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Oct. 11, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:45:46

1479 Sunday Show October 11, 2009

What I have to be grateful for, why Christians are so happy, and a philosophy of addiction...

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	Well, thank you everybody so much for joining us shortly after 4 p.m.
	October the 11th, 2009.
	You see, it is 9, 10, 11.
	It is a good hand of cards for people who don't know much about cards, like, well, me.
	So I hope you're having a wonderful week.
	I hope that your life is going beautifully and excitingly.
	It is Thanksgiving Day weekend up here in Canada, so a nice three-day weekend.
	And I was just at a brunch with my wife and daughter, and it's interesting when you become a parent, especially with a very young child, a brunch consists of one of you grabbing something to eat while you amuse, but the other amuses the baby or the child, and then vice versa, and then Izzy wanted out of her seat.
	She's like a little torpedo boat flying around the restaurant these days, so we can't really sit with her for very long.
	So it is a kind of very different experience than the long leisurely adult chats that we used to have, but still completely wonderful.
	And we were just talking about things to be grateful for, things that I'm grateful for, and just wanted to share them with you.
	I think it's important to express gratitude in the face of the challenges that philosophers or philosophically minded people have in the world.
	Casting aside all of those challenges, which can be stressful and difficult and problematic, I think it's really, really important to be grateful.
	I'm grateful, of course, for my family.
	I mean, a happy family, a joyful place to be is, to me, the most beautiful thing in the world.
	It is an immense gift and treasure to have my wife and my daughter in my life.
	A joy beyond compare.
	And I tell her that absolutely every day.
	I want to make sure that both Izzy and my wife feel loved and worshipped and treasured and nurtured and cared for and entertained as best I can.
	And that is something to be enormously grateful for.
	I had a lot of relationships before I settled down, so to speak, before I met the right person.
	And therapy had a lot to do with the improvements In that sense.
	But it's not something that I take for granted.
	You know, there's nothing in life that I see as an inevitable unfolding of what came before.
	And so the fact that I met my wife and, you know, we have the marriage that we have and we have the daughter that we have, I just feel so grateful for that every day because there's absolutely no guarantee that it was going to happen.
	And so, you know, the readiness is all, as Hamlet says.
	So I hope that you will take heart If it's not in your life as yet, and prepare yourself for a great love, and if that great love is in your life and that happy family is in your life, then, you know, please, please treasure those people as much as you can.
	Open your heart to them as much as you can.
	Be vulnerable, be happy, be sad, be angry, be tearful, be joyful, be calm, be pleasant, be kind to the people in your life and great beauty and great peace and great joy.
	Will arise as a result.
	I'm quite sure of that.
	With the right people in your life, virtue rebounds, echoes and grows in your life.
	So that's something I have to be grateful for.
	I'm incredibly grateful for this community.
	You guys, you absolutely mean the world to me.
	I get requests for conversations from people and sometimes it can take me a little while to To accommodate people, and I'm sorry for that.
	It is a challenge to schedule these days.
	But I am so enormously grateful for this community, for the friendship, and the trust, and the openness, and the generosity, and the vulnerability, and the courage, and the honesty, and the criticisms, and the general hurly-burly of a mishmashed community devoted to reason and empiricism is a truly beautiful thing.
	To be a part of. I feel like coming to FDR is like Superman flying off to the North Pole to a well-populated fortress of non-solitude, almost from another world, almost from the future.
	But an absolutely crystalline place of beauty to be.
	And I just wanted to thank everybody who is in this conversation.
	You know, whether you're just listening alone, whether you're talking about it with friends, not about this show, but about the joys, the challenges, the beauty, the terrors, the excitements of A truly rich philosophical life, a life dedicated to courage and curiosity and honesty, virtue, strength. I just want to thank you who just listened.
	I want to thank you if you participate in the chat.
	I want to thank you if you participate in the forums.
	I want to thank you if you send me messages of criticism and encouragement.
	I treasure both equally and appreciate both equally.
	I obviously thank you if you Donate some of your hard-earned money.
	I know there have been people who've subscribed for a year or two.
	You know, the 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month.
	That means the world to me.
	I do not take that for granted.
	It doesn't just become, you know, like little gold coins rolling down a hill from some unknown place.
	I don't take it for granted.
	I take the subscriptions and the donations, but particularly the subscriptions With great seriousness.
	And I strive, I strive, I strive to create as much value as possible for that.
	And I really do appreciate those who subscribe and make all of this possible.
	And if there's anything that you think I can be doing better, please, I am wide open to feedback.
	Please do let me know. To the people who come up to sing and eat for the barbecues, I really appreciate that.
	I think as one lady referred to it, the Bataan death march we had this summer was actually quite a bit of fun.
	I'm grateful for that.
	I'm grateful for good health.
	It's nothing to take lightly.
	I'm grateful for that.
	I'm grateful to be living in the West.
	I'm grateful to be living in a culture that allows the conversations that we have.
	However begrudgingly and to whatever degree it may be angry or hostile towards certain aspects of this conversation, I'm enormously grateful that I live in a culture where this conversation is possible.
	And I believe that the gratitude is really due to the men and women in the past who have fought to fight back The nets or the curtains of darkness which so beshroud and besmirch the human mind of superstition, bigotry, ignorance, prejudice.
	Who beat back these descending curtains of ignorance to give us the glimpse of light that we can use to navigate ourselves by science, reason, evidence, logic, philosophy.
	I just... I mean, they can't hear us because they're dead and gone, most of them.
	But I just...
	If I could send a message in a bottle down the sticks to the afterlife...
	I would send a huge hug and a thank you for the challenges that they faced to help us to crack wide this hole in the roof to let the sun into the cave of ignorance and superstition and prejudice which for most of human history we have been mired in.
	So I have a huge appreciation to those who've gone before who have helped and who faced a far more challenging struggle than I think we ever will.
	Just as we hope those who will come after us We'll face less of a struggle because of our efforts than we do.
	And to be part of this chain that hoists the human condition, heavy and inert though it seems at times, up the cliff edge towards the light, out of the canyon, out of the abyss, out of the crevasse of history, to help hoist it a few notches higher towards the light is an incredible privilege.
	And I thank everyone who participates in it.
	I thank all of those who came before And I encourage all of those to come.
