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March 2, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:42:59

999 Sunday Call In Show March 2 2008

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	Okay, well, thank you everybody so much for joining Sunday, the 2nd of March, 2008.
	It's relatively easy, actually, as long as I can figure it out.
	If the day is before the 12th of the month, I get confused, because I don't know if it's the month or the day.
	Should I go into a lot about my problems with time, or should I just start the show?
	Okay, Christina is energetically signaling to me to start the damn show already.
	Boy, that just reminds me...
	Every show reminds me of our honeymoon.
	Anyway, so thank you everybody so much for joining.
	One or two items of business before we get started.
	Remember to start your topic engines so that we have fewer crickets in the actual show.
	But... So, the book offer, all four books, it's the extended version of Real-Time Relationships, On Truth, The Turin of Illusion, Universally Preferable Behavior, Irrational Proof of Secular Ethics, and The God of Atheists, so extended version of RTR, all available for $79 with shipping.
	Just go to the donate page at freedomainradio.com, donate $79 with a note saying, give me the books, bro, homie, and such will be done.
	And also please remember to visit for FDR Swag.
	I think it's available on the website.
	You can just go there and order t-shirts and hats with clever slogans.
	I'm in the cult.
	That kind of stuff. You can also create your own slogans and so on.
	I think it's freedominradio.spreadshirt.com as well.
	So you can do that. Of course the individual books are available.
	Audio... PDF and print.
	All the books are available so feel free to pick them up.
	And thank you everybody who dropped a little sugar my way towards the end of February, thus allowing me to stop consuming my toenails and working my way down to my toes for food.
	I really do appreciate that.
	And that's wonderful.
	Thank you to the people who signed up for subscriptions.
	That's the mere $20 a month, dare I say, about, what, 60, 70 cents a day?
	less than half the price of a cup of coffee, to help make the world a more sane and rational place.
	Because the work that we're doing here at Free Domain Radio, the participation and the conversation that you have to whatever degree you do, even if all you do is listen to the podcast and never do anything else, this is making the world a better place for you.
	There's more people who get exposed to rationality and empiricism and emotional maturity and intimacy and vulnerability and honesty and persistence and love.
	That makes the world a better place for you, right?
	So the donations which spread the word, which make other people happier, who knows?
	The money that you donate to Free Domain Radio might be enough to get advertisements out to meet the woman of your dreams, having already had her exposure to philosophy and rationality.
	So your donation could buy you love.
	It can buy you love.
	Thank you.
	The more people who are interested in philosophy, the more people you will be able to have rational and positive relationships with.
	So spreading the word takes money.
	It takes time.
	It takes effort.
	Of course, we have two employees now and one mistress, Queen Bodejia, overlord in the form of Christina.
	So 2.03 mouths to feed.
	And so your financial support is absolutely essential in terms of what we're doing here.
	So thank you again so much.
	And if you haven't donated, and this is podcast 999...
	I think it's about time.
	Don't you? For Podcast 1000.
	Shockingly, none of them were, Steph, if you could do the Ring Cycle set to FDR, that would be great.
	Or, in fact, any other musical renditions whatsoever were not...
	Anyway, sorry, can I just get a Kleenex there, sweetie?
	Just dab that away. Anyway, be strong.
	So we had this idea, basically, which was that people could record audio and video about what it is that they like about FDR and what it is that they dislike about FDR as well.
	It doesn't all have to be this hymn to the glory of what we do, and we're going to put that together as an audio and as a video, and I think that's a beautiful idea.
	I really do think it's a wonderful idea.
	So it's going to be a bunch of user stuff and then at the end of it it's going to be Christina saying anybody out there who could help Steph get back to a real job And then that would probably be the most emotional plea of all.
	Please, for the love of God, or at least send over a nurse who can sponge bathe him.
	So, there's lots of possibilities for Christina's heartfelt plea to the rest of the world.
	She also may have some heartfelt thanks, which is to say, basically, that if I wasn't talking to you all so much, who would I be talking to, honey?
	Who? Who? Right.
	So for her, I'm basically like a nymphomaniac and she wants me to go bang other people.
	So that is good for her and so she'll have probably quite a passionate speech that will completely discredit my marriage at the very end.
	So, the upshot of that is...
	Greg, can you just put the website address in the window here?
	So, what's happened is Greg and I have whipped up a tasty little souffle of a webpage which allows you...
	To upload your video testimony, your audio testimony, there's a comments field where you can go on for page after page if you just want to do text and don't want to upload anything.
	You can upload a Word document, whatever it is that you like.
	You can send to us and it would be great if you would answer a couple of questions too because I'd like to sort of scroll underneath people's testimony.
	Where they are in the podcast series, are they listening in order?
	I'd like to find those people who aren't listening in order.
	Well, sorry, that's for another time.
	But if you would like to, if you could please come by to www.freedomainradio.com forward slash FDR1K. I'll just say that again because there's no possibility of rewinding on an iPod.
	FreeDomainRadio.com forward slash FDR1K. All caps.
	FDR1K. And if you can answer the questions and you can upload two files, up to two files.
	So if you upload a video, that's great.
	If you just have audio or text and you would like to include a photograph of yourself, then you can upload the audio and you can upload a photo.
	So we're going to stitch that together.
	And I think it will be quite a lovely thing.
	I'm certainly looking forward to seeing people's feedback.
	And remember, you can always get a pink colander, put it on your head, and rant with a fair amount of...
	Camera-coated spittle at a camera as a tribute in terms of fairly accurately reproducing the tenor of the show as a whole.
	So, if you could do that, that would be fantastic.
	I'd really appreciate it. And that's it for the orders of business, unless there's anything else that I have forgotten, so I just had two brief things that I wanted to talk about this.
	Or about what's going on lately.
	Here's an interesting thing. Christina and I were just talking about this today.
	For those who are absolutely fascinated with the minor aches and pains of being over 40, I have for the past seven months or so had a problem with my shoulder.
	It's sort of around the top left of my My shoulder blade, the muscle was just continually tensing up and I couldn't figure out why.
	So I went to get massages and I went to get ultrasound treatments and so on.
	And it got better and it got worse and it got better and it got worse and so on.
	So finally, I went to the doctor for the third time and sort of said, okay, look, I need to get an ultrasound.
	I need to get an MRI. I need to get an x-ray.
	Like, I need to know what's going on here because I couldn't figure out whether resting it was getting better or worse.
	So we went and got all of this stuff done.
	And the doctor gave me some pills for muscle relaxant pills and so on.
	So sorry that my head was missing from the video for some of them.
	But a nice pillow on the desk now to help with that.
	So, we went through all of this and went to get the x-rays and the ultrasound, went back to the doctor, and the doctor said, well, you know, you've got a stretcher, you've got some calcification.
	What was the phrase?
	Do you remember? Tendinopathy and calcification of a ligament, I think it was.
	A muscle, thank you. And he's like, but I can give you muscle relaxants and there's no side effects and you can keep taking them and so on.
	And I thought, well, gee, the permanent medical solution doesn't really appeal to me.
	So we kept asking questions and kept asking questions and kept asking questions.
	And the upshot of it, well, what came out of it?
	Was that he finally said, well, it's not because I said my shoulder, my shoulder, my shoulder.
	He said, it's not your shoulder. That's not the problem.
	The problem is your bicep.
	Right? And I said, well, what do you mean the problem is my bicep?
	I just have little girly arms.
	It's not my fault. Then after Christina talked me down, he said, well, that's where the pull is.
	That's where the calcification is occurring.
	So it's got nothing to do with your shoulder.
	So basically what was happening was that because I had pulled some horrible deep tendon in my armpit, probably from excessive flop sweating, not that I need to tell anybody who's seen the videos.
	So it was pulling on my shoulder.
	My shoulder was compensating by pulling back up.
	And that's why the shoulder muscle was conceded.
	So basically what happened is after seven months of off and on discomfort in this area, I have been stretching for like 20 minutes a day and it is completely and totally healed without medication.
	It is like completely back to normal.
	Christina and I have been playing an hour of squash every day and it's been fantastic.
	So we were talking about this and she says, well, that's medicine, right?
	That's medicine. They want you to come back.
	They want you to do more doctor's visits and they want to give you medication and so on.
	And I said, but that's not medication.
	Sorry, that's not medicine.
	That's socialism. And that is an entirely different kind of species, right?
	Because if I keep going back for the doctor and the doctor says, oh, you still have a problem, well, here's the prescription, then he gets to bill the government slash the taxpayers for a visit, and of course, if he can prescribe medication, that's the fastest thing.
	But it really is amazing that we had to keep pestering him and pestering him to finally find out where the actual problem was.
	He certainly didn't volunteer the information.
	And again, maybe he was just distracted, maybe he was just busy, but after seven months of dealing with socialized medicine on this issue, I just thought it was quite interesting.
	So keep your wits about you when talking to doctors and really, really, really consistently and constantly try to make sure that you get as much information as possible.
	So this is the hell of socialized medicine, clearly in a DRO situation.
	This would have been something that would have been solved, I think, much more rapidly.
	So anyway, that was one thing.
	Now the second thing is that the great philosopher Joe the Supernanny is just not acceptable.
	It's just not acceptable behavior.
	And Supernanny has given what I think is the first independent verification of the DFU theory, which was quite exciting.
	So last night I had a very exciting conversation with Aaron.
	I'm going to post that at some point.
	And this conversation that I had with Aaron was very, very liberating for me.
	Very exciting, very thrilling, very liberating.
	I've been feeling fantastic ever since last night.
	Well, not that I normally don't feel quite happy, but I just feel extra special wonderful, so thanks to him again.
	And so I couldn't sleep.
	So I was down watching a Supernanny and having a bowl of cereal.
	And there was a family that was being talked about in Supernanny, where the son was five years old, and was a real, very aggressive kid, would hit his mother, would scratch his mother, he was a real scratcher, to the point where her hands were covered with scratches, to the point where he drew blood.
	And she was just... He would do this in public.
	He would do this at playdates and so on.
	So a very violent and aggressive child.
	And as it turns out, to make a long story relatively, for me, short-ish, the issue was that...
	Well, one of the issues was that the parents weren't happy with each other and weren't getting along.
	But the father... Was physically violent with the child.
	Now, the only thing that we saw in the actual show was that the son was sitting on his younger sister, who was like three or whatever, and the father sort of muscled in and pushed the kid off, his son off his daughter, and the son just sort of lay on the ground crying.
	Now, he didn't punch him or even spank him, but it pushed him really hard, imposing his sort of physical might.
	It turns out...
	That the mother knew this violent streak within the father or this cruel or abusive streak within the father.
	And so what happened was she would consistently intervene and be the sort of disciplinarian because she was afraid of the father's disciplinarian habits or disciplinary habits that they would turn violent and ugly and destructive and so on.
	So, what happened was she kept hiding bad things that the boy had done, which of course left him to be sort of a wolf child and so on.
	And this, of course, the child was acting out a lot of rage against the mom because the mom not only wasn't protecting him from his father...
	But also had had another child with the same man after.
	Now, of course, the kid was five, so it was very likely that he was done already.
	It was no, there's not going to be any solution that's available for him.
	But what I thought was really interesting, what I thought was really interesting and really, really struck me I mean, this is a woman who is recognized as a child expert, is very well educated, is very experienced, and has her own show.
	And Lord knows, I have to go with the claim that having your own show makes you an expert, for obvious reasons.
	But she said, when she sat down with the family, she said to the father the following, which I thought was just fascinating.
	She said... If you continue to muscle your son to use your physical strength your size as a disciplinary tool you will have no relationship with your son and when your son grows up he's not going to want to have anything to do with you.
	And, I mean, my Weedabix went halfway across the room.
	I was just stunned that this had actually been talked about on national television in prime time.
	That even mild physical...
	Muscling from father to son was said by one of the preeminent experts on child development and parenting was said to be grounds for a defu.
	I mean, that's shocking to me that this would be talked about.
	I just was amazed.
	To me, this is like watershed, epoch, transitioning moment, and it comes from Supernanny, of all places.
	That, yeah, I mean, who knew that so much wisdom could have come out of somebody whose eyes are so white-based and who is essentially shaped like a fridge box.
	But an amazing woman and a very warm-hearted and wonderful woman, great spirit.
	And I just thought that was astounding.
	If you continue to use your physical size and strength to discipline your son, you will have no relationship with him and he will want to have nothing to do with you when he grows up.
	Astounding. And she's not somebody who, like, it wasn't said as a threat.
	She's actually, I mean, she's a very warm and empathetic and powerful woman.
	And I didn't get at all the sense that it was spoken of as a threat.
	But I just wanted to point out that the ice that we have carving our way through for the past couple of years, it looks like some people may be catching up.
	So I think that is beyond great.
	So that was my sort of two introductory bits of information or thought.
	But from there, I just wanted to open it up to the magnificent, fine, wonderful, generous, amazing, beautiful listeners.
	Comments, questions, issues, problems, and movie reviews as well.
	Go ahead. Have you thought about starting up a therapist referral service through FDR? Well, we have had a number of requests for that, but no.
	We haven't seriously thought about it.
	Certainly, if somebody was in the Toronto area and asked Christina, I'm sure she would be happy to provide the name of a good therapist.
	Okay, I was just curious.
	All right. Hello, Steph. Hello.
	Oh, Carl here. Hey, how's it going?
	Good. How are you doing? I'm just fine.
	Thank you. Good. I just thought I'd make a couple of comments about self-trust because I'm finding it to be a very liberating thing.
	And of course, you've had the graduation podcasts and so forth.
	Right. We were talking with Nate a few days ago about finding anxiety about leaving work and needing a job and income.
	I'm in a similar situation.
	I'm not crazy about my job.
	I have anxiety. I think, oh, I don't like this job.
	Oh, but I can't leave because I need the paycheck.
	It goes around in circles.
	I'm just starting to really trust myself.
	I know that we all reach a threshold at a certain point.
	And I just find that when I reach that threshold, it becomes just obvious, emotionally obvious, that something needs to be done and I do it.
	And just to trust my future self, you know, to do that when the time comes, it relieves a lot of anxiety and I can relax and accept the present situation as it is and trust that I'll be able to do the right thing when the time comes.
