he's out sleeping around, she wakes up one morning, she says, you know, I can't stand this filthy bastard's hands on my body.
	He touches everything in sight.
	I caught him fondling some sausages at the supermarket the other day.
	He got thrown out. He just grabs everything.
	Even my plants get violated.
	That's why I had to buy the Venus flytraps.
	I can't stand him.
	I'm going to divorce him. Well, that's great, right?
	Relatively speaking. However, if she wakes up and says, that hound dog and bastard, he sleeps around to me, I know it, he lies to me, I know it, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to follow him around 24 hours a day, and I'm going to call his phone 50 times a day, and I'm going to check his email, and I'm going to capture his keystrokes, and I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do that, and I'm going to catch him, and I'm going to stop him from doing it.
	Well, hatred is getting the person out of your life.
	Rage is when you want to punish the person And when you want to control the person and when you want to get the person.
	And that's not really very healthy, in my view.
	That latter part is very, very different.
	The first part, you're just getting someone out of your life.
	And that's healthy.
	And that's how you get over hatred.
	You don't sit there and try and control the person who you hate.
	You don't try and reform them.
	You don't try and change them.
	You don't become a slave to them and to their bad habits or whatever it is that you dislike so vehemently.
	You listen to your hatred which is trying to set you free.
	And you just get the person out of your life.
	But with rage you want to dominate the person.
	You want to control them.
	You want to put them down. You want to catch them.
	You want to get them. And that never ends.
	That never ends.
	That is slavery of the worst kind.
	Trying to get bad people.
	Well, I say get them out of your life.
	And I try and sort of show that on the board.
	People who I end up disliking.
	Well, I just...
	I don't engage with them and then if I see that they're causing lots of trouble with other people, I ban them.
	I don't follow them over the internet and find out where they are in some new forum and try and get them and try and send out email lists to people that they know and try and say, hey, he did this bad thing and he did that bad thing and she's a liar and he's a hypocrite and he's a this.
	Life's really short, right?
	And to go after people you dislike and try and get them And this is true of people on the internet, it's true of people in your life, it's true of lovers, it's true of family, it's true of friends, it's true of siblings, all of it.
	Don't chase bad people all over the universe trying to get them.
	Because that kind of makes you into a not such a good person, right?
	You invite people to be elsewhere, right?
	And you don't try and get them.
	You know, I have this thing every now and then, like when I ban somebody from the board, right, and they send me a message or they do something publicly or email or the instant message system, and they say, you know, you're just a hypocrite and you're deaf and you're a liar and you're a cult leader and this and that and the other, right? So then I ban them, right?
	And I ban their IP. Because I don't want to waste any bandwidth on these people.
	And they shouldn't want any of my podcasts, right?
	I mean, that's the funniest thing in the world.
	I swear to God, more than 50% of the time, people send me unbelievably angry emails saying, what do you mean an IP ban?
	Why did you IP ban me?
	Well, because you said I was a bad guy.
	Right? I mean, I can't understand that.
	That's like somebody saying, you are the sickest and most evil person in the universe, Steph.
	I never want to talk to you again.
	And I change my phone number.
	And they get really mad.
	Well, how am I supposed to get in touch with you if you change your phone number?
	I mean, it's madness!
	And it's inevitable with certain kinds of people, right?
	So, you know, just invite people out of your life.
	If you dislike them, I mean, there's this question, like, do you descend to their level?
	Well, I think it's valid at times.
	Like, if somebody punches me, I'll punch them back.
	Well, actually, I'll hide behind Christina and call them names.
	But theoretically, if I were a tough guy, I'd punch them back.
	And then they go away, right?
	And then I don't go to that bar.
	I don't go to where they are.
	I don't chase them around trying to punch them down later.
	I figure out what got me into that mess, how I ended up in that situation.
	I get those people and anybody like them out of my life.
	You know, if you drink from a well and it makes you sick, The thing to do is not keep drinking from the well in the hopes that you're going to build up immunity.
	It might kill you. Just don't drink from that well anymore.
	Wherever there are tadpole, lava, leeches, and pond scum in the water, I'm going to manage my thirst by getting water from elsewhere.
	And if you don't enjoy interacting with somebody, people don't interact with them.
	That's what I call freedom.
	If you're on a thread or you're in a conversation and you don't enjoy it, you're not having a good time, no unchosen positive obligations.
	Remember? You don't have to tell anyone anything.
	You've got to look upon yourself as a kind of treasure.
	as a kind of sack of gold and diamonds and rubies and all the wise dust in the universe and you've got to dole yourself out only where it gives you pleasure only where it makes you happy It's not a question of you owe the truth to people because you want to spread the truth and this and that and the other.
	No, it's always lead by example.
	It's always lead by example.
	When you get involved in entangled and messy and ugly and difficult and unpleasant conversations with people, all you're saying is, I'm not free!
	You've got to demonstrate Freedom.
	You've got to live no unchosen positive obligations.
	And the way that you do that is you actually don't have any unchosen positive obligations.
	Now, naturally, if you're engaging with somebody and it turns unpleasant, you always have to go back.
	How did I get here?
	How did we get here? The very first post, how did I feel?
	The very first interaction that I had with this person.
	And if You decide not to interact with somebody, I guarantee you that a bad person will immediately and automatically say, oh, I guess you just run away when I beat you, huh?
	Guess you can't handle the truth!
	Oh, heat's getting a little rough, you gotta run out of the kitchen, huh?
	Huh, guess I win! That's how you know it's a really good idea not to be in that conversation.
	You don't owe anybody a reply.
	If somebody sends you an email and you don't like it, you don't owe anybody a reply.
	If you've exchanged 10 emails and on the 11th email it's abusive or mean or weird or just unpleasant, block them!
	Don't reply. He's like, oh, well if you don't reply, I'm just going to assume I've won.
	Great! You go off and you assume that you've won.
	Fabulous. Have fun.
	Enjoy. Relish that.
	Because I'm interested in the truth, not the appearance of truth.
	I'm interested in negotiation, not leveling, not one-upmanship, not rank competition based on Machiavellian emotional bullshit.
	I'm interested in a positive, flourishing conversation about truth and virtue and values, which is fun and enjoyable, and we can call each other on stuff, and we can have a sense of humor about ourselves, but is never, NEVER negative, hostile, abusive, or weird.
	Or if it does happen, it's a real misstep, a little misstep, and people say, sorry.
	We don't have to be perfect, but we at least have to be correctable.
	Alright, so this woman came in recently.
	Who said, uh, you know, I'm just too hot to handle and every guy around me just, uh, they just, uh, they're really grabby and I keep getting to all this trouble, right?
	Started probing, so to speak, to say, well, maybe this, maybe that.
	Hey, it's not my fault, period.
	Okay, well, right, then you're not coming to If you come to a nutrition forum and you say, I weigh 300 pounds and it's not my fault and there's nothing that I can do to change it, then don't post on a nutrition forum.
	You have no responsibility.
	These are all just clues and ways that you can figure things out sooner so that you can avoid these kinds of quagmires.
	So if you are friends with your hatred, you get to live a life that is remarkably free of hatred.
	If you listen to your anger, you get to live a life that is remarkably free of anger.
	You don't sit there playing whack-a-mole.
	You get the people out of your life who are difficult and problematic and dangerous and unpleasant.
	You don't owe them anything.
	They don't owe you anything.
	And that's what I call freedom in your life.
	And that's why it's important to not reject your hatred.
	You have to resist the urge to control people.
	And we all have this from our family, right?
	Because with our parents, we could not hit the eject button.
	Mother Nature puts the kibosh on that.
	We can't hit the eject button with our parents or with our siblings or with our teachers or with the bully in school.
	It's a whole series of rotating phalanxes of various types of prisons when we're a child.
	So it's understandable that we want to manage and control those who cause us pain, but it is a fool's trap as an adult.
	It is a quagmire, a quicksand, a hole with no bottom that will swallow years, decades, or the rest of your life.
	The whole point of wisdom is to make different choices than those that were available to us when we were children.
	Hatred is your friend.
	The same way that your antibodies or your immune system is your friend.
	It's designed to get dangerous substances out of your system, whether that's your body or your social network.
	Listen to it. Act on it.
	Not abusively. When you get people out of your life, you don't have to abuse them.
	If you feel that you have to stay in your life and you've got to control them and you've got to manage them and you've got to change them...
	Well, then you're trapped with them.
	And that's rage.
	That's helplessness. Anger and hatred are empowering.
	Rage, control, is powerless, frustrating, helpless.
	So I just wanted to point out the distinction between these two emotions.
	Always be suspicious of emotions that are called bad.
	I bet you they're really good for you.
	Just bad for other people who are not good people.
	Anyway, that's it for my intro.
	I turn the microphones over to you, my friends.
	Speak now! Hello, can you hear me?
	I sure can. Can you hear me?
	Yeah, good. Yeah, so I guess in line with that whole hatred and rage thing, I posted a thread the other day about my class and how I got really angry and I lost my temper.
	Well, I was wondering, what do you think about expressing emotions generally, let's say, in front of people who aren't in your inner circle of friends?
	I mean, is it really a good idea to ever just, for example, express that you're angry with a particular arrangement at work or at school?
	Well, I think it is. And certainly for myself, what happens is I have a sort of a little set of Punch and Judy hand puppets, I guess you'd call them.
	And what I do is I let usually Judy express my rage.
	Just kidding. Could you just run over this scenario for those who didn't read the post that was going on in your university?
	Okay, well, I have this really, really dumb class on economic development that I had to take because of scheduling issues.
	So, the class pretty much is governed by this old, tenured, and arrogant bastard professor.
	Okay, well, that shows my bias.
	Excellent. You're expressing your feelings already.
	Good. Go on. So anyway, the whole class works in this just ridiculous way.
