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Nov. 25, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:22:00

921 Sunday Call In Show Nov 25 2007

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	Well, good afternoon, everybody.
	It's Steph. It's a little bit after 4 o'clock on the 25th of Sunday, 2000 in November.
	Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon.
	We have a full house, dare I say, and I really do appreciate everybody dropping by and carving off a slab of Sunday for a little philosophical salad.
	So, I would highly recommend if you are listening to this, you're listening out of sequence, if...
	And I say if. You have not listened to 920, where we will go next.
	Also known as G-O-Y-A. And that will make more sense a little bit later.
	If you could listen to 920, if you haven't already, this will make a little bit more sense, and I hope that that will help you if you feel like, hey, I have cleaned up every scrap of personal business that I conceivably could, and now I must forge on to new territories.
	The new territories are explained in abrasive detail in 920, and I hope that that will make some sense to you.
	Thank you, of course, to donators this month.
	We have been cranking out.
	The last time I did a big advertising run in May, we doubled the number of people hitting the site, and that never went back down.
	I spent about $5,000 in April and May to advertise FDR. Thank you to the donators who made all that possible and kept me in possession of both kidneys.
	I am doing another big run at the moment after the site redesign and so on.
	We are doing a big run.
	Greg and I are pounding Google and Yahoo groups and I'm spending a small fortune on StumbleUpon to make sure that people trip into our moor, so to speak.
	So if you can spare any shackles before the end of the month, I will turn them straight over to StumbleUpon and of course the Google Ads continue to run as do the Bitvertiser ads and various targeted blog ads and it's good!
	We are experiencing a rather significant increase in bandwidth usage because we have lots of new listeners and also because I spent some time a couple of weeks ago upping the quality of the first bunch of files so that new listeners would not be too appalled by the audio quality, and it would not be a distraction from, hopefully, the content quality.
	So, thanks so much to the listeners.
	Thanks to the purchases of the book.
	The Free Domain Radio swag shop has been set up by the fabulous employee number two, Greg.
	Yeah, so thanks so much to the dinators.
	Thanks to the book purchasers.
	Thanks, of course, to the gentleman who gave a very glowing review of universally preferable behavior, a rational-proof of secular ethics.
	And oh, dare I say it!
	Dare I say it!
	Thank you, thank you, thank you so much to the Ron Paul supporters.
	Who have left such enlightening comments on my YouTube video, wherein I posted about 40 minutes of questions and criticisms of the Ron Paul approach, citing historical example after historical example going back about 150 years, and pretty much got called a turnip head repeatedly, and turnip head is probably the nicest way that I can put it.
	So, I... Just wanted to thank the Ron Paul supporters for coming by and helping me to shore up my theories that philosophy creates beauty and politics, she doth create the ugly fest.
	I put this out there not because I'm anticipating Any particular change of heart from a true Ron Paul aficionado slash cultist slash daddy replacement aficionado?
	I'm not expecting these people to change their minds, but what you do want to do is you want to put out your predictions about how things aren't going to work so that when they don't work, people can remember who are at all interested in actually having things work and so on.
	They can remember, well, this guy said it wasn't going to work, so maybe I'll go and listen to him.
	Now that's going to be a year, maybe a year and a bit.
	Just wanted to mention that I wanted to put it out there Both for that reason and also just to show you, you know, like, I mean, there's some pretty recent arguments in there.
	I certainly don't claim to clinch the case during that video, and if you haven't seen it, it's well worth looking at.
	It's Ron Paul, The Shape of Things to Come.
	But no particular response that merits any argument.
	One gentleman did post, since I was talking about how the government is an agency that works to defend itself, those who have a vested interest in it.
	And so I did talk about that, and how if you try to privatize stuff, The civil service unions will be up in arms.
	And I did get some responses back saying, well, the French president has confronted a rail workers union and the public sided with the government rather than the rail workers union and so on.
	And that's fine, except that has nothing to do particularly with what it is that I was talking about.
	And certainly it has nothing to do with the kind of radical changes that Ron Paul We're good to go.
	Nothing has actually occurred to limit the size and power of the state and its obligations in France.
	So that is not even scratching the surface of the kind of stuff like getting rid of the Fed or the income tax that Ron Paul is talking about.
	There was a symbolic victory in France, a war of words that was won by the government.
	That is not actual change.
	And it's not good to see people grasping at straws.
	I was also accused of slandering Ron Paul because I said that Ron Paul wants to deport 10 to 20 million Americans, that this is a slander that I have been repeating for six months and I should not slander Ron Paul in this manner.
	So then of course I went over to the Ron Paul website.
	And copied the words about 10 to 20 million, the Ron Paul's words, 10 to 20 million illegal immigrants, and posted it back and that he wants to deport them.
	And sorry, somebody's just joined.
	You need to mute yourself.
	We are definitely muted up here.
	So, Ron Paul absolutely wants, he says, you know, these are a lot of people to be breaking the law.
	No amnesty for illegal immigration.
	No amnesty for illegal immigration.
	Well, of course, that's deportation.
	He wants to uphold the law, and the law is that illegal immigrants are deported.
	And he says, I want to uphold the law.
	And of course, the sickening thing about this, the sad thing about it in terms of the people who were criticizing me on this is that they claim that I was acting basically by slandering Ron Paul in public.
	And they said this in public.
	And then when I corrected them with Ron Paul's own words, what did I hear?
	Why? I heard nothing.
	I heard nothing.
	No apology. No.
	Gee, you know, I was really concerned that you were slandering, because slandering is really bad, and I'm sorry for slandering you in public, blah, blah, blah.
	And just sort of to mention, just so people understand this, I mean, the problem with this sort of stuff, right?
	I mean, with politics and this, one of the problems.
	is that you have a situation where you have the non-aggression principle, which Ron Paul talks about vociferously, and then you have illegal immigration.
	Now, clearly illegal immigrants have not violated the non-aggression policy.
	They haven't initiated the use of force against anyone.
	In fact, much like the Founding Fathers, they are fleeing political oppression in Mexico and other places where you have a socialist slash communist slash dictatorship.
	And they are fleeing oppression, the same way the Founding Fathers did.
	So, when they then turn up on American shores, you have a problem if you're a politician and you're trying to appeal to the xenophobic von Whitey crowd.
	You have a problem because these people have not violated the non-aggression policy, so how is it that you're going to, non-aggression principle, how is it that you're going to justify initiating violence against them?
	Well, you have no choice.
	You have to say, I'm going to uphold the law, and immediately you are no longer interested or can no longer credibly be taken seriously in the realm of philosophy or virtue or values or truth.
	Law is an opinion with a gun.
	Law is just an opinion with a gun and a whole lot of guns at that.
	So the moment that you say...
	I'm going to point guns at people who've done nothing to initiate violence, then you're no longer interested in libertarianism or philosophy or virtue or values.
	You're just waving a gun around to please people and there is no way that Ron Paul could get elected or even get one or two thin dimes in his carpet bag if he was not talking about kicking out the illegal immigrants.
	And what kind of people are really interested in kicking out the non-Whitey Von Whiteys?
	Well, Not very palatable groups.
	White supremacy groups, racist groups, not only, of course, the xenophobic groups as a whole, people who are terrified that immigrants might get one little snippet of the power that the whiteys have enjoyed, lo, these hundreds of years.
	It's our gun! Don't try and take our gun with your grubby brown hands!
	Well, I can't really respect that.
	But it's inevitable, right?
	If you're going to go with the non-aggression principle, the moment you start talking about Initiating the use of force, you have to make up this magical thing called, well, I'm just enforcing the laws of the country, as if that means a damn thing.
	Who as a political leader has not enforced the laws of his damn country?
	Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and all the others.
	I'm not saying that Ron Paul is exactly the same as these kinds of people, but the rude justification is identical.
	It is the law, and we will enforce it.
	That's why he says, well, the problem with the Iraq war is that it was not approved of by Congress.
	Well, That's not really the problem with the Iraq War.
	The problem with the Iraq War is that regardless of whether a war is approved of or rejected by Congress, the initiation of the use of force is occurring against the citizens to pay for everything under the sun, including their own enslavement.
	So that's just something I wanted to mention, since I did have a particular theory about Ron Paul and allegiances, and I think we can see That there's not a lot of rationality, and there's a lot of...
	But it's a panic, right?
	I mean, these people are panicking, and I totally understand that.
	They're panicking, because it's like, well, if we don't do this, if Ron Paul doesn't work, what is going to work?
	What can we do? Now, I think we have a good answer, but it's a whole lot more scary than writing a check to Ron Paul.
	So, thank you so much for your patience.
	We still have people I can hear a fair amount of rumbling, typing, background noises.
	Please! Mute yourself if you're not talking.
	We had somebody who was up first.
	So the first listener who had questions or comments or issues, please go ahead.
	Yeah, I really support everything you're saying about taking freedom in your personal life.
	And basically what I'm starting to realize is that I set a limit.
	I set a time when I was going to take that step and be open with my parents.
	To take that freedom, to stand up for myself and set my own boundaries and preferences so I can be free, I set that time limit at uni.
	I thought, okay, I'm living with my parents now.
	Before I can get to uni, it might be a bit uncomfortable.
	And I felt a lot of anxiety, so I thought, okay, I'll put it off until uni.
	Podcast 920 you did really, I mean, thanks a bunch for giving me that kick up the backside because that really helped.
	And I guess what my question is, is I'm trying to think about how I can actually go about this, about confronting my parents on the whole issue, about asking questions about my childhood, about getting to the root of what will really help me.
	But it's thinking what...
	What questions I can ask, which will end up in a discussion which will make them back into the corner rather than me back into the corner.
	Well, the first thing, just for those, sorry, if you've just joined, if you could put your mute button on, please.
	We're getting an echo. The first thing that I would say is that for those people who aren't British, when he says, wait until uni, what he means is that, like most British men, he's trying to grow a unibrow, and he's waiting until that joins across the bridge of his nose, and that is going to be the catalyst for his personal action.
	It's either that or university, I can't remember, but I think it's the former.
	But the first thing that I would say is, you have to think of, or it would be useful to think of going into this conversation with your parents, without an agenda.
	So if you say, well, I want them to back down rather than me to back down, you're going in trying to control the outcome of a relationship.
	And that will not serve you well.
	You can't control other people.
	You can't control other people.
	And so I would suggest, and I'm going to work on some of these questions in the Real Time Relationship book, because I know that it's something that I've just sort of started working on in a more advanced podcast at the Diamond Plus level, but...
	The real-time relationship in these conversations with your parents is just a relentless honesty about what is occurring for you while they're talking.
	So if they're making you feel scared, you say, Ma Da, I'm feeling really scared right now.
	I feel really nervous. My hands are shaking.
	I feel sweaty. And you see what they do with that, right?
	You see what they do with that.
	And if they get more mad, you say, well, now I'm even more scared and so on, right?
	And then if they do things that make you angry, you say, now I feel angry because of X, Y, and Z. And it's just giving a constant feedback on your emotional experience of the interaction, of the relationship.
	Relationships in their fundamentals are emotional.
	Interactions. Relationships in their fundamentals are emotional interactions.
	You can have cash interactions with grocers and your banker.
	You can have intellectual...
	But relationships at their core...
	are about values and virtue, and values and virtue translate into emotional energy.
	That's the one thing that we've always been talking about here, that from the roof of the skies to the root of the earth is the same essential grand ideas.
	That which is our highest and widest abstraction is also our deepest and most fundamental emotional experience.
	Sorry, there's nothing I can do about the choppiness.
	We have as much bandwidth here as humanly possible.
	So, I know that that is an abstraction that doesn't really help that much, but it's just something important to remember that your relationship with your parents, if it is to be saved, if it is to be created almost, has to be not with you going in there trying to get them to back down, but just to say, my experience of you as parents is X. I feel good, I feel bad, I feel this, I feel happy, I feel sad.
	That's my experience.
	Of you as parents.
	And if they say, well, you're wrong, right?
	Then you say, you know, when you say that I'm wrong, I feel so bad inside.
	Like, I feel like I'm on a trap door that's just opened in the floor and I'm just falling.
	It's really scary when you tell me that my experience of you is just wrong.
	It makes me feel kind of crazy.
	It makes me feel afraid.
	It makes me feel angry, too, because I kind of feel like it's not true.
	I feel like you're just kind of being defensive.
	And they just wait to see what they come.
	Oh, stop psychologizing.
	What's all this psychobabble? Stop listening to that bold Brit-Canadian Commonwealth dude.
	Right? And then you say, what's important to me?
	This is this podcast and so on.
	And now I feel even more scared.
	I sense that you're really frustrated.
	And what I'm feeling is that I don't know what to say next.
	Like it's just being relentlessly honest in the moment.
	And it is unbelievably difficult.
	It is like fifth Dan black belt difficult to do it.
	Not because it's hard to know what you're feeling.
	It's just hard to see what happens to people when you're actually emotionally honest with them.
	It's hard to look into that kind of ugliness.
	And that's what we need to do when we're going through this kind of process.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
	That really helps. I guess the thing I was confused about was...
