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March 1, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:14:04

1287 Sunday Show March 1, 2009

The history of the world wars, and the greatest challenge of empathy.

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	Well, good afternoon, everybody.
	Arr, mateys.
	It's Steph, it's Pinch Punch, first of the month, March 1st, 2, 9, 4, 14 in the afternoon, and I'm feeling much better after a short bout of being sur le weather, or as I like to say, dominated by determinism.
	And I hope that you're having a wonderful, wonderful week.
	And news from the family here is all good.
	Isabella has a new nickname, which I think is her 31st.
	We've actually counted it. She has no idea of her identity whatsoever.
	And her new name is Mimlet, which is Miss Isabella Molyneux.
	And left is because she's relatively small.
	I say relative to me, though not necessarily normal.
	So I hope that you're all having a wonderful week.
	We are heading, hopefully...
	To New Hampshire.
	We will be leaving Thursday and staying through Sunday.
	We will be arriving Friday and staying through Sunday.
	We'll be giving a speech at the New Hampshire Liberty Festival.
	In Nashua, New Hampshire, so if you can drop by, that would be fantastic.
	We will be recording it.
	We're going to use all of that CNN technology for 3D imaging because there will be lots of group hikes and you won't want to miss out on that because I know libertarians earn nothing if not touchy-feely.
	So, progress on the new book has stalled while I was not well, but it will be resuming When the whim and mood strikes me.
	But the first draft is done, and I'm very, very pleased with it.
	It does close the chapter on the family topic for me, which I think is great.
	And so I just wanted to sort of mention that, that I'm looking forward to moving on to new topics.
	And I finally did my video on 9-11 after lots of requests, and I must say that the response from Truthverse has been More civilized than effective, which is good and speaks only to perhaps my bad experience with truthers in the past.
	So if you want to check that out, that's True News number 22, aka.22 caliber baby.
	So that's it. As far as that goes, Miss Isabella is doing beautifully, her mom is doing beautifully, although for some reason does appear to be a little higher.
	I'm not sure why, because my sleep is fine, so I can only assume that she's mistreated me in some manner and is lying awake because of the annoyance of a bad conscience.
	But we're not sure.
	Isabella says hello.
	And sends greetings and thanks.
	To all of the people, and she currently is enjoying the show so much that she's actually doing it.
	Isn't she sweet, darling? Yes, she is.
	So, she's live in Yelpie, and she's doing well.
	She's hitting every developmental milestone, as yet she can only juggle soft nerf balls, though not to flaming knives, which is apparently not until week 13, but she's over 10 weeks old now.
	She's actually into her 11th week.
	And so she's almost two, if you look, two and a half months old, coming on three months, at which point the child labor laws in FDR no longer protect her, and she could be quickly used vacuuming, which will be excellent.
	No, you know what? You know what we can do?
	It's too bad it's not fall, because certainly after she's had a big meal, I think she would be an excellent leaf blower.
	Just peel back the old diaper and let it rip.
	Although we wouldn't want a blower for lampposts and cars and stuff like that.
	Marking her territory? Marking her territory, so that might be a little bit much.
	But this is all just a note for Isabella's future lawyer.
	This will be part of the lawsuit. So you might want to take a note of it right here, right now.
	So that's it for me.
	I'm happy to listen to questions if you have them.
	I have a true new segment coming up on Iraq.
	And this, oh gosh, are we ever going to pull out of Iraq?
	Well, they're not.
	And so I can start off with that, unless people have any burning questions, which I am more than happy to entertain and answer.
	And thanks again to the very kind listener.
	On the new premium podcast, which is Silver Plus.
	And if you have not picked up your premium podcast, which is How to Overcome Fear, I would really, really recommend it.
	It's under the Silver Podcast.
	Go to Media, Silver and Silver Podcasts.
	It is the most recent one as of, I guess it was posted a day or two ago, so the end of February.
	I highly recommend it. And thanks again to the listener for his or her participation in it.
	And thank you again for all of those who have donated to the point where this is all possible.
	We all thank you and hopefully the world thanks you as well.
	Sorry about the positive podcast.
	The book plus some illness has knocked me out for some Parts of February, but I have finished a three-part series, which I will be broadcasting to the general stream.
	The MECO System Podcast, I will send it out to those who have signed up for subscriptions recently.
	Thank you so much. The MECO System Podcasts are highly recommended, and if you sign up for a $10, $20, or $50 a month subscription, you get them.
	I'd like to say it's free, but frankly, it's more amortized than anything else.
	So that's it for News in the Weather here.
	I open my head and my heart to questions.
	Isabella is here if you have any questions that require a certain amount of ricketer yodeling.
	And Christina is here if you want non-tangential, vaguely sensible responses.
	So question away if you dare.
	Is it okay if I start?
	Arr! Hi, this is Colin.
	I've kind of lurked pretty hard since November.
	You know, I've come to a couple of the call nows, and I had a question about...
	I'm in school right now.
	I'm taking an AP U.S. history class, and we're about to start up World War II and Woodrow Wilson in the banking system.
	What was that?
	You said AP history class?
	I'm just not sure what that means. It's the honors level.
	We get college credit in my high school.
	Oh, okay, good for you.
	Congratulations. Sorry, you just managed that World War II. Yeah, we're just about to start that, and I was wondering if you had any advice on how to go about that, because we just did the Industrial Revolution, and I had some fun arguing against child labor laws and stuff, and I was wondering if you had any advice on going about that.
	I'm sorry, I was making a silly joke.
	If you could just repeat the question, I would be more than happy to give you a hopefully somewhat sensible answer.
	I was wondering if you had any good points to bring out, just any recommendations or advice on that period that might be interesting for me to bring up.
	Because I've been listening to a lot of your podcasts lately, and I was trying to pin down something to really nail on in that period.
	Well, yeah, I mean, I think those are excellent, excellent questions.
	I don't know if you're a donator, but there's a book I wrote on the origins of World War II. It's a novel called Almost, which is, I think, in gold or something like that.
	But it's just in case you don't have the chance to plow through that.
	I think the question to ask about World War II is...
	World War I. World War I. Yeah.
	Just the Woodrow Wilson, the banking and all that, just to pin something down.
	Yeah, I do understand.
	Well, there's a number of interesting takes on World War I. I've had it on a list of podcasts and videos to do for quite some time, but there is still just this massive mystery for a lot of people as to what the hell happened?
	Why did after a century of relative peace Did Europe plunge into this absolutely decimatory, genocidal, bloodthirsty, ten-million-killed war that wiped out almost all of the games of the Industrial Revolution?
	Now, certain psychohistorians, the Lloyd de Marston, you can get this at psychohistory.com, have a theory that you can look at the childhood origins of war.
	I've got it as an audiobook at freedomandradio.com forward slash psychohistory.
	But their theory is that When society starts to do really well, and they seem to have done some pretty good statistical analyses of these trends, that wars do not occur when society is doing badly, that wars occur at the height of a peak in prosperity.
	And their theory, and I'm roughly, roughly paraphrasing it, I'm not going to claim that I've got it all correct with my theory, the theory that they have as far as I understand it, It's important to understand that society is not a belong,
	right? Because we generally think of society as a melting pot, different cultures and so on, and we certainly do understand that there are different ages, but the way that psycho-historians seem to divvy up society to a large degree is in terms of psycho-classes, and what they mean by that is people who were raised with different parenting styles.
	And so when you have, in society, you will generally have three generations coexisting, more or less, right?
	Grandparents, parents and kids.
	And the grandparents, of course, were raised, let's say that they're 70 or whatever, they would have been raised by people in their 20s or 30s.
	So you have parenting styles heavily influencing society that are almost a century or sometimes even more old, right?
	Because the people who are in their 60s and 70s have a lot of power in society and a lot of wealth and positions in political and military power and so on.
	And so you have, at the sort of apex of power and money in society, parenting styles or people who were parented by parenting styles a century old, which tend to be almost inevitably much worse than the parenting styles that are going on from their children to their grandchildren.
	And when society goes through a period of growth and success, there is a kind of anxiety and panic that occurs In the elder generation, because this plenty and this peace provokes feelings of anxiety and hostility because their parenting was usually pretty brutal.
	And the reaction of the response is to start a war which bleeds off the excess wealth, sacrifices the children, which is an ancient ritual, When it comes to managing the anxiety to do with plenty, right?
	Like if you get extra crops, you burn some of the crops.
	If you get extra livestock, you will kill some of the livestock.
	And infanticide is common as a way of appeasing the dogs, right?
	So there's this fear in humanity that when you have too many good things, you need to kill off some of the good things, otherwise a disaster will occur.
	The anxiety of plenty or a horrible sense and so on.
	Now, I'm not saying that this would be something you necessarily want to bring up, because it would be a tough topic to bring up in a history class, but I really do think it's worth having a look at the childhood origins of war, and there's lots of essays on the psychohistory.com website, which I think are very good.
	I think that's worth examining, because I just don't think you can—it's really hard to understand war without understanding childhoods and how the childhoods influence these kinds of decisions.
	Now, all that having been said, I think that there are a number of questions that are worth asking about World War I. The first, of course, which I've mentioned before, is would any of these have been possible without central banking?
	I think the answer is pretty safely no.
	But I think that's important.
	It is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for war to have a central bank.
	In other words, not every country with a central bank immediately goes to war, but all countries that do go to these kinds of mass slaughters do have a central bank, at least to my knowledge, which is not perfect, of course.
	So I think that's very important to understand, because once you have a central bank, then you have the ability to fund these kinds of anti-economic I mean, war is purely destructive in every conceivable way, except for the profits of those on the inside, and those profits are only possible because of central banking and the printing of money.
	I mean, I've often sort of thought, you know, not that I ever would, but it would be tempting it away to, you know, those professors who say, well, war is good for the economy.
	it would just be great to go out and key that car, see if they got anything.
	Like, well, you said the structure of property was good for the economy, so I'm only adding to it being your car.
	Right?
	I mean, because to go from the abstract to the particular is usually so deranged for people that they completely incensed that you actually took it seriously and tried to apply it to him.
	Right?
	I mean, shocking.
	Absolutely shocking.
	Well, if you pay someone to key the car, then it might be beneficial for the economy.
	Well, no, even if you don't, right?
	Because it's not like the soldiers were well paid, because he would say, well, the economic stimulus of getting my car repaired is good for the economy, right?
	And this is, of course, just how ridiculous economic theories get when they're applied to abstract concepts like states and wars, but then when they're applied to individuals, those individuals fully recognize the economic insanity of destroying property in order to create wealth.
	This is completely bizarre, right?
	That's like calling the pill a fertility drug.
	I mean, it's just completely bizarre.
	Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. So I would definitely look into the central banking aspect of things and look at the degree to which that was possible.
	I think an important question about World War I is, you know, what the hell are they fighting about?
	Right? I mean, the trigger of it, right, the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand by an anarchist, and then the investigation of that that was considered to be handled, I think, by Serbia, And Austria then gave Serbia 10 key things they had to do to speed up or improve this investigation.
	And Serbia responded with approving of nine and partial approval of the tenth.
	And then Austria considered this to be absolutely wrong and then invaded Serbia, which then triggered a whole lot of alliances with everyone else piling in.
	The dispatch is going on about the First World War, the cables going back and forth among the embassies.
	There is this unbelievable sense of desperation and inevitability.
	This is going to be a completely ridiculous example, but if you've ever known a guy who's just going on A real self-destructive kick in a relationship.
	She's going to leave me. I have to clamp down on her.
	Oh my god, I have to go through her stuff and see if she's dating some other guy.
	She's going to leave me. There's this desperate inevitability and panic that is going on in those kinds of situations.
	And you know for sure that it is the fear of the girl leaving the guy that is causing him to act in such a way that would drive her away.
	It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
	Yeah, yeah. Self-fulfilling prophecy in the grimmest possible sense.
	And you can see this terrifying undertow of a drive to war that everybody consciously doesn't want and unconsciously is utterly unable to resist.
	And knowing that it will be there, they knew it was going to be a new kind of war.
	And so it is just chilling to see that.
	And you really can't understand that without two things, right?
	Without economics and the philosophy of statism and without psychology, right?
	How is it that these people know this disaster is coming, that it will be one of the greatest human disasters ever?
	And in many ways, it can be considered the greatest human disaster ever because World War I set the stage for, of course, the gold standard, the rise of Nazism, directly the institutionalization of communism in the increasingly liberalized and manchivicized Soviet Russia.
	Oh, Russia gets at the end of the Tsar's ring.
	And this, of course, all led to the Great Depression, led to World War II, led to American militarism, the Cold War.