	Well, I mean, I think that's an excellent point.
	And it certainly has been my experience that things that I have done sometimes make no sense whatsoever until literally five years later, when I look back and go, oh, that's why I was doing all of that.
	And I think that comes partly from the fact that a lot of us, though not all of us, of course, have survived particularly unpleasant or difficult childhoods.
	And if we have survived those kinds of things, clearly we didn't have knowledge of of philosophy and psychology when we were navigating those treacherous and bloody waters.
	And the fact that we made it through, I think, should give us an enormous amount of self-trust that we will do the right thing at the right time and that we can relax and let the current take us, right?
	What I call the ecosystem, right?
	The ecosystem of individuality or personality.
	That we can let the current take us a little bit and be more curious about the journey rather than controlling the journey, which is, of course, the great temptation of individuation, right?
	It's now I'm in full control of my destiny, and of course, all of this stuff has to be navigated and negotiated with a multiplicity of feedback from other people and from different aspects of ourselves.
	So I think that the self-trust is very interesting, and self-trust is really around RTR with yourself, right?
	So if you have an impulse, like, oh my god, I've got to leave this job, I've got to get out, I've got to Then say, well, I wonder why I have this feeling and I wonder why it's so strong and just be curious, right?
	And that can... And I've sort of found that when I relax into things and try to be more accepting of the flow as well as the will of life, and the will of life is very important, what happens is I actually become a different kind of person to interact with, and that brings different people into my life, if that makes any sense. So if you're relaxed and enjoying who you are, then it is more likely that other people who are the same way will want to spend time with you, and we don't know where that can open up different opportunities in life.
	So if you are sort of relaxed and happy but looking for new opportunities, then those new opportunities will be much more likely to come up in your life rather than if you're like, you know, I've got to get off this burning ship, you know, and dive into the water and so on.
	But that is not a particularly inviting space for other people to come into your life and help you with whatever is going to be coming next.
	So I hope that makes some kind of sense.
	But I think it is a very important thing to get used to.
	Yeah, I found the self-trust also had to do with the people around me, and, you know, maybe the people I work with aren't all the most fascinating people in the world, but I'm finding when I relax and accept the situation as it is, and also trust myself that, well, I'll more or less be able to deal with them the way I should, you know.
	Then suddenly I'm finding people, I say hello to people I must be doing in a different way because they're saying, oh, hi, you know, it's like it's kind of a new positive energy that just by changing my mental attitude, it seems to open up, you know, some kind of a little bit more benevolence with other people too.
	Well, I think that's true.
	And this is one of the reasons why I have spent the last, honestly, the last few hundred, though not the next couple of podcasts, pounding so much on the personal.
	because after we've accumulated all of this knowledge about how to really help people and how a voluntary and non-coercive Society can really flourish.
	In fact, there's no other way that it can flourish.
	What I really want to get is that people should not imagine that the accumulation of knowledge is going to be enough to change people's minds.
	The accumulation of knowledge about a state of society, about psychology, about philosophy, about economics, whatever, that is not going to be enough to change anyone's mind.
	And the way that we change people is, honestly, it is 90% attitude and 10% knowledge.
	And so we need the knowledge, for sure, but then we need to change people through invitation, not through intellectual assault, so to speak.
	Right, or lecturing.
	Or lecturing, yeah, which is the same sort of thing.
	You have to have something...
	That other people want called happiness, right?
	So the way that you change people is you are happy and then if they ask you or they seem impressed or they seem influenced by your positivity, then they will ask you how you do it, right?
	So if you've lost 100 pounds, then the other people who are overweight around you will ask you how you did it.
	But lecturing them about weight while you're still overweight and how to lose weight while you're still overweight...
	We'll have no credibility whatsoever.
	And I've talked about this stuff before, but that's why I really focus on being calm and at peace and happy with who you are and passionate about what you're doing.
	And that joy will transmit itself to other people.
	And that, of course, has been my strategy, so to speak.
	I mean, it's genuine, but that's been my approach, that I have been quite energetic and positive.
	And that's what I think has opened up this conversation for a lot of people.
	And that's what we need to share with other people.
	We need to share our joy with other people.
	And the other thing, too, is that when you're talking with somebody, as you know, like 90% of communication is nonverbal.
	When you're talking with somebody, if you are genuinely concerned with making them happier, they will get that in their gut and they will be very open to listening to you.
	If they feel that you're frustrated because the world isn't the way you want it and you need them to change to reduce your anxiety, then they will sense that and be completely unreceptive to you.
	So there is a Zen in talking to people and having them accept the beliefs that you have.
	You have to practice it and you have to, have to, have to be in it to make them happier.
	Yeah, it's funny that you should say all that because I've been recently, you know, noticing I'm reading less and less.
	I hope to get back to it at some point, but I'm realizing that my motivation right now is to apply what I know and share it with people and talk to them.
	So it's absolutely, I virtually stopped reading my books and I had anxiety about that, but then I released that anxiety because I'm realizing, oh yeah, of course, that's not what I need to do now.
	And so I'm shifting to working on relationships.
	And improving those.
	And that's been very fruitful.
	Also, the frustration of dealing with people.
	I used to walk around with a kind of quiet rage.
	It would turn to anger, maybe if I'm driving in the traffic or whatever.
	But just kind of a simmering low rage.
	And that kind of has disappeared.
	There's this almost ecstasy of calm you can get when you really release these things and relax.
	That's really wonderful.
	And people sense the difference.
	No, they really do.
	They really do. And it's almost like the way the bats don't really have very good eyes, but they navigate with sonar.
	Our social world, which is the world that is the most influential to our happiness after physical health, but our social world is navigated by the sort of subsonic happiness radar that we put out.
	And yeah, if we are quietly angry, then people who are not angry will tend to steer clear of us, right?
	And the people who are also angry will tend to, as we know, cluster to us, right?
	We create – in society, we create who we are deep down.
	We recreate it.
	It's inescapable.
	And so it tends to be self-reinforcing, which is why people can get stuck in this broken record loop or this scratched record loop of negativity.
	There was a guy who posted on the boards, you know, how is it that we deal with the frustration of the world – We have the answers for how to make the world happy, but...
	Ah! Nobody's listening, so how can we get rid of that frustration?
	And of course, I would ask somebody like that, that if you have the secret as to how to be happy, why are you more frustrated?
	That's sort of counterintuitive, right?
	And so my thing is, well, look, we have this community, we have this conversation, we have the internet, we have access to staggering amounts of communication tools that let us completely bypass the media.
	We can have these conference calls essentially for free.
	And we have ways of disseminating truth and virtue and so on in ways undreamed of by the past.
	I also want to take people who are frustrated with the modern world.
	It's like I'd love to give them a week in the year 1150 or something.
	Well, look, if you feel that the modern world is inimical to your freedom and so on, then go back to the Roman Empire when the average life expectancy was 22.
	and see what happens when you get a toothache.
	There's so much to be enormously happy and pleased about.
	Not only do we have these incredible new post-Gutenberg revolutionary communication tools, but I think with all due non-humility, I think that we are the people who are making the best use of it.
	And so I think that I would rather be here than in Encapistan because all of the glory accrues to us here.
	I would rather be the guy who discovers the cure for polio than the guy who simply injects the cure for polio.
	There's more glory, I think, in this fight than there will be even in what comes in the future.
	So I think that I myself would not want to be in the past.
	I myself would not want to be in the future.
	I know I've gone through phases of yearning for that.
	But I think we are making the best use of the best tools that have ever existed in history.
	And I think that we have an enormous amount to be proud about, to be happy about, and to be satisfied with.
	Yeah, it's exciting to feel like one is at the forefront of really applying these ideas.
	I mean, we've had Rand and Rothbard and all these great thinkers who've contributed wonderful things, but to actually have the methodology and the technology Of improving interpersonal relationships to the point where you can really spread ideas and just also spread goodwill at the same time, I think is great. Yeah, and we're just a step, right?
	I mean, what we're doing here is then some super genius will come along and, you know, blow all...
	It's just a step in the way that we...
	It's a baton that's handed forward, right?
	I mean, we're not at the end.
	We're just a step forward.
	And that is just...
	I mean, to have that privilege, to be part of that conversation...
	I mean, it's an incredible... I can't even tell you just what an incredible privilege it is for me in this community to be part of that conversation and...
	To be part of that chain, right?
	Because the world moves forward through the extraordinary will and dedication of individuals, not through the inertia of the masses and not through the distractions of the media, but through the committed thought and integrity of particular individuals.
	And we have a group of amazing individuals here that I am just unbelievably proud to be a part of.
	And if we can't find satisfaction in that, then I think that the word satisfaction has to be struck from the dictionary.
	Right. Yeah, I think I used to be much more afraid of this because it's so different than the way other people think and people disapprove of you and relationships can get weird.
	And now I'm just, again, with the self-trust a little bit more, I'm kind of excited to explore and, well, you just find out.
	I was at work and I was having more positive interactions with just about everybody.
	And that was intense. And then with this kind of change of attitude.
	And then there was one person who really just weirds me out.
	And I had just a really bizarre interaction with that person, which was very negative.
	But, oh, crap, you know.
	But then that was information.
	I was like, okay, right.
	That person, I remember, I do not want to interact with.
	And it was just a certainty. So that was, even the negative part was helpful.
	Right, right, right.
	And was there anything else that you – I mean, I could talk about this all day, but there may be other people queued up.
	Was there anything else that you wanted to talk about with this topic?
	I think it's fantastic. And, of course, you have to keep us updated on your dating life because there is, frankly, a flurry of dating that is occurring in the community, which is excellent because, like the Borg, we need to respawn.
	And so this is all good.
	Right. Well, I certainly will.
	Okay. Well, thanks very much.
	I appreciate that.
	Okay. So whoever has a question or a comment or issue next, feel free to step up to the mic.
	It is not electrified.
	And don't feel stressed. If people don't ask, I can sit here for five minutes.
	No problem. I'm just pacing back and forth.
	We can sit here for five minutes while people collect their thoughts.
	thoughts.
	Don't feel any anxiety.
	You can just edit this crap out, right?
	Steph?
	This is Carl again. Since you mentioned dating life, I figure I'm probably not going to be meeting somebody for a little while, but I'm making such high-quality friendships with the new people I'm meeting on FDR. I feel like I'm really getting spoiled in a good way.
	That if I meet somebody and I can't establish this kind of openness and honest communication about ideas and feelings, that I'll be at least warned away from relationships that might be tempting on the surface, but will divert me from having integrity or honesty or whatever, that I would just kind of abandon all my other interests just to...
	I think that's right.
	One of the patented inoculations of philosophy is called Hot Immunity.
	And it means that you're immune to hotties.
	And that, of course, is really, really, really helpful.
	So if anybody sashays past wearing a tool belt and a felt cap, it is just easier to sort of say, hey, nice piece of meat doesn't mean I have to buy it.
	And that, of course, is a very positive thing.
	I would also say, of course, that in developing a more positive way of interacting with people in this conversation, it means that You are inevitably leading yourself towards that in a romantic way.
	Because if you're happy with or used to or stuck in negative or dysfunctional relationships, then the happy people won't see you.
	You don't show up on their radar, right?
	But the happier that you get, it's like you can't get to that without practicing, which is why the board and the community and so on is such a good idea.
	Right. Somebody had a question that says, how can you avoid talking to people you don't want to associate with at work where you kind of have to?
	Well, that's a bit of a false dichotomy and perhaps you could explain it a little bit more.
	You can't avoid something you have to do.
	We all have to die. How do you avoid dying when you have to?
	There are a number of things that I have done.
	There's the old Howie Mandel trick of putting a rubber glove on your head so you can still breathe through your mouth but the nose is inside the rubber glove and what you do is you inhale through your mouth and you exhale through your nose and what that does is it inflates the rubber glove and you get these big five, I guess four fingers and a thumb, these antlers or spikes coming up.
	I challenge anybody to continue a meeting with you when you're doing that.
	That will certainly help.
	Keep people away. That's not mine.
	But anyway, this is just possible ways of doing it.
	This is just part of the notes that I'm coming up for a YouTube video.
	My most popular YouTube video is job interview skills.
	And so I also wanted to talk about ways to avoid getting a job done.
	Yeah, we got an echo. So...
	So, did he write any more about that?
	Yeah, Sisselpak, you can...
	Does he have a mic? If you, Sisselpak, or your friend Mike can speak, that'd be great.
	Oh, it can't seem to get it working.
	Okay. I'll just throw a few, I don't know, sky flares up and we'll see if we can see the shape of the landscape.
	But in general, the way of associating with people that you don't really like or who are difficult or unpleasant to associate with is...
	Well, there's lots of options that you have, right?
	You can change your job.
	You can become self-employed.
	You can try to get yourself assigned to projects or work with people who are more positive.
	And I've done some other podcasts.
	If you go to the podcast categorization or archive system at freedomainradio.com forward slash podcasts.html and look for the business ones, there are some other tips on how to work with that.
	I've had a podcast topic for donkey's years on my list, which is how to deal with irrational people and administrators and so on in high school, which of course is a really non-optional or non-voluntary environment.
	But there is no magic. There is no magic.
	You have to – I mean there's sort of three layers of things that you can do.
	One is to work on yourself and your own happiness and positivity because you never know until you change your side of the equation.
	You never know the degree to which your negativity is creating.
	The situations that you are having a problem with.
	And I've mentioned this before, but it was a fairly good way of explaining it.
	But I was chatting with a guy, I guess about two months ago, and he was saying, you know, would you kill someone for $10,000?
	And I said, good God, no. Much less than that.
	But no, I said $10,000, and I said no.
	And he said, well, I bet you most people would, because every time I talk to someone and ask them this question, They say, yes, I will kill someone for $10,000.
	And I said, well, I bet you if I asked the question, everybody would say no, right?
	Because he said, well, I would kill someone himself.
	I would kill someone for $10,000.
	So I said, the fact that you'd be willing to kill someone for $10,000 completely influences how you ask the question and completely influences how people will answer it.
	Because most people, as we know from the Milgram experiments, just read the social cues and do whatever is the least dangerous, right?