	So I have just such an enormous amount to be grateful for in this life.
	And so much of it has to do with you who listen, who have accepted the challenge.
	That does not come from me, obviously, just as philosophy in no way, shape or form comes from me or anyone else, but who've taken the challenge on within your own hearts to attempt to live extraordinary lives.
	Extraordinary lives.
	Lives dedicated to being honest first with ourselves, with others, with retaining curiosity sometimes in the face of hostility, with retaining a dedication to reason sometimes in the face of aggression.
	That is an extraordinary choice to make.
	It is counterintuitive in so many ways because we are trained to be conformist to power To speak truth to power, particularly among our fellow citizens, let's say, for want of a more accurate word, to speak truth to power,
	the power that flows horizontally across the underclass that we are relative to our political masters, to speak truth to the power that runs horizontally across the world, slave to slave, is an enormous challenge.
	It's very counterintuitive.
	It is not easy.
	Because if it were easy, everybody would do it.
	It's not easy. And it is an extraordinary thing to do.
	It is the equivalent of sailing over the horizon, armed only with a belief that the world is round, and on the edge of the world lies not a cliff edge or the edge of a turtle shell, but a new world and a new life and new possibilities.
	So I want to thank everybody who's taken That step has taken that courageous step to live an extraordinary life.
	A life that I believe we can look back on in our fading breaths with extraordinary pride.
	Simply because of the difficulty, the challenge, the scariness of speaking elemental and essential truths to the world.
	The need for honesty.
	Taxation is force.
	Relations are voluntary.
	Virtue is essential to love.
	Aggression, abuse is intolerable in relationships.
	The future peace of the world is to be built on the present peace in our relationships and to not settle for anything but peace and negotiation and goodwill.
	Virtue and love in our personal relationships.
	We are building a shining city out of our own hearts using our Souls as stones to build the city.
	It is an astounding thing to do.
	It is a beautiful thing to watch and I just so wanted to thank everybody who participates in this conversation.
	It is a truly glorious, glorious thing.
	We are like the ancient myths that there were beings of immense power who lifted the sun behind a chariot and lit up the world by thundering With heavenly horse-hoof beats over the roof of the world and I believe that is us.
	I believe that is us.
	And so I think if you can reach around and pat yourself on the back for building a life that you can be truly proud of, an extraordinary life, a philosophical life, a life to be remembered by all who meet you.
	As a man, as a woman, as a soul dedicated to truth, To the beauty and the ugliness sometimes of truth, and to honesty, to virtue, to compassion for the victims, to strength against the victimizers.
	That is a noble calling.
	And instead of sitting passively and watching heroes fight for virtue on a screen, You can step into that movie to a life more real than that which we lived before and be the heroes that we so often used to watch to step in to become the leading man, the leading woman, the ingenue in your own script, in your own life.
	That is an amazing thing to do.
	Instead of sitting munching popcorn and scratching yourself and watching heroes do impossible things, we have become those heroes who do the impossible and make the impossible.
	Peaceful world. Respect and love and tenderness towards the helpless.
	We have made that which hitherto was impossible to conceive.
	We have brought it to life.
	We have brought it to flesh and blood in the world.
	And I think that will be remembered and appreciated, not by the present.
	Those who bring difficult truths are very rarely appreciated by the present, but that's all right.
	History will judge.
	Well, that's it for my briefly introduction.
	I am entirely wide open to your conversations, to your questions, to your issues.
	I am sitting and I await your feedback.
	Step right up.
	Hello, Steph.
	Hello. I was just, thank you so much for that intro.
	I thought that was beautiful and I feel enormously grateful to be part of FDR and for all of the great things that that involvement has brought me.
	So I just wanted to say I really appreciated what you just said and also I wanted to ask you because it was, I was Thinking about it while you're saying it, you know, some of the things that you were talking about in terms of being grateful, we just did a book in the book club called Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman.
	I don't know if you've read that.
	I have not and I'm so sorry that I didn't get a chance to, I was hoping to get by yesterday but I couldn't.
	No worries. But it's a book that has, it's a sort of book about positive psychology and it has, you know, a lot of Sort of, basically, tips in it about ways to increase your happiness.
	One of them, being grateful and really thinking about what it is that you're grateful is one of the things that it actually talks about in terms of, you know, as a kind of way of focusing on ways to be happier.
	And there are a whole load of other ones in there, and some of them have, you know, more mileage than others, I suppose.
	But one thing that I did want to ask you about, and the thing that we talked about quite a lot, was the happiness of religious people.
	Because one thing that this book states is, well it makes two claims really.
	One is that religious Americans are less likely to abuse drugs, commit crimes, divorce and kill themselves, and that they're also physically healthier and live longer.
	And those I suppose you could say are like behaviors that would be associated with more personal happiness.
	But the other claim that it makes is that survey data consistently show religious people to report being happier and more satisfied with life than non-religious people.
	And so I just basically wanted to sort of like see what you thought about.
	I mean, I've certainly got some Well, I'd be happy to, but since it's a call-in show, I'd like it if you could tell me a little about what your thoughts are on it.
	Well, I mean, one of the things that occurs to me is that With happiness, on the second part, which is about, you know, religious people reporting themselves to be happier, we were talking yesterday about, I think there is an expectation, particularly in religion, that you're supposed to be happy, because you're supposed to be, you know, like it would be an offense to God not to be happy.
	So I'm guessing that people who are religious, if you ask them if they're happy, That they will report it more, they will just say yes more, because they're out of fear and social conformity.
	But then again, you know, you could argue that the questionnaires are a little bit more complicated than that, and they don't just say, are you happy?
	They sort of ask a whole range of questions in roundabout ways to get people's subjective experience of happiness.
	So it may also be that religious people believe themselves to be happier, and I think that may be part of the sort of mania that you see with religious people.
	But it does make it kind of difficult to get good data about what people's subjective experience of happiness is.
	It does fly in the face of what we understand religion to be about, which is really to be essentially teaching children really cruel lies about the nature of the world and of themselves.
	So I thought, yeah, my one thought was basically that they may be reporting happiness because they feel they should or they might even believe that they're happy.
	But the thing about, you know, less likely to abuse drugs, commit crimes, divorce and kill themselves and physically living longer, I'm not sure about some of those.
