Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Dec. 23, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:46:18

945 Sunday Call In Show Dec 23 2007

Soldiers and mothers, fleeing minefields, extracting principles and a call that has NOTHING to do with my girlfriend... ;)

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Well, good afternoon everybody.
	It's Steph. It is 4-0-something-something on December the 23rd, 2007.
	And thank you so much for joining me on this pre-Christmas special.
	And the dancing girls will be ready in a minute.
	And just before they come out, though, I just wanted to say hi, give you an update.
	The RTR, like UPB, is going to be a GFB, which I'm very, very pleased about.
	That's a great fucking book.
	And I'm very, very happy with it.
	I had a monster-charging session of writing yesterday.
	I wrote 9,200 words in a single day.
	Sadly, they were all the same word.
	So really, it should be 9,200 words in a day.
	It's just one big word.
	Which goes, all work and no play makes stuff a dull boy.
	And then I grabbed a hatchet.
	So, I hope that you will get a chance to have a read of it.
	The first draft should be done.
	Maybe tomorrow, maybe shortly after Christmas, and then a second draft should be done in January, books should be out later in January.
	I think it's great!
	The metaphor machine that I am is working overtime, kicking up some damn fine stuff.
	I think, with this, armed with this book, and a massive quantity of PCP, I think it is entirely within my grasp to win PCP. An argument with my wife.
	But we don't know whether that will actually occur.
	We are just hopeful.
	We have faith in the way that we understand the term.
	That having been said, I hope that you are having a wonderful, wonderful time getting ready for Christmas, or whatever it is that you do this time of year.
	So, I have nothing else to say.
	I've basically been spending my whole time cranking away on this book, so I got nothing.
	Oh, and I also had a very good chat, at least I thought it was a very good chat, with a lovely couple in the FDR community who had a couple of questions about the real-time relationship, and...
	Hopefully they will allow us to release it.
	It was a great chat, and I look forward to hearing their feedback from that chat when they have listened to it.
	I await your questions and comments and issues and problems and rank praise, so please feel free to go ahead.
	Well, I just wanted to compliment you on the fine improvements to the website stuff.
	Why, thank you. I did it all myself.
	They look fabulous. Yeah, I do.
	Actually, you might want to tootle past the website and have a look.
	We did vamp up the – I think pimped up is the phrase that I would use because I'm just terminally white.
	But it definitely does look a lot better.
	We've started up an advertising campaign again.
	So I think that it will draw in more.
	And again, thanks so much to Charlie who gave us an excellent template.
	We've stayed pretty much within the confines of that template.
	But we have pushed it beyond what most would consider the bounds of good taste.
	But that is not exactly a first for this show.
	So I am very pleased with it.
	So thanks very much.
	And has Steph had a lot of coffee?
	I think that we would want to compare that to oxygen.
	Have I had a lot of coffee relative to oxygen?
	Yes, I have had a lot of coffee, had a lot of coffee, had a lot of coffee.
	It's been many more sips than breaths.
	So not only am I caffeine stimulated, I am oxygen deprived.
	And that should make for an excellent show that probably is more coherent than usual.
	So, please, let me not interrupt anyone, particularly myself.
	Go ahead. Oh, and Christina baked some cookies, so I have to have some sugar, too.
	Whee! Crash!
	Okay, well, I guess that's a very short show for today.
	Thank you so much about the comments to do with the web.
	Anybody have any other questions they wanted to bring up?
	Well, so I was watching this documentary yesterday called The War Tapes.
	Not sure if you're familiar with that one?
	Yes. Basically, four GIs with handy cams document their deployment from 2003 through 2005.
	And it was pretty much what I expected it to be, but it was just amazing to hear how all four of these guys and their families all had different They're all telling each other different stories,
	right? There was so little truth in that documentary that it was hard to follow it.
	Because every one of these guys has a different kind of, like you say, a different mythology for them.
	Why they had to go and why they're there and what they're doing and how things will be once they're done.
	One thing that struck me particularly near the end They sort of did this little brief interview with all the wives.
	And the one wife was saying...
	And they all pretty much said the same thing.
	Oh, he's not the same person anymore.
	But she said...
	On top of it, she said...
	Most days I don't like him.
	But I still love him.
	And that stuck out for me because...
	Wait, sorry, is this how you're going to bring up your relationship with me as an employer now?
	Because I can understand that.
	I'm going to put Christina on for a while.
	Sorry, go on. No, no, no.
	Things are just fine.
	But why it stuck out was because I used to say the same thing about my parents.
	At the time, the contradiction was totally lost on me.
	The idea that it just makes no sense at all that you could simultaneously dislike and love somebody.
	Well, it does in a secular context, but it makes perfect sense in a religious context, right?
	How so? Well, they have a perfect and beautiful soul, right?
	But they're tempted into bad actions by the devil.
	And so, you, you know, love the sinner, hate the sin.
	Oh, okay.
	I guess that makes sense, but they didn't really put it in those terms when they were being interviewed.
	No, no, of course not. No, of course not.
	If they had that kind of insight, they wouldn't have sent their kids to war.
	Right, but, I mean, they would have...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Was this the guy whose mom was single and really clingy?
	No, no, no. This was the Michael Moriarty guy.
	The guy with the two kids.
	Right, right, right. Sorry, there was a guy who had this totally clingy mom who had completely turned her son into a kind of quasi-husband.
	Yeah, that was the...
	Spanish-looking fellow? Actually, he was Pakistani.
	Pakistani, right. And it was just like, you just knew who he was really putting bullets into, eh?
	Yeah, when you watch the interview at the end where they're interviewing him and his mom in the living room together, just the looks on his face is so amazing.
	Oh, Rage Against the Breast, you know, that was the name of his outfit, you know?
	Shoot the boobies or something.
	It was just, that was totally Oedipal and totally clear where this kind of murderousness comes from.
	Yeah, and she's sitting there making sarcastic remarks at him and, you know, cackling at the camera and...
	And he's sitting in the chair across from the couch.
	You could just see the resentment and the disgust just seething off of him.
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	Just amazing to watch.
	And the amusing thing is, you're not supposed to notice that, right?
	Right. You're supposed to sort of only pay attention to what's coming out of their mouths.
	Yeah, well, you know, over 90% of communication is nonverbal, right?
	Right. I mean, you think I have clothes on.
	Actually, you don't. But probably some of the other listeners do.
	Well, now, hang on there, because I've been practicing this for weeks, imagining you with clothes on, so don't ruin that.
	Quite right. Quite right.
	It's tough.
	It's like imagining me with hair.
	But I just thought it was an interesting study in learning to pay attention to what people do as opposed to what they say.
	Okay.
	Yes, actions speak louder than words that you want to.
	And this, of course, is your gut instinct, right?
	If you were just listening to an audio tape, you probably still would have felt the tension in this guy's body.
	But seeing him there, you couldn't even pay attention to what the mom was saying, right?
	Because you're just waiting for this guy to, you know, to just like rip her intestines out through her nose or something.
	Right, right. Right, that's exactly.
	Well, and quite frankly, I sort of felt like that myself through periods of that documentary that just...
	I want to grab some of these people by the lapel and shake them really hard, you know?
	Right, and you can also see, I mean, not so obviously, but when you become more psychologically astute, you can see also that the child is the mother's rage against the world.
	She can't go out and be a killer, but she's obviously got murderous impulses towards the world, and the son is to a large degree acting out the mother's murderous nature.
	Yeah, she openly admitted in that show, too, that he had a sort of love for the military.
	And he himself says that that's the only thing he wants to do.
	He loves being a soldier.
	The only thing he doesn't like is he doesn't get to pick where he goes, right?
	Yeah. Yeah.
	So I love killing, right?
	Yeah, that's exactly right.
	I love to kill.
	And he has a completely cynical attitude about why, too.
	Oh yeah, he had no illusions about bringing democracy to this, that, or the other.
	Right? I like guns!
	It's just a murderousness.
	That's at the root of what these people do.
	They'll cloak it in a whole bunch of sentimental shit, but it's just the desire to bully, to kill, to slaughter, to wound, to maim, to torture.
	Yeah, that's exactly right.
	And it didn't...
	It didn't occur to me at the time that he's just an expression of her will, but that makes perfect sense.
	Yeah, I mean, the way that you create a guy like this, of course, is that you simply do not mirror him at all when he is a baby, right?
	That you resent the baby, that you hate your life, that you narcissistically wallow in your own depression rather than be there for your baby.
	And your baby then grows up pretty much in a state of nature, knowing that he's never going to get anything for free.
	He's never going to be given anything.
	And so he has to bully and force and shoulder aside and take.
	And so the kid grows up with no sense of empathy, with no sense of win-win negotiations, with no sense of tenderness, with no sensitivity to any other soul, and with the absolute knowledge that he better, like, you know, those piglets all squealing to get at the mother's nipple, right? That he's got the sow's nipple.
	They have to shoulder each other aside, and if I don't get mine, someone else is going to take it.
	And so they better get out of my way, because I'm going to get what is mine.
	And I can never expect anyone to give it up voluntarily, so I'm just going to take it from them.
	It's not that hard to create these kinds of guys.
	You just have to be a psychotic bitch of a mom.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	And she pretty much was...
	Yeah, and the sentimentality, right?