	I mean, World War I was this unbelievable snowball that just laid waste to hundreds of millions of people's lives throughout the 20th century, and the repercussions, of course, continue to echo into the 21st century.
	So it really can be considered the most calamitous disaster of humankind.
	And it is one of these things That constantly surprises people.
	Because when you look at the 19th century, the rise of capitalism, the increasing virtualization of the West, and to some degree Russia, the end of slavery, the end of serfdom, and the rise of women, some first faint blimmerings from the Freudian school that children should be protected by people, you would say, wow, what amazing progress.
	And you would say, they seem to have solved no Western European war for a hundred years.
	Unprecedented. Growing skepticism, growing secularization of society, increase in science and medicine, incredible increases in longevity, in nutritional intake of the poorer classes and so on.
	You'd say, holy crap, these people have finally figured it out.
	And then you would not think that the next thing that would occur is bloody starvation, totalitarianism, genocide, the Treblinka, the Gulags in Russia, the whole ugly Gestapo, the NKPD, all of these incredibly We're good to go.
	For any species, it has been the relationship of the dinosaurs to a meteor.
	So it is an absolutely fascinating thing to study, and I'm sorry to be skipping around so much, but this is a topic that I want to do.
	You simply can't understand the 20th century at all without the First World War, and the causes of the First World War remain debated almost 100 years after it started.
	So it's certainly something that I have a few things to say about in time.
	So I would say, yeah, I think the psychohistory stuff's interesting to look at.
	I really think that the The central banking, that kind of financing I think is important.
	And the last thing that I think is important to look at in terms of the First World War was what was the criteria for victory?
	What were the criteria for victory?
	What was considered victory?
	And of course, as I've mentioned, I guess it's from Harry Brown, the role of the Americans coming in to the Western Front, thus causing Excuse me one minute, because I've heard people say they did that beforehand, that Lenin was already on his way to Russia before all that happened.
	I can't give you the exact chronology, but I know for sure that Everybody knew America was coming in before America came in, so if it happened slightly before, it's because they knew.
	I mean, America had to draft, they had to mobilize, they had to ship everyone over, they had to train them, they had to arm them.
	There was a long time between the intention being clear and the people landing and actually doing any fighting in America, and Germany had ample time to prepare.
	And, of course, the First World War was the first war where civilians were deliberately and systematically targeted, right?
	Churchill, as first Lord of the Admiralty in the First World War, was the architect behind his first great slaughter of German civilians.
	The first great slaughter of German civilians was the starvation blockade against Germany that went on, that caused hundreds of thousands of Germans to die from a lack of food and a lack of medicine.
	And of course, this is the same thing that the British did again against Iraq in the 90s.
	The second, of course, great slaughter of the German civilian population was Bomber Harris' Reign of Terror, Lucifer Strike, against the German population in the 1940s under the bombing campaign from the ARIA, which were entirely psychologically driven.
	They had almost no war value whatsoever.
	In fact, if they had diverted resources from bombing about German civilians and actually targeted The war would have been over literally years earlier.
	A book came out about that recently, which is very interesting.
	A book called The Unnecessary War, which recently came out, that I think is well worth the read.
	So I think there's lots of good questions to ask about it.
	It's an absolutely fascinating thing.
	I would go in with as much of an empirical and open mind as possible.
	I think that the question still remains to be solved.
	Of course, I doubt I'm going to solve it or anyone, but I think that the question still needs to be solved about what and how it happens.
	It's the same thing that George Fukuyama, I think, recently wrote a book, well, not that recently now, at the end of the 90s, called The End of History, about how liberal free-market democracies have triumphed over totalitarianism because of the liberalization that was going on at the time in China and what was happening in the Soviet Union and so on.
	And, of course, that's proven to be a The totalitarianism is actually on the rise, and recently there are now more dictatorial societies in the world, for the first time in a while, than there are even the liberal societies that we live under.
	There are all of these premonitions about the imminent liberalization of the human condition, which always ends up provoking a backlash.
	I think the psycho-historians have a very good explanation for that backlash.
	The clash of primitive parenting styles with the liberalization of new parenting styles, right?
	And the desire to sacrifice the young to reenact the trauma that the elder parents or the grandparents received themselves as children, right?
	Because when you're heavily traumatized, which is an older parenting style, liberty breeds anxiety and hostility and fear.
	So when they see increasingly liberal parenting styles, I think it's a pretty good explanation.
	Again, it's hard to prove this sort of stuff, but I would keep my eye on that because there was no trend that would have ever predicted what happened in the 20th century other than certain aspects of psychology, which I think made it The central bank made it possible, and the psychological backlash to the new freedoms from the elder generation made it inevitable, if that makes any sense.
	So, sorry for the long ramble-tangent lecture, I hope, that at least has some utility to your question.
	And a great question, by the way.
	Well, thanks. And what about the U.S.'s role?
	Because it's an American U.S. history class.
	So what about their role in it all?
	Because I think it's interesting, too, when we talk about history, we much focus on the causes and the actual wars.
	But in World War I and II, we never actually talk about the causes in class.
	We always just talk about the battles, the types of warfare.
	It's kind of interesting. So you say, what about the U.S. role, and what do you mean?
	Yeah, what about, you know, what exactly went on with that?
	What did the U.S. do wrong?
	Well, the U.S., what they did wrong was getting involved at all, right?
	I mean, this is... Yeah. And, you know, we think of the anti-war protests as being something relatively new.
	It's really not. It's not true. The, you know, 200,000 Americans vanished in the face of the draft of the First World War.
	Vanished. Yeah, I've listened to, like, all your podcasts on this.
	I was just... Yeah, pick up a copy of the War Racket by Harry Brown.
	Write that down.
	I mean, of course, the question of why America got into the war may never be answered.
	Obviously, there was huge profit, which I talked about, for the war in the industry.
	Of course, Wilson got in saying, we're not going to go to war.
	Europe is going to fight its foreign wars.
	We don't care. Then that changed around with the Lusitania, which seems to have been pretty much a false flag operation.
	They kept sailing into U-boats, patrolled German waters, even after being warned that they would sink on site.
	And then they sunk and so on, right?
	So similar to 9-11 or similar to the Gulf of Tonkin or similar to Quill Harbor, I mean, these are just highly misinterpreted events that are allowed to launch a war, which really has nothing to do with the event itself.
	And so America got in, of course, and, you know, 110,000, I think, American troops died.
	And America ended up changing its economy fundamentally, and the socialist candidate for president in, I think it was at some point in the war 1690, Eugene Debs ended up going to jail for 10 years for speaking out against the war.
	You had this unbelievably restrictive and destructive The laws, the anti-sedition laws and so on, thousands and thousands of people were thrown in jail.
	I mean, this doesn't happen. This doesn't happen at the moment, right?
	And you wonder in the degree to which anti-war protesters at the moment, if they were facing ways that mass arrests and repressions would still be on the job.
	I know I wouldn't be, but this is something that really radicalized and expanded the power of the federal government and in its repression of dissent in the First World War.
	And those repercussions, of course, led You know, the American involvement led to such a disproportionate balance of power on the Allied side that instead of going home exhausted, which is what they were going to do, the Allies ended up with such overwhelming success on the Western Front that they were able to take these crazy turns to Germany that destroyed the German economy throughout the 20s, you know, triggered the hyperinflation as the German government printed money to pay back the debts that they owed to the Allies.
	And that's, of course, staged over.
	It paved the way for Hitler and the inevitable resentment that comes from being cornered and bullied.
	So I think that the American involvement in the First World War was one of the great catastrophic decisions of the 20th century.
	The First World War was The most, right?
	And the American involvement in the scale of the balance of power and created the stage for communism and for the Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent hyperinflation, collapse of German banking, the middle class, rise of Hitler.
	It's hard to imagine there would have been a Second World War if America had not entered into the First World War.
	Yeah, I understand that.
	Yeah, and if there had been no Second World War, and if America had not entered into the First World War, there would have been no Cold War, because Russia would have probably liberalized itself and not faced the backlash that came back through Lenin.
	I mean, it's hard to imagine, but I think it's really important to understand, it's really hard to have a revolution.
	You cannot have a revolution without your tens of millions of dollars in arms and trained people and so on, and so all the stuff that goes on in Latin America with these These coups and all of that.
	I mean, you can't just be some guy who says, I'm going to go over for the government.
	The same thing with Lenin.
	Without the support of the German government, which seems to have come directly from the US as well, it simply could not have happened.
	You know, you have all of these pictures of Lenin, you know, showing off his forehead on a railway car, yelling at the workers.
	But that had nothing to do with the revolution.
	I'm sure he was a wonderful orator and a very passionate guy and great with a turn of phrase.
	But that has absolutely nothing to do with a revolution.
	A revolution is money and guns.
	That's all it is. And with the money, you buy the people to shoot guns and the guns themselves.
	So, without the American involvement in World War I, I think World War I would not have led to the incredible disasters throughout most of the world in the 20th century.
	And it's very possible that imperialism, which was a dying force in the I mean, World War I could have effectively wiped out imperialism, which is what the Second World War did eventually.
	But it could have wiped out imperialism, but instead imperialism was transferred to the New World and then was used as a...
	The Cold War was used as a justification, the expansion of imperialism by the Americans in particular and the British to a smaller degree and was then used, of course, for all the horrendous You know, Korea and Vietnam and Cambodia and Iraq and Iran and all that sort of stuff that went on.
	It was used as an excuse for this expanded imperialism, which was a rot that came all out of these decisions to go into the First World War from the Americans.
	It really was just an absolutely horrendous decision.
	There's two decisions that I could change.
	The first would be no public schools.
	I don't think it's an accident that Yeah, the patriotism shoved down our throats at schools.
	Pretty disgusting. Yeah, I mean, war, you know, as I talk about in real-time relationships, the state is horizontal.
	It's a slave-on-slave violence that makes the state possible, and war is the ultimate sort of aphrodisiac for the orgy of slave-on-slave violence, to mix my metaphors in a truly brutal manner.
	But when you have the external threat, the slaves all line up and scream and shoot at anyone who steps out of line.
	So without that, America would have been a very different place, and the world itself as a whole would have been a very different place.
	Thanks, I'll look into that. What was it, Unnecessary War, you said the name of the book was?
	Yeah, Pat Buchanan, I think, wrote it, but it's called The Unnecessary War, which I think is really worth looking at.
	It is a skeptical look. It's one of these books I've read that I think we need to do a review on for quite some time, but it's a book that talks about the lack of necessity for England, in particular, to get involved in the Second World War, which I think is...
	You know, there's always one war that everyone thinks is just, in the same way that you think, oh, well, the Second World War and so on.
	Of course, I don't believe that at all.
	But, yeah, it's worth having a read for sure.
	Roy Jenkins' book Churchill, which was something I used quite extensively for my research in my novel almost, is well worth a read.
	It's a very good history of this kind of stuff.
	Harry Brown's The War Racket.
	Is very good.
	And if you want any other books, I have a whole bibliography and stuff that I use for my novels, so just shoot me an email and I'll send you those.
	Alright. Yeah, thanks.
	Alright, now that we've put all the people not interested in history to sleep.
	Yeah, I love history.
	It's probably my favorite subject in school.
	Oh, it's fantastic. It's fantastic.
	After theater school, I went back into history because...
	During theatre school I did a number of historical plays and did a lot of research and just realized just how fascinating it was.
	Although I never really, I didn't really, I took a whole course on the Second World War, where of course we started on the First World War, like a full year.
	I can't remember that much from it because, you know, the problem is there's no point studying history unless you can figure out patterns.
	That you can use to change the present, and so also the future.
	This is true to the family, as well as the state, as well as the world.
	And unfortunately, most of the history classes that I took, you couldn't extract a principle out of them if you prayed to anyone, right?
	So that was a real shame.
	I had to really work with the principles, and people got kind of hostile about that.
	But that was the only point that I really saw in the room.
	I've noticed that with a lot of my history teachers, they don't have really an opinion on anything in history.
	I was arguing with a kid about market anarchism in class, debating, and the teacher didn't even really care.
	She just gave you that thousand-yard stare, looks at you and says, oh well, we don't have a computer simulation to test it out.
	They're just so far removed from it all.
	They just enjoy talking about it but not actually thinking about it.
	Yeah, I had a professor who made me write an essay three times on Martin Luther because he said I was jumping to conclusions.
	Even though I had quotes and evidence, and basically all I had to do was I had to continually scrub this stuff out.
	And when I was handing it in, this guy was a prick to use a technical term.
	When I was handing it in, I really wanted to ask him, I went to his office with the third one, which was now bland and neutral and had no fourth content whatsoever, which then got me to Mark.