	So this guy is 6'4 and pretty rough looking, and so when he says, I'd kill someone for 10,000, would you?
	I was like, yeah, okay.
	Right? Or something like that.
	I know, but that's because you're protected by me, sweetie.
	So he wouldn't seem rough looking to you, but rather a challenge for your superhero BCF to take down.
	Does that make sense? You know, like the costume we had on last night with the tights and the Anyway, we'll come back to that certainly soon.
	But... So you really want to be as positive as possible and that way you can at least eliminate the possibility that your own negativity is contributing to the outcome.
	As Carl said, you know, he's very positive and then there's one guy who's just, you know, a dick, so to speak, or really difficult or negative and you can't do anything to affect that interaction.
	So when you've become positive yourself, what happens is you send out this sonar and you map the environment.
	So you find the people who are like flags, right?
	Any way the wind blows. And if you become positive, they will respond with positivity.
	And then you'll find the people who are like the rocks under the bay, right?
	So you find, okay, well, I can calm the waters, but I can't move the rocks, right?
	So I can sail with positivity and interact more beneficially with people.
	But then there are people that I can't do that with at all.
	And then you try and find ways to avoid those people.
	If it's impossible to avoid those people in your environment and they end up having a lot of power over you and they end up really interfering with you, then you just have to leave.
	You just have to leave and find some other occupation because life is very short.
	And with your newfound skills of positivity, see this is the amazing thing.
	If you're a negative person and you go for a job interview, you will be hired by a negative boss.
	That is the ineradicable fundamental equation of life.
	That we create in our environment who we are deep down, which is why we have to work so deep from here.
	So if you were a negative person but now you're a positive person, then you've kind of changed your resume.
	You kind of sold yourself as one person and were hired for being that person and now you're being a positive person.
	So I can guarantee you that with your newfound positivity, if you go into a job interview as a positive person for your next job, then the negative boss won't have anything to do with you and the positive boss will grab to you like a drowning man to a piece of bark.
	So, this is always the challenge that we face when we learn some new fundamental truth, that the environment we have shaped for ourselves, the ecosystem of our entire social and romantic and familial and professional environments, that we made all of that, all of those choices, we embedded ourselves in our environments when we were fundamentally different people.
	So, how do we evolve when we change our fundamental perceptions or approaches to things?
	Well, we can alter some things about our environment, but fundamentally we chose that environment when we were in some ways the complete opposite of who we are, right?
	So we're like a polar bear who goes from the Arctic to the equator.
	Well, you better shed that fur pretty damn quick, right?
	Or vice versa, you better grow it.
	So... That, of course, is the challenge.
	They'll not even want to hire you.
	So that would sort of be my suggestion.
	Change yourself as much as you can.
	Be more positive in your interactions.
	If the rocks that remain are too tricky to navigate around, then you simply have to change your environment knowing for sure that your new environment will be radically different from your existing environment.
	Why? Because you are.
	So that was it for my spiel.
	I hope that that has helped.
	And we cast the net of silence wide to snare another listener.
	Hello? Oh dear.
	I heard something!
	Good, that wasn't just me, right?
	I'm never sure when the MIGO system breaks through.
	Somebody's trying to talk.
	Help. I'm trapped under my car.
	Sorry, say again? Can you hear me?
	I sure can. If you could crank it up just a tad, that would be excellent.
	Steph, I just wanted to tell you how sexy you are and how great your coding is.
	I used your programs to raise the dead, and it worked.
	Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
	Sorry, try again. No.
	Okay, next. Hey Steph, I got a complaint.
	Go for it. FDR is ruining my salary prospects.
	I had an interview yesterday and an interview the day before and they're with companies that I just can't work for anymore.
	I'm sorry. Wait, wait, wait.
	Sorry. I have to interrupt you right at the beginning.
	Are you coming to me, of all people, and telling you that FDR is lowering your salary?
	Christina, would you like to leave the room for a moment?
	She's gently sobbing to herself.
	I'm sorry. The one-armed man says to the no-armed man, hey, I'm having trouble doing my shoelace up.
	Sorry. Go on. I can't.
	One was a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin, and I just talked with a guy, but there was just no way I could go forward with it, even though it would have been like $125,000.
	It was $125,000?
	Yeah. Is the job still available?
	Yeah. Because what I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of moving to a Mormon-based percentage of income donation system, and when I say donation, I mean extraction.
	So we actually, ladies and gentlemen, we have found the price of my principles, and it is something less than $125,000.
	But no, what was it that occurred for you in the interview that gave you this creepy feeling or whatever?
	Yeah. Well, the guy was expressing a lot of enthusiasm for the things that they do that I know were just wrong.
	I mean, they support chasing down illegal immigrants and support, you know, the war on drugs.
	And he's all enthusiastic about it.
	And I'm looking around the room in Starbucks, and I was kind of embarrassed to be sitting with this guy.
	But nobody at Starbucks was listening anyway.
	Right. I'm sorry to hear that.
	I really am. Of course, Lockheed Martin, I've done some work for Bell and also for Boeing in my career.
	And Bell, because it was originally a military organization and then was a government monopoly for many, many, many years and many decades in Canada.
	And I worked with them in the 90s and the culture was just rat poison, the entire culture.
	And Boeing, of course, has won Lockheed Martin, some of the biggest US military contractors, their hoovering up into the imperialistic military state, right?
	The military-industrial complex has a massive, massive effect on their capacity to morally process reality, right?
	Because when you've been bought and paid for and you sold your soul for this kind of violence or supporting this kind of violence...
	It's, I mean, you simply can't look at anything directly, right?
	You can't look at anything straight on, right?
	Because you live in this weird Enter the Dragon Funhouse mirror kaleidoscope of moral lies, so it's really, really hard.
	Now, you can work for these companies if you have moral clarity and you can stomach the culture or maybe it's, you know, something where you don't touch any of that kind of stuff.
	It's not impossible, but the vast majority of people simply take the money and then have to make up all these stories as to...
	Why what they're doing is moral, so it sounds like you have dodged a bit of a bullet there, though I am really, really sorry that it has to be that kind of choice for us at the moment.
	Well, it's cut down on people I can use as my references, too, because I shunned one of my co-workers last month when he forced his kid to join the Air Force.
	And that was after me talking with him for over a year and him agreeing that being in the armed services was slavery and immoral.
	And then he got his kid into it and I said, well, you know, don't talk to me anymore unless it's something directly about work.
	And he tries to initiate conversations all the time and I just don't talk with him.
	Sorry to interrupt. I'm a little bit confused about how he would force his kid to join the military.
	Well, he didn't make his kids sign it online, but he's been putting pressure on them year after year, telling them about how all of his problems would be solved with his wife and his kids if he would just join and, you know...
	Just things that he knows are wrong.
	And I've told him and discussed with him that they're wrong.
	But he gets his kid into this anyway.
	But he knows...
	I know that it's slavery.
	He knows that it's slavery.
	And he doesn't have any problem getting his kid into being a slave.
	I mean, a complete slave.
	That's what being in armed forces is.
	Well, but it's not...
	You're more of a murderer than a slave, right?
	I mean, you're... It's voluntary in the way that taxation isn't, right?
	Yes, there's no draft, so yes, it is voluntary.
	Right, so I would say that slave is not hitman, murderer, or so on.
	That would be where I would go with that, more so than to slave.
	But I mean, that may be splitting hairs to some degree.
	Was this guy ex-military as well?
	Yes. And another one of my co-workers that was cheering him on and talking with his son and getting him to do that, I told that co-worker the same thing, too.
	Don't talk to me anymore.
	So, I've got a couple people I can use as references, but most of them I can't.
	Well, if it's any consolation, you're welcome to put me down as a reference and I will talk about what an impeccable anarchist you are.
	Yeah, they'll love the anarchist part.
	Excellent. You know, these security packages too, you can't have ever talked to a psychologist or a psychiatrist or even a counselor.
	Is that right?
	That's right. Because apparently if you have something to talk to them about, then you're a security risk.
	Yes, of course, because there would be doctor-patient confidentiality there as well, right?
	Plus, they don't want people who are introspective, right?
	Because then you can get a conscience accidentally.
	You just don't grow a conscience overnight, huh?
	No, you have to, I mean, if you're interested in your own inner processes, that means that you have a dangerous capacity to develop empathy, and thus a conscience, and thus to be able to put what you're doing in a moral context.
	That's not particularly good for that, right?
	Yeah, and the second interview that I had, I was talking with a guy, and I started asking him about How he liked his job and he started talking about his personal life and how he's in the middle of a divorce and he's living with his girlfriend and his ex-wife is crazy and they're trying to sell the house.
	I said you know Did this guy bring this on himself because of the job?
	Or did the job have something to do with it?
	And by the end of the interview, I was pretty convinced that it was just the culture and that atmosphere that he worked in that was a big contributor to his personal problems.
	Right. And of course, what kind of person will go into his personal difficulties with a complete stranger?
	Well, yeah, I mean, some kind of guy who needs to be a security risk and talk to a psychologist instead.
	Right, right.
	And what are the other prospects?
	We're not quite hiring at FDR yet though.
	Of course, I'd love to airlift out.
	Yeah, because I get lots of comments just by the by.
	Lots of comments. People say, well, it's fine for you.
	You've got FDR, but I still have to earn an income.
	And it's like, well, yeah, but that didn't come out of nowhere.
	It came out of taking and making different choices.
	So are there any other things floating around as prospects?
	Well, no, I applied to 50 other jobs.
	My last day is Tuesday, so we'll just see what this week brings.
	Right, right. Okay.
	Yeah, 50. Well, I mean, look, if there's anything I can do, I mean, I'd be happy to look at your resume.
	If you would like any kind of feedback, you may already have gotten some of that.
	But, I mean, I've looked at, I don't know, thousands of resumes in my life and hired hundreds of people.
	So, if there's anything I can do, I certainly would be happy to help.
	Okay. Good talking with you.
	Yeah, keep us posted.
	And I know it's a tricky pass, but if it was the right thing for you to do to take these jobs, I think you can trust that you'd want to take these jobs.
	So the fact that you don't is entirely right.
	And sometimes you do have to walk away from a sick amount of money to get to a better place, right?
	After I was involved, or I guess, in one of the leads in selling the company that I'd founded with my brother, oh, man, I mean, this company from the States bought it out, and I'd already left at this point, and I was working on The God of Atheists, and they wanted me to come back, and they said, you know, we're not going to do this deal unless you're sitting right there in the captain's chair or whatever, right?
	And I'm like, ooh, Star Trek metaphors, I'm in.
	No, wait, sorry. And...
	And I said, well, I'm working on a book, so I'm certainly not available full-time.
	I could do three days a week maybe.
	They said, okay, well, we'll pay $150,000 and give you all of this stuff in terms of stock options for you to come back and work for three days a week.
	And I was like, that's seriously tempting, right?
	Because that could have gone on for a long time.
	That's seriously tempting.
	But what I wanted to do was to make sure that there was a possibility of negotiating with them.
	So I started negotiating with them, not to raise my salary because I don't think you should always ask for more if what you feel you're getting is fair.
	But to talk about different ways of structuring the stock options and so on.
	And I said, I'll even take a reduction in salary to get more stocks because I found that to be much more lucrative in the past and so on.
	And they just flatly refused to negotiate, right?
	And that means that they lacked empathy, that they lacked the capacity to give back and forth.
	And what that meant was that there's no way that they would stick to three days a week.
	So I just knew where that was heading.
	And so I just walked away from it and ended up...
	Through that process, right?
	I mean, these are all ridiculous things, right?
	There's no coincidence that you can predict, right?
	But because of that, I ended up staying where I was staying, which meant I met Christina, which meant that I ended up not having to work again.
	Okay, so I hadn't thought of that before.
	Failure to negotiate means lack of empathy.
	Yeah, I mean, because they want to set the terms, and if they don't understand that you also want to set the terms, particularly, I mean, you don't negotiate it when you're getting a job flipping burgers, but at an executive level, you have to negotiate.
	To me, I've always done that when I get a job, because I need to know whether or not they can give and take, right?
	Whether or not they can understand that I have needs and preferences that they will need to accommodate, just as they have needs and preferences that I need to accommodate.
	And I've not taken jobs.
	And then in the last instance, I guess about seven or eight months ago now, no, a year ago now, when I was looking for a job after I left my last company before I started FDR full-time.
	A year and a half. I had two job offers on the table and one of them was for – with a company where the guy said – because he was young, right?
	So young people Google, right?
	Google you, right? So he Googled me and he found my website and so on and he really, really heavily cross-examined me on my political beliefs and whether they would influence my job or whatever, whatever, right?
	And I found that he just could not listen in a positive manner to what it is that I was saying.
	I certainly wasn't asking him to agree with me off the bat, but sort of saying here's where the ideas come from.
	How did you pick that up?
	Was he interrupting you when you were talking?
	Sorry, did you just interrupt me?
	I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
	Yeah, it made me crazy!
	Well, no, what happened was I could...
	You can smell this, right?
	I could see him getting tense.
	And I could see him getting tense.
	And we were at a...
	At a sushi place having dinner, going over the way that the deal might work if we worked together.
	And he got really tense.
	And of course, I was long enough in the conversation to know that this meant that if he accepted this truth, it was going to have calamitous effects to all his other relationships and so on.
	But he also wouldn't let the topic go, right?
	So I just said, well, it's private.
	It's like, yeah, but I need to sort of know how is it that you could justify this stuff even to yourself and blah, blah, blah.
	So he couldn't let the topic go, but neither could he listen because he got too tense.
	And so that meant that it was going to get into a weird kind of thing where he couldn't stop picking at the scab, but he also couldn't let it heal, but he also couldn't, right?
	So that said a lot to me about that.
	And so I ended up going with this other company where, in a strange way, things worked out much better.
	So in terms of like it was only there for six or seven months, but it was a better situation all around.
	Well, tomorrow's interview is going to be with a company in Salt Lake City, and I live in Virginia, so if there's any FDRs out there in Salt Lake City, let me know.
	Excellent. Excellent.
	Well, hopefully you're not going to be passing by stacks of Mormons piled up like cordwood.
	Oh, God. I don't know.
	I've never been in Utah. Dress black.