	Some of the things are clearly to do with the prohibitions that go with being part of a religious community.
	But I don't know. What do you think?
	Well, I think it's a complicated question, so I'm going to move on.
	No, I think it's a complicated question.
	And these would be my thoughts.
	And I've thought about this before, so I'm not coming into this completely cold.
	There are some things that are good about religion.
	And when I say this, I think it's important to recognize that this survey is not comparing religious people to rational philosophers.
	I think that's the first thing that I would note.
	What you and I and most of the people in this conversation would mean by atheism is not a rejection of God, but a rejection of irrationality as a whole.
	So, for instance, a communist who accepts all kinds of crazy and irrational things in the realm of economics and politics and history and all this sort of stuff Would fall into the non-religious category, but not out of a rejection of irrationality, but out of a rejection of God, a substitution of secular irrationality for religious irrationality.
	The second thing, of course, is that this group would not, sorry, the group of non-religious people would also include nihilists.
	And a nihilist believes in nothing, so to speak.
	And one of the things that he doesn't believe in happens to be God, but it's not It's part of an embracing of reason and evidence and self-knowledge.
	It is simply a rejection of all values and God is perceived to be a value and therefore God is rejected.
	I would say that to be a nihilist is a surefire route to unhappiness, even relative to something like religion.
	And to be a communist is a surefire route, I believe.
	I mean, irrationality as a whole breeds unhappiness, but if you're comparing Religious irrationality with certain kinds of secular irrationality, I believe that religious irrationality may come out ahead in many ways.
	Religious irrationality promotes things which are beneficial to health, to physical health, such as community.
	Nihilism does not breed a community, right?
	Communism does not breed a community.
	And by community I mean You know, people who are around for life's trials, right?
	For the aging and death of parents, for the birth and raising of children, and so on.
	Religion will breed a community around those sorts of things, which can help de-stress people during those difficult challenges because they have other people around who can take the load to some degree.
	So I think it's important to recognize that it's not religion versus reason that is being compared here, but religion versus Secularism.
	And secularism, as we all know, is not a rational philosophy.
	Just because you reject superstition does not mean that you embrace reason and evidence and first principles and philosophy.
	So I can certainly see how some of the communal aspects of religiosity can be really helpful.
	I think that religion has some beneficial aspects in terms of reducing stress in people's lives.
	So, for instance, if somebody's going through a really bad year, they may say, or will often say, God does not give you more than you can handle, or this is part of a test of faith, or God has plans for me.
	And so, in a sense, when you're in the hurly-burly of events beyond your control, it can be helpful to say, I'm going to just relax during this very difficult time, and I'm not going to try and will to control that which I cannot control.
	I'm simply going to let this nasty current take me, and I'm going to reassert my will when my feet hit the bottom, so to speak, because I'm floating and, you know, the current is overpowering of bad news or bad things.
	And with religion, you kind of get to just kind of shuck that stuff off your shoulders and say, you know, let Jesus take the wheel and so on.
	And I think that can actually be useful.
	That can actually be a useful approach to simply say, look...
	Some bad stuff can happen.
	It's not going to be something I can't take, but it's important to recognize the limits of my willpower, the limits of what I can control, and to relax and accept certain things.
	Because I think sometimes people on the secular side of things attempt to will too much or attempt to think they have control over too much.
	So I think that could be helpful.
	So you've got community. Conformity is a de-stressor.
	I mean, this is one reason why irrational communities last so long, is that it's very stressful to oppose irrational communities.
	As we all know, it's very stressful to oppose the myths of the tribe, whether those myths are religious, God exists, or whether they're secular, right?
	The government is peaceful, or something like that.
	Whenever you oppose myths, it's stressful.
	Whenever you accept and conform to myths, It de-stresses you.
	Because you don't have to think for yourself anymore.
	You don't have to challenge the convictions, sometimes the very angry convictions, of people around you.
	You can simply relax into the great collective goop of tidal bigotry and say it's virtue.
	And if you don't know what to do, you go and ask your priest.
	Or if you don't know what to do, you just conform with the society's laws or whatever, right?
	And so you kind of get a de-stressor.
	I mean, I think it has huge costs, but We don't have to get into those right now.
	So it's a de-stressor to simply give up thinking for yourself and challenging social norms.
	And just the best way to get along is to go along, right?
	I mean to take a silly example, right?
	People who are into the government don't stress about taking government jobs.
	They don't stress about taking government grants.
	They don't stress as much about paying taxes.
	They don't stress as much about new regulations.
	Because they're kind of like, well, it's good.
	They don't stress about should they send their kids to public schools or not.
	It's not something that they have to deal with.
	They just go along.
	And it's a de-stressor for sure.
	So those are on the sort of more practical side.
	The last thing that I'll say, and this is a big topic, so feel free to add whatever you want for anyone.
	But the last thing that I would say...
	Is that since I work with a model of self-knowledge called the Mico system, sort of my way for saying that we are a sort of whirling ecosystem of different aspects of personalities, I think that when a man kneels down to pray and he asks God for an answer and he surrenders to that answer,
	This would, I think, be somewhat analogous, though not directly, but somewhat analogous to somebody saying, I'm going to put the question out to my unconscious because there's no God.
	So when somebody's praying and gets an answer, the answer is obviously not coming from God, but it's coming from his or her own unconscious.
	And so the act of praying is incorrectly believed to be floating a message in a bottle up to heaven and having it come back with some answer.
	But of course what is actually happening is the unconscious is being harnessed.
	The power of the unconscious is being harnessed.
	I think that people who pray can make better decisions sometimes than people who don't.
	Because I believe that the unconscious has enormous power to guide us.
	You know, there are ancient parts of the personality that have kind of in a way been through all of this before.
	And there is a kind of wisdom in the unconscious that I find to be astonishingly powerful.
	And that's, you know, why we'll sometimes talk about dreams or these kinds of voices or roleplay and this kind of stuff because it is just a way of opening that power up.
	And so I think that prayer, while it's, you know, the way that people believe that it works is not true at all, I think that it has a powerful way of giving people instinctual, useful feedback and responses.
	Surrendering yourself to the will of God is in a sense surrendering yourself to the wisdom of the unconscious.
	And I think from that standpoint, religious people have the edge.