	I mean, the sentimentality, which, as Jung correctly pointed out, is the superstructure of brutality.
	The sentimentality of these kinds of...
	These women who have children in the military, they always have the flag on their porch, right?
	They always tear up when they hear hail to the chief.
	They always have this sick, fetishistic love for this fantasy of the old republic and their country.
	And it's a sentimentality which is necessary...
	To distract from the brutality is omnipresent, and we feel a genuine and healthy terror about piercing through this kind of sentimentality.
	Yeah, yeah, sure.
	And it was extremely bizarre to me hearing it come from Pakistani immigrants, basically.
	Well, I mean, it's not...
	You know, immigrants...
	To some degree, it's immigrants and the poor who keep both religion and the military alive, right?
	Yeah, that's true. We were just reading this article on the weekend.
	Up here in Canada, the church attendance is collapsing, and this is the result of the collapse of young female attendance in Canadian churches in the 1960s, when feminism and secular Marxism and socialism came along and other forms of mysticism that were less demanding.
	Basically, the church attendance completely plummeted.
	Except for the Catholic Church, which has remained stable, but the Catholic Church has only remained stable because of immigrants, right?
	It's like Roach Motel.
	People go in, but they don't come out of Catholicism.
	And it's the same thing with the military.
	One of the reasons why the government loves to educate people badly and loves to get them trapped in the welfare ghettos is because it's a perfect breeding ground for enforcers, for the thugs that they need.
	Yeah, that's true.
	I don't know that Catholic attendance in the United States has really maintained stability, though.
	In some of the bigger cities, I think it has, but in general, I think they've got declining numbers.
	Last I checked, anyways.
	But still, it makes perfect sense.
	I used to know a guy, I used to work with a guy who's native Mexican, and his wife is native Mexican.
	And the two of them were both extremely xenophobic, amusingly enough.
	Totally had the, you know, pull the drawbridge up behind me.
	Attitude about immigration and was completely unapologetic about the contradiction built into that whenever I pointed it out to him.
	And that always flummoxed me.
	I couldn't understand why having experienced immigration That whole process, why you would want to inflict it on other people.
	Well, I mean, nobody hates the trashy blacks like the middle-class blacks, right?
	Yeah, that's true.
	Because they don't want to get confused, right?
	And they drag the whole...
	Like, those rap ghetto thug kids in the black community, I mean, nobody hates them more than a competent, smart black lawyer or businessman or doctor, right?
	Yeah, that's true. Because that's what people see, right?
	Right, the resentment there.
	I actually read something interesting just by the way about immigration recently about one of the reasons why the Mexicans are swarming into America is because the subsidized food that is being produced through the farm subsidies by the American agricultural industry is flooding the Mexican market with cut-rate food.
	Thus not allowing the Mexican farmers, just as the farmers in Africa and other places, are not able to compete, right?
	You can't compete with subsidized.
	And so because they can't sell their food locally, because the American subsidized food is swarming across the border...
	Right.
	Right. Right,
	yeah, and it was easy to get away with that with other third world countries because you can't exactly hop on a raft in Nairobi and, you know, manage to make it to the United States.
	Right, right, for sure, for sure.
	Right. So...
	Just another example, right, that if political libertarians were really interested in principles...
	They would not want to increase government power by kicking out immigrants, but rather they would want to deal with the problem at its source by stopping subsidies to American farmers.
	Right. Right.
	Right. It's just one more...
	Sorry, somebody's got a cell phone buzzing away.
	If you could just turn that off, please.
	Sorry. No problem.
	It might be mine. Let me pitch it over the...
	I'm sure it's not mine, because I'm not sure the ringer even works.
	Is that better? Uh, yeah.
	Okay. So...
	Oh, where were we?
	Yeah, the hypocrisy of libertarian and libertarians.
	Where do you think that comes from?
	I mean, for the folks that aren't...
	Well, I guess it's pretty obvious, right?
	It's family, right? Yeah, I mean, when you become consistent, when you become philosophical, when you become an anarchist or a voluntarist or a stateless advocate...
	You are going to be ostracized, right?
	If you say, well, I think the government should be smaller, eh, there'll be people who disagree with you, but you're still playing within the court, right?
	Right. You're still playing by the rules.
	You just want modified rules, right?
	Sure, sure.
	But if you say, the whole game is corrupt and evil...
	Right? We know what happens then.
	All these people who claim to love you to death will kick you to the curb like yesterday's fish.
	Right? And we all know that, right?
	We all know that our relationships are entirely tenuous based upon us propping up the false self-egos and vanities of other people.
	And at the moment we speak the truth.
	The eject button gets hit, the trap door gets opened, and we get flushed out with the sewage.
	You know, that's fascinating that you say that, because that's exactly what they accuse us of, right?
	I'm not a purist, so you're not going to associate with me?
	Like, you have to...
	The accusation is that they have to have exactly the same opinions you do in order to be friends with them, right?
	Right, right. And that's, I mean, of course, that's completely silly.
	They do have to have a virtuous methodology.
	I mean, if you want to be a scientist, then you've got to accept the scientific method, right?
	Right, but the irony is that's exactly what they're doing to us, right?
	Yeah, but it's inevitable.
	That's projection, right? Sure.
	I call all the people who, you know, people over these other forums, he's so manipulative.
	Steph just uses psychological trips and he's out to dominate and control people and so on.
	You know, I would have started with Christina.
	Actually, maybe it's because I can't do it with Christina that I'm striving to do it with everybody else.
	Oh, wait, she just gave me another kibble.
	Sorry, what were we talking about?
	But, yeah, I mean, it's just projection.
	I mean, you are allowed to say any form of shit you want except the truth, right?
	And then if you speak the truth, and especially if you're curious, then you're called intolerant and selfish and monstrous and uncaring and close-minded and culty.
	The knives only come out when the truth raises its head, right?
	Sure, sure.
	That makes perfect sense.
	Yeah. And you could see that too in this documentary I was watching, you could see that too, where when they started questioning these guys about their reasons for being in Iraq and the validity of the war and all of that,
	You could just see the, I swear the one guy's neck started getting red.
	you know That Moriarty guy talking about...
	He and the other guy with the PTSD were just getting visibly angry at the suggestion that the war might not be a good idea.
	Right. Yeah, yeah.
	Given that there are no weapons of mass destruction, doesn't that just make you a murderer?
	Right. Right.
	Even forget the whole weapons of mass destruction thing.
	Just the principle of it at its core.
	No, no, no. I agree with that.
	But I mean in terms of what you would ask those people, right?
	Does it change the moral nature of what you were doing if you were lied to about why you were doing it?
	Well, that's an interesting question.
	Well, and that's the most obvious question that you would ever ask a soldier.
	Right. I mean, if you were lied to, does that change the moral nature of what you're doing?
	In other words, does the truth have anything to do with the ethics of what you're doing?
	And if they say, no, I'm here to shoot whoever they point at, and they can tell me whatever they want.
	I'm a hired gun, right?
	Right. And that's honest, right?
	It's frightening, but it's honest.
	But they're going to get really messed up with that question, right?
	They say, well, I went in with the best intentions.
	It's like, yes, but you stayed when you knew you'd been lied to.
	You didn't go to jail, and you didn't put down your weapons, and you didn't flee, or whatever, right?
	So does it change the moral nature of the lives you are taking if you are there under false pretenses?
	Oh, and that's the distinction.
	Whether they know they're being lied to or not.
	Yeah, I understand that.
	And they say, well, you know, we were in there, you know, they built the, what is it, the Pottery Barn Principle or shit like that?
	Yeah, like breaking a vase is like breaking a country.
	But, you know, while we were in and, you know, it's obedience, it's like, oh, okay, well then don't talk to me about ethics.
	If it's just obedience, then don't talk to me about anything to do with ethics.
	Yeah. Right.
	And it's interesting, too, when I think back on some of the conversations I'd had with my own brother, who was heavily involved in Afghanistan, how he would regularly mix I mean,
	he knew exactly what he was doing and why he was there and what was going on, but he would regularly move back and forth between the moral argument and the pragmatic argument where it was convenient,
	right? So sometimes he would say, well, you know, the world is dog-eat-dog and we have to do what's necessary to protect our way of life, you know, all that crap, right?
	And then when necessary, he would shift back to the moral argument, which was, you know, we need to make...
	We need to make the rules clear and people need to follow the rules and whoever doesn't needs to be punished and that sort of thing.
	Yeah, no, there is this constant cycle back and forth from ethics to pragmatism, right?
	It's the same thing that you get with Christians, right?
	When they say, why do you worship God?
	Well, because God is moral.
	But doesn't God break his own moral commandments?
	Well, but God is powerful, right?
	God is above the law, blah, blah, blah.
	It's like, well, are you worshipping power or are you worshipping virtue?
	And it's the same thing with the military, right?
	Are you obeying orders or are you doing virtuous things?
	And if you're doing virtuous things, then you have some explaining to do if you've been lied to and killed people because of that.
	And if you're just worshipping power, that's great.
	Then don't talk to me about ethics, right?
	Yeah, it's funny you mention that, too, because I got another crack at those goofy Mormons that came by my door last week.
	Actually, last Tuesday, they came by and got into exactly that discussion.
	You know, God is the standard of morality, right?