	I hear that's the way to go.
	Well, thanks very much. Do keep us posted.
	And again, if there's anything that I can do, I'd be more than happy to.
	I know that philosophy can be a bit of a hit, but it's definitely...
	You know, to hit like quitting smoking is a hit, right?
	I mean, it's tough, but it's much, much better in the long run.
	Yeah. Cool.
	Thanks. All right.
	Shockingly, there's a span of silence which anybody can fill who has a mind to.
	I have a question about references.
	Hello? Hello?
	Hello. Can you hear me?
	I sure can. Can you hear me?
	Yes, you're pretty quiet though.
	I do not know how to fix that.
	Is this better? I think you just did.
	If you keep talking, Skype cranks up the volume, so you're fine.
	Sorry, go ahead. I just had to swallow my mic.
	What I was wondering is, I was listening to a podcast about predicting the downfall of the state, and some of the, I guess, conclusions that you came to were that The downfall can be predicted because people, everybody thinks that the state's going to fall in 40 years, so everybody will start grabbing at resources and it will fall sooner and sooner and sooner.
	And I was just wondering if there was any way to know what people actually thought in the realms of politics, when they think the state's going to end and how you can use that to extrapolate a A timeline or something from that.
	Is there any way to use empirical evidence to look at, say, the Roman Empire or something and say, well, they produced, I don't know, a bunch of fiat money for X amount of years and after a while their GDP fell to some point and it collapsed their economy.
	I don't know. It's an excellent question, of course.
	It is, in a sense, the billion-dollar question, because if you knew that, you could short the U.S. currency or something and make a fortune.
	But no, because they're far too smart for that.
	That's why the Fed has stopped printing the...
	Stop reporting on the printing of the money supply, right?
	Because they know that if people have the information...
	I mean, the information about the economy that we get is all nonsense, right?
	I mean, it's like the stories of the five-year plans in Pravda under the Soviet Union.
	It's all complete nonsense, all made-up stuff, right?
	There's a place called Shadow Government Statistics.
	I don't know how good it is, but it claims to have a better view of the economy.
	But, I mean, just silly examples like the unemployment statistics don't count people who've stopped looking for work, right?
	Which is completely ridiculous, of course, right?
	Doesn't count people on welfare.
	Doesn't count people in jail.
	all of whom are involuntarily unemployed.
	So it's all just nonsense, right?
	So the more that the information is available, it's going to be kept to a very, very small circle of people who are then going to be able to make out like bandits at everybody else's expense.
	And I don't think that looking at any historical situation is going to be that helpful because there's just no situation where there's been this amount of credit, particularly international credit, that can stave off the inevitable for longer.
	So I wouldn't know of any historical parallels that could work.
	So I say like 20 to 40 years instead of like 150 to 180, say.
	Oh, well, I mean, for me, that is particularly with the US economy, that's just looking at the unfunded liabilities.
	And of course, you know, like a groundswell, almost like a tsunami, the demography is just going to smash apart the existing system, right?
	So as the baby boomers retire, there's simply no possibility that the existing system can continue.
	And we know that that's, I don't know, what is it, five years hence or whatever, when the big bulge really begins to retire.
	Right. Yeah.
	university education and of course it's more expensive in the states but particularly at state colleges and so on it's still relatively cheap compared to the total cost but so people have to stay in school longer and longer to get any kind of decent job I mean if you if you don't have a degree or at least a college degree it's it's tough right stuff so what's happening is if their people's adolescences are being extrapolated or extended in crazy crazy ways
	And of course, as the economy gets worse, the impulse or desire to stay in school gets better or gets more and more.
	I certainly know that one of the reasons I went back to do my master's was there was this horrible recession in the early 90s.
	And it was like, okay, so I can't get a job doing anything.
	So I'd rather spend a year in school reading great books and writing than trying to find some crappy job to survive.
	So what happens is there's this sort of adolescence and non-working aspect or underachieving aspect of people's lives get stretched longer and longer into their mid-20s and sometimes beyond.
	While at the same time, there's a massive increase in the requirements for the tax base because of people retiring and so on.
	And of course, the war in Iraq is, in my view, of course, it's the pillaging of the treasury, right?
	That's what it's for.
	And it's because people know that it can't last and there's no way to...
	There's no way to pillage the treasury that's better than going to war.
	I mean, it's just a massive, massive rape of the public purse, and that's why it's continuing, because it's got nothing to do with bringing democracy to anywhere.
	You know, the system's coming down, everybody knows it, and we just need to get as much money as possible.
	So, I think, if you just look at, I think it's last time I checked, which was about six months ago, unfunded liabilities in the United States were cooking at about 70 to 80 trillion dollars.
	That's just lunatic.
	That is just a sad, sick, lunatic amount of debt.
	And there's no way out of it now.
	There's just no possible way of reversing this situation.
	The logic of the system is going to have to crash.
	Public finances are the same as any other addiction, particularly violent addictions.
	It only changes... When you hit bottom, right?
	A drug addict does not stop doing drugs until he completely hits bottom.
	This is a classical addiction pattern, initial high followed by a slow decay followed by a sudden crash.
	And this is the same...
	It's exactly the same pattern with public finances.
	Anything that is based on compulsion and corruption is going to follow the same pattern.
	So... So it's just looking at the demographics and looking at the public debt and looking at the war, there's no other way out.
	And we know because despite the fact that these sort of pseudo-Republicans or pseudo-small government Republicans are in power, that the government expenditures are spiraling up immensely rapidly, even with the war and even with the prescription drug program and all the other boondoggles that have gone on to pillage the public purse.
	We simply know that as it gets faster in terms of the increase in public spending, it gets closer to the end, just like any other asymptotic thing.
	The faster it's rising, the closer it is to the end, and it's rising at an unbelievably accelerated rate at the moment, even with these small government Republicans in control of Congress and the White House.
	So yeah, that's the evidence that it's fairly close to the end, but of course it's impossible to predict, I think, with any real degree of accuracy because all the information is kept to a small group of people.
	So isn't there any way they could, I guess, fail to meet their obligations, like say these baby boomers get into retirement and then they just say, well, we don't have the money to pay you, sorry.
	Well, but it won't happen like that.
	In my view, again, there's six million different ways it could happen, but what happens is that you get an ever-escalating degree or attempt to extract money from an ever-dwindling supply of labor, right?
	So the people who are, say, 25, 26 to people in their late 50s who are working and so on and who in particular are salaried employees, they get hit with more and more and more taxes to the point where Laffer's curve, which has already kicked in to some degree, they get hit with more and more and more taxes to the point where You get fewer and fewer taxes and as the government finds itself unable to meet its obligations, what it does is it starts creating more bogeymen.
	So the next bogeymen will be people who aren't contributing their fair share and so on because the government blames its victims like all corrupt and evil organizations.
	So there will just be increasing attacks in terms of propaganda and force upon the general population.
	I mean, that's the way it always seems to work.
	But then there's just a crash, right?
	There's just a crash where the government can't pay its bills.
	What happens then, I think, is up to us.
	I mean, that's the way that I approach it.
	It could be completely grandiose, but I say what happens after that is up to us.
	Is there historically a period of time where people get together and start talking about things or does it immediately go from chaos into let's throw somebody like Putin in?
	Well, no.
	There was a crash in 1922 in Germany after the war, partly because of the Versailles Treaty and partly because of war debt.
	And then there was a limping along through the hyperinflation and then through again to the stock market crash of the Weimar Republic.
	But unfortunately, the artists and the intellectuals were hell-bent on dismantling what they considered to be festering leprous and decadent French democracy and getting back to good old-fashioned German authoritarianism, a la Bismarck and Luther and so on, the Prussian military model of society.
	And so the intellectuals determined the course to Hitler from the corruption of the Weimar Republic.
	But here, we have a different opportunity.
	So I think that we don't have to go down the same rails.
	So you think we should be, I guess, trying to talk to people in power right now?
	Oh, no. No, no.
	No, you don't talk to the people.
	You don't talk to the hitmen.
	You talk to the... I'm sorry.
	You don't talk to the mafia. You talk to the shopkeepers that the mafia is extorting, right?
	So all these, like, Bilderbergers and those type of people, they all know.
	They're well aware of this stuff. I don't know who Builder Burger is.
	Oh, it's supposedly some organization that all these high-powered politicians belong to.
	Yeah, it's a conspiracy theory tinfoil hat thing.
	Oh, like the Grove, right?
	The Grove, where they dress up as sparrows or something.
	Well, I don't know. I don't know, and it doesn't matter to me, because...
	I mean, you're either in that circle, in which case you know stuff, or you're not in that circle, in which case it doesn't matter, right?
	So I don't care, you know, who's going down on what part of the ship, right?
	I mean, it's just, for me, clear that the ship's going to go down, and that's why we need to get as much information out there so that when the shit hits the fan, people turn off the fan, right?
	I mean, that's sort of the important thing.
	I'm sorry that there's not much that I can do.
	I don't get invited to these shindigs.
	Hell, I don't even get invited to libertarian shindigs, let alone skull and bones places and so on, right?
	So I can't say much other than, you know, this is the way that I think it's going to go down.
	And what we do now has a peculiar and particular kind of urgency.
	Is there, getting back to the references, is there any way like that, I don't know...
	To be more effective in arguing with people like the shopkeepers and stuff, is there any way to have a collective organized things that have all the referenced material that you use in your podcast?
	Well, yeah. I mean, Christina and I were just talking about this today when I was working on the next bit.
	I think that what I'm going to do is I'm going to put forward or put together a series of very short introductions to the ideas that we talk about here, like five minutes or less, and try to make them as interesting and compelling as possible.
	And just the thin edge of the wedge to get people interested in a more in-depth capacity.
	Because I know people, particularly on YouTube, are like, 30 minutes of a bald guy in a car.
	Yeah, right.
	Right.
	So I think that if it's – and of course, I've got my teleprompter now so I can script them and I can make them – I can rehearse them and make them really polish little gems, at least polish little bits of ways that we can talk about the truth with people.
	And so there's lots of different things that we can do.
	But whatever it is that makes you the happiest and makes you feel the most powerful is what I would suggest approaching, which could be doing nothing but working on your personal relationships, which is the most important thing, I think.
	Yeah, that's another thing I have problems with.
	Like, how do you go around finding these people that supposedly agree with you or maybe not agree with you, but just have the same type of perspective?
	Like, I don't really want to go around wearing a big shirt saying anarcho-capitalist or anything like that, but like you mentioned sending them a signal.
	Well, you don't find these people.
	This is the thing, right?
	You don't find these people.
	You can't go around hunting for love.
	You can't go around hunting for fellow travelers in terms of philosophy.
	But you work on yourself and they'll find you.
	I mean, so just to – I know that that sounds all cryptic and stupid, right?
	So I understand that, right?
	But just to give you a very, very brief example, I didn't go looking for Christina.
	I went to therapy. But you didn't find her in therapy, right?
	No, I did not find her in therapy, which would be highly inappropriate as a whole.
	Banging your patients is not considered to be the best thing.
	No, I did not, but what happened was then Christina found me, right?
	Because I was who I was, because I was happy and positive and productive and excited and energized and I'd just written a book and so on, I was attractive to Christina, right?
	So you'd kind of have to go in the, I guess, work on yourself and then figure out what you like and what your real opinions are and then you kind of walk in the same circles?
	Sorry, I just felt a small part of my soul die with the enthusiasm that you brought to that statement.
	Is this something that you with?
	Like, okay, so I guess I just don't have Novocain and I take out my own tooth with a shovel.
	Is that right? That's the answer.
	Sorry, the whole feelings thing is another thing I'm working on.
	I made a post about that earlier, but I really haven't figured it out yet.
	Oh, you're this guy.
	Yeah, I'm that guy.
	Sell your blood to dentists.
	Sorry. It's more of a business model because if you actually have this in your blood, it's going to be a lot cheaper than anesthesia.
	That's sort of what I'm saying. We'll talk.
	Anyway, let me just – because I thought this was a very interesting topic and I'm glad that you called, but I don't want – if somebody else has got a yearning burning, then I'm happy.
	So let's talk to them and we can come back to this if we have time.
	So I'll just cast the net out if anybody has anything else that they wanted to talk about that's popped up.
	I'll give you a few seconds to come in.
	Otherwise, we'll continue this podcast.
	Okay, looks like you're up.
	Do you have a pseudonym I can call you, Sally?
	A pseudonym. Mr.
	Cinnamon? Sure, that works.
	Mr. Cinnamon, okay, that's great.
	So, Mr. C, this issue that you have around feeling, are you the gentleman who posted and talked about your mom being a drinker?
	No, no, no. You were on that thread, but not that, right?
	I don't think I was on that thread.
	But no, my mom wasn't a drinker.
	Okay. So your mom was dehydrated?
	Just kidding. So tell me a little bit about feelings in your family and feelings in your history and whether you were able to express them or felt that you expressed them at some point and stopped or whether you don't ever remember being able to express them.
	I think we had a discussion on this earlier with one of the podcasts.
	Basically, my family was, I guess my dad was really introverted, kind of quiet.
	But when he wanted me to do something, he would tell me that I needed to do it.
	And that was it.
	And if I didn't, I was lazy. And my mom was, you know, she was always right.
	And if I ever wanted to do something that was different, it wasn't like she'd even really question it so much.
	She'd just kind of, you know, this is the way you do it.
	So I guess the whole time I've been growing up, it's been kind of like, I don't want to say what I wanted to do was suppressed, but I think it kind of developed that way over time.
	Does that make sense? It certainly does.
	Would it be fair to say that you also have some issues with procrastination?
	Oh yes, that is me.
	Right, okay, okay.
	Because these two things go hand in hand, at least in my experience, and inability to feel goes hand in hand with procrastination.
	Self-alienation goes hand in hand with procrastination, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah. And so, if I understand this rightly, I'm going to characterize relatively rapidly here, but just obviously let me know if there's anything I say that just doesn't make any sense.
	If the approach was taken in your family, as you say it was, and of course I'm sure you're right, if the approach was taken in your family that says you, Mr.