	The one thing that I find is true about secularists is they tend to live very intellectually, very consciously.
	And not in a good way, but sort of hyperconsciously.
	And they don't, I think, have that natural rhythm with the unconscious, with the instincts, with the body that I think makes for a really fruitful and rich life.
	And it's my own habit too.
	It's something that I have to consistently remind myself.
	So those would be sort of some of my answers.
	And our goal, of course, is not to make everybody stressed and unhappy, right?
	But to create a new paradigm of thinking, or I guess thinking, I would call it, wherein it is not stressful and oppositional to speak basic truths, right?
	Ghosts, fairies, and goblins, and gods do not exist, taxation is forced, you know, the kind of stuff that we talk about, or have talked about here.
	Voluntarism and peace is the way to solve problems, blah, blah, blah.
	It's stressful at the moment to talk about these things and stress can be deleterious to the health, but our goal of course is to help to create a world where it is not stressful to speak basic truths and where it is not considered weird to introspect and to ask the unconscious for feedback and to talk to yourself as a multifaceted entity.
	Those would sort of be my responses.
	And again, I don't want to go on too long because it's supposed to be a call-in show, not a monologue, but is that of any use?
	Yeah, I think that really makes a lot of sense.
	The problem is comparing religious people to everyone else.
	And what we're trying to do is sort of like actually differentiate the everyone else part.
	Because within everyone else, you can essentially have a whole range of different approaches, some of which are wholly self-destructive compared even to religion, I guess.
	Right, and remember, the first people to figure out that the world was round, to take a silly example, faced a huge amount of hostility from everyone who told them that they were crazy and they were insane and they were ridiculous and they were stupid, and that's very stressful.
	So those people who first figured out that the world was round And started to talk about it with others, they faced a lot of stress, a lot of attack.
	I mean, women, the suffragettes and the feminists from the 19th century onwards, or the 18th century, if you want to count, I guess, Mary Shelley, they faced an incredible amount of hostility.
	I mean, far more than those of us who talk about the rights of children.
	Far more hostility.
	Those people who just blithely went along with the status quo, that women were somewhere between men and domesticated animals in terms of rights, I mean, those people who just went along with the prevailing wisdom faced no social opposition and were welcome wherever they went.
	Those people who began to say that women have rights and properties and values equivalent to men faced a huge amount of opposition and hostility.
	The people, the abolitionists, the people who first started talking about the evils of slavery, You live in the South in the 18th century and you have no problems with slavery, then nobody has any problems with you.
	And you can kind of sail along, float along like a cork on the ocean, just bobbing along and being carried by the current.
	But if you begin to question and prod and poke at the ethics of society, well, I think we all know there's great joy and pride in that, but it can be alarming at times.
	It can be challenging at times.
	I don't know. I mean, if you look at innovators who take on the status quo with superior and more powerful and more empirical arguments, do they live longer?
	Do they live shorter? Well, I think it's fairly well established that stress shortens lifespan, right?
	I mean, there's a study that I posted on the board recently about how people who are exposed to multiple stressors as children lose almost 20 years from their lifespan as a whole.
	And it has something to do with Stress hormones and cortisol, and I don't know.
	I'm no doctor, right? But there's also another study that I'm just reviewing at the moment, which says that people who've gone through really stressful childhoods have a 49% higher chance of getting cancer over their lifespan.
	And again, I mean, this is not to alarm anyone, because I think this is if you don't process it.
	I mean, I think if you do process it, then I think it's much, much better.
	And maybe better than the average.
	In terms of health, like if you go to therapy and you get the help that you need with the issues.
	But it is stressful and stress is deleterious to health.
	It's sad but true that the martyrdom that is imposed upon the basically rational is something that is consistent throughout history and is gruesome and perpetual throughout history.
	I don't want to go on too long.
	I just mentioned that I want to do a podcast This month on figures like House, the Gregory House on TV, this doctor.
	He's allowed to be rational as long as he's crippled.
	He's allowed to be rational as long as he's miserable.
	And you see this quite a bit.
	Monk is allowed to be Adrian Monk, the Tony Schell-Hoop character detective.
	He's allowed to be rational.
	He's allowed to be moral.
	He's allowed to be passionate.
	He's allowed to be empirical. He's allowed to be smart, a genius.
	But he has to have obsessive compulsive disorder.
	So you're allowed to be rational as long as you're crippled.
	And that's something that we see over and over again.
	I mean, from the popular conception of Jesus, To Socrates.
	I mean, you can look at a variety.
	You're allowed to be a truth-teller as long as you're crippled and punished.
	And I think that does have effects on health in the long run.
	I just think they're worth it.
	But, you know, that's just my perspective.
	All right. Well, I think that we have time, I guess, to move on to another question.
	If you would like to bring up issues or challenges.
	Oh, are you back? Hi there.
	I just thought I'd ask a different question as I think the person is finished now.
	I think that would be safe to say.
	Okay. Well, I'm a newbie.
	I've been listening to your show for quite a long time now.
	And I posted something on your forum today.
	It was about the philosophy of combating addiction.
	Oh, the gambling dude, right?
	The gambling addiction. Did I get that right?
	Did I get that right? You have a gambling addiction, is that right?
	Well, yeah, basically...
	Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you, but you already posted it on the forum, so I figured that was okay to say, right?
	No, that's okay. What do you mean again?
	I didn't know. I never get any problems.
	I'll try to do it anonymously, but it's not going to work.
	Yeah, I posted something about the gambling addiction that I've got.
	Sorry, did you use your real name on the forum, or is it a pseudonym?
	It's Susu's name. Okay, so we're still pretty anonymous, right?
	You're just some guy somewhere who has, right?
	Sure. Just somebody in Afghanistan.
	Afghanistan, there we go.
	I thought I recognized the accent.
	The word is nice. Sounds, it should be a little more anti-British, but okay.
	So, go ahead.
	So, the question was, I wanted to know a little bit more about the philosophy of actually combating addiction.
	Because I read a lot about what addiction is and the type of methods they've got at the moment that are most popular to deal with different types of addictions.
	For example, you've got the 12 Steps program, which is in Gamblers Anonymous, which has been going for quite some time, which is quite successful, but I don't think it's I'm not sure if it's really for me.