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, then God says that killing is wrong, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, then how do you explain, assuming the story is true, how do you explain the fact that he drowned everyone on the planet?
	Well, that's different.
	Yeah, how so? Well, they were evil.
	Right, okay, so you can reconcile an evil with another evil.
	Yeah, that you can kill someone if they're evil.
	And you can kill children if they're evil.
	And you can kill cats if they're evil.
	And not become evil yourself.
	Well, yeah, become evil or not, right?
	I mean, God killed all the children in the world too, right?
	Yeah, oh yeah. And there must have been some virtuous people in the world.
	Other than Noah, right? Well, you would think so.
	But certainly children, right?
	I mean, God, who counsels against abortion through the floods, killed tens or hundreds of thousands of unborn babies, right?
	Were they evil? Were they responsible for the sins of their mother?
	Babies in the crib drowned in that flood, right?
	I mean, this is just psychotic genocide, right?
	Well, that's actually a pretty amusing thing.
	There's nothing in the Bible that explicitly talks about abortion.
	That's all church interpretation.
	Yeah, for sure. Well, let's open it up, see if anybody else has any other questions about or comments.
	So are we going to read what's been going on in the chat room?
	Would you like to read them? Come on.
	A little bit. Here.
	So one of our lovely board participants and listeners said that one of the greatest party, I guess, experiences is to take the words in my pants and attach them to names of different movies.
	So we've had quite a few on the chat.
	While we were talking?
	While we were talking.
	Betrayal in my pants!
	Debbie does Dallas in my pants.
	Lethal weapon in my pants.
	Alien in my pants.
	Placing saddles in my pants.
	The elephant man in my pants.
	Ants in my pants.
	Pretty woman in my pants.
	A few good men in my pants. A few good men in my pants.
	The 100 Red October in my pants.
	Anaconda in my pants.
	Anaconda in my Batman Begins in my pants.
	Oh, that's the Robin movie.
	Midnight at the Garden of Crabble in my pants.
	The big limbo whiskey in my pants.
	Good Will Hunting in my pants.
	And so on.
	Sorry, Greg, I can't help the immaturity of the people who are having fun while we're talking about war.
	But I also can't blame them at times because that's pretty funny shit, I gotta tell you.
	Million dollar baby in my pants.
	Jaws, ah! In my pants.
	Right, right, right.
	The big cane in my pants.
	The cane mutiny in my pants.
	Ghost in my pants.
	Got it. I think I understand how this works.
	Friends in my pants, yeah.
	Sorry, Steph. I invented that one in college, and I just couldn't resist.
	That's some pretty fine stuff, I must tell you.
	That's some pretty funny stuff.
	Did you have a question or a comment, or did you just get defilosophized in Germany?
	Oh, I got my philosophy head blown off.
	Spaceballs in my pants.
	Okay, that's it. Last one.
	Oh, no. The one kind of funny thing that happened in Germany was...
	They had these humongous Christmas markets going on in all these little towns.
	And the one in Frankfurt was chock full of people.
	But there was this one dude that was standing up on a bench somewhere that was yelling about Jesus this and that.
	He was one of those, you know, Helen Brimstone type guys.
	And... It was actually kind of entertaining because most people were just walking by and staring at him funny and stuff, and all these little kids were taunting him and everything, and it was quite a different world over there, I think.
	They were fully capable of teasing the religious guys.
	That's good stuff. Germany went through a pretty secular period, certainly after the Second World War.
	I had cousins who would come over.
	From Germany when I was a kid, and they, I mean, they weren't allowed to play with weapons, and of course there's been a whole lot of propaganda about what happened in Germany, and a lot of it has to do with, you know, that somehow Hitler was an atheist and all this kind of stuff, right?
	I mean, it's nonsense. I mean, it was the most religious country in Europe, right?
	I mean, during the Weimar Republic and into the Nazi period, just as Russia was the most religious country ever.
	In its section of the world when the communists took over, right?
	So just, you know, I mean, they went through a real 180 because they recognized the danger and the explicitly religious nature of their patriotism in a way that Americans still have to figure out, right?
	But they just haven't had a big enough disaster yet to figure that out.
	But anyway, sorry, please continue.
	Oh, no, I was just grasping for a topic since I had my mic on.
	Oh, wait, wait, we have another one?
	Planet of the Apes in my pants.
	I can see that. Twelve monkeys in my pants.
	Oh, I love that. Brief encounter in my pants.
	That's good. What dreams may come in my pants.
	oh yeah those last four words will surely show up at a remix at some point one of the slightly less serious shows but hey It's Christmas. We'll have to bust this game out down in Miami, I think.
	Oh yeah, no question. No question.
	That'd be good with song titles, too.
	In a Gata DeVita, in my pants.
	Anyway. So, that's it.
	No topics for you? Nothing else?
	I don't think so.
	Have you been keeping up with the shows?
	Yes, I have. I was trying to figure out how to get them When I was over in Europe there, because I couldn't really sync my iPod.
	Whatever, just technical crap.
	But I did manage to figure out how to jam MP3s onto my GPS navigator so I could listen to them in the car.
	Nice. That was good.
	And when you were playing FDR, did the UR heater change?
	No, it's really cool, though, because when the little navigator lady with the sexy British accent on my GPS would announce directions, it would pause the audio, so it was pretty cool.
	Now approaching enlightenment.
	That's right. The state of bliss.
	Right, right, right.
	Okay, well, thanks. Great to hear from you again.
	I'm glad that you came back.
	And maybe Greg E. M. had a follow-up from last week's show about Ye Olde Photograph and his self-consciousness with regards to seeing his blurry background image in somebody else's picture somewhere on the web.
	I think it was Facebook. Is that right?
	Yes, it was. I'm going to have to minimize the chat window so someone doesn't throw up in my pants that just makes me laugh out loud.
	I'm trying to concentrate and not think of funny movie titles because, you know, when there's a chance for bad humor, it's like a gravity well for me.
	Like, I scrabble like a gecko going down a sliding sheet of oiled glass.
	Yeah. I have to make sure I stay away from it too, that virus of in my pants.
	But please, go ahead.
	So, you had some photographs in your pants.
	Sorry, you were talking about that.
	Yes. Don't worry.
	It's recorded and I can post it on the board as an example of the depth of the conversation.
	But anyway. Well, I did my homework.
	You told me to think of the thought that preceded the emotion.
	Otherwise, you didn't really have much to work with.
	And sorry to interrupt you right at the beginning.
	Do you know if you knew that thought last week but didn't want to talk about it or you didn't know the thought at all?
	Well, of course I knew it, but it was just hard to...
	It was nice of me not to corner you there, wasn't it?
	You know how most people say, well, I don't know, and I say, yes, you do, right?
	But I did, you know, because I got the sense that you were really tense about it, so please, go on.
	Yeah, well, and I'm a lot more loosened up about it now, if you can tell.
	So, yeah, I mean, I knew it, but I think it was just really hard for me to access.
	That the thought that preceded the emotion was, oh, crap, people will see it.
	People that I know will see it.
	We'll see you. We'll see the picture.
	Right. Yeah. And the people that I know would probably have recognized it as being me, because I have a pretty, or had, pretty recognizable hair.
	I mean, I cut it off, but I mean, I did have pretty longish hair, and I had the Freedom Man radio sweatshirt on, so the people who know me well would know that.
	They would say, ah, there he is.
	So, that was the thought that preceded the emotion.
	Whereas I thought it was maybe just the picture of me in general.
	Right, so it was you with the t-shirt with Free Domain Radio that was the problem.
	Well, I don't know if it was necessarily the Free Domain Radio.
	Because I think I very well could have had a Google sweatshirt on or something.
	And it would have felt the same way.
	Because I wear the sweatshirt all the time.
	The people that I know...
	See we with it all the time and listen to the conversation and love the conversation.
	Right. I mean, not all the people I know, but the people that I can call my friends love the conversation.
	So it's not... I don't think it's the free domain radio, although that's certainly a possibility.
	I'm going to keep that open.
	But I'm sorry, and I don't mean to interrupt you, but I'm not sure I would understand why the tension would be higher if you were wearing – or the same if you were wearing a Google t-shirt or one of your Britney Spears t-shirts or whatever.
	Well, I'm just saying that I don't think – My point in that was that I don't think that the Freedom Man radio sweatshirt's a variable that counts much into it.
	Do you think that could be the case?
	Well, since I have a theory about the t-shirt consumption, I obviously have a vested interest, but I'm not sure how...
	I mean, you have to be wearing something, right?
	Is it the fact that it has a logo of any kind?
	No. No, I don't think so.
	I mean, it could have been a plain t-shirt, and I think I would have felt the same.
	And so, I'm sorry, I'm just not sure exactly what the thought is that causes the catastrophic thinking that we talked about last week.
	Right. Well, the thought is, oh God, people that I see are going to see this and recognize me in it.
	Right. Which I didn't quite access that last week.
	Well, but, I mean, sorry to state what I consider the obvious, which may not be obvious to you, but it's just my perspective.
	Okay. Of course it's only because people might recognize you, because if they didn't recognize you, there would be no stress, right?
	Right. So, for sure, it must be something else that would cause the anxiety.
	Well, and I think there is something else that I think it also had to do with the person I was interacting with.
	Go on. It was someone that I ran into that I hadn't seen for a while and who I don't particularly respect a whole lot, but I was still interacting with her.
