Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

May 3, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:50:30

1344 Sunday Show 3 May 2009

FDR news, gaining the future from losing the past, and inspiring those left behind.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Well, thank you everybody so much for joining us.
	It is May the 3rd, 2009.
	Only 21 party days left before the May 2-4 weekend.
	And I guess following that, the barbecue weekend.
	So I have booked a private karaoke room.
	And so it's Mississauga.
	Options are limited. So please be sure to brush up on your Korean.
	So I'm looking forward to having everyone join us.
	And I can't wait.
	If you haven't told us you're coming, please tell us soon, if not now.
	Otherwise, we won't be able to accommodate you.
	But I hope that you will come up.
	It is a huge amount of fun.
	I look forward to it every year before crawling back into a tiny cave of familial isolation.
	So, I hope that you're all having a wonderful week.
	I wanted to just start off the show by addressing something that has come up a bunch of times in the chat room and in my email, which is Oh Steph, oh Steph, you are Icarus flying too close to the sun, and what is going to happen if Isabella doth decide to defoo you in the future?
	And that, of course, is an excellent question.
	I'm not sure, I'm never really sure what the rhetorical aspect of this is supposed to do, like people say, well, what happens if she defoos you in the future?
	Well, that sort of asks and answers the question, right?
	What happens if she defoos me in the future?
	Well, she has defood me in the future.
	It's like, what happens if you trip?
	You fall. But I must tell you, in all honesty, and of course there is a great deal of anxiety sometimes that floats around when people put out positive certainty statements of this kind, but I must tell you with complete candor that I do not fret for a moment or worry for a moment that Isabella is going to separate from me as a father in the future.
	I don't have any concern that Christina is going to leave me tomorrow or the day after simply because I am aware of the voluntary nature of our relationships or to some degree, of course, with Isabella, the involuntary nature of her relationship with me and with Christina.
	And because it is involuntary, I make sure that I am as positive and helpful and enjoyable and rich and deep and rewarding and stimulating and affectionate A person with her as possible so that she has a positive experience of me as a human being, of me as a father. A very positive experience.
	And, you know, we're complicated as human beings, but we're not random, right?
	I mean, at least not healthy people, right?
	So to say that Isabella is going to not want to spend time with someone who...
	Is helpful and affectionate, loves her madly, would do anything to help her, hopefully has some wisdom and utility of experience to impart to her to make her life easier.
	And better would be to say that human beings would just act against that which gives them pleasure and utility and that would be pretty random, right?
	So I just sort of wanted to point that out.
	I absolutely have no fears whatsoever That Isabella is going to defoo me or Christina or anything like that.
	It's not going to happen. As she gets older in life, she's going to have some sort of career.
	She's going to have problems in that career, as we all do.
	And I hope that I will be of utility to her in terms of listening and helping her with some principles so she can learn to figure these things out for herself.
	And so if you have someone who's, you know, wise and deep and loving and funny and affectionate and helpful and so on, why would you not want that person in your life?
	The only people who would not want that in their lives would be masochists.
	And in order to produce a masochist, you have to basically inflict a hideous amount of abuse on a child, which of course is in no way shape or form any part of my parenting.
	In fact, quite the opposite.
	So given that she's not masochistic and I'm going to be a continual, though not eternal, source of pleasure for her, then...
	It just makes no sense.
	It's like saying, well, Christina absolutely adores me as I adore her, and we love spending every moment that we can with each other, but she's going to leave me tomorrow.
	The human beings are not that random.
	And so I just sort of wanted to point that out.
	And there is, you know, it is an interesting thing.
	To me, it's not a real question that people are really concerned about Isabella and the future of my relationship with her.
	I think what happens is that people have probably grown up in an environment where Any positive statement of certainty or confidence is met with attack.
	And that is a very common and very tragic situation that people grow up in.
	And it's not just family.
	I mean, it's society, it's culture as a whole, right?
	If you do too well, if you're too confident, if you're too happy about the future, then what happens is the gods will smack you down and lightning will split your spine and so on, right?
	Like if you, a hubris, pride cometh before a fall, and We've all seen those movies where the moment that someone is really enthusiastic about the relationship, the other person breaks up with them.
	Happiness and confidence always leads to a disaster of rejection and so on.
	And so when I put out happy, confident statements like the one I'm just putting out, people feel uneasy.
	It doesn't have anything to do with me.
	Fundamentally, it has to do with their own history.
	But there is something that is quite tragically obvious.
	about even asking that question, which is that people feel that if I put out a positive, confident and happy statement, tragedy, disaster and catastrophe will inevitably result.
	And that's something to, I think, to examine and uncover internally to yourself.
	Where is it that you learned that confidence and happiness leads to catastrophe and disaster?
	So, My suggestion is to look at that.
	That's where I think the really fruitful self-examination is going to go.
	I just wanted to mention that up front.
	Last but not least, and thank you to those who have chipped in for this.
	Hit with a juicy $4,200 plus U.S. bill for the FDR server.
	And, you know, it's a pretty powerful server.
	It's dedicated. It's got a nice juicy amount of RAM. And, of course, the bandwidth is monstrous.
	And there's a RAID drive to keep the cockroaches out and all that kind of stuff.
	I hope that if you do enjoy the resource of Free Domain Radio that you will consider throwing a few bucks to my way to help defray the cost.
	There is no free lunch.
	And if you don't, others have to.
	So, I just wanted to mention that.
	And that's it.
	Oh, yes, I don't know. Izzy Update.
	She is doing beautifully.
	She's actually learned to kiss back, which is the cutest and sweetest thing.
	I posted a photo of her.
	She only appears to be sitting up.
	She can't sit up yet. That doesn't happen until about seven months.
	So she's able to stay on her front for quite a long time now, doing that stationary front crawl swim to nowhere that babies do before they learn how to crawl.
	So she's...
	So she's doing fantastically.
	And her sleep is much, much better, which is great.
	And so everything's wonderful in that area, that arena.
	We did go and get some family portraits done, which I think are just lovely.
	And I think that's wonderful.
	So that's it. I hope that you have questions, comments, issues, or are failing that you're going to cast me out to enjoy this beautiful sunny day up here in Canada.
	So... I am all ears if you have questions or issues or comments.
	Spreckensee now! While we are waiting to people to what they're questioning for the brain, I just wanted to mention there has been some talk and I think it's useful talk about a redesign of the FDR website And I think that it's been about 18 months since we've done a redesign of the website or an upgrade of the website.
	And I think that it is a good idea.
	I can't remember if I mentioned this or not.
	The search feature now does include searches for transcriptions.
	I got four computers grinding away for about a month transcribing the podcast using an automated tool.
	So it's pretty good. It's about 90%.
	It's not perfect. But it's certainly not bad.
	And if you go to freedomainradio.com forward slash search, you can do a search for, as usual, the titles and descriptions of the podcast.
	But you also have the option to search within the transcripts and then you can go and have a look.
	And nobody's going to read the transcripts and replace a podcast because they're not perfect.
	But it is a great way to, if you wanted to find out all the podcasts where the word mythology is mentioned, then you can do that search.
	And I think that's very helpful. Also, the other thing that I wanted to mention about that is that I have added up to, I think, 1333, podcast 1333, into the search engine and into the Wizard, because they were only up to 999 for quite some time.
	So there's another couple of hundred podcasts that have been categorized and more accurately described and so on and are available in the search and in the tree view and all the other ways that you can find.
	They don't get automatically added to your feed.
	So if you did a search using the Wizard and made your own feed, there's no way to get those automatically added because they're pretty static.
	So I just wanted to mention that if you want to do searches, you can search through the podcast transcripts.
	And I think it's a pretty cool tool and I hope that you will use it.
	Yeah, someone said the question also assumes that for children defooing is a capricious action.
	It's very true. I mean, it is something that people have a great deal of difficulty processing, this issue of DFU, because, of course, it's generally portrayed by those who are not down with the theory, to put it as charitably as possible, or down with what is actually happening.
	It is sort of portrayed as, I don't know, like, I've got hormones and grumpiness and itchy bits as a teenager, I don't like doing the dishes, and so I'm going to separate from my family.
	And that is, I mean, that is just the purest kind of nonsense and it's extremely insulting to the people who've gone through this extraordinary challenge, right?
	Nobody would say that a man divorces his wife because he doesn't like the way that she cooks his roast, right?
	We all understand that it would be more than that and that that may be a symptom, but it would be much, much deeper.
	But the people who've actually gone through this terrible, tragic passage of temporary or permanent separation from family of origins to a man and woman have done so because of extreme, extraordinary amounts of Of physical, emotional, and sometimes sexual abuse.
	So it is, you know, getting out of a kind of gulag.
	And where violence and predation and destruction and evil run rampant.
	So the idea, too, I mean, it's not a capricious action.
	It is not something that anybody takes lightly or does on a whim or out of pettiness.
	It is a grueling, difficult, horrendous escape from a kind of biological prison.
	And what has occurred in the families where a lot of people have defooded It's something that prisons, even in Turkey, would flinch at.
	So, I just sort of wanted to mention that as well.
	All right, I could keep talking.
	or Yau Ketong.
	Sorry, somebody did bring up a dream analysis I don't particularly feel like doing a dream analysis today, if that's all the same to you.
	I just did a good podcast series just over the last two or three days, which is a very interesting one.
	It is an examination of the conscience from the standpoint of UPB. And it's going to go out to...
