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July 12, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:05:22

1411 Sunday Show July 12, 2009

Is there a ruling elite in society? Also - intellectual property gets a workover!

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	Well, hello, brothers, sisters, and in-betweeners.
	I hope you're doing most well.
	It is July the 12th, 2009, just after 4 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time, and I hope you had a wonderful week.
	Sorry there was no show last week, but I'm sure, as you were aware, I was randomly tangenting my way through a very exciting debate with 2004 presidential candidate Michael Badnarek.
	And in Philadelphia, and prior to that, I gave a speech in Independence Square in Philadelphia, July the 4th.
	And so, thank you so much.
	I mean, I know that I'm a little bit sort of catapulted or trebuchet front and center for a lot of this stuff, though that, of course, is only some things.
	You all are doing stuff as well.
	And I just sort of wanted to remind everyone, and I'm sure you're aware of this, but I think it bears reminding.
	You know, people said to me, and I really appreciate it, you know, great job at the debate, and I certainly did have a lot of fun with the debate.
	It was quite a marathon. It was four and a half hours on how much government is necessary, and it was a rousing and spirited conversation.
	And I appreciate people say good job, but I think it's really, really important to remember that I'm only there...
	Because of you, right?
	That's really, really important to remember that this is...
	I mean, I'm pretty clear when I go out and do anything in public that I'm sort of representing the posse, so to speak.
	And so I try not to, you know...
	Point one, don't be nuts, right?
	That's really important. Point two, still, don't be nuts.
	And point 722, still, please, don't be nuts.
	So I'm aware that I'm representing the kindness and generosity of people who've donated time, money, and energy to this philosophical conversation.
	So I'm out there, but I think it's really, really important to recognize that if you have contributed, and most of you have here, have contributed to Free Domain Radio in whatever way, shape, or form, could be referrals, could be money, could be blogs, stuff, could be anything, right? That...
	It's important to pat yourself on the back as well, because I'm only there because of the enthusiasm and support of y'all.
	It's not like I would have gotten this invitation if the listenership were not so strong and the show itself were not taking off in the way that it does.
	And, I mean, that has something to do with me.
	It has a lot to do with the wisdom, kindness, and generosity and openness of the listeners.
	And for those who've contributed, maybe you've never had a podcast, That's why I'm there.
	So if you think that I did well in Philadelphia, I thank you for that.
	But remember, I'm only there because of you.
	And I think it's legitimate to take pride in picking a winning horse, let's say.
	Sorry, all of these false metaphors are because we're feeding Isabella Oates and Barney now to make sure that she grows a fine, glossy coat and tail.
	Anyway, I just wanted to remind you of that.
	I certainly appreciate your good wishes, but remember, you who have contributed are not passive people in this conversation.
	I'm only there rousing people in Philadelphia and having marathon debates because of people's enthusiasm for the show.
	I just wanted to mention that.
	And that's really it as far as stuff goes.
	Isabella is doing magnificently.
	She is crawling like a hyperkinetic breakdancing caterpillar, which is quite exciting.
	She's on a whole host of solids.
	We just picked up vegetables for her.
	And so that's going to be quite exciting to see how that goes.
	I will post a photo or two in the chat room in case people are interested in this kind of stuff.
	But she's just great.
	She's sleeping very well.
	And it was a little exciting in Philadelphia.
	Although I must say, she was completely fantastic during the drive, which was only 12 hours each way.
	Up from nine and a bit.
	So I just wanted to mention that everything is going fine here.
	Parenting is still a complete and total privilege and joy.
	And that's about it.
	I've been a little light on podcasts this week, working on various other things to do with the show.
	But I will post.
	I had a nice two-hour chat on the radio Friday night.
	And so I will post that.
	And that's it.
	So I will turn the show over to the Brains of the Outfits, a.k.a.
	Yowl. And I hope that you will engage in the conversation.
	And so if you would like to come up with a question blurted off the top of your head, I am all ears.
	Yeah, hi, Steph. Hello.
	Hi. Can you hear me?
	I sure can. Okay.
	Yeah, I've just got a question about the rulers of the world.
	So, wondering if that topic is, you'd be interested in that?
	Absolutely. Shoot away.
	Okay, I was listening to your interview.
	I think it was the Atlas Radio interview on the 27th of June.
	And you mentioned that you believe that there was probably, you know, something like the New World Order.
	And you think it exists.
	And I just want to know what your thoughts were on it.
	of what their aims are and what you believe it's all about.
	Okay, is there something that's in the call?
	I mean, is it that what I said was too short, which is rarely the case, but could be?
	Or is it that you had a specific question, or would you just like me to sort of ramble about it for a minute or two?
	Well, yeah, I mean, from what I gathered, your views that speculating about who these people are and, you know, and all these, you know, Bilderberg, all that kind of Stuff is probably pointless, which I agree. But my question is, in the short term, that's probably what we're most likely to be our reality in the short term.
	So it's probably interesting to see what their aim is and what they're trying to do and how we can basically protect ourselves.
	use this kind of knowledge that this is coming to maybe, you know, choose a sector of the industry or won't be as affected by this?
	Well, I certainly would...
	I don't think I'm competent, and I'm not sure if there anyone is, to give people advice about the best sectors to be in or anything like that.
	I don't think there's much we can do other than keep speaking the truth.
	I mean, I've seen a little bit of a couple of clips of the Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberger Group and all this kind of stuff.
	And I saw this...
	60 minutes on the skull and crossbones by a guy who just looked like he was permanently annoyed that he didn't get invited.
	There is a kind of geek frat house envy stuff, I think, that goes on in this kind of stuff.
	Again, which is all just nonsense as far as I know.
	So I don't have any facts.
	I don't have any proof.
	I've not seen anyone who has any particular facts and proof.
	But I don't assume that...
	I mean, human beings are very, very well adapted to working within collectivized time hierarchies.
	I mean, that is really the dawn of our species, right?
	I mean, in so many ways, you know, shaking off the state is shaking off the history of the supertripe, right?
	I mean, we came out of the swamps, so to speak.
	We evolved out of the, or in parallel to the apes, and we inherited all of the grim primitiveness of those ancestors, right?
	So we inherited No respect for rights for women who were vessels of child reproduction in many ways.
	We inherited the infanticide, the sacrifice of children to the gods.
	We inherited the superstition of an animated universe or the projection of our consciousness onto the universe as a whole.
	And we inherited slavery.
	We inherited a very primal, violent Aggressive, controlling, dominating instincts, which are perfectly appropriate to half-man, half-ape in the jungle, not so perfectly appropriate to modern life.
	And so we have this history as a species of wanting to dominate.
	And there's two ways in which human beings dominate.
	They dominate the world, and they dominate other people.
	There are the producers and there are the parasites.
	And it's not like everyone who's in charge is a parasite, I'm just talking from a political standpoint, that people conquer the world, and agriculture, and domestication of animals, and so on, and people conquer other people, which is hierarchical tribalism, slave-owning, and the sort of stuff that I've talked about in the Statism is Dead series.
	And so human beings are very well adapted to controlling and manipulating other human beings.
	And, I mean, in many ways I would imagine that the invention of language Was not to write poetry, but rather the invention of language was facilitated by its ability to propagandize individuals and reduce the need for the direct use of force to control, exploit, and extort people, right?
	So that you would teach them. You kind of need language to create a really mystical veneration of a political or religious leader, a military leader.
	My belief is that language, it's all nonsense, just my thoughts, right?
	But language was invented by the parasitical classes in order to reduce their need for direct violence and confrontation in the control and manipulation of the human livestock that provided their income and the source of their power, both religious and political and military power.
	So I think that given that instinct and given the enormous The dichotomy between citizen and ruler, and by ruler I don't mean Barack Obama, who to me is little more than a pretty boy figurehead, but the rulers are those who control the money supply.
	Fundamentally, that's huge.
	You've got the immense productive wealth, for instance, of the United States, of which the income tax is used to pay interest on debt that no particular individual has signed for.
	It's really astounding that 20, 30, 40% of the richest nations in the world's income is pillaged to pay interest on loans that were contracted, in a sense, for by governments, not by people. It's just astounding.
	It's like I go into debt and everybody sends you the bill.
	Well, of course, I'm going to keep spending.
	So I think that control of the money supply is really important and it takes a lot of propaganda Given that everybody understands that counterfeiting is a crime, it takes a lot of propaganda for people to not see just how egregious that is, right?
	That if a private individual prints money in his basement, that's counterfeit, and that's immoral, and that's theft, particularly from the poor, but if the government does it, as all governments do, it becomes noble and wonderful, but fundamentally it's sort of not talked about, right?
	I mean, it takes a lot of noise, sound, and fury to obscure this basic fact that Human beings, in the modern West in particular, are being progressively enslaved through status of debt, right?
	And that's really only achievable through two things, through the initiation of fraud, which is the counterfeiting of currency, that is modern fiat currency, particularly since the last vestige of the gold standard, which began to crumble in the 30s, ended in 71 under Nixon, I think it was, thus triggering the energy crisis.
	So the initiation of fraud, which is counterfeiting of currency, is the one great power.
	And that's only possible because of the initiation of force under taxation, right?
	People will only allow the government's printed money to be of any value because the government has the coercive power of blunt force instrument theft taxation.
	And it's not an accident that when you bring these topics up, people who consider themselves well-educated, I used to I used to have conversations with people who were having a master's or even a PhD in political science that could not explain to me what the government basically was and where its power derived from.
	Because the education is just so perfect.
	That's not accidental. Now, I'm not saying that it's a smoky back room somewhere in an orbiting space station that this stuff occurs or with people in funny hands and bohemian growth.
	I don't know. But it's not accidental.
	I believe that it's genuinely or generally more instinctual than it is Sinisterly plotted and written down, I think people just have a good instinct for propagandizing and controlling others because it is a very valuable thing to do from a merely biological standpoint.
	In the absence of ethics, Getting other species to work for you or getting other creatures to work for you is really, really good.
	That's why it confused me if there are eggs in other birds' nests, right?
	It's really great from a resource standpoint for any biological organism.
	And so when you can rope in the hundreds of millions of people from the world's richest economy to give up 30 or 40 percent of their income for deaths that they themselves have contracted, that takes a lot of work to have people swallow that system.
	And it takes a lot of ignoring the basic issues, and it takes a lot of focusing on dumbass empty patriotism, and it takes a lot of social aggression, right?
	Because, I mean, the weird thing is, once people get into the matrix, they become progressively more paranoid about seeing that they're in the matrix, right?
	Once people get into this illusory, claustrophobic, weird, creepy, unreal world of patriotism and allegiance to your masters, they would get progressively more paranoid, alienated, and fearful about anyone who comes along and points this out because, well, for a variety of reasons we don't have to get into here.
	So, I mean, I'm sure that there is a group of people who have a fairly clear idea, you know, like the inner party in 1984, they have a fairly clear idea of what's going on.
	I don't think that they sit there and plot their particular project plans any more than the average silverback gorilla has to be an engineer in order to climb a tree and get A banana.
	That's just the instinct of resource acquisition.
	I think that it happens at an unconscious level.
	I think that it's very well calibrated.
	It's very well controlled.