	Right. And these people don't know this person.
	The people who would recognize me wouldn't know this person.
	Okay, so they would recognize you, but they wouldn't recognize the person that you were...
	In the picture with, right?
	Right. Because I was trying to just think of every variable.
	I looked at the picture like you told me to and tried to think of every variable that could have changed and made it less.
	Right.
	And a variable that I found was that if I were talking to someone else, like if I were talking to one of my close friends, I wouldn't have felt as much tension.
	You would have felt some tension, but not as much.
	Not as much.
	So I do think that's a factor, who I was talking to.
	Okay.
	And what is then – so what is the catastrophic story that would, for you, result from people seeing this?
	Picture.
	I think it would have been a recognition of others that – of an area where I maybe don't have as much of an ability to – Okay, so this is like the friend, and I mean, God knows for most of our life we all have someone like this.
	Who, for some reason or other, you got into an acquaintanceship or a friendship with at some point in the past.
	Either you've grown or they've diminished or whatever, but now it's just not somebody that you would hang out with, but you can't find a graceful way to exit the relationship?
	Bingo. Okay, I got it.
	And what is it about this person that you would consider to be less than ideal?
	Very skewed views on parenting.
	And a very strong Christian.
	And I didn't really know her that well.
	It wasn't like this was someone I hung out with every week.
	But this was someone who had very...
	Like, that spanking is a very good way to show that you mean business or something like that.
	Well, and do you know if there were any other abusive tendencies?
	Does she have kids? No.
	She doesn't have kids. Okay. Did she ever exhibit any other abusive tendencies other than it's good to hit children?
	Not particularly.
	But again, I didn't know her that well, so we never really got that deep into stuff.
	But when I found out her views on parenting, that was the deal breaker.
	Well, but it wasn't, right, if you're still hanging?
	Yeah. Well, yeah, right.
	But it was the deal breaker in my mind.
	Like, oh, this isn't someone.
	And that's why I think I have this conflict.
	Like, in my mind, I know this isn't a person I should be interacting with.
	Uh-huh. But I interact with her.
	So I think that's where the conflict is.
	Do you think that does that sound...
	It certainly is possible.
	I guess the question that I would have, let's take your thesis and run with it, because obviously it's you, right?
	So you're the guy who's probably the most right.
	But what it would indicate to me is not that you are afraid or feel negatively towards a lack of integrity.
	But rather that you are afraid or feel negatively towards public evidence of a lack of integrity.
	Okay, can you go on?
	Okay, so when you hang out and chat with this woman, you do not experience the same anxiety as you do when there's evidence out there That you have chatted with and interacted with this woman.
	I do feel anxiety when I'm interacting with her, but you're right, not as much.
	Right, so what that means is that, to put it bluntly and not too charitably, it's not the crime but the conviction that concerns you.
	Right. Okay.
	Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
	Go on. That it's not so much that I'm interacting with her.
	It's That I don't want people to know.
	Right. You know, I mean, like, if you were dating some, I don't know, trashy woman with big tits or whatever you liked in there, that it was not somebody of quality that you had the chance to really get to know and love, but it was just like some, you know, horny-ass humping relationship.
	And she showed up at your parents' place, right?
	You would feel anxiety.
	Not because you were, you know...
	You know, humping the bimbo, but because you were now seen to be humping the bimbo.
	Oh, yeah, I get it.
	Does that make sense? Exactly.
	It makes perfect sense.
	So is the solution to this just to live more with, I mean, I know this is a pretty all-encompassing solution, but to live more with integrity so that I don't have to have the fear?
	No, I wouldn't say that.
	I mean, obviously living with integrity is a good thing, but I don't think that...
	Because you don't want to, I would suggest, you don't want to make your decisions on how you're going to live your life based on your fear of other people's disapproval.
	Right. And I do think in some instances I have gotten people out of my life for integrity.
	So it's not like a complete...
	Lack of integrity, but I do think there are certain little pockets where I'm trying to live almost splitting.
	I'm splitting. Yeah, and please understand where I'm coming from.
	When I use the word crime, I mean, that's all an exaggeration, right?
	What did you do? You had a conversation with a Christian.
	I mean, so what, right?
	This is not – it's not the issue.
	But I guess my question is, is your relationship to virtue and integrity based on rules and fear or instinct and pleasure?
	Right now, because of my past, there's a lot of the rules and fear in it.
	Right. Well, I would obey none of those rules if I were you.
	Right. I would set it as my personal goal to not do anything...
	Because I was afraid of disapproval.
	To not do anything because it was a rule.
	Right? Because it's not going to work.
	All it's going to do is it's going to entrap you more, and God knows you've already had enough of that, as we all have in our life.
	And the key thing to philosophy is to internalize the standards, right?
	Right. Okay.
	Well, see, this is making me nervous right now.
	Excellent. Well, because I'm feeling like...
	almost like I've trapped myself.
	Because I do want to live in...
	I do, as you know, want to live with integrity for pleasure and integrity...
	Yeah, live with integrity for integrity, yeah.
	No, live with integrity for pleasure and for virtue and for joy.
	But because... I've got this template for follow rules because they're the rules.
	Follow rules so that I don't get punished.
	So you don't get attacked. Let me just interrupt you because the language here is so important.
	Punished indicates something to do with justice, right?
	Like if a dog attacks me, nobody says the dog is punishing me, right?
	Oh, so it's an... Yeah, you're right.
	It's an attack. You're afraid of being attacked.
	So come home by 11 or you're going to get attacked.
	Right. In the same way...
	Sorry, in the same way that...
	Sorry, in the same way that if you owned a store and the mafia came over and said, pay $500 a week or we will burn your store down.
	Right? Nobody would call this a punishment or rules.
	It's just, I don't want to have my store burned down.
	Wow, okay. This is pretty significant for me to figure this out.
	Yeah, I mean, sorry, and I just really want to make sure that you look at your interaction with your parents and your authority figures, your teachers.
	This is not anything to do with ethics or crime or punishment or virtue or integrity.
	It's like, do what I want or I'll fuck you up.
	Right. This is like lunch money at the bully's fist.
	So, could part of it be that, in a way, part of me is drifting?
	I mean, obviously, I love philosophy, and I love ethics, and I love truth, but could part of it be for the wrong reasons?
	It certainly could.
	Because I'm replacing one rule structure with another rule structure to almost normalize?
	Well, it's better. I think it's important to recognize that if you want to quit drinking, it's okay if you take up bowling.
	And what I mean by that is, if you have a way of interacting with people which is like, I'll do what they say and call it moral because I don't want to be attacked.
	And I also don't want to know that I'm doing it because I don't want to be attacked.
	So if you take that methodology of interacting with people off the table, you don't go from fat to fit in five minutes, right?
	And you say, okay, well, I'm going to have a better set of rules.
	At least you can internalize these rules.
	You cannot internalize other people's crazy-ass opinions, right?
	Yeah, I can't internalize be home by 11.30, but if I'm home by 11, I'm going to get punished anyway.
	Yeah, you can't internalize conformity to abuse.
	Because conformity to abuse, by its definition, is wrapping yourself around the bullying of somebody else.
	So you can't... At least this stuff you can internalize, right?
	Because it's a methodology, not a conclusion.
	And it's not about punishment, right?
	Okay. So to go back to the...
	I just want to make sure I'm on the right track with this, because this is a pretty significant jump for me to recognize this, I think.
	Because... Now I have a question for you, if you don't mind.
	In your interactions with me in the past, was any of this obvious to you?
	That you had a...
	That I had a habit of redefining compliance as a kind of virtue?
	Yes. Well, I wouldn't say that it scrolled across my mind as a sort of CNN ticker tape, but if you'd stopped and asked me, for sure, there is a certain amount of tentativity, if that makes sense, to your approach.
	You're not somebody, as far as I can tell, let me know what you think, you're not somebody who has an easy time Staking the claim that is yourself in the world, right?
	So that you are a moving fortress, right?
	That you are who you are in the world.
	If people like it, great.
	If they shit on you, then they're just idiots and you move on.
	I have a feeling that you ask for permission to be in the world.
	So I'm almost looking for approval from people because that's how I was When I was a child, I was always sort of like you give a picture to mom and look into her eyes like, oh, is this good?
	And almost like that. Well, I'm going to back you up for just a second just to point out the habits that you have.
	We all look for approval, and there's nothing wrong with that.
	I look for approval from my wife.
	And every Christmas I get it.
	So looking for approval, there's nothing wrong with that.
	I look for approval when I look in the mirror.
	I look for approval that my podcasts are of decent quality from the listeners.
	Because if they're not, I have to go back to work.
	I don't want to do that.
	So you were not looking for approval.
	That is a self-humiliating way of putting it, if that makes sense.
	So what are some of my habits that...
	Instead of looking for approval.
	I mean, just from what you can tell.
	Well, you weren't born as an approval seeker.
	Nobody is, right? You weren't born having to beg for approval or for validation from other human beings, right?
	No man is born a slave.
	Right. So, what were you doing?
	If seeking approval was only an effect, what was the cause?
	What was really going on?
	What were you really trying to do?
	Avoid abuse. And so now I'm doing that in relationships where I don't have to.
	Like, I can avoid abuse in my current relationships.
