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April 26, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:17:14
1340 Sunday Show April 26 2009

Looking for work in a recession, meditation and mysticism, and a review of the novel 'White Tiger.'

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I guess I have a program which gives you people's birthdays when they have birthdays coming up.
I'm not sure exactly how the hot young gay couple in New York City with a webcam got on my contact list, but I wish them happy birthday anyway.
I just may not be able to join them for their online festivities.
It's a mystery. Hot young gay couple in New York with a webcam.
My story is that I don't know how they got on my contact list.
And I'm afraid I'm going to have to stick to that.
Excellent.
All right.
Thanks.
Thank you.
So thank you everybody so much for joining us.
It is April the 26th, 2009, Sunday, the day of rest and of our Lord, 4.13 PM. I hope you're doing very well.
And it's been a fun week.
It's been a great week. It's been a very enjoyable week.
I just noticed something with Isabella today.
I haven't even told you, Christina, what I noticed with Isabella today.
So Isabella is getting pretty good at grabbing things.
She obviously has inherited that from me.
And it's interesting because she's figured out how to, you know, bring things to her mouth and she's got a soother or binky, a little pacifier it's called, right?
So she has this pacifier and today Just when I came in to check on her, she'd woken from her nap and she had the pacifier in her mouth and she was hanging on like grim death to the handle of the pacifier and she kept pulling it out of her mouth and getting upset.
Like some alien hand was reaching down from the heavens and pulling this binky from her mouth.
And she was like... Then she would put it back in her mouth and then I guess...
The alternate ego would take over, yank it out of her mouth and she'd get upset.
And literally while I watched, while I watched, she figured it out and she put it back in her mouth and she slowly let go and was happy.
It's just astounding to see how quickly these pathways are being formed.
I think I have about 72 hours before she's far brighter than me.
So I'd better get in all my dominance, patriarchy before rather than after.
So that was just a wonderful thing that happened today.
And you were saying that today she began to push with her feet, is that right?
Yes, she did. I had her in her swing and I was just playing with her, tickling her feet.
She's not responding to tickling yet, but I noticed that she was pushing my hands with her feet, so I sort of put her feet against the palms of my hand.
And whenever she pushed, because she was in her swing, her swing would move.
She soon got very used to this and quite enjoyed it.
She would push and the swing would move back.
And then she would release her legs and swing would move forward again.
It was quite fun. Yeah, she's just absolutely wonderful.
Sleep is still a little bit of a challenge.
But we've got a consultor in who's going to give us a hand.
It's certainly improved, but it's got a little bit of a ways to go.
She's napping down during the day, which is good.
She's just wonderful and charming and wonderful and squealy.
She did five hours last night.
And I did a series for those who are interested on depression which I'm quite pleased with and some mixed reviews on part three but certainly part one and two definitely worth listening to.
I think part three is worth listening to as well.
But of course whenever I uncork the old Philosophy, passion, some people get goosed.
But not to worry. It is all for the positive of humanity, as best we hope.
So that's it for the news and the weather here.
Is there anything else exciting that's been going on this week?
No, I don't think so.
So, I'm sorry. I'm crushingly dull because I'm just a parent boar and a philosophy boar, but you know that.
So, I guess it's up to you to make this show interesting because I have nothing for you people other than perhaps some feedback to your feedback.
So, I will stop here and open up my ears, close my mouth and let y'all do the talking.
So, please go ahead if you have questions.
Hello? Hello!
Hey, Steph. I just want to start out with some personal advice that I wanted to ask you.
I just came back from the mall right now, and I was trying to look for a job, but unfortunately, there weren't any positions available.
Sorry to interrupt you. You came back from where?
From the mall. The mall, okay.
And you're looking for a job, and you're having trouble finding it.
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, and when I came back home, I was kind of feeling down because I didn't have any luck, so I decided to come on and ask you for some advice, what do you think I should do?
And what kind of jobs are you looking for?
Well, I mean, I'm just a college freshman, right?
And I don't really have any experience with anything, so I just need some money to help me get through college, at least for right now.
And what's your skill set?
Practically none. That's the problem.
I really haven't worked anywhere before.
Well, is there anyone on the call who has some experience with this or anyone in the chatroom who has some experience with this who might be willing to lend our good friend a little bit of help On putting a resume together for a first time job applicant.
That's sort of my last. We'll start with that and let's turn it over to Christina, who may have something brighter to add.
Yeah, I think that if you're a student in college, a lot of universities, a lot of colleges have career centers, and they often provide free services to students for preparing a resume, preparing a resume, interviewing skills, those kinds of things.
So you might want to consider that. I don't know if that's available at your college, but that's certainly a good place to start.
And also, a lot of these places do have...
I know when I was an undergrad, I got one of my summer jobs through student placement through the university.
They had posted a number of jobs that students could apply for.
I didn't have a lot of experience either at that time.
I had worked in a mall myself.
I sold shoes for a while and I had worked when I was much younger as a young teenager in the public library.
Shelving books and organizing and that kind of thing.
But those would be my suggestions in terms of how to get started.
I don't know if anybody else has anything else to add to that.
Yeah, I mean, I sort of remember it was 92, 91, 92 was just a brutal recession.
And I had just come out of my undergraduate in history.
And as you can imagine, it was not a lot of A lot of demand for that.
Now, I had experience as a waiter, and I'd done a little bit of temp work in offices, but it was just brutal.
And the only thing, I had to just cobble together stuff.
Like, I'd go down to the Manpower Center.
I did weeding in people's gardens.
I got paid cash for that, and declared it all, of course.
Someone had their grandmother in town, and I took the grandmother around to see the sites, because they had some other family crisis and couldn't.
So I got, you know, back then, I don't know, it was like 60 bucks a day for doing that.
There is, you can sort of patch things together.
I did cleaning people's houses.
I mean, this is all junky work, right?
But in a recession, you really have to take the dribs and drabs.
That's been sort of my experience.
Put down your computer stuff.
Put down any clubs that you've gone with or been a part of.
Put down anything that you've done.
Any awards you've done.
Any after-school activities, sports, things like that.
Or people just want to look and see, you know, do you have social skills, do you have team skills and all that kind of stuff.
But it is brutal out there and it is really a terrible situation for people looking for work.
On the plus side, you know, a recession is a complicated thing because in a recession you will end up doing things that you haven't done before or haven't done otherwise.
Which you actually might end up enjoying more.
And the other thing too, for those who do have jobs, a recession is a pretty good thing because the prices of everything tends to come down pretty quickly because demand is down.
Sales are amazing in a recession.
It's tough to get a job, but once you get a job, you will be doing a lot better than if you had a job and it was a boom, right?
Because then the price of everything keeps going up.
There is a sort of light at the other side of the tunnel, but yeah, definitely you need some help to get your resume up to speed.
That was certainly my experience.
When all I had was waitering and I wanted to go for office jobs, I needed a full revamp of my resume, and that was a real challenge.
I had somebody in my family who was in HR, and she helped me, and that was helpful.
So that's why I'm sort of saying if anyone would be willing to do that, and if nobody is or nobody has that experience, I would be more than happy if there are a number of people Who have this problem of sort of first-time resumes.
Maybe we could do a conference call and go through it.
Because I hired a lot of people straight out of school.