	I guess he wanted to give.
	I wanted to ask you, you know, what's the point of history?
	You know, because if I go to my doctor and say, what's the point of medicine?
	He'd say, well, to promote health by illness.
	Go to an engineer, what's the point of engineering?
	Well, to build down structures that are safe and efficient.
	Whatever, right? But you go to Intel, what's the point of your computer chips?
	Well, it's faster and cheaper and more energy efficient, right?
	But you go to most of the people in the audience, and I wanted to go to this guy, and I'm glad that I didn't, because it would have been a pointless humiliation of him with no power on my side, right?
	But to ask the guy, I'd say, well, if this is the essay we want, which has no full content in it whatsoever and is a mere bland recitation of Luther's thoughts, What is the point of history?
	Is it to photocopy badly other people's thought processes, which I can't ever do because I'm not a German monk in the 15th century, in the 16th century, and so I just can't.
	We can't get into those people's mindsets.
	You can't scrub 99% of what you know and picture what it's like back then, although that's what he wanted us to do, is to sort of photocopy history within our own mind, which is a useless endeavor.
	Someone said, I think it was a woman who said this about the ancient Greeks.
	It was so impossibly long ago, and it is so impossibly hard to imagine.
	And it really is for us to go back to picture these gods as real, to have the worldview that these people had, to have the view of Of women and children and slaves and the blackness of the world and the cosmos.
	We can't go back into these people's minds.
	But that seems to be what a lot of it all.
	We have to go back and understand how these people thought.
	But we can't. All we can do is figure out what they got wrong and try and apply it in the present.
	We don't study the Black Death.
	Could we create what it's like to get the Bubonic Plague?
	We studied Black Death, hopefully, so that we can prevent these things in the future.
	That, to me, would be the point.
	But a lot of historians wouldn't agree with that.
	Yeah, I know what you mean.
	All right. Well, thank you.
	Excellent, excellent question.
	Thank you. Appreciate that. And do keep us posted about how things go in your class.
	And my advice from having spent a number of years in the trenches of various universities, don't You know, don't feel that your job is to displace the teacher.
	Don't feel that your job is to educate the students by giving them the perspective that the teacher is not giving.
	I mean, if you want that, I would say, you know, play the game and then try to become a professor if you want.
	But just, I felt, and maybe you don't feel this way, but I had this feeling when I was younger as well, You know, I have to be a countervailing weight of propaganda that's coming out for the anti-thought that's coming out from the professors now.
	And so I spend a lot of my undergraduate time sort of shaping against these, like an inner pie against a nylon web.
	But I spent a fair amount of time shaping against this stream of information.
	and it really didn't do much except irritate my fellow students.
	Well, they don't even care in the first place.
	They're not even learning anything.
	That's the part I've noticed.
	I've kind of given up on it because the teachers, they don't even have an indoctrination goal.
	They're just there to collect the paycheck.
	It didn't add to the knowledge of the professors or the curiosity or the knowledge of the students.
	All it did was subtract from my enjoyment.
	Basically, I just viewed it as an excellent chance for me to read and to debate with like-minded people, those that I could find, and a comfortable and enjoyable place to study.
	And once I got to graduate school, of course, it would be much, much better because I could choose my own topics and so on.
	Although it was really, really tough to get a professor to do with my thesis.
	But, yeah, just don't try to be the school within a school.
	And it sounds like you're not, so I won't let you.
	No, I'm not going to be a Randall Patrick Murphy.
	I'll pass on that role.
	Good, good, because they have their own ways of carving out your fumbledores.
	Oh yeah.
	And I've been told, you know, I've gotten to fights with people and I've gotten to the point where they just yell at me to say, "Get out of the country." And it's like, I'm told I'm being passive aggressive.
	You know, I'm one of my friends that, you know, gets an amusement out of me when I do this to people, you know, I argue this.
	It's like, how is that passive aggressive?
	I don't, you know, how is them getting upset by what I'm saying, me being passive aggressive?
	They say like, I'm trying to provoke them like that.
	Like I just told these views to be contrarian, but I'm not.
	I don't know. Well, I think it's important to understand that the accusation of passive aggression is 99.9% of the time it's an expression of passive aggression.
	And the way that you figure out whether somebody is being passive aggressive when they're accusing you of passive aggression is you ask them for their definition of passive aggression.
	And most people will say anything which pisses anyone else off.
	But that's not the definition of passive aggression, of course.
	The definition of passive aggression is quite different.
	But when people say something negative about you, then passive aggression is certainly a negative statement you hear.
	And since I face this a couple of dozen times a day, you just say, well, okay, what's your definition of passive aggression, right?
	If somebody says, Steph, you're Caucasian, then okay, and if I don't know what the word means, it's like, what's your definition of Caucasian?
	And it's like, you know, ultimately sexy boy.
	Okay, I guess, right?
	I'm down with that. So just ask for that definition and just keep asking questions.
	It's like, okay, well, how does that apply to me and not to others?
	How does it apply only to me in this situation?
	You know, just be curious until they recognize.
	Then they'll call me passive-aggressive for doing that.
	Or they back down, or they give you something useful which can help.
	Oh, yeah. It makes sense.
	The curiosity in the face of insults, you know, it can be considered a passive aggressive thing, but it's the only way to save the relationship, right?
	Because if somebody is actually being helpful, well then they won't just call you passive aggressive, but they'll Instead of launching labels of people, psychological labels of people, it's usually, of course, better to ask them how they're feeling, what they're thinking, how they're doing.
	So if he sees you in an interaction that is problematic, just say, well, what were you feeling?
	What were you thinking? Rather than just hurling a label at you, which is completely counterproductive and frankly not very friendly.
	Well, my friend that does that, she...
	We're pretty close. I don't think she's doing it to be counterproductive, but at the same time, I think she does it to dilute my points so she doesn't have to think about them.
	She doesn't really care about any of the topics we talk about, but I don't think she wants to think about them at all, either.
	I think she just tries to usually dilute what I'm saying by putting titles like that.
	I don't think she's trying to hurt me. She's just trying to save herself, if you will.
	Yes, but I think that it's important to recognize that it's one thing to save yourself by jumping out of burning buildings.
	It's another thing to push someone back while you're going out, right?
	Mm-hmm, yeah. But she is saving herself, but it's at your expense, right?
	Yeah. And for me, at least, the fundamental mechanism that occurs, right?
	There's always been this great mystery, and Mencken talks about it, and Socrates talks about it, and Nietzsche talks about it, and Rand talks about it.
	everybody talks about it who has tried to bring a few shards of bright truth to the dark case of the human mind, is why the hell the truth teller is so universally reviled?
	Why are truth-tellers so universally reviled?
	I mean, my answer is complex and simple, and I'll probably just do the simple one here, but my answer is that the reason that truth-tellers are reviled is that They reveal to people the hostility of the society they live in, the truth, which destroys the illusion that people have that they're living in a virtuous society.
	It pushes people into an uncomfortable truth, which is the society you live in is not virtuous.
	It talks a lot about virtue because virtue is the best way to control people, but you do not live in a virtuous society because a virtuous society Well, it gives them responsibility to do something about it.
	If they know about it, they have to change it, and that they should change it.
	You could be right, and I'm not going to again say you know that you're living in your personal society.
	I don't think it goes that far.
	I don't think that it's because they don't want to get up and do stuff because obviously people do get up and do a whole bunch of stuff to improve the society in their mind that they live in, right?
	They support Obama. They are anti-war protesters.
	They give $100 billion a year to US religions.
	They will anti-nuclear protest.
	People will do a lot of stuff.
	To improve the world that they're living in.
	So I don't think it's just resentment because we have to do stuff because a lot of people want to do stuff.
	Yeah, but that's kind of easy stuff.
	You know, it's easy to put the belt in a box.
	It's easy to go to church every Sunday, but actually go out and help people to actually change the way you live, you know?
	Well, I mean, you could be right, but I think for a lot of people, environmental compliance, low carbon footprints, it does cause some considerable changes in lifestyle.
	And it's not easy.
	And of course, you think at the moment, you give 10% of their income to the church.
	Some people give even more than that.
	And, you know, it's not that easy to give up half of the Sunday to go to church and feel guilty and pray every night.
	Well, it's easier to do that than stop beating your kid, you know.
	I'm not saying that there is more resistance than least resistance, but a lot of people will do things that aren't easy to improve the world.
	But I think that But where I do agree with you is those are, in general, socially sanctioned ways of doing good.
	I mean, if most people, if you're in the States, particularly in the South, you say, I go to church, most people aren't going to say, ew, right?
	Whereas, I don't know, if you say, I don't know, I'm part of the Man-Boy Love Association or something, people will say, ew, right?
	So, I think that it's not...
	I don't think it's first and foremost at the point of activism.
	I don't think people reject the truth because if they accept the truth, they then have to go out and do stuff.
	I think it's because they simply don't...
	I can write about that. I think they want to hear something else.
	Yeah, well, they want to hear your American dream and your perspective.
	They want the regular load.
	Oh, I see.
	You should just repeat then.
	This is what they expect you to do, I think.
	Yeah. That's sad.
	Can you guys see me? I wasn't sure if I'm back in or not.
	Yeah, you're back, Steph. Beautiful, beautiful.
	You're a little faint, but yeah, you're here.
	Yeah, I love that one, Matt. Don't let me interrupt.
	I just wanted to check if I was back.
	Are you guys done?
	Yeah, we were just chatting while you were getting back in the chat.
	Yeah, I'm waiting for you. Chatting along.
	Now, sorry, if anybody else had other questions, we actually have a question for other parents.
	Do we? Yeah.
	Yeah. But if we have questions, we can ask the parent question in a second.
	Oh, and I saw Crystal something in chat, and yeah, we get a lot of Union indoctrination.
	They're the epitome of good.
	We're doing progressives right now, and we had to pick which progressive was our favorite and do a class vote on, you know, the best progressive there was, Progressive Hall of Fame.
	So, we get a lot of that.
	You mean Union like Teamsters?
	What was that? You mean Union like Teamsters, right?
	Teamsters? Teamsters, you know, like the International Brotherhood of X, Y, Z. Those kind of things.
	No, like union of, like a labor union, teacher union.
	Yeah, that's what I mean. Oh yeah, yeah, for sure.
	That meant that the corporation plus the state equals a power balance that can only be balanced by the unions and the brotherhood.
	Well, the monopoly of unions is infinitely good for people, and the monopolies of corporations are infinitely bad.
	Right. Unions are a reaction to the predatory powers of the corporations in particular, but the state has a sort of, you know, the corporations rule the world and the state is a mere handmaiden, and then unions are required to balance that power and so on.
	Uh-huh. Unions are looking out for the little guy.
	All that, yeah.
	All that Norma Rae stuff. Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, they were just asking about propaganda, I see.
	The lower classes in particular have just been unbelievably hammered by unionization.
	And of course, like all things, right, and I talked about this very early on in the podcast series, in fact, you've got the space program.
	When you first get violence involved in something, whether it's statism or whether it's We're good to go.
	It changes somewhat rapidly later on, which is really, really tragic.
	So, I think that unions at the very beginning, yeah, they do offer people's salaries and their benefits.
	Well, the wolves get in it. In the beginning, it's, you know, a bunch of people with their high ideals, but then slowly, you know, people see it as an opportunity and then they infiltrate it.
	Yeah, and also there's the effect that I talked about in a recent True News segment 21, I think, which was You know, when inflation hits, right?
	When you print a bunch of money, those closest to the epicenter make out like bandits, and everyone else gets hit in the shorts, right?
	But it's the same thing with unionization, right?
	When they start, companies are profitable, the manufacturing base is secure, and so they can start to...
	What they do is they inflate the prices of things to some degree, and they end up making a lot of money.
	But then that inflation goes through the economy, which then makes the manufacturing sector, as a whole, less competitive.
	Driving people to import from overseas, that's undermining.
	But any time you drive up the price, you're going to drive down demand.
	That's economics 101.
	It's not even 101. Everybody knows that going in, right?
	And so what happens with unionization is it drives up the price of labor, which makes a lot of money for the people in the first generation.
	It's just that usually a generation or two down the road, everyone gets it in the shorts, right?
	And the manufacturing base in the U.S. has shrunk by 40% over the past 10 years or something like that.
	We only export the dollar, that's how we stay afloat.
	We just keep our bases up so everyone uses our greenbacks, so they're reliant upon us.
	That's why we have bases everywhere, so we can pump that money into them.
	Right, and it's the time value of violence that it's like a peak and then it drops out, right?
	And it's the peak at the beginning, right?
	So when Canada and the doctors were first privatized, it was a fantastic system.