	I'm so enormously grateful to the subscribers and donators.
	This is going to go out to donators who I don't give enough goodies to because they tend to be sort of in the general ranks of those who've donated.
	So I'm going to send that out.
	There was a lot of really heavy work on the unconscious there in that series.
	So if you could just hold off from dream analysis, I don't think I would be able to apply the correct amount of intellectual juju juice to it, if that would be okay.
	Oh, I also did get an invitation to speak in Philadelphia in July.
	And I'm generally happy to speak anywhere where there are four cheesecake, a cheesesteak carts per square meter.
	So we may be heading to Philadelphia in July.
	mid-July, I think. I would be speaking, I think it's the 11th.
	Let me just double check that.
	Was it July 4th?
	Independence Day.
	That's right. I think I'm leading a secession movement, which will be fantastic.
	So let me just double check on that.
	Yes, July 4th, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
	And it is specifically, this is a pretty large group that has been studying everyday anarchy and practical anarchy.
	And so they want me to come down and give a sort of, I think they really liked the New Hampshire speech.
	Oh, of course, right. The New Hampshire Speech is up on YouTube, and I really do have the feeling it is about the best quality YouTube video on the planet.
	The reason being that I have an account that allows me to upload up to 20 gigs per video file, and no limit on length, of course.
	And so if you want to check it out, you can go to fdrurl.com forward slash nhr.
	And you can look at the playlist for the speech.
	If you've heard it in the audio, I think it's worth watching, frankly.
	I mean, I think it's a lot funnier and more engaging with the visuals.
	And so I hope that you will get a chance to check that out, even if you just want to look at the geeky, ridiculously high-def quality that YouTube can produce if you give it seven gigs of data and let it chew through the compilation for three and a half days, which is what it took to produce content.
	The high quality video.
	So I hope you will check that out.
	I was very, very pleased with the speech.
	And I think that you will enjoy seeing an audience play around with the ideas with me.
	Because I think that's something that we don't obviously get a chance to see very often.
	So I hope that you will get a chance to check that out.
	Oh yeah, and you can look for the FDR members as well.
	And you can actually hear Isabella, although I don't think she ever shows up.
	the video.
	No, she doesn't because he was shooting from the side.
	Yeah, and thank you again to the listener, to Paul, who did the video I tried six different ways from Sunday to put all these videos together, but it just never worked.
	The files were too big, so I ended up just uploading the raw ones to YouTube in two formats.
	So yeah, please do check out.
	Also, if you want to sign up for the FDR BBQ, tinyurl.com forward slash 2009 FDR BBQ. I hope that you will check that out.
	Please sign up because we do have to order the food.
	We will be eating goat, and when I say eating goat, first of all, we'll be hunting goat.
	So we'll be releasing it in the neighborhood, and then we will be going out and attempting to bring it down with razor-sharp syllogisms.
	And so be sure to prepare for Your bow and arrow debating skills.
	And so, I hope that you will help.
	We also did, okay, since people are talking, I'll just keep rambling about the news and the weather.
	We did last week, a long while ago, probably a year ago or so, we did a sort of late night conversation that was mostly about things we found funny at FDR. It was called Shites and Giggles.
	And we did another one, which I've posted up in the Diamond Plus section And people have not had any objections to releasing it, so I might put that into the general stream.
	But it was a very funny conversation and maybe we should do that more often just to take some of the heavy load of philosophy off our backs from time to time.
	I think it's good to have some shits and giggles from time to time.
	So we'll put that out into the general stream and maybe we can make that a little bit more of a regular occurrence because I certainly did enjoy it and it was very nice to...
	Sorry?
	Yeah, Christina was asleep, which is why we could talk about her for the most part.
	All right, we have almost 50 people in the chat room, a huge number of people listening in on the call, all of whom have been struck dumb.
	Unless there's something wrong with my audio, and I can't hear people for some reason.
	So if you've had a question that I haven't responded...
	Oh, hello? Hello?
	Are you my conscience? Yes.
	Good, and what have I done?
	It's... Everything's wrong.
	Everything's wrong. Good.
	Well, that's UPP compliant.
	Fantastic. Well, just I had a question about...
	Well, two questions.
	One may end up with a long conversation.
	The other may just end up with some suggestions from Christina.
	So I don't know. We had the conversation a while back about anger and rage.
	And... With the example being traffic situations.
	But since then, you know, I've been...
	I've listened to that call a couple of times and talked to my therapist about it.
	And I've noticed that anger has just been a...
	It's always been a huge barrier for me.
	And I think there's a lot of toxic shame that I carry about it because of...
	Of the kind of messages I got about anger or the mixed contradiction of anger.
	It is bad for me to feel angry, but everybody else can.
	Now, sorry, just to be precise, before we go any further, are you talking about anger or rage?
	I don't know.
	Honestly, I don't know.
	Well, anger is something that we feel in the moment.
	It kind of arises within us.
	We feel comfortable with the emotion, though not necessarily with its direct experience, but we feel comfortable with the emotion.
	And we express it in a non-abusive, non-destructive way, and then it's done with us, right?
	It's like the difference between a fart and constipation is the difference between...
	Anger and rage, right?
	Because constipation just kind of bottles, bungs up in you.
	With rage, we feel provocation, and we instantly self-attack, and we instantly repress, and then we turn and attack others within our own minds.
	It lasts for a very long time, and it has the risk, of course, of becoming chronic.
	Okay, so I've never felt anger.
	Okay, yeah, and I just wanted to be sort of precise about that, because that is something that we will often conflate the two together, and they're actually quite opposite.
	If you understand, like love and obsessive stalking both end up with you spending a lot of time around someone, but they're not quite the same.
	In fact, in many ways, they're complete opposites, right?
	Right. So I don't know what anger looks like.
	And if I saw it, I may not even be able to identify it.
	I don't know what...
	I don't know what healthy anger...
	You could describe it to me all day.
	I've never experienced it, I don't think.
	Because what I experience is this rush of...
	It's almost like someone has injected or...
	A very large syringe with a very large needle directly into my carotid, a very heavy amount of toxic, filth, poison, like a mix of poison and adrenaline and testosterone all at once.
	Right, and unfortunately it seems to be a paralytic, right?
	It's, yeah, it's like I could do anything when I feel it.
	You mean anything like you mean you have visions of violence or that kind of stuff?
	Right. Right, which is why it's a paralytic, right?
	Because you don't actually want to do that stuff, but that's your response, right?
	Right. Right, okay.
	It's like, I'd really like to act on this, but I don't want to go to jail, right?
	Right. Right, right.
	And, of course, that creates further stress and tension with you when you get into those situations, right?
	Right. And it's like, I can't sit here with this.
	It's... I cannot sit there and do nothing about it.
	Sorry, you can't sit and do nothing about it?
	I just misheard.
	Yeah, sorry. I'm on the phone here.
	Sorry, that was my roommate.
	Sorry. Yeah, I can't...
	I could sit there, but it would just be unbearable.
	Right, right, right.
	Yeah, I mean, I don't have any complicated formulas, but the way that I kind of work with the concept of rage is that, you know, rage is the result of anger plus injustice plus repetition plus helplessness.
	Right. I'm not saying those are the only ingredients.
	Those are the primary ingredients that I work with when trying to deal with the problems of rage.
	Right. So tell me what that all means to you.
	Well, it fits.
	It's accurately descriptive of what I feel and what happens for me.
	There are multiple parts of me that shame me for feeling anger.
	There's parts of me that say, oh, you're feeling angry.
	You don't want anyone else to know you're angry.
	Otherwise, you're just a fraud.
	It discredits me in some way for being angry.
	Like, oh, angry people aren't happy people.
	Well, sure, but we would say that chronically angry people aren't happy people, right?
	True. But if I'm angry more than once a week...
	Sorry, go ahead. Like, what if I'm angry more than once a month?
	Is there...
	Well, see, it's not relative to time, it's relative to provocation, right?
	Right. Right, so let me just go over the list again and then I'll sort of try and give you some practical tips on how you might be able to work to diminish this, right? Because you don't want this chronic situation where you feel enraged and then self-attack and then it becomes malignant and as you say toxic and filthy and chronic and so on, right?
	Right. So we all understand that there's no rage without some kind of anger at its base, right?
	Right. So when I looked at the list, right, so anger, injustice, provocation, repetition, and helplessness, right, those are sort of the unholy brew that goes together to make, you know, the soup Nazi rage brew, right?
	Right. So we can't get rid of anger because anger is at the root of it in some ways, right?
	Right. We can't necessarily, although sometimes we can, get rid of injustice, right?
	Right. By simply either attempting to help people in their lives understand if they're being unjust, and if they won't and continue to be unjust towards us, then we don't have them in our life, right? We have some control over the injustice that we experience, right?
	Yeah, and with the greed to our relationship to people we know, people we're in relationships with, Right.
	And provocation is sort of related to injustice, right?
	But it means that other people are initiating.
	Right. Repetition ties into when it makes us helpless, right?
	So if you are constantly being unjustly provoked and someone's projecting his or her anger onto you and so on, and it's repeated over and over again, then you can end up in a chronic situation, right?
	Right. And so if someone is unjust to us once every couple of months, then that's part of the healthiest relationship, right?
	Right. I mean, no one's perfect and we all make mistakes and we can all be jerks from time to time, but that's all part of a healthy relationship, right?
	That it's going to happen, but when it's heavily repetitive, then it's a problem, right?