	Well, no, I guess the thing I knew but didn't want to admit was that the real-time relationship is not something you just use.
	As if I have to wait first, like my friends, to say something or do something really horrible for me to give my emotional reaction.
	I can just start off the conversation with a reaction to what they did to me for the last 17 years.
	Exactly. A real-time relationship is fundamentally proactive.
	You're bringing the truth of your experience to your relationship with others.
	And I swear to God, no matter who your parents are, even if they're Charles freaking Manson, there is no parent, no human being, no lover, no child, no teacher, no sister, no brother, no aunt, no uncle, no grandparents, no niece, no nephew, etc., etc.
	All the Waltons agree.
	That they would like you to tell them the truth about your experience.
	There's nobody on this earth who is going to say to you, I don't want to hear the truth of your experience.
	I don't want to hear honesty from you.
	I don't want you to be honest with me.
	Lie to me! Right?
	So what we're doing, and this is part of the whole Untruth book, right, is what we're doing is we're simply saying, okay, what if virtue, what if honesty is in fact a real value?
	Let me be honest with people about how they make me feel or how I feel around them.
	Not in terms of condemning them immediately, just saying, look, I'll be with you.
	And being open to theirs, right?
	And then if they say, well, my experience is that you're an ungrateful child.
	That's my experience of you.
	Then you say, well, that just really scared me what you said there, but tell me more, right?
	And then just let them go and then talk to them about how you feel.
	and you will get to the root of the relationship in 10 minutes.
	I really get that.
	I mean, I feel, I get all of the messages you sent me, like, about, like, feeling empathy with the anger, which has been frustration and humiliation, etc., which has built up since I was a kid.
	And, like, now I can feel it, but the next step I've just taken is...
	Now I have to say it.
	I mean, it's like I was caught in that, like Hamlet, right?
	I don't want to scream at my mother and turn the whole situation into something horrible, which she can just say, oh no, look how hormonal this crazy teenager is.
	And, you know, then blame me for going mad at her and being violent in her language, you know.
	I mean, that's not productive at all.
	I mean, that would just make the whole process worse for me as well.
	Right, and if your mom says, basically in one form or another, I want you to stop talking like this.
	You're talking like some Vulcan emoting robot.
	I don't like it. Stop talking about this.
	I want you to share your feelings or whatever, right?
	Whatever she's going to do. Or if she just gets up and storms out or says, oh, I can't talk to you when you're like this or something, right?
	Then you set.
	I feel.
	Right?
	So I just want to understand the rules of the relationship.
	If the rule for the relationship is, I'm not supposed to talk to you about how I feel, then I need to know that.
	Because you need to get a commitment from people about what the relationship is.
	You have to have some kind of contract with the people in your life, even if it's implicit.
	Right? And so you say, okay, so like, is it that I'm talking to you about my feelings that bothers you?
	Is it the feelings themselves?
	Is this, are you just uncomfortable with it and I should do it more?
	Or do you just like, we never do this again and I'm never allowed to talk to you about my feelings?
	And in which case, what is a relationship to you?
	Like if my emotional experience, my actual alive experience of you and the world is not, is never to be brought to this relationship, then I don't really understand what you mean when you say you love me and we have a relationship.
	Right. That makes a lot of sense.
	I mean, if I want her to be honest with me, the least I can do is be honest with her.
	Well, I would say that you just want to be honest.
	Like, forget about what she's doing.
	Right, right, exactly.
	Yeah. As I say, you only have control over your own level of honesty and vulnerability.
	You know, the reason that people lash out, the reason that people lash out is they're getting close to the truth.
	Not lashing out is really hard because what's on the other side of that is very, very strong emotion.
	Very strong, like storm-tossing emotion, like crack skyscrapers emotion.
	And that is a very hard place to go to.
	It's essential because that's where our future and our energy, not to mention the future and the energy of the species, the planet.
	But that core is where we need to get to, and that's what happens when you don't blame, you don't mythologize, you don't lash out, and you stick with real honesty and vulnerability.
	Okay, I guess he's left to go have that conversation.
	Happy to chat with whoever wants to come up next.
	Thank you so much and do keep us posted on how it's going.
	The Divine Miss C, I believe you had something to chat about?
	Yes, if you'd like, if I'm next.
	Sorry to be annoying. Could you just take the mic back a little bit?
	Unless you're actually eating the microphone, it sounds a little bit loud.
	Oh, sorry about that.
	By the way, I'm going to buy my mother a t-shirt and send it to her, I think, for the irony value.
	Okay. Okay, wait, wait, wait just a second.
	Really? I don't know.
	Depends on if I have, you know, some extra money.
	Okay, okay. Just wanted to see where you were with that, but let me not interrupt you again.
	Sorry, go ahead. I watched the Ron Paul video the other night and one of the things that you talk about is sort of working towards personal freedom versus, you know, societal freedoms and societies obviously not ready for to be free yet.
	One of the things that I've kept running up against in my own thinking is I would think that they would have to go hand in hand.
	I'm not sure how one could actually have personal liberty while being tortured in a gulag or something like that.
	So is there a way that you can speak to that?
	Because I'm still kind of running up against that.
	Well, sure, and I certainly do appreciate that the gulag that you're tortured in still has internet connection, so that's excellent.
	But seriously, you're not being tortured in a gulag, right?
	Oh, absolutely not.
	I think it's probably going to get there eventually, but, you know, until my name is Alexander Solzhenits, and I don't think that mine's quite as bad as his yet.
	I don't think that we're going to end up being tortured in a gulag.
	My personal opinion is that we're not going to end up being tortured in a gulag.
	And if we are, you might as well just assume that you're not.
	Because if you end up not being tortured in a gulag, you haven't wasted time worrying.
	And if you do end up being tortured in a gulag, at least you didn't waste time worrying about the inevitable.
	But I don't think that's where it's going to go.
	Now, I certainly do agree with you that when you are being tortured in a gulag, philosophy ain't going to do that much for you.
	At least the kind of philosophy that we talk about here.
	That would be more sort of around personal, just how do I survive this emotionally.
	The philosophy that we talk about here is in the realm of nutrition, right?
	So in the realm of nutrition and exercise, which is all about preventing health problems as far as it's able to, then we can do an enormous amount to help people eat well, exercise, not get diabetes, not be overweight, and so on, right?
	However, what diet and exercise help when you're currently having a heart attack?
	Well, the answer is it doesn't help at all.
	So you're completely right that this philosophy will not do you a whole lot of good in a gulag, right?
	I mean, then you might as well believe in Zeus or the Christian God or whatever, it doesn't matter, right?
	Diet and exercise is all about prevention.
	It's to some degree around cure, right, insofar as if you have the heart attack and you survive, then clearly you want to deal with diet and exercise.
	So that metaphor I've found to be quite helpful in understanding that what we're trying to do is prevent society from having the aneurysm of fascism, right?
	So we're working to prevent this from occurring and that we have power over that is the key, right?
	You have power over your relationships.
	You have no power over the state.
	You have no power over other people.
	You can point guns at them, but fundamentally All you can do is force fleshly obeyance.
	You can't force love. You can't force loyalty.
	You can't force commitments. You can't force donations.
	I've tried. You can't force other people to do anything that is of any value, right?
	All you can do is reduce them to a meat puppet of obedience, as happens so often in families.
	So recognizing where you have power and control is certainly key, that you can bring freedom to your own life through your own choices.
	Through that, Through that, you liberate the world.
	And I'll tell you just a very short story about dinner that Christina and I had on Friday night.
	There was a guy at the dinner table Who said to me, well, you'd kill a guy for a million dollars, right?
	And I said, Canadian?
	No. I said, no, I would never kill a guy for a million dollars, and it didn't matter how much money I had.
	I'd live under a bridge in a box before I would kill a guy for any amount of money.
	And he said, well, I would kill a guy for a lot less than a million dollars, right?
	And he said, most of the people that I talked to would agree with me, and they would also kill a guy for $50,000, $25,000, and so on, right?
	And I said, yes, but you're the one asking the question.
	And he said, what? I said, if you and I both approach 50 different strangers, you would get almost all of them to agree with you to kill a guy for $50,000, and I would get none of them to agree to kill a guy for a million dollars, because we condition the world in how we approach it.
	We change the world in how we approach it.
	When you become personally free, you change the way that other people perceive not just you, but freedom.
	Right? So the personal project called freedom is the demonstration of a state in the society.
	It is the demonstration of no unchosen positive obligations.
	The way that you interact with people when you're free is like a positive virus, and it's not going to make the world free tomorrow, 10 years, 50 years from now, but how you approach the world is the most conceivably powerful way that you either aid or hamper the spread of freedom as a whole.
	So that's my suggestion.
	We have no control over the state, can't control the church, can't control our parents, can't control anybody.
	But we can generate amazingly positive and surprising results when we ourselves are personally free.
	Does that answer your question or just go on a complete tangent?
	That helps. Thanks.
	The killing for money guy's response was, of course, he started talking about his family.
	He basically said that he was never ever going to have a real-time relationship conversation with his mother in no way, no how, but he sure as heck was looking forward to them being dead.
	You there? Yes, I sure am.
	I wanted to talk about this most recent set of conversations on the board in relation to the real-time thing.
	Apparently I have a lot of defenses I didn't really know about.
	Or something I'm doing that I didn't know I was doing.
	Or other people have defenses that they don't know about, right?
	I really...
	Honestly, I'm just...
	I don't know. I have no idea.
	I don't know who...
	But I know that the majority opinion seemed to be the same, and I don't think it was any kind of mass hallucination on their part.
	Right, okay.
	Unless this whole thing is a mass hallucination on everybody's part, Nate.
	Do you think about that? Sorry, go on.
	Right. Yeah.
	You're scaring me with that.
	Well, I apparently...
	Whenever I try to engage in a real-time thing, what happened was, at least in this conversation, it came across...
	as being manipulative in some way and maybe you know I'm totally open to the idea that I have and I think maybe I was to some extent but like if I say I'm sad does that mean what does that mean you know does that mean I'm being manipulative or well but but the question is why you know if I just say I'm sad then what is the next step for the other person Like,
	that would make you happy?
	Well, I'm sure just, like, well, tell me more would be the next step, but...
	Right, so, sorry to interrupt, and I'm going to be an annoying guy as always, but the first thing here is that if I say to you, Nate, I'm sad, right?
	And that's it, right?
	Then, like, if I say, Nate, I really want to meet for dinner, and then hang up, what are you going to do?
	Um, be confused.
	Right, it's just like, well, we need a place to meet, don't we?
	We need to, you know, where, when, how, whatever, right?
	So if I say to you, Nate, I'm sad, there's nothing for you to do with that, right?
	Right. Now, you can say, tell me more.
	But why should you have to, right?
	So, I, of course, you don't have to say, tell me more.
	Um... You don't really have to do anything, I guess.
	Well, if somebody just said to me, somebody sent an email and said, Steph, you make me angry, I'd be annoyed.
	Why? Well, because they're not opening a dialogue.
	They're not telling me anything other than a base emotion which I can't do anything with.
	I can't conceivably do anything with an emotion called, I'm angry.
	Just as nobody can do anything with an emotion called, I'm sad.
	Right? Like, if somebody calls me up and says, I'm in pain, I don't know if they've just lost their mother.
	Got rejected from an audition or stubbed their toe.
	Like, I have no idea. If you just give people a tiny little bit of information that they can't work with, and that's all you give them, that's not the real-time relationship.
	Okay. So let's say, in relation to the other thread that I'm confused about, the one where you were talking about Not confronting our parents in a real-time sense.
	I didn't see my parents at all because I knew exactly what would happen if I did.
	I knew I would go round and round and round and it would go nowhere and I would get the same confusing...
	It would either be sentimental passive-aggression or some kind of Attack on my intelligence.
	Sorry to interrupt. I can guarantee you that a real-time relationship conversation never goes nowhere, and it never goes around in circles.
	Because here's the thing, and I mentioned this on the board, right?
	If you had gotten to the core of your relationship with your parents, then it seems inconceivable that you would end up in the subsequent disastrous romantic relationships, right?
	I mean, if you really get that smoking is bad for you, you don't just switch to filters, right?
	So what happened was when you were looking at your...
	And this is nothing I was talking about at the time, as one astute listener pointed out, right?
	Like, I was sort of saying, okay, well, you sort of get who they are, and so on.
	But what I'm looking at is, in the aftermath of the Defu Rockstars experience, of the Defu Rockstars tour, in the aftermath of that...
	Some problems have continued to occur, right?
	So you went into some relationships.
	So we need to tweak it a little bit.
	That doesn't mean going back to talk to your parents or anything like that.
	But we need to understand why this process of ditching the parents did not result in vastly improved relationships or for you even improved relationships in your dating life, right?
	And my guess is that you did not talk to your parents but hit the eject button, but you didn't hit the eject button with a complete knowledge of the dysfunction that you came up with, right?
	Right. You didn't hit the eject button because you wanted to avoid the experience of being consciously invisible to your parents.