	Sure, yeah. As an adult, you can, for sure, but it provokes great anxiety in us.
	To avoid abuse, when that's what we're used to, right?
	Because it's a new way of being that is scary.
	And it brings up a lot of pain in us, right?
	Like once we realize how safe we can be, we realize just how constantly bullied and in danger we were.
	So I'm complying with these rules, like the rules of philosophy, which as you say are better rules.
	The rules of a methodology rather than the rules of a conclusion.
	Almost, I'm leaning towards it as sort of another way to avoid abuse.
	Well, for sure, there is an aspect of approval seeking in any, you know, whenever you have a mentor or to whatever degree I or others or people on the board or whatever, right?
	There is... To a certain degree, a kind of approval seeking, and there's nothing wrong with that, right?
	I mean, if I'm trying to learn how to be a black belt in jujitsu, then I look to the approval of the guy who's teaching me that, right?
	Because he knows what he...
	So, looking for approval, and so all of these things are good things.
	I mean, all of these things are healthy things.
	You're in a state of transition insofar as you are realigning your personality, right?
	So that instead of figuring out what to do by seeking out and navigating through the queues of the people around you, right?
	You are getting a map which you can plot your direction.
	You're not just, okay, are there rocks here?
	Are there rocks there? Is there a deep bit here I can go?
	Oh, shit, there is a rock over there.
	Now I've got to move over here, right?
	What you've been raised to do Is to navigate in stormy seas perpetually through rocks and foam and sharks and hail.
	Well, a minefield is what came up to mind before you used that metaphor.
	Yeah, you got a stick and it's like, where can I step, right?
	Right, so I was moving, and I'm still doing that to an extent.
	I mean, to a very large extent, I would say.
	Which is hard for me to realize, but I think it's true.
	I'm trying to navigate...
	Around a minefield with a stick, whereas I'm sort of now formulating a map, as you said.
	So I need to not...
	Let me sort of explain it to you, if this makes sense.
	We'll continue with the same metaphor with the minefield, because that's what works for you.
	So beforehand, you don't even know it's a minefield.
	You just know that sometimes shit blows up, and you've got to be really careful, right?
	And so you kind of got a stick and you're poking around.
	You don't know what the hell happens when you're a kid.
	You just know that bad shit occurs and you got to avoid it.
	Then what happens is somebody says, you're not in a place of random geisters.
	You're in a place where somebody laid minefields to screw you up.
	Oh, shit. Oh, wow.
	Okay. Right? This is not accidental.
	This is not, well, the world is just unstable and geisters erupt for no reason.
	This is not a naturally occurring phenomenon.
	That's a lot of what I do is say, this is not natural.
	This is not human nature.
	This is not the world. This is a minefield that was planted to screw you up.
	And then you say, holy shit, I'm in a minefield, right?
	And it was put here by people.
	And then I say, sorry brother, can't airlift you out of the minefield because I don't know where your mines are, right?
	But what I can do is I can tell you how to see the little mounds where the mines are.
	And also that the whole world is not a minefield.
	But there are beautiful forests and great shining cities and islands.
	With hula girls. And you don't have to live in a minefield.
	And then you say, okay.
	It's a minefield. It was put here by bad people.
	I'm not incompetent at walking.
	I just don't want to get blown up.
	Right? Because this is a very important thing.
	I guarantee you that you still feel weak.
	Because you had to carry such a heavy load that your legs are trembling.
	And you say, gee, my legs are weak.
	No. Your legs are incredibly strong.
	Well, it's funny you said... Sorry?
	Well, it's funny you say that because physically my legs are trembling at the moment.
	No, I would not be at all surprised about that because what you sense is freedom, right?
	This is what we're talking about. So now you're like, okay, I'm in a minefield.
	Bad people put me here. I'm not weak.
	I just did the best to survive in the environment I was hurled in by the evil gods of circumstance.
	So now what you're doing is you're saying, okay, I'm still in a minefield.
	But I know that this is not all the world is.
	So I can get out of the minefield.
	I can't fly because, you know, it's reality.
	Nobody can come in to get me because only I know the map of my family, my history.
	But I now can see the minefield and I can make my way towards the edge and never come back.
	Right. Okay.
	So, I get it.
	Yeah, that helps a lot.
	So, yeah, I think that basically sums it up.
	Well, let's go back to your Christian friend, if you don't mind.
	And I use the word friend loosely, but just call her your friend for now.
	Because it's easier to say than acquaintance.
	You, my friend, are completely and totally free to talk to this Christian friend.
	There's no rule. There's no God.
	There's no punishment. There's no hell.
	There's no FDR lightning bolt that's going to find you in your sleep and fry your eyebrows.
	There is no rule that says you cannot talk or be friends with a Christian.
	The only thing that you need to really focus on is how do I feel when I talk To a Christian.
	Do I feel free?
	Guilty. Do I feel self-expressed?
	You said guilty, but that's rules following.
	Exactly. Like, oh shit, FDR says I can't talk to a Christian, I'm bad!
	Right? Yeah.
	But that's nonsense, right?
	I mean, what do I care, right?
	Talk to anybody you want.
	The important thing is not what other people say is right or wrong for you.
	I know you're not an axe murderer, so we're not talking about any of that nonsense, right?
	Right. But the question is, how do you feel?
	Forget the guilt. Do you enjoy talking to the Christian?
	No. And what do you not enjoy about talking to the Christian?
	Well, I can't share values.
	I mean, it's...
	It's impossible to have a deep and meaningful conversation with someone whose values are anti-values to me.
	So when I'm discussing, when I'm chatting with her, there's this...
	I mean, to go back to the minefield, there's a minefield of topics that I have to sort of prance around and not touch.
	Right. So your goal is to get out of the minefield and be free to walk and sing and dance and do cartwheels wherever the hell you want, right?
	Right. Ah, so I should align my actions to not feel anxiety or guilt.
	That would just be almost an anxiety management tool.
	That's not getting the cause.
	But instead, I need to realize that I'm not free if I'm talking to her.
	Well... It's not that you're not free.
	Again, let me sort of... This is complicated stuff, and these are great questions, and I hope this is helpful to you, because I'm sure it is to other people.
	You are perfectly free when you are talking to the Christian.
	You're not in jail, right? Well, I use the word free somewhat loosely, because I'm not free, as I said, to talk about certain things.
	Sure you are. So when I'm...
	Well...
	No, you are. Seriously.
	She's not going to shoot you. Okay, so I'm using her to manage my anxiety by not talking about those certain things.
	Yeah, I mean, you know that if you talk about these things...
	Sorry, go ahead. Oh, well, if I were to talk about these things, I would feel a tremendous amount of anxiety.
	So by avoiding these things but continuing to talk with her, I'm managing my own anxiety.
	Well, sure, but I would say a little bit further than anxiety, and I know I used the term, but just for real precision in this part of the conversation.
	Okay. The reason that you don't want to talk to her about your values is because you know she's going to attack you.
	Right. So, you're not just avoiding your own anxiety, you're avoiding a legitimate and genuine attack.
	Yeah. Okay, in the same way.
	It's a legitimate and genuine danger. Like, sorry, let me sort of explain what I mean.
	If there are a bunch of, I don't know, if there's some street on Toronto where every time you walk down it, you get mugged, then I say, well, I don't want to go walk down that street.
	I'm not just sort of managing my anxiety.
	I don't want to get mugged. Right, but it's not going to kill me if I say something like that.
	Yeah, but the problem is that in the past it would have.
	Oh, okay.
	All right. Like a guy who's been in Iraq for four years in heavy shelling and gunfire and so on, right?
	If he joins a marching band, he's going to freak out every time they practice with that big booming drum by his ear, right?
	Hold on. Should I do the on-hold music?
	Sorry about that. Sorry about that.
	There was an interruption.
	So the guy who's been in combat is not going to be very good in a marching band, right?
	With the boom-boom of the drums and the rat-tat-tat of the drums, right?
	Right. Now, you say, what?
	It's just drums, right? But it's like, no, because of his history, he's not good at that.
	He can't undo his history.
	He can't undo the inevitable results of his autonomous nervous system.
	He can't undo his PTSD, his fight-or-flight mechanism, the way his adrenal gland pumps out the adrenaline.
	He can't change that, right?
	Right, he can't.
	So, the key is to not expose himself to loud, sudden noises, right?
	Ah, okay.
	I get it. So it's not going to kill me now if I say, so what about God?
	But it will invoke the fight or flight or the whatever I would feel, the attack that I would feel when I was younger.
	Right. It does not kill the Vietnam veteran to go and see Full Metal Jacket.
	Right. But it's not a lot of fun, right?
	Okay. And as you've said to me before, I'm never going to get rid of that.
	Well, I mean, maybe there's a way to do it, but I... Yeah, I mean, well, a lot of it's biologically ingrained.
	Yeah, like, I mean, there's more fun things to do with your life than to find out how to talk to corrupt people without getting scared, right?
	Why just not have the corrupt people around, right?
	Right. Okay, so...
	or to not talk to the Christian, the only question, Greg, that you need to ask yourself, if you want to get out of the minefield, is you need to say to yourself, am I heading out of the minefield, or am I heading into the minefield?
	Right.
	And every time you get into interactions with whom there are these mines, these landmines, you're heading into the minefield, not out of it.