	I mean, when we talk about abusive families, people who've heard these podcasts on FDR, they know that Just about every time I talk to somebody who's from an abusive family or a family that they themselves describe as abusive, that they've never talked about it with an outsider.
	Well, is that because the parents sit there and say, aha, what we're going to do is, you know, and they draw up an action plan and so on and say, well, what we're going to do is anytime, you know, there's a bond being formed with an outside family member who might be sympathetic, who might have moral clarity, we're going to review that, we're going to intercept, we're going to take these, these, and these steps.
	Well, of course not. That's not what abusive people do.
	Abusive husbands don't sit there with an action plan about how that's going to slowly gaslight and break down their lives.
	They just have an instinct for control, an instinct for keeping somebody broken, an instinct for keeping them away from the strength that they possess and the strength that they might receive from morally clear and empathetic outsiders.
	People just have an instinct for this kind of stuff.
	And of course, because people do have an instinct for this kind of stuff, we can't have a government because that's automatically going to happen.
	So that's my two minutes or perhaps slightly more on it, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, I guess you don't have a crystal ball, so it's kind of hard to see.
	Where are we going to end up?
	But I was just thinking, you know, the general direction which we're going, you know, what would be the best way to insulate yourself, you know, from this.
	But obviously, you know, it's very difficult to tell, I guess.
	Well, we're going to end up free or we're going to end up not free, right?
	I mean, that's... I mean, more in the short term, long term, you know, I'm sure you're...
	Oh, you mean in terms of what to invest in or this or that?
	Well, you know, or just, you know, your activity and, you know, that kind of thing.
	Well, I mean, to be perfectly honest, I feel pretty passive about this stuff, which is not a right or wrong approach.
	Maybe it's a completely wrong approach, but I feel, I mean, maybe you can buy gold and put it in your basement.
	No, seriously, I mean, people say, well, I'll buy gold and leave it at the bank, but when the government starts to go down, they'll just steal the gold from the banks, right?
	I mean, So maybe you can do some stuff.
	You could invest in this or invest in that.
	But I feel, frankly, fairly helpless and a little hopeless about this kind of stuff as far as finances and this and that.
	Maybe you can grow a vegetable garden.
	I mean, I don't know, right? But I don't think it's really going to get that bad.
	But as far as what steps you can take to minimize yourself from the damage of an unstable monetary system, I just...
	I don't know. I mean, you could buy a bunch of stuff, so you have stuff rather than money in the bank, right?
	I think that's got some value to it.
	But frankly, I don't...
	Because I just assume that they're going to just take what they want when they want it, right?
	I mean, that's what they're doing anyway.
	It's not like that's going to change when they start to panic, right?
	So they'll just, you know, nationalize the banks and they'll take whatever they want.
	You know, they have the nukes, they have the aircraft.
	Yes, they have the military.
	So, for me, I don't particularly feel like there's a whole lot that I can do.
	I mean, and that's not really my focus.
	My focus is to get as much truth out there as quickly as possible so that people can more accurately identify the causes of decline rather than that.
	So, I mean, I know lots of people have lots of strategies, you know, learn how to shoot, find ways to recycle your toilet water for drinking and so on.
	I don't believe that it's going to go that way in particular, right?
	Like, I mean, Rome at its height had a million people and then in the early Middle Ages was populated by 20,000 people, mostly living in ruins and herding goats, right?
	I don't think it's going to go that Fight Club way.
	I really don't. There's just too much knowledge, too much information, too much communication.
	But I don't particularly believe that there's much that I can do to protect myself against the predations of a government that's going through its last mutated freakazoid paranoid phase of just grabbing everything that it can.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Yeah. And so I'm just going to enjoy my life and find the truth out there, take reasonable steps, and so on.
	But I don't think that I can imagine that I can do much to outwit the government and its guns, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, I mean, the general idea I had was that Since we're going towards a world where the banks control more like a rent-seeking sort of economy, that maybe certain sectors will be more and more difficult to operate in, and others will be a bit more...
	Banking is probably something that's going to take more and more importance, which it has in the last few decades.
	So I'm guessing that that's going to...
	continue in that way.
	So, you know, it's probably not a good sector to work in, but, you know, that's one sector that definitely will prosper.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	I will say that I'm a little happy to be out of the IT sector, if that makes any sense.
	I think that I think that it's important to try and get more of a diversity of skills going.
	I think it's also important to be an entrepreneur, and I think it's also important to spread your economic basket around a little bit, that's a bad part of putting it, to sort of hedge your bets, right?
	So, I mean, I didn't obviously know when the recession was going to occur, because I don't have access to the M1 money supply nonsense that the Fed no longer publishes.
	I mean, Christine and I talked about this, that, I mean, there was going to be a downturn coming.
	One of the things that I thought about, it certainly wasn't the reason for my decision, but I certainly thought about it, was to say, okay, look, if there's a recession and the economy goes down 30% or 20% or whatever, or job prospects go down, Then you might keep your job or you might not keep your job, right? And if you're one of the 70 or 80% who keep their job, good for you.
	But if you're not, then you go from 100% down to 0% in terms of your income, which is, you know, fairly alarming to say the least.
	Whereas I thought, okay, well, if I sort of work to build up the FDR income, even if there's a drop of 30% or 20% of the FDR income, I'm not going from 100% to zero, if that makes any sense.
	So I think that...
	This entrepreneurial diversification may not be for everyone, but I think that if you can get into...
	Some people, of course, buy and sell through eBay or other kinds of online market sites.
	That kind of stuff where you've really spread your risk out to a certain degree.
	It's your level of risk.
	I prefer a 20% loss of income for sure than a 20% possibility of 100% loss of income.
	So I think that kind of stuff can be helpful, but it may not be for everyone and that's just my two cents on it.
	Why did you say you're happy to be out of the IT industry in particular?
	Well, it's not so much the IT industry in particular.
	Okay, it's just the industry in general.
	The business world as a whole. I mean, I went into the business world with a bit of a starry-eyed, randroid idealization of the businessman, forgetting that it was the heroic businessman by far the minority.
	There were far more Wesley Moochist than Hank Reeder in the novel.
	Integrity can be a tough thing in the business world for sure and there is a lot of bodies buried around that I sort of noticed and a lot of attention when anybody started to smell anything in the room.
	So, it may not be in particular to IT, but I was sort of on a collision course with the business world as a whole, just by working on myself to the degree that I did.
	So, I shouldn't say it's not particular to IT, but for the business world, for me, I think it was an exit scenario that was a long time coming.
	Right, but in a way, the Anoko capitalist...
	You know, utopia is everything is replaced by the business world.
	I'm just a bit surprised.
	Do you think it's due to the government intervention in the market?
	Oh yeah, because in the business world as it stands, and this is all nonsense off the top of my head, Just share if it's been a use, right?
	In the business world as it stands, most people get a significant portion of their income from government sources, right?
	I mean, government contracts and so on.
	And those can be very difficult and very challenging and deeply strange and weird to work with.
	And, of course, I mean, as I've mentioned before, and it's sort of in my novel, the financial...
	I think that this aspect of the business world has become simply lunatic, in my opinion.
	And I say this, I mean, I worked at Unisys, I worked at IBM, I worked at a number of large companies before I ended up as an entrepreneur.
	And luckily since then it wasn't in any kind of senior or significant position, but I still did get a sense of the flavor of those.
	I think it's important to remember that Ayn Rand was writing about rational productivity in the business world long before 401k plans via massive amounts of hyperinflation, sorry, massive amounts of fiat currency creation that went on in the 80s and all the stuff I've talked about in the supercharged stock market series of podcasts and videos and articles.
	It's incredibly busy, and which I talked about in the CEO pay video, which I went to, I think it's True News 45.
	It's really warped business in a very, very subtle, powerful, and strange way that there's so much money to be made off short classifications.
	And that just was not the case way back in the day.
	It really, really has changed.
	The way that business is conducted, that it is much more about, and again, please understand, these are just my opinions, right?
	But it's much more about appearance than it is about reality.
	It's much more about pumping the numbers than it is about creating long-term value.
	And that aspect of where the profit-seeking intelligence of business people is focused has really, really altered how management works with employees.
	Because employees who actually have to do the work are very much focused on preventing long-term problems.
	Just think of a coder. The coder says, I want to get it right.
	I want to design it properly so that we don't just draw something that has to be patched later.
	And the executive or the manager is saying something like, we need to get it out this quarter or our stock price is going to tank.
	Two groups used to be much more in harmony, but now that there's so much pressure on management for short-term gains, numbers for analysts, because there's so much money charging around the stock market looking for any sort of hint of profit or loss, that the interests of workers and the interests of managers are no longer nearly as aligned as they used to be in the business world.
	And that, I think, has created a lot of tension.
	A lot of difficulties, and it creates a certain level of slime in the business world, sort of above the project manager phase, and I think that creates a lot of cynicism and skepticism, and a lot of hostility on the part of the workers who feel that they're just kind of bullied into helping the managers meet their numbers for a bonus that most of the managers get, and then the workers are left to deal with the fallout of rushing things through for the sake of short-term gain, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, thanks for that. That's all I had.
	But if you're an entrepreneur, you can ameliorate some of these things.
	Anyway, I hope that helped a little bit.
	No, thank you very much, Steph.
	You're very, very welcome. I know for those who may not want to go through the whole debate, I do have some preliminary audio for which I will try to post.
	I might put it in Gold Plus just to get people's feedback on the audio quality later today.
	I think I do give a pretty good speech about a guy who's saying, how do you survive as...
	A philosophical purist in an impure world.
	And I think that is...
	I think I gave a pretty good speech about that.
	I certainly felt I let up the stage, but we'll see what other people think.
	And that speech, which is close to the end, somewhere in the third and a half hour, you might want to check that out to see if it...
	I might pull that out for a podcast as well, but...
	Yeah, so I think that in a rational world, businessmen are more rational and productive, but the world is just not heading in that direction.
	And, you know, when that sinkhole opens up, it takes a good deal of business people with it as well.
	July the 5th, that's when I gave that speech.
	It was during the debate. There was a lot of Q&A period with the audience, which, of course, I enjoy the most.
	So that was that. Alright, we are ready for question the next.
	How are the Philly videos and audio coming along?
	Alright, we'll do something dated, but I'll keep it short.
	Problematic, to say the least.
	I just bought this new camera, and I think I misattributed it.
	I think it said it had a 30 gig card drive.
	It actually has an 80 gig card drive.
	But I got this camera, and we were so laid down with baby stuff and this and that, and I know how hairy things get when you're preparing for a debate and getting yourself in the right mindset to debate properly.
	So we didn't bring our camera, and the organizers were...
	to be videoing it and unfortunately they had the audio is not good and unfortunately for about 40 minutes in the middle there's this really devastating hum you know when you get a loose connection that I guess there's something to do with the The audio connection that had a problem, and I've been working on it, and other people have been working on it to try and extract the actual language from it, and we've made some progress, but I just heard from someone else that they have a high definition video version, and I'm sure their sound will be better.
	It's the friend of a guy who did the New Hampshire video.
	I haven't released anything particular yet because I hear that thundering over the horizon are higher quality versions.