	Cinnamon, in a state of nature, in a state of self-motivation, are lazy and bad, you in a natural state, in a non-interfered with, in a non-bullied, in a non-coerced state, are lazy and selfish, would that ring true in terms of your experience with your family?
	Yeah, I kind of think what happened is, I'm not sure when it began, but at some point I think I said, well, maybe they're right.
	Maybe I am this lazy person and maybe I should be listening to what they say because they profess to love me and have my best interest at heart, supposedly.
	So that kind of looking into it, I think, kind of maybe hurt.
	Maybe hurt? There we go again.
	It did hurt. So many people are moving to Switzerland these days.
	I don't know if you've heard that latest podcast, but you get sort of the political semi-answer.
	I guess in some theoretical universe, if I were more silicon-based, it would have been possibly painful.
	Who was the bigger influence in this?
	Was it your dad or your mom? My mom.
	Okay. If you were to ask your mom as a kid, say, Mom, what is it you love about me?
	What would she have said? That I'm happy and smart and friendly or something like that.
	I don't know. So, is it what you said or the you don't know part?
	I guess I really don't know.
	Okay, so you don't know what your mother loved about you.
	It's not an accusation.
	You don't know what your mother loved about you.
	I'm just curious, right? Yeah, I don't.
	And what about your dad?
	If your dad said, you know, why do you love this lummox, what would he say?
	I have absolutely no idea.
	There's not a whole lot of communication there.
	Right. Well, in fact, there was.
	But we can talk about that perhaps a little bit later.
	And if as a kid you would sit down with your dad and say, Dad, I've got a pen here and I've got a big hunking piece of yellow paper.
	In fact, it's a pad of paper.
	I want you to list down or tell me all the ways in which I could be a better kid or more responsible or harder working or whatever.
	What would he say? Oh wow, I have no idea.
	Or maybe I do, but I just don't want to admit it.
	Okay, go!
	Yes, you do.
	No, you do, because you just told me them earlier, right?
	Like in this very conversation.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Which ones were that? You told me the criticisms that your parents had of you as a child.
	Yeah, being lazy and just not wanting to help, that type of thing.
	Okay, but tell me what that type of thing was, right?
	Tell me the criticisms that you got as a kid, right?
	And mean them. Once more with feelings.
	No, not yet. But just tell me what it was that you were considered to be deficient of when you were a kid.
	Well, it was just that. It was being lazy or not wanting to get up really early in the morning and go help out on some crazy task that he wanted done.
	So I wasn't given too many reasons.
	It was just, well, why don't you want to do this?
	Like that type of thing. You mean they asked you why you don't want to do this?
	Like perhaps you could explain to me what it is that you find problematic with this task and I'm open to hearing the answer?
	I don't think they would have been open to hearing the answer.
	So, when they say, well, why the hell don't you want to do this?
	It's a rhetorical question, right?
	And an aggressive one, too, right?
	Now, when I ask you these questions about your parents, how do you feel?
	A little anxious.
	Okay, and where does that anxiety show up for you?
	Is it like, Sweaty palms?
	Is it random barking?
	Is it a queasy stomach?
	Where does it show up physically for you?
	My voice is getting a little shaky.
	Okay, and that's a physical symptom, but the sort of physical cause or the physical sensation that precedes that?
	I'm not sure what you mean.
	Um... Do you feel light in your chest?
	Do you feel butterflies in your stomach?
	Where does the emotion localize itself physically for you prior to the manifestation of shaky voice?
	I don't know. I guess in my chest?
	Well, I can't tell because I'm not in your chest.
	I guess in my chest?
	Well, you can feel it.
	You can feel some sense of anxiety because you've told me that, right?
	Yeah. We can go through your body.
	Is it in your little finger on the right hand?
	I don't think it comes from anywhere physical.
	Wait, wait. Okay.
	Right toe, second from the left.
	It's just a process of elimination.
	We can go on as long as you like.
	But it must have some physical place where it starts from.
	Because it's not being beamed into you like an x-ray, right?
	Mm-hmm. And I know that this is annoying, but just bear with me for a minute or two, right?
	There must be some physical place where it's localized in your body to start with.
	It can't start in the voice.
	Well, it certainly could start in the voice, but you gave me a description of a symptom which is trembling voice, which can also happen when you're cold.
	It can also happen when you're hoarse, right?
	So, is it that your throat feels tight?
	No. Okay.
	So, you said it might be in your chest, but when you sort of think about it, you can sort of close your eyes and just try and sort of do a self-examination, sort of where is this tension in your body?
	Yeah, I think it's a physical manifestation of the feeling, anxiety.
	A physical manifestation?
	Yes, but where? Well...
	Where in your body? Oh, isn't that kind of like asking, like, where do feelings originate?
	Well, sure. But I mean, if I feel – my particular thing is I get anxiety sort of around the belly, right?
	So I feel sort of butterflies in my stomach or a certain kind of tension in my stomach.
	And occasionally I've had it in terms of difficulty breathing, in terms of real anxiety that's very unconscious for me.
	So, see, this is the thing.
	If you want to sort of go down the road of learning how to feel, the first thing that you have to identify is physical symptoms, right?
	Because if I remember rightly, you feel a fair amount of frustration because you don't know how to feel, right?
	Sorry, that was Swiss.
	I couldn't tell. Okay.
	So, the first thing that you have to do is you have to figure out the physical sensations of emotion, right?
	Yeah. So...
	If you don't know where the emotions show up in your body, that means that there's quite a strong disconnect.
	But they are coming from somewhere.
	And this is not just me making stuff up for once.
	I mean, if you see somebody who's stressed out on an MRI, there will be particular increased neural activity.
	There will be particular increased blood flows in particular areas of the body which are manifestations of that emotional state, right?
	And it's different for everyone, right?
	Yeah.
	So, where is your – I mean, you get the trembling voice, but where is the feeling or where does your body feel different before or elsewhere?
	Like, what's the difference?
	How do you know?
	So, this is another way of putting it.
	How do you know that you feel anxious?
	It's not that the only way that you know you feel anxious is because your voice is trembling, right?
	So how is it that you know that you're feeling anxious?
	What is the difference in terms of your internal sensations between anxiety and non-anxiety?
	I'm not sure.
	See, that's – I mean, because you had said, what's the first step, if I remember rightly, or someone had said that about this question, how do I feel?
	What's the first step? And the first step is that you have to know that you feel differently physically when you feel different emotions, right?
	I mean, you certainly can tell the difference between anxiety and love, right?
	Yeah. Okay, great.
	So, in your body, there is a different physical or biochemical or neurological reaction to these different emotions.
	It manifests itself The brain has no nerve endings that signify pain.
	It all comes from the body.
	Pain and pleasure, it all comes from the body.
	Now, it's heavily, heavily influenced by what it is that we think in the mind, but the mind itself has no nerve endings that signal pleasure or pain.
	You can have somebody do open brain surgery on you and you won't feel a thing, right?
	So it's in your body that the emotions are manifesting, and if you can't identify where in your body the feelings are occurring, then you will never be able to access your feelings in any consistent way or way that is integrated and enriched, if that makes sense.
	So... I guess if you touch a hot stove and you burn your hand, that's kind of like a physical sensation that gets interpreted by your brain.
	The difference between anxiety and happiness, say, there's no external, I guess, representations.
	Is there? Wouldn't it be a psychological thing?
	Mr. Cinnamon, it's Christina.
	Hi. Hi.
	Let me give you an example of sort of an anxiety response.
	If you're lying in bed one night and it's late in the middle of the night and all is quiet and suddenly you hear a loud noise in your kitchen, something topples over, a glass breaks, what's going to happen to you physiologically?
	What are you going to feel physiologically in that moment?
	Maybe a faster heartbeat.
	Yep. Anything else?
	I don't think so.
	Nothing like that, okay. Maybe faster heartbeat.
	It could be that your muscles might tense up a little bit.
	You're definitely going to sit up in bed.
	Your hearing, you're going to start straining to listen more carefully.
	What was that? Your pupils might dilate so that you can start to see a little more clearly.
	But these are all physiological responses to a perceived threat.
	Similarly, if you're just, you know, you're up in the woods, you're camping, and suddenly there's a black bear in front of your tent, you're going to enter this sort of panic fight-or-flight mode, right?
	The same kind of thing is going to happen.
	Your heart's going to start to race.
	You might start to feel a little sweaty.
	Your blood actually is going to start pumping into your large muscle groups.
	And you might feel actually some tingling in your fingertips as the blood leaves the extremities and goes into the larger muscles that will prepare you for the fight or flight response.
	This is what happens to us when we are in the vicinity of danger, of real danger.
	Now, the anxiety response that I think Steph is trying to get you to understand in terms of what happens to you when you feel anxious, it's exactly the same kind of thing.
	Except the threat is, for most of us, the threat in anxiety is perceived.
	So it's something that we think is frightening us or something that we think is dangerous to us that will elicit the same kinds of physiological responses.
	So what you might feel is a tightening in your chest.
	Maybe your breathing is going to change a little bit and become more shallow.
	Or you might start to hyperventilate depending on how extreme the reaction is.
	Your heart rate, as you mentioned, will speed up a little bit.
	And again, this is all in gradations, like an outright panic attack or an outright flight.
	I mean, if you're sitting on your couch and there's no black bear and there's no intruder in your house and you start to experience these symptoms, then one might consider it a panic attack.
	I'm sorry, I just wanted to point out that when Christina says she's just misspeaking a little bit, when she says black bear, she actually means African-American bear.
	Okay, I lost my train of thought.
	You do this to me all the time.
	You were talking about him sitting on a couch.
	Right. So if you're sitting on your couch watching television and something on the television sparks a memory from something that happened to you in your life, either as a child or with an angry coworker or a bullying person, A schoolmate, you may start to experience some of these physiological symptoms which would indicate some anxiety.
	And again, they could be very severe as in sort of a panic attack or they could be mild where you kind of feel a little edgy, where you feel a little edgy or nervous.
	That's I think the kind of thing that Steph is trying to get you to understand in terms of what's going on for you with your physiology.
	Mm-hmm. So, having a shaky voice, there's more to it?
	Are you saying that maybe it's caused by a tightness in the chest or something?
	That can't just be a single...
	The shaky voice might be, again, the shaky voice is probably just one symptom.
	There might be a slightly more rapid heart rate.
	It could be that you also find that your hands get a little sweaty or dewy.
	It could be any number of things.
	Your breathing might change or your hands might shake as well as your voice shaking.
	I don't know. I mean, does any of that sound familiar to you?
	Could your chest feel tight?
	Maybe a little. I just said it feels like...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Not the sweaty palms or anything.
	It's just the... Maybe a little bit of the chest.
	Maybe a little bit of the chest, right?
	And that is supposed to feel different than when you're in your relaxed, calm state.
	So I guess Steph is saying, do you have a relaxed and calm state?
	Yeah. Yeah.
	So what he's trying to get at is when you identify yourself as having a shaky voice and a tightness in your chest, that's a sign that maybe you're feeling some kind of an emotion.
	But isn't like the shaky voice, isn't that just an indication of anxiety?
	It's a symptom. I mean, a shaky voice could also be due to some physiology.
	That's some, I don't know, maybe some illness that causes shaky voices.
	So then determining a feeling is a combination of different physiological symptoms, or is there something more?
	Like a shaky voice can be attributed to having a cold or something, but there's something else that makes it anxiety.
	Well, the way that I would analogize it is to say that The pain in a toothache comes from the stimulation of the nerve ends as a result of an infection, right?
	So, you know that you have an infection because you have a physiological symptom, right?
	And so, in the same way...
	If you hear that your voice is shaky, then you know that you're feeling nervous.
	And then you can go backwards from the physiological manifestation to the feeling that is at the root cause.
	Once you can identify the feeling and where it is occurring within your body, then you can feel it more solidly and you can get better used to identifying your own emotional states.
	I don't think I'd know that I was nervous because I could be cold, say.
	Well, yes, but the difference, if you were in a psychologically relaxed state, but your voice was shaking because you were cold, that would feel different than if your voice were shaking because you felt anxious, right?
	Because you would have voice shaking, no sensation of cold, and sensation of anxiety in the one situation, whereas in the other situation, you would have voice shaking, no feeling of anxiety, but feeling of cold, right?
	So the actual feeling is one of the indicators, right?
	Well, yeah. The feeling is what you're actually experiencing.
	Because what you're asking is, if I understand it rightly, I don't feel.
	I mean, I'm putting it in extreme ways, right?
	But I don't feel, and I'd like to learn how to feel, right?
	Yeah, I think I do.
	I just don't express it, or I don't interpret it correctly.
	Feelings is one of these things that you don't think that you do, right?
	You feel or you don't feel, right?
	You have access to that or you don't.
	I mean, fundamentally, it doesn't mean that that's always the case and it's constant or whatever, right?
	But it's kind of like if you say, well, I think I feel but I just don't express it, then that's not the same as feeling something, right?
	Like you don't say, I think I'm alive and I'm speaking, right?
	Right. Right.
	You just are because you know it.
	You inhabit that, right? So if you have these feelings and you're able to identify them...
	Because basically what has happened...
	I mean, you may be somebody who has a less...
	Trigger happy physiological response as a whole, right?
	That's certainly possible. Not everybody feels to the same degree and that doesn't have anything to do with quality of life or value with a human being.
	It's just that, you know, some people like Christina is really, really good with pain, right?
	I see somebody stub their toe and I faint.
	So we don't want horror movies, of course, right?
	So Christina, I mean, so that doesn't mean that she's a better person, or at least not for that reason.
	But it's just that you may have a slightly less, I mean, my emotional apparatus is like completely hysterical and hyper, right?
	Sorry, sweetie, you had something that you wanted to say to do with that?
	That's an understatement. What?
	What? Oh, wait, sorry.
	I'll go back to that. So, it may be less volatile for you, and there's mercurial personalities, and there are people who are more sedate or less hyper-stimulated that way, and there's nothing wrong with that.
	And that may be part of it, of course.
	But the other thing, of course, is that you weren't allowed to feel as a kid.
	Your feelings were inconvenient to those who had power over you.
	Your feelings were inconvenient to your parents, right?
	You can't bully people who feel strongly.
	Well, not all the time, because I... I'd come home from school crying or something and my mom would comfort me.