	Rather than actually be invisible to your parents.
	Experience what that is like.
	Because once you experience consciously what it's like to totally beat your head against the wall of another person's defenses, you are never tempted to do that again in any relationship.
	Right. And that's something I kind of did with the last relationship.
	But I didn't do it with them.
	Do you think it's important that I do it with them?
	Because if so... No.
	No, no, because now what happens is because you've been out of it for a while, what's going to happen is if you get back into it, they're going to say, oh, so he can be gone for six months and then he'll be back.
	So all you've done is reset the clock, right?
	So you can't go back and do it now.
	I think that would not be a good idea.
	And certainly you did go through that with your fiancé, your ex-fiancé, so that's good, right?
	But I'm leaning more towards, and I did talk about this on Truth, right, to examine your parents about ethics and virtue.
	You can get very quickly to the core of these kinds of things, and I've been sort of reviewing my own and Christina's Defoe experiences to figure out where the difference is between what we did and what some of the other people have done.
	done, not everybody, but the difference is that we put ourselves in a completely vulnerable position over and over again until we totally got it, like with no doubts, no questions, no issues, no problems.
	What you cut out there?
	Yeah, that we just totally put ourselves out in a vulnerable way with our parents and siblings and kept asking and kept saying, this is what I need and so on, until you really get to the core of the relationship, which is that there's no person in the other body.
	Okay.
	Right. So, did I screw myself?
	Well, no, no. What happened was, I mean, look, let's look at the upside, which is considerable, right?
	Basically, what's happening is, you're out of the wheelchair, and now you need a couple of new dance steps, right?
	You're out of the wheelchair, so let's not poison the silver lining on this cloud or darken the whole sunshine that we've got, right?
	You got your manipulative parents out of your life.
	Things have happened, right?
	But when we're talking about how to tweak this, because we are inventing a kind of new paradigm for relationships here, or basically coming to the reality of relationships, so there's always tweaking, right?
	There's always things where you say, well, you know, if I did that again, I would do it this way.
	And that kind of stuff is what we're talking about here.
	So it's not like, well, I didn't jump out of the burning plane perfectly.
	I bent my toe when I could have landed better.
	It's still better than being in the burning plane that's going down.
	So don't say, well, now I'm screwed because I missed one particular thing because you went through a lot of that with...
	Your fiancé. It's just that if we were to go back in time, this would be my thought, I would suggest going to have that conversation and staying in that conversation with your parents and really being...
	And of course, I'm working on this real-time relationship book, so I'm sort of mulling over this stuff.
	Oh my god, I detached my parents in the wrong way and I'm going to curse to wander the earth as a loveless wreck forever.
	No, it's nothing like that. It's just that when we look back on this, everything that we're doing that's so new...
	It is helpful, highly helpful to tweak it, right?
	For the people, obviously for ourselves, and also for the people who are coming after, right?
	Right. Yeah, this is so very new that there's not a lot of places you can, like I was saying on one post, like trying to get this far with a therapist, I mean, I don't get my defenses pointed out by them.
	I mean, at least the last two.
	They've not been very good at all.
	But maybe the next one will.
	I don't know. It's like trying to find a telephone in 1896.
	It's just not going to be easy to find.
	I'm not getting Mars on this thing.
	I don't think. Right.
	But I really don't understand the real-time thing very...
	I'm not really understanding the real-time relationship thing too much, I don't think.
	And maybe I should just wait until the book...
	Yeah, I mean, we are having a seminar, right?
	We're doing this thing in Miami, which is going to be where the unveiling of whatever it is that I've been able to come up with is going to be there, if not the final book form, at least the general ideas.
	And so we'll talk about it then.
	But it really is just about being very proactive and honest about your experience of the interaction with the other person and being also curious about their experience of their interaction with you, right?
	So if you get criticized and you feel really bad and you say, well, I just feel really bad that you've criticized me or whatever, then you're kind of not being curious about the other person's experience.
	And it's putting your ego aside and genuinely trying to get into the other person's shoes.
	I mean, there's lots of complex things about it, but Hopefully it will make a little bit more sense come January, but I am a little bit more, you know, having looked at the aftermath of a large number of these situations over the last year, I think everybody did magnificently.
	There's an enormous amount to be incredibly proud of, but, you know, things can always be a continual improvement, right?
	Things can always be, we want the Six Sigma DFU experience, right?
	So we want to keep tweaking it as far as possible, and that's sort of what I've been trying to work on.
	We should probably, I don't know, have a conversation later about the actual thread.
	I don't think it's too productive on the board right now.
	Yeah, I wouldn't try the real-time relationship on the board myself.
	Because the unfortunate thing is, since emotions are the core of our interactions with others, wherever there's anything other than the most perfunctory of relationships, a board is not going to work.
	You can't get tone, you can't get the pauses, you can't get the oh of understanding.
	The forum is great for talking about ideas.
	It's great for sharing stories.
	It's great for sharing insights.
	It is not a good place to have conflict.
	And I regularly bail out of conflict on the boards and say, let's talk about it.
	It is just not possible for it to work productively.
	Yeah, sorry, as Christina's saying, over 90% of our communication is non-verbal, right?
	So if you can't tell whether somebody's pounding the keyboard with a ball-peen hammer, you just don't know what's going on.
	So thanks so much.
	I appreciate that.
	And if we would like to bring on the next person, that would be excellent.
	Hey, Steph. Hi.
	How's it going? It's Rod.
	Good. How are you doing? Doing all right.
	So I'm wondering about this, my spamtastic fear about getting together a list of emails of random people to send advertisements to.
	Well, see, wait, wait, I'm going to stop you right there, right?
	Because I must say that there's a little bit of mythology in what you said, if you don't mind me mentioning it.
	Oh, Sean, this is what I'm asking.
	Excuse me, I need to drink something.
	Okay, go ahead. Well, random people to send advertisements to is...
	It's not a very value-neutral way of putting it, if that makes sense to you.
	First of all, there's no advertisement.
	Because I'm not charging for anything.
	I'm not charging anybody for anything in this conversation.
	We've had people who've gone through the entire podcast series twice, never donated a penny.
	Right? So this is not an advertisement.
	This is an invitation. I mean, I'm not just making up semantic words here.
	An advertisement is if you're trying to sell a product and I'm giving it all away.
	And there's no hidden catch and there's no listen to 10 podcasts and I own your dog.
	I mean, there's nothing hidden. Right?
	If they want to donate, great.
	But it's not an advertisement, right?
	And secondly, of course, the way that I have talked about it is it's not random either, right?
	Well, see, for me, if I was to go out and try to find these names, it would feel like I was just grabbing random, because I've told pretty much everyone that I know about this, and from From here on, it's just going to be the people I meet or just people I'll go looking around the internet for lists of people.
	But there's something that just feels kind of dirty about that to me.
	I'm not sure why. Well, I mean, that's a very interesting question, and I'd like to spend a few minutes on it, because this is something that is important.
	But let me ask you this. If you were being paid $500 per email to get emails of people who were interested in this conversation, so you could make a fortune in like a couple of months and retire, how would you go about doing it?
	You know, for some reason that still didn't...
	Dislodge anything. The feeling is very much the same.
	I'm extremely excited about the...
	It's not an advertisement, so it's not a product, but you know what I'm saying.
	The subject of these emails, I'm really excited about that.
	It pretty much dominates most of the conversations I have lately with my acquaintances.
	I've been... Telling people verbally about how awesome these books are and such, and I'm just so delighted to be a part of this conversation in the early days because I think someday, 100 years from now, people are going to look back at this and say this was a watershed moment in history of the human race.
	I mean, I really feel that this is huge, but there's something about, like, I get this image of someone opening up their email and seeing a...
	It's the equivalent of a cold call to me.
	When I get unsolicited emails from anything, even if it's from a source that I would normally be interested in, I get really just put off by it.
	I don't want to see that there.
	I surf the internet with Adblock on, so I don't see any advertisements anywhere.
	I can't stand things that are uninvited in my life.
	I feel that if we contact people with These emails out of the blue like that, it's going to turn people off from this conversation.
	I don't know. It's probably my reaction to something, and I'm probably telling myself a story, but I'm just not sure where it's coming from.
	Well, and I'm certainly open to other possibilities, other alternatives.
	So how would you suggest that we could get the conversation out to more people?
	I'm ordering one of those really tacky...
	Back window decal stickers with the website name on it.
	I mean, that's going to be like my car wearing a t-shirt, I guess.
	And see, that's something that I'm putting it out there for people to see, but I'm not throwing it at their email inbox.
	Okay, and so what do you feel when you receive an unsolicited email?
	If you'd never heard of this conversation and somebody said, listen, there's this great podcast about philosophy.
	It's free. It was an award winner or top 10 or whatever, 2010 podcast awards, biggest philosophy.
	Would you feel that that was intrusive?
	Would you feel like that was annoying?
	Would you feel like that was invasive?
	Yeah, actually I do. There are some emails that I receive from I don't know.
	Maybe it's just something weird about my inbox that I just hold sacrosanct or something.
	I guarantee you it's got nothing to do with your inbox, but that's where we'll start because it has a metaphorical level for you.
	I don't like sending out unsolicited emails.
	I sent one list out April of last year and I just reused those emails again.
	So I figure once every 18 months is not exactly spamming people.
	Of course, for a lot of people, it may go into the spam box.
	Some people have thanked me, written back and said, you know, that's great, I'll definitely check it out, and so on.
	One guy over the last year and a half has said, you know, this is unsolicited email, you shouldn't be doing this, blah, blah, blah, right?
	But to me, it's like, well, you put your contact information out on the internet.
	You've got a blog about libertarianism.
	I'm sending you links to a free libertarian podcast.
	Like, help me understand how that's abusive.
	You know what I mean? Okay, now that just changed something in my mind there.
	For some reason, that flipped a switch that the, you're going to earn 500 bucks in address, didn't flip in my head, so...
	Right, so here there's a kind of, maybe you'd be less motivated by the financial rewards and more motivated by, for me, if somebody puts their email address out on the internet, and I don't try and figure out their email address from their blog or anything, like if there's a contact me there button or a contact me there form, Then I'm going to grab it. I'm not going to put them on my email list and spam them every week.
	Of course not, right? I'm going to send them an invitation.
	It's like, you're interested in libertarianism.
	Here is a free libertarian show that I think you will really enjoy.
	Right? I mean, that's not invasive, right?
	Isn't that helpful? Yeah, it is.
	Right, because by your principle, right, most of the people here would not have been Well, I shouldn't say that.
	By your principle, a lot of the people here, like Greg, would never have come, right?
	Yeah, and I recognize that when I was talking about this on that thread.
	That's how Greg got here, and obviously Greg's one of the more valuable members of this community.
	I mean, I value him in the community.
	I don't care what other people think, but...
	Actually, he's one of the most expensive members of the community for me, but I do know what you mean.
	Right, right, yeah. So anyway, the...
	Yeah, it's... I think there's something mixed up in this about the...
	Maybe it's the fact that I fear too many...
	Too many trolls coming in and spoiling my phone or something.
	I don't know what it is, because I think that there's, it's something like if a lot of people show up and they don't know what's going on, it's kind of like I have this just completely selfish and irrational feeling that I want to keep the club to the people who get it, you know? Well, I absolutely understand that, but let me try a countervailing perspective.
	If we don't win, how many trolls do you think are going to come along as a whole and mess up this conversation?
	Oh, life is going to suck big time if this doesn't succeed.
	I mean, yeah, I mean...
	I mean, at least the trolls on the internet, it's an IP address, right?
	It's not guys coming to your house, taking you away, right?
	Yeah. I mean, when I first started donating, I mentioned that If I live another 50 years, the quality of my life after this conversation for those 50 years is just priceless to me, right?
	And if this conversation recedes and goes away, then I'll be losing that priceless value again.
	And it'll be even worse to have grasped at it and lost it than to have never had it.
	Well, but you're still talking about yourself, right?
	Yeah, but for everything.
	For the amazing and beautiful human race that is to come that we love so much.
	I have that same feeling that you do, and I think that's one of the reasons that I have a great deal of optimism in thinking about this stuff.
	I really do feel very optimistic about the future.
	I think it's going to kick ass.
	Well, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
	But I don't know how to get...
	How am I going to get there from here?
	You understand that it's kind of funny to feel optimistic about the future but not want to contact people in the present.
	That's what I was just going to say.
	How do I get there from here when I'm reluctant to do anything like emailing people?
	I mean, it's...
	I don't know. Or wear a t-shirt, right?
	Yeah, the t-shirt thing is no problem at all.
	I'm actually... I was planning on getting one of those anyway, but...
	Well, sorry, and just so I understand it, can you tell me why you didn't order yet?
	And again, I'm not trying to nag everyone into buying, because Lord knows we're not going to make any money off these t-shirts.
	I'm just curious.
	So you say, I'll get one later. Like, what was the delay?
	And it's just a marketing question more than anything.
	Oh, no, I don't think it's anything odd for me.
	I think it's par for the course for the way I do things.