	You've also got something else called CBT which is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy which I've been put on a waiting list for and I've read about it a little bit but again I'm not too sure how successful it is And I just wanted to know if there was anything that I've missed in philosophy or anything or a new approach or maybe if you had any thoughts on addiction or habits that people pick up that they don't seem to be able to stop,
	even though they know it's destructive behavior.
	Right, right. Well, I mean, you know that I'm not a psychologist, not a doctor, not an expert in this field.
	I can give you some of my thoughts as, you know, an amateur podcast philosophy dude, but I just want to be really clear that I bring no expertise whatsoever to the conversation.
	So I just want to say that up front, and then I'm happy to share with you the thoughts that I have.
	Okay, so did you have a stressful childhood?
	Um... Compared to others?
	No, did you experience a lot of stress?
	Sorry, but because when you're a kid, you don't have a compared to what, right?
	You only have your own particular experience.
	And did you experience stress, significant stress, when you were a child, or was that not a factor, particularly in your upbringing?
	Yeah, no, I did. Yeah, of course I did, yeah.
	Well, the of course is, you know, I don't want to presuppose, right?
	It's just hard to, obviously as an adult now, I look back and I see other children that don't have it as bad or had it better than I did, but I did have stressful situations as a child.
	Yeah, I mean, I understand that, and I think that that can be helpful, but I think that's something that comes at the very end of processing childhood stress, in my opinion.
	I don't think that's something that comes at the beginning.
	If it comes at the beginning, it seems more like an avoidance or a defense to avoid childhood stress or dealing with childhood stress.
	So if you had a lot of stress as a kid, and the first thing you do is you say, well, but lots of people had it a lot worse, in a sense, you're just saying, I'm not going to go there.
	I'm going to use this comparison to nullify it.
	My own experiences as a kid.
	I think, you know, if you dive in and you work through it with a therapist or whatever, I think that then at the end you can say there were people who had it worse.
	But I think that's only after you've gone through the real process of empathizing with what happened to you as a kid.
	I mean, it's sort of like if you, you know, we just installed this gate in my living room so that my daughter doesn't scurry off to the stairs.
	And the moment that we I installed the gate.
	I knew what was going to happen.
	I knew what was going to happen is I was going to go downstairs to grab something before I went to bed or whatever.
	It was going to be dark.
	And because I'm really into philosophy, I have about 1% of my brain available.
	To scan my surrounding area because I'm thinking about all these abstract topics all the time.
	So I knew what was going to happen. I was going to be thinking about something I was going to do in a podcast.
	And I would go crashing straight into the gate in the darkness.
	I mean, that was inevitable because it wasn't there last week.
	It's there now, but my brain takes a while to update.
	So last night, naturally, I went full tilt with my little toe into the side of this gate.
	And man, did it ever hurt, right?
	Now, in the moment of that pain of like, oh my god, I thought my toe hasn't come off.
	Agony! I don't immediately say, I'm not going to feel any pain because, you know, some guy got his entire foot bitten off by a shotgun.
	Right, yeah. Right, because it's my experience in the moment.
	And yes, there are people who have much worse pain...
	But right now, I just stabbed my toe, right?
	So that's what I'm going to deal with, and I'm not going to try and minimize my pain by immediately comparing myself to some other situation, if that makes sense.
	Right. Yeah, and I understand what you're getting at.
	Okay, so my, you know, because when I asked you about childhood stress, your first thing was, well, compared to who?
	Well, there is no compared to who.
	When you're a kid, you simply experience what you experience.
	And if you doubt that, you know, try giving a five-year-old kid an empty box for Christmas.
	And say, well, in other countries, they don't even get boxes.
	And would the kids say, you're right, this is a wonderful present, thank you.
	Sure. They wouldn't, right?
	I didn't, I didn't, sorry, I didn't get dropped.
	Hello, am I still here? Yes, are you still on?
	Yeah. No, no, the kids, yeah, go on.
	No, you go ahead. Are you saying that about the people opening, children opening Christmas presents?
	Yeah, if you give a kid, It's an iPod box but it's empty inside, right?
	And the kid opens it and it's empty and looks up to you and is very upset.
	And you say, well, kids in Afghanistan don't even get boxes.
	Is she going to say, no, you're right, this is wonderful, I feel much better.
	No. No.
	No, they'd still be disappointed. They would be very upset, right?
	So it's important to remember what it's like for a child.
	That there is no compared to what for a kid, right?
	There's compared to how I felt five minutes ago, maybe.
	That's about it, right? Okay.
	Yeah, no, I get your point.
	The only thing I'm not sure, the only problem I'm having with answering this is I did have stress as a child, but I had a lot of stress and had a lot of good times as well.
	And there was stress for different occasions.
	Am I still here? Yes.
	Oh. Yeah, there was stress for different occasions.
	Relationship-wise, academically.
	Go ahead. No, it's okay.
	Well, I was going to say, so what you're saying is that as a kid, in a sense, you had lots of highs and lows, right?
	Yeah. You know why you just laughed there, right?
	Yeah. Because what is a gambling addiction but lots of highs and lows, right?
	Yeah. Do you see, and again, this is no answer, this is just a vague possibility to explore, right?
	But this is where I would go, right?
	If I were in your, I hope you still have shoes, but if I were in your shoes, you haven't gambled away yet, but if I were in your shoes, the first place that I would look is I would say, okay, well, what is the nature of my addiction?
	Because obviously there's lots of different kinds of addictions, right?
	And lots of different emotional responses, right?
	So an alcoholic Doesn't have quite the same highs and lows because alcohol is a depressant, right?
	Somebody who's addicted to weed might not have the same...
	But gambling is really all about the highs and lows, right?
	Yep. Right?
	There are six million scenes in movies of people nervously playing cards for high stakes, right?
	But there's not a single scene in a movie that I can remember about watching somebody smoke pot, right?
	So there is something inherently dramatic and highly stressful and...
	Anticipatory and highs and lows and it's an elevation and then a crash that is, to me, particular to gambling and probably the closest would be something like an addiction to cocaine which comes with a high and then a crash but even that's not quite the same because it's something that's biochemical not risk-based in the way that gambling is, right? No, I think you just hit on a point there.
	Because I did actually have quite a lot of very big highs as a kid, and at the same time I did get knocked back quite hard as well.
	So that does make sense in that point.