And so I sort of know what it was I was looking for in resumes.
So we could give that a shot if there's enough interest.
But, you know, there is work out there.
A recession is not no work.
It just means you're going to have to try stuff that you maybe hadn't thought of before.
And I think it could be, it really can get you to branch out into things you've never tried before, which can be, I actually had more, I had more fun doing my patch together bunch of stuff in the summer, in the summer of 91, than I did when I just had a regular job for the summer, like in a restaurant, I guess, originally, or later on in an office.
I actually kind of had more fun doing all these different things, because if you liked the job, it was great.
If you didn't like it, it was only a week or so that you'd have to be there.
You know, stuff like moving office furniture and so on.
Again, it's pretty brain-dead work, but, you know, when you're in college, you get that kind of stuff anyway.
So that's sort of my thoughts and suggestions.
Does that help? Is that useful at all?
Well sure, but there's also this other big problem that I'm kind of like, socially I'm very like anti-social, and I'm also, physically I'm also very frail, which is kind of very bad things, especially when you're trying to look for work.
And I was trying to find out ways, you know, how I can overcome that or use that to my advantage.
You mean if you're anti-social and physically frail, right?
Yeah. Well, there is definite advantages to that.
And again, I'm not an expert in this, so have a look in the chat window for people who are adding to this.
But if you're antisocial, there are jobs which are pretty solitary, which some people who are more social don't want to do, like night watchman or night backup monitor or whatever, right?
So you also may want to go...
I went for security guide.
I never actually ended up getting a job as a security guide for various reasons, but I did go for security guide training when I was in my teens.
And... That can be good because you get graveyard shift where you really don't have to interact with people a lot and it doesn't require any physical strength.
So that's another possibility to look into.
And I know that this is all nonsense I'm just throwing out there, but these are just the thoughts off the top of my head.
I don't think that you're going to be able to overcome sort of shyness or antisocial stuff in time to get you a job, if that makes any sense.
That's a bit more of a longer term project.
Yeah, that makes sense. I'm sorry.
I feel like I've further drained your will to live and achieve.
No, that's cool. That's cool.
I just wanted some positive feedback.
I was feeling down. I just wanted some positive feedback.
Well, and the other thing that I would recommend to think about, you know, in a recession, confidence really stands out because people begin to feel kind of desperate, right?
And I think it's important to When you're looking for work, it's a fine line, right?
You don't want to be begging, but you also don't want to be cocky, if that makes any sense.
And so the thing that I would do, and I mean, this sounds all too cheesy for words, but it really does help, and it really does work.
And this is stuff that I did when I began to get down about looking for work.
And this doesn't end, right?
I mean, when I was an entrepreneur, it's like, ooh, I'm running a company, but that means I'm desperate for customers rather than a job, which means that I'm You know, on the phone doing that thousand to one call to sale ratio that is kind of brutal as well.
So it doesn't... You know, these are skills that will serve you for your life to get used to this kind of stuff.
And what I would suggest is I'm going to assume that you would make a good employee.
Is that... Like just in any job which wasn't like neurosurgery, right?
In any job where you had a reasonable chance to...
To do the job, right?
You're intellectually capable and so on.
Can I assume that you would be a good employee?
I would think so, yeah.
And why would you make a good employee?
Well, when I get my head into something, when I focus on something, I do it all the way.
I don't like to half-ass things.
So, you know, if someone would offer me a dollar, a task, I wouldn't try to find excuses to not do it.
I would completely do it without, you know, offering much resistance or laziness.
Right. I kind of think you need to make a list of this stuff.
Again, I know this sounds cheesy, and you can be all kinds of skeptical about it, but you're conscientious, you're hardworking, you're intelligent, you're verbal, you figure things out for yourself, you're a self-starter.
All of these kinds of things are really important, because particularly in low-rent jobs, smart employees are hard to find in low-rent jobs.
I remember when I worked in a hardware store.
Oh God, the number of jobs I've had is ridiculous.
When I worked in a hardware store in my early teens, I was always the guy who would take the money to the bank because, of course, I was just ridiculously honest.
If I was overpaid, here's the money back.
Or if there was any kind of problem, then I would always do the right thing.
I was just annoyingly honest back then.
Because of that honesty, I would be trusted to take all the cash to the bank and deposit it and then bring back the receipts.
No one ever felt that I would not put all these thousands of dollars in the bank or slip a few or whatever for myself.
I would make a list of all of the things that I'm sure you are competent doing, that you are good at doing, that you are positive about doing.
Really make a list of them about how that is going to make you stand out From all of the other grasping hands looking for the work, and then go in with the confidence that you have something of real value to offer an employer.
And an employer will, you know, if you're not cocky and say, you know, like, you won't be able to succeed in business unless you hire me as your stock boy or whatever, right?
As long as you go in confident, so really make a list of all the things that would make you a really good employee.
You know, you're a self-starter, you're hardworking, you're intelligent, you're whatever, right?
And, you know, go in with confidence to look for work.
A confident enough applicant can actually generate work.
I've actually created positions in a company because somebody came in so confident and positive.
I was just like, well, I don't care.
I can pay this guy to shine my shoes, but I got to have him around for something, right?
And I know that's a high bar to set, but it is really important that you just make a list of all the things that That are good about having you as an employee.
And remember that not everyone has these abilities, right?
A lot of employees don't work out kind of lazy, kind of resentful, kind of annoying, kind of untrustworthy, and so on.
And I'm assuming, because you're into moral philosophy, that you don't have any of that nonsense.
So just remember, you know, smart people will be even smarter to hire you.
And if you're aware of your value, then you can really turn something into an opportunity.
It's not going to happen every time.
It's not even going to happen most times.
But it is going to happen.
And I would really be positive about what you're bringing to the table.
Otherwise, it is kind of like you're, you know, it's like those African villagers, you know, just a bunch of hands reaching for whatever the UN is throwing off the helicopter.
You're kind of undifferentiated.
So that would sort of be, and I'll just list down all the things that are great about you as an employee that would be really positive and go in knowing about all of that and look for mutually advantageous opportunities, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, actually, that does make pretty sense.
I'm going to spend some time tonight and I'll look some stuff up and I'll write some stuff down.
And remember, philosophy training at FDR or wherever it is, philosophy training is really, really positive for your skill set as an employee.
Because you've learned how to debate.
You've learned how to negotiate. You've learned how to think from first principles.
You've learned how to be creative.
You've learned how to live with disapproval.
And learning how to live with or perhaps even thrive in the face of disapproval is really essential for success in life.
You can't be a success in life unless you can handle disapproval.
And Lord knows, being a first principles philosophy buff really does start to help you to work with disapproval.
So there's lots of really great things.
And it learns for you to think for yourself and not just go along with the crowd, which is incredibly important in an employee.
Because, you know, when you're a boss, when you have a bunch of employees, if you don't have someone who's thinking from first principles, they all just tend to herd together.
And you don't get the kind of feedback when there are problems.
They just wait for problems to develop and then present you with the whole mess.
So, again, all of these things are just really...
The time that you spent listening to philosophy or working in philosophy is incredibly positive for you.
As an employee. Now, of course, you know, I'm an anarchist.
That's why you should hire me. I'm not saying any of that.
But just recognize the value that you have created through your pursuit of this kind of stuff.
There is real economic value to the study of philosophy.