	I mean, I visited the lulu.com page, I think, six times before I ordered all the books that I've ordered there, so...
	Okay, got it. I'm not sure what it is.
	It's just kind of like I like to stalk my prey, I guess.
	Now, and this is something that I'm going to sort of lower onto you, and you can let me know sort of what it is that you think about it, and let me know if it resonates with you at all.
	Okay. What I get a sense of, and certainly having known something about your history, is that for you, empathy was a disaster, right?
	Yeah. Yep.
	Right? So empathy was the massive meat hook that other people could plunge into your heart and drag you wherever the hell they wanted, right?
	Yes. Or should he use a more extreme metaphor?
	I believe it was the Krakatoan explosion over your Hiroshima.
	I don't know. But this was a huge vulnerability for you that people could just...
	Like the guy you talked about, the 80-year-old guy who was helping your dad because your dad was mad.
	His sensitivity to your dad's anger made him an unpaid slave laborer, right?
	I mean, this sensitivity is vulnerability.
	Empathy was how you got screwed, right?
	Yes. Because the thing that I am getting from, and I talked about this again in 920, if you haven't heard it, you should listen to it now.
	The thing that I'm getting is that, you know, Greg and I, and more Greg than I, worked hard to get these t-shirts out, right?
	Yeah. Now, when we launched this stuff, my sense would be, if I were to put myself in your shoes, right, and say, how could I make Steph and Greg feel great about this?
	How could I help them stay enthusiastic about what it is that they're doing that's important to me and for the future and for my kids and blah, blah, blah?
	Right? I don't think that that crossed your mind.
	It's not a criticism. I'm just pointing it out.
	We can be frank, right?
	I mean, I don't think you thought, how can I help keep them excited about what they're doing?
	You're right. And I'm very, unfortunately, I can be pretty stingy with praise sometimes.
	I'm not sure what causes that.
	Sorry to interrupt. Again, just to be annoyingly precise, it's not that you're stingy with praise.
	I don't think it crosses your mind.
	In this particular area, right?
	Yeah. No, that's true, I think.
	You didn't say, if everybody feels as I do, and we're just going to buy them later, in a week or two, or whatever, how is that going to make Steph...
	I'll just talk about myself. How is that going to make Steph feel...
	If he launches all of these t-shirts and nobody buys them.
	Right, yeah. No, I get that.
	Well, it's exactly the same way that I felt.
	I have this recurring pattern in my life where I get super interested in something and then lose enthusiasm for it.
	I'm always thinking about that when I do new podcasts.
	I'm like, God damn it, how am I going to keep this guy's interest?
	He's like ADHD central.
	No, I'm kidding. Go on. I don't know how many new hobbies I picked up and dropped within a month when I was a kid.
	I mean, dozens. And each one was going to be the next best thing.
	And so I know what that's like to be enthusiastic about something and then to pour that enthusiasm into just a black hole.
	Well, but this is a little different, though, because this is a little different, because this is something that you...
	Sorry, maybe I shouldn't say that.
	Did you just lose interest in your hobbies, or was there something else that caused you to abandon them?
	Well, I think, I mean, looking back at it, I think it was just the thing where my parents made a show of, you know, you can do anything you want, and we'll buy you, you know, a new...
	This or that to go with your new interest, but that was it.
	They made it materially possible for me to pursue that interest, but that was literally the end of the mirroring of my enthusiasm from them.
	Right, so they wouldn't take any interest.
	You get a wood-burning kit, you lose two fingers producing an ashtray, they don't even take a look at the ashtray, right?
	Yeah, I mean, there may have been some token, oh, that's a very good job that you did on that thing, but it was just, you know, it wasn't, it always felt like I was, I mean, I did most of my learning and most of my developing in a vacuum as a kid, I think.
	I mean, it was literally, I'm very used to self-teaching everything, and if I didn't, if I wasn't able to generate sufficient interest in it myself, it was very difficult for me to stay with anything.
	Right. So what happened is, as a defense mechanism, and this would be as common for everybody, and nothing's in particular to you, though this is not to downgrade what you felt, your defense mechanism is to render yourself unable to feel disappointment at other people's lack of interest, right?
	Right. And I think that's very common in this listenership.
	And I think that's very common as a whole, except for crazy people, which we're not.
	But you then, as a defense mechanism, said, fine.
	When I want something, when I want somebody to show interest, I am hurt, I am rejected, I am ignored, I am minimized.
	That's really painful. Why would I want to keep beating my head against that wall?
	I am no longer going to feel disappointment.
	I am no longer going to empathize with my own experience of being rejected and being disappointed when I'm enthusiastic.
	Yeah, and I'm also going to stop trying new things for the most part.
	I mean, that...
	That run of trying new things over and over and over again has really sort of dried up in the last decade of my life or something.
	I've just kind of honed in on the few things that I know I like right now, and I pursue very few new interests.
	I mean, this whole libertarianism into the FDR conversation is about the only new interest that I've had in the last probably six years, I would say.
	Well, and your business. Oh, yeah.
	Right? Remember the whole quit my career to start my own business?
	Yeah, well, that's come in response to the FDI conversation.
	Right, right. So when the t-shirts come out, it's not possible, and again, this is not a criticism, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, right?
	It's not a possible or default position for you to say, how's my buddy Steph going to feel if nobody buys his t-shirts?
	Right. Now, I'm not saying that anybody should buy the t-shirts just based on what I feel, right?
	I mean, it's not like, well, in order to...
	I don't want to manipulate people, right?
	And to say, well... But it's like, how is Steph going to judge people's experience to this conversation if nobody wants to buy a t-shirt?
	Yeah, and when I first opened up that thread on the FDR swag shop...
	I remember the feeling, and I've gotten this feeling many times.
	I mean, I troll the boards quite a bit.
	I have, I think, just about every forum set up to automatically email me when there's a new post.
	I'd certainly like to apologize for filling your inbox.
	Sorry, go on. No, there's a filter that throws it all off into its own folder, so it's not in my inbox.
	But anyway, the... I frequently will go into these threads and then kind of say, oh, I'll come back and talk later on this one.
	And of course, since there's literally like hundreds of these every day, a lot of them I don't get back to.
	But this one, I distinctly remember going into this one and thinking, I should do something about this, but then I put it off long enough for it to sort of leave my immediate attention.
	Right, and that's because your immediate attention was on yourself, right?
	Which, again, I would say that your immediate attention should be, to some degree, you know, my friend is selling this stuff and, you know, obviously he's not making any money from it, but your focus should be on the people who could see the t-shirt.
	Right. And that's, you know, the god of atheists is sort of this thing at the end, I'm not giving anything away.
	You've got to get into something that's bigger than just your own needs, right?
	That's meaning, right? Meaning is not just what we want in the moment, and I'm not accusing you of that or anything like that, but meaning is when we have something that aligns our energies in a big, massive, meaty, beautiful goal.
	Right? So when you say, oh, wow, I could be a billboard for this conversation and the shirts look comfortable.
	Right. Right? So it's about the people who are going to see these t-shirts or hoodies or caps or whatever, right?
	That's the people you should be thinking of.
	So you say, okay, well, I'm going to order it in a week.
	Then you can say that's seven days that 50 people aren't going to see this t-shirt.
	Right. I mean, again, I'm not trying to manipulate anyone.
	I do already feel like...
	Remember that scene in the Blues Brothers movie where they have that humongous speaker on top of the Blues Mobile?
	We're on a mission from God, yeah.
	I do kind of feel like that sometimes because I literally...
	Everyone who knows me knows about Free Domain Radio.
	I mean, there's no one who I know...
	Any more than just a really, really kind of minor acquaintance that doesn't know about this.
	So you're done with your people you know, right?
	Pretty much, I think I've exhausted that, yeah.
	Right, and exhausted is probably a very good word.
	So you're done with that, right?
	And this is sort of all about the next thing, right?
	Yeah, yeah. And I've been wondering about that too.
	too.
	And the other thing that I mentioned in that thread where I was talking about this was the fact that I still haven't reviewed your UPB book.
	Oh, and tell me if there's a typo.
	I'm sorry, but just give me the typo.
	I'll fix it.
	I mean, I just didn't even, I may have read it so many times I don't see it, but just give me the typo and I'll fix it, right?
	But then again, see, there's your fear of putting out something that's not perfect, right?
	Now, the issue is, of course, not so much that you're afraid of putting out something that's imperfect.
	God knows we all are, right?
	I mean, I thought I'd maybe gotten away with UPB, no typos.
	It turns out there were two little ones.
	But the key thing is, of course, that you're not alone, right?
	So there's lots of people on the board who would be more than happy to review your review before it goes out, right?
	That's a good point. Yeah, I never even thought of that.
	You're not sitting here on the mirror space station alone, totally cut off, drifting in deep space, saying, oh my god, I have to post a review, right?
	So there's a reason why...
	That's more than just the...
	Because when I say it, that's obvious, right?
	Like, you have to proofread your own stuff.
	God knows I don't. But now, see, understand that that's a very new concept to me, though.
	I mean, this whole...
	But it wouldn't be... Sorry, I'm so tired to interrupt you.
	It wouldn't be if you were totally lashed to the mask...
	The mask, sorry, of getting this conversation out.
	And again, this could be anything that you're into, but we'll just talk about this philosophy or this conversation.
	If you were totally committed...
	And this doesn't mean 24-7, but if you just had, in your decision point, something called whatever it takes to get this conversation out, if that was your octane, you would have figured out that you could ask someone to read your stuff.
	I guarantee you, because you're a scintillatingly intelligent fellow, and it's totally obvious when you think about it, but because you have an option called Later, maybe, someday, whatever, whatever, right?
	It doesn't get you out of your comfort zone to the point where you get the obvious thoughts, because you hit a kind of inertia, right?
	Yeah, the inertia is huge.
	I mean, it's that whole 911 podcast with the un-enslaving thing.
	That one really resonated with me a lot.
	Right. Right.
	So how do we combat inertia?
	We can't combat inertia with willpower, right?
	Because by the time we've hit inertia, our willpower is piss poor to begin with, right?
	So you can't will your car into motion, right?
	But the way that we combat inertia is with reference to larger goals, right?
	Yeah. I've got some notes about the procrastination video, which I promise I'll get to this week.
	How do we stay creative?
	Well, we stay creative by breaking our own habits, right?
	By getting out of our own comfort zones, by putting out stuff that's dangerously alluring.
	And that means when you come to a decision point like, do I buy a t-shirt, do I post a review of a book?
	And you say, well, relative to my big goals, how do I prioritize these things, right?
	So if my big goal is, like, I'm gonna do whatever I can to get this conversation out to people, then clearly I have to get this review out by the end of the week or tomorrow or whatever, right?
	And then you say, okay, well, now I'm paranoid about being spell-checked.
	And then what happens to you, and God knows it happens to me too, right?
	But what happens to you is you say, well, that fear of putting out something erroneous is gonna push off my deadline, right?
	So that's where the fear ends up turning your imminent activity into a never-to-be-completed-in-this-universe kind of thing, right?
	Whereas if you don't move the goalposts, if you say, well, I'm really terrified about getting this review out with an error, but I've still got to get it done by tomorrow, that's when your creativity kicks in.
	That's when your true self gets activated.
	That's when we break our habits.
	Does that make sense? Absolutely.
	In fact, in the past when I've When I force myself up against deadlines, that's when I always produce just amazing stuff.
	Usually, this is the funny thing about me and procrastination is that I don't know if there's ever been a time in my life when procrastination has actually hurt me.
	It hurt me as far as the performance of what I was doing comes in because so many times I have literally pushed deadlines up until the 11th and a half hour And I produce something that gets like an A grade or something like that.
	And it's always been, oh, wonderful this, wonderful that.
	And it drives me crazy because just once I would like for it to blow up in my face so I can learn not to do that.
	But it never seems to blow up.
	Well, and sorry to interrupt you, but you said it's never hurt you, right?
	Now, why would I not be able to listen to that in composure?
	Right, but now it's hurting you, though, right?
	Yeah, it hurts me, right?
	It hurts me. And that's something that I need to focus on, I think.
	And it doesn't just hurt me, right?
	I mean, it hurts, like, if 50 people had seen this T-shirt or, you know, 50 people had read this review...
	Right? Then one person might have gone to the website, listened to the podcast, or bought a book.
	Maybe, maybe, right? Now what does that put?
	Five bucks into my pocket, what do I care, right?
	But what that matters, or what matters about that, is that that person could be, could be the person who's 20 years old who we pass the torch to.
	Could be! We don't know, right?
	Could be the guy who's got 50 million dollars in a trust fund who's just yearning and burning to do something meaningful with his life.
	Looking to blow it on something, yeah.
	Yeah, looking to blow it on something, right?
	And give me the biggest freaking toupee on the planet, like an afro the size of the Sky Dome, right?
	Or it could be someone who's in the media, right?
	Who's like, wow, this crazy Canuck has, you know, got some magic juice that we should get a hold of.