	So to reword it just so I can maybe make sure that I understand it, what you're saying is you can't airlift me out of it, like you said earlier, but I have to realize the direction I'm heading so that I can leave it.
	Yes. And in having these interactions with corrupt people...
	I'm just burrowing myself deeper into this minefield, which is against my self-interest.
	Forget rules. It's just not in my self-interest to have these discussions and to put myself into these situations.
	It's putting myself back into my childhood.
	Yeah, and there's comfort there because you know how to deal with the minefield.
	You don't know how to deal necessarily with the wide open spaces and the beautiful savannas and volcanoes and the cities.
	You know how to deal with the minefield, right?
	So this is a familiar territory.
	You know what you're doing. So there's going to be a part of you that's drawn into the minefield, right?
	And there will be lots of people around you who are really happy that you're coming back into the minefield, right?
	Right. Because if I go back into the minefield, they don't feel anxious about having to leave it.
	Yeah, and then they can pretend that the whole world is a minefield, and by the way, there are no mines and so on, right?
	Because basically, to stretch the metaphor beyond all recognition, they then use you to shield themselves from the mine blasts, right?
	So they don't have to get out.
	They're safe because they're abusing you.
	Okay, that makes perfect sense.
	So I should appeal in my own mind, and I'll give this a lot of thought over the next week.
	Because my palms are sweaty right now just thinking about it.
	I need to appeal to my own rational self-interest, not to some platonic ideal of virtue.
	Or to some platonic rule of don't hang out with corrupt people, because that's not going to be free.
	I think I get it.
	At least intellectually, I think I need to ponder over it more.
	Yeah, I mean, there's a little thing that I put on the website.
	Like, every page has a different tiny little two-liner about philosophy.
	And one that I put up there is Free Domain Radio.
	Welcome to Utopia.
	But Utopia is Y-O-U. Right.
	Utopia. Not some abstract platonic utopia that you have to earn your way in through obedience to abstract rules.
	Okay. Yeah.
	But Utopia.
	Because that's not free. No, what is pleasurable to you?
	Okay, and I think that makes more sense.
	Wow, thanks so much.
	I'll definitely get back to you on this.
	Yeah, just feel free.
	The thing to do, go talk to the Christian woman and see how you feel.
	Do you feel good? Do you feel energized?
	Do you feel positive?
	Do you feel empowered?
	Do you feel excited?
	Do you feel thrilled? Do you feel enthusiastic?
	Oh, do you feel kind of jumpy?
	Do you feel kind of edgy? Do you feel kind of like, oh shit, I can't talk about this?
	Oh, I can't talk about that?
	Do you feel inhibited? Do you feel claustrophobic?
	Do you feel confined?
	Pensive would be probably the word that comes to mind.
	Well, pensive maybe, not so much, but just edging around, trying not to disrupt the minefield.
	Right, and so what that means is that you're not there for you.
	You're there for her.
	Managing her emotions.
	Well, she's using you, right, to legitimize her own craziness, right?
	Well, if a guy who's really into philosophy is my friend, I guess I'm not that crazy.
	Right. If a rationalist is enjoying talking to me, I guess religion is sensible.
	Ah, okay. So you're used to serving the needs of crazy people, right?
	Absolutely. Yeah, so he is a crazy person.
	You don't get any benefit out of it because she's a crazy, culty Christian, right?
	But so what are you there for?
	You're there to serve her needs, which is what you're trained to do, right?
	You're a love and affirmation robot as a child, right?
	That's what you're trained. That's your program, right?
	What do the crazy people need?
	How am I going to stay safe?
	Well, I'm going to appease the crazy people.
	I'm going to give them what they want.
	Oh, it's changed. No problem.
	I'll just give them that. Whatever they need.
	In the moment, to make myself secure from attack, I'm going to please and do whatever I can to make whoever's got the most power, whoever's the craziest around me, I'm going to just please them, whatever they need.
	And all I do is scan the environment and figure out what people need and I provide that to them so that I can feel safe.
	Because that's all I know how to do.
	And if I don't do that, I'm going to get the shit kicked out of me in one way or another.
	Wow, well, just to close it off, I think we've got it, at least to a degree, because, I mean, I don't think we've nipped it completely, but I do think in this discussion, I found a cause, and we've looked into that cause, because I'm feeling the same sweaty palms that I felt last week during this conversation.
	Right, and the sweaty palms are, I now know how to get out of the minefield, right?
	And the anxiety is around freedom.
	It's not around... You know how to be a slave because that's how you were raised.
	We all do, right? Right.
	Okay. Yeah.
	But you don't know how to be free yet, but you're really close, right?
	Which is great. Fuck, I wish I did this when I was your age, right?
	But you know how to be free and that's the excitement that you feel.
	So when I move to Boston, do you think I'll be feeling this same sort of anxiety in about 10 days?
	Not really knowing how to deal with a lot of this freedom.
	I mean, it's going to be relative freedom because I'm still going to have the phone calls and stuff.
	So do you think I'm still going to have to deal with sort of, whoa, this is weird?
	Well, I think that the reason that you're not free as an adult is that you're still not there where you need to be in terms of self-trust.
	Right. I don't know how to live in the forest or the beautiful oasis yet.
	Yeah, in a way, but to put it into more prosaic terms, you still yet have to trust that your experience of people is perfectly correct, and that if somebody's making you feel uneasy, as a child, you couldn't get rid of that, right? So you just had to learn to manage it, right?
	You couldn't change your parents, right?
	You couldn't become a better family.
	Right. So, you had to ignore and repress your feelings of anxiety or negativity towards people because if your parents ever really got wind of how bad they made you feel, you would get attacked, right?
	Yeah. And as I'm still living with them, I do sort of fear that the discovery of freedom in radio by them...
	Sure, it's terrifying.
	Because if they hear some of the things that I've chatted about...
	Which is why the ones that have dealt with more of the childhood topics, I've asked you to put into the gold or the donator only.
	Yeah. Because I just don't...
	Yeah, no, that's what it's for, too, right? So that we've got a private closure.
	But I think that once you learn to say, my instincts are perfectly great.
	If I'm not enjoying an interaction...
	It's not because there's something wrong with me.
	Ah, okay, that clicked.
	Okay. So what clicked there?
	It clicked in that, let me put it into words, that I need to make my decisions based upon myself and my own, as you said, I needed to trust my own instincts more.
	Yeah. Yeah. I'm chatting with someone.
	You go to school and somebody starts chatting with you.
	You need to monitor yourself.
	Because you have a habit, as I do, as Christina does, as most people do who've been raised in these kinds.
	You have a habit of saying, what does this person need?
	I'm going to provide it to them.
	They need me to laugh at their jokes?
	I'm doubled over. They need me to express admiration?
	I'm praying at their feet.
	Okay, yeah. But you sit there and you say, okay, this person is talking to me.
	How do I feel?
	If you don't feel good, you don't need to explain it.
	You don't need to justify it.
	You don't need to cross-examine them to find out if it's right or wrong what you're feeling.
	It's right! It's right!
	What's your feeling? And then make my...
	I don't know. This is the mind detector, right?
	Sorry, go on. Oh, so I need to make my decisions based upon my own feelings.
	Yeah. Yeah, you trust your feelings.
	Your feelings got you through this hellish maze of your childhood.
	You trust your gut.
	You trust your instincts. And you say, okay, I'm not feeling good in this interaction.
	So now you say, well, I'm not feeling good in this interaction because I'm disobeying these abstract rules, so I feel guilty.
	But you don't get to then have your feelings.
	You've just got another set of rules that you've got to obey.
	That will make me anxious.
	Yeah, throw the rulebook out.
	You're not going to go on an axe-murdering spree if you throw the rulebook out.
	Throw the rulebook out.
	I'm not saying do crack cocaine every morning, which you won't, but throw the rulebook out.
	And you say, I am the rulebook.
	I am the rule book.
	How do I feel when I'm talking to this person?
	Do I feel good or not good?
	Do I feel happy or do I feel diminished?
	Do I feel elevated? Do I feel put down?
	Do I feel respected or do I feel manipulated?
	Do I feel empowered or do I feel used?
	And then, when you walk away from that person, if you've lost track of who you are, as we all do in certain conversations, when you walk away from that person, you say, okay, what is my emotional experience after talking to this person?
	Do I feel good, like I would voluntarily like to see them again?
	If they phone me tonight and I know it's them calling, will I feel happy or anxious?
	What is my experience?
	This is the real-time relationship, right?
	Primarily with yourself.
	What is my experience emotionally, instinctually, psychologically, at every level, spiritually, What is my experience of my environment?
	And let that be your guide.
	Wow, well this was tremendously helpful.
	I think this conversation is a milestone for me.
	I'm going to re-listen to it and I'll definitely get back to you on this.
	Yeah, please do. I mean, I know it sounds completely bizarre for the guy who wrote UPB to say, you are the rule, right?
	But that's ethics.
	We're not talking about ethics here.
	Talking to a Christian is not evil, right?
	I mean, we're not talking about good and evil and governments and gulags and wars, right?
	We're talking about utopia.
	What is going to make your life happiest and most rich.
	Exactly. Okay, well, thanks so much, and I'll let the next person chime in.
	You bet. You bet. Absolutely.
	I really do appreciate that, and great, great conversation.
	Thank you so much for sharing, and get back to us if you can next week.