It's just not something often talked about.
All right. I'll do that then.
All right. And, you know, feel free to use this community here as a resource, right?
Post your resume and, you know, anybody who knows anybody...
You know, hiring a free domain radio person, I must tell you, is a pretty good decision, I would say, almost exclusively.
So remember that if you're in the hiring mood, you may want to post jobs on free domain radio or wherever it is you find quality people, because I think having that stuff in common will be very good for employees and employer relations.
Well, thanks very much, and do let us know how it goes.
And again, if you don't get good stuff, From your school or your college in terms of resume help, let me know and we'll set up a conference call and we'll work through a resume with other people who may be in the same boat.
And hopefully we can bring some, you know, practical empirical philosophy to bear on this challenge of job hunting.
All right, man. That sounds good.
All right. Best of luck.
Thanks for the question. Sweet and highly appropriate.
And I'm sure that you will do just fine.
Alright, I think we have time for a question and three.
Just while we wait, somebody wrote, I'm feeling really worried about this.
It sounds like it would be impossible to get a job if you're not confident and positive.
No, no, no, of course not. It's like saying nobody but Brad Pitt can get a date, right?
It's a scale. But to raise your odds, I think that you want to Be confident and positive about the value that you have to bring.
Realistic as well, right? About the value that you have to bring.
But it's not an either-or.
We're just looking to raise your odds a little bit.
Guess even Brad Pitt can't get a date because he kind of married into crazy, right?
I think he did. I'd also like to mention while we wait for the next question, I'm not sure what hold The movie Zeitgeist and Zeitgeist Addendum has over the minds and typing fingers of the listeners, but I must say that I don't think I've ever gotten angry at responses, not even, maybe a little on the Ron Paul stuff, for my Zeitgeist Addendum review.
It is almost universally, you know, really angry.
I don't know exactly why, but it's just something that's kind of interesting.
I sort of have a completely, probably unfair vision of people who are into, you know, the alternate barter economy where scientists do all the work for you and there's no need to have a job.
I kind of sort of think of 30-year-old guys putting down a smoky bong in their parents' basement and then when I sort of say that's all nonsense, that's why they get angry.
That probably is completely unfair, but that is the image that I have of why people would be so angry at the idea that, you know, scientists are going to give you jetpacks and flying cars.
All you have to do is sit around on your hands and wait.
I just, you know, this is sort of the image that I get because they do seem pretty angry and they also seem pretty condescending.
And that is...
Yeah, that is...
This is something I noticed.
I don't know if it's true or not. But, you know, if anybody here is a big fan of Zeitgeist Addendum, let me know.
And, you know, maybe we can talk about it further.
And, you know, to me, I'm all kinds of nitpicky about this kind of stuff.
And it's not like I'm perfect in this in every regard.
But I just...
I never quite understand where if people want to be condescending, they don't check their spelling and grammar.
I mean, that just seems to me kind of like a basic...
And it seems to be that the worse the grammar, the more arrogant and condescending the person.
But, again, that's just my experience, so it may not be entirely true.
Somebody has asked, how do you get over being cocky and arrogant?
Because sometimes I am unconscious of my behavior.
Well, I mean, confidence is I have something of value to bring to you, and cocky and arrogant is more like I'm better than you.
And I think that is, I think that's sort of the difference.
If you're looking to be better than someone, it's not ever going to be a productive interaction, right?
That's why I shut down a few things.
Actually, only one thing on the board this week where, you know, it was turning into a dick measuring contest, to not put it too subtly.
Just because, you know, if you're not into positive win-win negotiations with anybody, you know, the truth is so complicated and so difficult to get to.
You can never, ever get to the truth in an adversarial situation.
And so, you know, when you're being confident, you're saying, I have something of value to bring to you, and I'm curious to see what you have to bring to me, and it's a respectful situation.
But when you're being cocky and arrogant, it's like, you know, I'm better than you.
You'd be lucky to touch the hem of my garment and so on.
And that's a win-lose. And, you know, win-lose stuff is lose-lose in reality, right?
You can only win-lose very temporarily.
You know, you lose in the long run, for sure.
So I just wanted to sort of point that out.
Oh, somebody wrote, I think some of the stuff in the addendum came from Lyndon LaRouche material.
Is Lyndon LaRouche, is he that, there was this creepy guy with blonde hair who was doing this black and white, there was this black and white video of him in Zeitgeist's addendum, was that?
Lyndon LaRouche? He sounded like he was sort of getting, you know, instant messaging from the far side of Jupiter and reciting it through some sort of Spock-driven computer voice.
Is that the guy? I don't even know who that is, but there was this guy in it who seemed kind of creepy.
Yeah, there is. Zeitgeist made the point that sales and marketing is inherently about lying to people so that they buy products.
Their model of society wanted to avoid this.
I thought this was appealing at first, but practically I don't see how this could be put into practice.
Sales and marketing is inherently about lying to people so that they buy products.
That, you know, sales...
Sales can be like that, for sure, absolutely.
But, you know, everything in life can be like that.
That's not specific to sales.
And I don't think that the Zeitgeist addendum people or whoever they were quoting from the Venus Project were accurately representing the free market.
So if they're saying, well, in the free market people lie to sell their ideas or goods, and then they lie about the free market to sell their ideals and goods, I don't see how they gain the moral high horse.
But that is my particular idea.
My particular reality.
This idea that, look, there's a lot of crap that's out there.
And I mean, for sure, we all know this, right?
Like all the stuff that's out there to make you insecure about your appearance or your weight or whether you have the correct number of abs or, you know, three too many.
And there's all this stuff that's out there that is designed to make you feel insecure and all that.
But I think that we need to look at how children are sort of raised and brought up.
Because that is sort of an exploitation of existing insecurities rather than creating those insecurities.
And of course once we get private schools and better parenting, which is the goal at least that I'm working with or for, then we will have fewer or less of that kind of corrupt exploitation as an effect of the original insecurity that comes from a lack of bonding within the family and a lack of self-confidence in the educational environment that you are raised in.
So just wanted to mention that.
And sales and marketing is important.
You know, it is important.
There was something that came up on the thread this week.
I was going to do a separate cast about it, but there don't seem to be a lot of questions today, so I'll just mention it a little bit here, and maybe we can talk about that.
But there is this issue where ad hominems are sort of used in my mind as an ad hominem themselves, right?
Some guy wants to criticize UPB and people say, well, he doesn't appear to act particularly ethically.
That's an ad hominem against the man.
But I don't know that that's particularly true.
Sales and marketing is an important aspect of communication.
To say that Someone's ethical choices are completely irrelevant to their ethical reasoning.
To me, it's like saying that whether someone is a chain smoker is completely irrelevant as to his theories about how to quit smoking.
And it's unfortunately, it's just not.
I mean, I could claim to be an expert on ethics and then behave in some horrible or abominable fashion.
And people could say, well, you know, if Stalin says 2 plus 2 is 4, it doesn't mean that it's not, right?
The moral qualities of the individual have no bearing on the moral theories they present.
But unfortunately, they do.
They just do. And if you doubt this, right, just imagine the following scenario, right?
Where I am a rabid anti-smoker, and I say I have a foolproof, fail-safe, can't-miss, low-effort way for people to quit smoking.
And I write a book.