	70% of your class grade is notes.
	You go to class, you take notes verbatim, and then you come back to the next class and he randomly selects you to read them.
	And that's 70% of your grade, and then 30% of your grade is an exam.
	Anyway, there's been a lot, there was a long series of just like, I mean, I could write like, you know, the Declaration of Independence.
	I could kind of write that for that class.
	It's just like a long trail of abuses and all these terrible things, like where the professor is a complete bully.
	For example, once he asserted that you could establish historical facts, but interpretation was entirely subjective.
	And when I tried to challenge that, he claimed that I didn't understand what he was saying at all.
	And, uh... And that I should, you know, if I ask Plato or Kant or Aristotle, I'll get a different answer, which I find hilarious, right?
	Because I study those philosophers, and clearly some of them are not more right than others.
	Anyway, he pretty much bullied me out of that conversation.
	He refused to discuss it with me.
	So anyway, just the other day, he didn't issue a syllabus at the beginning of the class.
	And just the other day, he had assigned some suggested reading at the beginning of the semester.
	And the other day, he asked a question to the students, and they failed to answer it.
	So instead of being curious about why the students weren't reading this absolutely dreadful and boring book policy report by the World Bank, he assigned us a 10-page book report.
	Which is like we're fifth graders.
	You know what I mean? He assigns us all the same All the same thing, right?
	We just have to summarize this dreadful 10-page book.
	And I pretty much lost my temper.
	I mean, I got really mad, and I felt myself losing control in the class for a second.
	And, like, I turned to my classmates next to me, and I was wondering, like, how can they even accept this incredulous proposition?
	I mean, in the middle of the semester, he decides to issue us a 10-page book report, which has, like, no substance, no learning capability whatsoever, and these people just laid down and took it.
	You know what I mean? I mean, they gave the typical groan, like, oh, oh, no.
	Oh no, but I have another paper due that day.
	But within five seconds it was like, hey, double-spaced?
	Does it have to be ten pages?
	Can we do more? Can we do less? And yeah, I kind of lost it.
	So there's the background.
	Huh, okay. Well, there's a lot in that.
	But let me first just ask you just a couple of questions.
	It sounds like you were surprised that the students just took it.
	Yeah. And why were you surprised about that?
	What were you expecting to happen?
	Or what would you ideally have liked to happen?
	Well, I mean...
	I mean, they usually lie down ideologically in front of the teacher and they're pretty much not going to challenge his knowledge or whatever.
	But I figured since this is something that's actually a policy for the students and it's so unprecedented in the sense that in no other class does anything like this ever happen, I thought that the students would just express so much disdain that he would just give up and say, okay, never mind.
	But I don't know. That was really, I guess, wishful thinking.
	Sorry, have you seen that happen in other classes?
	Never. Not once before.
	I've seen a professor maybe slightly alter an assignment, perhaps add a reading or something, but never something as big as a paper.
	And would you have expected this guy, given his personality, would you have expected him to back down based on a groan?
	Yeah, probably not.
	Well, tell me, tell me, because if you're expressing doubt about that, then there must be some aspect of your approach to things which thinks that it is possible for, let's just say, and I'm sure you're entirely right, that this guy is a sadist, and he's worse than Alder in my novel, right, because he's actively humiliating and destructive.
	Tell me where the reasoning is, and you could be right, but where's the reasoning that says a sadist who enjoys humiliating others is going to back down when people don't like that he's humiliating them?
	Like, he lacks that, right?
	Isn't that what he's in for?
	That's what he's got the job for.
	Right. Well, I mean, it's not so – I mean, the expression – I mean, as it actually played out, I didn't confront him about it, which I'm glad of because I didn't – it would have ended up absolutely tragic because I've argued with this guy before and it's ended in just absolute failure.
	So all this would have done was probably gotten me a bad grade on my dumb book report.
	So – What I was more concerned about, though, was just, I mean, me expressing it, let's say, in front of just my classmates.
	I mean, how do I determine whether, I mean, is it just a matter of determining whether it's going to be futile or not?
	Or, I mean, is it just best to keep these types of feelings to myself if I'm in that kind of environment or that kind of setting?
	No, in all these situations, you have to look at the thought that precedes the emotion.
	And you have to figure out whether the thought is reasonable or not.
	Right, so a massive secret in life around the question of peace of mind, and this doesn't mean like Zen, nothing bothers me, lightning can strike me and I don't even burn or whatever, but in terms of just recognizing how to have a more peaceful and happy life, What generally goes wrong in people's lives, I mean outside, you know, I got cancer or something, I'm just talking about the stuff that we sort of deal with at our age.
	What goes wrong is not that bad things happen, it's that people expect that bad things won't happen.
	So if you have this, it's a bit Schopenhauerian, but if you have this expectation that you're going to be able to beat or get this professor, Or that the students should rise up as one and confront this sadist, then when that doesn't happen, then you're going to be disappointed, right?
	You're going to feel like something bad has happened, something has gone awry, something like reality has not risen to my expectations.
	And you have one of two choices, right?
	You can either continue to chafe against reality, or you can adjust your expectations To be more in accordance with reality.
	So, I know that you're in the United States.
	I mean, this is a generation, and this is not the only generation, who war was declared.
	An illegal war was declared.
	They have a president who's a war criminal.
	A mass murder, a genocide, right?
	And do they rise up and do anything about it?
	No. People crank up taxes on them.
	Do they rise up and do anything about it?
	No. People layer more restrictions on them.
	Do they rise up and do anything about it?
	No. You're in a situation where you had to take a certain class.
	Did you rise up and say, my God, this is ridiculous.
	How can I have to take this class?
	I'm paying for this.
	I'm a taxpayer. I'm a guy who pays his tuition.
	There's no way that you guys are shoving me into a class against my will because of your scheduling screw-ups.
	So if you look at, and this is why I say, you know, how is it that we grow up so broken-spined?
	How is it that all we can do is go, oh, oh well, I guess, well, is it double space?
	Can I at least cut some stuff out of that?
	Can I beg for a little bit of freedom?
	Can I beg for a little bit of, maybe the taxes won't get raised too high?
	Maybe there won't be a draft?
	Maybe they won't print the dollar into atoms, right?
	But we're all brought up this way.
	This is our families. This is our school.
	People are broken.
	People are shattered. People are protoplasm.
	They have a faint, foggy smudge where their spine should be.
	Except for the crazy people who are as assertive as all hell as they drive us all off a cliff.
	Good people are full of doubt and broken-spirited.
	And this is the huge machinery which we call culture, which Has people give birth to children and then smashes them up.
	Left, right and center.
	And then they sit there in their rows begging and hoping and praying that they can get a little bit of freedom by complying with the brutality and sadism and power and violence and control of everybody who's in charge of them.
	And these people will go from their parents to their teachers to their professors to their bosses to the people who bossed them around in the old age home.
	And then they will fade like poor, like empty trickles of nothing into their graves, having barely lifted a finger to exist the whole way through.
	That's the reality. That's not something I'm making up.
	This is something you and I see every day.
	You are in the land of broken people.
	right?
	I mean, if you were the coach of a basketball team and everybody was in a wheelchair, you wouldn't sit there yelling, jump higher, you lazy bastards, right?
	So let's say it weren't just about my expectation that they would do something.
	It It was just maybe...
	I mean, I didn't really expect them to defy the professor.
	I mean, that's what I wanted, but obviously I had the realization, as I did for myself, right?
	I mean, if anybody would be able to stand up to the professor, it'd be me because I would give the best reasons, right?
	But clearly that wasn't going to work.
	So... What I'm wondering more is like, should I have even bothered to engage the students on whether the assignment was arbitrary or not?
	No, this is what I'm trying to say, and there's nothing wrong with this that you don't have this yet, because I know you're a young man and I'm like the ancient craggy philosopher guy, but I'm telling you, what you don't have is compassion.
	You're just mad at them!
	Right? But if you were to come across, if you were, I don't know, an Allied soldier in Germany, 1945, you come over a hill to Treblanke or to Auschwitz or something, and you see a bunch of, this is over the top, but just go with me for a second, and you see a bunch of people in those striped suits and their skeletons and they weigh 80 pounds and they got no hair and their teeth have all fallen out and they're just shuffling around.
	You wouldn't be mad at them, would you?
	No.
	You'd have compassion.
	So, I can't, but there's no way for me to be compassionate yet express that I'm angry.
	Like, what makes those two incompatible?
	Well, but you're angry because you don't get how broken people are.
	So you're frustrated.
	Because you think that they should, they're people in a wheelchair, but you think they should be able to do triple layups.
	And so you're mad, right?
	Right. But philosophy is about accepting the reality, right?
	The stuff that I write about in Untruth, I'm not kidding.
	People are broken.
	People are bullied and smashed and crushed and crippled.
	I mean, you've heard my yelling, crush, crush, podcasts, right?
	I don't know if you have, but look at the podcasts on humiliation.
	They are slaves.
	They are broken. The best they can do is groan and hope that somebody takes pity on them and lightens their load just a little bit, but the chance of them actually negotiating with someone in power?
	Unthinkable! That's how you get yourself beaten, or screamed at, or humiliated, or ignored.
	Right? We're all raised in terror.
	I mean, you're asking sheep to become wolves.
	And you're frustrated. And all I'm saying is that in a healthy world, in a happy world, in a free world, this situation would never arise at all, and if it did, people would be confident in saying, this is not reasonable, this is not fair. And they would say so, All the way at the beginning, right?
	They'd say, no, no, no.
	I'm a customer here.
	You don't tell me that I have to take this.
	If I go to a store and I want to buy some cornflakes, they don't say, oh, you have to buy these five other items, too.
	It's like, no, I don't. I go to another store that will, right?
	But these situations would never arise.