	I don't want to release a low quality version because people will struggle through that and then if a higher quality version comes out, it's not like they're going to go back and say, oh, I've got another four and a half hours that I wanted to listen to this by Alexander Blatt's movie.
	I'm holding back on what's going to be released until I get a variety of versions.
	And of course, that's what I did with the New Hampshire debate as well.
	I think it took about a month and about another week for YouTube to transcode the entire HD file.
	So I'm a little loath to release, in fact, I'm not going to release the audio that we have, which is not bad, but not great.
	I don't want to release it into the general string because people just...
	They're not going to come back and listen to it again, and I would rather they have a decent piece of audio fidelity ahead of time.
	And I have heard video.
	I have audio for the fourth, which is not bad. - Yeah.
	I don't have video for the 4th, but I've heard that there is video for the 4th, so I'm just waiting for that to roll in, and of course, as soon as I get it, I will upload it to YouTube.
	I was sort of talking to people afterwards.
	I got the sense that I did a pretty conservative speech on the floor.
	There was no rabble rousing and some pretty practical debating tips.
	It was not scintillating and that really was by design.
	But if you watch the speech, please don't expect Lenin on top of a train yelling at the proletariat.
	It's not that environment.
	It's not that crowd. It's not that kind of speech.
	So just don't expect anything spectacularly fiery.
	It's a muted and understated performance, I think you could say.
	But I think certainly I did let things rip with a great deal of pleasure more in the debate on the Sunday at Drexel University.
	All right.
	Do we have somebody else with a question?
	Thank you.
	All right, we have a question.
	Do we have a mic or is that too much to ask?
	No.
	Hi, Stefan. James Cox here from PeaceFreedomProsperity.com.
	Oh, hey. Long time no talk.
	How's it hanging? Good.
	My question to you is your thoughts on intellectual property.
	Obviously right now, which I disagree with, government controls anybody that has an idea and submits it to a patent office.
	In a true free society, how would we control intellectual property and You know, how long do you think that that person, you know, should hold on to it?
	My thoughts on this are that, you know, I think that if somebody has spent 10, you know, long, hard years working in the shed or the garage and, you know, working a part-time job and struggling and all of a sudden, hey, presto, comes up with a brilliant idea and it hits the market.
	It makes money.
	Nobody has the right to use that idea unless they get permission from the originator of the idea.
	And that could be through licensing or whatever.
	So I'll mute my mic and listen to what you have to say about that.
	Well, just before you vanish into the land of no sound vacuum, you said something there which I don't think many even advocates of IP would agree with, which is the patenting of an idea.
	Most people would say that you can only patent the expression, not the idea itself.
	Oh, you want me to come back on that?
	I wouldn't mind clarifying that.
	I'd appreciate it. Okay.
	Well, it goes back to what I've said.
	If somebody's struggling for 10 years because they're developing an idea, obviously they've forfeited.
	They could have gone and worked for a company, so they've given part of their life to this idea, and now they make this idea a reality, and they bring it to market.
	How do they, in a true free society, How would they protect that idea from other people stealing it?
	Because if you think about it this way, this is my thought, what would be the point of producing anything if everybody had the right to steal it from you?
	So if you had an idea and you put it onto the market and started to make money from it and then all of a sudden somebody took it and changed it just slightly or made it a different color or whatever, and then all of a sudden your profits from this start to dwindle because now somebody is producing this at half the cost or whatever, my question is what protection do you give the individual?
	And don't go away yet.
	I'm still trying to follow what it is you're saying.
	I have an idea.
	No, I understand. So let's say, for instance, it was original to me, though I certainly believe that there are other people who've thought of it before, but the argument that I come up with about DROs, let's just say, right?
	I don't know if that means anything to you, if you're familiar with that argument at all.
	You don't have to be, but just have you heard of it at all?
	Oh, okay. It's ways in which state functions can be replaced by private insurance or protection agencies, right?
	So we don't have to get into the details of it.
	But let's just say I came up with that idea, which was original to me.
	And let's say that it was original, right?
	I doubt it was completely original.
	I think there probably is an original aspect.
	And let's say that I have that idea.
	The fact that I've invested a lot of labor into an idea in no way guarantees me an income, right?
	Lots of people invest lots of labor into stuff for which they are not going to get paid, right?
	Bad ideas, right? Novels that will never get published because they're bad or whatever, right?
	So the fact that someone's invested a lot of labor doesn't really matter.
	Would it be that other people, if they heard this idea, that they would not be able to speak about the idea without paying me?
	Is that what you mean? I'm not actually talking about that in general.
	I'm talking about once the idea has been brought to market, so once it's been launched, let's say you've got this car that you designed.
	We'll talk hypothetically here.
	You've got this car that you've designed and you've created the motor that John Galt And it basically runs with that motor.
	And it's actually in production and you're selling it and then all of a sudden, you know, obviously people buy one and then they start manufacturing them and selling them.
	And now the market's been flooded with your idea.
	I'm not just saying that, oh, you know, I had this idea 10 years ago.
	You have no right to...
	You know, steal my idea.
	I'm talking about actual things that have been, you know, brought to market.
	Okay, so, sorry, I think I understand.
	So, I have the idea of DROs which I can't patent, which I think few people would agree that you could.
	But if I write a book called, you know, the DRO Wikipedia Brains Flash Extravaganza, going over the idea that people can't photocopy that book and sell it because they didn't create it, right?
	Right. Okay. Well, I think that there certainly is an economically efficient argument to be made that people will produce fewer new things if there's no IP protection.
	However, there seems to be quite a bit of research that indicates that when IP protection is less, that people produce more.
	So, there is that aspect of things as well.
	So, the economic efficiency argument has evidence both ways, right?
	So, when IP protection is less, the degree of innovation in many studies seems to be higher.
	So, I don't think that you can use an argument from effect for IP. But I'll give you my two cents on it, and I'm hopefully going to do a video series on this when I can.
	But I'll give you my two cents of thinking on it.
	And I do have a series on IP that might be of interest to you.
	You can find it at freedomandradio.com forward slash search.
	But if I make something, let's just say, let's take a silly thing, I make a book called Practical Anarchy.
	I write a book. And I think that I can make, as a condition of selling that book, that you will not copy it.
	That can be a condition.
	So if I rent lawn mowers to people, then it is a condition of renting the lawn mower that you cannot sell the lawn mower on eBay and pocket the change.
	We would agree on that.
	So we can put conditions of use on just about anything that we want, right?
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, we could put conditions on anything.
	My thoughts on it though are what do you do when somebody does take your book and mass produce it And you're selling it at, let's say, $10, and then all of a sudden this person's selling it at $2, and your sales plummet, and he's stacking them high, selling them cheap, so to speak.
	Well, what I would do, because no individual is going to enforce those kinds of intellectual property rights, you're going to need some third-party agency, right?
	Like, I'm not going to go around to second-hand bookstores and find out if they're selling my book and not giving me a cut, and I'm not going to go to every book that comes out about anarchy and see if they've pillaged paragraphs or pages from, I mean, so there would have to be some third-party agency who is going to, you know, find these copies and apply some sort of sanction.
	I think we can agree on that, right?
	Right. Right. So...
	The question would be...
	Could we...
	I'm sorry? Could we not use...
	I just had a thought, actually.
	Could we not use social outcasting?
	Well, I think social outcasting would not be strong enough.
	I think that... I mean, the DRO aspect is economic outcasting, right?
	So the DRO aspect is...
	Clearly, I think we can say that the people who create content or who create ideas or who create things, whether they're books or cars or whatever, those people vastly outnumber the people who copy stuff, right? - Mm-hmm.
	Right. They are going to do business with the very largest and most powerful, I simply mean that economically, the largest and most powerful DROs.
	And those DROs are going to kind of set the standard, right?
	So if I'm a United artist and I produce, I don't know, 100 movies a year with, I don't know, a billion dollars worth of revenue or two billion dollars worth of economic effect, I'm going to have a lot more economic clout and a lot more leverage with my DRO than some dude who's, you know, iPhone videoing movies and releasing them on his website, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And so the very largest, I'm going to ask for the very largest and most powerful DROs.
	Now, DROs have a kind of domino effect with each other in that if you choose not to do business with the very largest and most powerful DROs, then you are at a significant disadvantage because other DROs are always going to want to do business with the largest and most powerful And so those who want to not do any business with those or do business with those who do business with those are going to be at such a significant economic disadvantage that I don't think they're going to be producing...
	They're just not going to be able to stay in business, right?
	Right. And so if I am found...
	So the movie guys are going to want economic exclusion...
	from people found to be copying movies until restitution is made, right?
	How do you get the restitution, though?
	This is part of the DRO theory, which we'll just have to touch on here, though it's impractical anarchy in some podcasts.
	You can listen to the first half dozen podcasts.
	For more on this, right, but everybody who operates as an economic agent in any kind of civilized society Requires currency acceptance and requires contract validity, right?
	Like, if I want to rent an apartment, I have to have someone who's going to take my money, and I'm going to have to have someone who respects my right to make a contract.
	And since mostly what we do is business with strangers, people are going to want a third party who's going to validate and say, yeah, Steph, you know, he agrees with his contracts, he stands up to his contracts, or at least we'll deal with them if he doesn't, and, you know, his cash is good and blah, blah, blah, right?
	And so if I go around iPhone-ing people's movies and releasing them, then either I can be caught or I can't.
	And if I can't be caught, then no status or IP doesn't mean anything, right?
	Then it's just nonsense. But if I can be caught, then what's going to happen is I'm going to be told I either need to make restitution in whatever manner is deemed fair.
	I'm not going to guess what that is.
	Or my contracts are no longer going to be honored in the DRO system.
	My currency may not be good anymore, because I probably won't use gold, but something a little less uncertain.
	And so, there will be punishments.
	Now, the punishments are not the initiation of aggression, but rather the withdrawal of economic participation, which is even more significant than going to jail for many people.
	So, I sort of think that it will be negotiated And there will be conditions of purchase.
	And there will be a desire to protect the value that people are putting together.
	But there will also be a punishment for people who violate those standards.
	That having been said, I'm going to make a very short counter-case for that, right?
	Because, I mean, you're talking to a guy who gives away everything for free, right?
	So, you know, my IP... Laws, they don't mean much to me.
	I don't want IP. I tell people to copy stuff.
	I ask them to leave it intact, but I'm obviously not chasing anyone down who wants to put pictures of llamas in the middle.
	I don't care, right? So I give away everything for free, and what that does, I mean, I did that for a number of reasons, which we don't have to get into here, but one of the reasons that I did it was I knew that if I give away everything for free, that I would be challenged to continue to create and provide extraordinary value And what it is that I was doing.
	The one thing I completely loathe about IP laws is the endless promotion of dumbass mediocrity in the media.
	Don't you watch movies and just feel like you've seen it all before?
	You know, it's the same characters, it's the same goddamn plot.
	It's just the same thing over and over again, you know?
	Someone sees something that no one else can see, but there's evidence that it's real, but no one can tell.
	It seems the cop is a drinker and he's had a divorce.
	You just feel like you're seeing the same shit over and over and over again.
	And that's, I believe, directly traceable to economic causes.
	And again, I'm not saying I'm proving it.