	Right. And if we don't do anything to act To minimize the injustice, the provocation, or the repetition, then we end up, or we are, helpless, right?
	If we don't do anything, then we're helpless.
	Yeah, and then it's chronic, right?
	Because then we're like in a situation where we have a very loud noise, like some bell is going off in our ear, and we won't move, and we won't ask anyone to turn it off, Then it just becomes chronic, right?
	The whole point, if a really loud bell goes off in your ear, the whole point is so that you'll move or reduce the noise.
	That's the whole point, right? So that you'll do something to minimize the negative stimuli or eliminate it, right?
	Right. And so if we are in situations where we can't act to change the situation, then we are helpless, right?
	Right. And...
	You know, the last time that I had to sort of deal with this in any substantial way was during this media kerfuffle last year, right?
	So, of course, I felt angry about what was happening because there was such a high degree of injustice that was being written about.
	It was very unjust. It definitely was provocative because it wasn't something I initiated but was initiated by others.
	And there was...
	Repetition, right? Insofar as everyone who was writing about it pretty much had the same opinion, right?
	Right. And so I had to deal with that problem.
	And the way that I approached it was to say, well, I don't want to not be angry because, you know, a terrible injustice is being done, right?
	Not hugely against me, but against others, right?
	Right. Now, I couldn't change the people who were doing it to make them more just, right?
	No. I mean, that wasn't going to happen, right?
	I mean, I tried two interviews I gave, and so I tried, but no luck, right?
	So no matter what I said or how much information I put out there or how many facts were actually, people would continue to beat the same stupid drum, right?
	Right. So I couldn't change the injustice of the situation.
	I couldn't change whether other people were going to provoke this situation.
	I couldn't change...
	So the only thing that I could change was the repetition, right?
	By not responding in the same way.
	Yeah, well, by just not engaging, right?
	Right. Because you only need one of these that you can change, right?
	And then you're not helpless, right?
	right but you need to find one that you can change because if you can't change any of them then you're a child with abusive parents because this is where the helplessness comes because when we're kids if we have abusive parents we can't change these situations right no right but as adults we always have options that
	Right. So you have stuff that makes you angry and there is an injustice that has occurred.
	The chance to change someone who's unjust into someone who is just, I consider that to be a very small chance.
	That's not the first place I would look.
	It's worth a shot, you know, why not, right?
	But it's got such a small likelihood of occurring.
	And I simply say that because you and I are not the youngest fruits on the tree, so to speak, and anyone that we meet who's contemporaneous to our age group has had a long habit of injustice and is very, very, very unlikely to change.
	That's quite true.
	Right.
	So the older you get, the...
	Right. If you're 18 or 20 or 25 or whatever, the people you're meeting who are unjust, unless they've just been that jerky bully in the playground from day three, they don't have those habits terribly ingrained.
	They can turn it around. You meet someone who's 40 and an asshole, he's not going to change, right?
	No. By and large, right?
	Maybe, but it's not where you'd put your money on the bed, right?
	Right. And so usually the only thing that you can do is to disengage, right?
	Because the person's not going to change.
	They're acting out a habit that they haven't acted out against countless people before.
	And if they were to change, they would have a huge amount of apologizing and restitution to do and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Right. So the only thing that you can do, as far as I'm concerned, or the first place to look is When it comes to reducing the amount of rage that you're feeling is to look at the problem of repetition, right?
	Which requires your participation.
	I mean, they all do to some degree, other than anger, right?
	But it is to lower the odds of repetition, right?
	Yeah, and that would be rational.
	And I think that's the problem.
	Go on. The problem...
	That is what you do after you're no longer being bombarded so much by these feelings that you can think.
	No, no, sorry. We'll get back to that in a sec.
	But I'm talking about the actions you can take.
	Because you're going to get bombarded by the feelings, right?
	Right. So, if you're in particular situations, you're going to be bombarded by these feelings.
	You can't control your feelings, you can only control your environment, right?
	Right. If that makes sense.
	Like, if you're going to stab yourself in the fleshy part of your muffin top with a knife, it's going to hurt like hell no matter what.
	You can't control the pain, but you can control whether you're going to stab yourself in your muffin top, right?
	Not your muffin top, but you know what I mean, right?
	Right. So, I agree with you about the feelings.
	You can't control the feelings.
	You can only control, to some degree, the stimuli that produces those feelings, right?
	To some degree.
	In terms of relationships with other people, but in my recent experience, for instance, the call on the phone that we had before, There are preventative things I can do,
	but there's always going to be mistakes made and things I might learn from later, but there's always going to be something that happens or happens as a result of certain decisions or unjust things that happen.
	For instance, My bike was stolen the day before yesterday, and this was just as I bought a nice rack for it so that I could actually take it out of this neighborhood and ride it wherever I wanted, rather than through the neighborhood, which isn't the best neighborhood to be riding in.
	So when I bought it, I brought it home and had it all ready to put the bike on there, and I discovered my bike was gone.
	In that moment, I had been dealt a great injustice by some kid in the neighborhood.
	Who knows whoever took it?
	Whoever took it, it had been stolen from me.
	For the most part, it was outside my control.
	And while it could have been prevented, Made sure that every day, you know, obsessively, meticulously made sure that the garage door was closed.
	I could have put the bike inside somewhere.
	I'm sorry, I just want to understand the circumstances of the theft.
	Where was the bike? In my garage.
	The bike was in your garage.
	Was it locked? Locked?
	You mean chained up? Yeah, unless you use the word differently than I do.
	No, it wasn't chained up.
	But the garage locks.
	The garage door was locked?
	No. No, in this case it must have been open and I must have been home.
	But if you were home, you would...
	I mean, sorry, and again, I'm just trying to understand.
	I'm not saying you're right or wrong, and I don't know, right?
	But if you were home, wouldn't you hear the garage door open?
	I mean, ours is pretty loud. I don't know about yours.
	Not if the garage door was already open and I was home.
	Because I have my roommate's car is in there, my car is in there.
	So what you're saying is that you had an expensive new bike visible from the street unlocked in a neighborhood where crime can happen.
	Right. I'm not sure that's a great injustice.
	I typically obsessively close the garage door.
	Because I don't, for one thing, I have the bike in there.
	Sorry, sorry. For another thing, I have my parents that might drive by and I don't want them to think I'm home.
	No, I understand that, but how often do you use the bike?
	Usually during the spring and summer.
	I mean, a little bit during the first part of the summer and...
	What I mean is, when was the last time you used the bike before it was stolen?
	About a month before.
	Right. The thing is, if you're using the bike three times a day, then it's a real hassle to lock it up and then unlock it, right?
	Right. But if it's been a month since you've used it, locking it makes a little bit of sense, right?
	Right. Or locking the garage door, right?
	Right. Or closing the garage door, or making sure it's closed.
	Yeah. The problem with that is making sure it's closed, which is something that I almost obsessively do.
	If there's one day where I happen to just be distracted or this must have been that day where I was distracted or I didn't close the garage door because I was going to go back out and bring the groceries in or any number of possibilities.
	Well, but it, sorry, and again, just to be annoying, like the usual, it's easier to not worry about the garage door being open if your bike is locked up, right?
	Right. Like you say, well, I obsess about the garage door, but you actually don't have to obsess about it so much if your bike is locked up, right?
	Right. And the reason I, look, I've had bikes stolen from me in the past.
	I know what a hassle it is.
	I really do sympathize because it's very frustrating and it makes you feel, it's very, you know, violated and so on.
	But the way that I sort of think about it is that the way to feel less helpless is that there's risks and rewards, right?
	I mean, if I left my keys in my car and my car unlocked every day, I would never have to look for my keys, right?
	Right. But the odds of my car being stolen would go up considerably, right?
	Right. So that's a risk-reward, right?
	Right. I don't choose to take that risk.
	Right. If you don't lock up your bike, and it doesn't take a philosopher to tell you this, right?
	But if you don't lock up your bike, the odds of your bike being stolen go up considerably, right?
	Right. So I should have just kept it inside.
	No, no, no. Should or shouldn't doesn't matter, right?
	I'm just saying that to make you feel less helpless.
	Right. That you made a choice that locking your bike was a hassle.
	And it is. What's the combo kind of stuff?
	I feel really frustrated.
	I know. I know that you feel frustrated.
	And I may be being an entire jerk about this.
	I don't have a clear answer yet.
	I'm just trying to play the thoughts out.
	So if you can try and be patient with me, I'd appreciate it.
	I mean, I had already realized that I could have prevented it in any number of ways by keeping the bike inside, keeping, you know, since there's no way to lock it up in the garage because there's nothing to lock it to, I would have kept it.
	Oh, no, no, no. See, there is, right?
	Because you can install a girder that you can lock it to.
	I'm not saying it would be cheap, but you could do it, right?
	Right, I could do that.
	Or you could chain it to your car, hubcap or whatever, and then unlock it every day you use your car, or maybe drive off with your bike attached to your car, sorry, but you know what I mean, right?
	Right. Like there's steps you could take.
	Every single day you could carry your bike through your house and put it in your basement, or every single time you used it, right?
	And then it's not going to get stolen, right?
	Right. And the reason, because the reason is you can't do anything about the bike in the past, as far as I understand it, but it's really around the future, right?
	What is your risk and what is your reward?
	Well, your reward for not locking your bike up is every month or week or whatever, you have less of a hassle because you don't have to unlock it, right?