And I take it to a publishing house, and they're interested in it.
Maybe it's a well-written book. It's got good theories on how to quit smoking.
And I show up for the first meeting, and I'm puffing away like a chimney, right?
Smoke, smoke, smoke, lighten cigarettes, chain-smoking, lighting one off the end of another.
And what would the publishing house say?
They'd say, well, wait, wait, wait, you say smoking is a great evil and you have the perfect way to quit smoking, so why are you still smoking?
And I said, well, no, no, no, the fact that I smoke has nothing to do with my theories.
And they'd say, it kind of does!
It really does! And I'm sorry that you don't see that because you're mad, right?
And if I said, well, yes, okay, but I insist that on the book jacket is a picture of me smoking, The book jacket of how to quit smoking is a picture of me smoking, and every time I go on a talk show, I want to be able to smoke.
In fact, I insist on being able to smoke to promote my anti-smoking book.
Well, yes, tactically, and from a sort of abstract, bloodless, platonic, logical standpoint, yeah, it's irrelevant.
But in the real world, when you're actually trying to get things done and trying to convince people to quit smoking, it's pretty important!
There's a reason why they don't use 300-pound models to sell Victoria's Secret's lingerie.
Well, technically, the quality of the lingerie is not affected by whether you can see it over the muffin top or not.
Well, it kind of is.
Because if you can't see the lingerie because of the muffin top, then nobody can judge whether it's good or bad, nobody will buy it, and therefore you won't have the capacity to make quality lingerie, because you won't have the income.
I just think this idea that the moment you criticize an individual, it's an automatic ad hominem, I just don't think it's valid.
You know, life is short and we do have to be very judicious about who we take advice from.
It's really, really important to be very judicious about who you take advice from.
And life is short.
We don't have time to try every crackpot theory out there.
So the first thing that I look at, and I hope the first thing that you look at, when somebody wants to give you advice is, well, do you take that advice yourself?
Somebody claims to be an expert on ethics, I will actually look at their life before I look at their arguments, right?
The same way that if somebody claims to be a brain-spanning genius, I will look at whether they can type the word there or there correctly.
And if they can't, then they're either dumb as a pile of rocks Or they simply type things badly and don't correct them and have no idea that that is going to impact whether somebody thinks they're intelligent or not.
We do have to be judicious when it comes to life and the people we take advice from.
And I would say particularly in the realm of ethics, because ethics are so tricky, ethics are so slippery when it comes to formal definitions that, you know, I think that we want to have pretty high standards For taking advice from people about ethics with regards to their own personal behavior.
This doesn't mean perfection, of course.
God, nobody's perfect and I'm not.
But, you know, I have to get at least some of the basics down, right?
So, you know, if somebody is, I don't know, just mean and nasty and cold and cruel and contemptuous and dismissive or whatever.
I'm not talking about anyone in particular.
But if they're like that, I'm like, you know what?
I have no interest in listening to you about ethics.
I don't even have any interest in looking over your theories.
Because if your theories are true, about ethics but you're not a good person then you either don't care about ethics in which case why are you writing so much about them or you do care about ethics but you don't care to practice them in which case all you're doing is kind of wrecking the whole topic by not practicing what you preach,
right? So I just wanted to sort of I think that the and I've mentioned this before but I think it is I think it is important to to look at the person when it comes to certain things If somebody claims that weight loss is the ultimate good and knows exactly how to do it, then you kind of expect that they're not going to be morbidly obese.
That's just the basic reality.
That's why you don't see morbidly obese people on the cover of diet books, except perhaps in the before photo.
We just hope that philosophers and academics and the brain-spanning geniuses of this field can somehow figure out The basic reality of the world to the degree that, say, a junior copy boy who's 12 could figure it out, right? We just kind of hope that they can go that far.
But I think that we will hope in vain for some time, to say the least.
Anyway, I just wanted to sort of mention that while we're waiting for the next question.
If you are wondering how you ask questions, if you're new to the conversation, you can type them in the chat room.
And you can also just unmute your microphone, say, about now, and spreken.
Hello.
Hello.
Oh.
Hi. Am I getting through and everything?
You are getting through and beyond.
Oh, well, great. Yeah, I'm just totally a newbie, you know.
I've just kind of discovered you a couple of weeks ago or less, I guess.
And I have a couple of just general questions.
I'm not ready to debate you or anything like that about any of it.
I'm just sort of taking it in.
I haven't found anything to debate, really.
But I just wonder if it's okay if I can just ask for some clarifications, you know?
Absolutely. I will certainly do my best to help if I can.
Please go ahead. Oh, that's great.
I could give you a lot of praise.
I'm very enthused to, you know, your openness and the humor and the thinking is just so stimulating and, you know, there's an emotional content, you know, that's, I mean, you can get the dry academic stuff, you know, But it's lacking the live zip that the Molyneux has.
And I just find it quite wonderful.
My questions though, I've been kind of interested in somewhat irrational things and I don't know, you know, how you look on things like psychology and psychology has a bit of an irrational side to it,
you know, insofar as that you have to look at your experience, you know, and try, first of all, To experience things and, you know, go by your dreams.
I've heard you talking about going by your dreams and that sort of thing.
And I'd really like to hear a little bit more about this kind of borderline between the rational and this other thing that's not exactly rational, but it's just the courage to experience, you know, something like that. I'd love to hear a few words from you about that sort of thing anyway.
Boy, you must be new if you're asking for a few words.
Oh yes, I apologize.
No, I appreciate that, but I want to just sort of understand what you mean, and I think I do, and I'm not certainly challenging anything you're saying, I just want to make sure I understand it fully.
When you say that there's a certain irrational element to psychology, you know, the old question is always, compared to what?
Compared to what discipline would you say that there's irrationality in psychology?
No, maybe I'm not phrasing that the right way.
I just mean that psychology deals with irrational elements.
I've been involved in meditation groups and then they always add a few little extras onto the basic meditation practices and so on.
This seems like Frankly, to me, irrational elements, you know, and yet, you know, the meditation does affect you.
You can feel its effects and everything.
I don't know if you can sense where I'm going with this or what my question, properly phrased, would be and so on.
So you've had some experience with meditation, and you feel that meditation's effects, which you say, and I believe you, and I've experienced the same thing, are sort of empirical on your body, right?
Like you follow certain thought patterns or certain ideas, and you can feel, say, muscles relax or endorphins release or other good things that are occurring within your body.
Is that right? Correct.
And what aspect of that...
And again, I'm not saying you're wrong, of course, right?
I just want to make sure that I understand.
What aspect of that for you falls into irrational or semi-rational?
No, it's not that per se, but I find that, well, I've been involved in some groups that then add, you know, and on top of this direct experience, You know, there's the astral plane, and it's like there's this kind of borderline between taking things on faith, you know, which is, I don't know, what do you have to say about that?
Right, no, listen, I think I understand.
Some of the things seem to be quite irrational, sorry.
Yeah, no, listen, I'm glad that we zeroed in on this, because, as you know, my wife practices psychology largely on me, and So I just wanted to make sure I understood what you meant by the word psychology.
Because I don't think, and she's here in the room, if I remember rightly, you didn't take any courses on astral planage until you got to graduate school.
Is that right? Would you like to respond to that or should I? Okay.
Because what you're talking about there is bong hippie happy mysticism, right?