	It's my belief. I'll just give you the brief argument.
	Maybe that makes sense. Because of IP protection, You can charge people more for movies than if IP protection was shorter.
	Because you have a monopoly for longer, right?
	So if you have a monopoly for longer, and I think it's Warner Brothers who owns the rights to happy birthday to you.
	That's why nobody uses that in movies, right?
	Because you have to pay them $20,000.
	This thing that was written in 1920s is ridiculous, right?
	which is why movies are, you know, like 14 bucks or 13 bucks to get in, even if the movie costs one-tenth to make as the latest Bruckheimer blockbuster brain fryer, right?
	So, because movies are so much more profitable, they generally are less quality, right?
	When you have a monopoly, you have lower quality.
	That's just inevitable. The Soviet department stores with three things on the item.
	A vinegar, a bottle of water, and a toothbrush with no bristles.
	So when you have a monopoly, which is what IP essentially grants people, existing status IP, you end up with lower quality.
	A movie then becomes such a potential source of enormous profit that people will only We'll tend to try and make the most expensive movies or the most flashy movies that will appeal to, I think, the aim of 12-year-olds or the intellect of 12-year-olds.
	So you don't get a lot of sophisticated, intelligent, deep, insightful, philosophical, innovative movies.
	Because if you're going to make a movie, plus all the union stuff and this and that, but if you're going to make a movie, you want to make a big, expensive, flashy movie that is going to be easy to translate into foreign languages because you've got worldwide IP rights.
	That is going to appeal to the average, below average intellect, so that you don't have a lower cutoff.
	And that's because you have such a monopoly and such a profit source that it just makes sense to try and make it for as wide an audience as possible.
	And that dumbs down movies just terribly.
	And you see this, a lot of movies start off kind of well, and then just end up to be just bad, right?
	And so movies can't take a stand on anything.
	They can't take a stand on anything philosophical.
	That's just tragic. Every argument has to have a counter-argument.
	You saw this in The West Wing all the time.
	Every movie, if it presents an atheist viewpoint, it has to then undermine the atheist viewpoint and show the religious viewpoint.
	If it presents X, it has to present the opposite of X. It has to give great arguments for and it has to give great arguments against.
	And that's not because everybody's into Socratic violence.
	It's just because you don't want to alienate the opposition.
	You want to appeal to as many people as humanly possible, which means everything gets diluted into this wishy-washy confusion.
	I remember a movie called Full Disclosure, Denny Moore and Michael Douglas.
	There was an argument about, you know, are men dominant?
	And it was something like, well, you know, if men are so dominant, then why would we...
	Die sooner, get more diseases, get killed in wars, right?
	And then there was a counter-argument, well, men start wars and blah, blah, blah.
	And everything just, it was just at the end of it, you were like, well, so everyone's right and no one's right, and nothing ever gets concluded.
	And that's the frustrating thing about when you look at movies from a philosophical standpoint.
	And that's because there's so much profit to be made from appealing to everyone at a 12-year-old level that that's where movies end up.
	And with some rare exceptions, of course, right?
	So I think it's really tragic the amount of talent that is just wasted in movies, of which the weak point always seems to be the script, and particularly the last half or the last third of the movie.
	So I'm definitely a foe of Stata Solutions, and I'm a foe...
	But I certainly do believe that people should have some protection for the amount of effort they put into things.
	But I also wonder that if that monopoly were more diluted, whether or not high-quality stuff would come out.
	I hope that this show is an example of, you know, if you really throw yourself on the mercy of the listeners, you will try to be as innovative and creative and challenging as possible, and that you will not be afraid of taking a stand on things if you don't have to appeal to everyone.
	And that's just some of the thoughts that I've had about it, if that makes any sense.
	So just to clarify then, somebody going on the internet and downloading a movie that somebody is uploading, do you class that as theft or not?
	I wouldn't really know how to classify that.
	I mean, if you look at the state of society, the whole thing is founded on theft.
	Right? So, is it theft that you have to pay time and a half union rates or double time union rates?
	Because the unions have gained control of the political system to the point where it seriously inflates the price of your movie ticket.
	Is that theft on the consumer?
	Well, of course it is.
	Of course it is, right?
	Is it theft on the consumer that we do have this, currently, I would say, fairly ridiculous system of patents, which grants people monopolies which are, I believe, morally unjust, which causes them to be able to raise the prices of things?
	Yeah, I think that's kind of unjust.
	Is that theft? Yes, it is.
	Is it theft to download a movie and watch it without paying?
	Yeah, I guess so. But to me, it's like...
	And it's theft to have taxation, and it's a theft of children's brains to send them to public school.
	It's just not a theft that I'm particularly concerned about, because to me, it's an effect theft, right?
	So, for instance, up here in Canada, I can't get movies over the internet.
	I can't. Why? Because people don't want to sell to Canada?
	No, of course they do, because of nonsense copyright stuff, wherein it's too expensive to negotiate relative to the size of the market.
	You know, I'd love to pay.
	I really would. But no one's giving me a chance to.
	So to me, it's complicated.
	I think when you turn on...
	This is something I sort of say over and over again, right?
	And I'm not saying that you're doing this, right?
	But to me, if you turn on the thing called theft, and you turn on the lights everywhere, right?
	And you have to look at theft that's going on in society as a whole...
	Do I think that people who download movies and watch them are evil people?
	I don't particularly think so.
	They're not initiating force.
	So it's much less so than the unions who are causing the resulting overcharging in terms of movies.
	So, I mean, in a better society, or in a reasonably moral and decent society, this would not be a particular issue.
	Because... People would work to make it as convenient and cheap as possible to provide a better quality experience to people, right?
	So, if you download movies, apparently you get crappy stuff with finished subtitles and you waste time.
	I don't know, right? But this is what I hear.
	Or maybe some screen cam that's too dark and people picking their nose in front of the camera and stuff, right?
	So that's not a great quality experience.
	So, if it were 99 cents or $1.99 to watch a movie and it's streamed in high definition in Dalby's area, would people still be sitting there saying, I hope this one that downloads in two hours is not going to be a piece of crap?
	Well, no, they pay the 99 cents, right?
	So, there's ways in which a free society would simply make that less appealing.
	That's the challenge, right? So, I hope that, you know, I just don't think it's a big issue in terms of the theft that's currently going on in society as a whole.
	Okay. So, alright.
	I guess we'll move on, because some people don't particularly like IP discussions.
	I mean, I think they're interesting, and they are a challenging, complex souffle of intellectual and economic challenges, but I just wanted to sort of put my two cents in.
	Again, nobody knows exactly how it's going to be solved, but it's not going to be solved by initiating, for sure.
	You know, it's just my thoughts on this, that if somebody has struggled all those many years and then developed something for somebody to just come and take it, And make money off this person's back.
	To me, I think it's immoral and unjust.
	Without consent.
	You know, and I certainly do agree with that.
	And I think that it definitely needs to be something that needs to be addressed by the productive, voluntary, brilliant minds of humanity as a whole, not by a minority who've got the ears of politicians who have controls of the guns of the police, right?
	That's not the way to solve it.
	But I think that there will be a way to solve it that is going to be creative and productive.
	And it's going to need to be adaptable, right?
	I mean, the problem with statism is that it freezes everything in time.
	And so the IP stuff that was invented for sheet music in the 1880s is working in a digital media, just doesn't make any sense at all, right?
	But they're still trying to fit that round peg of the modern media into the square box of old media, and it just doesn't work, and that's where you get all of this nonsense, right?
	I mean, there was a law that was passed up here in Canada, I think it was seven or eight years ago, which said that The artists were concerned about Napster.
	I think it was at the time when people would go to to download music.
	And the Canadian artists were upset about it, right?
	And so what they did, and this is what's so tragic about statism, is they got together and they lobbied the government.
	And as a result, the government levied a pretty significant tax on all storage mediums that could be used to store music, right?
	So SD cards, portable hard drives, flashcards, everything which you could use to store music had a big tax slapped on it.
	And what did this do?
	I don't know why people can't figure this shit out, but they really just can't for some Well, what happened was it's predictable at sunrise.
	Or me claiming that I have a short answer and then having a long answer.
	But what happened was so entirely predictable.
	What happened was that...
	The Canadian public then said, oh, so we're paying this tax, so now we can download everything under the planet, like under the sun, right?
	Because we're paying this tax, which now is licensed to download, right?
	Because now they're getting their money and this and that and the other.
	So people just in Canada went hog wild downloading everything, and CD sales plummeted, right?
	Now, did the artists end up getting any of the money from the taxes that the government was collecting?
	Of course not!
	I mean, of course not!
	That's like having the mafia go and collect some debt on your behalf.
	Do you ever think you're going to see a penny?
	Of course not! Once they've got the money, they're just going to keep the money.
	And so they ended up getting fewer CD sales, they ended up not getting pittance of the money that was being collected through the taxes.
	And to me, it's like, well, you didn't come to me as a consumer and say, you know, here's the case, here's the cost, you know, here's what's happening, here's our solution.
	You went to big daddy government with the gun, and you got them to take a bunch of money from us.
	And in that sense, it sort of feels like I think a lot of Canadians felt, okay, we're kind of in a state of nature now, right?
	It's like you all just pulled the gun on us and went to the government rather than coming to us as the consumers or trying to improve what you were offering to the point where you could come up with something better than, you know, often crappy MP3s over the internet.
	And so it's kind of a state of nature.
	And I think that's the tragedy, right?
	If they hadn't had the option of going to the state, they actually would have had to be much more creative and innovative in how they went about it.
	But because they went to the state, they lost everything.
	All right, but enough IP, because I know some people like it and some people know so much, but they're liking it.
	So, we have time for a question or two more, if people have stuff to bring up.
	This is Todd Andrew Barnett.
	I'm the co-host of Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity Movement Radio.
	And I just wanted to call and ask you a very important question here.
	I guess, okay.
	Before I go on to my question here, I just want to lightly touch what was discussed before.
	I'm not going to go into it completely because I know IP is very, very, you know...
	Not exactly a pleasant topic to really talk about for a lot of people.
	I used to be for IEP, but in my journey of libertarianism, even within the last few months, I've come to think of IEP as totally ridiculous and nonsense.
	So you can label me as an anti-IP libertarian, if you wish.
	But now, my real question that I want to talk about...
	Well, I guess my question for you is, what are your views on religion?
	Because I find that religion, even organized religion...
	Even though it may have intended to be something interesting, maybe intended to be good as far as spiritual ideas and so forth, but I'm just curious, what are your views on the subject?
	I think you're an atheist, are you not, or...?
	Yes, that certainly is one of the conclusions, I think, of thinking clearly, but it's a big topic, organized religion and religion as a whole.
	I mean, if religion as a whole is nonsense, then organized religion is nonsense as well, whereas some people have the opinion that religion or spirituality or whatever is not nonsense, but organized religion is.
	I'm definitely not of the latter opinion.
	I think that religion is a catastrophic curse upon the brain of mankind and particularly on the minds of children who are bullied and frightened and terrorized and intimidated into believing stuff which is completely bad for their brains.