	Right. But the risk is that your bike gets stolen, right?
	Right. And we all do this when we're driving, right?
	What is the risk of going a few miles an hour over the speed limit?
	Well, it's not really that great, but it's safer in many ways because everybody does it and you're going with the traffic flow, right?
	I hate being that rock in the stream where the cars all just have to go around me.
	I feel that's dangerous too, right?
	Right. So we say, okay, well it's a little safer, but there's a risk, which is that you might get some anal cop pulling you over and giving you a ticket, right?
	Right. So there's risks and rewards in life, right?
	And if you're conscious of the risks and rewards, then you usually will make better decisions.
	This is what I'm trying to get to you, right?
	Because in hindsight, do you feel...
	That the reward of not having to lock your bike up was worth the risk of it being stolen.
	No. Right, and that's what I'm trying to tell you.
	It's not to get to beat yourself up about the past, but just to look into the future.
	Because if you live in this, quote, and I'm not saying you do, but if you live in this magical universe where your bike is never going to get stolen, there's not even any point putting it in the garage.
	I guess you put it in the garage to keep it dry, right?
	But you don't need to lock it up when you go to just lean it up outside the store because you live in a magical world, probably Sweden, where nothing gets stolen, right?
	Right. And because nothing gets stolen, there's no risk and therefore everything is gravy.
	Everything is a reward, right?
	Not locking it up is like, well, why would you, right?
	I don't chain my chair to my desk either because it's not going to get stolen, right?
	Well, this is just a bike.
	I mean, this is just one instance where I felt rage.
	No, no, but we're looking at the principles here, right?
	Right, so in every aspect of my life there's something...
	No, no, let's not go off into every aspect of your life.
	Let's stay on this one. Because you want to bounce off this one because you don't like what's coming next, right?
	You know what's coming next. Well, I feel a lot of anger at myself for not...
	I feel a lot of...
	I feel bad and ashamed for being angry because I could have prevented it, but I didn't.
	And now there's nothing I can do about it.
	And... Well, no, no.
	See, but there is something you can do about it.
	Because you have a choice.
	You either... Lose your bike and feel shitty about it, or you lose your bike and learn something from it.
	Either way, you're going to lose your bike, right?
	Bike's not coming back. So you're either going to say, well, let me trace through the thoughts that ended up with me losing this bike or having this bike stolen, and let me see where in my life I might be applying the same flawed thinking.
	Right? So that I can use...
	The loss of my bike to make wiser decisions in my investments, in my car, in my driving, in my health, wherever, right?
	Right. Because if you lose the bike and nothing else happens, then you're net negative, right?
	Right. If you lose the bike and you feel chronic rage, frustration, self-attack, then they've stolen a lot more than your bike, right?
	For sure. However, if you look at the flawed thinking which led to you losing the bike, and I don't mean irrational, but what I mean is that if you had thought of the risk of your bike being stolen, you would have locked it up, right?
	That's right. And so this is not isolated to your bicycle.
	This is a kind of non-processing of risk and reward that I guarantee you shows up elsewhere in your life.
	And you can lose the bike and you can gain a rational, alert, aware, and conscious calculation of risk and reward in other areas of your life that can and conscious calculation of risk and reward in other areas of your life that can save you a hell of a Thank you.
	That's true. And that's what having a bike stolen from you can give you.
	If you let it.
	It can be an incredible gift.
	Because I guarantee you, if this flawed thinking shows up elsewhere in your life, you're going to lose more than a bike in the future, and it's probably going to escalate until you learn the lesson.
	I don't know exactly what lesson it is that you need to learn, but it's some calculation of cause and effect, of risk and reward.
	And I suspect it's around your dating.
	Sorry, go on. Around my dating?
	Yeah. Or not dating?
	Yeah. Well, yeah, but I mean, you're going to start dating at some point, right?
	And, you know, in the past, your risk and reward ratio was not exactly finely calibrated relative to the women you were going out, right?
	No. And, yeah, lately it's been just all or nothing.
	And now, lately, it's nothing, you know, over the past...
	Right. But, you know, if you lose the bike and through examining the thinking that led you to the loss of the bike, you end up with the possibility of being able to judge women so effectively that you will get the woman of your dreams, that would be a good trade, wouldn't you say?
	Yeah, sure. Right.
	If I said to you, Nate, you're going to have to have someone steal your bike in order for you to get the woman of your dreams, would you trade a bike for the woman of your dreams?
	For sure. Right.
	And that's the trade that is available to you.
	If you cut out the self-attack and look at the flawed thinking which you inherited from your family, from your church, from your culture, from your education, right?
	You mean all the...
	Voices that I hear in my head that are saying, ah, see, we're wrong, and...
	And the world is evil, and everything goes wrong, and every time I try and get one step forward, everything goes behind, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	No, it's worse than that.
	It's a bunch of people standing on high hills, looking down on me, saying, just sort of with a...
	Condescending, haughty, superior-than-thou type of shame on you.
	You didn't prevent your bike from being stolen.
	Right, and you can either cower or rage at those, or you can say, that's interesting, I wonder why.
	You know, you're right. I did not prevent my bike from being stolen.
	I wonder why.
	And look at the kind of Right.
	And you say, you know, you're right.
	I was really enraged at this.
	I wonder why.
	Right? This is RTR Curiosity 101, right?
	We don't bow down.
	We don't fight back. We simply keep asking questions.
	It's the Socrates of the self, right?
	And then we ask the questions of the people on the hill, I wonder why you feel the need to attack me so viciously.
	And if you lose the bike and gain some peace of mind with regards to this kind of self-evisceration, it's worth losing the bike.
	Thank you.
	Right. And I'm not saying this is easy.
	I'm really not. This is really advanced stuff.
	When a disaster occurs to me, I recognize that the disaster has occurred and I don't try and pretend that it wasn't a disaster.
	But then I say to myself, I wonder how, what wisdom, what knowledge, what happiness, what growth can I extract out of this disaster so that at some point I will be glad it happened?
	Do you feel a resistance to doing that?
	Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, of course.
	Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, because you want to wallow, self-pity, rage, blah, blah, blame the world.
	Yeah, absolutely, for sure. But then I sort of feel like, okay, so now I have someone punched me and now I'm going to spend four days punching myself.
	What the hell? What the fuck is the point of that, right?
	Right. Whereas if someone punches me and I sit there...
	And try and figure out how I got into a situation where I got punched so that it will never happen again, then that punch becomes worth it.
	It is no longer a disaster, right?
	And I just thought of something where I could apply these same principles of risk-reward to traffic, driving, like the...
	I think you probably suggested this last time, but just let me pretend you didn't.
	Checking the traffic before I leave versus the time it takes to check the traffic every time I leave the house, no matter where I'm going.
	Versus the time I save not doing that, but then lose in the traffic Absolutely.
	And it's a choice, right? And it means that you're not helpless.
	Because then you say, well, okay, so I've saved myself five minutes for, you know, two weeks, right?
	So that's, what, 100 minutes?
	That's over an hour and a half.
	And now I'm stuck in traffic for 45 minutes.
	Well, so I'm still 45 minutes up, right?
	Right. And then you can make that same calculation, like, what do I make per hour and...
	How much money would a GPS system that checks traffic cost?
	Right, exactly, exactly, exactly.
	And you might say, well, if I have a GPS system, I'm going to be less stressed when I drive.
	I'm going to be able to listen to more podcasts more concentratedly, right?
	Right.
	And so on, right?
	As opposed to, you know, if you're driving, you don't know where you're going, you end up with this uneasy feeling, oh shit, did I pass the street?
	And, you know, like, what is that worth to me to not have to just relax and know that, you know, 99 times out of 100, it's not going to drive me off a cliff, right?
	And these are all just choices, right?
	And then if you don't buy the GPS...
	And then you end up really frustrated because you get lost.
	Then you say, well, I just got paid $400 to be lost for an hour.
	$400 an hour, that's like lawyer money.
	That's pretty good, right? Right.
	Or you might say, you know what, I've now been angry for an entire day.
	That's $400 I could have spent for a really high quality GPS system.
	And I will spend $400 to not be angry for a day randomly.
	And then you spend the money, but you don't spend it resentfully because you're buying not being angry for a day once a month, right?
	That's true. I mean, these calculations, this is the essence, of course, of economics, but it is also really the essence of just calculating your risks and rewards in life, which is foundational to happiness.
	Because if you don't calculate the risks and only go on the rewards, then anytime the risk comes up, you're going to get enraged, right?
	Right. And if you only count the risks and none of the rewards, then you just live a light of paranoid isolation, right?
	Probably drinking your own toilet water in the woods somewhere, right?
	Quite true. And this is great as far as preventing future incidents of rage.
	Well, and if you could, out of the loss of your bicycle, be released of two days of rage a month, wouldn't you like, here, I'll buy another bicycle and give it to someone so that I can get rid of another two days, right?
	Right. Whereas if you just make up this mythology about, you know, the world is bad and I can't get ahead, then your bicycle was stolen, but you don't have to give away your happiness, right?
	That's true. But at the same time, we don't want to just say, oh well, the universe taketh and the universe giveth and, you know, the stuff ebbs and flows in like flotsam off the Titanic after a high tide, right?
	You don't want to just get all zen and all that kind of crap, right?
	You actually want to process the thinking that led you to something you didn't want.
	Which is you look back and you kick yourself for not locking your bike, right?