	This guy would never have a job in a free society.
	He would never have a job in a free society.
	So I think having compassion for how broken and busted up people are from childhood onwards is going to make your life a lot easier.
	It's sad. It's heartbreaking.
	It really is heartbreaking when you look at the smoking wreckage of people's noble and beautiful souls in the world.
	but if you can find it in your heart to have compassion rather than just be angry and frustrated with them, which is itself a kind of sadistic impulse.
	See, this is one of the reasons why this professor bothers you so much.
	Because you have a little streak of cruelty, as we all do, in you.
	Which is why you get mad at people who are smashed and broken up.
	That's not too blunt, is it?
	I hope you don't mind.
	No, I think it's true, and I think it's something that I've just inherited.
	But I mean, to some degree though, I think part of it also is anger directed at the fact that my well-being is constantly tormented and pulled apart day by day as I go through this gauntlet, this nightmarish gauntlet of academia.
	But Greg just asked in the chat, isn't there a significant fundamental difference between the victims in the class and the actively corrupt, like the people at Liberating Minds?
	So I guess what I'm saying is, suppose my anger were simply directed toward the professor.
	I mean, is he also a broken and shattered person who I should not have any anger towards?
	I mean, what can I be angry at?
	Because I know that I feel angry in a way that isn't just about cruelty.
	Well, we can't answer that question until you tell me how you inherited a cruel streak.
	I guess it's because I had a childhood where people were quite cruel to me.
	Especially people in that environment, right?
	My friends, there's like less cruelty now among me and my friends, but I'm saying in that whole school academic environment, I just had a very strong streak of cruelty where I was constantly the loser kid in the class.
	And what would you have liked if you can go back in your mind to that situation?
	And I really do appreciate that.
	That's very honest. What would you have liked to have happened in that situation?
	what would have eased your heart in that situation when you were frightened and you were bullied?
	Yeah, for somebody to have stood up for me, for example, or what would have ideally eased my mind was for people to have just accepted me and let me do my thing.
	But people didn't let me do my thing.
	Well, I think this is the gap, and I'm going to be even more annoying now, and I do apologize for that in advance, but I think this is the gap where your anger, what I would call rage, is sort of flowing in here.
	If someone had stood up for you when you were being bullied, you would not have felt better.
	you would have felt worse.
	You would have felt more frightened.
	Okay, so why?
	Why is that?
	Well, because if my brother was sort of yelling at me or hitting me or whatever when I was a kid and somebody stood up to him and bullied him back or humiliated him or put him in his place or whatever, what happens to me later?
	Well, you become dependent on that kind of bailout.
	No, no, no. Let's go a little bit more detail.
	What happens to me at night with my brother?
	He just got humiliated and pushed back because he was bullying me.
	So then we go home together.
	What happened that night?
	He bullies you some more. Of course he does.
	Because he's a leveler, right?
	So he gets his bullshit little false self ego boost from bullying me or somebody else.
	So then somebody bullies him and pushes him down.
	He's got to assert himself by bullying me five times more or ten times more.
	When somebody stands up, unless they're gonna airlift us right out of the situation, if somebody stands up to a bully, That doesn't make us feel better.
	Like, if you'd stood up to this professor, how would your fellow students have felt?
	Yeah, it wouldn't have been good. I mean, I think that all factored into the whole futility equation.
	Well, they would have felt anxious, right?
	Because they'd have been like, shut the fuck up, because otherwise he's going to give us 20 pages or 30 pages.
	Yeah, of course.
	And I didn't want to help anything to his cause of being sadistic.
	I didn't want to throw any fuel in the fire.
	Right, so if someone had stood up for you, that would not have eased your heart very much.
	If people had just, as you say, left you alone and let you do your thing, that also would not have eased your heart very much, because it would have been very lonely.
	Well, what I meant by leave me alone to do my thing is the people with whom I did not want to associate wouldn't have constantly interfered with me and constantly pushed me around or slammed my head against a desk as they did once.
	So, you know, I had friends there who I would have liked to have stayed with.
	I mean, I didn't mean to be completely alone.
	I just mean for the bullies to have left me alone.
	Well, sure. Well, sure.
	I understand that. I understand that.
	but what you're missing in this which would have really eased your heart which is what I know you wanted the most is what you won't give to other people which is compassion What you really wanted and needed when you were being bullied was for someone to sit you down and say, how are you doing?
	This is bad. What you're experiencing is bad.
	And how are you handling it?
	And how are you doing with it?
	it and what are you thinking and what are you feeling?
	I mean isn't that really what was missing when you were being bullied?
	Was for someone to care about you?
	not to stand up like some catastrophic superhero and fight the bad guys, and not to just leave you alone, but to care about you and your heart and what was going on for you in this horrible situation.
	I guess it's true that I do.
	I guess I don't care about my classmates in that way.
	Well, and how could you? Nobody ever cared about you in that way, right?
	Right. So you have these dreams of vengeance, and you have these dreams of isolation.
	But neither of those will solve the problem of having been bullied.
	Because what happened to you, I mean, earlier when you said, my head was slammed against the desk, you gave a little laugh.
	And again, I'm not trying to criticize because I understand exactly why, I think, you ended up with this emotional approach to the savagery that you experienced.
	But if somebody pounded your head against the desk, that was brutal, that was criminal, that was sadistic, that was evil, and that should never, ever Have gone unexamined, unremarked, unpunished, unempathized with.
	But I'm betting that it did, and I bet that nobody ever stopped to say to you, how are you doing?
	My God, that must have been terrifying.
	How are you feeling? And so you kind of pushed that need away, because it was never going to come.
	I mean, if I've got diabetes, I don't sit there and stare at the candy bar tray all day because it's just torturing myself.
	I just push that need away. But that's how cruelty is born, right?
	If nobody empathizes with you and you say, fuck empathy, nobody empathizes with me, I'm not going to empathize with anyone else, but that's how cruelty reproduces.
	You have to fight that trend and empathize with yourself.
	Who was scared and angry and hurt and bewildered, like, why isn't anybody helping me?
	Why isn't anybody talking to me about all this?
	and that's a horrible and unpalatable truth about the world that we live in that children suffer the torments of the damned every day and all these so-called virtuous people go their merry way and step over the little bodies
	so is it possible for me to have perhaps income an incomplete empathy Because I don't think I'm a non-empathetic person.
	I just think that I might be lacking in some very important areas.
	And I guess maybe just how I've organized people into classes.
	I have empathy for my girlfriend.
	I have empathy for my closest friends.
	I have empathy for somebody when I'm in a discussion with them and I realize that I'm pushing some very uncomfortable buttons for them.
	But at the same time, I think I sort of have a lack of empathy for For different kinds of people.
	I mean, is that a possibility?
	Oh, for sure. For sure. I mean, there's no human being with a pulse in a non-vegetative state who lacks empathy.
	And I don't mean to put you in this, like, you know, natural-born killer's cold sociopathic territory.
	That's not you at all. I totally understand that.
	But the kind of empathy that you have is very likely the kind of empathy that is the constant low-grade radar scan for possible abuse, right?
	You scan the environment.
	You're looking for predators all the time.
	And then when you find a predator, you fuse.
	You get meshed in. You have to watch that predator's every move and you get really mad and you get tense and you get frustrated because you're in danger.
	Like, I'm not going to relax if there are like 500 lasers from snipers on my body.
	So you do have empathy, but I'm guessing that it's empathy more for things like sadism and things like brutality and things like cowardice and things that would be considered, quote, negative or dangerous emotions.
	And you can't get to the layer below that, right?
	Which is the people who don't fight back in the class, yourself included, at the bottom are just broken hearted.
	They're just brokenhearted because nobody ever listened to them.
	They never had a say.
	And they were lectured to about how moral all their parents and teachers were, and nobody ever listened to them.
	And I bet you nobody ever listened to you or consulted you about how you wanted things when you were a kid either, right?
	So what's at the bottom is just this big, black, broken heart of being ignored, being rejected, being used, being manipulated, being bullied, but not being real, not being listened to.
	Okay, so to better understand your comment about the empathy and sort of like the low-level empathy, one of the things I mentioned in my post was that somebody asked, why does the United States not practice free trade in reality?
	And I raised my hand to answer and I made a comment answering it.
	And in the middle of the comment, A substitute professor interrupted me and said, oh, he sounds like he knows what he's talking about, but he really doesn't.
	He meant this, I guess, jokingly, which is a terrible comment to say as a joke.
	And then a girl quips to him, yeah, like most political science majors.
	So my empathy at that point picked up the whole bullying aspect, the whole passive-aggressive aspect, but I missed out on perhaps I failed to empathize more deeply with her.
	No, you failed to empathize more deeply with yourself that what you were was hurt.
	You get to the rage right away.
	You get to the humiliation, you get to the rage.
	What you skip over, which of course is perfectly understandable given your history, what you skip over is the pain.
	When sadists feel, and I'm not calling you a sadist, just so you understand the psychology of those who may have been around you when you were growing up, but when a sadist or a sadistic kind of personality, when they feel pain, it instantly gets translated to rage.
	And I'm not saying that you're a sadist, but you have to watch that tendency.
	What you really felt was hurt.
	And what you really felt was stupid.
	Because what you did, and the reaction that you had, given your considerable intellect, was entirely unworthy, and I totally understand why, of your amazing brain.
	Because when you look around the world, And you realize what a crazy and chaotic mess the world is in, how unwise, how defended, how abusive, how hypocritical, how exploitive everybody, for want of a better phrase, everybody in the world is, how can it be shocking that you get mocked for talking about freedom?
	If you weren't mocked for talking about freedom, the world would be a whole lot more free.
	And if you understand that the TA and the professor that you're dealing with there live off violence.
	Right? Do you understand?
	They live off the fruits of violence.