	Right, and so the way, again, just as an amateur idiot on the internet, the way that I would look at addictions is I would say, what childhood...
	What experience does the addiction recreate or normalize?
	And if you had a lot of highs and lows and anticipation and crashes and so on as a kid, then I have a particular theory, which is not empirical or proven, it's just a theory, which says that if we have overwhelming experiences as children, then Which we cannot control.
	And the highs and lows and stressors are things that we cannot control.
	We may have some influence over them, but fundamentally we cannot control them.
	And the same is true of gambling, right?
	You can have an influence over the outcome, but you can't fundamentally control it.
	But what happens is, we become addicted to having control over the feelings of not having control.
	We become, like, if someone beats me up every day, I can't have control over whether they beat me up, but I can have control over my response to them beating me up.
	The only sense of power that I can have is control over the stimulus, my emotional response to the stimulus, not to the initiation of the stimulus itself.
	Now that works very well when you're a kid, because it allows you to retain a feeling Of power, of efficacy, of control in some way.
	I have control over myself even if I don't have control over my environment.
	The problem is that when we become an adult, if the only thing that we have as the basis of our sense of control and efficacy in this world is to manage dysfunctional situations, Then we will inevitably be drawn to recreate those dysfunctional situations because it's the only way that we know to have any power in our life.
	any sense of control.
	You mean doing it consciously or unconsciously?
	Oh no, I don't mean consciously.
	No, no, I certainly don't mean consciously.
	And this is why I say it's just a theory.
	It may be if you shoot me, it may not be.
	But it's really, you know, I think it's really important when we look at the parallels here.
	Yeah. Well, so far it makes sense.
	Sorry, does the explanation make sense?
	Because it's a weird thing to put your head around and I'm happy to take another swing at it if it doesn't make any sense.
	Yeah, that theory makes sense.
	But the thing that I'm interested in is combating that.
	Sure, okay, but can you just maybe simmer in the insight for like 30 more seconds?
	Okay, fine. Okay, you've blown my mind.
	I have a huge insight. I can tie my childhood to my gambling addiction.
	That's blah, blah, blah. That's behind us.
	Now let's fix it, right? Okay.
	No, it does make sense.
	Well, the way that I would approach it, again, this is just my way of approaching it.
	You can see if it works for you or not.
	You know, if there's a connection, Between not being able to control the highs and lows in your childhood, but becoming addicted to controlling highs and lows.
	And that is why you're drawn back to the gambling addiction.
	This is why the gambling addiction shows up.
	Because the only way you know to have control in your life is to put yourself in uncontrollable situations and manage your response.
	Then the solution is to reverse.
	The concept, as is always the case.
	Dysfunctional repetition is all about, you have to just take it completely the other way around.
	So, for instance, if you had these highs and lows as a kid, which you say you did, these stressors of these good times, bad times kind of thing.
	I can give you an example, if you want.
	When I was younger, I used to play football, or soccer, as they call it in America, and I was pretty good.
	But I was really small for my age.
	So all I ever wanted to do was play football.
	That was the only dream I had.
	I didn't care about anything else.
	And I made it to quite a high level to sort of professional as a child.
	But they turned around and said that I was too small.
	So it was a bit...
	Obviously, you know, I was devastated, disappointed, but there was a point where I thought that I was...
	Good enough to control how I played.
	But obviously I can't control what they say where I'm too small.
	And you can't control your size, right?
	Yeah, and I can't control my size.
	As much as I willed it and urged it, I can't control my size.
	No, listen, I've tried most of those junk spam things about controlling your size.
	They really don't work. You just end up with a lot of welts.
	But anyway, go on. Yeah, and I didn't...
	I didn't get any tall until I was 18 or 19, which was too late.
	So that was a point of very big highs where I did get spotted for a team and I was able to play for them.
	I played very well, but the uncontrollable part was where they turned around to finally make it and say, actually, you're too small.
	You're good enough, but you're too small.
	So in that sense, I can see where I kind of felt like I had control, but at the same time I didn't have any control over my height and over their decisions about whether they picked me or not.
	So that's the comparison I can think of at the moment.
	Right, and I guess the question would be, why didn't you know about the science requirements before you poured your youth into becoming a soccer player?
	Because football or soccer is not really...
	It shouldn't be about size, but when I was younger it was.
	It shouldn't really be about that.
	But you had a coach, right?
	Yeah, I had several coaches.
	I'm sure you did. And you trained like crazy, right?
	Yeah. Every day.
	So my question is, oh I know, hours a day, right?
	So why is it that your coach never told you, or did your coach ever tell you, listen kid, you know, you're good, you've got the goods, but you don't have the height, or you don't have the size?
	So, you know, to give you a reasonable expectation.
	I try and put myself in their shoes, probably because I was quite good, but, and there are some very good, well, I look now and there's quite a few good, really small players.
	So they probably thought, well, you know, there are some players out there that are small, so there is a chance that he could, a very small chance.
	But did anyone tell you that?
	Only when it came to the crunch.
	Thanks.
	The actual people who made the decision.
	Yeah, and see, that is...
	Well, what do you think of that?
	I mean, I have thoughts about it, but it's not my addiction.
	So what is it that you think about that?
	I mean, the way that you described it, it seems like there was nothing that could be done ahead of time.
	But it seems to me that there could have been a lot done to prepare you ahead of time or to give you guidance ahead of time.
	I'm not sure. I think maybe parental-wise, they probably saw it more as a hobby and they probably didn't want to crush my dreams as well.
	So I'm not sure what could have been done.
	No, sorry.
	Nobody was saying that you should crush your dreams, right?
	It's just a question of being given facts about the situation, right?
	Like, if I want to be a basketball player, right, and I'm 5'2", Somebody should tell me, right?
	Play basketball all you want, but you're never going to get into the professional leagues because you're just way too short, right?
	Or the odds are very low.
	Or, you know, give you the facts.
	Like only one guy who's 5'2 has ever played basketball and that's just because he was the mascot and ran out of the field.
	Whatever, right? But it's a matter of giving you the odds, right?
	If you don't grow, There have only been five players over the past decade of your size who've made it in professional football.
	It means you're gonna have to work either a damn sight harder or You're gonna have to recognize that unfortunately because of your physical stature You're very unlikely to be professional and you can make your choice You know based on the facts right?