Oh yeah. And this is the annoying thing about people who are Interested in the inner life, right?
And the inner life is the life of self-knowledge, the examined life, the purpose of every man and woman's existence in many ways.
To be ethical, we have to have self-knowledge, right?
So that we can be objective and sympathetic in situations where we may not feel that way because of our histories or our habits or whatever.
So there's this terrible dichotomy In the world, right?
And there are the engineers and the physicists and the biologists and so on.
And I'm using these terms very loosely.
And I'm painting with a way too wide a brush.
But just for the sake of efficiency, there are people who are into the outside world, right?
Like the engineers and so on.
And they're kind of scornful of the inner life, right?
You know, take dream analysis to an engineer's convention.
You'll just get a thousand yard stairs and possibly a taser, right?
Oh, yeah. But on the other hand, you go to these, you know...
Guys with, I don't know, porn mustaches, strange oils, and long bathrobes who are really into sitting cross-legged and doing yogic flying, and they are scornful and contemptuous towards the empirical world of reason and science, right?
Because they're like into the inner life, right?
That's where I'm stuck, right between the two of those, yeah.
I hear you. It is a really annoying and frustrating thing, because to me, the reality of the inner life is empirical.
It is as empirical as, you know, touching a tree, right?
When you're in the life, when you're happy, you're sad, you're angry, you're aroused, whatever, these are all internal states.
The biological effects of therapy are pretty well documented.
The biological effects of meditation are very well documented, that they can result in lower blood pressure, it can result in lower cholesterol, it can result in a variety of beneficial Mental and physical states.
So to me that's part of science, because you've got a mental state which has objective, empirical and measurable physical effects.
Now, the people who go into the inner life stuff can have the discipline of scientists, which is of course where my wife comes from, and other therapists that I would respect and recommend.
But there are these other people who just kind of go into this inner world and they go way past what is rational and empirical into things like past lives and theosophy and alternate planes of existence and out-of-body experience and all that kind of stuff, right? And that to me is really annoying.
It's the way that people go out into the world And they go past the sky and they create a god, right?
And it's like, well, let's go out into the world.
Let's go past the sky. Let's explore the heavens.
But let's not put silly old men in thrones up there, right?
Let's not make a god, let's not make a religion out of reality.
Now, our inner life is a kind of reality.
It's a very real reality.
And in many ways, it's the most important reality.
Because happiness is the goal and happiness is an internal state, right?
Which has empirical measurements and so on.
But in the same way that when people go out into the universe, they have this irresistible urge to just go 12 steps beyond that which is rational and create gods and devils and so on.
And even the agnostics do this by creating these realms where gods might exist and so on.
And it's like, why do you have to go that one step extra that just makes it stupid and silly?
And it's the same thing with our inner life, right?
So our inner life, you know, self-knowledge is important.
Dreams are valid things.
Real internal phenomenon and they can have very important and helpful training capacities for our minds.
And you may want to see this, a BBC documentary that came out recently called Dreams or Why We Dream, I think.
And I think it's available on Google.
You might want to look it up. They've done some pretty specific measurements about the nature and purpose of dreams, how they do help us to deal with life, how they do train us, how they are rehearsals for that which is Better.
And of course, if we've got to lie down for eight hours when it's night to conserve energy and to avoid predators, you know, those who develop dreams that will help them in life will do better than those who don't.
So it's an adaptive and positive internal state.
And it's entirely rational and it's entirely biological.
And the annoying thing is that people, like the people who go beyond the sky to create gods, people go into the mind and then want to create another kind of religion, right?
This mysticism of, you know, the The true self and the yogic, all this crap.
And this is really annoying because it's like, why do you have to take your interest past the point of empiricism, science, rationality, and logic into the realm of, you know, nonsense made up mystical crap?
And it really is annoying because it discredits those Who want to go in and to learn about themselves and learn about the psychological phenomenon that exists within their minds.
Those people who try to carve off internal stimuli and make some alternate reality that it's coming from strike me as both insane, fundamentally, and also it's annoyingly discrediting to those who actually want to learn about themselves from an objective standpoint.
Does this make any sense to you at all?
I mean, I hope that I'm making some sense.
Oh yes, yes, it makes very good sense and I'm very slow thinker and I probably will just take it in and think it over and stuff.
But one thing, like I got in this group about a year or so ago investigating your dreams, you know, and it just seems like they ask you to,
you know, sort of Do all these little practices you know and they start having an effect on you and then somehow you know you lose your individuality a little bit because you're just kind of going with the program and I don't know it's like it's hard to say you know because there is this side of the mind that's like the unknown the unconscious and And maybe you could use a guide to go in there,
and if they say they know how to go in there, how do you know or not know if they're telling the truth, and so on and so forth, you know?
It's like easy to get lost.
Right. Now, is it people who, and Jung is to some degree responsible for this, though he's not the only one, are these people who talk about the collective unconscious?
Has that sort of come up?
Archetypical dreams that...
And they believe there's some sort of universal mind of which our unconscious is a fragment.
Is that sort of stuff come up or is it not quite that nutty?
It's not irrational.
I've been going on their website and saying, you know, what about rationality?
And of course, they just don't talk about if something's rational or irrational.
They talk about astral planes, you know, like you can go to other planets once you become truly objective.
Oh, it's pretty wild, you know?
I mean, I appreciate you.
I appreciate the rationality and the philosophy and everything.
But somehow I'm kind of interested in this, and yet, I don't know.
I'd love to hear what you say about it, Bill.
Well, I think it's all nonsense.
And dangerous. Dangerous nonsense.
When you go out into space, you need a space suit.
You don't just sort of pray that the gods of oxygen will cluster around your head and give you the right amount of pressure so you won't explode.
When you go out into space, you need science, you need grounding and empiricism and rationality.
When you go inward, when you go into your unconscious, when you go into your dreams, you even more need A tether, right?
You need objective facts.
You need reality when you go inwards.
You don't want to go inwards to the unconscious, which is volatile and challenging and exciting enough, without being tethered to reality.
You don't want to go into the unconscious and into fantasy at the same time.
To me, that is like going out into space without the science and tether of a spacesuit.
So I think that it's very dangerous to give people the idea That their inner lives are somehow portals to some sort of external dimension.
It's completely disorienting and completely untrue.
We would never say, like an oncologist would never sit down with you and say, well, you have cancer, and what we're going to do is meditate so that you can project it into a rock on Saturn.
Because we would recognize that that which is within your body can't magically become a portal to some other planet or other world.
Right? So, you would no more say that when you're going into a dream, which is completely, empirically and totally an inner internal state.
You can see it on a CAT scan.
You can see it on an MRI. You can see dream activity occurring in people.
And you know when it's happening because of some REM aspects and so on, right?
So, you can see dreams.
That are occurring and it is a purely internal state.
There are no little portals that open up to other dimensions.
You don't see little asteroids in someone's brain when they're dreaming.
It is a purely internal state.
That is a scientific fact. When you then say to people, well, what you're actually doing is visiting another dimension, you're actually denying them self-knowledge because you're saying that they're walking through some glowing door into some other realm and exploring something real out there in some astral plane.
It's not true. They're exploring their own self.
It's not something that's out there and you're denying, not you, but these people are denying people the understanding that their dreams and their unconscious and their impulses and their emotions are their own creation, their own doing.