	Tenure, a protected...
	Public school teachers, we all know this, right?
	Live off the fruits of violence.
	Right? So when you start talking about free trade and free association and voluntary trade, They get that right away in a way that you're not getting yet.
	You get it intellectually, but you don't get it in your heart.
	When you start talking about freedom with people who survive off violence, what do you think they're going to do?
	They're going to be snappy and defensive.
	They're going to humiliate you. Why?
	Because they feel that you're humiliating them, and you are!
	Talk to a tenured professor about free trade.
	What do you think he's going to do?
	Or a TA who wants to be tenured?
	I'm just trying to up your radar a little here, right?
	Because you're a brilliant fellow and you're articulate and I think you've got a great heart and I think I have nothing but compassion and sympathy for what you went through as a kid.
	What I'm trying to do is to get you to raise your head above the trench and look around so that you can see the shells that are coming in.
	Got to take this stuff seriously.
	The stuff that we talk about here is deadly serious.
	When you talk about freedom, When you talk about liberty, when you talk about choice, when you talk about no unchosen positive obligations, when you talk about non-violence, volunteerism, it is explosive.
	You might as well be rolling a grenade.
	And then you say, I can't believe it.
	People yell at me and they're diving out of the way and they're calling me a terrorist.
	Well, yes, because to them, you're rolling a grenade down the aisle.
	Which goes right to the core of their relationships.
	With themselves, with their lovers, with their family, with their siblings, with their friends.
	With reality. Right?
	You are speaking deep mojo in the room.
	And I need you to be aware of that.
	Because otherwise, you're going to get burned out.
	You can feel that a little bit.
	Like you're stressed about going to school, right?
	Yeah, I'm a bit annoyed. More than a bit annoyed.
	More than a bit annoyed.
	Right? But there's a step that you've got to get to where you really take this stuff incredibly and unbelievably seriously.
	Doesn't mean you can't have fun with it.
	I think I can speak from that.
	But we're not fooling around with this kind of stuff.
	Like, I mean, I get an email the other day from a guy who's like, you know, I'm talking to my dad about volunteerism.
	He gets really mad. Turns out the guy works for the post office.
	The dad. And it's like, I understand, but what do you think is going to happen?
	You say violence is evil, a guy who gets paid through a coercive state monopoly?
	This is not a toy.
	This is not an intellectual pursuit.
	This is not like Sudoku. This is not like...
	This is right at the core of every human being, and it is explosive in its energy.
	And in its revelatory power.
	This is nuclear.
	This is like ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, maybe fire.
	Not like discharge blindfolded and see what happened.
	So I should be more selective with my words.
	Well, that's a way of processing the end result of what I'm saying.
	What I am saying is that everybody is a genius and everybody is a philosopher, as I keep saying.
	So when you talk about free trade with a tenured professor or a TA, they immediately get what you're talking about.
	Immediately and completely, they get what you're talking about.
	Really. Which is, you guys are evil.
	You live off violence.
	I'm not saying that's entirely true, but that's what they get in their gut.
	I mean, if you were to stand up in that class and say, well, my professor, you are evil because your pay comes from coercion that you are trying to obscure, and that's incredibly corrupt.
	That you're a dangerous quasi-Nazi that is corrupting the mind of the young.
	How do you think he would react?
	I really wish I could say that, but yeah, I would probably be thrown out of the classroom instantly.
	Well, of course you would, but you wouldn't be surprised if he got angry, right?
	So why are you surprised when you talk about it in a kind of philosophical proxy and he gets it and you're surprised?
	The more metaphorical things are, the more exaggerated their responses will be.
	Which also begs the question, and this is just another question, we can stop any time you want, which is that if you told the truth, you'd be thrown out of this class, What are you doing in this class to begin with?
	You say, "Well, it's a scheduling thing." Well, that's nonsense. You could take a night course, you could take a correspondence course, you could wait a half a semester and take it any time, right?
	You were in this class, I assume, and I'm being mean, so I apologize again.
	I'm just trying to sort of awaken you to a kind of self-protection, right?
	You were in this class for a couple of weeks.
	You could have dropped it. Usually it's two months or even six weeks that you could drop the class.
	You knew what this guy was like the first time he opened his mouth.
	Right?
	So you need to be there.
	And I would say that you need to be there for this very reason, that you've got to find compassion.
	For yourself. And then through that to others.
	This is the most instructive course that it's likely you will take in your life.
	If you're willing to learn the lessons as to why you're there, why you're drawn to this, why you need this.
	And it's to break free of this blindness and this not taking things seriously in this realm.
	And to know the kind of power that you have in your hands and in your voice when you speak these truths.
	So you're there for a reason.
	And the professor can help you enormously in a weird kind of way.
	But that's what I would suggest you can get out of this class.
	and then we'll see you next time.
	Well, yeah. I mean, I caught on to that immediately.
	I'm not saying that suffering makes you stronger.
	I never really took it from that perspective.
	But that whole anger experience that I had as a result of that little paper assignment fiasco, I felt was really instructive.
	And in a way, I was kind of grateful that it happened in such a controlled setting, as opposed to a setting where things could have gotten much worse or much more dangerous or uncomfortable.
	Oh, you just kind of faded out there.
	But anyway, listen, I mean, you have a chance to listen to this again when we post it, but I would certainly suggest you do a couple of times, because we went through a lot here, but what you're trying to get through is not to your anger at your professor, but to your sadness and your pain when you were a kid, right?
	That's why we're drawn to recreate these situations until we really get it emotionally.
	The truth will always out.
	It's all these fairy tales.
	The dead bodies come back to life and tell the truth about their murders.
	The truth will always out.
	We can either keep repeatedly repeating the same difficult or problematic situations until we get to the truth, or we can really hotly pursue the truth and free ourselves from the repetition compulsion.
	So I would really strongly suggest that what you do is you go, and this is going to sound ridiculous, but I swear to God, go into the back of the class when it's not busy, Look at that professor, drink in all of his sadism, and just weep like a bastard.
	Because that's what's really going on.
	I'm serious. That's what's really going on.
	You are in unbelievable pain in the presence of this professor, because he reminds you of everything that went on before that you could not empathize with in yourself.
	And then you'll never have to be in the presence of anyone like this again.
	And that's release.
	That's closure. Getting mad at your classmates is just another way of repeating the same situation.
	Right? So he humiliates you and then in your mind you try to level yourself by humiliating your classmates.
	So you've got to break that cycle and that is a painful process.
	But I would say that's what you're there for.
	All right. I'll take that into consideration this upcoming Tuesday.
	All right. Well, keep us posted and thanks so much.
	I really do appreciate it. It was a great chat.
	I hope it was helpful. All righty.
	Oh, next! Hey, another related question to this rage thing.
	I've noticed that I feel this...
	Crushing empty feeling every time I'm alone and I think that before is what drives me into these miserable relationships where I'm bullied and I'm trying to figure out why I keep repeating it.
	and where you bully just a little bit by by sorry you just said where you are bullied you You're drawn into these miserable relationships where you are bullied.
	Not to be mean, but just to point it out from a clarification standpoint that you also bully a little bit in these relationships as well.
	You raise your voice, you can get mad, you can get frustrated, you can yell, and so on.
	Right, but it's kind of in response to that.
	In response to a relationship that you pursue?
	In response to being bullied.
	Okay. This is good, because we'll stop right here then, and we can talk about this opening bit, and I'm sorry to be bypassing the other stuff.
	We'll maybe get to it, but if you pursue a relationship, right, then I'm not sure how you translate that to victimhood then.
	Well, no. I'm not trying to say that I'm...
	I'm not saying that I'm not going through this repetition compulsion thing that I keep doing, that I keep seeking out these relationships somehow with...
	Without realizing that somebody who's sweet at first turns into a bully, I mean, missing all the first indications and all that stuff, or just kind of overlooking them or something.
	Well, again, just to be really annoying, and this is a defibrillating conversation.
	I hope it will be helpful.
	But you don't miss those, and you don't overlook them at all.
	They're just not conscious for you at that time.
	Because people don't change when we get to know them better.
	They don't suddenly become different people, they don't change personalities, they don't end up with different histories, they don't end up with different habits.
	And the reason that I say this to you is that it makes the past more painful, but the future less painful.
	It makes the future safer, but it makes the past more painful.
	So when you think about the people that you've gotten into relationships with, you can look at markers in their life which were available for you in the first 50 seconds that you talk to them about their level of success, their level of maturity, their relationships to their families.
	Right, right. But you know what I mean?
	If you accept, and this is not a question of necessarily getting mad at yourself or blaming yourself, but if you accept that these signs were evident from the very beginning, and in fact if they weren't evident, you probably would not have pursued the relationship, then it means that you can see these things in the future.
	Do you know what I mean? We always look at the past and we kick ourselves, but in the future, if we recognize that we can see these things and we don't have to wait months or whatever to figure these things out, but we can see them at the very beginning, it makes the past more painful, but the future more safe.
	Sorry, go ahead. Right.
	I see what you're saying, but I'm just trying to figure out the empty feeling that It drives me back into that, or previously drove me back into that.
	Now, at this point, I'm kind of exhausted from that loop, and I know that I know what will happen if I tried it again, so I'm kind of avoiding all situations that at this point to keep from doing anything that's going to Right.
	Look, I mean, I really do feel for you, Nate.
	I really do. This is an incredibly difficult situation that you're in.
	You're like an exhausted shark, right?
	Sharks, they can't, except for nurse sharks, but they can't stop swimming because they don't have an air bladder.
	So if they stop swimming, they sink like a stone.
	And you're like an exhausted shark, and you can barely move your tail, but if you stop moving your tail, you're going to sink like a stone, right?
	So you're in this really, really, really difficult situation, and that is actually good news, right?