	Or it could be somebody who's in the book reviewing industry who's like, I want to republish the god of it.
	It could be. You don't know.
	Or it could just be someone who is going to have kids next year.
	Or it could be somebody who is the most socially networked guy you can imagine with 5,000 emails that have great cachet to his listeners.
	It could be somebody who writes a newsletter.
	You don't know who is going to see it and what that might do.
	But you do know that without the t-shirt, that's not going to happen.
	So it doesn't hurt you to procrastinate in this area.
	Except in the long term, right?
	In that we want to do what we can.
	Again, not 24-7 because we've got lives to live.
	Well, you guys do. But we want to do what we can to make the world as healthy.
	Of course, that's going to be satisfying.
	And of course, that's going to mean our kids grow up in a healthier world.
	And of course, that's going to mean that we can take great pride in what it is that we're doing.
	But all of that is so far in the future.
	It's like floss now so that you'll have a good-looking teeth in your skull, right?
	I mean, when you're dead. That doesn't mean anything.
	But what it means now is having something which we are willing to throw our ego under the bus to get to.
	Right. And, you know, looking back a few, well, about a half a year, I guess, to the The time when I was really revving up the engines to do this, leaving my old career to start my own business and all that stuff, and the process of writing that letter to the previous employer who owed me money and all that stuff.
	And all of that, there was a string of time when The procrastination was just blasted out of me.
	I would think of something and I would do it.
	I'd think of something and I would do it.
	Recently, I've lost that momentum and the old procrastination is coming back.
	Everyone does. Everyone has.
	That's why I put out 920 because everybody is really communicating to me very clearly.
	I don't know what to do next.
	I'm stuck. Because they're stuck and it's not conscious, they're going to leave me stuck.
	Oh, it's been conscious for me, actually, because when I started listening to that podcast, I was like, oh, sweet, he's getting to this because I need this bad, so...
	Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, now that we've got our own personal lives in order and your personal life is, you know, compared to a couple of years ago is in good shape.
	And mine, according to Christina's report card, is still a lot of bees, but that's mostly around personal hygiene.
	But actually, bees I'd be happy to get.
	But now that our personal lives are in order and we're kind of aligned and we're doing what we want and we've got the bad people out of our lives, it's like, well, now what?
	Well, now we have to save the world, right?
	Now, next, check, personal life in order.
	Check, defood. Check, got rid of the bad people.
	Next, save the world.
	Okay, get your fucking cape, because we're doing it.
	Right, right, right.
	Okay, so are the capes on the t-shirt shop?
	Don't make me come over there, man.
	I will. One more complaint about these goddamn t-shirts, all right?
	Can I get this cape in red?
	Oh, my green pounding.
	Just kidding. Right, but no, we have to go out in front and center and brave all of the telescopic laser sights of the cynics and the relativists and the Ron Paul fans and all the other people, right?
	We just have to go there, throw our arms wide and say, shoot!
	I'll survive. Pull the trigger, I'll fly.
	Throw me off a cliff, I'll float.
	When they're looking at me through their rifle scopes, I just need to grab my crotch and sneer, right?
	Yeah, pull a Michael Jackson, do whatever it is you like.
	Break dance. But we have to go out there and say...
	I don't care if this sounds like a complete crazy pile of batshit.
	This is a great conversation.
	And people should be listening to this, and they should get into this.
	And this has credibility, and this works, and this changes people's lives.
	And I know that this has been said a million times before, and I know there's a million and one charlatans out there pissing in the river, but there's one clear stream that gets you places.
	And this conversation, which is not a new conversation, it is an expanded conversation using age-old tools of reason and science and evidence, this conversation will do it.
	And we just got to go out there and keep saying that, and keep saying that, and cold calling, if you like, call it what it is that you want, but that's about willing the world to a better place, because all the crazy people in the world have all the motivation that we don't.
	And that just means they'll win.
	And we don't even need that much motivation.
	Because the reason that Christian parents have to send their kids to Sunday school for 9 million years is because Christianity is badass, stupid, crazy nonsense.
	So we have a little current that we're swimming with called the truth, right?
	And that means that we don't have to swim that hard.
	That's why I don't say to people, I need 10% of your income and you send me the heart and valve of your grandmother and so on.
	That's why I say, you know, we can do it with little things.
	We can do it. Order some books for someone.
	You know, write a book review.
	Just get people into this conversation.
	You don't have to pound doors.
	We're not Jehovah's Witnesses selling nonsense.
	We happen to have a little thing called truth and reality on our side, which means we're swimming with the current.
	But that doesn't mean we don't have to paddle at all.
	That's not what I'm saying, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, I get...
	Yeah. You know, it's funny.
	I used to have these...
	Oh, I still do sometimes. I have these conversations with my friends that we see successful people who, for all intents and purposes, shouldn't be successful...
	And I say, doesn't this moron know he should be failing?
	But he's succeeding, you know?
	And here I am trying to figure out how to succeed, and I'm not taking lessons from the moron who's succeeding.
	Right, right. I mean, why should crazy people have time on cable and we don't, right?
	It just fundamentally doesn't make any sense, except for the fact that they're working harder than we are, right?
	Right. They're working harder, and so they're going to win.
	There's no mystery to this.
	There's no magic sauce, other than the fact that we've worked damn hard to make sure that we're right.
	That's a collective endeavor.
	I've been thrashing out, but people have been watching my back and pointing me in better directions.
	It's been a mutual effort.
	We've put a hell of a lot of work.
	That's been for me, too.
	I didn't come to this conversation with everything sorted out, right?
	But we've now spent two years pounding our heads into this brick wall of truth, and we've got a nice human-shaped dent that works.
	And that's why we get installed, because it's like, yeah, I got it.
	I got it. I'm living my life by it.
	It works. Philosophy is valuable.
	It's bringing me happiness.
	It's scary as hell, but it's worth it.
	And now we just have to go and, you know, put on the tights and go save the world, because there's not much point in us taking it with us to the grave, right?
	Right. No, I don't want to.
	I want to get this out there.
	I mean, when I got done reading...
	Or listening to The God of Atheists.
	I mean, I was freaking juiced, you know?
	Like, I sent you that dough and said, here, go do something with this.
	And again, that was probably me just trying to pawn off the work of doing it to you.
	No, that's great. That's great.
	Look, I mean, the donations are great ways to do it.
	Like, you know, when people say, I buy a t-shirt, I never donate again, right?
	I mean, because, you know, a buck isn't going to help me eat.
	So the donations are great, and I don't mean to diminish any of that.
	But the donations are having me do it.
	Right. Right? And that's great.
	I love doing it, don't get me wrong.
	But I want you to have the satisfaction of doing it, right?
	Right. Yeah, and also, I mean, having a third party show enthusiasm about it is going to get the word out 20 times faster, too.
	Oh, sure. I mean, if five different people go to a Yahoo group on anarchism and talk about this conversation, that's good, right?
	I mean, that's a lot better than, hi, I'm Steph, come to my show, right?
	I mean, that's, you know, not quite as credible, right?
	Right, right. Okay.
	Okay. Sorry, there was a guy talking earlier just about how you're staring at the...
	Just to do the good internet thing, right?
	Sorry that that is a horrible URL. We're going to upgrade it as soon as we can, but that's where we're at now.
	But you have a thing of staring at this t-shirt, right?
	And I think the t-shirts are good, myself.
	Greg and I spent quite a bit of time brainstorming over taglines, which are hellishly difficult to do.
	All right, Freedom Aid Radio, there is no tagline for philosophy.
	I mean, we just couldn't come up with anything good.
	Well, you know, I think I came up with a good one.
	Oh good, now we've got t-shirts.
	Go on. So if there's a, you know, Moral Philosophy is, they've tried basing it on religion and the government, and I was thinking this is like Moral Philosophy version 3.0, so I'd like to put on my t-shirt, I'm going to try Proud Beta Tester of Moral Philosophy version 3.0.
	How's that? That's very good.
	That's very good. Note, version 1 and 2 are viruses.
	Yeah. No, I think that's good.
	But this guy was staring at it and it says on the front, Free Domain Radio, which is a logic of personal political liberty.
	And on the back, it's take the red pill, freedomainradio.com, which I think is pretty good because it's a reference that the young folks will get.
	And that's important. But he's saying, I'm standing at the store thinking of ordering a t-shirt and I'm terrified, right?
	And it is terrifying because...
	How often in life are we punished for showing enthusiasm when we're not around already insane people, right?
	So you can be an enthusiastic, speaking in tongues, spitting snake venom woman at a Baptist church, but they're all crazy.
	So you can be enthusiastic there.
	But how often are you around rational people Where you can be enthusiastic and not get eye-rolling and sighing and oh lord, you know, whatever, right?
	That's very hard. To be both rational and enthusiastic is something I think that's been kind of missing.
	Because there's this...
	Buddhist, spaced out, head in the clouds, Socratic nonsense, right, which is associated with philosophy, but mad rank joy and enthusiasm with regards to philosophy is something that's kind of a bit of the alchemical mix that's not been present.
	And putting it on your body and saying, you know, I'd love to do the tattoos, but unfortunately I came down against them.
	But... Putting it on your body and having people talk to you about it, it's scary, right?
	And it's just something that's well worth doing, right?
	Because it'll feel great. And as I say, I tried to sort of put the tease out there to say, well, you're wearing a t-shirt, there's going to be some other listener at your university, guaranteed.
	Guaranteed there'll be some other listener at your university.
	And hopefully they won't be crazy stalker guy.
	I don't think they will be. They should be a very pleasant and positive individual, but...
	But that's not enough for people, right?
	So I knew that even, because everybody's saying, oh, I wish I could meet other listeners, right?
	Well, the t-shirt is the way to do it, right?
	I mean, to sort of put it in a silly way.
	And that's not enough. And that's when I know that people are stuck.
	And that's when I know that I need to point the efficacy that has occurred within our own lives.
	We need to now point this at the world and walk forward with the confidence of having put it through the ringer of our own lab, our own reason, and our own lives.
	Can I get an amen? Amen, brother.
	Testify. See, we've got to use those tricks of the bad guys.
	Absolutely. I'll come in in Miami like John Belushi coming into that church with James Brown at the front, you know, with that flips that he does.
	I'll be working on that.
	I'll probably only get about one done and then I'll be in traction.
	But the enthusiasm will be there.
	Cool. Hey, thanks again.
	I'll listen to this probably twice because I think there's a lot in this one for me.
	Okay, well, thanks so much.
	I appreciate that. And certainly anybody else who wants to come up and talk about Apparel or anything else is more than Markham.
	Yeah, I had kind of a follow-up question on two callers ago.
	Okay, who was the two callers ago?
	I was talking about the conversation on the forum about tweaking the DFU process.
	So I sent my DFU email to my parents a couple of weeks ago, and I did not do, you know, What you were saying with him, you know, really beat your head against the wall in a real-time relationship way and to really get where they're coming from.
	So I guess my question is, you know, since my DFU letter said basically, you know, I'll get back to you when I feel I'm ready, could I not, or would it be not advisable to go back and kind of start that process or do the tweet kind of thing?
	Well, if there are other people in your life that you can do it with, and I remember you talking about siblings, that would probably be a better place to start.
	Okay, and why is that?
	Well, if you say to people, you know, if you say to your wife, I'm leaving you, right, and you go storming out and so on, and then you come back three hours later, so to speak, then it's not easy to do it again.
	Does that make sense? Yeah.
	Because you won't have credibility in the future, right?
	And of course, with knowledge of your history, there can't be any conceivable possible positive relationships with your parents.
	So I wouldn't do it now and then not have credibility later.
	But I'm sure that there are people in your life that it's hard to be vulnerable and honest with.
	Would that be fairly correct? Yeah, that would be fair.
	Yeah, so I would work that angle myself.
	And again, this is just a theory, right?
	This came out of this basic observation that I had, or this basic thing that I was noticing that people were taking a lot of what I hope and think was good advice, particularly on truth, but not one person had come back having talked to their parents about ethics, asked that question.
	About ethics, right? And I was concerned a little bit about this possibility that people were just saying, well, I don't like my parents, I'm going to get rid of them.
	And, of course, I'm not saying that you shouldn't, but you want to get rid of them in a way that is going to keep your future clear of any similarities.
	And we all have a lot of habits with our family.
	And so, talking about it with Christina and going over our own situations where we didn't have that same thing occur, I think it had a lot to do with that, just Keep going in being vulnerable with parents, however scary it is.
	But you don't have to do it with your parents because you have other people in your life that you can take that approach with.
	That would be my suggestion.
	Of course, it's up to you. Right.
	I think I did kind of do that to some degree with one of my brothers in that I did the real-time relationship thing and said, well, what you said made me feel like this.
	And basically didn't get much of a response in terms of being concerned about what was going on with me at the time.
	Right, but what happened after that?
	I'm sorry if we mentioned this before.
	So if you do that one thing where you say this is what you feel and you get this sort of howling wasteland of tumbleweeds of nothing coming back, what happens then for you?
	Um... I'm not sure.