And so when you talk about, oh, you dream, you go to astral planes and so on, you're denying some of the self-knowledge of what those dreams actually are, which is an internally generated state that has important information about their life.
Yeah, well, this particular group I'm with, they tell you that You have to stop dreaming in order to become objective.
And it's only when you wake up in a dream and you kind of go beyond dreams, and then you're in the astral plane.
You can't get into it if you're dreaming.
That's one of the things they say.
Right, and that's an interesting theory, right?
I mean, I think it's nuts as a $3 bill, but it's It's an interesting theory, right?
And then I would say to somebody like that, okay, great, where's your scientific proof?
You know, because anyone can say anything, right?
I can say that, you know, licking Windex cures cancer.
I can say anything that I want, right?
People can say whatever shit they want, right?
It's like, well, where's your proof?
Well, they say there can't be any proof because scientific proof requires external corroboration and when you're inside of yourself, they say you have to be You can't really ask somebody else to come inside your own head and so on, you know?
Well, so basically they're just like religion, right?
It's just another kind of religion, which is to me a complete mental disease, right?
I hate that stuff.
I mean, as you know, I have my loves, I have my humors, and I have my dislikes.
I hate people who set up entire structures where they can say whatever shit they want And then magically wave away the requirement for any kind of proof or evidence.
To me, that is snake oil salesmen.
It's exploitive and destructive.
And since people who go into that kind of stuff often, though not always, often come from traumatic histories or have difficulties with their own levels of self-knowledge or impulse control or whatever, the fact that they then go into a situation where they are basically being manipulated by the words of other people who are claiming a knowledge that they also claim is functionally impossible, That to me is exploitive and destructive.
And it prevents these people from getting real help because they're mucking about with astral planes rather than pursuing rational and real self-knowledge.
And so I really, really dislike those guys the same way that I dislike those guys who say, oh no, you can go and you can pray to have your cancer cured.
It's like, no, no, no, go to a fucking oncologist.
Go to a scientist.
Go to medicine. Or these people who say, oh no, homeopathy is the way to go because this, that, and the other.
It's all nonsense. It's completely not proven.
Oh, you don't need to do any underwater surveys.
Just grab this little stick and get a diviner.
They're actually preventing people from getting to the answers and the help that they need.
And I think it's exploitive and destructive to the nth degree.
All right. You're not unequivocal.
You aren't equivocal, let's say.
Well, look, I'm happy if these people want to talk about astral planes, right?
But then talk about it as a theory and pursue some rational and empirical proof.
But, you know, to just exploit people who need help by claiming all this stuff and then claiming that there's no standard of truth that can possibly be applied to it, but they're still charging money, right?
Well, you can donate.
Wait, they do everything for free, but you can donate?
Yeah. So you can do all of this meditation and stuff and they never charge you a penny?
No. Well, that's unusual because I must say most mystics do charge and I've never gone to a meditation session where I never had to pay anything other than maybe ones that I've had through my gym or something.
So that is unusual. But most of the people who are into this kind of stuff do charge, right?
um oh uh i don't know you know i haven't i have limited experience but uh uh you know i i just noticed like uh over like i'm an old guy i'm i'm 64 this year and uh i i've had unusual experiences i don't know why and i don't even know if it's a curse or a gift you know but a psychic kind of experiences and uh I feel like you should investigate them,
but it gets dodgy when you're investigating because you're kind of in this irrational zone.
And yet, boy, I totally appreciate rationality and figuring things out and things making sense.
Absolutely, you know? So you mean sort of premonitions or psychic things of that kind?
Oh yeah, yeah.
I could tell you stories, you know.
Right, and look, I totally accept your genuineness, right, and your belief in this, but the simple thing to do is to put it to the test, right?
I mean, you can get a friend, right, and you can guess the cards that are coming up in a randomly shuffled deck, or you can guess the numbers that are going to come up in a random generator, or something like that, right?
There's lots of ways that you can test psychic ability, and Lord knows, right, it has been tested up the yin-yang, From Six Ways to Sunday.
And it has never been proven to have any validity whatsoever, right?
Which kind of makes sense, because the future hasn't happened yet, and we don't have any magical abilities to predict it.
Because, of course, if anybody did develop the magical ability to predict the future, that gene would dominate everything else, right?
And if we did have the magical ability to communicate thoughts psychically rather than verbally, whatever tribe developed that ability would dominate all the other tribes, because they would be so much better At warfare, right?
Because you'd have like walkie-talkies in the brain in the Stone Age, right?
So there seems to me no possibility that we have this vestigial psychic ability because it would be so incredibly valuable from a survival standpoint that it would have dominated even more so than eyesight.
I'm sorry? Yeah, but in fact, people from centuries ago, even the Romans, I think, like, there's, I don't know, of course, the validity of the stories is, you know, you get into the unknown zone with this.
The validity of the stories, I can't vouch for, but there's a story about Octavius, one of the people who was fighting to become Emreher after Caesar, Was murdered, you know?
And his friend who was psychic said, told him, get out of your tent.
You know, I just had a dream where people came running in and murdered you in your tent.
So he, you know, his life was virtually saved by a dream because he didn't sleep in his tent that night and some sort of a A squad from Brutus' faction that very night ran into his tent with swords and they would have got him, you know, because they just kind of rushed in in an unexpected way.
And there's lots of other, you know, strange things like that.
Well, see, but from my standpoint, and of course I don't know the story and I certainly don't have any proof of this in this instance, but my answer to that would be that that to me seems entirely possible.
In the real world, without psychic abilities, and it seems entirely likely, right?
So I believe that, and it's not just me who believes this, right?
I've sort of been yammering on about it for years, but there seems to be quite a lot of empirical evidence.
You might want to read Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, if you haven't, that the amount of information that the human mind can process in a glance, in a moment, is astounding.
And the fact is that if you have a friend...
Let's just make it easier. Say somebody wants to...
I'm Brutus or whatever and somebody wants to come and kill me.
Well, that is going to be a plot that's going to be floating around and it is going to have some effect on my friend's behavior, right?
Or my supposed friend's behavior, right?
They're going to pause when I ask them something.
There's going to be a sidelong glance that I can't quite figure out.
But I really understand...
But I understand it at some level.
That something is amiss.
And that may only come out unconsciously.
I may have a dream about people killing me because I can't accept it.
Consciously. So I may have a dream about it with knowledge that I have.
So like a woman whose husband is having an affair may dream about it before she accepts it consciously.
Why? Because maybe he smelled a little different but she didn't notice it.
Maybe he glanced at her in a different way.
Maybe her seatbelt We're set to a different setting because the other woman is, you know, fatter or thinner or whatever.
And she doesn't know it consciously, but the body recognizes it.
There's a very interesting example of this in a book that I read recently called White Tiger, which is set in India.
And spoiler alert, right?
I don't think it's a huge spoiler because he talks about it at the very beginning of the book.
But one guy is going to kill another guy.
And I can't remember the exact quote, of course, but it goes something like this.
He's trying to lure him out of a car in the rain so that he can stab him.
And so he says, I need you to come out and help me with this flat tire.
And the narrator says something like this.
He says, and the man hesitated in the car.
And he didn't want to come out into the rain.
Because his body knew what was coming.