	Now there may have been I'm not sure I would listen to them but um Well, but then you would have not, at least you would have had the choice to listen or not, right?
	Yeah. Right, I mean, and nobody's asking you to listen like, you're not going to make it, kid, but here are the facts, right?
	Only some tiny percentage of people, right?
	But if you're given the facts and you reject them, that's very different from not being given the facts, right?
	Yeah. To be honest, I was probably told that there are small players out there that do make it.
	I was probably encouraged to try more rather than being told, you know, statistically it's not going to happen.
	Right, and do you know why you were not told?
	I don't know.
	Okay, I'm not a coach, but this would be, you know, putting myself in your coaches shoes, this would be my reasoning if I were not a particularly nice person.
	I would say, well, damn, this kid is great.
	Now, I'm not going to tell him that he's not going to make it professionally because he sure as hell is helping my team and my coaching career because he's so good.
	And if I tell him that he's not going to make it professionally, then he's liable to practice less or drop out, in which case I lose a star player.
	Right. It's exploitive, right?
	Withholding the facts that you need to make a rational decision about the allocation of your youth, right?
	Because if you weren't doing this, you could have been doing something else.
	Either another sport that you could have made a go at it, like being a jockey.
	I'm just kidding. I'm sure you're not that small.
	But something, right?
	I'm not small anymore. Yeah, right.
	Oh, yes, you're not small anymore.
	But you could have done something else.
	You could have made a rational decision based on the information that you were being given.
	The information was withheld, I would bet, though, I mean, of course, it's not a proof, but I would bet that the information was withheld because you made the coach and the team look good.
	And so he wasn't going to tell you that you weren't going to have a chance professionally because then you might have dropped out or switched or at least practiced less or taken it as more of a hobby and thus been of less use to him as a coach.
	Okay, we'll go with that.
	We'll go with that?
	Yeah, whatever.
	Don't explain it again, right?
	No, no, I'll tell you why I said that, because it's hard for me to put myself in a position of a coach and do that, to act like that.
	No, no, come on, it's not hard for you to do that.
	I'm not saying that you would do that, but it's not hard to imagine that.
	I mean, if you spent years around coaches, it's not hard to imagine that they really like good players who make their team look good and make them win, right?
	Okay. And you understand that if your coach had told you the facts, or your coaches had told you the facts, that you would not have worked as hard, or at least it would have been a risk that you wouldn't have worked as hard, right?
	I've never really thought about it, but It probably would have been different.
	I've never really thought about it.
	I've never thought that if somebody actually did say to me, look, you know, these are the statistics, these are the odds, you know, this is what you should think about.
	This is the first time that I've actually had to think about it.
	So, you know, I imagine that it would have been a lot different.
	Yeah, I'm sure it would have been.
	And if it hadn't been a lot different, at least you would have had yourself to blame, right?
	Having yourself to blame is a highly underrated virtue in my book, right?
	I think it's really, really important that if you're going to fuck up royally, that you be the author of the mistake.
	I just think, like, if somebody says, there's no way you're going to be a professional football player, right?
	And you say, screw you, Spud, I'm going for it, right?
	And you pour heart and soul into it, and then they say, there's no way you're too small.
	At least it's your screw up.
	At least you own it.
	At least you had the facts, you made the choice, you ran full tilt boogie into a brick wall, and you got the scars that you earned from your own mistake, right?
	As opposed to people not telling you stuff, stringing you along, and you don't even get the choice to own the mistake.
	I don't think they really...
	Because I did ask a friend of mine, I said to him, Was I like one of them, you know, you get X Factor, you get these people that think they can sing and they think they're really good and, you know, actually they're not.
	I was like, was I like that?
	And he was like, no, no, no, he was good.
	He was okay. So I don't know what people thought.
	I don't know if people knew that I definitely wouldn't make it.
	Yeah, but you see, you're back to absolutes again, right?
	You see, you keep sliding back to people would either tell you Yes or no.
	But nobody can tell you yes or no.
	Maybe, given your size, or maybe you would have grown earlier than 18, and maybe you'd have slipped in somehow, right?
	Yeah. I mean, it wasn't like you're four foot with one leg, right?
	I mean, it's not like that, right?
	So it's interesting. For a guy who's a gambling addict, you keep avoiding statistics and odds, right?
	Mm-hmm. And I know that this isn't going to eliminate your gambling habit.
	I mean, obviously this is a big and long-term project.
	But if I were you, the first place that I would look is the addiction to managing highs and lows comes long before gambling.
	Because was it true that the first time you gambled, you really liked it?
	Yeah. Right.
	And listen, I'm with you there.
	One of the first times that I gambled, I was a best man at an old friend's wedding.
	This has got to be, I don't know, some horrifying number, 15 years ago or something like that.
	And I was out in Vancouver. And we went to a casino.
	And I sat down at the blackjack table and so on.
	And I loved it.
	I loved it.
	I got to just focus on one thing.
	There was no chatter in my head.
	There was no ambivalence. There was no ups and downs.
	I didn't have to manage challenging personal relationships.
	I didn't have to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.
	I just had to focus on the next card and the next hand and the next win or loss.
	It took me right down to a very detailed, focused, moment-to-moment life, which I was not used to, right?
	And I really found it a thrill and an excitement.
	Yeah. And so I just don't gamble because I just know I like it.
	I know that I like it. And I know why I like it.
	Because my childhood was full of a lot of highs and lows and stress and rewards.
	And I get enough of those in doing this crazy life, right?
	Being a philosopher guy. So I don't gamble, right?
	My wife's good at it.
	And she'll go and gamble, you know, 50 bucks or whatever.
	And she can do really...
	When I was in Vegas for business, she spent a whole afternoon on 50 bucks and had a great time.
	Won some free tickets. Or got some free tickets to some show.
	But she... So she doesn't love it in the way that I do, so I don't do it.
	Because I get that it's a repetition of my history.
	And I am primed to really...
	Feel a sense of excitement and power and thrill and fear that is historical for me, and I don't want to recreate in my adult life.
	So that's what I would do, is I would look back and say, I didn't have control over the highs and lows when I was a kid.
	And if you get that you didn't have control, and this is something you would do with a therapist, right?