	All right! We have the next spot, eGappy Availability E. Hey, Steph.
	Hello. It's Nathan.
	Hey. With a working headset, right?
	Eh, it's not bad.
	Not bad. It's not as good as when you fixed it last time, but don't sweat it.
	Maybe it's the volume.
	How's that? It's good.
	Go on. Alright.
	Well, first I want to thank Greg.
	For that conversation, because that was exactly what I needed to hear.
	And second, I have a topic, and I don't know if this is an easy topic to even really get into.
	I was trying to figure out, you know, your methodology for extracting principles.
	Yes. And did you figure it out?
	Um, no.
	Oh, okay.
	Well, someone advised that I get a book called Informal Logic, and I did order it, but it's not here yet.
	Right. Okay, and can you think of an example where you've seen me do that, that you would like me to explain in more detail?
	Every single listener conversation and Steven all throughout the God of Atheists.
	Too many occasions to really count.
	Like a specific example?
	That would be helpful. I mean, I can come up with one, too.
	But if one's resonant for you, either on the board or a podcast or whatever, then you can ask it.
	Or even if it's in to go, we could abstract it.
	But whatever you like. Hmm.
	Let's see. It usually came out with Stephen.
	It was like in the form of a question.
	So, like, so it's wrong to do this?
	Or, you know, like, it's wrong to lie?
	Or, so it's right to lie some of the time?
	You know, things like that.
	Right, right, right, right, right.
	Okay. I think I remember the scene you were talking about where Alder is reading something from the newspaper about how the Liberal government has been skimming from, I think, public companies in a corrupt scandal, and he's sort of justifying it with appeal to the grey areas of politics and so on, right? Right. Right.
	And so what Stephen does, and this is in the novel The God of Atheists, buy it.
	So what Stephen does is Stephen says, okay, my dad is making a moral pronouncement about the world, which is that it's okay to embezzle, you just shouldn't embezzle too much, because otherwise you'll get caught and there'll be a scandal.
	Right. And that's sort of what Alder, the professor who's been eaten by the Cartesian demon, this is what he says.
	And this is kind of a hip, kind of cool, and I actually stole this argument directly from a friend of mine, or who was a friend of mine at the time, who was a good old Canadian boy, who was pro-liberal, and so on.
	And he's like, ah, it's a grey area, they went too far on this one, blah blah blah, right?
	So I stole this argument as I steal much stuff from people around me for books in particular.
	So Stephen says, okay, my experience of my dad telling me about moral rules is him saying, Stephen, you should not lie, because lying is wrong.
	And now, when he's talking about People in the government lying, suddenly it's not wrong.
	So, which is it?
	Were you lying to me when you said that stealing is wrong, or lying is wrong, or are you lying to me now when you say that lying is okay?
	Right. And what I mean by, I think, extracting principles is that someone will say something really muddled, just kind of, you know, confusing, but in there, there's a principle to extract from it.
	Yeah, sorry to interrupt.
	First of all, I would say that no one ever says anything that's muddled.
	Oh. My opinion.
	This is my opinion. I'm going to prove it anyway.
	But no one says anything that's muddled, right?
	So there's a guy on the board who's talking about some debate he had with someone, I think, about healthcare.
	And the guy gave him a total baffle gab answer about why the government should be able to use force but private citizens should not, right?
	Right. And it was very confusing, but not, right?
	But not confusing, right?
	Because if someone gives you a whole bunch of mealy-mouthed, baffle gab bullshit in response to a clear question, they're not muddled at all.
	They're very clearly being evasive.
	Oh, evasive, right.
	That's not muddled, right?
	Like when you reach for a squid in the ocean and it squirts that black ink so you can't find it?
	It's not muddled, right?
	It knows exactly what it's doing.
	If the guy who's a counterfeiter refuses to give you his money to run through the counterfeit detection machine and gives you some big nonsense answer as to why, he's not muddled, right?
	No. He's just lying.
	Yeah, I mean, is he doing what he needs to do to protect his own self-interest as it stands, right?
	So you and Greg were talking earlier.
	I don't know if that was his brother or the guy on the video, but he kept switching back and forth from ethics to obedience.
	I find it hard to extract principles from that because you extract it and it immediately switches.
	So yeah, you're right.
	It's just like an invasion. Well, I'm going to use this in the real-time relationship, and we had a listener chat just sort of after this occurred, but this Buddhist came on the board in the chat window, and he was talking about this, that, and the other, and so on, and I said, well, how do you know what is true and what is false?
	And we got around to reason and evidence, right?
	And then we continued on to the conversation, and he claimed that he had knowledge of physical laws that transcended existing physics, and I said...
	Okay, so what's your proof, right?
	Reason and evidence, we already established this, right?
	And he said, why is proof so important to you?
	Right? But that's an amazingly clear thing to say, right?
	And it says, I'm lying.
	You couldn't be more clear.
	He couldn't flash a neon sign above my house saying, lying bullshit artist.
	Couldn't be more clear.
	Go step by step down the argument.
	And then you say, where's the reason and evidence that you have for your proposition?
	Because we already established that reason and evidence were the criteria for truth.
	And he says, why is reason so important to you?
	That's the point at which he breaks the conversation, frames it, and tries to portray me as some anal guy who needs whatever.
	Start psychologizing and this and that, right?
	Right. It's like, but that's perfectly clear.
	So when it's baffling, it's perfectly clear.
	So when you say it's really hard to extract principles from a paid killer, well, of course it is, right?
	How could they be a paid killer if they weren't muddy?
	I guess that makes a lot of sense.
	And so the Buddhist basically just said, well, truth is no longer important for determining truth and falsehood.
	No, he didn't say that.
	No? No!
	Because that would have been even, I mean, that would have been more honest, right?
	Right. He just changed topic completely.
	Jumped out of the conversation, put a psychological framing and vaguely insulting thing in place.
	Why is proof so important to you?
	It's like, hey, proof is not important to me.
	Proof is the criteria that we agreed, right?
	But like somebody says, I want to borrow $5,000 from you, Steph, and I say, okay, great.
	You're going to pay me back the $5,000 in a month, right?
	And he says, absolutely, yes.
	Here's my contract and I sign this.
	Thanks so much for the $5,000.
	I'm going to pay you this back in a month, right?
	In three weeks I say, listen, I'm going to need that money back in a week.
	He says, no problem, absolutely, I will give you the money back in a week.
	It's all here, I'm ready to give it to you.
	And then I show up at his house in a week and say, listen, can I get my money back?
	And he says, why is money so important to you?
	Oh my god, yeah.
	No, seriously, that's exactly right.
	This is somebody who never had any intention of paying me my money back and only told me he would in order to steal my $5,000.
	Right, so lying bastard.
	Lying bastard and also calling me some selfish materialist when he is actually the one who's stealing money?
	Why is money so important to you?
	Hey, if money isn't important to you, why did you come to me for the $5,000?
	Right. I mean, it's a hypocritical mindfuck from multidimensional kaleidoscopic places.
	And it's perfectly clear.
	And I say, gee, I wish I'd learned that lesson for less than $5,000.
	But I tell you this, I'm not forgetting it now.
	Yeah, this makes a lot more sense now.
	And this guy was, I didn't even have to have, I mostly had this for the benefit of the people who were on the chat and talked about it afterwards, and we did a podcast, it's going to be the RTR book, but he's a Buddhist!
	Perfectly clear. So you say, well, I have trouble getting principals out of soldiers.
	They've already put on a uniform.
	They couldn't be more clear about their relationship to ethics.
	Right, their actions.
	Okay. Well, I think that answers my question.
	Okay, good. I think James wanted to ask something.
	Jimbo! Sorry.
	Sorry, I don't know why.
	I just plunged into Tennessee for a moment, but I'm back.
	A little dizzy, but I'm okay.
	James, are you there? Oh, yes, I am.
	James is fine.
	How are you doing? Honey, can I get some more coffee?
	No? Are we out? I think Toronto's out of coffee now.
	Please, go ahead. Now I'm going to get all the people on the planet who watch me do a podcast on drugs and say, see, I told you caffeine was a drug.
	It's exactly the same as LSD. You're so hypocritical.
	You should do drugs. You can't talk about nothing.
	Right. And then we'll open up the determinist debate again.
	Sorry, go on. I have to minimize that window again.
	Have we still got more pants thing going on?
	Oh, it hasn't stopped.
	Are you kidding? Alright.
	It keeps going and going and going.
	The hunchback of Notre Dame in my pants.
	You actually can see doctors for that.
	That's why I keep telling Rod, but he won't listen to me.
	Yeah, you can hang weights.
	You can unkink that. Anyway, please, go on.
	Alright, so, things have been getting pretty hectic for me lately.
	I mean, I got the job thing, which is sort of turning into a churn fest.
	But that's not even what I want to talk about.
	Why did I bring that up first?
	Let's see.
	Should we rewind and start again?
	Jimmy, Jimbo, Jimbo, sorry, go on.
	Okay, give me that first point again, and we'll see if we can't figure out why you brought it up first.
	Well, okay, so the point I brought up was the job thing.
	It's coming up with a lot of churn in the company.
	There are a number of concerns that I have, and basically I'm about a A month-ish from the end of my contract, which was supposed to be temp to perm, but now it's going to be...