	I mean, this was a few weeks ago, so I don't remember the exact specifics, but I went for a while on how I was feeling about how he was talking with me, and it just didn't really seem to go anywhere.
	Well, and did you experience frustration that it wasn't going anywhere?
	Yeah, yeah, definitely.
	And did you say, I now feel frustrated because this isn't going anywhere?
	No, I guess I didn't.
	See, when you can't remember the end of the conversation, that's because you back...
	And look, we all do this.
	Please don't... I mean, I never want to put myself as some sort of like, ah, I have mastered this in every dimension, right?
	But when you can't remember the end of the conversation, it's because you backed away from being honest.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Right, because then he's going to get irritated, and then you're going to say, well, now I feel kind of nervous because you're irritated.
	Like, just that relentless honesty, the biofeedback, you know.
	It's incredible how many of us go through life getting no feedback from other people.
	Like, no genuine feedback from other people about what it's like to be in our company.
	Now, I know I do, and particularly since I've started doing this, but it's amazing, right, just how...
	Your brother has probably never had anybody say, this is my experience, emotionally, of interacting with you.
	Yeah, you know, it's kind of interesting.
	The first time it happened in my conversation with him, this four-and-a-half-hour conversation I had with him, is he asked me a question that struck me as genuine, as him being genuinely curious about something pretty deep.
	And I kind of I was really kind of happily surprised, and I told him how pleased I was, how great I felt about how impressed I was at that question, how curious he was, and how happy I was that he was really curious.
	And his response was kind of negative.
	That's what kind of got all this started, and we went off on this tangent.
	Because I had a real positive reaction to one of the things he said, and I expressed that.
	And did he then say, so what you're saying is I never do this?
	No, he said, he just kind of got annoyed at me.
	Like I was trying to avoid the question that he asked that I was really pleased at, you know?
	Right, right, right. So he had an agenda and your feelings were an inconvenience to him, right?
	I guess, yeah. Sorry, that's not very clear, but what I mean is he wanted a question answered.
	Your feelings arose, and your feelings were considered to be an interruption to him in his achievement of his goal, right?
	It was either that or he really wasn't curious.
	And I think that's probably what it was.
	Well, the two are the same thing, right?
	And what I mean by that is when...
	We've all had this, right?
	If you have kids, right?
	And you're running late, and your kid is upset about something and bursts into tears, there's always a part of us that is like...
	Oh, God, just...
	We've got to go, right?
	Like, we've got to get to X. We've got to get you to the Gymboree, or we've got to get you to whatever, right?
	And so when you've got a goal, and you're in an interaction with somebody, their emotions so often come across as an interruption to the goal, right?
	I've got to get X. So your brother's like, I want to get an answer to this question.
	Why is he talking about his feelings?
	But the goal is the emotional interaction.
	The goal is, as the enforcer said, only connect with each other.
	Only connect with each other.
	The goal is emotional intimacy.
	Not getting your child to Gymboree.
	Not getting an answer to your question.
	Not getting to watch the TV program.
	Not this. Not that. The goal is connecting with each other.
	Because intimacy comes through honesty and reality.
	We can only meet in reality.
	We cannot meet in fantasy. It only divides us.
	But we experience what you experience continually.
	That someone's got a goal.
	They've got an agenda. And my brother would be like, Mom's here for lunch.
	And I'd be like, Oh man, I really don't want to go.
	And his goal was to get me down to have lunch with my mom.
	With him. So he didn't have to do it alone.
	So my feelings of reticence and hesitation We're just inconvenient things to talk me out of so that we could get to the goal of having lunch with my mom.
	When I stopped seeing my mom, his goal was not to say, what's going on for you?
	His goal was to use whatever manipulative trick he could to get me to start seeing mom again.
	So we say, oh, I had a great time with mom.
	It was wonderful. We had so much fun trying to make me feel like I was being excluded from some monster fun situation.
	And I said, well, I'm so relieved about that because I was feeling guilty about not being there, but if you're having a great time, I feel a lot better.
	And he got mad, right? Because the goal is not to understand how I'm feeling, but to get me to do X. And again, I don't want to lay all this on your conversation with your brother.
	I'm just sort of saying that it's really, really important that we're sensitive to what happens when our emotions are considered to be something that is in the way of another person's goal, because their goal should be to understand us and for us to understand them and so on.
	That makes sense because, I mean, I was quite taken aback because I was praising him and he got annoyed, you know?
	Right. It wasn't like I was saying, oh, what you just said made me feel angry, you know?
	It was like what you just said made me feel really happy.
	And then he got annoyed.
	So, yeah, I mean, I think that got in the way of his agenda.
	Well, and again, I'm not trying to sort of analyze your brother from a distance, but it could also well be the case that he uses praise as manipulation.
	So when he gets praised, he experiences it as manipulation.
	That's interesting, yeah.
	See, when we manipulate others, genuine emotion becomes a threat on two levels.
	One is that we fake it to manipulate others, and the other is that if it is genuine emotion, our manipulations will become very clear very quickly to the other person.
	So it's something that we need to get irritated about, move on, bypass, just step over the body, nothing to see here, folks, if that makes any sense.
	Right. So yeah, I mean, the real-time relationship, I don't think it's good to go back and try and reopen old relationships or relationships that you're taking a break from, but the relationships that you currently have, I mean, if you're not defuged yet and it's not a dangerous thing to do, then I strongly recommend just staying in that relationship until you get to the core.
	And I'll do a podcast at least about the core that I got to a little bit later this week, because I don't want to color other people's perspective.
	I just want to sit with the idea for a bit, but...
	But you can do that, real-time relationship, and I guarantee you, you sit with the real-time relationship, you'll never, ever, for the rest of your life, forget how that conversation ends up.
	Because the moment we can't forget, it's because we spaced out and we gave up our territory in the relationship and surrendered it to other people's preferences.
	Was there anything else that you wanted to add or mention?
	No. Was it helpful? Was there anything else that you wanted to talk about?
	No? Okay. Well, thanks so much.
	And do keep us posted. I mean, it's magnificent.
	And I don't want people to think, oh man, now I've done the wrong thing.
	I mean, that's not the issue. It's a minor tweak.
	It's something that's still open to question.
	It's a theory.
	It's a possibility. To make, if the experience is, if what is going on is a defu, to make it stick, right?
	So you don't end up reproducing it and have to go through one or two other relationships before you get it, right?
	So this is just trying to find a way to make it more efficient.
	It's not proven. It may not be possible.
	It's just a thought, right?
	So, you know, whoever wants to be the guinea pig will all applaud you from safety.
	So, thanks so much.
	I'm certainly happy to chat to the next person if you have a question or a comment.
	Nobody? Okay, we can put it out once or twice, one or twice call more.
	Otherwise, we shall shut ourselves down for this Sunday, the 25th of November.
	Going once, going twice.
	Hey, wait. Oh, no, I don't want to delay you too long.
	I just had a question.
	Last call-in show, you said something about teachers who don't think they can teach very well will give students the answer.
	Right. And I think I do that a lot because, well, I justify it by saying I'm just trying to be efficient, but that's not being efficient if I'm wanting to teach somebody, obviously. Right.
	Well, what is your goal when you're trying to communicate something to someone?
	Is it for them to get the answer or is it for them to learn how to think?
	Both. Well, no, it can't be both.
	Oh, well I want them to get the answer on their own by thinking.
	So then you don't give them the answer?
	Well, no, I do the opposite because I guess I get impatient and I don't know how to get them to the answer By not giving them the answer.
	Right. And that's what I mean when I say that, I mean, you lack certain skills about how to elicit answers in other people.
	And again, it's nothing I'm perfect at or anything, God knows.
	But if you lack the skills about how to lead people to the answer so they get the aha moment, that's fine, right?
	Then you just need to stop talking with people about answers until you figure that out.
	Until I figure out how to...
	Right. If I'm teaching people how to drive, and everybody I teach fails the driving test, I need to stop teaching people how to drive until I can figure out how to get them to pass, right?
	Right. So what that means is that you have an ego investment in getting people to, quote, learn something, right?
	Which is not about their best interest.
	It's something that you get off on, so to speak.
	Right. It's called a secondary gain, but what's the gain for you in giving people the answer?
	How does it make you feel? Well, it makes me feel superior for a minute, but then I realized I've really not gotten anywhere.
	I guess I realized much...
	It's not even right then that I realized that.
	It's much later, and that seems to be what...
	That seems to be how it always turns out.
	So, are you there?
	Yeah, I'm still here. Okay.
	Okay, no, I do understand that, and I would guess that...
	What may be lacking for you is a sense of how other people on the board are viewing you with regards to humility.
	I can just run through this relatively quickly.
	Because you've been in the midst of your own emotional turmoil, it's hard to see how that looks as an arc from the outside.
	And it's very hard for us to get this, right, to how we look from other people, particularly around accumulated experiences, right?
	So just to run through it very briefly, and this does sort of tie into what it is, I think, that you're asking, both in this and in the last, when you called in earlier in the show.
	So, for instance, if you were to give somebody relationship advice, how do you think, who'd been on the board for, say, a year, how do you think that would be perceived?
	Kind of hypocritical, I guess?
	Sorry, whoever's typing, it's really annoying.
	Please stop typing or turn your mic off.
	Well, I'm not necessarily saying that it would be hypocritical because if you were giving people relationship advice At the moment, and you did this a little bit after, and we talked about that, right?
	You did this a little bit after your breakup with your fiance, right?
	And I just had to say, look, now is not the time to be giving people relationship advice.
	If you did that, I don't think that people would automatically think that you were hypocritical.
	What they would be baffled by is your perception or your understanding of how you were perceived at that moment.
	Does that make any sense?
	No. Sorry, I'm not putting it very well.
	If I weigh 350 pounds, right, and I come in and say, here's how to lose weight, how would you experience that?
	I would not believe you.
	Well, and sure, but it would be kind of weird, right?
	because there would be such a big glaring problem that I was giving advice that obviously as I talked about in the tennis anyone either I had been unable to follow or I had followed it and it had been bad but either way there was a problem with my advice and the first thing that you'd want to say is but if you know how to lose weight why are you 350 pounds, right?
	right but if I did come in and lecture you on how to lose weight it would be very hard to say to me but wait a minute you're 350 pounds what are you doing right Do you understand that would be a tough thing to say to someone?
	Exactly. But why would it be tough?
	Why would it be tough to say?
	Yeah. I'm not clear on that question.
	What is that in reference? Sorry, if you were in the audience and the 350-pound guy comes in and tells you how to lose weight, why would it be tough to say, but you're 350, like the obvious thing, you're 350 pounds, how is it that you get to tell anyone how to lose weight?
	Oh boy, I know it would be tough, I don't know why.
	Well, what's the feeling that would make it tough?
	I guess I'd be afraid to tell.
	Like fear, I guess.
	And what would the fear be of?
	How he might respond?
	No, you wouldn't have fear of how he might respond.
	You would have curiosity about how he might respond.
	You would have fear because you would know a response would be a certain thing.
	I'd be afraid that he'd be angry, for sure.
	Well, you'd know he'd be angry, right?
	Right. Because the whole thing is a colossal mindfuck, right?
	If someone comes in at 350 pounds and says, here's how to lose weight, the whole thing is a mindfuck from the beginning, right?
	It's like a dare. It's like somebody's just putting something in front of you that just makes no sense, and they're asking you to ignore it.
	They're putting you in an impossible situation, right?
	Right. Right, okay, so I'm just going to run you through four Nate experiences, right, that people have had collectively, and then we'll go back to the teaching thing, right?
	And I say this just so that you see, and again, I'm not speaking for everyone, I'm just putting my guessing hat on or whatever, right?
	So you come on with Megan, and how did you describe Megan to people on the board?
	At first? Yeah.
	How did you introduce her?
	I just said she was a great girl, you know, Honest, reasonable, all that stuff.
	Right. And that didn't turn out to be the case, right?
	Right. It turned out to be the exact opposite.
	It turned out to be the exact opposite, right?
	And then you came on with Rachel.
	And I did the exact same thing.
	And you did the exact same thing, right?
	And then you came after your breakup.
	Well, first of all, you were giving relationship advice to people during the time that you were breaking up.
	Again, people didn't know that till afterwards, right?
	And then you had the breakup and then literally within a couple of days you were giving relationship advice, right?
	Right. And then, what happened was, I put up with that for a while, so to speak, and then you and I had the conversation about your capacity, your dockside, right?
	Right. So, if you want to know why it can be tough, why you want to give people the answer rather than to lead them to the answer, it's because you don't have the credibility that will give people the patience to have you step them through something.
	Yet. I'm not saying you won't.
	I'm just saying right now, You don't have the credibility, and I'm just talking about the board, in your personal life, whatever, your friends, I'm just talking about the board, right?
	You don't have the personal credibility because you have put poor judgments out in the past and been unconscious of them, right?
	I've seen. It's because you have a credibility deficit,
	if that makes sense. And that's the price that we pay for error.
	And I am conscious of it all the time, and I make errors, so I'm not talking about like, ooh, perfect or whatever, right?