	I mean, it is better to Feed a child a diet low in calcium than a diet high in religion, because you can deal with the calcium issues, but the resulting guilt, loathing, fear, and constant feelings of insecurity and lack of privacy that result from religious indoctrination tend to stick to the brain like fecal matter on a wall thrown by chimps.
	So I am a very deep and passionate foe of religious indoctrination.
	I think that if an adult who was not raised with religious indoctrination chooses to become religious, that's...
	You know, who cares, right?
	People can choose to gaze into crystals and try and see the future for all.
	I care. But I think that people who teach religion to children, as if it is true, are intellectual cowards, are gutless parasites of the worst order.
	Because children do not have the capacity to differentiate truth from falsehood innately.
	I mean, they have some capacity, right?
	Which is why if you give a kid an empty box and say there's an invisible present in there, they don't dance for joy, right?
	They do understand the basics of empiricism.
	But I think that religion survives by preying upon the tender and helpless minds of children.
	And you see this over and over again.
	You see this in the movie Jesus Camp or Bible Camp, or whatever it's called, where You know, they just say stuff like it's true, and then whenever one of these theists comes across a competent philosophical atheist, they start, well, you know, other dimensions and origin of things and this.
	They don't give storybook religion.
	They don't give soap opera religion to intelligent adults.
	They give weird Augustinian abstract ontological arguments, which is not what they do to children.
	What they do to children is say, Jesus died for your sins.
	Well, you know, that's right.
	And I think that is absolutely vile.
	I mean, it would be complete abuse, as I've mentioned before, if my wife died, heaven forbid, and I said to my daughter that your mother died because you were bad, that would be a complete mind screw, right? It would be completely abusive to tell her that.
	And that, of course, is a tiny thing compared to what children are told when they're told that Jesus died for their sins, that the best And brightest and most noble human being who ever lived died because they inherited original sin.
	And I'm just talking about one myth.
	I know not every religion has this myth and there are others who have different myths.
	But it is, you know, without the helpless credulity of children, religion would die off very, very quickly.
	And so I think it is...
	I just oppose it as something which preys upon the helpless minds of children in a really disgusting way.
	Well, you know, I'm glad you said that because I find...
	I think that religion in general, particularly organized religion, to be very much exploitative and very much statist in very, very much of its form.
	of Catholicism is, well, Catholic priests can't marry because they're married to God, but somehow they have all this knowledge in the world about how a married couple should work out their marriage, if they have any marital problems, a lot of these issues that your standard priest, your officiating priest, if you will, Wouldn't even have an idea of.
	I mean, he's never been physically married.
	He's never had children.
	He's never had a wife.
	Yet somehow he knows this by, what, second-hand, third-hand information, and he's never actually experienced it because he's been in the seminary or he's been in the priesthood for so long.
	And I just find that disingenuous.
	I find that intellectually dishonest when priests do that.
	But I think it's all because of that little code within the Catholic Church.
	I know I will probably get screened by a number of people who think, well, I'm anti-Catholic or I'm anti-Christian, which is not necessarily the case.
	I mean, if you want to believe an invisible being from the sky, if you want to believe in the black pits of hell, be my guest.
	But what I find very offensive is Is that in recent years, there's been this big push of this new idea in Christianity, which is basically, you know, if you accept Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, you will be brought to heaven.
	You will have your soul saved.
	You know, that kind of nonsense.
	And this is actually relatively new.
	It wasn't like that.
	Say it's 300 or 400 years before.
	But it's, until fairly recently, that's been actually the case.
	I mean, even when you look at denominations and ecclesias like Mormonism or, you know, like Presbyterianism or Lutheranism, you know, I grew up in a Lutheran religion.
	You know, I grew up in the Missouri Synod Lutheran, which is basically the conservative religion.
	It was predominantly conservative because you've got the Catholics who are predominantly liberal, right?
	Who are basically of the left-wing variety.
	And all this orthodox doctrine, if you will, all this crap they throw at you.
	Like, oh, well, if you don't believe in the devil, then Satan has controlled you or – Or, you know, this nonsense that, well, if you don't believe in Jesus, if you don't worship and pray to him, you will go to hell for what you've done.
	And I think it's nothing more than just a way to panic little kids and to submission and to an authoritarian situation.
	Ideology to an authoritarian church, if you will.
	This whole construct.
	You know, it's interesting because Christ really, I mean, there are people who don't believe that Christ actually existed, but then again, there are some historical accounts who say that he did exist.
	Well, if he did exist, assuming that he was physically real, and a lot of the historical accounts say, well, he was the son of God.
	Well, if he was the son of God, well, how does it explain the fact that he was suffering on a crucifix?
	If he was a god.
	If he were a god, he would wave his magic arms and just push everybody away from him, including the Romans, including Pontius Pilate, who was trying to crucify him.
	You would think he would basically wipe them all out if he had the power, if he was really the son of God, if he was a deity of some kind.
	So, but this notion that he was the Son of God when he died on the cross is just nonsense because before that he was just a human being.
	So for a man to have suffered and die on a cross physically meant that he had to have been a human being.
	He had to have been.
	It would have been impossible if he were some sort of deity under that kind of logic.
	But the problem with so many Christians and so many religionists is that they believe in a particular faith, but they don't question it.
	They think that, oh, somehow the faith is somehow… You know, something that is just a taboo subject.
	You can't talk about questioning it because you will be, you know, condemned by the church or you would be labeled as a heretic, if you will.
	Whereas, you know, in science, you know, you can question things, but there's no absolute.
	You know, science, I mean, it can be proven wrong.
	You know, at least in science, if...
	If evolution is what it is, and I believe in evolution, I don't believe in this nonsense of, well, Adam and Eve were created and, you know, this forbidden fruit, you know, they ate this forbidden fruit because of a talking snake told them these things.
	I just find that totally disingenuous, don't you?
	Well, just a minor correction, and I'm sure you would agree, right?
	But science does have an absolute, which is the scientific method, right?
	Yeah. I just find that...
	But I find this whole notion that this spiritual, at least this religious doctrine, that you have unquestioning blind faith in something, you know, I think it's totally disingenuous.
	I mean, you know, I'm a spiritual person.
	Sorry, just disingenuous.
	Can you tell me a little bit what you mean by that?
	I mean, is that just a $20 word for bullshit?
	I just want to make sure that we're on the same page.
	Well, it is a $20 word for bullshit.
	Okay, I just wanted to check. I mean, you don't have to be that polite, but...
	But I just wanted to know where you were coming from with that, right?
	Because it's... Yeah, it's exploited nonsense, right?
	It's basically what it is.
	It's telling a child, you have an imaginary disease...
	And my whispering in your ear will cure you, but you've got to pay me for the rest of your life.
	I mean, that would be illegal in any other context, right?
	I can't tell people they have an imaginary disease and then sell them sugar water as a cure for the rest of their lives, right?
	If they come every week and listen to me drone on and on and put money in the collection plate, that would be illegal, right?
	If you're going to say, you have a disease, you have to prove something, right?
	But this disease called original sin or The distance from God or the risk of hell.
	I mean, it's a completely imaginary ailment.
	It is a completely fictitious ailment, and the cure is completely fictitious as well.
	I mean, if we apply even the basic standards of fraud detection in the medical field, let alone science, let alone reason, to this, they would be revealed as a parasitical con man preying on the most vulnerable population of all, which is the children.
	I totally agree.
	I totally agree. I think it's silly.
	I think a lot of the ideas tend to be so much bullshit because there's just really no proof that Noah had an ark built.
	I mean, there's just really no historical proof.
	And I think a lot of the religionists try to Rationalize or even justify their claims because that's all they can dance around with, right?
	I mean, that's the only saving grace they have for them.
	That's the only thing that they've got to work with.
	So I think it's very juvenile for them to continue this age-old discussion of, well, religion is important in society.
	No, it isn't. I mean, there are lots of things that are important in society, but religion isn't exactly one of them.
	And we can do away with a lot of these old superstitions and a lot of these old nonsensical ideas because we have evolved and we can learn about ourselves without just diverting our attention into this whole realm of religion, which Makes absolutely no sense to me.
	Well, I mean, maybe we have a different opinion on this, and you can tell me what you think, but you say it's sort of juvenile and this and that, or irrational, but it's not from the standpoint of parasitism, right?
	I mean, if you can convince people that they've got an illness that only your magical words can cure, so they better give you money for the rest of their life, it's not...
	It's immoral, of course, but it's not juvenile or irrational or disingenuous to continue that practice.
	I mean, it's highly, highly profitable to frighten children into paying you money for the rest of their life.
	It's a huge, huge con business, right?
	I mean, so what they're doing is entirely rational from an amoral resource-grabbing standpoint, right?
	Yeah, that's true.
	That's true. It's nothing to do with Jesus for heaven's sake, right?
	It's nothing to do with the ethics.
	It's nothing to do with God.
	Right? It's nothing to do with those things.
	It's to do with, give me the goddamn money and give me the children.
	The reason the priests get involved in marriages is to make sure that they get their hands on the children.
	And I don't just mean that with the predictable, tangible way, but religion knows that it has to get its hands on the children because it's always one generation away from being consigned to the trashy of all of the other parasitical lives that have preyed upon humanity.
	Yeah. You know, and, you know, I am disappointed with, you know, I will say when I was growing up, I was, my mother came from, you know, from the Catholic church side.
	And she grew up.
	Basically, you know, Greek Orthodox.
	And she believes in this little fairy tale fiction, you know, that Jesus is there, that, you know, this whole fairy tale nonsense, I guess.
	And then, you know, I think when I was about maybe three or four, you know, we switched over to the Lutheran side.
	And probably the only good thing I can remember about Lutheranism...
	Probably the only good thing that had going for itself was the fact that you didn't have to confess your sins probably to a priest.
	You could confess as a congregation, and that was it.
	Probably the only good thing that came out of it.
	But when you look at the whole system of itself, it's just totally broken.
	I think the whole...
	The religious angle of it is just totally broken because you've seen – when you hear so many stories about child molestation going on in the Catholic Church, and you hear so many stories about how people finally came to terms with the fact that what they were told when they were a child was a lie, that the world doesn't work the way they were told it was going to work.
	Then you've got to come to the realization that there's no logic in everything that you were taught at a very young age.
	So I find the religious arguments to be not even a mile within of being persuasive, if you understand where I'm going with this.
	Well, I think I do, and I'm obviously not trying to cast your mother into this kid, right?
	But when you say the whole thing is broken, I'm not sure what you mean.
	I mean, it's profitable, right?
	I mean, they don't have to make anything.
	They don't have to produce something.
	No, I'm not saying...
	...and pillage them senseless for the rest of their lives, and parents hand over their children, seemingly gladly and willingly, for this indoctrination, rather than face the pain of being lied to themselves.
	So it's...
	It's only broken if you think it has something to do with ethics and the existence of God.
	It has nothing to do with ethics and the existence of God.
	Organized religion, in particular, but religion as a whole, has nothing to do with the Bible.
	It has nothing to do with the existence of God.
	It has nothing to do...
	I mean, if you look at how much the Catholic Church, just to pick on an obvious example, has mutated in terms of its ethics over the past, let's say, hundred years, if not thousand...
	Clearly, it's like, what bullshit do I need to tell you so you'll give me your children?