	And you say, okay, well, I can do that if I want and maybe that's helpful, but the more important thing is to avoid kicking myself in the future about something equally if not more important, right?
	Right. Right.
	I mean, when I got sick recently, I spent hours and hours over the course of a week just sitting and thinking about why I got sick.
	And, of course, I mean, it had a lot to do with stress and so on, and I'm actually, I can say this with all candor, I am glad I got sick.
	Well, maybe you can tell me what happened there, because I've had the same situations several times over the past month or so.
	Well, I don't want to get into all of the stuff that I learned out of being sick, but...
	I will tell you that if I hadn't been sick, I wouldn't have spent that time sitting and thinking about stuff that I hadn't thought about or was thinking about in the entirely wrong way.
	And it has really freed my mind.
	It has freed me from feeling that I have a tendency towards workaholism.
	A tendency or more than a tendency?
	A little bit of a tendency. And it has really freed me from that.
	And to be freed from that and to do something really out of the sheer pleasure rather than the pleasure plus the fear of, I don't do it, FDR is going to fail and the world's going to fall into the inky black of primeval ooze, right?
	I know that feeling. And I made that commitment to figure out if...
	And I don't know. Maybe it was just random, right?
	But if there was something of value to extract out of being sick, I wanted to keep extracting value to the point where I was actually glad I got sick.
	Now, I wouldn't feel that same way if it was, I don't know, a near-fatal heart attack or something, right?
	But it's just a little ailment, right?
	But I wanted to learn the lesson so that if I had...
	Through not living rationally, contributed to my illness, my body didn't need to escalate to the next level if I didn't learn the lesson.
	Right, I see what you mean.
	Like, next, your pinky falls off.
	I don't know, whatever is next, right?
	And so now I'm actually, I mean, it's weird, but I'm glad I got sick.
	Yeah, and I can see what you mean.
	I Due to all the anxiety and sickness that I knew was going to happen, I knew as my anxiety was rising that I was going to get sick, I started working on more journaling.
	And if I hadn't had that anxiety or oncoming sickness, then I wouldn't have started journaling.
	And I don't think I'm to the point of figuring it out just yet.
	I was hoping to extract something out of it.
	That's right.
	It's the magical alchemy of shit to gold that we can do in life with the aid of philosophy and self-knowledge and psychology.
	We can do that if we want, and we can turn shit into gold.
	Now, not all shit can be turned into gold, but it's definitely the place to start, if that makes any sense.
	Right.
	Right.
	And I don't believe that there's any Zen, the universe, trying to teach us something, but I tell you, Nate, there are things, very, very important things to learn from the thinking that cost you the bike.
	Thank you.
	Where the things you will gain from examining the thinking that cost you the bike will make you incredibly happy that you lost the bike.
	That's true. Or you can just chew your fingernails in rage, right?
	But this is the choice, right?
	Well, I'm tired of rage.
	Sure, sure, sure.
	And rage is tired of you, right?
	It wants to be more productive as well.
	And during the moments where I am filled with this sickly...
	Um... Flow of...
	Bile.
	Bile. I don't...
	I need a better metaphor for it, but as this is just flowing through me, and it's like somebody just jabbed a...
	Sorry, I used that metaphor before, but it's not like, I mean, I guarantee you, virtually, though of course I'm no medical expert, I would virtually guarantee you that if you went to get tested in the middle of this state, your production of stress hormones would be through the roof.
	It's not like someone has injected you.
	Right. Right, so it's like trying to concentrate when someone's just, I don't know, put LSD straight into your forehead or something, right?
	Right, and this may be more of a question for Christina, since this is more a cure than prevention question, but I don't know what to do in that situation to not do something I regret.
	Well, sure you do. Sorry, Christina's just getting the baby, but sure you do, because you don't do the things that you think, right?
	Well, sure. It's been ages since I've punched a hole in the wall.
	And it's been a long time since I've yelled at anyone.
	I did scream.
	Right. You scream, punch pillows.
	You scream into a pillow, punch a pillow.
	I mean, those things who work out or whatever, those things can definitely help bleed off some of the stress hormones, for sure.
	But what I'm suggesting is Look at the thinking that gets you into those situations.
	Look at the life that you have that gets you into those situations.
	And work to control the repetition.
	Right. Because once that's underway, it's like, how do I ride a horse when I'm tied to its belly and it's thundering down a hill with a mountain slide?
	It's like, well, you can't. But don't go up with...
	Don't strap yourself to horses, right?
	Right. To expect self-management in the face of that level of stress hormone, cortisol, or whatever the hell is floating through your system, is to ask the impossible.
	It's like saying, how do I compose a symphony when I'm in a coma?
	Well, you can't.
	I guess it is kind of a hard question.
	Yeah, but you work to minimize the situations and the decisions that lead you to those places.
	Right? So, if you know, if my bike gets stolen, I'm gonna kick myself up and down the street for a week.
	Right? If you know that about yourself, then lock the fucking bike, right?
	Right. Did you see what I mean?
	Right. It's not making the rational calculation knowing what happens.
	And maybe even insure the bike separately.
	Yeah, maybe insure the bike separately.
	You know that you have a low tolerance for risk.
	Because of your history, because of your neurobiology, you have a low tolerance for risk.
	Right. And therefore, you need to minimize the risks in your life.
	Lock the bike. And if you understand that you have a low tolerance for risk, you can apply that to every area of your life, right?
	So yeah, I was coming at this in a way that I was hoping to find a way to change my tolerance for risk.
	Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't do that.
	Because what you're dealing with is a physiological phenomenon.
	As you say, it's a rush phenomenon.
	Of hormone-laced craziness, right?
	Right. Injected directly into my amygdala.
	That's not going to change, right?
	You're what? 35?
	36? Right, so your neurobiology is your neurobiology, right?
	Right. It's like you've got a plan.
	Well, if I were a foot taller, I'd be in the NBA, right?
	Well, can't grow a foot, right?
	You have what you have, right?
	You have to work with what you have to work with.
	Thinking that you can talk yourself out of that base of the brain physiological response to stress is not reasonable.
	It's like saying I can have a calm dinner with my abusive family.
	That's true. Right?
	Right? We understand that if we have abuse, we can't, right?
	Right. You have to work with what you have to work with.
	I'm not going to be a hair model, and you're never going to have a high tolerance for stress.
	That's definitely a much...
	I feel more in control that way.
	You know, we accept the empirical, we're empiricists, right, first and foremost.
	The empirical reality is that this is your involuntary and very extensive physiological response to these situations, right?
	Right. If you were allergic to seafood, where you had a very extreme physiological response to shellfish, you wouldn't say to yourself, I'm going to solve this with therapy.
	Right? No, you would avoid seafood.
	Exactly! Because maybe if you really like shellfish, but the risk reward makes no sense, right?
	Right. So we work with the limitations of our histories, and through working with those limitations, we can come up with some amazing things.
	Amazing things! You can, through recognizing the limitations, you can come up with amazing ways to manage risk and reward in your life and be that much wiser, achieve that much greater self-knowledge, right?
	Right. Like Danny DeVito is not going to get to the NBA, and once he accepts that, he can go into acting, right?
	But if he keeps thinking he can go into the NBA, he's going to waste his life, right?
	I see what you mean. You're always going to have a very powerful reaction.
	You are allergic to stress physiologically, right?
	Right. You are stress intolerant the way people are gluten or lactose intolerant, right?
	Right. So you don't just sit there, keep eating, keep drinking milk and doubling over in pain and saying, gosh, I guess I lack self-knowledge because if I had more self-knowledge, I would not be lactose intolerant.
	you are stress intolerant and that's a fact that's an empirical fact and And willing it away is not going to work because it occurs at the involuntary base of the brain, hypothalamus, medulla, involuntary, stress hormone release, fight or flight mechanism, programmed, set, forgotten, hardwired, whatever you want to call it, right?
	It's not going to change.
	That would be interesting to see how this applies to my anxiety intolerant physiology.
	Thank you.
	Well, look, your stress hormones and your anxiety are trying to tell you something.
	This is not good for us, right?
	And you can either, you know, muscle through it and try and will them away, which is not going to work because it's physiological, right?
	You're not talking about a dream.
	You're talking about your hands shaking, stress hormones racing through your body, feeling like you've been injected with drugs, right?
	Yes. So...
	We are empiricists, right?
	This is your reaction to these things.
	And because it is your reaction to these things, you need to lock your bike.
	So it'd probably be good to write down all the areas in which...
	It would be brilliant to do that.
	it would be fantastic to do that.
	I'm not a big fan of stress myself.
	of.
	So I don't play money markets, right?
	I don't gamble. Some people can do it.
	Some people can go gamble and maybe they can even make some money in the short run.
	I can't. There's lots of things that I can't do because of my physiology.
	Whether it's inner or outer physiology doesn't particularly matter.
	It is what it is, right?
	And by that, what I mean is like, I can't be a hair model and, you know, I can't be a stock trader.
	Not that I want to be either, but you know what I mean, right?
	Right.
	Yeah, I know what you mean.
	This is just a matter of accepting the things that we can't change and Yeah, I'm too old to go to some 20-something club without looking like a bouncer, a narc, or someone looking for his daughter. That's just fact, right?
	Empirically, it is the case, right?
	That's true. And so once you recognize the physical limitations, they actually become opportunities, right?
	Because if you don't recognize limitations, you're just beating your head against a wall, right?