	She'd be like all over that. But I guess when it was contradictory to what they wanted, it would be a problem.
	Yes, of course. I mean, if there were external sources, then they could comfort you for sure.
	I mean, when I got sick, my mother could be wonderful and put me in the couch in the kitchen – sorry, put me in the couch in the living room and bring me tea and put the TV on and she was great, right?
	Because – but that doesn't mean that she was a good mom, right?
	That just meant that there were certain situations where I did not pose a threat.
	To her, or where she did not have any ambiguity about how she'd been treating me or any guilt or conscience about the brutality she'd been inflicted on me, which is not the same.
	I'm not saying it's the same as your situation, but this is part of the problem, right?
	That you're allowed to feel certain things, but not other things, right?
	So the feelings that would be generated in you, because when you get bullied by someone, you come home crying, that's feelings that are generated by somebody else that your parents are then helping you deal with, not feelings that either they have inflicted on you or that you have spontaneously generated yourself, right?
	Right. So that probably is the difference.
	Now, Christina, you have a workbook that you give to people sometimes.
	Is that right about... Was it the God of Atheists or UPB or RTR? Or was it just a donation?
	No, what was it? It depends on what you're looking for.
	If there's something that you want to do around anxiety, there are different...
	There's a workbook called...
	There's one on social anxiety.
	There is the Anxiety and Phobia Workbook.
	There is From Panic to Power.
	There is Mastery of Panic and Anxiety.
	So lots of books on anxiety.
	I mean, they're everywhere.
	But I'm not sure if this gentleman wants some help with identifying conversations, right?
	Well, have you ever tried meditation?
	Are you trying it now?
	Deep, deep, introspective thought, yeah, I've tried that, but I don't, not in the, like I haven't gone to a Buddhist temple and crossed my legs and Well, you don't have to go to a Buddhist temple, but meditation can be very helpful because it sounds to me a little bit, and this is ridiculous diagnosis remotely from an amateur, so I apologize for all of that, but it sounds to me a little bit like you're kind of outward directed, right?
	Like, I don't think that you experience a lot of stimuli from your inner life.
	What kind of stimuli do you mean?
	Well, spontaneous thoughts, ideas, emotions, and so on.
	I mean, what do you do for a living?
	I'm an engineer. Right.
	Right. Well, that would sort of make sense, right?
	So you're used to dealing with things, manipulating external objects in pretty structured ways, right?
	Right.
	Right.
	You need to listen to all the podcasts that are early from Rod the Engineer and just see how things can change.
	But, right, so that sort of makes sense, right, that you would end up being drawn to something where – and in a life.
	I mean it's not like you're going to end up being a mime or a comedian or an actor or whatever, right?
	I mean that would not be something that you'd be particularly comfortable with, right?
	Right.
	Okay.
	So what it means is that you have a strong focus and that's a great thing.
	I'm glad that bridges stay up, right?
	I mean, I have huge respect for engineers.
	I'm not even sure that that's something that I really want to do.
	Well, that's because you don't have any strong desires, right?
	Right. Right, so the question is, how do you start to cultivate that?
	Well, you know, you need to focus, if you want, to go down that road.
	You don't have to, but I think it would be well worthwhile.
	Right. But you need to become more focused on your inner life, which to an engineer sounds like, I want you to start smoking crack and join a cult.
	And that's, I mean, I know that that sounds like a weird thing to an engineer.
	And if it's any consolation, I mean, I've worked as a computer programmer and all that kind of stuff.
	So I'm very down with the whole structured engineering thing.
	I've built software from the entire programming architectures and so on.
	So I'm really, really down with the engineering side of things.
	And of course, I do some of that for FDR. But, you know, as this sort of pseudo-engineer to a real engineer, if you want to have a really rich existence and also if you want to have the kind of generosity to give of yourself freely and richly to other people, you're just going to have to spend some time working on your inner experience, which means starting to listen to yourself, starting to be aware of when you feel certain things.
	Once you become aware of when you're feeling stuff, then you can start to unpack the thoughts that lead to those feelings because all feelings that are not, as Christina said, externally created by these African bears are, All feelings are preceded by a thought, an evaluation, a judgment, which we're not conscious of.
	This is the cognitive model of psychology, which was talked about at the Miami conference.
	But for me to say to you, what are the thoughts that precede your feelings at the moment, would mean nothing to you, right?
	Because, like, I don't even know where my feelings are located, right?
	And I only know the physical manifestations, not the actual feelings, so it wouldn't make any sense.
	It's like saying, well, how do you get to this particular location in Beirut where you don't even know where Beirut is, right?
	So that would be my suggestion that when you have a feeling or when you notice a physiological response, literally you can carry a – this sounds all goofy as hell, I understand that, but it really will work, I promise.
	Carry a little notepad around and say, when this happened, I felt this, and here's where it showed up in my body.
	It's just a self-check, right?
	When this occurred, I felt this, and here's where it showed up in my body.
	You can start to look at the stimuli that produce the response, and then you can look for patterns, and then you can start to figure out the thoughts that go on behind those feelings and so on, and that will really open up.
	Because right now, your feelings don't influence your life, right?
	So it's the same reason I don't do podcasts in Arabic, because I don't speak Arabic.
	I would have no effect on that, right?
	So once you start listening to your emotions, your emotions will become stronger, because they will actually start to have an effect on your life, if that makes sense.
	Well, don't I kind of, like, sort of act on my feelings if I, say, don't like what I feel when I procrastinate?
	So I'm trying to find a way to fix that.
	Well, is it working?
	Well, I haven't really found a solution yet.
	Right, so it's not working, right?
	So I'm suggesting a different approach, right?
	And as an engineer, right, if you build the bridge, how long have you been working on this procrastination thing for?
	Um... Maybe about a year.
	Well, yes, but how long have you felt that you have procrastinated?
	Oh, for as long as I can remember.
	Okay, so for your entire earthly existence you've had problems with procrastination, and you've not yet made the kind of satisfactory progress that you'd like to in this area, right?
	So, obviously, to analogize it in a foolish way, if an engineer has spent his whole life trying to build a bridge and the bridge keeps falling down, what should the engineer do?
	Oh, for sure. Try different methods.
	And I'm completely open to that.
	But I was just asking if seeking help isn't a response to the feelings in the first place.
	Well, I think that's true.
	Intellectually, you get that something is not quite simpatico with yourself, that you'd like to have a richer and more emotional experience.
	I mean, you've listened to a bunch of podcasts, right?
	Yeah. So it's like, God, if I could just be as hysterical as Steph, imagine what that would do to my engineering career.
	Just imagine the possibilities if I screamed and cried in meetings.
	Just what could happen if I could be both British and a crack addict Italian at the same time?
	Just imagine the possibilities.
	So it's really tempting, right? So yeah, so it's just the idea that you know that there's something that you could achieve that would be richer and deeper and better than what it is that you're achieving.
	So for sure, asking for help here and on the board and so on is great.
	But the first thing that you have to do is start to make a commitment to start paying attention to your inner life, right?
	Yeah. I'm very glad that I'm not hanging my hat on being a motivational speaker, particularly in this conversation, because I understand, right, that I'm sort of sticking needles in you and you're going, yep, don't feel that.
	Don't feel that. Oh, I think that limb's totally dead.
	So, like, you don't feel a lot of enthusiasm for this, right?
	Right now I'm trying to find out what the best possible ways to reach my goal would be.
	Everybody wants to be happy, right?
	I see you and you have all these podcasts and you've come to these great conclusions and you're happy because of it.
	That's awesome and that's what I'm hoping for.
	I'm just trying to figure out logically the You engineers, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it's exactly the same conversation with Rod the engineer, I guess, close to two years ago, right?
	Because I said, you need to pay more attention to your inner life, and he's like, okay, I've got my graph paper out, right?
	I've got my scientific calculator, and I need a plan.
	I need a 12-point, it's got to be 12, can't be 11, don't want 13.
	Got to have a 12-point plan on how it is I'm going to achieve this, I need a time frame, I need resources, I need a Gantt chart, and I'm good to go, right?
	That's your approach, right? Yeah, I'm hoping, what I hope to do was to find out the truth, what's right, and then work from that.
	Because, like, I was raised kind of, you know, up is down, you know, don't listen to what you think, this is the way to do it.
	So I've been trying to figure out what's right and then to act on that.
	Right, so you're looking for an external conformity that you can pour yourself into in order to be authentic, right?
	Yeah. Well, do you understand the contradiction in that?
	Yeah. Would you like to tell me about it?
	Just to make sure, because sometimes engineers can fake knowledge.
	I know I've done it. Well, to be yourself, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to create a structured, rigid book for conformity on how to be yourself.
	Yeah, there is no external plan for who you are, right?
	To the degree that there is an external plan, and again, I know this is totally annoying, but to the degree that there is an external plan, that you're looking for a 12-point solution or a Gantt chart or whatever, it won't be you that comes out.
	You'll be right back where you started, but even more frustrated.
	Yeah. Okay, well, I'm going to let you off the hook now, and I'm sorry we didn't get more of a chance to talk about your parents, but until you can read your emotional responses a little bit more deeply, and by a little more deeply, I mean sort of at all, with all due respect, then there's not much that we can do, which is totally fine.
	This is where you are, and we all have to take these steps at some point or another.
	But, you know, I promise you that it will – we won't end up being the same, of course, right?
	And I know that there's a certain kind of emotional expression that I have that you may envy, but, you know, I can't build a bridge.
	So in this particular case, I'm not coming for you to build a bridge.
	You're coming for me in terms of emotions and self-expression.
	And I'm sort of saying that, you know, the first thing you've got to do is not look for external rules, but just start to really pay attention to what's going on below the neck, right?
	And that will be the way that it goes.
	Okay, so just take some notes on the external manifestations of what occurs?
	Yes, but I would say, yeah, take notes and see what are the feelings, right?
	So when you're feeling anxious, you write down how it feels in your body, and that may be nothing, right?
	And then when you say, well, I don't feel anxious, how does this feel?
	So that you can start to differentiate, right?
	Because you're like somebody who's regained their sight at the age of 30 or whatever, right?
	They can't tell the difference in depth perception.
	They just have to start with the basics, right?
	So you have to start with the basics.
	This I call contentment.
	How does it feel internally? This I call anger.
	How does this... You've got to go right back to the basics.
	And all that tells me is that your emotional development was stunted and opposed very, very early, right?
	Which is, I mean, my heart goes out.
	It's a terrible tragedy.
	But on the plus side, it is reversible.
	That's good to hear. Right.
	Okay, well, thank you very much.
	I appreciate it. You're very, very welcome.
	I do appreciate that. And thank you for sharing, you know, the difficulties.
	I know that for an engineer to publicly be exposed as not being particularly great at something will give you some very strong feelings, which you can write down.
	So, thank you so much.
	I appreciate it. No problem.
	All right, I think we have time for...
	Sorry, Andrew. I think we have time for one more quick question.
	if anybody has anything desperate to join in a minute.
	I can be desperate if you like, Steph.
	Thank you.
	Okay, let's go with that.
	Okay, I'm so, so terribly desperate.
	No, I guess it's not going to work.
	I was going to ask you, how important do you think it actually is to identify individually all of the constituent personalities, as it were, in your Miko system?
	In my case, I've Sorry, is it my ecosystem now?
	Are you all? I'm every listener.
	It's all in me.
	Yes. I'm using the royal your.
	Excellent. Please continue.
	Well, I guess in my case, I've had this...
	I call them the plenary council.
	I've been kind of meeting with them, I guess, since I was 12.
	And I guess there's a reason that they popped up around 12.
	But it's been that long.
	And it's odd because there's...
	I guess there's only ever one person that speaks, but...
	It seems like she's a spokesman or spokeswoman for a whole host of other people that are kind of there, and I can kind of see them, but I don't know who they are.
	So do you think it would be important to go and try to talk with them individually?
	Because right now, I think it's working pretty well.
	Okay, can you tell me what you mean by working pretty well?
	Working pretty well as in they've really helped me out.
	They've been actually talking to me more often recently.
	I've begun to notice a couple of things about myself in interactions with people, some things that I do that are kind of leftovers from my time with my very dear mother.
	And oftentimes when I sit down with them, I should say, Just about every time I sit down with them, they lead me in directions that I could never really go consciously.
	And I always end up feeling just, no matter how hard the actual conversation was, I end up feeling completely joyous and liberated after I'm done with them.
	So that's what I mean by working fairly well.
	Okay, because you and I know that you have a bit of a temper, as I do, right?
	But you have a bit of a temper, right?
	So when that occurs for you, right, when you get that bit of the old cold rage shadow comes over you, where is the council in that particular environment or situation, if that makes sense?
	That's when... Usually I get talked to by this spokeswoman girl, but whenever I get...
	Mad, like really angry, which happens very rarely, and it's been happening more and more rarely.
	But whenever that happens, there's a man that pops up, and I really don't know who he is.
	He only pops up when either I'm angry or, you know, I'm about to do something completely, completely stupid, like...
	Having the potential to kill myself, stupid.
	Which is, I guess, he's the only one that has a name.
	I call him Justice, just as a name.
	Which is a great name.
	Sorry to interrupt you for just a second, but it is astounding.
	And of course, I know how highly verbal you are.
	But what is so wonderful about the two syllables of the word justice in terms of emotions?
	Um, well, if you break the word apart, um...
	But I don't know what you're getting at, Steph.
	Well, if you break the word apart, you get just ice, right?
	Right. And this guy is really cold, right?
	Yeah. So, to have justice is to be without emotion.
	You are just ice, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, which is why he doesn't often come up.
	Well, but the name is also, his name is a cry for help, right?
	Right. Because he's wrong.
	Justice does not come from coldness.
	Right. Punishment comes from coldness, and punishment is the opposite of justice.
	So I think he's asking for help with the name, in my opinion.
	I'm just Ice, but you mistake me for justice.
	Yeah, I gave him that name a long time ago, so it's no wonder I mistook him.
	Because, I mean, when you got mad at me a couple of weeks ago, that was kind of cold, right?
	I mean, you felt kind of cold, and you felt like you were standing up for yourself, right?
	At first, but then not so much.