	What bullshit do I need to tell you so you'll give me money?
	Right? It has nothing to do With Jesus and God and Noah and proof and ontology and St.
	Augustine. It has nothing to do with any of these things.
	It is what bullshit do I need to tell you so that you'll give me some goddamn money and the lines will change and everything will change depending on what the current social flavor is, right?
	So religion will first oppose the sun-centered version of the universe because it's unpopular, and people will give you money if you oppose it.
	I agree with you.
	If it becomes popular, they will switch and say, oh, now it's popular, so now we agree with it.
	We will oppose evolution.
	Oh, now evolution has become popular?
	Well, we'll make friends with it.
	Why?
	Because it has no principles other than give me the goddamn money.
	I agree with you, Steph, and I'm just using the Catholic Church and Christianity as an example of how religion No,
	I understand that.
	I understand that. I know it's a concept, right?
	But what I'm saying is that if a con is working, it's not broken.
	If a counterfeiter is getting people to take his money as if it's real money, the counterfeiting In fact, it's very successful.
	It's exactly what it should be doing relative to the standards of counterfeiting, right?
	Well, no.
	I think you misunderstand me.
	When I mean broken, I mean broken in the sense that It's trying to, you know, you're right, it has become a success in terms of Being very bureaucratic, being very powerful and whatnot.
	Look at Lou Rockwell, for example.
	He believes in this nonsense.
	He really believes that the Vatican is all about the free market.
	Tom Woods wrote a book about how the Catholic Church brought about free markets or some bullshit that he was peddling, which I don't even buy into it, but that's neither here nor there.
	But sorry, this is something that, and again, I have no idea what these men's private beliefs are at all, at all, right?
	But libertarianism as a whole gets a lot of money from religious groups, right?
	Right, they do. So, I mean, there's money.
	I'm not saying that, look, I get money for what I say, so I'm not saying that that automatically makes everyone corrupt, right?
	But it's pretty significant.
	I don't know of libertarians who are staunch atheists who don't also provide some sort of nod towards religion as something, you know, I don't believe in God, but religion is a good force for virtue and freedom, blah, blah, blah.
	But, you know, there is a financial component that is involved.
	And, I mean, the difference is, I mean, obviously I could be taken to task with this, and I'm certainly happy to be done so.
	The difference is that I took a very unpopular stance originally and haven't changed my perspective since the very beginning.
	I think Podcast 13 was all the reasons why there isn't any such thing as a daily event.
	And so, and also that, you know, it's corruption from start to end.
	And I wasn't making any money at the beginning, right?
	I just stated my opinions.
	And yet, of course, the people who are involved in the political and religious aspects of libertarianism, there is a strong financial component that they knew about from the very beginning.
	Does that have an effect on their beliefs?
	Well, economists would say almost inevitably, though it is not an absolute gauge, of course.
	Yeah, I totally agree.
	But there was a part of me that, you know, for me being religious at one point, I came to realize that after the disappointment that I had gone through as a child when it came to Lutheranism, it just really made me realize that everything that I was told was a lie.
	And, you know, the whole thing about, you know, if you die, you go to heaven, that you're going to be living on beyond this world, that you're going to be, your soul's going to be going into some sort of a realm, if you will.
	I just don't believe in that.
	I believe, I think it's so stupid.
	Well, sorry, can I interrupt you for just a sec, because I mean, I want to go back to what you said, which I think made me a little harshly.
	You said that everything that you were told as a child was a lie?
	Well, everything I was told when I was a child when it came to my religious beliefs, yeah, it was...
	Well, but you said that your mother was religious, right?
	Well, she is still to this day to a certain point.
	She is religious. Okay. I would say that...
	I mean, I'm not going to make a big argument for this, right?
	This is my perspective, my opinion.
	You can see if it makes any sense to you at all.
	I would hesitate to say that your mother was lying, because she simply may not have been exposed to rational arguments against what she believes.
	When you were a kid, she just may never have heard them, right?
	Like, it's not like a guy's an idiot.
	I mean, a guy's an idiot now for thinking the world is flat, right?
	A guy's not an idiot in the 12th century for thinking the world is flat, right?
	Because he's just never seen the arguments, he's never whatever, right?
	So I would say that, in my opinion, prior to exposure to rational principles, people's thinking is kind of neutral.
	It's kind of in a state of nature.
	It's just inherited from whatever came before, which is inherited from whatever came before.
	But I don't think that we gain the responsibility of truth and falsehood until we are exposed to better or worse arguments, right?
	So, I mean, like you, I was raised religious, and I was...
	In morning school, I was in the church choir.
	I went a couple of times a week to church.
	I was never particularly down with the whole belief system, but I was definitely raised that way.
	And I don't think I would...
	I read a book, I can't remember the author's name, called Atheism, The Case Against God, which had arguments that were just like, okay, I can't dispute that, I can't dispute that, I can't dispute that.
	And so I really only gained the capacity To tell the truth about religion once I understood the lies about religion.
	And before I understood the lies about religion, it wasn't really true or false, if that makes any sense.
	It was just in a state of pre-knowledge, if that means anything to you?
	Yeah, it does.
	It does. Like, I don't think your mom was like, there is no God, but I'm going to tell...
	I mean, I don't know, maybe she was, but I doubt it.
	Your mom wasn't like, well, I know there is no God, but I'm going to lie to him and tell him that there is.
	Well, I'm just going by my perspective on this.
	I mean, I... Because that's all I can do by going by my own personal experience and my own feelings on this.
	Well, there's something you can do now, and I don't know if you have or haven't, right?
	But when you have better arguments, which obviously you have now, against the existence of gods and gremlins and gooblins and things, then you sit down with your mom and you say...
	Look, you believe that there's this God.
	My strong perspective is that there isn't, but I'm going to lay these arguments out in front of you so that you can evaluate them and see whether there is or there isn't, right?
	Because, I mean, we don't want people to labor under error, right?
	Because we assume that the truth makes you happy and free, although it's not always an easy ride to get there.
	So, now, if your mother listens to your arguments, thinks through them, processes them, comes back with rebuttals, and you have that, then, right, obviously she may have a great argument for why there is a God, in which case we'll all go back to church, right?
	Or, she may not, in which case, then the responsibility to me exists for someone.
	Once they've been exposed to better arguments, the responsibility exists for integrity, right?
	Because, I mean, sure, your mother taught you that Honesty and integrity were virtues when you were a kid, right?
	So when you bring her arguments that may go against what she believes, honesty and integrity, which I'm sure she told you were values and not subjective but objective values, she should then display those same values, ideally, right?
	And maybe not right away, it may take a while, but she should practice what she preached to you as a child in terms of I think I would have a tough time putting that label until I sat down with her and went through the arguments.
	Fair enough. Fair enough.
	I just wanted to pick your...
	I just wanted to actually pick your brain with a subject because it's been a subject I've been wrestling with for a very long time now.
	But I was just...
	I guess I'm sort of all along the lines of between the agnostic and atheist side and And it's been a very big struggle for me for many years to decide whether or not there's actually any kind of truth whatsoever in this.
	And I totally sympathize with that difficulty.
	I know you want to stop, and I just want to completely, completely sympathize with that difficulty.
	And I hope you understand that religion is specifically designed to be almost impossible to dislodge.
	It has been developed over tens of thousands of years.
	To be an infection that is almost impossible, or an addiction that is almost impossible to kill.
	It's like a drug that has been refined to be almost impossible to get out of your system.
	So it's not any weakness or any kind of...
	I'm not saying you think it is, but from my perspective, religion is a highly honed, invasive parasite.
	That gets into your head and alters your way of thinking and your relationship with reality.
	And unfortunately, it does a lot of time alter your personal relationships, if not inevitably, to the point where thinking for yourself puts you into a landmine in terms of your relationships with other people.
	And I've got a video called God is the Fear of Others, if you're interested.
	This is my perspective or argument, but it is very much designed to not get out, right?
	They design fish hooks with the barb at the end, so once the barb goes into the fishes, it stays, because otherwise it doesn't work.
	The fish hooks that didn't work that way ended up not being propagated because the fishermen all died of starvation.
	They could never land a fish. So it's designed like a dum-dum bullet.
	It's designed like a fish hook to do as much damage as possible and to be as impossible to get out as can be conceived of.
	So it is really, really hard I guess my next question for you, and I won't take up too much of your time, but Were you influenced, because of your thinking, were you ever influenced by George Carlin?
	I mean, he was totally atheist.
	I mean, he really was very much of an atheist, but I began to develop a very good amount of respect for him over the years.
	Was he a big influence on you?
	No, I certainly do respect a lot of the stuff that he said.
	A glowing kind of cynicism that really was a beautiful thing to see.
	And his cynicism around voting and religion and so on I think was fantastic.
	And he said in one of his videos, you think you have rights?
	You know, open up and look in your stupid little Wikipedia pages for Japanese internment camps in 1940s America and see whether you have rights or not.
	And when he says, you know, the people who say, well, if you don't vote, you can't complain.
	It's like, no, no, no. If you vote, you can't complain because you're part of the problem and you bought into the bullshit that voting is going to change something.
	So you can't complain if you thought it would fix something.
	And obviously it doesn't. So I think he's got a really, really ferocious, acidic kind of cynicism that actually I find is kind of like a rainbow, if that makes any sense.
	But no, I didn't actually have any exposure to George Carlin until my...
	Late 20s, I think.
	I just never ran across it.
	This is, of course, back in the dawn of time when there was no YouTube, no video sharing sites.
	I mean, to get a George Carlin video, you would have to go to some store, get a catalog, mail.
	I mean, these things, certainly he wasn't played on Canadian TV and certainly not on British TV. So I think that I can't remember when I first heard about him.
	But it was a long time before I actually got to see any of his videos.
	I guess it's interesting because another person that I've come to respect a little bit would be...
	I don't know if you've ever seen Penn& Teller bullshit.
	No, it's been promoted on the site a couple of times, but I've not seen it.
	It's actually a very good show.
	In fact, I have all the DVDs, in fact.
	It's actually a great show, in fact.
	They were talking about video game violence, in which Penn basically demolished beautifully this whole notion that video game violence basically has a way of supposedly committing our youth to commit actual violence after they played a video game, a very violent shooter-up game, if you will.
	So they did a great job with that, but they've had...
	I think they had another guest on there, and he's been on the show a number of times.
	Does the name James Randi mean anything to you?
	Oh, we love the Randi.
	Absolutely. I have used James Randi for quite some time.
	He's the editor, if I remember rightly, of Skeptic Magazine, of which I've only read a grand total of one copy, much to my shame.
	I know that he's had this million dollar for anyone who can prove psychic abilities out.
	I have a lot of respect for him.
	Oh, he's great. I mean, because whenever I meet some dippy person, often a woman, though that was probably some self-selecting group, but someone who'd say, I have psychic abilities, it's like, oh, fantastic.
	Let's test it. Contact the James Randian.
	I'll split the 500,000 with you.
	And suddenly it was like, well, you know, it doesn't work that way.
	It's just like, oh come on, there's a million dollars here.
	I'm not supposed to use it for gain.
	I love that stuff because it really just sort of brings out the bullshit in people and gets them gone pretty quickly.