	Like Danny DeVito keep trying out for the next, right?
	Right. But if you recognize limitations, they become opportunities for everything that's not that limitation, right?
	Right, right. Like once I accepted that the woman that I was dating before I met Christina, once I accepted that I could not make that relationship work, then I got an opportunity called Christina, right?
	Right. Recognizing limitations is creating opportunities.
	It's de-paralyzing.
	Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, when you don't recognize limitations but you keep trying to surmount them, then you're like, you know, Winston Churchill at the age of 60 saying, I want to become a ballerina.
	I mean, we all had those dreams.
	Tell me. Am I right? High five.
	Just kidding. Yeah. But that would be not good.
	It would be good for most of the citizen population of Germany, but that would not be a productive use of his time and talents, right?
	Right. I can tell you this is definitely going to...
	Actually, I'll let you know what I come up with.
	Yeah, I mean, if you want to use Diamond or PK Plus, just post the list if you feel it needs to be private or whatever.
	But I would certainly like to see it because I think that this assessment of risk and reward is really important.
	We have this belief that we should be able to do anything and it's all just nonsense, right?
	I mean, we have to work with the limitations that we have in order to leverage the opportunities we're capable of.
	Right. Because I had gotten to the point where...
	We're in this world full of these Christian-slash-Buddhist-slash-Zen people that pretend to be happy until you, of course, get them angry.
	And then... So I feel...
	or these people are in my head telling me or what I hear is that I need to What the problem is is that I'm getting angry and that I need to change how I react to things and not what we just talked about changing...
	Well, you can't change how you react to things, right?
	That's what I'm talking about, it's a limitation.
	What you can say to the people who are yelling at you for losing your bike is you can say, well, if you're so fucking wise, why didn't you tell me to lock the goddamn bike?
	Right. If you're all coming down on me like a mountain of bricks because the bike was stolen, why didn't you all mention beforehand, hey, you know, I think you should lock the bike, right?
	Don't pull this crap on me, right?
	Yeah, oh, hi.
	It's easy to say lock the bike after the bike is stolen.
	I mean, how retarded is that? The whole point of being remotely intelligent, I would say to these people, is to tell me to lock the bike before the bike gets stolen.
	And if you don't do that, then it's ridiculously embarrassing to come to me afterwards and say, you know, you should have locked the bike, right?
	And of course, these are the voices that keep me small and keep me seeking out the kinds of people that are like that.
	That we talked about before, I think.
	Yeah, and they keep you from asking the important question, right?
	Because they come down on you so hard that all you can do is fight, right?
	Or battle with them in your mind.
	But they help you avoid asking the important question which is, if this was the result of me not locking the bike, I wonder why I didn't lock the bike.
	That's the important question, right?
	Because that's what leads to the real growth.
	Right. As opposed to, you can't ask those questions when people are shooting at you, right?
	No.
	Then it's just like duck and roll, shoot back where the laser is right now, right?
	Right.
	You would think that these parts of myself didn't tell me that so that they could tell me that.
	Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, Monday morning quarterback is the most ridiculous thing, right?
	It'd be like, you know, imagine if I went to, I don't know, some money show and said, you know, I want to do a show where I predict the stock prices after they have gone up or down.
	You should have bought this because it went up.
	Oh, you should have bought that because it went down.
	Well, they'd say, well, what the hell is the point of saying that afterwards, right?
	They would laugh at me.
	It's funny how inconsistent this can all be.
	Yeah, it's like, you know, this is what I say to my ecosystem, right?
	If they start coming down on me, it's like, well, there's no fucking point now.
	We already got the data, right?
	Right. Like, you all want to help, then, you know, help beforehand.
	Otherwise, shut up.
	Or give me something useful now, rather than just yelling, right?
	I think that's been the majority of it.
	Yeah, if you all didn't know beforehand, what are you yelling at me for not knowing beforehand?
	I mean, that's ridiculous, right?
	Right, I can just as easily yell at them for not knowing beforehand.
	Yeah, if you wanted, yeah, yell back.
	Why not, right? I mean, but the important thing is that, you know, just don't fall for that nonsense where after the fact you yell at yourself.
	It's like, yeah, yeah, where were you when I could have used you, right?
	Right. There's no point saying don't jump off the cliff after I've already jumped off the cliff, right?
	A little late for that, right? Just a tad.
	There are no wily coyote moments where you can decide to run back, right?
	Exactly. And that's, you know, so, you know, that's what I would sort of say to my ecosystem is, look, we're all in the same boat.
	My bike got stolen. I'm really mad.
	And none of us saw this coming.
	So we're all complicit in this.
	So let's sit down and figure out how we can avoid it rather than all this stupid yelling, right?
	And let's not play this game where there's some part of me that knew all along but decided not to tell me and so on.
	Like, that's just ridiculous, right?
	I wouldn't respect that in anyone else.
	I'm certainly not going to respect that in any part of myself, right?
	Right, right.
	That sounds like a good way to go about it.
	Because I imagine at that point that I can actually get help in making this list.
	Yeah, let's say, hey, we had the bike stolen.
	We're all mad, right?
	We're all frustrated.
	So let's stop looking at this blank hole where the bike used to be and start looking at the future blank holes and how we can avoid them of where my car could be or my health could be or my family could be, right?
	Right.
	Let's learn from this tragedy and turn it into an opportunity.
	Thank you.
	Quite true.
	I mean, it's a choice, right? Or you can say, well, or you can just sit there and keep yelling at me, but I have no respect for you, right?
	Because you weren't telling me anything useful beforehand, so you can't yell at me afterwards, right?
	If they kept telling you, lock the bike, lock the bike, lock the bike, and you said, eh, screw you, I'm happy with the risk, right?
	Then they could have every reason to yell at you, but that's not what happened, right?
	No. Not at all.
	Right. So, they got no credibility if they don't know after the fact.
	It's like me being a weatherman saying, yesterday, the weather was, and calling myself some sort of predictor, right?
	Look, I'm a genius. I'm always right.
	Right. Weatherman, it comes on after the fact and tells everybody, well, you should have put sheets over your plants or something.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's no skill in that, right?
	Right. I can think of some places where these guys came from.
	I'm sure that you can.
	I'm sure that you can. All right.
	I think we've bled this vampire dry.
	Thank you very much.
	Shall I move on to the next question, if there is one?
	Yeah, go ahead. All right.
	Thanks, man. I appreciate that.
	All right. Thanks. Thanks for bringing it up.
	Thank you. All right. Talk to you soon.
	Bye. Next!
	Just before the show, I was having some Lunch and I was watching the Soup Nazi Seinfeld.
	Oh man, that woman, Julia Louise Dreyfus.
	What a comic actress she is.
	I've watched a couple of the...
	New ones she's got.
	New Adventures of Old Christine.
	I don't find that particularly classy or good.
	But the stuff she did in Seinfeld is just brilliant.
	Just that bit at the end of Seinfeld where she goes up to you through Soup Noxy.
	Next! It's just brilliant.
	So, next! Who has a question or a comment?
	Or shall we shut down for the day?
	Hi, Steph. Hi.
	Hi there. Um...
	I sent you a letter on Thursday.
	Yes, sorry, I'm just going to read it over the air.
	Nathan, thank you for the bike.
	Sorry, go on. Perfect.
	Okay, well, I was wondering, did you want to chat about that?
	Yes, I'm more than happy to.
	If it helps, just if you could refresh others and to a smaller degree me on the topic, then we'll go for it.
	All right, well...
	Lately I've been feeling kind of this sort of sadness in the back of my mind about my nephew.
	It started when I received a text message from my brother.
	I haven't spoken with him for, gosh, probably nine months or so.
	And this was since he was humiliating my nephew.
	at my house and so I called him on it and he got very aggressive with me and kind of got up in my face and all that and this was all in front of my nephew and so since that day everything has just pretty much I've decided not to talk to him anymore But the problem that I'm having is I'm having an issue with understanding the anger that I feel towards other people in my life that kind of ignored the abuse that I went through as a child.
	I have trouble understanding that if I don't make sure that I can do everything possible to know that I kind of fought for my nephew.
	And so that's where I'm at right now.
	Right, right. No, I completely, completely, completely understand.
	At least I think I do.
	So is there more?
	Do you want to talk about that?
	Would you like me to ask some questions?
	What would be most helpful?
	Other questions would be great.
	Okay, so you have a nephew, you have a brother, your brother treats your nephew disrespectfully or in a nasty way.
	You've tried to intervene, your brother has reacted in an unpleasant and difficult manner.
	You've cut off contact with your brother and I assume that this has necessitated cutting off contact with your nephew, is that right?
	Yes, yes. I know my brother well enough to know that he would never allow me to have a relationship with my nephew outside of him.
	Right, and so in the way that you felt that people did not respond to the abuse you were suffering as a child, you're concerned about falling into that same category, is that right?
	Yes, I am. Okay, and first of all, I mean, I think that that is an entirely honorable...
	Question and perspective to hold.
	It is a very difficult thing to look at and say, am I complicit in the way that other people were complicit with the abuses in my history?
	Now, I'm going to assume, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to assume that what is occurring to your nephew is nowhere near what was occurring to you as a kid.
	Not that I know of.
	I know that my brother He has used physical punishment before, and I know that he supports it, but I don't have any kind of evidence of that.
	It's mostly humiliation that I see.
	Right, okay, so when you say physical punishment, you mean sort of spanking?