He didn't know in his eyes, in his mind.
He didn't want to know in his eyes and in his mind.
But in his heart, In his flesh, he knew what was coming.
And that is why he didn't want to get out of the car.
And that really struck me just as an example of a kind of knowledge that we really have that we don't access enough.
And I think that would be an example of why dreams seem to have this premonitory ability.
Now, of course, I'm not going to claim that's a factual knowledge statement.
It is true that we can process an enormous amount of information very quickly.
Can't prove anything about the story that you've said, but I think that to go off into the realm of psychic abilities or predicting the future is to invent an explanation that's not necessary, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, it's better to keep your feet on Earth a bit, I guess, eh?
Well, I think that's the first place you want to look, right?
Because the moment you say, I'm not saying you, but the moment someone says psychic ability, You kind of stop looking for the answer, right?
Because you have this answer called psychic.
But it's not an answer, right?
In the same way that people say, well, where did the world come from?
Well, God made it. Well, it's kind of not an answer because it's a magical answer, right?
It's not an answer that has any empirical evidence.
And if you say psychic abilities, you kind of stop looking for an answer.
And I think it's really important to keep looking for answers until you find something that doesn't require, you know, magic or forethought or a strange...
Capacities in the brain that have never been measured or time to move in two directions.
You know, it just seems I go with Occam's razor.
Let's look for the simplest explanation that's the most empirical and logical.
Yes. What would you think about just saying, well, it's one of these unknown things and we don't really have something to cover it.
I mean, maybe is that the best we can do?
What do you think? I mean, I think that, I mean, there's lots of things that I have known, an infinite number of things that I have no clue about.
And so I say I don't have an opinion because I don't know anything about it, right?
But to say it's one of these mysteries and that's the best we can do is to just put an artificial barrier before the amazing and inevitable progress of human thought.
So I think that saying it's a mystery and we don't know is not a statement that is valid.
There is a way of knowing that will occur.
If it's happening in reality, we'll figure it out at some point, right?
Because that's what we do. We're like reality hamsters, right?
That's what our brains do. And so I think to say, well, it's one of life's sweet mysteries, I think, and I'm going to go out on a limb here, and I don't know you from Adam, right?
So this is just a nonsense theory that you can take or whatever, right?
My experience with people who like psychic phenomenon, What they like about psychic phenomenon is a feeling of unearned specialness or a feeling that they have something unique and cool and freaky and wonderful and a little scary and so on.
And I think that if the people that I've known who are into psychic abilities, if they were to say, well, it's just, you know, we have an amazing brain that processes a lot and I guess there's nothing psychic or magical about it.
They would feel kind of disappointed about that because they kind of like having this cool, slightly weird, slightly exciting, slightly unknown, mysterious power.
And if it's just kind of revealed as something as mundane, which I don't think is mundane, as the amazing processing ability of our brain, I think they'd feel, in fact, I know that they feel kind of disappointed, like they're less special, they're less interesting, they're less cool, if that makes any sense. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I believe that's true, yeah.
But I think that the real cool...
See, to me, it's a lot more cool to say my brain can process such an amazing amount of information that I can get a premonition about something before I'm even aware of it consciously.
To me, that is incredibly cool.
Whereas making up an ability called psychic whatever, to me, that's not cool.
That's just kind of foggy. And since it's not true, it kind of, I think, lowers self-esteem rather than raises it.
So I think that it's...
It's cooler and more electric and more exciting and more real to say I have amazing capacities within my mind that are well worth exploring rather than to say I have the ability to foretell the future in a way that I can never control or reproduce, which just seems kind of foggy to me and not nearly as cool.
Yeah, so you could say it's the unknown so far.
Yeah, it's the unknown so far, but the answer is not going to be magical psychic abilities, and we have the ability to predict the future, because, you know, future kind of goes in one direction, at least that's where science sits at the moment, to my knowledge.
So there is going to be an answer, like, in the 17th century, you would have been sensible to say, well, I don't know, because the Mark and Darwin haven't arrived yet, I don't know how the species came to be.
But I do know that it wasn't God mucking about with plasticine and magic breath, right?
Right. So that's, yeah, we don't know.
Like, I don't know, as far as I know, physics, we can't explain the origins of the universes yet, but it's not going to be Zeus, right?
And maybe it's going to be something pretty freaky, maybe, but it's not going to be a Pegasus, right?
It's not going to be a square circle, you know, making 2 plus 2 equal 5 and then coming back to life and rolling back the tomb door, right?
It's not going to be something that's completely freaky, right?
Clearly anthropomorphic and irrational.
It's going to be something and it might be kind of freaky to our sensibilities like the theory of relativity, but it's not going to be an old guy in a white beard breathe life into things, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So does that help?
I certainly, look, I really do appreciate it.
Your questions are fantastic and I think that you've been getting a lot of great feedback in the chat room, so I think the questions are great.
Is that okay?
Can I move on to the next person?
Yes, I just wanted to get your amazing brain out there in the outer sphere, you know, of this zone and see what it came up with.
Thank you so much.
Well, thank you for calling in.
I really do appreciate it. And by the way, thank you, of course, for your very kind words earlier on.
I really do appreciate that. That's very, very nice of you to say.
So, all right. Thank you very much.
We do have time for one more question.
I psychically predict that it will be coming from a carbon-based life form.
No silicons, please. Do I recommend White Tiger?
I listened to White Tiger in audiobook, and the audiobook reader was really good.
Country mouse. He was actually really good.
I would recommend it, actually.
It's not mystical.
It's not a mystical book at all.
I can tell you this.
It has just about the most spectacular defu you will ever read in literature.
It makes Hamlet's defu look like a country picnic with a bunch of Mormons.
It absolutely has the most spectacular difu you can conceivably imagine and I'm sure will ever occur in literature.
So I think it's interesting.
I think it is a very compelling and passionate and powerful vision.
Of a life, right?
A book is a chance to try someone else's life on for size.
And this is a very, very interesting, fascinating, and detailed view of life in the lower castes in India.
And I think it has a real Dostoevskyan flavor to it.
It's like an endless prequel to Crime and Punishment.
Crime and Punishment starts with the crime.
And then it ends with the punishment.
This starts with the punishment, ends with the crime, and then there is no punishment afterwards.
So it's really, really interesting to look at from that standpoint.
So yeah, I would definitely recommend it.
It's well written. It's simply and powerfully told.
So I would definitely recommend it.
Alright, Ed wants someone else?
So yeah, we have time for another question, if you feel like it.
Hello? Hello?
Yeah, it's me again. I just came back for a second.
I wanted to mention that if that guy who was asking you about starting up a piano teaching studio wanted to give me a call, that's what I am, and I might be able to give him a couple of pointers and that sort of thing.
Oh, that's wonderfully kind of you.
Thank you. Do you have a place that you can be contacted at?
You can just type it into Skype or into the chat room if you like, and I'll try and get it forwarded to him.
I don't know if he's actually in on the call.
I haven't looked at the list. Okay.
Yeah, sure. Thank you.
And if you have a board membership, you can post it and he won't get your email.
Oh, he is on the call. So if you just type contact information into the chat room, that's very kind.
And, you know, for those who are looking to get stuff started, mentoring is really important.
Even if it's like a 10-minute phone call, 20-minute phone call, it can absolutely save your bacon.