	You couldn't get a better system, so to speak, because you had all the discipline and the hard work ethic and all of that that came out of the private sector, but it had been completely socialized.
	It's a generation later that it all turns to crap, right?
	Well, like, now compared to the 90s, you know, look at the 90s, we win the Cold War, you know, we got these bases everywhere, it's all going well, and now all of a sudden it's coming back to bite us in the ass.
	I'm sorry, I didn't quite understand that point.
	If you could just fill me in on it.
	Well, it's kind of like, you know, even with the Cold War, we win it.
	So, you know, we have these bases everywhere.
	We're in control of the world.
	We have our empire. So it goes well at first, and now it's coming to bed.
	It's in the ass. It's all falling apart.
	Oh, I see. I see. Yeah, I can certainly see that.
	And, of course, when you print a bunch of money or borrow a bunch of money to invest in Whatever state sector, whether it's military, industrial or something else, yeah, I mean, everyone makes out like bandits, you know?
	Everybody looks great when they get their first five credit cards and max them out.
	It's just that down the road things are hell, right?
	So the promise of violence is that it imposes a transfer of wealth on a free market paradigm, which transfers the wealth but does not initially destroy that free market paradigm and all of the value and allocation of resources, right?
	So the The manufacturing sector, which has been optimized according to free market principles, then got frozen and hyperinflated through unions, and it takes a while for everyone to realize that that's kind of stuck in the past, it doesn't change anymore and so on.
	And that is a huge problem, but it takes a long time for that problem to show up, and of course by the time it does.
	There's a show called The Wire, which I've talked about before, and if you ever get a chance to see it, it's a great, great show.
	It's really interesting because it's really nitty-gritty, and they actually don't seem to care that much about telling a story, although it's very well done, and the acting is great.
	And they did something, a show about a rap called Generation Kill that's also quite worth the...
	Yeah, I like Generation Kill.
	Yeah, well, you feel like half documentary.
	It's a very interesting kind of cinema verite style.
	And they did, I think it was season three, I think it was, it was basically all about unionization.
	And how unions, you know, they were desperately hanging in.
	Subakya, I think was the name of the union guy.
	Yeah. They were desperately hanging in, trying to get a dredging job from City Hall, right?
	And this is how pathetic it had gotten for the unions, that they couldn't get a free market job to save their life.
	All they could do was donate to politicians in the hopes of getting thrown some state money to keep themselves alive for another year.
	I mean, that's how pitiful, bottom-feeding, pathetic it had become.
	And I think that that's a pretty accurate representation of what's happened.
	I mean, it just, you know, it's a...
	You know, it's like mass depression, you know?
	It's all fun and games when you're high, right?
	But it always crashes. And it's a multi-generational arc, unfortunately.
	By the time it crashes, it's also entrenched and it's got so much propaganda about it that it's really hard to see the causes.
	Well, I was thinking too, I read a thing about the bailout bill that all public works now have to use unionized labor and materials acquired by law.
	Right, and of course that has nothing whatsoever to do with efficiency or anything like that.
	The only thing that has to do is paying back the union for the support of Obama.
	I mean, the Republicans have a union called the military and the Democrats have a union called everything else, right?
	Yeah. Well, the military is kind of in both parties now.
	It's not like Obama is going to Close any of the bases.
	No, no, that's right. That's right, of course not.
	He doesn't have the balls to stand up to the Pentagon, you know?
	They want their G4 jets to fly around the world, the Admirals do, and he can't say no to them.
	Even if he wanted to, I don't think he could.
	Yeah, the U.S. is bankrupt fundamentally.
	It's a $1.75 trillion deficit, and the Pentagon's budget is $664 billion, which is half of total global military spending.
	And this Democratic peace president is going to grow in 2009 and 2010 by another $200 billion.
	And then another $40 or $50 billion from the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
	And it's got nothing to do with the Democrats reducing the amount of money that is being spent on the military.
	Oh, yeah. And they say, I'm still pulling out of Iraq, but they're still building more military bases there.
	Yeah, I know. It's like, what?
	Is there anything else that you wanted to add on that?
	Not really, but there was a funny YouTube video I saw with this dad telling his kids that we're going to take 800 billion of your dollars.
	They were like these four-year-olds, and they were like, what?
	You're joking, right? And one of them, like, started crying.
	It was like, the sad part is it's true, you know?
	This is my money that I haven't even made yet.
	It's just being taken.
	Well, it's not true. I mean, it may not be true.
	It's not true objectively, like the world is round.
	It's one of these things, it's only true if you believe it, sort of thing.
	Well, if we pay it back, yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, fundamentally, if...
	If some old guy comes to my house and says, I ran into debt, I'm now going to need to take half of your income, I'll be like, hey, you ran into debt?
	You pay it off, right? If you can't pay it off, it's their bankruptcy.
	It doesn't give you the right to come take from me, right?
	That, of course, is the position of these four-year-olds, right?
	They're going to grow up. And at some point, and I hope that we can make this transition philosophically rather than through any other means, right?
	It's either going to happen through reason or it's going to happen through force.
	And we obviously do not want it to happen through force.
	But at some point, there's going to be a shrug and a nihilistic fuck you to the other generation, right?
	Which is, yeah, well, you know, you guys set this whole thing up.
	with the expectation that we were going to pay for you guys until the end of time and frankly I don't want to and I'm not going to and now whether that comes in the form of a It's the richest generation in history taking on the fourth generation in generations taking money from them.
	And at some point, it's just going to be like, you know what?
	It's a funny game. The only way to win is not to play.
	I don't want to get involved in this system, but that's when the system will change.
	And of course, we want to point out these truths so that it can happen in a peaceful manner, which is not to say it will be easy rather than.
	Yeah.
	Well, I should probably give up the microphone and someone else can talk.
	Alright, thank you.
	Maybe Isabella, she seems itching to...
	Oh no, she's fine.
	She's not crying. She yelps.
	It sounds a little like she's crying.
	I mean, she's not crying or wailing.
	She wants something and she's vocalizing for that.
	She's a very, very affectionate physical baby, right?
	She really is only happy when she's asleep or being held.
	And that is quite a challenge as a parent, right?
	She's very content when she's being carried around and shown things, when she's been sung to, when she's being held.
	And she no longer enjoys lying on her back now.
	She wants to sit up and look at the world and see things.
	And she's not the baby who's hooked-downable.
	And she makes me look relatively not clinging.
	And that's not easy, let me tell you.
	So, yeah, no, it is a challenge.
	I'm sure it's a phase, but it is an exciting phase, as I believe.
	And that phase has been since the very beginning.
	She's never been... She's sitting in her chair more long.
	Yeah, she's sitting in her chair longer for now.
	and we've got her a little crown.
	So she sits there on the other side.
	It's like she's very affectionate baby.
	I mean, we're an affectionate couple, so I'm sure it's not a show.
	All right.
	Well, if we don't have any more questions at the moment, I don't know if we have any parents on who've had newborns, but we have a couple of questions about sleep.
	How do you feel about it? Somebody's asking you, how do I feel about the speech in New Hampshire?
	Fine. I think it's going to be fine.
	I'm going to give people the choice, because, you know, we libertarians are all about voting.
	So I'm going to give people the choice. Like, do you want the boring 45-minute speech with questions, or do you want something more participative?
	I'm sure they'll want something more participative.
	And we'll just do the role plays about how the arguments for morality, and in particular the against me argument, can be used to strongly disarm people who are taking the pro-status, pro-status positions.
	I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
	I'm looking forward to it. And I'm only hoping, of course, that we don't have any trouble getting across the border.
	Unfortunately, the government's made a whole series of mistakes.
	There's a valid first certificate.
	And so we're going to try and get across and be reasonable and talk to the guys at the border about that possibility that we won't be able to.
	In which case, I'll just go down for the one day, but we hope to do that for a couple of days.
	But no, I think it'll be a lot of fun.
	I'm looking forward to it. And don't forget to sign up if you're coming to the BBQ so we know how much food to order.
	and somebody will post that link into the into the chat room if they would be so very very kind yeah no kidding last seat at the border i We've talked about that.
	I'm a house husband. Yeah, you get those, oh, what do you do?
	Oh, I run a philosophy show.
	Oh, really? What's it about? Uh, energy, let me in.
	right so we'll see all right so yes go ahead felt if you wanted to ask a question that's more than fine with me Hey guys, how are you?
	Great, thank you. So I wanted to ask a question about a part of real-time relationships that I've just been having a heck of a time applying to my life.
	It's just been very difficult and I just wanted to ask some advice.
	And it's the part of the book where you talk about thoughts preceding emotions.
	I think the two examples that you gave in the book were the situation where you couldn't find your passport to go to France.
	And you're kind of like, I must go to France, but of course finding your passport's not really within your control, so it kind of leads you in a situation where it's either like win or lose, whereas if you go to it with, I wonder if I will go to France, It's a much less emotionally volatile way to look at it, I guess, in the sense that it's not going to leave you really depressed if you can't find your passport or something.
	I mean, am I correct there?
	Yeah, and I mean recently I had some physical symptoms that were alarming when I was ill and of course I went for a bunch of tests and x-rays and ultrasounds and so on and everything was fine and that's a little more exciting than getting a passport.
	But yeah, it's either going to be, is it going to come out one way or is it going to come out another way and you know thinking about it in advance and And anxiety, and it's not going to change the outcome.
	And I'm a bit of a worrier sometimes.
	Not WA, but WO. And so I have to really remember that, of course, that kind of advance concern merely strips pleasure from life without adding anything in return.
	And of course, it could well be said that worrying not only does not add something to life, but subtracts it in terms of unhappiness and stress and things which can also be there for your health.
	So that is something that I'm still struggling with, right?
	Especially because I have a high tolerance for stress, which is good, but it means that when I then get overstressed, it's not good, right?
	Because then I'll generally get sick with something or feel something that's negative physically.
	So that's something I continually have to sort of check on in myself, is levels of stress and so on.
	And I think a certain amount of stress can be good, particularly when you're doing something new or something challenging, but it's learning how to manage stress is still a challenge for me and certainly, of course, has been over the past six months.
	The last six months have been tougher that way as a whole.
	So yes, I certainly do understand it's a real challenge, but let me get back to your question rather than my rambling.
	Sure, sure. I mean, what I've been struggling with recently is more like day-to-day things that are happening that will sort of like...
	I guess I'll get sort of disappointed if something that I thought was going to happen doesn't end up happening.
	I mean, a good example was this week I was planning on meeting with a friend on, like, I think it was Wednesday night.
	And I was fairly excited about it because we had talked and...
	I had some interesting things that we were going to talk about and then what ended up happening was her grandmother got sick in the hospital and she needed to go because it was like she was going to pass away and she needed to go see her before she died.
	It was very sad but at the same time that was obviously totally out of my control and yet I still found myself sort of like Disappointed that like what I thought was going to happen, what I was very excited about, you know, sort of didn't happen.
	But of course there was nothing I could have done about it.
	So I feel like if I just looked at it more like, I wonder if I will see this person tonight as opposed to, I will see this person tonight.
	If I would have, you know, I'm sure I wouldn't have been as disappointed.
	And of course, the other thing about that is that I understand that conceptually and I still find it so hard to have that mentality of just like, you know, I wonder what's going to happen as opposed to, you know, this is going to happen, you know, later.
	And basically my question is just what do you do to sort of help remind yourself to be more curious about events that are sort of out of your control?
	Let's go back for a sec. So you were going to see a woman, a friend, right?
	Is that right? Or is it a romantic interest?
	Not romantic, just a friend.
	Okay, and this woman had someone who was ill in her family?
	Right, right. And it was very sad.
	I felt very sad about that.
	But yes, that's what happened.
	Okay, and I'm just trying to understand this gap here, right?
	The difference with the passport thing is like, I lost it, it's an inanimate object, nobody's sick, and so on, right?
	Because I think that there may be another way, another path with what you're talking about here.
	Let me sort of, I realize now that that example is...
	It's not a good example.
	Let me just... No, no. I'm going to be annoying and disagree with you that you brought this for a reason and that's what this example is.
	Well, okay. I guess what I was going for was, I mean, like, it's very sad that her grandmother passed away, but that wasn't what I was really referring to because, I mean, I don't really know her grandmother.
	I'm not particularly sad about that.
	I feel sad for her. But what I was more referring to was just the fact that I, you know, involuntarily felt disappointed that we weren't going to get together.
	And I think that what I'm...
	I feel like I wouldn't have been disappointed if I had gone into the situation with more curiosity.
	Instead of, we are going to get together tonight, definitely, I could have said to myself, I wonder if we're going to get together tonight.