	Because if you did not feel anxiety, deep anxiety, when you were alone, then these relationships that you had pursued would make no sense.
	Because then you'd just be a masochist, but you're not, right?
	You're just avoiding the pain or the anxiety that comes from solitude, right?
	And so I really do understand and have a huge amount of compassion for the agony and the pain that you're going through.
	So perhaps you can tell me a little bit more about this feeling, right?
	So you come home from work and the house is, the apartment is, the place is dark and it's empty and you're maybe hungry, you get something to eat, but what is the feeling that goes on That is so unpleasant.
	Very heavy, empty, void feeling.
	Like I'm this dense black hole.
	So is it a feeling of emotionlessness?
	Like, you know, when you get your tongue frozen and you can't feel your tongue at the dentist or whatever?
	I mean, is it that? Like you feel numb?
	No, no, no. It's a very heavy, empty feeling, and I don't know what...
	It's not just...
	Sometimes it's anxiety, but sometimes it's this other feeling.
	Maybe sometimes it's both.
	It's like a heavy black hole that just kind of...
	I feel sad at the same time as just kind of despair, or...
	I wish I could pinpoint what it is.
	Okay, let's try this.
	If you can imagine that the feeling that you're talking about would never leave you, that there was no recourse, no drug, no relationship, nothing that could ever make that feeling go away again, where would your life go?
	I don't know.
	Because it would go nowhere, because when I feel this way, I don't want to do anything.
	I don't feel like doing anything at all.
	Like, I don't want to...
	I just don't want to do anything.
	Now, do you mean like you don't even want to get out of bed, you don't want to eat, you just want to like stare at the ceiling kind of thing?
	Well, anything...
	By myself. I just want to get out.
	I want to escape. Well, no, no.
	Let's say that there is no possibility because you've done a lot of managing of this feeling over your life, right?
	So let's say that all of those levers and escape hatches were locked and bolted from the outside and you were just alone with this black demon.
	What is the end result of not managing this feeling?
	What happens if this feeling just grows and grows?
	What happens to your life?
	What happens to you? I'd feel like I'd suffocate or something.
	I wouldn't be able to do anything.
	It's like I sit there and I could be watching TV if I wanted to or I could paint or I could play video games or I could clean the house or the bathroom or organize the closet or something but I don't want to do any of that.
	I don't even want to sleep.
	I don't want to Go to bed.
	I don't want to read.
	I don't want to do anything.
	And why is it that you don't want to do anything?
	Like, what happens if you say, why don't I go play a video game or clean the closet?
	What is the feeling that arises in response to having a motivation?
	Just... disgust.
	Kind of just a...
	that same black hole feeling.
	That empty...
	I just don't feel like it.
	I don't feel like doing anything.
	So it's kind of like a nihilism.
	Like, there's no point.
	It's not going to matter. It's the old thing.
	We all say this as we're kids, and I don't mean to trivialize what you're feeling, right?
	So you say, your mom says, make your bed.
	And you're like, what's the point?
	I'm just going to get in it and mess it up tonight anyway.
	And I don't care, right? And so on, right?
	So there's this feeling of, is it feeling that everything that you could do would just be obeying an arbitrary and pointless rule?
	Or is it anything like that? Maybe more like hopelessness.
	Like if I clean the closet, it won't make a damn bit of difference.
	I won't feel any better.
	It won't distract me.
	I'm just trying to understand what is the feeling that arises when you contemplate doing something.
	That's right. Yeah.
	That it won't do anything for me.
	I won't get anywhere.
	I won't feel any better. I'll just, I'll feel the same way while I'm doing it.
	Got it.
	Okay.
	So tell me about the first time in your life that you remember being in a no-win situation.
	Let me just, just, just to jolt you, sorry, just to jolt you, I remember reading a book when I was a teenager about a girl who had anorexia nervosa.
	it.
	And what brought it on, or what brought on a psychological collapse for her, was this.
	And I thought it was quite an interesting moment.
	So she's in school, and she's hurrying along to class, and she's late for class.
	And then she realizes she doesn't have her book for class and the book is in her locker.
	And then she stops in the hallway and she says, okay, if I go back to my locker to get my book, I'm not going to be let into this class because this teacher just, if you're not there on time, he just locks the door and you can't get in.
	So if I go back to my locker to get my book, then I'm not going to get let into my class.
	However, if I go to my class without my book, he's not going to let me in, because I'm not going to have my book.
	And so she just stood there in the hallway...
	And then she basically just had a meltdown.
	She just burst into tears, curled up in a fetal position.
	She was in a no-win situation.
	She couldn't make a choice that was not going to result in what she felt was a disaster.
	There was no negotiation.
	The teacher was being obviously arbitrary and unreasonable, like every human being forgets a book once in a while.
	You just cut people some slack.
	But this was an arbitrary, artificial, Opposite absolutes can't conceivably win.
	No possibility of negotiation or a positive outcome.
	And that's what I'm asking you about because I think that's at the root of this.
	Well, there are probably a number of those situations in school and I don't know what would have been the case at home because I can't remember anything before except a few flashes of some Bad and good before five, so... Well, let me ask you this.
	Did you think that you could win with God?
	No. No, I thought I could, but it just didn't...
	It seemed to make things worse.
	What did? I mean, just...
	It didn't get me anywhere.
	The fantasy thing, the...
	I'm...
	No, I don't...
	No matter what, I was a bad person.
	Well, exactly, exactly.
	And I'll tell you, because I know it's very hard to get through to this kind of emotion, right?
	Because, I mean, I'm sort of working on this as going to be a little bit of a podcast series, but fundamentally the stuff that I'm working on is the question of depression as paralysis.
	Right? And depression in this kind of thing, the nihilistic kind of depression that you face, is when we are put in situations where there's no choice that we can make that is going to be positive.
	There's no way to win in the situation.
	And it's how ourselves get erased, obliterated, crushed.
	Because what I get a very strong sense of when you talk about the emotionality that goes on for you in these kinds of situations is that you, Nate, as a person who can make choices, does not exist.
	And the reason that you feel despair is that everything is a trap and therefore everything is pointless no matter what I do.
	I'm gonna get screwed.
	No matter if I clean up my room, I'm gonna get yelled at for doing it wrong.
	If I don't clean up my room, I'm gonna get yelled at for not cleaning up my room.
	If I say that I believe in God when I don't believe in God, as nobody does deep down, then I'm damned for being a liar.
	If I follow my instincts and want to go and have fun in the sun rather than go to a smelly old stuffy church on a Sunday, I'm also damned.
	So what I like damns me.
	I can't believe in what I don't like.
	I can't lie about it.
	There's no possible way to win.
	And so I'm just going to curl up in a ball and I'm going to not move and I'm going to really hope that people just get tired of kicking me.
	I remember feeling that way a whole lot.
	All the time.
	I had to go to school, and I hated school because I was just ridiculed all day long.
	It sucked.
	Yes, yes, and this is what we were talking about with the student earlier, the university student.
	This is the erasure of identity that is foundational to the cult of culture and the family and religion in particular, but also nationalism.
	The paralysis that occurs when a human being is given No recourse for successful action.
	This happens with animals.
	You can reproduce this, and we're animals, right?
	You can reproduce this in animals very quickly.
	When half the time they peck at the button, it gives them an electric shock, and half the time it gives them food, but the food tastes bad or is not nutritious, if you give them a no-win situation, they just stop doing anything.
	They stop moving. They're barely breathing.
	They just become paralyzed.
	It's like the way that you get a...
	If you get a muscle cramp in your bicep and your tricep simultaneously, your arm will just be frozen.
	It's like saying to a kid, go north and south at the same time.
	What's he going to do? He's just going to stand there and say, well, if I go north, they're going to say, hey, I told you to go south.
	And if I go south, they're going to say, hey, I told you to go north.
	It's an elaborate trap that is designed to kill yourself.
	To make you paralyzed.
	to make you paranoid.
	Right.
	And that's the route, I think, and my suggestion, I mean, that's where you need to start exploring, is that no matter what I do, I'm screwed.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	And that is the root of this kind of depression, where it's like, I could get up and do this, but so what?
	What's the point? It doesn't make any difference.
	Because everything's just a ritual.
	You know, my mom was herself very messy.
	And yet she'd get really mad if there was mess in the house.
	That's amazing. I went out with a woman in my 20s who was always messing and nagging at me to clean up, tidy up, clean up, tidy up, clean up.
	A year or two after I broke up with her, I went over to her place.
	I had to pick something up.
	It was a total fucking pigsty.
	Right? Right?
	Yeah, I keep dating my mother, too.
	Well, sure, because it's agony to uncurl, right?
	Your soul has been basically in a constrictive little box for decades, right?
	And you feel anxiety about having an identity.
	Existence equals pain.
	Identity equals punishment.
	Personality equals destruction.
	If you're punished every time you have an opinion, you're just going to stop having opinions.
	You're going to give up, you're going to curl up, and you're going to say whatever you want.
	You say jump, I say how high.
	You say go north and south at the same time, I'll try and go north and south at the same time.
	You'll yell at me, and I know it's a trap, but I'm not going to have any opinions.
	Because having an opinion is being punished, and it hurts less if I just curl up in a ball and hope that they stop kicking me.
	Right, and that explains everything I've been writing.
	It kind of, yeah, that validates all of that.
	When I was a kid, I was about, this was before I went to boarding school, so I must have been only about five years old, maybe even four and a half, but about five years old.
	My mother went on one of her rages.
	I think it was because I put a glass of water on a tabletop or something and there was like one of those little temporary white stains or little rings that comes when you put a cup.
	She's yelling and hitting and so on, right?
	And I was so mad and I was so upset and I was so angry and I was so hurt that at around, I don't know, two o'clock in the morning I got out of bed and I went into the kitchen and there was a Like a biscuit tin or something.