	I kind of melted. Right, right.
	But this is the guy who's like, you know, if I don't beat back the darkness, it overwhelms.
	Like, if I don't fight for what it is that I need, I'm not going to get anything, right?
	He's the guy who nothing gets given.
	Nothing is offered up.
	Everything has to be battled for.
	Sure, and he's the guy that would always show up whenever I was fighting with Mother, and Mother was screaming at me.
	Right, right.
	Now, who's the light-fingered one?
	Is it the same guy, or is it someone else?
	I don't really talk to anyone when that happens.
	It's like they go away.
	The council, you mean? Yeah.
	And replaced by what?
	By who? Nobody.
	It's like a void. No.
	It's not a void. It feels like a void, but it's not a void, because you're acting, right?
	Right. Acting with a desire to take something, right?
	Yeah. It's weird.
	I don't really feel it's a desire, either.
	What does it feel like? It's like...
	It's like an absence.
	Like, there's no there there.
	Right. So, in a sense, you are stolen from yourself.
	Your identity, your sense of who you are, your personality is stolen from yourself, right?
	Yeah.
	Sorry, I just missed that last response.
	Oh, did we lose her?
	I think that we have lost her.
	Let me just try bringing her back in.
	It's all in me.
	Alright, sorry, one sec. Oh, she's out.
	She's gone. So she has actually been robbed from the conversation.
	As well as from herself.
	And, alright, let me just, uh...
	Sorry about that.
	So, sometimes you find that you rob yourself from the very conversation?
	Sorry, go on. Yes, yes.
	That was Justice who came in and flipped the switch on my Wi-Fi.
	I think they're on to us!
	Quick disconnect! Right, right.
	Okay. Okay, so this is a complete absence in a sense, a sense of non-identity, if that makes sense?
	Yeah, pretty much.
	And that manifests itself as, again, this is not to say that you're a cat burglar or anything, but this is the mild kleptomania that occurs from you intermittently, right?
	Yeah. Oh dear!
	I think we've lost her again.
	She's still there?
	Nope, call dropped. Oh dear!
	Well, we're running from the server, so it can't be that.
	Yeah, I mean, maybe you can try adding her back in.
	I'll just talk for a second, otherwise we'll have to just pick this up another time.
	But around this idea of the Miko system, there is...
	It's the areas where we feel the most absent, where we most need to explore, right?
	So if you think there's a council or you have a sort of seat at the table kind of thing that we've talked about, if you have that experience, but then there's things that wipe that out, that means there's somebody else, right?
	There's some other aspect of yourself that still has unconscious or dominative power, and that's something that needs to be invited in.
	in.
	I know it's completely counterintuitive to seek health through fragmentation, to seek unity through disparity, but it just is.
	At least it's worked for me and it's worked for a bunch of other people.
	And it's worked for Christina too.
	And so this is just a painful empirical self-experimentation that seems to pay off.
	So yeah, however counterintuitive, it's well, well worth going on.
	And I can guarantee you that it's larger than you think when you start.
	It's larger, deeper, richer, more powerful than you think when you start the process, if that makes sense.
	So, sorry, go ahead.
	I'm here again.
	Okay. So, this self-erasure that occurs just prior to the mild kleptomania phases, right?
	That must mean that there's somebody else, right?
	I think there is because, you know, I wouldn't have motive power if there was somebody else.
	Somebody's got their hand on the switch here, right?
	Somebody's got their hand on the switch and can flick you off.
	And this may, of course, occur without the manifestation, the outward manifestation, but it means that there's somebody else who's got input or somebody else, right?
	Sure. Maybe it's the same guy, but this is somebody who you don't see coming.
	Is that right? Yeah, I mean, I know when he's coming, and I know when all of the other guys as a set are coming to talk to me, but this guy, I've never seen and can't see.
	Now, why is everyone going through a spokesperson?
	I'm not sure I quite followed the reasoning behind that.
	I can't speak for everybody, but mine's just because it's always kind of been that way.
	It's tradition. Cue the music.
	Can they not speak these other aspects of yourself?
	They don't have words?
	They can't speak? Like, do they write things down?
	Do they mime them? What was it?
	Kabuki? Did they not have a voice?
	I think they do, but they don't speak to me.
	They speak to her.
	And then it's weird because it's like a dialectical thing.
	Right. Well, I would say that you need to kick this woman off the speakerphone and you need to talk to them directly.
	Okay. Or rather listen, right?
	Because this is a very controlled environment, right?
	Yeah, I'm usually not the one who talks.
	I kind of let her take over, but that's...
	Right, so what that means, of course, is that there's a certain amount of...
	If someone says, I'm going to speak on behalf of these ten people, and they can perfectly well speak for themselves, it's because they're frightened of her, right?
	Right. Right.
	So, I don't think that you want to have the spokesperson for your inner beauty to be a tyrant.
	Or do you? I like tyranny.
	It's weird because I've...
	But you do in a way, right?
	Because you've let this go on for quite some time.
	Sure. Like it's a secure environment, right?
	Because she channels and censors and she cleans it up and gives you the summaries and so on, right?
	You don't actually have to go and speak to the rabble.
	How do I figure out who the rabble are?
	Well, you just say you can't talk to her anymore.
	You gotta talk to me. Hmm.
	Okay. Because it makes sense, right?
	I mean, the whole point is to...
	Unity comes from when everybody has a voice, right?
	Yeah. It's not unity if you have to rely on this inner aspect of yourself to censor all the other inner aspects of yourself, which they would only submit to if they're scared of her.
	You don't want that, because that's like an inner mom of the kind you know all too well, right?
	Yeah. So, yeah.
	I mean, hit the eject on that bitch, right?
	I mean, keep her around, right?
	She's useful, but she can't have that power, right?
	Everybody's got to have a voice.
	Sure. So right now it's not so much a plenary council as a one-on-one business meeting.
	Well, yeah, kind of, but you have a military model or you have a fascistic model, right?
	I speak for the people, right?
	No, I speak for them.
	Can I talk to them directly? No, you have to go through me, right?
	I mean, that's not something we would want in a society as a whole, right?
	You wouldn't like to be on the other side of that, not being able to speak directly, right?
	It's interesting that the only person who's not scared of her is the guy that's even worse than she is.
	Well, that's... He is...
	Like, they're the two sides of the same coin, right?
	He's there because she's there.
	The extremes in our personality occur because of each other.
	Right? If she goes down, he goes down.
	I'd like to see the back of him.
	If he relaxes, she relaxes. Sorry?
	I said, I'd like to see the back of him.
	In what way? Well, I don't want him to go away.
	I mean, he's been extremely useful to me, and he has a passion for Marcus Aurelius, which really impresses me.
	But it's like whenever he comes up, I know that something's extremely wrong.
	Right, right, right.
	But he's also not very good at predicting, right?
	Right. The reactionary force, right?
	So when you end up in a bad situation, he comes around, right?
	Yeah. So he's not good at predicting that's his weakness, right?
	None of these people can do the job on their own, like any more than I am my liver, right?
	Like my liver can't survive on its own.
	All it is is pate for some vulture, right?
	So none of these aspects of ourselves can do the job on their own, but they're all pretty vain and sometimes think they're God's knees, right?
	But he can't predict, right?
	He can't keep you out of these situations.
	He can only come up guns blazing when you're in them, right?
	Yeah. Right.
	Now, did you have...
	Sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead.
	I didn't have anything besides interesting.
	Did you have an experience when you were younger of somebody else claiming to speak on your behalf?
	Um... Not really.
	I mean, my... No.
	I was going to say, my grandmother, she was kind of like the conversation that we all had last night, that late night conversation.
	She kind of ran over everybody, but that was everybody that she spoke for, not just me.
	Did your mother go with you to parent-teacher nights?
	No, nobody went.
	They didn't care.
	Did she go with you to the dentist or to the doctor, or did she go with you for any of those kinds of situations?
	No. My grandmother would go if something needed to be done.
	Okay, so did you just not have the parent-teacher nights, or did somebody other than your mother come?
	The family just didn't go.
	I mean, there were parent-teacher nights, but we didn't go.
	Okay. Now, when you would be in a situation with your grandmother where you would be there and she would be there if you were at, say, the doctor's, did you talk or did she talk?
	I usually talked and then she chimed in with helpful details.
	Right. Okay. So there's, I mean, I just want to sort of map this.
	So there's nothing that you can remember where other people would sort of speak on your behalf or that you would have gone through that phase where other people would sort of appropriate things that you wanted to say?
	Not really.
	I mean... If anything, I was prevented from speaking and nobody bothered to speak for me.
	So it was kind of like either I was talking or silent.
	You know, it didn't go through anyone.
	Okay. Have you ever had it in a situation or have you experienced a situation where you feel that other people have taken credit for what it is that you're doing?
	Yeah, usually.
	Well, not usually.
	I mean, I've let them do it because I thought at the time, and I'm not sure if this is really the case, but I thought at the time that my pleasure was more in the doing that they can credit for.
	Right, like that great RTR book you wrote.
	Anyway, so you have experienced that.
	Can you tell me a little bit more about the details of how you feel that your work has been appropriated and other people have taken the credit or gotten the credit?
	Well, like when I was 14, I wrote my aunt's doctoral dissertation.
	She was an education major, so it's not like it was hard.
	It's just been stuff like that or, you know, generally the...
	Sorry to interrupt. Why did you do that?
	Um, because my mother wasn't buying me food and my aunt said she would if I wrote her a dissertation.
	That is so fucking evil, I can't even tell you.
	Yes, yes, it is fucking evil.
	Don't laugh with me about this stuff.
	I'm not laughing with you.
	You're laughing near me. You're laughing in my ear.
	Okay, so basically you had to fake other people's credentials in order to get food.
	Sure. Yes.
	Well, you're saying, sure, like I made this story up.
	Yes. Yes, I did.
	Okay, and what are other situations where that has occurred?
	You know, the general in-school quote-unquote group work where, you know, there's one person who does the work and the other people just kind of hang around and get the grade.
	I'm usually the one who does the work.
	Right. And what is your emotional reaction to all of that exploitation?
	I get pretty pissed off.
	I usually, well, in the case with my aunt, I try to kind of squelch it down because, you know, she was paying me in food.
	But, you know, in things like school, it usually ends up where I... I either blow up, not usually the people who are making me, well, not making me, but allowing me to carry them, but, you know, kind of in my own mind.
	It's like seething rage.
	Right, right. Now, this is going to be annoying for you, and I apologize in advance, but just bear with me for a minute or two.
	Why am I here if not to get annoyed, Steph?
	Exactly, right. Well, what else would I be doing but buzzing annoyingly in people's faces and evading the flyswatter?
	Oh, gadfly.
	Gadfly, how I love you.
	All right, go ahead. Okay, so does this continue on into your adult life?
	It did, but I've stopped it.
	It's been, I think, two or three years since I've gotten into one of those situations, just because I've made a conscious effort to stop putting myself or letting myself get into those situations.
	Right. Okay.
	Okay. Right.
	Because you doing the work for a collective is also anxiety avoidance for you, right?
	Yeah, I mean, I don't want the anxiety of, oh, what if they screw it up?
	I'd better do it myself. No, that's not the anxiety I'm talking about.
	Okay, what anxiety?
	The anxiety that I'm talking about is confronting other people on their exploitation, right?
	Yeah, that's true.
	Right.
	So what I'm saying is that it's kind of exploitive on your behalf to do the work on behalf of others.
	And I'm not talking about the situation where you had to eat.
	Right.
	I'm talking about that.
	Right.
	You got to eat.
	Right.
	But but you know how we say that or how I sort of always drone on about not using other people to avoid your own anxiety.
	Yeah.
	So taking on other people's work, not only does that invite people who exploit you into your life.
	Right.
	This is a Simon the Boxer thing, because managing exploitation is something that you're fairly familiar with, to say the least.
	Right.
	Sure.
	But but also, I mean, by not confronting them and so on, it's a kind of slave vengeance.
	Right.
	Because your aunt guaranteed did not end up happy with her doctorate.
	Of course.
	Right.
	And so this is your vengeance, like, fuck you all.
	You all can make me do this, and I'm going to debilitate you by working hard to weaken you.
	Yeah. Right?
	This is kind of your vengeance, your aggression, too, right?
	Mixed in there. Yeah.
	You sound less than convinced.
	Well... Which is fine. I could be completely wrong.
	It's just my theory.
	Well, no. With my aunt, I worked doubly hard.
	I got her to – I not only did her thesis, but most of her coursework.
	So I got her to graduate with honors.
	I didn't go to her graduation ceremony because I think that would have been – I thought at the time that that would have been too much.
	I think one of my conscious thoughts at the time was, alright, I'm going to do this so well that she will be so freaking embarrassed knowing that it's not her work when she gathers her little stipend every year and kind of knows that it was me.
	Yeah, and it ended up...
	She refuses to display her diploma on her wall, I guess.
	Did she become a teacher?
	Oh yeah, she's a high school principal.
	So, you realize this is a pretty savage revenge that you took, right?
	Well, she was already a high school principal when she took the doctorate.
	But it was more of a...
	If it's not her doctorate, she would get fired.
	Right. Like, if she faked her diploma?
	If she faked her doctorate?
	Plagiarism is a firing offense for academics or for people who are in the educational system, right?
	Yeah, if anyone ever finds out, she won't be able to work again.
	Right. So why haven't you exposed her?
	You probably have all the memories.
	You probably may even have some of the notes.
	You may write all of this kind of stuff, right?
	You may have some correspondence.
	You may have anything, right? Yeah.
	I don't know what good it would do now, is what I've been...
	I rarely think about it, but whenever I do think about it, the thing that I tell myself is, why would I bother doing that now?
	Oh, you know why. You know why.
	Would you like to tell the yet unknowing world, Steph?
	Well, I'd rather you told them, but you're very concerned about your exploitation of children, right?
	Frankly, I don't usually think about it.
	When I do, I'm disgusted.
	She recounts often with pride how when her students see her walking down the hall, they get out of her way.
	She's very proud of that.
	Right. So why haven't you...
	Why haven't you exposed her?
	I mean, you didn't like being exploited by your aunt, right?