	And again, when I say I'm disappointed, I wasn't really, really upset.
	It's just more that...
	It was palpable. I was kind of like, oh, that's fairly...
	I felt like through the rest of the night, I was like, well, now what I'm going to do with myself, I was sort of restless.
	And so that's kind of more what I was referring to in terms of the emotional state that I had.
	I would have liked to have not felt that, I guess.
	Right. Now, is this a good friend of yours?
	You've been friends with her for a while, or is she a more of a new acquaintance?
	Actually, she's more of a new friend, and that's one of the reasons why I was fairly excited about it, because we had had a couple conversations, and she had sort of been very interested in some of the things I was talking about, and not getting defensive when I would bring up certain truth statements like a lot of people do.
	So I was kind of excited to sort of get to know her more, and so yeah, that was the situation.
	And do you know if she was so close to her grandmother?
	She had said that she, like, not extremely close, but close enough that it was very sad for her.
	Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty devastating thing, right?
	I mean, grandparents can be pretty magical people for a child, right?
	Because they can be fabulously indulgent and, you know, all that kind, a lot of fun and so on, right?
	They generally don't tend to be the authority figures that parents sometimes are, so...
	It was pretty devastating for her life.
	Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely.
	I'm sure it was. I mean, do you see where I'm going with this?
	I mean, I don't want to get me wrong.
	I'm not upset that she couldn't get together.
	I'm not upset about that at all.
	I'm just more, like...
	Again, I can't control how I feel about a situation.
	Logically, I was like, oh yeah, of course you can't get together.
	That's totally fine. It was totally fine that she couldn't get together.
	I'm going to stop you there.
	It was a catastrophe that she couldn't get together.
	I'm sorry? You say, well, it's fine that she couldn't get together with me, right?
	But for her, the reasons that she was not together with you were catastrophic, right?
	Right, of course, yeah. And that's what I think is sort of missing from your emotional processing, which means that it's there, but you're not conscious of it.
	Okay. I'm sorry, I just don't think I'm quite following you, but can you maybe rephrase that?
	Well, I mean, you've talked about your upset, but not her sadness.
	Yeah, I mean, I also felt sadness for her.
	It's obviously a catastrophic thing to happen for her.
	Right, but what you talked about was, and again, I'm not trying to be nasty or anything, but what you talked about was your disappointment at not getting together, what am I going to do with myself, whatever, right?
	Right, yeah, I mean, yeah, that was the other set of emotions.
	Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like...
	I recognized the magnitude of what happened to her family at that time.
	And of course, I had the desire to self-attack.
	Like, why are you even disappointed?
	You should be showing more sympathy for her situation and not being upset that you don't have anything to do tonight.
	I mean, I wasn't upset. I was just disappointed.
	You shouldn't be disappointed.
	But of course, I can't control that I felt disappointed.
	What you said there was, you said you should be showing more sympathy.
	Right. And I would suggest that you should never show more sympathy.
	Because it's not a show, right?
	Okay. Right, because the interesting question, and I know that it's a volatile topic, right?
	I genuinely mean that this is an interesting question.
	The interesting question is...
	I'm sorry? You said?
	Yeah, the interesting question is, why didn't you feel more sympathy for her?
	And again, I know that that sounds like a really volatile, dangerous, nasty question, but I genuinely mean that with real curiosity, right?
	Oh, right, right.
	Yeah, I mean, that's definitely an important question.
	Oh my god, you cold bastard!
	I mean, it's a genuine question, right?
	Okay, I mean, my thinking, And again, like, you know, maybe this does make me sound really cold, but I'm not sad fundamentally about her.
	Like, I'm not sad. I'm sad.
	If I feel sadness, it's for her, but not necessarily for her grandmother, because I don't know her grandmother, and I've never laid eyes on her, ever had any interactions with her grandmother.
	So I don't feel sad because of That particular individual passing away, but instead for her and the experience it must be like for her.
	And I did feel that.
	I'm kind of trying to say that I felt both of these things, and obviously I didn't intend for, I'm glad that we're looking at this now, This wasn't obviously the original intention of my question, but of course...
	Okay, so let me ask you, I mean, this is just sort of basic questions, right?
	And these aren't basic, like, obvious, right?
	These are just questions so that I can sort of understand what you mean?
	Oh, certainly, yeah. I mean, you would like for the war in Iraq to be ended, I would assume, right?
	Yes. Now, do you think that it should be ended because it's a bummer to pay the taxes to support it or because people shouldn't be being killed over there?
	People should not be being killed.
	Right. Now, of course, you've never met these people.
	You don't know these people, right?
	So why would you feel bad about it?
	Or why would you want it to change?
	Because death, when it's, you know...
	Well, so we can feel bad for the suffering of people that we've never met.
	I mean, obviously, if it's a multi-generational project, the people who are going to inherit what it is that we're doing here are going to be free, and we don't know these people, and we'll never meet them.
	Right, right, yeah. Right, so the argument that, well, I'm not going to feel sad for the grandmother because I don't know her, doesn't fit with your general involvement in philosophy, in my opinion.
	Because philosophy is all about helping people we're never going to meet, and you don't know.
	Right, yeah, in many ways, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, you're right, yeah. I mean, I don't get to meet a tenth of a percent of the listeners, right?
	Or talk to them, right? I mean, it's people I don't know, right?
	Yeah. And when you listen to a podcast with someone that's a moving podcast, you may not know that question, right?
	But we feel for their pain or their suffering or their happiness or their breakthroughs or whatever, right?
	Right, yes. So the logical argument that, you know, I feel bad for the grandmother because I didn't know her, that's just not true.
	I mean, you have a bigger heart than that.
	I know that. Right, right.
	Yeah, I guess I was misplacing why I felt the sadness.
	Stop coming up with these answers.
	You don't know. Right, okay.
	Every time I voice something, yeah, you say, well, I didn't need that, or I'll quote you, or maybe in my sentence, but let's just go with we don't know right now, right?
	Yeah, that's a better way to look at it, I think.
	Right, because you're asking how to be curious with yourself, right?
	Yes, indeed. Right, so the important thing is to be curious with yourself, which is not to come up with conclusions, right, but instead to sit with the questions, right?
	Yeah. Yes, yes.
	Right, so you do care about people you've never met.
	You do have compassion for people who have suffered.
	You have compassion for the grandmother if you, you know, sat down and thought about it, and you have compassion for your friend and so on, right?
	But you were not able to access that in this situation, right?
	At least not significantly relative to your own disappointment.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, I would say that's correct.
	Because again, the feeling...
	I really don't...
	When I saw...
	She sent me a text message.
	She just said, hey, my grandmother's in the hospital.
	It looks like she's going to pass away tonight.
	I need to go take care of that.
	My initial reaction was not disappointment that she couldn't get together.
	My initial reaction was, oh, that's so sad.
	And it was later...
	It was after that that I felt disappointed.
	And then I was frustrated that I felt disappointed.
	So it was like sadness, disappointment, frustration, and the sadness lingered through the whole thing.
	So just to reiterate what happened for me, because I just want to make sure that I'm expressing that well enough.
	Yes, and that's why I said I don't want this conversation to be volatile, because I fully accept that you are a compassionate and warm and caring human being, right?
	Which is why it's so interesting that you ended up in a situation which could be perceived as kind of selfish, right?
	Which is like, well, bummer about your grandmother, but now I don't have anything to do, right?
	Right, right. That's not you.
	So that's what's interesting about it, right?
	In my opinion, tell me if I'm off it.
	Oh, definitely. I mean, it does...
	Yeah, I mean, I guess how I want to look at it now is more like, this is what happened, and I wonder why.
	Right, but that's not how you've been handling the conversation, just so you know, right?
	I'm sorry, what? Well, it's not how you've been handling your conversation with me, because you've been trying to come up with that trick, right?
	Right, right. And, yeah, it would be...
	It'd be more advantageous for myself, I think, to just sort of sit with the questions, like you said.
	Yeah, because, I mean, you obviously don't want to sit there and say, well, I'm just a cold person.
	That's too easy an answer, and it's not true, right?
	So, okay, what happened between the compassion and the non-compassion?
	What changed? I'm sorry, what do you mean by that?
	Well, you said when you first got the text you felt real compassion, right?
	As I'm sure we all would, right?
	Like, that's terrible to go and watch your grandmother die, go to hospital.
	I mean, death is a terrible and difficult and intimate and traumatic and, you know, rich and deep and, right?
	So it's a powerful thing, right?
	Right, right. You felt compassion for her, obviously, right?
	Or for that, and I'm sure if you've thought about it, like, nobody wants to be the person in the bed who's dying, right?
	Right, right.
	So that's a sad, tragic, difficult situation, right?
	Definitely. And you said that that was your response initially, right?
	Yes, that was definitely the initial response.
	So what changed to cool that off, to make that unconscious, for you to then say, well, but now my evening is inconvenienced, and oh, I shouldn't feel that, and I should feel more compassion, and blah, blah, blah, blah.
	That's a huge change, right?
	Right. Yeah, that is.
	So why did it change?
	Why did it change? What happened?
	I'm trying to remember what happened if there were any circumstances.
	I mean, obviously I know what happened emotionally.
	I'm trying to think if any of the circumstances of the time might have triggered that.
	Let's see here. Well, and just to...
	I know it's going to be tough, right?
	So I'll give you a couple of things that I think might be helpful, and you can tell me if I'm pulling nonsense or not.
	Okay, thanks, Jeff. Generally, Phil, we have the greatest trouble feeling compassion when we ourselves would be dissociated in that situation.
	So if I have compassion...
	Sorry, I would fail to have compassion for someone...
	Who had, say, been beaten as a child.
	If, when I think about my own experience as a child, I would dissociate.
	In other words, I would lack compassion for that other person because I would have the opposite of compassion for myself, if I put myself into that situation.
	Does that make any sense?
	Just, again, I'm sorry for my getting this a little more slowly, but can you repeat that one more time, just so I make sure I understand?
	Sure, no, no, this is a tough concept, right?
	If I was beaten as a child, right, so if somebody comes up to me on the board or in my email, let's say I've completely rejected and not dealt with the child abuse that I suffered, and let's say that someone came up and said, you know, and was crying and I was beaten as a child, my response would be dissociation and irritation, right?
	Right, yes. And because I would be unable to empathize with myself in that situation, and therefore I would feel annoyance at that other person, right?
	Yes, yeah. And so the question is, how would you feel if your father or your mother or your grandmother or your grandfather, if you got the call today, tonight, tomorrow morning, that they were in the hospital and died?
	I mean, I find that to be a difficult question, a really difficult question to answer.
	That's good. Because if it was an easy question for you to answer, your lack of empathy for your friend wouldn't make much sense.
	Or why your empathy shut up wouldn't make any sense, right?
	Yeah. Yeah.
	I don't know if this is related at all, but I just thought of this.
	I've never really experienced death in my life.
	I've never had a close person to me die.
	I don't know if that has any...
	I mean, I feel like it must have some relation.
	I think it does, and I'm sorry to be annoying, but I don't think it does, because...
	Okay. And just to put a completely blasé take on it, right?
	I mean, I've never been snowboarding, but that doesn't mean I have no empathy for somebody who hurts himself snowboarding.
	Right, right. We don't learn empathy for someone who's dying because we have experienced somebody who's dying.
	We understand that death is part of life, but death is life and we're only alive because people in the past have died and we need to renew the species or the species needs to renew itself.
	So it's not that you have not, because that would be to say that we can only have empathy in hindsight.
	And that would be to say, well, if you were never beaten as a child, you can't empathize with someone who was beaten as a child.
	And that's just not true. If you've gone to see a movie, Schindler's List or something, where you can empathize with people in concentration camps and say, well, I've never been in a concentration camp, so I can.
	We can absolutely empathize with people whose experience we have not shared because of the universality of human emotion.
	Yeah, you know, it's interesting that you say that.
	I mean, I never really thought that that was something that was valid to say, that I can empathize with somebody if I haven't experienced what they've experienced, you know, directly.
	Now, some people who feel a lot of irritation around empathy We'll say, well, you can't empathize with me because you've not experienced what I've experienced, right?
	But that's just a defense, right?
	We can absolutely empathize with people whose experience we have not directly shared.
	There's no question of that.
	Because empathy is a skill.
	Empathy is an alive part of the brain that allows us to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes.
	And we don't actually have to have an out-of-body experience and possess them like a devil or have had the similar or exact same experience in order to do that.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, I totally had sort of bought into that.
	Well, not, I don't know, I mean, if that's the right phrase.
	I mean, I always thought, like, I thought...