	Yes, exactly. Okay, so he spanks and there's verbal humiliation, and this is not to minimize the destructiveness of that, but that is still worlds away from what you experience as a child, right?
	Yeah. I mean, what you experience as a child, to my knowledge, is completely and utterly unholy, right?
	Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, that's the first thing to get, right?
	That your nephew's experience is not your experience.
	Because if your nephew's experience was your experience, you would call the police, right?
	Absolutely. That would be pretty much an open and shut decision, right?
	Yeah. So you're not like the people in your childhood, because the people in your childhood were one phone call away from getting you help, and that could have been an anonymous phone call, right?
	Right. But...
	What your brother is doing is not illegal, right?
	Right. And so you are not one phone call away from being able to help your nephew in the way that others were one phone call away from being able to help you as a child, right?
	So that's not the same situation.
	And that doesn't mean about what you should or shouldn't do, and I don't know exactly what you should or shouldn't do, or even approximately, but I think it's important to recognize that those who did not help you as a child We're acting horrendously in a way that you don't even have the option to do that.
	You don't have the option to just not make a phone call, right?
	Because it's much more complicated than that because what your brother is doing is not illegal, right?
	Right. So that, you know, I would draw that big, huge honking line in the sand first and foremost, right?
	Right. Because otherwise you're going to be like prone to self-attack, right?
	Like, oh my God, I'm like the people who didn't help me and what right do I have to stand up when I'm like, you know what I mean?
	Yeah, definitely. So your situation is much, much more complex.
	And when you say people who didn't help you as a child, do you mean people in your immediate family or those who are sort of in the neighborhood, or who do you mean?
	I would say both.
	I don't really...
	I don't have...
	Well, the memories are slowly coming back to me, so I don't have memories of knowing that these people knew, but they had to have, I mean, by...
	By the symptoms that I was displaying, yeah, they had to have known.
	Right, okay. So, it's not an analogous situation, right?
	First and foremost, fundamentally and morally, it is not the same.
	And it doesn't mean that there aren't two kids being harmed, you and your nephew, but...
	Fundamentally, from a morally actionable standpoint, it is not the same situation, because you're not dealing with illegal crimes, right?
	Right. So, I'm not sure that you get that emotionally yet, so I have a compulsion to repeat, which I don't want to do, so just tell me where that looks for you.
	It doesn't mean, well, that's not the same, it's not illegal, so I'm not going to do anything.
	I'm not saying that, right?
	But I am saying that you don't want to put yourself in the same category as those who didn't help you as a kid.
	No, I think you're right.
	And I think that it might be that I'm to the place in my therapy where I'm dealing with humiliation and just the psychological aspects of that.
	Because the night after this came up, I got this picture in my head just before I went to sleep, which is usually when I have these kind of Visions that kind of come to me just before I go to sleep when I'm really relaxed.
	And it was just the view of my little nephew's face looking down, not wanting to look anybody in the face.
	He's very, I don't want to say introverted because it's not like a personality trait of his, but I just got the That kind of picture in my head, and it just made me so sad.
	Sure, now I understand. I understand.
	So that might be where I'm kind of struggling with right now, is the humiliation aspect.
	Oh, it's heartbreaking.
	I mean, it's absolutely heartbreaking, as you may or may not know.
	No, I had to leave some nieces behind.
	It's wretched. It's heartbreaking.
	And I don't want to sort of project my own sort of thoughts or experience onto what you're experiencing.
	But I will share, and there's a podcast, you can do a search for this if you like.
	Sibling, I think it is, but it's the keyword.
	But I'll tell you a few of my thoughts and you can see if they make any sense.
	Sure.
	The first thing to understand is that you have no power here, right?
	I don't. No power.
	If your brother is not doing anything illegal, you have no power.
	You have no legal rights, you have no legal recourse, you have no options, you have no power.
	Right. So that's, again, different from the people who were around you when you were a kid.
	Now, that doesn't mean that there's nothing you can do, but it means that you have no leverage legally or Even socially, right?
	Because I would imagine that your brother is not surrounded by people who are horrified at what he's doing, right?
	No, he's not. Right, so you have no social leverage, you have no familial leverage, you have no legal leverage, you have nothing.
	From all of these sort of move the levers kind of thing?
	I don't. You're right.
	So, you need to sit with that for a little bit, right?
	Because, as I said to Nate, right, limitations are possibilities as long as we accept the limitations, right?
	Right. So whatever you're going to do, it's not going to be anything you've thought of doing yet because I'm sure you've gone over everything that you could conceivably do and recognize that you can't do those things, right?
	Right. And my therapist actually, when I brought this up to her, this is the reason why I kind of wanted to ask you about it because I didn't feel satisfied with the answer or the idea.
	She said that I could get a hold of him and...
	Try to connect with him later in life, and I just felt like, oh, is that all I can do?
	So, yeah. Yeah, that is pretty wretched.
	And I'm going to make a case for non-intervention, which is going to be entirely annoying and frustrating, but just bear with me, and I may be totally wrong, as always, right?
	But I'm going to make this case for non-intervention.
	Okay. Just, I don't want to get specific, but roughly, is he very young?
	Is he a teenager?
	Where is he? I don't want his actual age.
	Just roughly, how old is your nephew?
	He's right around seven, right?
	Okay, okay. So, he's not going to...
	Okay, let me ask you.
	If you could magically plant into your nephew's head The inappropriateness, let's say, of what your brother is doing, would you do that if there was a magical switch?
	Knowing that you couldn't get him out, that you couldn't do anything to help him directly?
	Oh, absolutely. Okay, I would say that that would not be a good idea, but that maybe, again, I could be completely wrong.
	Because he's got at least another ten years to go, right?
	Oh, right, right.
	Right. Yeah, you're right.
	So my, you know, this is a thought experiment and it doesn't prove anything, right?
	But if someone's in jail and they think it's a resort and they still have 10 years to go on their sentence, do you really want to convince them that it's actually a jail and not a resort?
	No. Wouldn't you just rather...
	Have them go on thinking that it's a resort?
	Yes. In a way, isn't that kinder?
	Again, this is all just a thought experiment.
	I'm not proving anything. I'm just ways of looking at it, right?
	Yeah, right. Right.
	And the other thing, for me, well, I guess it's the same thing that you're saying, but just in different words.
	But, yeah, to kind of tell him that, you know, what my brother is doing is really terrible and all that stuff.
	Either he would think to himself, okay, I can't believe that, so therefore I'm going to believe that my father is really good, and kind of maybe be more likely that he would internalize, like my brother has with my father's issues or whatever.
	Or he would be like, thanks a lot, you know, just what I needed.
	Right, right. And the other thing that is true is that he's not, I mean, he's too young to understand the philosophy to conceptualize it, right?
	To really process this, the stuff that we talk about here around parental power, the unconscious and so on.
	I mean, that would be asking a lot from someone twice his age, right?
	So he's not going to be able to process it.
	But what is going to happen if you were to try to intervene and, you know, get him for dinner or want to talk to him, whatever, right?
	Is that you're going to maybe have, at his age, maximum 10 to 20 minutes before he's going to not be able to process anymore, right?
	Right. The unfortunate thing is that your brother has all the time in the world, right?
	True. True. And so when it comes to who's right, he's not going to be able to process it from a philosophical, rational, empirical standpoint because he's too young, right?
	And so he's going to have to rely on authority.
	And so basically it's going to be your brother's authority against yours as far as he's concerned.
	Right. There is no conceivable way in any universe that your authority is ever going to outweigh his father's.
	Even if you're right, and perhaps especially if you're right.
	Right. Because he's going to have all the time in the world and all the authority in the world to lay out exactly why, you know, auntie is nutty, right?
	Right. And he's going to be able to put in little things during the day at dinner.
	He's going to make little jokes.
	He's going to have, or he may sit down and explicitly quote, explain it, right?
	He has 24-7, give or take, right, access to your nephew and you grab a little bit here and there, right?
	Right. There's no way that you're going to be able to, you know, quote, win in that interaction.
	Right. In my opinion.
	Again, maybe there's some way I've never thought of, but that's sort of my thinking.
	Right, that makes sense.
	Now, there is, however, a significant problem with doing that, right?
	Which is that if it comes down to a pitched moral battle between you and your brother over the loyalty of your nephew or his son, The most likely, and I don't know your brother, I'm just going on your reporting, right?
	But I have no reason to doubt you.
	The most likely weapon that he's going to use to keep the loyalty of his son is to discredit and put you down, right?
	No, I think that's what he did, actually, when I left the first time, when I brought it up, and him and I... Kind of gotten that argument, that first argument, because I had to come back to my house, and when I came back, my nephew was in my brother's lap, and he was talking to him, like, kind of in his ear almost.
	Right. So your brother then is going to have 10 years of drip, drip, drip Chinese water torture propaganda against you, where he's going to be out...
	Shining you a thousand to one in terms of access, right?
	Right. And I mean, I don't care how remarkable your nephew is, and he may be the biggest brain planner genius of all time, but there's almost no way that he's going to get to 17 or 18 and have retained a good opinion of you with his father, you know, drip, drip, dripping for 10 years, right?
	That's right. Yeah.
	And what that means is that then you will not have a chance for a relationship with him as an adult because he will have been turned against you pretty much irrevocably.
	Right. And I mean, I wish, maybe there's people in the chat room, if you have smarter ideas, this is all I've been able to work out.