	No. So, who were you guaranteeing is going to continue to be exploited by her?
	Um... I would assume me.
	But, uh... No. Oh, right.
	Well, all those poor little children.
	Well, tell me what happened for you there emotionally.
	Um... You know, it kind of just hit me like, you know what?
	This woman is responsible for terrorizing 3,000 kids every year and furthermore making up the curriculum for the high schools in the district.
	So she indirectly tortures many thousands more.
	Right. And that's why I said you see the size of your vengeance on the world, right?
	Right. For all the people who do not help me, I will wreak terrible vengeance on them.
	Yeah, that's enormous.
	Thousands of children will suffer for your suffering, right?
	Right. It's very...
	I'd only ever thought of taking revenge on her.
	I didn't think of the children at the time.
	Well, a part of you has always known it, which is why you got that rush, right?
	I don't mean rush like a positive feeling, but when you made the connection to the kids you're terrorizing now, right?
	That wasn't like me teaching you Mandarin, right?
	Right. So a part of you has always known it.
	And you told me that she takes great glee in terrorizing children, right?
	Yes, she does.
	And you know what my opinions are about people who terrorize children, right?
	So you couldn't have told that to me without knowing that I was going to have something to say about it, right?
	Of course. And the reason that I'm saying all of this is that, look, I mean, you're a good person, you did some amazing things and you survived an absolutely terrifying childhood, right?
	But... This tyranny, right?
	That she tyrannized you and then you're allowing her to continue to tyrannize others and so on.
	That, I think, is reflected.
	Because there's a part of you that knows the effects that your silence has had upon the career of your aunt.
	And that part of you doesn't have access to any hearing, right?
	Any voice.
	Mm-hmm. And what that says to me is that this woman who speaks on behalf of everyone else is not speaking on behalf of everyone else.
	Right. There are people who I haven't seen or talked to before.
	I've always kind of known that.
	What does Joe Justice say about taking this woman down?
	Sorry? What does Joe Justice say about taking this woman down?
	Um... He's not talking to me right now.
	He's standing in the corner with that wry smile that he gets.
	And what's he smiling about?
	It's something like...
	It's part...
	I told you so.
	In part...
	You saw I was going to get you back someday.
	In part... To get you back, Charlotte?
	Yeah, I don't understand.
	Get you back for what? It's always been like he's been...
	Just talk as him, if you don't mind.
	We'll see if this goes anywhere, right?
	right?
	But get you back for what?
	What did she do to you that was so bad?
	Well, she's always fought with me.
	She's always hated me.
	She's never wanted to speak to me.
	She's been frightened and I haven't spoken to her but rarely either because and I made her do terrible things because she won't listen to me Right.
	And do you feel that she does not appreciate you?
	No, she doesn't.
	And where would she be without you?
	Nowhere.
	She'd be...
	Like her mother. Right.
	Worse. So you saved her from that fate worse than death, right?
	Yes. And she's like, hey, thanks!
	I'm just going to take you downstairs to show you something, clang, into the dungeon, right?
	Right. Right.
	And why do you think she did that?
	She doesn't want to know that I'm a part of her.
	And why? What would it cost her?
	If she got that, if she understood that.
	She thinks that she would think that she would be evil, but that's not true.
	That's not true. Because you're like the Lone Ranger.
	You saved her from evil, and now she thinks that you would make her evil.
	Yes. Right.
	And she's thinking right now that there are people out there that are starting to hate her, but that's not true either.
	But why does she think that people hate her?
	Because she doesn't want people to see this part of her either.
	Right. Now, Mr.
	Lone Ranger, Mr.
	Justice... If you got control of the helm and you could do three things, what would those three things be?
	If you had your way.
	I'd have her forgive herself for the lies that she told to he who must not be named.
	And I'd have her Take down that bitch of an aunt once and for all.
	And then I'd have her talk to the rest of us, who she hasn't talked to before, who she can't see, because she doesn't see me.
	Right. So you'd have her forgive herself for the lies she told to he who cannot be named, you'd have her take down this bitch of an aunt, and you'd have her open up the discussion to other people?
	Yes. My God, you are evil.
	Okay, maybe you don't have a sense of humor.
	That's okay. Maybe somebody else in there does.
	So who is he who cannot be named?
	One of the people who comforted quote-unquote me while Mother was on her starvation and attrition campaign.
	Okay.
	So this is a positive feature in the landscape, right?
	There's a positive person.
	She thought he was at the time, but he's not.
	He wasn't. Okay, so he turned out to be a bad guy?
	Yes. And she feels bad for the lies that she told him?
	Yes. Now, I would assume that the things that he did were far worse than a mere lie, right?
	Yes, but she won't see that.
	Why not? She doesn't want to.
	Why not? She loves him or thought she did.
	Okay. There were two voices there, right?
	The loves him or thought she did.
	So that was present tense and past tense.
	So that's okay. That's no problem.
	It's just something to note, right?
	Yes. So, Mr.
	Justice, what you want is to have a seat at the table, right?
	Yes. I mean, no one can run things.
	We can't have a dictatorship anymore, right?
	That's got to be the goal that we all want, right?
	Right. I mean, you don't want to take over and kick everyone else into the dungeon, right?
	She's afraid I want to.
	I know. That's because she already is.
	Right? And that's projection.
	But that's okay. We understand that, you and I. But...
	You want a seat at the table, and you are very frustrated that you never get.
	Right? You come in and children run screaming, right?
	Birds, take to the skies!
	Right? Yes.
	So, that doesn't work so much for you, right?
	Right. Now, let's assume that she's never going to listen to you in your current state, in your current approach, right?
	Mm-hmm. And we have some pretty good evidence for that, right?
	I mean, how long has this been going on?
	I've been with her always.
	Right. And you've performed your task, right?
	You have defended the frontier.
	You're the thin blue line. You have got her through.
	But now, every time you take a seat at the table, you knock at the door and nobody answers.
	And then you pound at the door and nobody answers.
	And then you kick the fucking door in.
	You come into the room and everyone's fled, right?
	Yes. All right.
	So you've got to try something different, right?
	Yes. Because you kind of see if she's going to change, right?
	Because once you have the power, once you have the autonomy, once you can make your own decisions, then you will feel less frustrated, right?
	Because right now you're kind of doing the same thing over and over again and feeling worse and worse each time, right?
	Which makes you even more scary next time.
	Yes. Right.
	So, what can you do that's going to be less scary to everyone else?
	Yes. Don't you think I wouldn't have tried it if I knew?
	Well, I think that you're brilliant.
	And I think that if you were in that room and someone was kicking the door down, what would you do?
	Would you be like, hey, here's a friend!
	No. No.
	You would also be scared, right?
	Because part of your function is to frighten other people, right?
	Yes. Right?
	I think I've met you.
	Have you? Yeah, I think we talked a couple of weeks ago.
	But part of your function is to frighten other people because that's the only way that you could get people to back off when you were a child, right?
	Yeah, I was first used to frighten her mother.
	Right. It's like, back off!
	Right? Pull out the gun, take off the safety, and suddenly you've got just a few inches of personal space, right?
	Yes. Right, so you're the guy who screams at people, and you're the guy who throws up all of these warnings, signs, right?
	The hackles go up, the fur goes up, right?
	The growling, you're the menace, right?
	Mm-hmm. That pushes back this maternal acidic fog, right?
	Yes. You're the self-defense.
	And the best defense is a good offense, right?
	Yes. And there was no other possible way to do it, right?
	If there was, you would have done it.
	You don't enjoy this, right?
	You don't enjoy the solitude.
	You don't enjoy the anger.
	You don't enjoy the frustration.
	You don't enjoy the alienation.
	You want to kick back, have a beer, and chat with people and not have people run like rats every time you come into the room, right?
	Right. But you don't know how to change your approach so that you're not...
	Fulfilling your primary function, which is to terrify people, right?
	Well, if kicking the door down doesn't work, is going back to knocking going to?
	No. No.
	Because you're built to kick the door down.
	Right. Right.
	Because you're in pursuit of people, right?
	Right. And when you're in pursuit of people, and when you're scaring people, and when you're trying to make your voice heard by yelling, nobody hears you, right?
	Right. Which is not what you want.
	Now. It was necessary then, it's not necessary now, right?
	Right.
	So, what are you going to do?
	Can't tell.
	What would you like to do if you could do anything?
	If you could do anything, if you didn't have to kick a door and if you didn't have to yell, if you could do anything, what would you do?
	Hmm.
	When she meets with...
	The others, she imagines a big table, but there's only ever one chair filled, and it's not by me, it's by this other woman.
	I want the rest of us to be able to sit down in those chairs.
	Right, because what I get a sense of in talking to you is that there's a great sadness and a great loneliness in this part of your soul, right?
	And this Mr.
	Justice is a certain kind of Sadness.
	You obviously did not want a life where this was necessary, right?
	No. You did not sit there floating above the world before you were born and say, of all the households in the world that I could be born into, could I please be born into a household where I had to kick and fight for a shred of emotional space where I would be starved if I was not exploited?
	So, there is sadness and there is regret and there is loss at the root of this aggression, right?
	Yes. Because the people who frighten others can't show need, right?
	Right. They can't show their desire for companionship, right?
	Right. They can't show anything.
	They can't be seen.
	Oh, they can show.
	They can bear teeth, right?
	They can leap out of the shadows and go for people's necks, right?
	Yes. So, the way, in my opinion, for you, Mr.
	Justice, you have to take off the gun, right?
	You have to maybe put yourself in a sombrero, right?
	I have no sense of humor.
	Or maybe a reindeer hat, right?
	I still have no sense of humor.
	I understand that. But let's drop that then and say that what you need is...
	You need something from these other people, but you never show them that you need something from these other people, right?
	Right. You come in and you want to take it.
	You're owed it. You demand it, right?
	Right. Because that's the only way that you know how, because that was your function when you were growing up and defending the Miko system, right?
	Yes. So, if you want different results, you have to do different things.
	And so, if all you do is demand, because that's your function, you have to change that in order to get a seat at the table.
	So you have to show that you want into the room and you have to ask because you need and you want the companionship and you want to be sitting at the table and you want to be respected but you can't demand respect.
	You can't kick doors in and expect respect, right?
	And it was totally necessary what you did in the past and everybody should be cheering with gratitude for what you did in saving the systems.
	But now you have to tell people that you want something from them and not demand it, but ask for it and be vulnerable, which is the complete opposite of your intended function, but absolutely necessary.
	Alright. So what do you want?
	Forget about the plans, right?
	right?
	What would be the nicest and sweetest thing that you could receive emotionally?
	A thank you and a seat at that table.
	you And what would that feel like, to be truly thanked for what you did to save the planet?
	Can't express it.
	Thank you.
	Try. Validating.
	Gratifying. Joyous.
	Don't know if I can really feel joy, but...
	And if you are cheered and applauded and thanked and given a seat at the table, will you not bring the gun?
	Yeah. You don't need the gun.
	You have a voice, right? You respect it.
	Your recognition is necessary.
	And if you don't have a gun, people won't run.
	Right.
	And that's the only way to get out of uniform, right?
	Because as long as there's a threat, you have to stay with the safety off in full uniform, right?
	Right.
	But you see what's happened is now, instead of fighting the threat, you have become the threat.
	Right.
	Which means that you're free.
	To put down the gun, to take off the uniform, to slip into something a little more comfortable.
	I don't do casual.
	Alright, you can keep the uniform.
	And look, see? You have a sense of humor.
	Don't tell anyone. Don't worry, nobody's listening.
	Right, but this is how we know that we're out of the past, right?
	We know that we're out of the past when we recognize that there's no external threat anymore, and there's only internal threats, which are the habits that we develop to deal with the external threats, right?
	So that's where we can lay down our arms, and that's how we get closure in the past.
	That's how we change. That's how we free of the past, is we stop doing the things that we did in the past, which were necessary and required and absolutely praiseworthy and required, essential and virtuous, right?
	This guy is stone virtue, right?
	And the size of his aggression is the size of the attack, right?
	He is the craterer.
	of the impact of your mother.
	Oh, dear.
	And how are you feeling?
	Well, you two had a nice little chat, obviously.
	I was just kind of watching, but...
	I don't know.
	A little bit lighter. Well, what did you think of his responses?
	How did he strike you relative to your expectations?
	He was nicer than I thought.
	Right. Right, because if you listen, the tension goes down, right?
	Right. And he's a little funny.
	Yeah, yeah, well, I guess most of mine have a sense of humor.
	Of course, the hold has no sense of humor, whatever, but the constituent parts must.
	Right. And in terms of this, when you said you don't know what you feel, is that because you don't feel much of anything or you feel stuff that you're not aware of or can't identify?
	Yeah. I don't feel much of anything, but that usually means that I am feeling something, but I can't call it up, which they'll tell me later.
	Right. And I would suggest, if you wanted to, and again, I know your language skills are very good, that you might want to have a dialogue between this gatekeeper woman and Mr.
	Justice, right?
	Because I think that those two, my sense is that those two are fragments that have arisen in opposition.
	And that's my sense, right?
	That's my sense. And so I think that those two would have a pretty fractious conversation, but I think I would say that it's a necessary one, but of course it's up to you to see what works.
	Well, we'll see if they'll do it.
	Excellent. All right.
	Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
	I know that dipping into the old multi-gender roleplay is always exciting.
	And I really do appreciate that openness that you did that with.
	And I know that it's helpful for other people who find this whole process completely quasi-mystical and freaky and frightening.
	But as you can see, there is a great value and great self-acceptance that can come out of this process where everybody gets a seat at the table and everybody has some value to offer.
	And that rejection of any part of the self diminishes the entire thing.
	It diminishes the strength of the personality as a whole.
	So thank you very much. I think it was a good thing that you did.
	All right. Well, thank you everybody so much for a very interesting, wonderful, and scintillating show.
	I really, really do appreciate it.
	And have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week.
	I do still owe the PKs to business discussion.
	I'm going to dig that up and compile that as well.
	And I will get back to work.
	This week on some new videos I'm going to continue doing a podcast hopefully every day or every day and a half.
	So thank you again so much for your time and attention this week and I will talk to everybody next week and some of you perhaps before then too.

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