	I actually thought that I could empathize, but I thought I would think to myself, but you must be confusing empathy and sympathy here or something, you know, like, and I would just get all kind of confused about it because I think it was like a mix of sort of my true emotions and sort of the, those, thinking of those people saying, oh, well, you can't empathize, you know, if you haven't experienced it, so...
	That's sort of eye-opening.
	It's not something you thought of on yourself.
	It's probably something that was just sort of tauter inflicted on you.
	So the question then comes back, if a close family member of yours, someone that you were close to or someone who you knew growing up was in the hospital and was going to die tonight or tomorrow night, how would that occur for you emotionally?
	And I'm not saying you have to tell me, you don't have to open up.
	I'm just saying that you must have There's some highly ambivalent complexity around that, that you can't empathize with this other woman because this is a knock you can't pass in yourself again.
	Right, right.
	I wonder, yeah, because my reaction to that, of course, is very difficult to answer because I don't speak with my parents and I don't know my grandparents that well at all, but I'm trying to think of maybe like a close friend or something.
	No, no, I would say, let's just stay with your parents.
	Right. Yeah, it would obviously be very complex.
	It would be a very, very difficult call to get, right, if your dad or your mom was sick.
	Right. Yeah, I mean, I would definitely...
	I mean, a defree is a lobotomy.
	It's not like parents. What parents, right?
	Right, yeah, I mean, of course, yeah, they're still a part of my...
	Or, of my psyche.
	Yeah. And, you know, still people who I might end up seeing again, so, yeah.
	Right. And it would be, I can guarantee you, that it would be an all-consuming, tortuous, ambivalent situation to be in to get that call about your mom or your dad.
	And you know that. Right.
	You know that. Right.
	What have I done? Did I do the right thing?
	Should I change? Should I break? Should I go?
	It would be tortuous.
	Right, definitely. And I would suspect that that's why you went away from empathy with your friend, right?
	Because it's a very hard thing to process for yourself because it's a reminder, right?
	It is a reminder. That those decisions are going to cancel.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, this is like really hard to...
	It's really hard for me to...
	Fully grasp what the emotions I'm feeling right now.
	And I fully understand that.
	And look, I'm happy to talk about it if you want.
	I mean, it's completely up to you.
	But what I'm telling you is that you did not lack compassion for this woman because you are insensitive.
	You lack compassion for this woman because you are extremely sensitive.
	And it's short-circuit because there's stuff that you still have to process, as we all do right with these kinds of histories.
	Right, right. And I'm sure that's not something I can process immediately, but what would you suggest that I do to sort of continue to work with my...
	I just try to imagine that situation that will eventually happen with me and my...
	Family? Well, I would suggest that you already know, right?
	It's not a try to imagine, because that would be to say that you don't have those thoughts already.
	If you didn't have those thoughts already, you would not have avoided compassion with this woman.
	Right? It's not something you need to picture like it's not occurred to you before.
	It's already in your mind, in your unconscious.
	Right? This is not invention, but excavation or exploration.
	Right, right. I see that, yeah.
	Right, so you can trace your thoughts, right?
	Which was, okay, so I go for compassion to this poor girl, right?
	Is there anything I can do?
	Send her flowers? I mean, depending on your relationship, right?
	If you're disappointed enough to not go out with her, then...
	You know, send flowers, send a condolence card, you know, it might be nice to drop past the hospital with a coffee or something in case she has anyone she needs to talk to.
	I mean, you know, say I don't want to intrude in family time, but sometimes it can be helpful to talk to an outsider and just listen and be there for her, you know, that kind of stuff, right, if you have a friendship with a girl, right?
	Right, right. And I certainly did contact her and let her know she could give me a buzz if she needed to.
	Well, I can tell you that people who are grieving need more proactive responses, in my opinion.
	Right, right. That kind of stress and grief and the death of a close family member is brutal, right?
	I mean, people who are going through that kind of stuff, Phil, they can't process what they need because they're already carrying such a heavy load.
	It's like if you see someone you care about trying to carry an anvil and their hands are bleeding and their back is twisted, you don't say, hey, give me a shout if you need anything, right?
	You just go and help, right?
	Yeah. It's really hard.
	There's nothing you don't know, right?
	Right, yeah. And the give me a shout if you need anything is your way of saying, I'm really uncomfortable with this.
	Oh, yes.
	That's, yeah. Oh, man, that's really hard to look in.
	That's really hard to face.
	Right. But the good news is that you care, right?
	You really do care, right? It's an overwhelming of caring, right?
	Because if you haven't dealt with your own emotions, then you project them onto other people's situations, and then you can't deal with them effectively because you obscure them.
	It's like trying to drive when your mirror is 95% tinted as a mirror inwards, right, when you're a windshield.
	Really tough to drive because you see mostly your own reflection and not the world, right?
	Yeah, yeah, that's an effective metaphor, I guess.
	Right, and you do care, and you do want to help your friend.
	And look, again, I don't want to plumb the depths of your relationship, but if you do care about this woman, then you may have...
	Proactivity is the name of the game when it comes to that kind of stuff, because if she gets a message from you like, give me a shout if you need anything, you basically are keeping your distance and saying, I'm not comfortable with this, right?
	Yeah, I called her later too, but that's still not that much.
	Again, you'll know the right thing to do, but deal with the discomfort that you're feeling.
	To really be there for someone, that was a very proactive thing.
	It is a very take charge thing.
	To be there for someone, right?
	I mean, if Christina has a tragedy, or I have a tragedy, then we're there for each other in a very proactive way.
	You know, we take charge, we organize things, we take care of the person.
	It is a very proactive thing to do, to be there for someone.
	It's not a kind of, give me a shout if you need anything.
	Right, and it's interesting because, you know, there are friends, there are, you know, three people I can think of who live in my Immediate area, who I would have made a much more proactive...
	My actions would have been much more proactive if it had been the same thing for them.
	And so it's interesting to me that I didn't in this situation.
	Right, right. And, you know, again, around death and family members, there are no easy hunters in this area.
	And, you know, the listeners who've gone through this...
	No, there are no easy answers and no simple feelings when it comes to death and family matters.
	No matter what your relationship with your family is, good, bad, or indifferent, it is, well, never indifferent, but good or bad, there are no simple answers, right?
	And this kind of stuff is absolutely going to trigger some deep emotions for you, for sure.
	Right.
	Right.
	Definitely.
	Definitely.
	So, I mean, as far as proactive or positive things to do about it, there's a number of ways you can approach it, right?
	You can just go and be there for this person as best as you can and see what feelings come up, but that, of course, may...
	If the feelings that come up for you are very strong, then she may end up feeling that she needs to manage your feelings, or you may indicate that as an unconscious necessity, which would be a pretty heavy load to put on her, right?
	Right. Just like when you said that in regards to being proactive, I mean, I thought to myself, well, I'm not really sure what I would do.
	And I'm sure I would think of something because I was only thinking about it for a couple minutes.
	But I wouldn't want to intrude too much on her life.
	I apologize.
	But if you need to think about it, that's not empathy.
	You're not there, you're not able to help someone if you need to sort of draw up an action plan of how to help them.
	Because empathy is, you're in the other person's shoes to the point where you kind of know what they need, what you provide is of use and is of help, and you don't need to think through it, right?
	Because if you need to think through it, it's going to be clumsy and awkward, right?
	I'm sorry, I actually didn't hear the end of that because of Isabella.
	Oh, well, if you need to think through it, then it's going to be clumsy and awkward, right?
	Really being there for someone is not something that you sort of sit there and think through and weigh the options and so on.
	You just empathize and you understand, right?
	And not to, you know, put any sort of...
	Halo over my head, but when you sort of hear me in conversations or the way that I'm trying to have this conversation with you, it's kind of intuitive what I'm doing, right?
	Like I'm not sitting there with a flowchart and trying to work things out.
	I'm trying to listen and respond with what I'm getting from what you're saying, but it's not something that is plotted or planned or thought out on my part.
	I know that sounds kind of bad, but you know what I mean, right?
	Uh, certainly.
	Then I guess, yeah, then I'm definitely not, uh, I'm not empathizing with her yet then.
	Well, and you're not empathizing, you're not at a point yet where you can empathize with yourself in this situation.
	In other words, you have a lot of ambivalence and complexity and volatility around this issue with your family, with yourself, with your history, which makes complete sense to me.
	And of course, I would also look at the degree to which you have had this kind of lack of empathy modeled to you as a kind of behavior.
	In other words, have your father or your mother modeled this kind of lack of empathy to you, and I believe that Your dad has, right?
	I mean, but that is for you to explore and to answer, right?
	Have you seen this kind of empathy, this kind of sympathy in action?
	Because children are naturally empathetic.
	I can tell you that from Isabella.
	She loves mirroring emotions and facial expressions and voice as fast as she can and so on.
	And she loves eye contact. Wow!
	And so on, right? So I think children are naturally empathetic.
	We kind of have to be taught not to be.
	And again, you look at the barriers to self-empathy that has been modeled from your family history.
	Right, right, definitely.
	Because, I mean, the thing that is coming to my mind, you know, as you're saying this, is, yeah, like, I really just don't...
	I don't know...
	It's just kind of hard to stay focused here, but I don't really know what...
	I get into this situation, and I think this is a result of sort of how I was supposed...
	In order to empathize with my dad, I sort of had to just parrot back what he would say.
	And it's almost like I don't know what to think right now, and it's causing me to be in a panic, but I kind of just want to...
	I'm trying to get away from that and sort of just think, well, okay, like, just what do you feel?
	How are you feeling right now?
	To myself, you know, and it's because I don't really know what I think about the whole situation in terms of how I could better empathize.
	And of course, then I say to myself, if I could better empathize, or if I'm thinking about how to better empathize, like you said, then it's not really empathy, because I would just feel it.
	Right, and what you said about, to your friend, tell me what you need, or tell me what to do, is sort of what you said just now, you've experienced with your dad, which is basically, tell me what I can do, rather than I'm going to bring my complete self to this interaction proactively to help you.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Right. Yeah, empathy is a full-brained, top-to-bottom, full-on intellectual, emotional, spiritual, for want of a better word.
	It is a full-on proactive, sensitive, incredibly engaged process of really trying to understand and get to where someone is thinking.
	And it can be very proactive.
	It can also be quite assertive, right?
	So you wanted to not talk about this particular topic because you felt it wasn't appropriate.
	And I said, no, no, no, this is what is appropriate because I was trying to listen to why you had brought this particular one up.
	It took some courage, because in many ways it could be seen as not that flattering to you, although I don't think that's true deep down.
	But I was sort of assertive in my empathy there, like trying to get to the real reason why you picked up this topic and brought it forward.
	And I think that staying on this topic has been helpful in a way of moving on to another topic, wouldn't I think, if that makes sense?
	Right, yeah, I agree with you there.
	And of course, you know, it's interesting, the range of emotions when you say that, because of course I got a big feeling of shame when, of course, you know, like you said, it's really easy to look at that situation and just go, oh, you're just a cold person.
	You know, to myself, you know.
	And... But I still keep thinking to myself, and I wonder why I keep thinking this.
	I just keep thinking, well, what else could I have done?
	Like you said, I suppose I could have, I don't know, sent her a sympathy card or something.
	But she left town to go to see her grandmother, and this is a girl I've only met a couple times.
	And I was kind of like, I didn't...
	But that's what I keep thinking, and I keep thinking to myself, well, that's just still not empathizing.
	Well, but if it's something you're picking from like a menu, then it's not quite advertising, and you're right.
	But then saying, well, what else could I do is sort of like flailing around.
	What you need to do is to get to your core of your own ambivalence about the situation, and then you'll know after that.
	Right, right. You know, thinking that we can sort of plot or plan or empathy, and I know that's not exactly what you're saying, it's sort of like those seduce and destroy things, you know, like, if you wear this fair gnom and you say this to women, you will get women or whatever, right?
	It's all sort of plotting and planning, but when you have the real empathy and real compassion, what you bring to the interaction, right, the tone in your voice, you know, if you call up this woman and you say, I feel so terrible about what you're going through and I really, really do care about it.
	I know we haven't known each other that long, but I just want To help in any way that I can, and here's some ways that I thought of, but tell me what's going on for you.
	How she's going to respond to that is going to be very different than if you sort of say, you know, well, you know, I'm sorry this is happening, give me a shout if you need anything, best of luck, blah, blah, blah, right?
	It's the tone, and again, I'm not doing a great acting job here, right?
	But it's the tone, it's the openness, it's the empathy, it's the curiosity, it's what she hears in your voice that will be what empathy is.
	It's not what you say, right?
	It really is how you say it.
	Because empathy is not something that we bring to other people like a strip, or like an e-card, or like a present.