	Well, I really appreciate this stuff.
	I've been I'm thinking a lot about my spiritual beliefs and reevaluating them.
	I'm coming closer to more of the atheist side than anything else.
	And, you know, it's one of those things, and it probably will not please my mother at all, but oh well.
	I mean, that's just the way it is, right?
	But I really want to thank you.
	Thank you for addressing this.
	You've been a real champ with us.
	Thank you very much. That's very kind of you to say.
	I mean, you are absolutely the hero in your own journey towards the light from the superstitions that so many of us inherited from history.
	It's not from bad parents who just wanted to do bad things.
	It's just the collective history of what people were taught, of the lack of information and better arguments that people had, which you and I and many others are trying to use this new I think it's a bit of a quicksand because it's kind of like,
	well, okay, I'm free from the organized stuff.
	I don't know where the reasoning is fully, so if I were you, my opinion again, I would not pause too much in the comfortable quicksand oasis of agnosticism before continuing.
	Because I think it is in a way where the least rationality is, because the greatest shadows are where the greatest sunlight is.
	And when you've got the arguments that get you away from the sort of prejudicial religion of your childhood, then you already have the reasons.
	And there's no, I think to me, stopping halfway is almost the most irrational.
	But I can totally understand why it's appealing.
	So I've got a video.
	They bought my videos for free.
	And it's called Agnosticism, the Incomprehensible Halo, which I hope will help.
	And I will post...
	In the Skype chat window, I had a debate about agnosticism.
	Let me just bring it up, and I will post it.
	With a fellow named Bill, who was an agnostic.
	We get them here sometimes.
	Hang on one second. Yeah.
	Green furry gods agnosticism debate.
	Yes, let me just post that link here.
	You might want to listen to that.
	Again, does this close the case?
	Not for many people, but...
	It's not a bad place to start if you want to start looking at some of the challenges of the agnostic position.
	Anyway, I hope you will get a chance for that.
	That having been said, I think that we will stop here unless anybody has a completely yearning-burning, relatively shorty-short question to end.
	Last chance, last chance, last chance!
	Yeah. You know, you've become quickly one of my big heroes in the movement too, Stefan.
	I mean, next to Ron Paul and, well, next to, well, you're actually my second hero and Sheldon Richman is my biggest hero.
	Who? Sheldon Richman?
	Oh, cool.
	Can you email me a site or something?
	I mean, always good to know the others who I haven't heard of before.
	He writes for the Future of Freedom Foundation.
	He's also the editor of the Ideas on Liberty, the Freeman.
	At the Foundation for Economic Education, which is mainly a – it is a free market education center or think tank, if you will, but it's more on economics than actual personal liberty.
	But they both do a lot of – some discussions on personal liberty, like free speech, but mainly on economics.
	Yeah. Yeah, that's Sheldon Richmond's blog site.
	And he's more along the lines of an agorist-type libertarian.
	But I love his arguments.
	He's one of the best and probably one of the biggest thinkers.
	In fact, he's an atheist. Maybe I'll try and lure him into doing an interview before he finds out how controversial this show is.
	I'll just try and lure him in and get him down on paper before.
	Sheldon is one of the best writers in the movement.
	He wrote a – he basically wrote a very incredible piece on this nonsense about the tax protester movement.
	And I've been totally against a lot of the tax honesty nonsense that there was no law that – there's no law that compels you to pay an income tax.
	And he basically debunked that argument.
	And he – because you have a number of tax protesters who say, well, there is no law that compels you to pay an income tax.
	And that's through the groups like We the People Foundation, like Bob Schultz, who believes that there's no law that compels people to pay an income tax.
	But he totally debunks the argument itself, which I thought was brilliant.
	That's a pretty important one for people to get a handle on because we lose some people that way, right?
	Yeah, so... But he totally debunks that argument, and he also debunks the global warming myths, too.
	So he's written some extensive articles, and he's also...
	I never liked the there's no law compelling us to pay taxes, because the corollary or the shadow of that argument was that if they pass the law, then we should, right?
	And that to me is like, well, it's all fiction, so whether they've written down the piece of fiction or not, right?
	It's like saying there's a huge difference between Right.
	Right. So...
	But you should read his stuff.
	I mean, he's just amazing.
	And he is just probably one of the biggest heroes in the movement.
	He's pretty much a very big chunk of why my ideas are formed, you know, the way I write and everything.
	He's been one of my biggest influences.
	And now you've become one of my biggest influences, too.
	So I thank you for that.
	That's high price. And thank you so much for the link.
	I will look into his stuff when I get time.
	Because I certainly do love reading new like-minded things.
	It's funny because he's also written a book called The Separation of School and State, How to Liberate America's Families, and calling for separation of education and And from the government, that is. Just getting the government out of the whole education sphere and bring it back into the realm of the free market.
	And he's also wrote a book called Tethered Citizen, How to Abolish the Welfare State.
	He wrote an excellent book on that.
	It's one of his best books.
	Well, thank you very much.
	I will definitely look into what he's got, and I look forward to reading his stuff.
	It's a type race if he's your big hero, so I will absolutely look into it.
	Yeah, he's outstanding.
	He's awesome. In fact, I've had him.
	He and I are very good friends, by the way, so he is a very good...
	I'm a very good speaker.
	So you're kind of wedged like a pastrami in an atheist sandwich, right?
	You're the agnostic pastrami in the atheist sandwich of he and I, so good, excellent.
	The jaws of reason will close slowly, but gently.
	Yeah, you know, I've, you know, I think it's interesting because, you know, I guess many years ago, I would never have dared, you know, to question the whole religion thing.
	I mean, that was just something I just could never do when I was younger, but...
	As I get older, you know, and I started getting more wisdom and more experience, and I came to come to realize that not everything can be solved in a book.
	You know, I don't care if the Bible is the number one book solved in the United States.
	You know, it's one of those things where it's just nonsensical.
	You know, I mean, I I really refuse to support any kind of religious doctrine.
	It says you have to believe this or else it's either all the way or you're not of this path.
	There's none of this only one true way nonsense.
	I totally think that's totally silly and absurd.
	Right, right. Now, if you don't mind, we had one person who wanted to time in for a quick question, and usually that means a huge question.
	Somewhere over the rainbow.
	You had a question? Yeah.
	Hi, it's Ofer.
	Yeah, go ahead. Cool, just testing the mic.
	Yeah, so I've been meaning to go see a psychotherapist for a while, and I've finally gotten the time and motivation together, but I have no idea on a pure practical level Literally, how to find one.
	I mean, I suppose if I search in the yellow pages, I can find one, but there's no criteria to distinguish one from the other that I know of.
	So I was wondering, I know you've been to one and you're married to one, so I figured you're a good person to ask.
	Yeah, I appreciate that.
	First of all, congratulations on taking the step.
	I know it really is like jumping off a cliff and hoping you'll grow wings before the jaws of rocks close around your head, but I really do appreciate and respect for what it's worth, the courage of taking that step.
	Do you have a doctor that you see?
	Nope. Excellent.
	I'm allergic to the medical system.
	It's so bureaucratic, so many forms that I'm pretty healthy.
	I've never really had any problems except for appendicitis a bunch of years ago one time.
	So I pretty much just ignore that whole aspect of things until something goes tragically.
	You're from the States, right?
	So you're one of these tragically uninsured people that they're trying out.
	It's like, yeah, most of the uninsured people are just young people who aren't sick.
	But anyway, let's talk about that another time.
	Do you know anyone who's done any kind of therapy?
	That's the thing. I'm a Free State Project member, so I recently moved to New Hampshire.
	So I only know so many people, and most of them have moved here recently, too.
	And we've never really talked about psychotherapy.
	We've mostly talked about liberty.
	So... There's a couple of them close enough to you to ask.
	You've gone to therapy because they're not barricading themselves in front of a courthouse.
	But anyway, we'll come back to that another time.
	Okay, so you don't have a doctor.
	You don't know anyone who does.
	Clearly, the yellow pages and this and that can be useful.
	My suggestion is...
	Go to someone who's got some accreditation.
	Obviously, that's why I don't do therapy.
	I have no accreditation for it at all, right?
	But I would say, you know, go to somebody who's got accreditation.
	I would look for someone who has maybe not just a sole practitioner, because if you go to somebody who's got a clinic, then they're going to have people specialized in different things.
	And so you could ask, you know, as opposed to one person that's going to say, I do it all.
	And maybe they do. But I would say that, um, go to a clinic, if they've got, you know, doctors on call or therapists on call, that would be good.
	By clinic, you mean an office with multiple therapists?
	Sorry, go ahead. By clinic, you mean an office with multiple therapists?
	Yes. Yes, sorry. Yeah, that's what I mean.
	Okay. Um, there may be a referral agency I would certainly expect that in the free market but nothing is for certain in the modern world.
	Sorry? I would certainly expect that in the free market.
	Right, right, but we don't know whether that's legal or not, right?
	Some regulation or another, right?
	But that might not be a bad place.
	All of that having failed, you know, the advice that I give in this area is to really, really trust your gut, right?
	You are the consumer.
	You are placing...
	Your heart in someone else's hands, right?
	So if you get any kind of uneasy feeling, even in the call, right, then I would say, I'm just shopping around, you know, thank you for your time, and, you know, slither off like a courageous cat into the night, right?
	But I would really, you know, really trust your instincts.
	You know, there's...
	I mean, it can be harmful, right, to spend a long time in deep therapy with someone Who is not working for you at an emotional level for whatever reason.
	So really, really trust your instincts and assume that you know how it's going to go based on the first, you know, that sort of blank thing, right?
	The first 10, 20, 30 seconds.
	Do you get a warm, cozy feeling?
	Do you feel safe? Do you feel comfortable?
	Do you feel enthusiastic? Do you respect the person?
	You can pick up on that kind of stuff, I think, pretty quickly.
	I know what you mean. Sorry?
	I know what you mean and I'm pretty good at that.
	Oh good, okay. I'm going to go on about that.
	There's also the issue of what criteria is relevant.
	Because I know you've talked in the past about, for example, your therapist was not necessarily an atheist or an anarchist and that those were not particularly important traits for the purpose you had in mind.
	Yeah, my dentist I'm sure is a statist, right?
	But they can still drill my teeth and I'm happy that if I had to wait for the atheist, anarchist, the fully self-actualized or partially self-actualized dentist, My teeth would probably all fall out waiting for it, right?
	So, I've mentioned this in a show before...
	But psychology is a little closer to a dentist where it doesn't matter what they believe as long as they understand the mouth.
	Yeah, no, I was just going to make that point.
	You're absolutely right. It is not as value-neutral as a shoemaker or a dentist.
	I know that...
	I mean, the woman I saw was definitely mystical or mystically inclined.
	She wasn't like, you know, a complete bonghead, but she was mystically inclined.
	But what worked for me was that she had an incredible respect for the images and the power of the unconscious and respect for dreams and all these kinds of things, which as an objectivist rationalist, I didn't really have much connection with.
	So she had a strength when I had a weakness.
	Now, I would say I had a strength when she had a weakness, which was philosophy versus mysticism, but we weren't treating her.
	She wasn't the client.