	And I grabbed a bunch of biscuits and I put them in my pillowcase.
	Because I was leaving. Didn't know where I was going.
	Just thought, I'll go to the woods. I'll live off nuts and berries.
	God knows what I was thinking. And I then snuck out.
	And I wasn't trying to make a statement.
	I wasn't like walking heavily, lightly, hoping that somebody would wake up.
	I genuinely wanted to get out of the house.
	It was a horrible place to be.
	And my mom woke up, and she came at me like a fucking tsunami, right?
	And I was at the front door, and she literally grabbed my shoulders and pounded my head against the front door.
	Like, repeatedly.
	To the point where you get that, you know, that battery acid taste in your mouth when you get a head trauma.
	And I remember very, very clearly that at that moment, with my family, with my mom, I was like, I get it.
	I give up.
	There is nothing that I can do in this situation.
	My mother has communicated to me absolutely clearly that I can never make a decision.
	That I am never allowed to have an identity.
	That I am never allowed even a shred of self-protection.
	Because I wasn't attacking her.
	I just wanted out of the place because it was horrible.
	Right? So those kinds of moments, we all, I mean, maybe not quite that traumatic, maybe even a whole lot worse, but we all go through these kinds of things when we're children, whether it's with a teacher or with a parent or with a policeman or something like that.
	Where we are told in no uncertain terms, you cannot exist.
	Your existence is an affront to me.
	Anytime you make me even feel the slightest bit bad for the evil that I've done, you will be punished and there will be no bottom to your punishment.
	I mean, can you imagine what would have happened if I'd fought back or called her names or kicked her?
	I could have been killed. I'm not saying murder, but accidentally.
	I could have been traumatized to the point where I had brain injuries.
	So those kinds of situations that people get into with either extreme physical or emotional violence, that is to say that existence is pain.
	I made a decision to leave the house because it was horrible to be there and that decision, to stay was horrible but to leave was even worse so I got it and I just gave up and I spent most of the rest of my childhood basically rolled in a ball just hoping I wasn't going to get hit too much Right,
	I think I just read about Hitler having done that too as a child at 13 and I did that too I don't know how old I was.
	I think I was 12 or 13.
	I was in church with my dad sitting next to him.
	I refused to sing the hymns or whatever.
	He kept telling me to sing and I didn't want to sing.
	My little brother wouldn't sing either.
	He was just kind of following me.
	So my dad takes us out to the foyer and pushes us into a corner to where we're like humiliated in front of the few people standing out there and leaves us there saying that we better be there when he gets back and my brother and I leave the church and just kind of walk somewhere and my dad goes out looking for us and we were hiding in a ditch and And as he passes by,
	you know, and so we walk home from there.
	I think it's like maybe 10 miles as, you know, a 12-year-old and an 8-year-old walking 10 miles to the house.
	And then by the time we get there, we were like, we didn't know where to go.
	We stayed out for a while.
	We didn't know where to go at that point because there was nowhere to go at that point.
	There was nowhere to go at all.
	Sorry to interrupt. There was nowhere to go at all.
	And I'll just tell you one other thing that I guarantee you got deep down, which is probably one of the reasons why you're staying in this conversation.
	I'll tell you the other thing that you got deep down, which we all did when we went through these kinds of things, whether they were this dramatic or less dramatic.
	I guarantee you that everybody in that church and everybody on your street knew exactly what was happening to you kids.
	I guarantee you that I was in a...
	This was 12th Priory Crescent in England where I grew up, near Hermitage Road in Crystal Palace in London.
	This was an apartment building.
	It was kind of an older apartment building.
	And people... You could hear other people in other...
	You could smell their cooking.
	You could hear other people. The walls weren't paper-thin, but they weren't exactly like a castle keep or something.
	So, at 2 o'clock in the morning, do you not think that they could hear a mother screaming at a child and beating his head against the door?
	Of course they could. And this, of course, was not a solitary occurrence.
	Right? So, this is how deep and far the trauma goes in the world.
	That everybody knew...
	What was going on in your family and how brutal your parents were and did nothing.
	See, it's not about our families, fundamentally.
	It's about the world and about what the world allows while professing virtue.
	What the world allows to happen to children.
	I'll let you get on with your story in a second, but This is why I could never believe in God and could never believe in welfare or socialized medicine or unemployment insurance or old-age pensions.
	And people say, oh, well, we just want to take care of the helpless.
	Bullshit! Bullshit!
	If somebody was that interested in taking care of the helpless, wouldn't they have knocked on the door of my mom's place that night?
	Or any of the other damn nights where she's screaming at us and everybody in the whole building can hear it?
	Does anybody do anything?
	Lived in three different continents when I was a kid.
	Met hundreds of families, thousands of people.
	And everybody talks about compassion.
	You know, I really have to bite my tongue sometimes.
	People say, well, what about the poor who won't get educated?
	But these are exactly the same people who would have turned over in their bed with their eyes wide and tried to get back to sleep when they heard a child being beaten in the same building.
	Now, don't talk to me about human compassion, because I went to three different countries, four if you count Ireland, Ireland, England, Africa, Canada, with a child in all four continents.
	Extended family. People in the building.
	We weren't living on the moon. And not one person ever, once, lifted a finger to protect me.
	And that's why when people talk about the virtue of society and how we want the government to do this, I know that people are talking bullshit about ethics.
	Protect the innocent?
	I went through hundreds of different, thousands of different people.
	Teachers. I was in the Boy Scouts.
	They knew. They saw bruises.
	They knew. How is it that I just managed to magically walk through all these amazing walls of human compassion and virtue?
	Never stopped by anyone.
	And that's one of the main reasons why I started from ground zero when it came to ethics, because I sure knew nobody was living it.
	And that's why when people say to me, well, what about the poor and the education?
	It's like, I just know that they're just making up stuff because they don't want to be good.
	The same way that everybody makes up stuff.
	Because they don't want to have to actually act in a moral manner themselves.
	Because it's scary. And I understand confronting my mom or your parents would have been scary.
	But people can say, okay, well, I'm not going to do that.
	Because that's scary. It's like, well, then don't talk to me about ethics.
	And it doesn't mean that everyone in the world is bad.
	I'm just saying that statistically, I was batting a thousand meeting up with endlessly pontificating moral hypocrites who wouldn't lift a goddamn finger to help a child being beaten.
	Sorry to interrupt, but it's important that you understand that the reason that it lingers on so deeply is because it's not about your parents.
	It's about society.
	It's about the world that you live in and the planet that you inhabit and the culture that you're embedded in, who let it all happen.
	Yeah.
	Well, I wasn't really, there wasn't much left to the story other than...
	I went home and Basically the same kind of thing happened to you, except maybe less brutal.
	Less brutal physically and more brutal emotionally and verbally.
	What are we going to do with you?
	Stuff like that.
	No curiosity whatsoever.
	Just crushing Completely crushing.
	And then what you were just saying explains Nietzsche's whole predicament when he was a child.
	Nobody helped him. The whole love thy neighbor thing was just all bullshit.
	Complete bullshit. Right. He got that people were living in a fantasy cloud of self-pontificating virtue.
	He just never descended to find the earth, right?
	And that's sort of what I wanted to try and learn from him and from Rand and from all the other people who have started out with a kind of nihilism about the world and then unfortunately just say, well, that cloud castle is really bad.
	Come live in this one, right?
	It's like, can we just get out of these goddamn cloud castles and start from the ground up?
	And that really was the foundation of UPB, but...
	You have to have a very strong skepticism, which I didn't come about naturally as I'm a very optimistic person for the most part, but the empirical evidence was just incontrovertible, not just my own, but everybody's.
	Everybody just talks about virtue and they say, oh, we care about the poor and we care about the old and we care about the helpless.
	But does anybody actually intervene when a child is being injured?
	No. So, anyway, I wanted to point out that this question of paralysis and a no-win situation, I would almost guarantee you, is at the root of what you're feeling, this anxiety, right?
	And the anxiety, you need to embrace it.
	Because the anxiety that you feel is you thinking, well, what if I can make a decision now, right?
	It's a possibility that causes anxiety in this situation.
	Well, I can make decisions now.
	I can choose who it is.
	I don't have to reproduce the past.
	I can choose who it is that I want to go out with.
	I can choose what it is that I want to do with my time and my life.
	But that causes anxiety because every time you made a choice as a kid, you got mashed!
	You're right. And I went around yesterday and I was thinking about this.
	It's the helplessness, I feel.
	The complete helplessness, the powerlessness.
	And I recognized, I was just like, that's why I keep fantasizing about power.
	If only I had power.
	And it's just a fantasy that will never happen.
	Because what I need to realize is that I do have, I'm not helpless anymore.
	Right, and you could have that power, and this is how we have six billion people on the planet, is people feel exactly that kind of anxiety and helplessness, and they decide to fix it, to solve it, by having children that they have power over.
	And that's a route that you're not taking, at least not yet, which is good.
	But you've got to not fight this anxiety.
	It's there to help you. It's there to tell you that you can change what went on before, that you are in a different situation now, that you can have choice and identity, and in fact you must.
	Because the option of drugs and relationships using those things to reproduce the past and so control your own anxiety is not an option that really is available to you anymore.
	So you have to just fight this demon and let it inhabit you and let it free you.
	Because your anxiety is trying to help you.
	It's trying to tell you that you can have choices and be alive now and enjoy that rather than having choices which cause destruction as was the case in the past.
	Yeah, this is all making more sense now, I think.
	I think I've got enough here to take to my therapist on Tuesday and really let it all pour out.
	I was gonna show her that long list of goals that I have so that we can establish where we're going.
	No, I would really just bring as much passion as I could to your therapeutic interactions.