	But the reason you want to get people to the answer quickly is because you have not as yet dug yourself out of the credibility deficit on the board to the point where people are willing to have you lead them.
	Because people followed you before, In your descriptions of Rachel and your descriptions of Megan and your descriptions of how wonderful your fiancé was and how great everything was and then how it was all her fault and she was bad and then it turns out that you are the older guy and you chose her.
	Do you see what I mean? People don't have, I'm guessing, they don't have the confidence to follow you in a protracted discussion where you're leading them because you've led them Sort of metaphorically off a cliff a number of times before.
	Does that make any sense? Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
	So I just need to stop teaching.
	Well, no, you need to rebuild your credibility.
	This happens to me too.
	I apologize to people at least once a week for mistakes I've made or things I've misunderstood or whatever.
	It's just that you need to have the patience.
	Weirdly enough, this is very similar to where we started this show in terms of Ron Paul.
	Ron Paul is an answer.
	People don't want to lead other people through the process.
	They just want to impose an answer called Ron Paul.
	And it's impatience, right?
	And fortunately, it's why it doesn't work, right?
	The world doesn't learn until it goes through it.
	Until people feel enslaved, they're not going to try and be free, right?
	And Ron Paul is just this big bandit's solution, right?
	So what you need to do is you need to recognize, again, if other people disagree with me, just let me know.
	This is just my guess, right? You need to have a rational assessment of the situation and say, well, if I wasn't me and I'd been listening to me in particular areas over the last year, what would I think in terms of trust and credibility?
	And obviously, because you had some issues from your childhood and you were acting out some stuff and you have the dark side which you were unconscious of, which we all do, You did things which lowered your credibility with other people, right?
	Now, if you're aware of the fact that your credibility is in the negative, right?
	I don't think it's even zero, right?
	You got to work to get to zero, right?
	And that's just a challenge, right?
	And you would do this on the board because you want to be able to do this in your personal life, right?
	And so there would be a certain humility in approaching a particular question or problem, right?
	So if I've been right, sorry, if I've been wrong 10 times before with my math solutions, if I put forward my 11th math solution as, this one is right, it's going to irritate people, right?
	Because I'm clearly not processing that I've been wrong 10 times before, right?
	Right, and this may be why people are irritated, or why certain people are irritated quite a bit, especially those that have been around a lot longer.
	Well, sure, because you're coming in saying, and again, I understand this, right?
	It's just feedback, right?
	You're coming in and you're saying, well, I think it's this, I think it's that.
	But I don't think that you've processed fully, right?
	I mean, I know you're working on it.
	I don't think that you've processed...
	The fact that you have misled people, again, not evil guy, ooh, I'm going to mislead people, right?
	But you have misled people because of your own needs, right?
	The exploitation that we talked about, the dark side, not just with your girlfriends, with people on the board, that you would present a particular portrait that satisfied your own needs at the time at the expense of other people's processing of reality, right?
	So when you say on the board, well, you know, Megan was great and then she turned out to be really bad, but this woman is really great.
	It messes with your heads, right?
	Yeah, they do the eye roll thing.
	Like in your book, I think you said you had a line just like that.
	Right, and so, in a sense, you're the fat guy saying, here's how to lose weight.
	And if you're not conscious of the fact, if you don't come in and say, okay, look...
	The first thing we need to talk about is that I'm 350 pounds.
	If you're not coming in to a debate where you're telling people how to lose weight and saying, the first thing you say is, okay, look, I know that I walk in here and everybody's thinking, who is this guy to tell me how to lose weight?
	He weighs 350 pounds.
	So the first thing I want to tell you is that I used to weigh 1,000 pounds.
	Now I'm down to 350 and I'm on my way to 190.
	So, in terms of understanding how other people are perceiving you and addressing that up front, now it's their job to say, you know, the reason I'm irritated, and I don't know exactly why, it's because you seem to be kind of like not with where I'm at, you don't have much credibility.
	You can have that conversation with people in the real-time relationship paradigm, But the thing to do is to always try to, when you're communicating with another person, always try and put themselves in their shoes, right?
	That's why I'm so rigorous with never humiliating people, right?
	Like, I hope that you're not experiencing this as like, oh, Steph is crushing my ego once more and throwing it in the pit, right?
	No. I see all this as very, very helpful because, you know, I know I have this dark side and I'm still not conscious of all the little dark side things that I do.
	Like, What's it been?
	Three weeks? Come on, of course you're not conscious.
	I'm still digging stuff up after years, right?
	So for sure, and of course it's because you have, you know, I think you have great capacity for this, right?
	And that's why, you know, it's worth getting that kind of feedback, right?
	That you have great capacity for communication, you have great capacity for integrity, but it's important just to know.
	I don't want you to sort of Go through the board feeling baffled and confused that you're not getting the responses that you want.
	The first thing that you need to understand is that there are long-term consequences to what you did in terms of, and again, not did, like boo-aha, rub my mustache, be the evil guy, but There are long-term consequences to what you did in terms of how people feel misled and mistrustful.
	And they don't feel mistrustful because it's like, Nate is an evil troll who lies to us about it.
	It's nothing like that. It's just like, okay, so this guy is well-meaning, he's smart, he's verbal, he's committed, he's intelligent, but there's something about him that goes a little off and sometimes way off in terms of credibility, right? And so...
	In terms of who am I going to listen to in the top five people I'm going to trust implicitly, you're not going to make that top five.
	I mean, guaranteed, right? And maybe I don't even sometimes too, but I just don't want you to be confused about why it is that you're not getting the results you want, and so that you can understand your own desire to provide people with an answer.
	But what you need to do is to approach with the knowledge that I think?
	Your actions and how you have presented them have confused people, right?
	And I don't know that you've processed that, or if that makes sense.
	Fest up, if that makes sense?
	No, I haven't.
	I didn't process that particular aspect of it either until just now.
	Sure, sure. I mean, I feel really bad about that.
	I didn't... Yeah, I just, oh man.
	Well, but, you know, and I mean, don't go off into the, oh my god, I've got to throw myself off a cliff now, right?
	But the issue, it's just looking at and saying, actions have consequences.
	So, if I am afraid of being alone, if I'm afraid of being alone, and so I manufacture virtue in someone just so I can avoid being alone, and then I broadcast that virtue In a group that is expressly devoted to rational, virtuous philosophy, and then it turns out that the woman I chose because I was afraid of being alone was not, in fact, virtuous.
	In fact, it was quite the opposite.
	There are consequences to that, right?
	And the consequences aren't a lynch mob.
	Fortunately, we're all scattered.
	No, the consequences aren't a lynch mob, but there are consequences to using the board to satisfy To appease your own fear of being alone.
	So you invent virtue, and this is virtue...
	Look, everybody knew, deep down, consciously or not, everybody knew that, particularly Megan, and then even more particularly Rachel, everybody knew this was a disaster, and nobody told you, right?
	And that's part of how you present it, right?
	So if you say to the guy, wait a minute, you're 350 pounds...
	How is it that you get to teach me how to be thin?
	And he says, are you kidding me?
	I'm perfectly slender.
	Right? So, you know, we all knew that this was not going to be good, right?
	And you certainly, Christina told you, I told you that it was too soon, and you were rushing and so on, right?
	But you were like, no, you guys are wrong.
	She's really virtuous. So now, when you talk about your knowledge and understanding of virtue, people are cautious, right?
	I don't think everybody says, oh my god, Nate's going to throw me off the cliff for his own neurosis or whatever, right?
	But people are cautious, right?
	And so if you come in and you say, now this time, I'm right.
	And with no knowledge of the skepticism that people might have, then it is going to be annoying, right?
	You'd be annoyed by that, right?
	Right, I would. Right. I lost my train of thought.
	Excellent. I win.
	I'm just kidding. I need to rewind.
	The last thing I'll say while you're sort of gathering your thoughts is that the lesson to get out of this is not, I must be perfect or I will never have credibility.
	I can't make a single mistake or whatever, right?
	That that's not the less, because that's just going to be another kind of rigidity, right?
	And that's going to paralyze you, and it's going to rob from you the genuine pleasure that you take in discussing these ideas on the board and with other people, right?
	You don't want to deny yourself that pleasure.
	But the key thing is that everybody processes everything, and unfortunately the person who needs to process it the most, the person who's doing it, is usually the last, and that's true of all of us and so on, right?
	But But the important thing is to say, I can make mistakes, my mistakes have an effect on other people, and I need to respect and empathize with the effects that my mistakes have on other people.
	I have a complete Ron Paul apology speech already worked out.
	I'm telling you, I'm absolutely serious about it.
	I have a complete, oh my god, I was so wrong, I can't even tell you about Ron Paul.
	I don't think I'm wrong. And certainly this last week has not done anything to advance the thesis that I'm wrong.
	But I'm certainly not omniscient, God knows, right?
	So if it turns out that Ron Paul gets elected and the income tax is abolished the following year and Libertopia arrives three years later, well, it won't even take that long.
	But then clearly I have made a very large mistake.
	And I'm not going to not act and not make decisions based on reasonable evidence and reasoning because there's some possibility that I've overlooked or missed something.
	But yes, what will have to happen is I will have to say I have just made a terrible mistake.
	I will spend six months apologizing and another year trying to figure out exactly what mistake I made and write a book about it so that hopefully people won't make that mistake that I made in the future.
	And then maybe a year after that I might start to regain some credibility with those people, right?
	Right. Right, that would be...
	But if I just went, well, I was totally wrong about Ron Paul, but I'm totally right about this guy.
	Or if I just say, I'm totally right about this guy without even mentioning Ron Paul, then people are suspicious, right?
	Exactly. So this ties back into the teaching thing.
	Sure. If you have credibility, then you can take it slow.
	Because people will give you that, right?
	So I have these ridiculous hour and a half or two hour long conversations with listeners, right?
	And they don't know where the hell I'm going half the time, but they know I'm going somewhere.
	Because they've listened to other listener conversations, or they listen to a bunch of podcasts, and they know I'm going somewhere, and it's probably going to be helpful.
	Right? So I can go slowly with those people because they're willing to give me the time to work through it patiently, right?
	Right. Like you're willing to give me a half hour here and you're willing to hear all this nonsense about your past relationships when you're like, but I just want to know how to teach better.
	But you know that I'm trying to get you someplace useful because we've gone down this road a bunch of times before.
	So you're willing to give me the time to step you through it, if that makes sense.
	Right. And people aren't...
	People have been afraid to tell me or point things out.
	And maybe I reacted differently during...
	During the relationship, but afterwards, when they confront me on something, I'm like, I'm not responding with anger, even though that's a little twinge.
	I do feel angry for a second, but then I realize, okay, you're totally right.
	Well, it is other people's job to give you feedback, but it's not other people's job to process your mistakes for you.
	Right. And you're perfectly aware that you told everybody a whole bunch of mythological nonsense about your exes, right?
	I am. And you're totally aware that you were giving relationship advice all the way through this and even after the breakup of your engagement, right?
	Yes. So, this is nothing that's not unknown to you.
	You also know that you spent a lot of time blaming these women, and then you and I had a conversation where some significant portion of responsibility fell on your shoulders, right?
	And you're also aware that everybody knows that, right?
	Yes. Now, the reason that we try to avoid mistakes and we're cautious is because credibility is easily lost and it's hard to win, right?
	Definitely. I'm not even sure how to win it back or even get it back.
	Well, I mean, the first thing you do is you say, I don't have the credibility that I want.
	I have a credibility gap versus my ideal, right?
	And that's costing me, right?
	Because it costs you, right? Because you want to have a positive effect on this conversation.
	I'm not saying you don't, but you want to have a really positive effect where things can be efficient, where, you know, it can be more fun and where you're not, obviously, you're not annoying people, right?
	Because annoying people isn't going to help you get what you want.
	So the first thing you need to do is just recognize the reality that you have a credibility gap that you need to work through, right?
	And you need to go through the process of atonement and restitution.
	And that means Ferrari's for everyone.
	No, that just means that, you know, there's just this thing where you sort of...
	And don't go post right away.
	Just mull it over and say, well...
	Obviously, I was trying to rope everybody into my self-serving fantasy about the virtue of these women, and when that got out, of course, that was going to be problematic.
	And then you can say to people, why didn't you tell me?
	But not like, why the hell didn't you tell me?
	But like, what was it that I was doing that caused you to feel that you couldn't tell me, right?
	And because I guarantee you that people didn't tell you for a very good reason, and that reason was you.
	Because there's not a forum, there's not a conversation where people are that shy about the truth, right?
	So people didn't tell you for a very good reason, and that reason was you.
	And if you ask them, and you keep asking them, and you're patient, you will hear it.
	You can ask me right now.
	You could ask Rod.
	Yeah. I remember when you got engaged, Nate, I got a...
	I got one of these emails out of the blue that I was talking about earlier, but it was an email from your fiancé, and I literally had no clue who this was from.
	I didn't recognize the name or anything.
	It just said it was a wedding announcement for these two people, and I think it was...