When Christina was starting her Her practice, she talked to a woman who has been doing it for 30 years, for 45 minutes, and it was just fantastic in terms of how much it can really help.
So try and find people in the field who, you know, and people like to mentor, right?
I mean, they like to help out people who are starting out.
So it's a really, really wonderful thing to do, and thank you so much for the offer.
Just added somebody if you wanted to ask your question.
We are all with the earrings.
Lando on the board has a question in the chatroom.
I'm sorry? Lando has a question in the chatroom.
Are you on Skype?
Can we talk about it? Or is he just going to type?
He writes, I'm an anarchist, but I really enjoy violent slash creepy movies with tons of blood, like Tarantino and Del Toro of the Grindhouse, right?
There is something really cool about some guy getting his arms lopped off.
What is up with that phenomenon?
Well, I can't.
I mean, that's a lot to talk about.
I would prefer to talk about it if you can actually talk.
Do you have the Skype?
And actually, I went through this a little while back in a Sunday show, so I would sort of keep it brief.
Do you have a Mickey phone?
Do you have a phone number?
You can whisper it in the chat room.
1-800- Candy pants.
No, I don't think that's the real one.
Well, I mean, I would just say that the first place that I would look if I were in your blood-soaked shoes are...
What is your history with violence?
Do you have a history having experienced violence, seen violence as a child?
That's the first place that I would look, is my own personal history with violence.
You say there's something really cool about some guy getting his arms lopped off.
There's not, actually, anything cool about a guy getting his arm lopped off.
And again, I'm talking about the sort of quasi-realistic movie stuff.
I mean, I'm not talking about cartoons or whatever.
But yeah, you really want to look at your own history with violence.
And you may be drawn back to recreations of violence that you haven't processed at some point in your personal history.
That would be my first guess.
But of course, you would know infinitely better than I would what the truth would be about that.
So, what are my thoughts about lucid dreaming?
I can tell you that I miss lucid dreaming enormously.
I went through a phase when I was going through therapy where I had the most astoundingly wonderful, exciting, beautiful and thrilling lucid dreams.
Where I can completely understand the belief that it is an alternate reality and so on.
Just the most amazing details.
And I haven't had these kinds of dreams in years.
I still dream every night, and my dreams can be, you know, range the usual gamut.
But I haven't had lucid dreams or dreams of that particular peculiar intensity in years.
I'm kind of happy in a way to not.
I miss them, but I don't miss all of the psychological excitement, let's say, that was going along with them.
So, you know, I'll take a calmer life without lucid dreaming.
I know that there's a certain discipline of lucid dreaming where you're supposed to Enter into your dreams and you are supposed to be able to control your dreams and so on.
I mean, I think that's kind of cool.
I think that dreams are better off when you receive them and you process them in your conscious waking state.
You know, maybe if you have a nightmare and you're supposed to confront the monster in your dream or whatever, but I think it's actually, I mean, my experience would be that it's actually better to just note the dream down and talk about it with a therapist or somebody who's sympathetic or try and work it out yourself while you're dreaming about a monster.
I don't think that overcoming the monster in your dream by some sort of lucid approach is actually going to help you that much because there's a reason why the monster is there and it's not your unconscious trying to get you, it's your unconscious trying to help you by warning you of a danger that's in your life.
So I would strongly suggest that you process the dream as a warning about a danger in your life rather than try and fight back against the monster in your dream through some sort of lucid dreaming thing.
But again, this is just my experience, my thoughts, but that would be my strong suggestion.
Yeah, if you can use it for flying, that would be fantastic.
Flying is great.
If you're just zooming around stuff, I think that's great.
But I know that there's a certain kind of...
A discipline where you're supposed to be able to be trained into lucid dreaming and you get eye patches put on and all that kind of stuff.
Alright, we do have time for another question.
If you have a lucid dream where you overcome the monster, is that part of the unconscious or does lucid dreaming not work that way?
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what that means.
How is the karaoke setup for the barbecue going?
It's on the list of things to work on this week.
When will hyperinflation hit America?
I don't know that there's any way to predict it, and I'm not sure that it's going to happen that way.
Central banking is more sophisticated now, and the knowledge of economics is more sophisticated now than it was in the 1920s when hyperinflation, say, hit America, or even in Argentina in the 70s, or 80s, I think it was, or early 90s.
So I'm not sure that it's going to be hyperinflation.
There could be any number of ways that the problems are going to occur that maybe...
I mean, I've sort of been mulling over whether it would be worth writing some sort of predictive article about how it's all going to go down, but it's going to be something quite challenging, and we are the ones who will be the happiest through the process of adjustment that society will go through, because we will actually know what has happened, why it's happened, and where to go, whereas most people will be very stressed and freaked.
So... Somebody said, sorry, if you're able to overcome the monster in your dream and make a choice to do so, is the ability to do that part of your unconscious helping you out, or sending you a message, or is lucid dreaming less about the unconscious side of things?
Because I've never studied lucid dreaming, it simply occurred to me when I was keeping a dream journal and in the throes of very intensive therapy, I couldn't really say whether or not lucid dreaming is designed to help that or not, so you'd have to look that up on the internet.
That would be beyond my knowledge base, I'm afraid.
And I mean, I've been sort of meaning to do a video about things to be positive about.
I mean, maybe y'all would like to be born at a different time.
I would absolutely not like to have been born at any other time in history.
So with all of the challenges that are going on in the world, we do have this communications medium.
We do have access to an amazing amount of knowledge.
And we do have an amazing amount of knowledge within this community.
We've worked out some pretty astounding and deep and wonderful things.
None of that would have been possible without the technology that is here.
And with that technology comes increased predation from the state, and that's natural.
But I sure as heck would not have been like to live in the 18th, 17th, 16th, go back to, you know, the dawn of time.
This is the time to live.
Would I like to live I don't know, 200 years in the future when we've achieved Libertopia?
I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know.
Because I don't know who or what I would be in that kind of society.
It's too hard to picture. But I certainly would not want to live in any other time.
And I think if you would not like to have lived in any other time, I think you can take some real pleasure in where we do live and the capacity for communication that we do have.
Yeah. Any update on the World War I podcast?
I'm sorry, it's still on the list.
Fatherhood. We have a baby who is...
And maybe other parents can correct me if I'm wrong.
She is completely wonderful, but for about 70% of the time that she's awake, or maybe 80%, she needs to be carried by either Christina or myself.
That's all she wants, is to be close to us and to be carried and shown things and all that.
So that is...
And when she's down, she's not a baby who self-stimulates.
She needs someone to play with her.
She gets bored very easily.
So that's really cut into a lot of my productivity time.
Or rather, I guess it's just made that productivity time slightly different.
So yeah, sorry it's on the list, but it will come.
Alright, well, I don't want to draw the show out beyond that which is logically necessary.
If anybody has a question or comment, you can speak up or we can shut it down after shockingly only 90 minutes.
Well, thank you everybody so much.
I hope you have an absolutely wonderful week.
Thank you for the donators.
Thank you for the subscribers.
I hugely appreciate your kindness and generosity.
Remember, if you're a Silver Plus, there are four or five fantastic new Premium podcasts available for you.
Just click on Media and go to Silver Podcasts and you will get a hold of them.
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And have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week.
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