	It's not about list validation, but it's really about, as we talked about before, yakking up emotionally on their carpet because they have to pay the bill and that's good.
	Oh, I see, yeah.
	Yeah, that vomit on the carpet thing.
	Yeah, just do a big, big, florid, emotional, technicolor yawn all over their carpet.
	I mean, that's, you know, the important thing with therapy is never give them any shortage of stuff to work with.
	You realize, Steph, if they did that here, we'd be paying the bill.
	Don't do it here. But all other therapy offices, absolutely.
	Right, right.
	All right, I'll turn this over to the next person.
	All right, thanks, Nate. Well done.
	Right, or what we do is we just get a yak-colored carpet.
	And we just say, well, it has texture and DNA. All right.
	Was there anybody else who had a question or a comment or issue?
	Who would I like to do that?
	Oh, gee, I think we've killed the conversation.
	Perhaps we shouldn't have talked about things so dark and dismal.
	But fortunately, many years in the past.
	So is there anybody who wanted to bring anything else up?
	Feel free to take this to a sunny direction if you like.
	Or if you'd like to continue to talk about the dark side, we can do that too.
	Everybody's quiet. Well, no problem.
	Listen, we had a couple of very intense conversations today.
	Wait, something just popped up in the chat window?
	Well, they're both acronyms, three letters each.
	UPB and RTR, how do they link up?
	Did you want to put the question in more detail, or do you want me to just make up a link?
	He has no mic. You know what?
	He's probably having trouble with his Mac.
	Just kidding. Yeah, you plugged the RTR into the UPB board.
	Hit the wrong button. Actually, I'd hit the right button if I were you.
	Next week.
	Hit the wrong button. Did he get disconnected?
	Oh, well, throw him in. He can ask a question.
	Let's do something tasty and theoretical.
	Yeah, I'll type it in. We're calling Greg now so he can chat with us.
	Hello? Hello?
	You know, you could have just not answered for a while.
	I could have gone on with that for quite a bit.
	With a webcam, I could have a whole soft shoe number and everything, released the balloons, the dubs.
	Anyway, go on. Hey, you're the guy who sent me the boxers with the sequins on.
	That's all I'm saying. Well, sounds like you're enjoying them.
	Oh, yeah. Well, I was just thinking about universally preferable behavior and this real-time relationship thing you always talk about as well.
	And wondering how You know, how UPB applies to...
	how you should apply UPB to everything in your life.
	Well, how it's sort of impossible not to, right?
	So, how to put it into a question...
	Well, sorry to, you know, I think if you put, just to answer a question that somebody had earlier, that song that I keep singing, that comes from, well, the song is Havana Gila, of course, I think it's a traditional Jewish song, or is it the guys at the airport, the bald guys? I can't remember.
	Anyway. It's Jewish.
	But I think that where it comes from is when I was a kid, my mom was a fairly big Harry Belafonte fan, you know, the guy who was always offering you day-old donuts with his shirt off.
	And this song was on one of his live at Carnegie Hall, where he actually has a 20-minute song that goes like this.
	Matilda! Matilda! Matilda!
	She take me money and run to Venezuela!
	Everybody! And he goes on like that for about 20 minutes.
	So it's either Matilda or it's Havana Gila, but those are the songs that he sang.
	And that occasionally pops into my head, particularly when I'm talking about childhood stuff.
	Did that help you forget your question, or was there something else?
	Yes, I think so. Everybody, Matt.
	Okay, so the real-time relationship stuff really comes down to honesty, right?
	I mean, it's the searing kind of honesty that's tough to get started with, but it's useful and easier as you go along.
	But in On Truth, of course, I say that it's essential that we drop mythology and focus on reality, right?
	Because mythology is the opposite of intimacy.
	Mythology is the opposite of Of authenticity, it is the opposite of honesty.
	When you can just make up an answer as to what's going on, then you never get to the truth.
	So wherever you make up an answer, you never get to the truth, because then you think that you have an answer, so you stop looking.
	The real-time relationship is designed to be the oppositional force to our tendency, which I don't know if it's innate or it's just exploited through culture, to make up answers.
	The real-time relationship is just the habit of being relentlessly honest about what's going on.
	If Christina makes me mad, I say, I'm feeling angry.
	I don't say, you're a bad person, unless we're role-playing.
	So, I mean, really, it's just about being honest, relentlessly honest, and not making up answers that you don't have, that aren't real.
	So people do this all the time in relationships, right?
	So a woman might say, I'm unhappy because you're not tidy.
	But that's just a story.
	The only thing she knows is that she's unhappy, and she also knows that she feels the urge, perhaps, to criticize him for being untidy and so on.
	But that's not really the truth of the situation.
	We don't know what the truth of the situation is.
	We just spent 45 minutes with the student at university talking through a tiny little interaction that he had, that was obviously emotionally significant, but a few minutes in a class.
	And you can spend a huge amount of time unraveling why it is that you're feeling what you're feeling, because we all grew up in these chaotic mythological paths.
	So getting through to the truth We're like the early scientists trying to figure out if it is turtles all the way down.
	It's really hard to get that kind of anti-mythology stuff going.
	But the real-time relationship is I refuse to make up answers.
	I refuse to come up with stories about...
	What is going on?
	I'm just going to tell people what is going on for me emotionally.
	I'm not going to make up conclusions.
	I'm not going to make up answers. I'm not going to give reasons.
	I'm not going to wrap it all in mythology and stories and come up with this, that, or the other.
	I'm just going to say, I feel this.
	And I don't know if it's right or wrong.
	I don't know where it comes from. I don't know what's happening.
	Let's explore it. Let's examine it.
	That really is the real-time relationship.
	So if you put together on-truth, which is anti-mythology, with the positive virtue of honesty that I talk about in UPB, that in practice is the real-time relationship stuff.
	I mean, it's not standing tall for the rights of mankind, but it is about being just very honest about the truth and reality of your own emotional experience in a relationship with someone.
	Right, so in essence, it's really kind of impossible to practice, to put the principle of UPB into practice unless you're able to apply this real-time relationship methodology as well.
	Well, I think you could in certain situations.
	I mean, you could if you were arguing about a mathematical syllogism with someone, you know, the logic may win out.
	But in personal relationships, which of course is where the real meat and drink, I think, of human value is, in personal relationships, you simply cannot end up in an intimate relationship unless you're willing to be honest about what you feel and the limitations of knowledge That feelings have, right? Feelings are simply markers about how you feel, right?
	It's just, I feel... Now, it could be that you're incredibly accurate, you're bang on, but it can take a long time to figure that out.
	Now, you get better as you move forward and so on, and Christina and I don't need to spend the whole weekend on something now, so we can usually get it done in 20 minutes, because we sort of practiced and we've got the hang of...
	Every time you solve a problem, you don't reproduce it, and you come up with new problems, right?
	So... It does get more efficient as you move forward, but there is just that basic commitment to simply speak the truth, which is that I feel X, not this is so.
	Right, right. So what I'm saying is that the spread of this principle is really a psychological problem, not a philosophical one.
	Well, I would say that everything that people talk about, because philosophy is in such a decayed state, everything that people talk about is a psychological problem, right?
	So if somebody comes up to you, to use an example we talked about earlier, and says, well, yeah, but what about the poor?
	What they're really saying is, I feel anxiety about what you're saying.
	But what every libertarian and anarchist on the planet, except for us and three other guys, what everybody says is, okay, well, let's talk about the poor.
	But nobody's talking about the poor.
	The poor is just a mythological convenience to stymie a question that is causing anxiety, which is voluntarism, which is pacifism, which is peaceful, non-violent ways of solving problems.
	People feel emotional anxiety about that, and so they make up this mythology called the poor in order to distract everyone else from the real issue, which is that they feel anxiety.
	About the fundamental question.
	So everybody then goes chasing off statistics about the poor and this and that and the other.
	The poor have nothing to do with it.
	There is nobody who cares less about the poor than a socialist.
	There is nobody who cares less about the poor than a statist.
	I mean, obviously, even just remotely, if you looked at any of the empirical data, you'd know that the poor are doing much worse under socialism or the welfare state than they were before.
	So nobody cares less because they're just using the poor to manage their emotions.
	They're using anxiety about the poor to shut down a conversation which they know, if it keeps going, is going to hit their family.
	So what I'm saying is that There's two levels to this.
	There's the fact that the argument for morality, or UPB, just like any other philosophical argument, It's a no-go from the start if you can't establish with the person that you're discussing it with a common No,
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but I wouldn't put it that way at all, because that's like saying, well, if we both agree to speak Japanese, we can have a conversation.
	But it's not that arbitrary.
	You can't have a conversation with anyone about anything unless those people are willing to be honest.
	Sorry, I just say, this common framework just sounds a bit subjectivist, right?
	Like if somebody says, but what about the poor?
	And they don't say, you know, when you say, no government, I feel kind of disoriented and weird.
	Why do you think that is?
	They say, well, tell me more about this feeling, right?
	If they can be honest about that and say, I feel anxious when you talk about no government, then you can have a great conversation with that person.
	But if they say, well, you just don't care about the poor, then they're not even at the tiniest level of honesty.
	They're actually, it's not even that they're not being honest, they're being actively misleading and dishonest, and trying to send you on a wild goose chase as if they're even caring about the poor.
	Right. They're using you to avoid their own anxiety.
	Well, they're using the poor to avoid their own.
	And they're exploiting the poor.
	And of course, it's all these people.
	This is the psychological stuff that's really interesting, at least to me.
	And I'm sorry to interrupt you. But these people always care.
	And they're so horrified at the idea that somebody could exploit the poor.
	But they're exploiting the poor to manage their own anxiety.
	That's why it feels so real to them.
	That corporations would do it or DROs would do it or something.