	So I focused on where her strengths were very good in terms of where my, it's hard to say deficiency because I mean it wasn't like I knew and I just didn't know what I didn't know.
	So where I had a deficiency and she had a strength, it fit really well.
	And that's really what I would look for in terms of that.
	Although it's hard to know a priority what my deficiency is, which is sort of the point of going.
	Right. That's an excellent question.
	Your deficiency might be overanalyzing things.
	I'm just kidding. Actually, I believe partially it is, yeah.
	Well, because that's kind of what you're doing, right?
	The yes, but, well, what if this and what if that, what if the other, right?
	So you've got a kind of real peace, receptivity, and...
	Openness, right? Because if you have a kind of nitpicky brain, Lord knows I understand that.
	I have the same one, right? But if you have a kind of nitpicky brain, you probably want to find somebody who's really, you know, relaxed and open and receptive because that may be something that you need to develop more.
	Okay. And the last sub-question.
	Are there any particular...
	You mentioned how there are different sort of specialities.
	I don't know much about, I mean I know the difference between psychologists and psychiatrists is you can prescribe drugs, but within the talking therapy domain, I don't know anything about variation of abilities.
	Right, right. Now, again, I'm way out on the limb here, so do your own research, but this is sort of my knowledge as it stands, which is by no means expert, but this is what I sort of understand.
	In the studies that have been done on the various approaches to talk therapy, and there are lots of different approaches to talk therapy, there does not seem to be one that regularly comes out ahead.
	Now, there has been some serious skepticism about Freudian and Jungian therapies, and unless you're actually made of gold and diamonds, it may not, because that's long-term therapy, right?
	That's like years, right?
	So, there has been, but other studies have shown that the Freudian method has been somewhat effective, so there doesn't seem to be one particular school of therapy that is hands out ahead.
	Now, the exception for that is that if you are, like if you have a particular phobia, then Freudian therapy is probably not the best fit, right?
	Then you want to go to somebody who's got very specific graduated exposure phobic approaches, right?
	Where they, you know, you're afraid of spiders, so you look at pictures of spiders, you gradually escalate, right?
	Talking about your mother, if you're afraid of spiders, may not be the best approach, right?
	So if you're going for, you know, general mental health tune-up and happiness, Yes.
	Aiming, then there's not one particular.
	I, myself, am slightly more biased to the cognitive school of therapy, which is to say that we have these core beliefs that are unconscious to us, and we end up experiencing these feelings, and we don't know the thoughts that produce them,
	and the purpose is to discover the thoughts that produce the feelings, and that's really the purpose of therapy, is to uncover our own core beliefs and automatic thinking to the point that Where we feel something and we can trace it back as to the thought and the stimulus that provoked it and sort of learn to change how we respond to stimuluses so that we're less automatically driven by the past.
	That's a really brief and probably not very accurate summation.
	Well, it's also very similar to what Ayn Rand has talked about.
	Yeah, for sure. I mean, Brandon, I think, is in that camp.
	Alice Miller is not far from that camp, although she's a little bit more experiential.
	But I would certainly ask about that.
	If you've read books on psychology that you find to be valuable, that they can be reasonably expected to know, real-time relationships not counting, then I would say, you know, I like Alice Miller's or Nathaniel Brandon's or whoever it is that you like.
	I like their approach.
	What do you think or have you ever read these books or whatever?
	That can be helpful.
	I wouldn't necessarily be a final determiner, but it can be helpful for sure.
	But the fundamental thing is you are the customer.
	You are entering into a very important trust relationship and you really have to feel secure and safe and happy and comfortable with the person.
	So it really is about reading your emotional response to the person to find whoever.
	And you don't have to have a session.
	You can do that, I think, to some degree over the phone.
	Okay. Just so you know, I did actually buy the Psychology of Self-Esteem, Nathaniel Brandon, on your recommendation.
	Oh, what did you think? Have you had a chance?
	Not yet, but I'll probably be doing that shortly.
	Yeah, I mean, I think that...
	I don't know how that stood the test of time.
	It's been a while since I've read it, although I did read it about...
	Six years ago, but I just thought it was, it certainly awoke me to the life of the deep mind in a way that I just had no idea of before.
	So I've been very grateful to that book for many years.
	Yep. I'm definitely going to check it out soon.
	All right. Well, thank you very much for your time.
	You're very welcome. And if you get a chance, do let us know how it goes.
	Somebody posted in the board chat room, I will repost it over on Skype.
	There is an article on how to look for a therapist, which probably contradicts everything I'm saying.
	Alright, I'll check it out on the board.
	Somebody asked if I did ever change therapists.
	Not once I got into therapy.
	I did go and see a therapist a while before.
	I've seen the one who I stayed with and it was really not good.
	It was really not a good experience.
	I remember it was a big office building downtown.
	He had a very nice office. It was an older gentleman.
	And I was talking to him about my history and why I wanted to do some work.
	And I thought he was originally writing stuff.
	At least you could see on the back of his pen, he was doodling.
	He was doodling.
	And I thought, you know what? I don't think that's exactly where I want to go in terms of therapy.
	And he actually...
	You know, if I'm going to go to a personal fitness trainer, I don't want them to be 300 pounds.
	You could call me prejudicial.
	I just don't feel that comfortable with it.
	And this guy just didn't seem very happy at all.
	And if he was dissociated enough to doodle, then he obviously wasn't very committed.
	And so for me, that was just, I just didn't go back to him.
	And I sort of kept looking.
	I can even see what he was doodling.
	Little birds. I think he did an airplane.
	I just grabbed that piece of paper and say, are you kidding me?
	150 bucks an hour?
	Maybe you unwittingly walked into some kind of scientific study where they wanted to compare people's reactions to people taking notes.
	Right, or maybe he was drawing that tortoise in the comic books to find out if he had artistic talent because he was tired of being a therapist, or maybe it was just an art class and I was confused.
	You know you're in trouble if you grab the notepad and it's the list of alternative careers he's considering.
	Right, janitor, nude model, right, absolutely.
	Alright, I'll get off now, but thank you very much for the help.
	No, thanks. That's a great question.
	And, you know, just remember, I'm certainly no expert or even credited, so these are just my personal experiences and thoughts about the process.
	And I hope that you find the right person.
	You find the right person that is...
	It is fantastic.
	It is an electric fit.
	You know, there are those artists who don't flower until they get the right manager or the right muse.
	There are those bands that have those crappy careers until they get together.
	There are artists who just don't flower until they get the right model or muse.
	And the amount of emotional and intellectual and spiritual growth That you can get from a great therapist is staggering.
	It is really worth being picky because the opportunity costs that you're losing are significant if you get one that's just okay.
	I definitely suspect that's the case.
	Yeah, it really is. A great coach can make a great athlete even out of an average person.
	I think it's really, really an important thing to And, you know, keep alive to it as you go forward, right?
	I mean, if you're in the therapy session.
	And if you don't like something about the therapy session, it's so important.
	And, okay, one last thing and then I'll stop.
	But it's so important in the therapy session to say what you don't like.
	Like, I'm not happy with how things are going or I didn't like that moment just there.
	Because that's really important.
	The therapy is not just about talking about what happened to you when you were a kid.
	And that's an important aspect, but it really is, you know, this annoying RTR stuff, right, that I keep talking about.
	I mean, part of that, the idea for that came out of therapy, which is where I had to be alive to what was happening.
	This was really the second year of therapy for me, where I, you know, cleared a lot of the decks of the past rubble, but it was about how do I feel in the moment, because I just didn't have that skill.
	I didn't have that sensitivity to how I felt in the moment.
	And it's really important.
	People are like, oh, I don't like this particular aspect of therapy.
	And they just kind of grit their teeth and say, well, maybe it's part of the process that I don't understand.
	You know, like they're being in some sort of boot camp for the brain.
	But, you know, it's really, really important to express what you think and feel in the moment with your therapist.
	It is obviously designed to be a safe environment for For that kind of self-expression.
	And I think that's really, really important.
	That can make the difference between good and great therapy, is the degree to which you commit to honesty in the moment with your therapist.
	Right, because that's what's necessary for self-knowledge, which is the entire purpose of going.
	Right, and therapy is about the future.
	It's not about the past, in my experience, in my opinion.
	It's about the future. It's not about the past.
	And so in the future, you want to clear off the past, right?
	But in the future, you want to be sensitive to what's actually going on for you in the moment in your life because that's why your instincts and your deep brain and all that kind of useful ecosystem stuff really can help you launch forward.
	And you want to practice that in the room.
	I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I agree.
	I don't give a damn about the past except for how it can help me improve my future.
	Exactly, exactly.
	Or how it's hindering my future.
	Right, right. All right.
	Well, thank you. That's an excellent question to end on.
	I really do appreciate that.
	I know a lot of people have a number of questions about that, and ultimately, of course, nobody can answer it except you, but those are just some thoughts that I had about my experience with it, and I hope that that's of use.
	You don't have to be qualified.
	I mean, you ask a friend which car dealer you want to go to or which mechanic you want to go to, not because they're a mechanic themselves, but Because they're honest.
	Or rather, their interests are aligned with yours and they have the best understanding of what you're looking for.
	No, I appreciate that. And I know you know that.
	But the reason I do all of this annoying qualification is because, I mean, some people would just listen to one show.
	Right, so, and I want people who just listen to one.
	I mean, there's stuff that I will claim to have expertise in, for sure, right?
	I mean, some of the philosophical stuff, I hope that I'm an expert in UPB. The theory cannot necessarily, always the application, but I put the qualifications down just because if somebody says, oh, you should listen to the second half of this podcast, it's got some really good advice on how to choose a therapist.
	I don't want anyone who just listens to a snippet to think that I have some sort of expertise in That is formal in the area, right?
	So I know for you, you know that, right?
	But I'm just always concerned about the people who are doing the bungee jump podcast listening, so that's why.
	And I know it's annoying, but I just always wanted to be clear about that.
	Even if it was annoying, I've heard your critics go at you, so I mean, I know what is necessary to survive in that environment.
	It sucks. I'm glad I don't have to do it.
	Right, right. Hey Nave, it's me, Todd.
	I just wanted to unplug here for a second and I'll get back to what you were doing and stuff.
	Sorry about that.
	But I just wanted to say thank you for the kind comments in the chat.
	I really appreciate that.
	Oh, it's my pleasure. I mean, I know you're in a tough place.
	Yeah, so... Yeah, I really appreciate it.
	I hope we can be good friends by...
	Yeah, so...
	Hopefully I'll get to one of these barbecues one day.
	Fantastic. I think we've actually helped someone we can add to the manwich, so that's really good.
	Alright, well thank you everybody so much.
	I really do appreciate your time and attention and your wonderful support of what it is that we're all doing as a community here.
	And I hope that you have an excellent, spectacular, wonderful week.
	And have yourselves a great deal of fun in the summer here.
	For those of you who, like me, live in a climate that occasionally turns and bitch slaps you across the face with fingers made of icicles.
	So enjoy the good weather while you can.
	And have yourselves a great, great week.
	Bye! We'll talk to you soon.
	And thank you again, everyone, so much for giving me the financial and emotional support to get down to Philly and do what I think was a A pretty damn good job.

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