	Now they're not sure what they want, so I don't even know if I'm going to be offered a permanent position.
	And my boss is leaving, you know, like, two months into my contract, and he's leaving, and there was another person who left, like, the first week I was there, and so all signs point to, this is a bad idea to stay here for very long.
	Just in terms of how many people seem to be hired and not fired, but sort of quit.
	And the way this is related is...
	I post...
	My post... Was it earlier today or yesterday?
	About talent? Yes.
	And I guess that's sort of related.
	And I'm always...
	I keep coming back to this.
	You know, I mean... I've got some ability to string sentences together, and it's nothing inherent.
	I was listening to the premium podcast, and I really got that.
	There's nothing inherent in the fact that I've got talent, but at the same time, I would like to use it, because if I don't use it, I'm going to lose it, that sort of thing.
	Right, and also, it's like, fuck if Steph can do it.
	Yeah. Sorry, go on. No, that's not it at all.
	Sorry, just kidding. Go on. But also, I mean, not only that, but I enjoy doing all this stuff.
	I've sort of been toying around with the idea of doing podcasts, but I don't think I can just sort of launch into it, because I don't know what I would do.
	I mean, I did that ad for FDR, but that's kind of like, alright, so everything else I've been doing is just sort of anecdotes and I mean, I got a few people who like to listen, sure, but that's only like a handful of people.
	I mean, I'm not going to be...
	I guess the thing is, I don't think I'm going to be bringing the philosophy to the world, necessarily.
	I just don't. Maybe that's something that I can think about, but it doesn't...
	I don't know how to put it.
	Well, if I understand it rightly, and I don't want to put words into your mouth, but let me see if I can jam a couple down without you coughing up, but you want to make the world a better place, right?
	Of course, yes. I mean, you're not like, I want groupies and jets and so on.
	I mean, not that those are bad things, but you want to do good for the world, right?
	Yeah. Right.
	And you are looking for a talent that is going to allow or help you create good in the world, right?
	This is a very satisfying thing to do.
	Mm-hmm. Right.
	Is there something that...
	And this is just a general question, and I'm not asking it out of vanity or solicitousness.
	I just want to know. Is there something that you feel that is missing...
	From the FDR podcast, because I think this is the premier philosophical conversation in the world and certainly the most voluminous, so to speak.
	And, you know, I'm sort of cranking out my third book in four or five months, so...
	Is there something that you feel is missing from the FDR conversation that you could add?
	I mean, and I don't mean in terms of a participant, I mean in terms of leadership.
	You know, I thought about that.
	I haven't thought about that in terms of directly being a part of FDR, but certainly in terms of on my own, I don't know what it is I could add.
	I mean, I don't... If anything, I find that I'm gaining a lot personally from participating in the philosophy and I'm trying to contribute back.
	But as far as developing new aspects of the theory, I don't think there's a topic that's been untouched.
	Sorry, I was sort of in a dig.
	No, no, listen, I appreciate that, and I don't think we've talked on the ethics of hedgehog sex yet, but that's slated for next week.
	Right, right, right.
	Okay. But there is that...
	I don't think I can...
	I don't think I really have anything to add to that aspect.
	Maybe certainly... Something with a different focus.
	Maybe not with the philosophical conversation.
	Well, I had an idea for a website.
	I haven't had the time or the energy to work on it.
	Or you could say I have chosen to not work on it.
	I was talking with Greg about this.
	It's sort of an educational website idea with people aimed towards anybody who wants to go, but also very basic skills.
	Where I would provide the content and, you know, math, science, computers, those are my strengths.
	But the technology side of things is something I don't really want to spend a whole lot of time on.
	I want to get on generating content, but there's really not a platform.
	Sorry, but what content do you want to generate?
	Maybe this is something that's worth some research.
	The content in particular is a...
	Sort of a directed educational map.
	I can't remember the word right now.
	Basically, the idea is that a child, maybe, will come to the site and will basically go through a lesson in mathematics.
	And this is obviously not just a child in the United States, but anywhere in the world, potentially.
	Um, and they could, you know, go through, go through sort of like a lesson, but it's, you know, there may be, you know, clips of maybe a few minutes in length where they would be able to listen to that and then choose where they want to go next or ask a question or, or that sort of thing. So sort of like a, a teacher kind of basis, kind of educational.
	I mean, The idea is to provide this educational thing in a way that really hasn't been done before.
	And granted, I don't know if this has been done before, but...
	I mean, I don't want to go into a public school to do that sort of thing.
	I mean, I wouldn't last very long.
	My experience as a student there wasn't all that great.
	So if I was going to provide some sort of education to people...
	I'd want it to be, um, something actually, they actually learn something, actually come away with a knowledge, you know, and learning how to think, um, and, uh, that sort of thing.
	So, uh, I think, I think I went a little, a little afield there, but I mean, that, that, that's been my idea.
	And, um, I kind of don't want to muck about with building the framework so much.
	It's just not that interesting to me.
	But then again, I guess if I don't want to get over that hurdle, maybe I don't really want to do it.
	Well, and do you mind if I take you on a tangent?
	Sure. Okay.
	Now, this is not something I can tell just by the way that you're talking about it.
	This is not something that is organically coming to you as a kind of thing that you feel like you really have to do.
	So, yeah, I can tell that, look, I've been an entrepreneur for many years, and I know what it's like when somebody has a yearning burning, gotta get it done.
	You can't stop them, right?
	It's not like, oh, well, you know, maybe I'll do this, but the content's a bit of a hurdle, and I haven't done any research into the contemporaries and so on and other alternative and what's out there, but this is the kind of thing that I could see myself doing if the right circumstances came about and so on, right?
	Yeah. If somebody really wants to get something done, you can't stop them.
	You throw any obstacle in their way, they'll just chew right through it, right?
	Yeah. And I think that you're capable of that, but this is not it.
	Yeah, as I was talking, I was really beginning to get that sense.
	Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that.
	Yeah, that's good, right?
	Eliminating things that you only kind of want to do is very important in life, so that you can save your energies for what you really do want to do.
	Now, let me tell you the subtext that I got from what you were saying, and you can tell me whether or not it makes sense.
	The subtext that I got from what you're saying is, Steph, please ask me about my girlfriend.
	Okay. How did you get that?
	How's your relationship? Because you know that was the big topic last time, right?
	That is very true.
	You're right. I have not heard much about the girlfriend of the James in a while.
	And you want to talk about living with integrity and living and making the world a better place, which I hugely admire and respect, but I'm not sure an ill-defined learning portal for students who may or may not find a way to it or be interested is necessarily the most immediate thing on your plate of things to deal with.
	That might be accurate.
	So, perhaps you can tell me the subtext rather than the surface.
	What is happening with your relationship?
	Well, uh...
	She's right here.
	I don't know.
	That the last I heard, there was the odd challenge or two in it.
	I've not heard anything about it since, and people generally don't tend to keep good news to themselves.
	So that's something we can talk about another time.
	I don't want to put you on the spot. But if you're looking for a place where you can gain traction in terms of virtue and really help the world, right?
	Then it's going to be living with integrity in your personal relations.
	Right. Right.
	I understand. It...
	Well, we can probably go into more detail another time, but for now I would say it seems like there have been some good things, but some things I'm not sure about still.
	Right, which means that you are sure about them, but you don't like the answers.
	Yeah. Yeah. Okay, but listen, I understand maybe you can't send her out for pizza or whatever, so I understand that you're in a difficult position that you can't talk, which also, of course, says quite a lot, but we can talk about this another time, but I would say that it's probably not a good or wise idea to focus on abstractions that you have pretty lax motivations for, and that that may be a feeling that...
	That is being driven from a desire to avoid the things that are more pertinent and relevant for you to deal with in terms of liberty and being an illuminatory light for the world as a whole.
	I follow what you're saying.
	Thanks for cutting to the quick.
	No problem. I've been known to from time to time.
	Anyway, that's all we wanted to talk about right now.
	We can talk about this another time.
	Yeah, do you do phone calls?
	I do phone calls.
	Yeah, just give me a shout.
	This week obviously is a little tight.
	I'm trying to finish this book and we have some guests for Christmas, but just keep me posted and we'll have a chat.
	Okay. All right, man.
	Thanks for the call. I really do appreciate it.
	And if you sort this other thing out, the portal thing could be cool.
	So, anyway, we'll talk to you soon.
	Thank you so much. And do we have anybody else with a last yearning burning before we close up shop for this side of Christmas?
	Anybody on the chat?
	Alright. Some people just joined as we're ending.
	I'll give them a second, last chance, if you want to say anything, questions in the chat window or crank up your microphone if you just joined.
	Sorry that you're parachuted onto the ship just as we come into the dock, but I can certainly take one more relatively quick question if you're around or would like to ask that.
	Sorry? Ah, okay.
	We have someone here who said, I have no microphone.
	Yes, we have no bananas.
	But perhaps he's typing something?
	Because he wouldn't say, I have no microphone, unless he had something he wanted to say, but was not saying it.
	We shall wait for a second or two.
	It doesn't look like he's coming back with anything.
	Okay, well, thank you so much, everybody, for a wonderful, wonderful show.
	Thank you so much to the callers, as always, for the rampant generosity and openness with which they lay themselves open to this examination.
	I know it's always an exciting challenge.

▲