	At that time, I think I still recognized your name as your screen name and not your name, Nate.
	And so until I was digging through the...
	Delivery header on the email and found the other names on the list.
	I had no idea that it was even you.
	And so my first experience of...
	I had even no idea that you were dating anyone because you had recently crashed and burned with the previous girlfriend.
	And suddenly I got this flowery looking email with the fancy type and everything on it.
	Talking about this wonderful wedding that was going to be held in Jamaica early next year.
	And I was like, as soon as I figured out who it was, the first thing I went through in my mind was, what the hell is he doing?
	I mean, this is like, if I could have plotted a story that could have sent you in the exact wrong direction after your previous breakup, it would have been to do this.
	And there was such a feeling of overwhelming, like, this is insane, that I had no idea how to respond to that at all.
	Because if I, I don't know, it seemed like there was such a wall of unreality there that I couldn't even dent it.
	And I was intimidated by, I mean, how do I respond to such obvious enthusiasm with a cold bucket of water without expecting some kind of Horrible retaliation response, you know?
	And sorry, I don't want to interrupt your response to that, Nate, but you would have gotten that, right?
	You would have gotten that kind of hostility back, for sure.
	Oh yeah, and I felt like I was...
	I wanted so desperately just to say, dude, you know, eject, eject, get out of this, but I mean, there is no way to bridge the gap between we're so in love and we're going to get married and you're invited to don't do it, Nate, you know?
	And what was really odd about it as well, aside from just the oddity of the whole situation, was just the fact that the email was coming from your new fiancee, and I had literally no clue who this girl was.
	I'd never even heard of her before, this email.
	I had a similar experience back in May.
	When it started.
	Yeah. I don't mean to be piling on with, like, you suck or anything like that, but I'm just saying that that was my experience of it, was that there was just a monolithic wall of fantasy right in front of me, and I just had no idea where to even begin with that.
	It was just utterly baffling to me.
	Yeah, if I try to mentally switch places with you, I can...
	I can definitely say I would react the same way, I think.
	Because... Yeah, that's quite a...
	A monolithic wall is the right word for it, for sure.
	And I can definitely say that I probably wouldn't have responded too kindly.
	Yeah.
	No, and I got that, too, because of just the...
	I mean, the care that was...
	Put into making this email and stuff.
	It looked like someone had spent about an hour crafting this really pretty email and stuff like that.
	I had a very solid in my bones feeling that no matter what I said here, it was just going to completely bounce off of this wall of fantasy that was going on here.
	Yeah, it came tumbling down, didn't it?
	Well, yeah, eventually.
	And sorry, Nate, you had conditioned that response even for people who had not been in the board, but particularly those who were on the board since you had talked about how great she was, right?
	Right, I definitely conditioned that with everybody.
	That they were afraid of responding, it would have been like, I'm afraid of poking a rabid dog, but that doesn't mean I should do it.
	Well, I mean, it's like, again, not to pick on the chunky guy, but if the guy who's 350 pounds says, I'm the best diet expert in the world, and he's puffing away, and I'm also a marathon runner, And he's puffing away on three stogies at the same time, then there's no common ground to begin a conversation about the truth, right?
	Because the person is obviously in a state of anti-truth to the point where there's not even...
	it's like trying to debate physics with a witch doctor.
	Yeah, I understand...
	I can really picture it just from putting myself in their shoes.
	What that would be like.
	I really don't know why I did it.
	Well, you did it because you didn't want to be alone, right?
	We sort of went through that last time, right?
	You did it because you had to go with the lowest common denominator, i.e.
	a woman who was happy with being with a guy who was only with her because he didn't want to be alone, right?
	And the alternative to roping us in or attempting to rope us in...
	Now, of course, the reality is that you didn't rope anybody in with stories of her virtue.
	All that you did was you put a big guard dog, a big snarling schnauzer, up against the gate leading to the truth, right?
	And basically when you put forward that kind of florid falsehood, you're not fooling anybody, but what you are doing is saying it's going to be mighty costly for you to question me.
	Right.
	Right, so the woman who prays three hours a day and who goes to church five times a week, right, and is like one Adam short of being a full nun, how is she going to respond if you question the existence of God to her?
	Well, kind of the way somebody had commented on my journal who seemed pretty...
	Pretty much like that.
	I threw out quite a few things on just how doubtful the existence of God was to begin with.
	I don't know why this person was trying to talk to me to begin with because it was obvious just based on everything on my blog that I'm an atheist.
	It's like, why are you talking to me?
	Why are you trying to tell me this?
	Why are you trying to meet me in fantasy land?
	And here I was just coming out of trying to meet people in fantasy land.
	Right, but the more invested somebody is in their fantasy, it's not because they want to convince you of their fantasy.
	It's not even fundamentally because they want to convince themselves of their fantasy.
	It's a clear marker and a warning, which is that I'm going to fuck you up if you try and penetrate this fantasy.
	So the more outwardly somebody is invested in a fantasy, the more people don't want to confront them on it because it's a big marker for like, if you cross over this line, I'm going to get really mad at you.
	That's why we don't talk to nuns who've given up their entire life as a woman.
	We don't talk to them when they're 80 about the existence of God.
	Because they're so heavily invested that...
	I mean, my God, what are you going to do?
	So the more publicly you invest in a fantasy, the less people want to confront you on it.
	And of course, if you don't express any doubts about it, which is a total investment in fantasy, then what you're saying is that anybody who does express a doubt in it, I'm going to attack them.
	That's a clear marker.
	And that's one of the problems with this fantasy, is that it cuts people off from giving you honest feedback.
	Yeah, and I think Greg...
	I think Greg had tried to confront me on it, and I don't think I responded in the best way at all.
	I think I responded fairly...
	I think I almost...
	I might have attacked him.
	You might have attacked him.
	I think I did attack him.
	I don't remember what I said, but yeah, I think I did.
	What was the emotional aspect of that conversation for you, Nate?
	Like, what were you feeling when he was asking you this?
	Well, I was angry. Right.
	Right, and so, of course, and you can choose to be angry when somebody's making you uncomfortable, and all that means is that you don't get people telling you the truth anymore, right?
	Exactly. Sorry, Greg, you were saying something I had to interrupt.
	No, I was just saying that was the exchange back in May.
	Yeah, that was. I think it was a little later than that, actually.
	More recent than that.
	When you first mentioned the new girlfriend on the blog, right?
	Oh, that one.
	That one. The one I actually ended up responding to in the end.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	Well, I can...
	I can definitely see...
	Well...
	I can definitely see where this ties into today's board conversation and last night's.
	I'm... I'm...
	I probably just...
	I apologize on...
	Like I said, I will buy you dinner.
	I will do anything to make up for having attacked you like that and told you you were wrong.
	Well, I'm actually curious about that board post last night, now that we've gotten this far into it.
	When you asked me that question, I'm trying to remember the thread now.
	Oh, I had mentioned about how I chickened out on confrontations over the last couple of months, right?
	And you asked, was Chicago one of those places?
	Right? And after everything we've been through over the last month and a half or so, I was thinking to myself after you posted that, well, of course you have to know the answer to that question, so why are you asking it like that?
	Well, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I would say that it probably is one layer deeper than that.
	Whose job was it to confront Rachel in Chicago?
	Nobody? No.
	Who brought her? I did.
	Right. Right.
	So, if your guest is doing Crazy Talk 6000, right?
	She's booting up with Crazy Talk Mark 12 million.
	Whose job is it to confront her?
	Well, mine. Of course.
	Right? So, it was your job.
	You brought her, right? You brought her.
	So if she starts doing crazy talk and dominating the conversation, right, then it's your job as the person who invited her to confront her on it, right?
	Yeah.
	So if you criticize Greg for not confronting Rachel, I could see how Greg might find that as a little annoying.
	Right?
	Right, because then I'm just kind of manipulating everybody else.
	Well, you have a standard called you should confront people, and Greg, you kind of chickened out on confronting people, particularly in Chicago.
	But you didn't confront Rachel the whole time you were with her.
	Particularly not in Chicago.
	And that's what I mean about the humility.
	It's the humility to say, well, I can't blame other people for not confronting Rachel, because I sure as hell didn't, and I brought her into this conversation.
	That was hypocritical of me.
	Well, you know, sorry to interrupt.
	It is a little bit, but I wouldn't even say that.
	I just say that you need to put yourself in the other person's shoes, right?
	Because Chicago kind of got messed up because you brought Rachel along, right?
	Right. And then blaming other people for not confronting the person you brought up who messed up the interaction that people had spent a fair amount of time and money attending, blaming other people for not confronting your fiancé who you brought is kind of giving them your job, right?
	Right. Right.
	And then having a standard called you should confront people when it's your job to do it and you're not doing it.
	And all that after months of making it clear that if anyone did, you'd get angry.
	Right. I mean, another reason why people didn't confront Rachel was because you would have gotten angry.
	You would have rushed to her defense and you would have blamed the other person, right?
	Right. That is quite another...
	Aspect of my dark side, I guess.
	Well, sure. You would absolutely have sided with Rachel, because that's what you were doing on the board, right?
	You would absolutely have sided with Rachel, and you would have attacked Greg for confronting her.
	And now you're criticizing Greg for not confronting her.
	Wow. Yeah, that is...
	That's kind of cruel, and...
	Wow.
	Wow. And you're not conscious of it, right?
	I mean, nobody's saying that you're plotting whatever, right?
	But this is the reality of other people's experience of you, that we all need this kind of feedback.
	And as I say, I get it 50 times a day in my inbox.
	I always get this feedback, but we have to throw ourselves open to the feedback of other people.
	So that we can prevent situations where we don't get what we want.
	Because you didn't get what you wanted with Rachel, you didn't get what you wanted in Chicago, and you're not getting what you want in terms of your board interactions, Nate, right?
	So this is not, Nate is a bad guy, this is how to get Nate what he wants.
	And that does mean looking at things which would be annoying to any human being, yourself included, right?
	And saying, well, I'm not going to get what I want if I'm annoying, so I need to not be...
	You know, annoying in these areas.
	I'm not saying annoying in perpetuity in all situations, but in these particular areas, right?
	Right. And I definitely don't want to be this irritating, annoying, cruel, you know, I mean, cruel in a very subtle, what has apparently been subtle, at least to me, because I'm not aware, I haven't been aware of it until right now.
	And to be fair, To be fair, I did sort of hang a target out there when I responded the way I did in that thread last night.
	Well, I don't know why I said it or mentioned it.
	What was going through my mind at the time was that I've done the same thing over and over and over with several people.
	At Thanksgiving dinner, I was invited out to an old friend that I haven't seen in a while.
	Just randomly. I went and had dinner with them, and they usually have these enormous Thanksgiving dinners.
	But some lady down at the end of the table, they were going around the table saying what we're thankful for and stuff like that.
	It was some goofy tradition.
	And when it got to her, she mentioned that she thanked the military and it's glad we have our freedom.
	And I could have said something.
	But she seemed so enveloped in her own fantasy that that probably would have been a bad idea.
	Now, sorry to interrupt you for just a second there, Nate, but the feeling that you had was that if you had confronted her even mildly, she would have gotten angry, right?
	Right. Right.
	So that's what we were feeling.
	Right. Because she was so invested in her fantasy.
	Right. So I... I get that with that whole feeling.
	I understand for sure.
	I don't know why I had mentioned Chicago other than to mention that I know how that feels.
	You mentioned Chicago because there's not closure in Chicago.
	There's not closure about Chicago yet, which means that it's not processed.
	That's why it comes up.
	When we have closure with stuff it doesn't come up anymore.
	You guys talk about Chicago and it still evokes strong emotional responses because you haven't gotten to the truth about Chicago and that's why it's circling around.
	That's why we work hard to get to the root of these things so that we can put them behind us and move on with closure.
	That doesn't mean never talk about it again but it means it doesn't pop up unexpectedly and produce strong emotional responses.
	Right. Oh. Well, I'm glad I did bring it up.
	That was definitely a good idea.
	And I'm going to suggest, just because the majority of people weren't at Chicago and haven't heard the Chicago tapes, but it sounds so conspiratorial, the Chicago tapes where the real killer of JFK was exposed!
	It was the waitress. But I'm going to just suggest that you guys could have a chat about this, and please record it if you don't mind, but you should have a chat about Chicago, the people who are there, but I don't know that it's going to be hugely relevant to other people, but maybe we could release it as a For sure.
	And I think that would be really good for all of us.
	All right. Well, listen, thanks so much, everybody.
	I'm going to close the show down now because I've just peed myself, and that's usually a good sign that the end of the show is relatively imminent.
	Wait. Okay.
	So thanks, everyone, so much.
	Again, I will have a show next week, next Sunday.
	Thanks so much to everyone who joined in.
	It was a great show, as everyone, and as it always is, and it's really been fantastic lately in particular.
	So thanks so much. For the listeners, to the listeners for that.
	Look forward to your donations. You still have time to order my books for Christmas.
	So thank you so much, everyone.
	And pick up some t-shirts, or I absolutely promise I will cry.

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