	But anyway, go on. But my point there is that you can't even begin to argue UPB until you can establish that.
	And with most people, you can't really establish that right now, not in the situation that we're in.
	So taking that to the next level...
	Since you also argue that this entire situation we're in starts with personal relationships, starts with the family, starts with ourselves, right?
	There's no point in arguing the evils of the state until you can address your own personal evils, right?
	Sorry, can you just move back from the mic a bit?
	You're breathing kind of heavy. Oh, sorry.
	Is that better? Yeah, thanks.
	Okay. I'm pacing.
	It just seems to me that there is a lot more ground to be gained From the Untruth book than from the UPP book if we look at things from that perspective.
	At least at this moment.
	Well, sure. I think that's true.
	And I would say that there's more to be gained almost from the god of atheists than either untruth or...
	People have to get that they're living in a fiction before they're even interested in looking at their own emotions or the truth or anything like that.
	And if somebody reads The God of Atheists and says, I don't get it, it's weird, it's not believable, there's no way kids would do that, my family's fine, blah, blah, blah, right?
	If that's their reaction to a fictional question about the virtue of the family, I wouldn't even bother sending them on truth.
	It's a waste of a poor tree, right?
	I mean, or some part of it.
	The whole point of what it is that I'm trying to do here is to optimize our efficiency.
	Right? So people want to tangle with everyone.
	I keep saying, don't engage, don't engage, don't engage.
	Trust your instincts, trust your instincts, trust your instincts.
	Some people say, oh, I sent a copy of your books to my grandparents, who are X, Y, and Z. It's like, really?
	You couldn't think of anyone.
	Did you not call them? Did you not talk to them?
	Did you not figure out whether you're casting your seeds on rock or earth?
	The whole point is, if somebody can't even tell you about, and you see me do this on the board, right?
	So people will say X, Y, and Z, and I'll say, oh, well, tell me a little bit about your family.
	And if they say, no, that's got nothing to do with it.
	This is an absolute question about philosophy, but it's totally clear.
	That it's about their family?
	It's like, I don't care.
	I'm not going to ban you or whatever. I'm not going to talk to you.
	If you can't even be that curious, if you don't even know, if you're not even psychologically minded enough to know that we all come with our own bundle of prejudices and pain avoidance mechanisms coming from a bad family situation or just education or whatever, then life is short.
	We have a lot to do.
	And I'm not going to try and force my medicine down the mouth of people who are biting at me, right?
	It's like, I just keep moving on.
	And it's going to be one person out of a thousand, or one person out of 500, who's going to even take the pill, or look at the pill, and not try and gouge my eyes out for, you know, saying take the red pill.
	And that's what I'm trying to communicate to other people.
	Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving.
	Every moment you spend engaging with somebody who isn't going to get it, you're not engaging with somebody who will get it.
	And you're not having fun.
	Most importantly. Right, and the irony is that if we lived in a world where people were willing to engage applying something like the real-time relationship, then you wouldn't even have had to bother putting all the effort into a book like universally preferable behavior because people would just get it automatically.
	Well, I would have been lauded through grad school.
	I would be running five universities.
	I mean, that would be a different world, right?
	But that's okay. I mean, as somebody who's had the most opportunity of any philosopher in history to get the word out, I'm not going to complain about the situation that I'm in.
	But yeah, absolutely.
	It would be a different kind of world.
	And adjusting our expectations to the empirical reality and the logical reality.
	Of what we face is essential.
	Like I was just talking with Christina, we went for a walk on Friday, and I saw him talking about, I've now only been working like, I don't know, four or five hours a day for the last two weeks or so after getting the UPB book and the God of Atheists out.
	And so I'm sort of thinking, okay, well, what's the next thing?
	And I was talking about Christina. I've got this great idea for a book.
	I'm just going to throw it out there because I think it's going to be absolutely fantastic, but it's going to be a fuckload of work.
	So I'm just going to put it out there right now.
	And the book is the future, right?
	I mean, because we want a description of an anarcho-capitalist society, top-down, all continents, everything that you could imagine, a totally realized world.
	And it's not like I'm starting from scratch, so it won't be the end of the world.
	But the question is, how do you get it to work as a premise?
	So, what I've got is, I think I'm going to do it like this.
	Toss it out there. I think it's an interesting idea.
	The President of the United States gets cryogenically frozen.
	He's out for like 500 years until they discover a cure, or 200 years or whatever, until they discover a cure for whatever it was that the cancer got him sick.
	And he wakes up and he expects to be a hero, like George Washington, but he's a criminal.
	He's considered a criminal because there's no government anymore.
	And it's a story of him trying to make his way in a free society, having been a political leader in a non-free society.
	And I think it would just be a great, great story.
	And I think it's a good way of pointing out these two things and helping people understand their own disorientation.
	And whether he gets tried for war crimes, I mean, that could be a whole other thing, because that would be a very interesting take on things.
	But I think it's a good idea.
	Like, it's a good framework for working on it, but I'm not going to work on it next.
	Sorry, you're going to say? It's sort of the inverse premise of the H.G. Wells book, right?
	Sleeper Awakes? Right, or it's the opposite of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, right?
	It's the idea that you go to the future, and you bring all of your prejudices and horrible statism to the future, and he won't even be able to get a date.
	It's going to be like that, right?
	He's going to be viewed like if Hitler came back to life, that's how he's going to be viewed.
	And the absolute disorientation, and psychologically it could be absolutely fascinating to watch this guy's false self completely disintegrate in the face of indifference and hostility when he's so used to feeding on power.
	So I just think it could be a really great book, and of course it would show a free society, and he would be completely bewildered about how everything works, but it would work beautifully, and I think it would be a great, great book, but man, it's going to be a hell of a lot of work, and I've got to keep it not too long.
	So anyway, I'm going to work on the real-time relationship book before that, because I think that's going to be something more immediate.
	But I think that it could be a very good tragic comedy kind of book to put this politician in the future.
	That's about the extent of what I had there for today.
	Thanks very much.
	One other thing.
	A new free-domain radio thing, just because I've had some time on my hands with which to think.
	We're going to do a virtual salon.
	That's going to be the idea.
	The idea is going to run like this.
	I hope that you will find it interesting.
	I think that we should get together at my place every two weeks on a Friday night or something.
	Saturday? Friday? Every couple of weeks, let's say.
	And if you're around, come over.
	You know, it's after dinner because we're cheap.
	But we'll give you drinks and we'll give you finger food and so on.
	And we'll just shoot the shit, right?
	Because, you know, I work from home alone, so I need to talk to more people.
	So come over and we'll just sit around and we'll shoot the shit.
	But the cool thing is that we're also going to buy a conference call speakerphone.
	So that everybody can pile in and be part of the conversation, even if you don't happen to live near Mississauga.
	But I think that would be nice.
	I certainly did enjoy the barbecue.
	I think that it's not that great to have it only once a year.
	I'm only going to get 40 or 50 more before I'm dead, and I'm more greedy than that.
	So I'm just going to put it out there as a sort of symposium or not a symposium, a sort of a salon where we can get together and talk philosophy and it won't just, I promise, won't just be me lecturing like these damn shows, right?
	But everyone can come if you can make it to show up.
	Bring your girlfriends, bring your pets, bring your musical instruments, whatever it is that you're working on.
	Bring an essay, bring a poem, whatever, right?
	We can just shoot the shit about these ideas or any ideas and if you can't People saying,
	more of Steph's voice? Where's my gun?
	I'm not sure what that means. But anyway, so we'll put it out there and I think it would be a lot of fun.
	And I certainly miss talking with people about this stuff more face-to-face and so on.
	I miss all the blank stares around the business table, around the conference table and business meetings when I bring up some of this stuff.
	It would be nice to have blank faces in person.
	Yeah, webcam would be great, actually.
	Webcam would be great. So we'll set all that up.
	I will broadcast from the Sony Handycam that I use to record the YouTube videos and so on.
	And, you know, it'll be like, you know, grab some finger food and instead of watching a rented movie or whatever, you can just sit down and chat and shoot the breeze with whoever's here.
	And... We'll do it either through Skype.
	I think I can get a conference call in through Skype or whatever it is, but we'll sort it out so that we can get as many people around chatting as we can.
	It'll be a little less Q&A stuff, but less Q&A than this show, but something where we can just have a salon.
	Yeah, just more of a social thing.
	It doesn't have to be about philosophy.
	It can just be about anything. It can be about movies you've seen or books that you've read or anything that you like.
	It can be about anything that you want.
	So it's just more of a social gathering.
	But I think that would be fun.
	Hairdos? So when you talk about hairdos, what you're really saying is, Steph, we don't want you to talk as much.
	Because hairdos, for me, are pretty much the things that they use to polish bowling balls.
	That's my approach to hairdos.
	All right. Well, thanks everybody.
	It was a great, great show. I really do appreciate, you know, we're getting some fantastic shows out of people.
	I can't believe you people kept your best games up here for the 900s.
	But I really do appreciate it.
	And I will set up this salon thing.
	Don't forget! That we were going to be in Miami.
	We're just looking into whether or not we're renting a condominium and whether or not there's a room or a sort of party room in the condo we can use.
	If not, we will be renting a place.
	But that is the 19th?
	19th of January, 2008.
	Christina and I will be doing a day's symposium for $150, I think.
	And we'll probably go into the wee hours with food and drink and wassailing.
	And I think Greg found a place that doubles as a volunteer karaoke slash strip bar.
	So we'll have some fun there.
	And I hope that you can join us there.
	I think that will be a lot of fun.
	And Christine is going to be doing some presenting on cognitive therapy and how it is that she managed to work it into our marriage repeatedly and consistently, and sometimes with both Prozac and a ball-peen hammer, and I will be talking about some other stuff.
	So, thank you so much again for listening.

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