	And I'm not saying it's particularly thick soup, but it's all I've got in the bowl, right?
	Right. Right.
	Yeah, I think it might be something I have to work out the ambivalence about it, just kind of emotionally.
	Now, there is another possibility though.
	I mean, there are two other possibilities, right?
	One, of course, is that you bite your tongue, put up with your brother, and try and have a relationship with your nephew, right?
	My belief, and it's no more than my opinion, is that that doesn't work.
	Because once you've taken a morally oppositional stance to someone, the relationship doesn't work.
	You either resolve that moral opposition, or it ends, right?
	No, you're right, and that's how it's been.
	Right, right. And, you know, it's really, really tough.
	It is really, really terrible.
	If we assume that that option, which may be available to you, but if we assume that it's not, because I mean, obviously, I don't have anything to say about that, not because I disapprove, whatever that, I mean, not that my approval or disapproval would mean anything.
	But if you're going to work that out, there's no one anyone, nothing anyone can tell you about that, because that's just something you'd have to navigate with your own heart and instincts in history, right?
	No, yeah, I know. I know that won't work.
	Yeah, I mean, it's my opinion too, but it's still something to mull over.
	But if we assume that that's not going to work, there really is only one other opportunity.
	And it's almost, in a sense, like to prepare for that opportunity, right?
	So if you don't have a relationship with him for the foreseeable future, if you can't work that out with your brother in some manner, then if...
	Then the important thing is he's going to have some curiosity about you when you get older.
	When he gets older. He is.
	Because he's going to remember you. He's old enough to remember you.
	And he's going to look you up.
	He's going to find out something about you.
	He's going to find stuff out about you.
	However, you know, these kids with their computers, right?
	However he does it, right?
	Right. And he's going to be curious about you and he's going to want to know what your life is like, right?
	Right. And the question is, what kind of life are you going to show him when that occurs?
	And this may not be, I'm not saying when he's 18, it may be when he's 13, maybe when he's 12, maybe when he's 15 or whatever, right?
	Sure. And the only solution that I've been able to come up with is to have a life that is as happy, as positive, as helpful, as loving, as...
	Hopeful, as optimistic, as passionate as I can.
	And if people are interested in that, then great.
	And if they're not, then okay, right?
	Because if your brother is who he says he is, and of course I believe you, then he's going to get less happy as time goes along, right?
	You can't be... Cruel to children, even in terms of...
	You can't be cruel to children and stay happy.
	You just can't. No, he's miserable.
	Right. And it's going to get worse over time, and in particular during the teenage years, right, you can humiliate particularly a boy, and it's a little unfair to girls, but it's just what I've noticed.
	But then you get a lot of rebellion in your teenage years, right?
	Right. So he's going to have a lot of problems with his dad, Statistically, it seems to be likely that when he gets to be a teenager, and he's going to become very skeptical of his father because he's going to see that his father is not happy and that his father does not live the ethics he preaches.
	All the untruth stuff that I've written about, right?
	Right. And he's going to be curious about the people who had a problem with his father, of which you would have been one, right?
	Right. And if you have a life that is not like his father's, but is quite the opposite, you know, full of happiness and love and whatever, right?
	Then he's going to see that.
	And then his future will hang in the balance, right?
	Do I go north or do I go south, right?
	Yeah. But I think what you want to have is as strong a beacon as you possibly can if he wants to go north.
	Right, that makes sense.
	You know, if he wants to sail his ship in from the sea, you need to have as bright a lighthouse as possible.
	It doesn't mean he's going to, but if he's going to, you want to give him as much help as possible, and the best way to do that is to have as rich and happy and satisfying a life as you can, so that he can see the difference empirically between you and his father, right?
	True, yeah. And it may happen sooner, it may happen later, but it's going to...
	Cross his mind quite a bit for quite some time.
	Yeah, I definitely noticed there was kind of a difference in the way that he looked at me after this argument I had with my brother.
	The next day he was kind of talkative, because usually he's a very shy kid, always had his head down and all that.
	The day after this quarrel, he kind of sat up in his seat and kind of leaned forward and was talking to me.
	And it was the first time that I'd seen him do that in a long time, since he was probably two, two and a half or so.
	Right. And I'm going to be annoying and invite a possible correction on two words.
	Okay. One, he's not shy.
	He's frightened. Oh, absolutely.
	And two, it was not a quarrel.
	A quarrel is a very small word for this, right?
	Right. I mean, it's a battle, right?
	It's a war. No, you're right.
	Yeah, you're right. I mean, people have wanted me to do a podcast on shyness for a while, and it's on the list.
	I mean, just working my way through the thoughts, but I don't know.
	Maybe there is such a thing as shyness, but To me, it's just fear.
	I was a very, very shy child.
	I would barely say boo to a mouse.
	As I began to work on my courage and my integrity and so on, I began to become more confident.
	But I was as terrifically shy as a child.
	But all it meant was that I was actually just terrified.
	I lived in fear my whole early childhood.
	And when I began to not live in fear, I began to become more outgoing.
	I didn't magically overcome my shyness through some programming technique or some self-talk.
	I just was no longer in an environment of fear.
	It's the same way we don't say that a prisoner in a 10x10 cell isn't agoraphobic.
	No, he's just locked up. He doesn't overcome his agoraphobia when he's taken out of his cell and allowed to walk around free.
	He's just no longer locked up.
	And that really was my experience with shyness.
	Yeah, you're right.
	You're absolutely right.
	Yeah.
	And because shyness is often associated with a rich inner life, but all that means is that you're frightened of your society, so you create a society within yourself, right?
	That's why so many artists come from that kind of traumatic and shy background.
	Or, you know, if it's not trauma from parental problems, it's sickly or whatever, right?
	But a rich inner life just means you've had to substitute an ecosystem for a social environment because your social environment is terrifying.
	Yeah, and it is.
	It absolutely is for him.
	So I know that that's a probably distinctly unsatisfying series of non-factual opinions that I'm putting forward.
	But I've not been able to come up with any kind of better solution.
	Of course, if your brother were doing anything illegal, then you would deal with it through those channels, right?
	But that's not... It's not the case.
	And the beacon thing and working on my own happiness is the only way that I knew how to be able to do it.
	I don't want to get into my experience, but those are the thoughts that I've had.
	Oh, introverts? Yeah, well, I think, sorry, somebody just asked about introverts.
	Yeah, it's the same thing.
	I think there are people who naturally have a greater degree of internal stimuli, like through imagination and creativity and dreams.
	I think there are people who are more outwardly directed and people who have more internal stimuli.
	But, no, introverts are...
	Just frightened people, right?
	They've been attacked.
	They're frightened, they're controlled, they're bullied, they're humiliated, low self-esteem, and all those kinds of things.
	Again, I don't have any proof of that.
	That's just the way that I have experienced.
	And I've never talked to an introvert who had a happy childhood.
	It doesn't mean that every extrovert has a happy childhood.
	You can be traumatized into extroversion as surely as you can be traumatized into introversion.
	That's sort of my...
	But the extrovert usually has an empty inner life, a lack of an inner life, and thus must sort of balance out the vacuum in the middle with a consistent pulling in of people from the outside, like a black hole, right?
	Whereas the introvert is terrified of the outside world and thus creates an inner world to substitute for that.
	Because in the same way, when we're sleeping, our brains need stimulus, and that's one of the reasons why we have dreams.
	If we are too terrified to interact with people socially, we simply substitute fantasy, play, imagination, and so on for that external interaction.
	So those are my thoughts on it.
	Right. Well, thank you so much.
	Those are very helpful thoughts for me, and I'll be thinking about them.
	Yes, and of course, as always, if you can, if you don't want to post it, that's fine, but just email me if you can and let me know what your thoughts are.
	and how you're going with this because it is a huge, great and tragic challenge that we face in these situations.
	Great. I certainly will.
	Thank you so much. Thank you.
	I really do appreciate you bringing that up.
	It's definitely tough.
	Somebody has said that there is biological evidence for introverts.
	I believe that that's true, but I'm not sure that the biological evidence is cause and effect.
	In other words, I don't think that they can predict an introvert from the womb.
	You know, without any external influences.
	It is certainly true that people who are introverts have some different brain structure, but I don't think that people know, and correct me if you know any better, of course, I don't think that the testers know whether, you know, they are frightened of the social environment and thus develop introverted traits and thus end up with different biological characteristics, or whether the biological characteristics are prior to the social environment.
	So, again, if you know better, please let me know, but that's what I don't know.
	All right. I think unless anybody has a last quick question, we should probably wrap up.
	I'm a little concerned about overproduction.
	So if you have a quick question, speak up now.
	Otherwise, we will close it down for the week with great thanks here from the main compound.
	All right. Well, thank you everybody so much.
	I really do appreciate it.
	Thanks for those who chipped in for the monster server costs.
	If you have a few shekels rolling around, I would really appreciate it if you could send them to freedomainradio.com forward slash donate dot HTML. And if you are a subscriber, please look tomorrow.
	I'm going to send out the series that I'm very, very, very pleased with, UPB and The Conscience.
	And please let me know what you think.
	And if I don't get it to you for whatever reason, if my records have gone awry, please let me know.
	And I will sort it out post-haste, if not before.
	So thank you everybody so much.
	Have yourselves a wonderful weekend.
	Thank you so much, as always, for your support of this wonderfully exciting and successful philosophical conversation.
	Have yourselves a super, super week.

▲