	Empathy is a possibility that we bring to people, a possibility of listening, a possibility of openness, a possibility of curiosity, a possibility of actually being there for them without our own agenda, without our own avoidance, without our own manipulation.
	Not because we want to feel like a good person, not because we want to praise ourselves, not because it's the right thing to do, but just being there, being open and being curious to someone It is just that openness.
	And it doesn't matter what you say, fundamentally.
	It doesn't matter the words.
	It doesn't matter whether you send the e-card.
	It is the openness and the tone that you will bring to the conversation that is empathy, if that makes any sense at all.
	Oh, yeah. I definitely agree with you there.
	There's been times with my close friends where I felt extremely close to them, even when they're telling me things like, I'm irritated right now or something like that, you know, just because they're being so honest.
	And so, yeah, I know.
	I follow you. Right.
	I mean, we can fake being nicer than we are, but not a lot, right?
	And if you genuinely do care about what this woman is going through, right?
	You think of, you know, her grandmother who bounced her on her knee and she was a little baby and her grandmother came and played with her and the smell of her grandmother and so on.
	And that her grandmother is dying, and that this, of course, brings the cataclysm of mortality into the family, right?
	Death sits at the table when a family member exits, right?
	Or is in the process of exiting.
	That is going to have a huge and powerful effect on her parents and on herself, the reminder of mortality, its affinity of life, and so on.
	It is a very deep and powerful experience, and if you care what she's going through, And if you yourself have thought of the big questions of mortality and the value of our life and the inevitability of its ending, If you have thought about those things too,
	and have things that you can ask about, or thoughts that you can share that will help, if you have empathy for the situation, then contacting her, you'll just know what to do, because your very tone will open up the conversation.
	If you don't have that empathy, then yeah, you can send an e-card and this and that, but it's actually going to be more alienating than intimate for her.
	Right, right. I mean, I have a strong desire right now to, because as you're saying these things, like, you know, imagining the grandmother, you know, bobbing the little child on their knee.
	I mean, like, I just, when you said that, I just felt, like, just so awful, you know, like, about the whole situation and how she must feel, you know.
	It must just be so terribly sad for her, you know.
	And I had a strong desire to apologize to her, you know, like when we get off this call.
	Well, I think that's good, but I wouldn't rush that, right?
	Because if you feel awful, that's not the same as empathy.
	And I know I just said empathy for yourself and so on, right?
	but if you're curious about how she feels, that's closer to empathy.
	Now, it's important to know that you feel awful and to understand that you would feel awful in that situation, but of course it's not quite the same as empathy if you go up to someone whose grandmother has died.
	I'm not saying you would, right?
	But it's not quite the same as empathy to go up and to say, "I feel awful that your grandmother has died," because then in a sense, you're the one she's got to comfort, if that makes sense.
	Right.
	Yeah, because I guess I'm not 100% sure that just because I would feel awful in that situation that that has to be what she feels.
	Well, she probably does, right?
	But it's your concern and curiosity about her feelings, right?
	That is really the basis of empathy.
	Right, right.
	And now it's important to know that you would feel bad so you don't go in saying, wow, you must feel really happy that your grandmother's dead.
	Again, I'm not saying you have a word, right?
	But it's important. To put yourself in that situation is important so that you understand how the other person is feeling.
	But then you don't want to bring your projected feelings to that person, right?
	Because it's their feelings that need to be expressed and opened up, right?
	Right, so...
	Right, right.
	Yeah, I think that what I would...
	Do you think the best approach would just be to just ask?
	Just how do you feel about the situation?
	Well, see, again, you're looking for an approach, right?
	Yeah. You're looking for a script, right?
	You can't script empathy, right?
	Right. Would it be possible, I mean...
	What can I say to a spell that will make her lightning?
	I know it's tough, and this is why I'm saying don't rush into a fall with her, because you've got a lot of complex feelings, and you have a natural empathy that you have repressed right through your history and so on, and the lack of modeling in certain kinds of empathy.
	So I know, because you're looking for an answer.
	You're looking for, well, I should do it this way, and that's called empathy, right?
	Right, right.
	Right. I guess so.
	Right, right. Yeah.
	That's right.
	Sorry to be rambly, it's just hard to process.
	This is an excellent, excellent topic, and I really do appreciate you bringing it up.
	And it is a challenging topic.
	Empathy is something that is...
	You know, really lacking in the world, right?
	It is a very tough and challenging topic, and it's not because people are naturally not empathetic.
	I think we're all incredibly empathetic, but it is something that is really, really lacking in the world, right?
	And I mean, I've talked about this with Isabella.
	If she's crying or unhappy, It's, you know, I can either say, well, that's inconvenient to me because I was just about to do a podcast.
	And again, I mean, this is to take an extreme, right?
	Or I can say, gosh, how terrible it would be to be in her body to be helpless to overcome her discomfort.
	It would be like having a cramp and not being able to move your leg.
	How uncomfortable would I be and how happy would I be for someone to relieve me of that discomfort, right?
	It is a challenge, right?
	And it is a balance. Again, we have to have our own feelings.
	We have to have other people's feelings.
	If we only empathize with other people, we kind of become empty ourselves, right?
	We become an enamel. And if we only empathize with ourselves, then we're selfish, right?
	It is a balancing act.
	It is one of the complex Challenging, exciting, can always learn more about interactions in the world.
	So this is a very important topic, in my opinion.
	This is something that is not easy, but it is something that when we get it, we have almost limitless power to help in the world, right?
	But it is a challenging thing, and we, of course, want to rush to the answers, right?
	But it's like the answer to self-knowledge.
	There is no answer to self-knowledge, right?
	Right. What I'm wondering, what I was just wondering when you were going through that, is that, I mean, obviously, since I've started getting into philosophy, I've gained more self-knowledge.
	So there's a methodology that I've started to use in my life that has helped me become more aware of my own emotions.
	And I can't obviously have planned exactly everything that I did because I don't know.
	But I wonder, because again, maybe this is just something from my past that is not really a good thing, but I always like to know that there's an action that I can take to, like for in this example, become more empathetic in the future.
	Obviously, I can't change how I feel in the present, but I could maybe take an approach to my thought process or to my interactions with myself and others to help improve my capacity for empathy in the future.
	Well, and I appreciate that, right?
	And, you know, I've toyed over the years about, you know, exercises and programs and this and that, and I'm still thinking about that as a possible SQL director.
	You know, for what we have at the moment, Phil, the first thing that you need to notice, like if you say, well, I want to become better at navigating the woods, right, then, you know, the first thing that you need to notice is when you're lost, right?
	Because if you don't notice that you're lost, you're never going to deploy any navigation skills, right?
	So the first thing that you need to figure out is to notice when you are no longer feeling empathy, right?
	So if you didn't notice the transition from I empathized with this woman to I'm now mostly annoyed that I can't see her tonight, right?
	The first thing you need to do is to be aware of that transition, right?
	And those transitions are usually We usually know when we're in a state of non-empathy with ourselves, when we worry, when our thoughts are shallow and repetitive, when we don't experience any deep emotion, when we find ourselves easily distracted.
	Irritation is mild irritation, strong irritation is a very strong indicator of that kind of separation from the self.
	When we find ourselves going in small circles unable to break that pattern for whatever reason, when we say, well, I'm going to try and apply self-empathy to big concepts, and then a few minutes later or 30 seconds later we're back in the same sort of repetitive thoughts.
	When we feel irritation with ourselves, when we self-attack, that's a very strong indication of a lack of self-empathy.
	In fact, that's really the definition of a lack of self-empathy is self-attack.
	So these, again, we could go on about this, but I think when you notice that you're in that particular situation, your emotions are not deep, your thoughts are shallow and repetitive, you are going round and round in circles, and you feel irritation or self-attack, those are examples of a state where you are Not empathizing with yourself.
	In fact, you're probably actively rejecting your own identity or experience.
	Then when you notice that as a symptom, right?
	Oh, I'm lost. Okay, well let me retrace.
	Where did I get lost?
	Where did I last know where I was?
	Okay, well I felt the empathy for this woman and then I did not.
	Right? Or I felt less.
	Or what happened in the interim and so on, right?
	If you notice that you're lost, then you can retrace your steps to the point where you were lost, right?
	And then you can navigate.
	But that really is...
	You have to notice the state first in order to be able to recover from it, if that makes any sense.
	Right, right. Yeah, like identify what's going on first.
	I mean, that's a really good way to put it, I think.
	That's obviously where you would have to start, you know?
	Right, and what you do then is you extract the principle that is causing the irritation, right?
	So what I mean by that is...
	So then what you do when you notice that is you...
	My suggestion, again, none of this is...
	But my suggestion, at least what I find helpful to do when I'm in this situation still, is I say, okay...
	Let me try and put myself in your situation.
	Okay, I feel empathy for this person and then in the phase of feeling empathy for that, then I start feeling empathy, right?
	And what is the principle by now, which by now I do not feel empathy for this woman?
	Well, clearly what I'm seeing is that her emotions are causing me inconvenience.
	Does that make sense? I think I'm following you, yeah.
	Okay, so, who taught me that somebody else's strong feelings are inconvenient?
	Yeah, yeah, that's a good question to ask next.
	Well, we know, we have to get into it.
	You and I know the answer, right?
	Yes. Right, so, and we also have a specific example, so, right, which we talked about in our last call and we originally talked about in our first call.
	Sure, sure, yeah.
	So you have a specific experience of where you were feeling a great deal of suffering and someone in your life viewed that as inconvenient and negative, right?
	Yes. Right, so the pattern of going from strong feeling to irritation and selfishness is a pattern that you have experienced, right, as a child growing up, right?
	So you would look at that transition and say, okay, well, who taught me that somebody else's strong feelings are now an inconvenience and a negative, right?
	Right. Right, yeah, definitely.
	Yeah, that's a good way to look at it.
	Right, so you've noticed the transition, you've caught the signs, you've noticed when the transition occurred, you've looked for templates where that transition would have been programmed into you, so to speak.
	Right, and then there's no, the last step, of course, is the most challenging one, which is to find your way back to empathy.
	Right, which is basically to recognize that Your strong emotions as a child should not at all have been treated as inconvenient lovers.
	Yeah. It's incredibly disrespectful and destructive towards your identity as a human being.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, because if I can start there, if I can start there, then I'm going to...
	I mean, let's put it this way, if I don't recognize that about my past, then how the hell am I going to understand what's going on for somebody else in that situation?
	Right, and then if you don't get that, then what's going to happen is you're going to start to feel guilty and you're going to self-attack for not feeling empathy, and then what you're going to do is the most destructive thing of all, which is you're going to fake empathy towards someone, which is more destructive than not showing any empathy at all, right?
	Yeah, yeah, that would, yeah.
	Because then they feel like, well, he said empathetic things, but I still don't feel like he's being empathetic.
	Well, maybe I'm just cold.
	Maybe I just don't kind of set out.
	Maybe I'm just wrong, right?
	Then you transfer it all to me, right?
	Yeah. Oh, I just saw that just spiraling out of control with loads of people.
	Kind of maybe why we have a state.
	Yeah. Oh my gosh.
	But this, you know, if we say, well, I should fake it, and again, no, we don't ever say that to ourself, but it's like, well, a good person would be empathetic, so I'm going to call her and be empathetic, right?
	Tell me what you're feeling, right?
	And the person's going to be disoriented and not get that sense of empathy, which we get in age when it's there, right?
	Right. And it's going to be weird, and then she's going to have her grandmother's death, her family's trauma, her parents' unhappiness, and a weird interaction with you to deal with.
	You're actually adding more angles to her love, right?
	Yeah, yeah. And there's no script that you could possibly follow that would not result in that, other than throwing away the script in genuine empathy, which means confronting the stuff in your history.
	Right, right.
	And there is no shortcut, which is why I said don't rush the call.
	Right, right. Yeah, yeah.
	And maybe this one you don't deal with, right?
	That's okay, right?
	Because it's better to not do something than to do something wrong, right?
	Right, right.
	Has this been completely helpful or helpless?
	Tell me what to call because I know it's probably a little more than you expected though probably not.
	Right. I came in just expecting for a small clarification on something but no, no.
	It's very helpful. I'll talk with my therapist more about this meeting with her tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to Take this as another sort of step towards hopefully more empathy in the future.
	Well, that sounded like I just had a hand if you an anvil to carry over a mountain.
	You say, well, I guess maybe my legs will get stronger.
	It sounds as enthusiastic as a driver.
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	It's just... Yeah, I'm sorry.
	It's just... Yeah, I'm sorry, Mike. That was...
	So much information for me to process...
	I get to see the cavity filled and they have to take my head off.
	Yeah, I mean... I'm sorry.
	This is extremely helpful for me.
	It really was. I just am so...
	I'm so sort of blown away right now that I wasn't really considering how you were feeling there.
	No, that's fine. I'm not saying you should.
	I'm just pointing out what I was getting back from you.
	But if it's any consolation, this is the big one, right?
	Empathy is the big one.
	And it's something that as a community we still face a lot of challenges with.
	I see this in the chat room.
	I see this in the board interactions.
	I'm sure this happens in the horizontal interactions way outside of my radar.
	But A, you're not alone in this.
	B, this is the big one for you, for me, for us as a community.
	It is the genuine empathy and curiosity where we're not Judgmental, that we're not, you know, coming to conclusions, that we're not using RTR speak to dominate each other, you know, like if someone laughs at their nerves saying, I don't think that's funny, you know, as a way of dominating them, right?
	The genuine empathy thing is the really tough one, but it is the last one, right?
	You get that, and everything else is easy.
	So this is not like, okay, this is step two of a thousand, and it's unbelievably hard, right?
	This is, you know, when you get the empathy thing, Then everything else opens up, because you know that you can be there for other people.
	You also are aware when somebody's not being empathetic with you, and you can actually have some sympathy for that, but you don't then self-attack when you don't respond to somebody else's fake empathy.
	You really do recognize the lack of empathy inherent in stuff like religion and Statism and so on, right?
	So, empathy is the big meaty center of the doughnut.
	It's the big creamy center of the doughnuts, in case you don't like doughnuts, but your bacon crullers.
	So it is a big one, right?
	But if you can get this, then you can spread it with others.
	Your friendships, your romantic relationship, whether this one or if it develops around the future, will be absolutely, you know, you're building your relationships together.
	On rock, not sand, or water when you work with this kind of empathy.
	So I know it seems like a big step, but it's not step two of a thousand.
	This is step one thousand in my experience.
	Right, right. And, you know, it's definitely the direction I want to take with my life.
	So, you know, in that sense, thank you very much for sort of even, I mean, Kind of for everything, you know, of course, you know, everything that you're doing here.
	But particularly, you know, this conversation has been very helpful for me, yeah.
	And I think others too, the last thing that I'll mention is that...
	When you have empathy, you no longer need self-management.
	I mean, that's the beauty of empathy, right?
	Because when you hear this again, and if you think back on this conversation, you're like, well, I felt empathy, and then I didn't, and I got mad at myself, and now I'm not figuring out what I should do and what I should say, and I left this message, but maybe it wasn't enough, so I thought maybe I should do this and be part of it.
	There was a lot of self-management there.
	Right, definitely. Yeah.
	Now, that's exhausting, right?
	And... The great thing with empathy is that when you have empathy, you don't need self-management anymore.
	Because you're not trying to make yourself do stuff to conform to some standard, right?
	Because you have empathy with yourself, so you know what you're feeling, you're comfortable with what you're feeling, if you're upset with something you're feeling, you can be curious about it, you can learn about yourself, but you don't need self-management.
	And the degree to which that is going to free up your mind to explore the world and explore other people and be out there is something you can't quite get yet, but it will blow your mind when it hits you, right?
	Because if you think of a life without self-management, what a wonderful thing that is!
	A life where I don't have to talk myself into and out of things.
	A life where I don't have to look up the rules in order to figure out what to do.
	Right? Where I can trust myself in every situation to do the right thing.
	Where I don't have to sit there and say, well, this person's irritating me.
	I wonder why. Maybe it's because of this.
	Maybe it's because of that. And I have to sit here and journal.
	I have to go talk to my therapist.
	when you genuinely have empathy with yourself you'll understand very quickly why that person is bothering you and it won't bother you that they're bothering you you're not like a horseman who constantly has to hang on to the horse and yell into its ear You're an easy, expert rider.
	You're a scent work, in fact, right?
	Right. Right. Yeah.
	That's it. Yeah. I mean, that's what's on the other side of the ring of fire, so to speak, right?
	Which is that you don't need that kind of self-management when you have self-empathy because you'll understand yourself.
	You'll understand other people.
	You'll know the right thing to do in situations.
	And you won't be looking back saying, oh, I should have done this.
	Oh, I should have done that. Because you will know that you will do the right thing in situations.
	And there's not a situation that you can think of where you're going to end up doing the wrong thing.
	Because you have self-empathy, and you're not talking yourself into and out of stuff, right?
	You are a speaker.
	You're not translating everything in your head, and then second-guessing whether you used the wrong word because someone seemed to get offended.
	You're learning Mandarin. Maybe you used the wrong form of address, and it wasn't familiar.
	It was too familiar or something, right?
	You don't have to be in your head that way.
	You can be in life, in the world, right?
	Right. So, I mean, but this...
	I mean, I could just start...
	I mean, it sounds like you're just saying trust your instincts in any way.
	Yeah, okay, easier said than done, right?
	Right, right, of course, yeah.
	I mean, but when you were saying this, I just, at first I started to feel fear, you know, like, what do I do until I get this, so to speak?
	But then I just started to think, well, just, like, trust yourself and You know, I mean, I haven't made ridiculously stupid decisions in my life, so, I mean, why just trust myself, I guess, is kind of what I was saying to myself.
	Well, yes, but you didn't notice that you stopped feeling empathy, right?
	Right, yeah, yeah.
	Right, so you can say to an experienced athlete, let go of your training and just trust your gut, right?
	Now is the time to stop training and stop playing, right?
	Right, so basically you're saying, yeah, like I'm still sitting in the training phase.
	Yeah, as we all are in various aspects, right?
	So you don't say to the guy, you know, five days into learning Mandarin, stop looking it up and just talk, right?
	Right, right. Or the guy who's just starting out in boxing saying, forget your footwork, just, you know, or the guy who's learning to play piano, stop playing scales and just improvise, right?
	Right, right. So, yes, trust yourself, but you still have to gain knowledge in order for that self-trust to be valuable and earned and meaningful, right?
	Right, right.
	Yeah. And you're saying that you'll know?
	Or that I'll know?
	Absolutely. If you are in constant contact with yourself, right?
	I mean, if your emotions have a free and welcome path to you, and vice versa, right?
	Then you have all of the incredible processing of the unconscious, which is where most of our intelligence lies, in my experience and opinion.
	So you have this incredible horsepower of the unconscious, of the instincts, all the way from the hypothalamus, medulla base of the brain up to the neofrontal cortex.
	You've got the whole machine working, including the gut brain, which is where the emotions hit us.
	We have a huge cluster of nerves and neurons within the gut as well.
	So you have the full-body brain experience going on.
	And so you don't need self-management any more than you need to sit and look in your body and say, okay, well, make sure to send some of this liquid to the kidneys and make sure to keep some of it for the retention and make sure to send blood up to the brain.
	I mean, if you had to manage all of your organs, you'd never get anything done, right?
	Right, of course, yeah.
	But Joe, you'll assume everything's fine if you don't have 30, right?
	And you take care of yourself.
	And so when you get the full-on brain experience, and I'm not saying I'm there, I'm just saying like I get it sometimes, right?
	But when you get the full-on brain experience, you can absolutely trust your instincts because they're full, they're available, and they don't wink out on you all the time, right?
	As a pilot, you can trust your plane if the engines don't keep going out, right?
	But with you, in this particular instance, with empathy, the empathy engine went out, right?
	And you didn't even notice it. You're like, oh, shit, we're going left.
	I guess we're going left, right? Right, right.
	So once your engines are running, and you can trust that they're running, and you're getting that feedback, you're feeling the vibration, the gauges are all there, then yeah, you can do some acrobatics, and you can fly.
	Right? But you need to notice when things have stalled, when things aren't working, when you've separated, when you have disconnected from yourself, right?
	And then you need to know how to get back to yourself and keep that connection alive, which we're all born with, but unfortunately it's battered around quite a bit for many of us when we're young.
	Once you have your instincts, you can trust your instincts, but the problem is that you get disconnected from them, right?
	Right, right. And I guess...
	What I'm wondering is, you know, you talk a lot about everyone is a genius and everyone is a philosopher, but I guess we kind of have to get sort of the crap out of the way before we can access that?
	But Phil, the crap is the genius.
	You knew exactly when to dissociate.
	Okay. Right? So that's your sign, that you know exactly when to dissociate.
	So you are processing it all perfectly, right?
	Just kind of in a weird negative, right?
	Oh, okay. All right. I follow you.
	That's how we know. The reason I know everyone's a genius is that I know that when I bring the truth to most people, I know exactly when they're going to freeze up and tense up or get hostile or dissociate or get irritated or change the topic, right?
	I know that. I know exactly when I bring it up, right?
	Statism, coercion, religion, child abuse, right?
	No matter how I bring it up, no matter how gently, how circumvented I, right, there is a point where they're just going to freeze up or clam up, and I know that.
	And that's, you know, nobody can dance through a minefield without setting things off and then say, I had no idea there were mines there, right?
	Right. Yeah.
	So the dissociation is the genius.
	That's how you know that the genius is working.
	That's how you know the instincts are working, right?
	You just need to have them work for you rather than to separate you to mirror prior trauma, or to mirror a prior abuser and to shield yourself from prior trauma, right?
	Yeah, okay. Yeah, now I'm getting the relationship.
	You've got the body to tell you when it's hurt, as long as you're not taking painkillers, right?
	Right, right. You've got a painkiller called dissociation that means you can't trust Your instincts, because they can shut up, right?
	Right, right.
	I got a dentist appointment on Tuesday.
	I'm sure that it's going to be fine because I have no pain in my teeth.
	Now, if I was taking heroin, I wouldn't be sure of that, right?
	Right, definitely. So, yeah, you can trust your instincts once they're present and stay with you, right?
	Yeah, yeah. Right.
	It's a little bit... I mean, it's actually very intimidating.
	Because, you know, the thing I'm sort of saying to myself is, like, what if I just...
	I totally miss the next time I dissociate, you know, like, in that situation.
	Look, I mean, don't give yourself a standard that gives you more chance to dissociate and self-attack, right?
	You absolutely will.
	I miss it. Christina misses it.
	Okay, Isabella never does, but she's perfect, right?
	But you absolutely will miss it when you dissociate, which is the whole point of dissociation, right?
	Right, yeah, obviously, if I didn't miss it, then I wouldn't have done it in the first place, right?
	Right, right. I mean, you forget, and then you forget that you forgot.
	That's the whole point of dissociation, right?
	So, yeah, you'll miss it, for sure.
	And that's okay, right? I mean, it's a process, right?
	It's not like saying, oh, okay, now someone told me how to serve, I'm never going to hit a serve out of bounds again.
	Well, of course you will, right? You'll just be able to work on it to improve.
	Right, right. Right.
	Yeah, I definitely think I'm understanding...
	I'm understanding the whole situation a lot better now.
	That's very helpful.
	Right, and this kind of, hopefully, wisdom and knowledge is what comes when we don't jump to conclusions or self-attack, but we're genuinely curious about what happened to our empathy, right?
	I mean, that's some great stuff that comes out of that, so I really do appreciate you sticking with that.
	I know it wasn't necessarily the most fun topic for the most fun example, but I think it was the most productive, right?
	You know, it's our souls that we want to stay close to.
	It's not about, you know, how do I not worry about finding a passport, right?
	I mean, it's much deeper.
	And I think you hit on the right topic or right example to tease the best out of that topic.
	Yeah, yeah, definitely.
	And I appreciate you not, you know, realizing that I wasn't, that I needed some more guidance there and continuing with it.
	I appreciate that. You're absolutely welcome.
	And do, of course, let us know how it goes.
	And don't feel the time pressure to deal with this woman, right?
	She's going to be friends. She'll be there.
	When you can stay in constant contact with yourself, you can tell her and apologize and all of that, and she won't experience it as a burden, right?
	Whenever we're in touch with ourselves, right?
	I mean, when I talk about my history, I mean, I hope I stay in touch with myself and...
	Not on the webcam, that's for donators.
	But I hope that I stay in touch with myself to the point where people can understand and empathize, but they don't feel it's a burden when I'm talking about it, right?
	Because I'm not putting things onto them because I'm obviously processing things myself.
	So don't rush with the scroll, but this is a very, very excellent thing for you to open up so that you can notice when you are dissociated from yourself.
	Work to figure out the causes, work to reverse it and stay present.
	That is the most amazing and powerful thing that you can do to help yourself to live a happy life and to free the world.
	Well, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.
	I appreciate it. You're welcome.
	And I guess with that, we will shut down the show for this week.
	And sorry to break into all kinds of bilingualism, but thanks and have yourselves a great day.

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