	That you didn't actually have control over the highs and lows you experienced as a kid, then you will go through the morning of having those highs and lows, You know, which I assume were somewhat outside the norm.
	You'll go through that morning, and you will not feel the need to gain a sense of power in this world by controlling highs and lows.
	When you no longer have the need to gain a sense of efficacy and power in this world by controlling highs and lows in your life, you won't need to gamble.
	Hmm. Because to my way of thinking, and it is just my way of thinking, gambling fundamentally is anxiety, addictions as a whole are fundamentally anxiety avoidance over childhood trauma.
	Because if you don't gamble, you start to get anxious, uneasy, right?
	Itchy. You have to go, right?
	Now it's become more, I don't feel the highs and the lows and all that anymore, it's just become an addiction, a habit of really, like smoking, you know.
	Right, like smoking for sure.
	And a smoker, although of course it's not quite the same because there's not an external, I mean, it's not quite the biochemical stuff because you don't get the nicotine in your system which is the stimulant.
	So it's mostly internally generated, it's not like alcohol, but that doesn't mean that it's any less bad, but it's slightly different from smoking.
	I certainly do understand that smokers, when they don't smoke, start to feel a lot of anxiety.
	And you gamble to avoid anxiety, not because you get a great thrill out of gambling, as you've said, right?
	I don't know. It's just got to the point where I gamble if I'm happy.
	I gamble if I'm sad.
	I gamble just normally.
	It's an unconscious thing that I do now.
	And it's a compulsive thing as well.
	I can spend 23 hours of the day saying I don't want to gamble.
	I will never gamble. I can be logical about it.
	I can, you know, talk about it very logically and say how stupid it is and how silly it is to gamble.
	But in a split second, I'll turn around and gamble.
	Sure. Compulsively.
	Sure, and I think that the empirical evidence there, and I think that this would be true for most people who have addictions, is that willpower does not solve the problem, right?
	Definitely not. Yeah, and I completely agree with you.
	Willpower does not solve the problem.
	It is emotional in nature.
	It is historical in nature.
	It is a repetition compulsion of early trauma to recreate early trauma in your life.
	That would be, you know, a complete wild ass amateur guess.
	And I'll give you an example from my own life.
	I sucked my thumb.
	My dad left when I was a very, very...
	I was too young to even remember him being in the family.
	I think I was six or eight months old when...
	He left and he moved to Africa and I barely saw him.
	And throughout my childhood, I had this guilty secret.
	Like I sucked my thumb to go to sleep.
	Continually sucked my thumb to go to sleep.
	And I tried everything.
	You know, I'd get wormwood and I'd put it on my thumb.
	I had nighttime braces for a while to correct an overbite and so, but I'd take it out to suck my thumb.
	I couldn't get to sleep without sucking my thumb.
	And every now and then, even when I was in my early teens, I would...
	I have my thumb in my mouth.
	And occasionally I would do it when there were people over.
	And it's like, you know, at that age, right?
	That's not exactly what you want to be seen doing, right?
	So I'm chewing my thumb or whatever, right?
	And so on, right? And I couldn't stop it.
	I could not stop it.
	I tried everything. Willpower was completely useless in that situation.
	I'll tell you something interesting.
	When I was 16, I flew to Africa and I spent a couple of months with my father.
	Right. The very first night that I slept in my father's house, I fell asleep without sucking my thumb and I never once had the urge since.
	Right. Now, the psychology of it is probably quite complex and we don't have to sort of get into it around, you know, a father figure and, you know, reintegration into masculinity and not needing the breast and, you know, femininity.
	There's all kinds of nonsense going on down there.
	But... The point is that it had nothing to do with willpower.
	It had to do with getting some sort of psychological closure.
	I'm trying to think how I can get psychological closure because I had stress from that but I also had a similar experience to yours as well where my dad left when I was a baby and he lived half an hour up the road but he didn't bother.
	I saw him when I was 20 years old Oh, no, really?
	Oh, man. He lived half hour up the road and you didn't see him?
	No. Oh, man.
	Oh, that's terrible, terrible, terrible.
	Why do you think that was? Because...
	Well, I think...
	He's kind of...
	I'd say that he's probably quite selfish and he doesn't think about other people.
	He doesn't understand... Um, his responsibility for having a child.
	You mean he doesn't understand, like, what do you mean?
	I'm not sure. Like, he doesn't have the intellectual capacity to understand that you should see your child.
	No, he does because he said, um, you know, he got married and he had two other children that lived with him, um, all the way, you know, up until recently where he got divorced.
	Actually, I just, um, he tried to get in contact with me recently because I tried to contact him to, um, To try to get my daughter to know what her history is.
	And he phoned me recently to say he's going to have a barbecue and asked him, when is it going to be?
	And he said, soon.
	He said he'll let me know. It'll be sometime over the summer.
	And he didn't bother.
	So there's a high and low right there, right?
	Yeah, another high and low.
	Right. I'm so sorry.
	Oh my God, that's just unbelievable.
	I mean, it's not unbelievable because it happened, but I'm just stunned.
	I had a friend who had the same sort of issue.
	His dad left and lived in the same city.
	And he didn't even know that his father had died until he heard it quite by chance from some remote person.
	And so it is, I mean, it's absolutely, absolutely tragic.
	I mean, my heart goes out to you.
	What a terrible, terrible thing to experience as a kid, that sense of unimportance.
	It's not even rejection.
	It's like not even being noticed.
	Sure. And I don't know if you saw, I had another question on your forum, which we're getting a bit mixed up now.
	But I've got a daughter and I would never, ever, ever leave my daughter.
	But the same thing is kind of happening to her, which happened to me.
	With your ex-wife?
	Yeah, with her mum. Which is crazy.
	And I've tried everything I can do.
	But anyway, we'll stick...
	Yeah, listen, I mean, there's no magic wand, but what I would strongly, strongly suggest is that if you pick up the phone, I know it's a really tough call to make, pick up the phone, call a therapist, talk to a therapist, talk to them on the phone, see how you feel.
	If you feel good about going to see them, go to see them.
	Don't just go and see someone and see if you like it or pay, whatever, right?
	If you get a good feeling about it.
	I would go and talk about the highs and lows that you experienced as a child.
	I don't think that there's any...
	I mean, you know... As you say in your post, you could lose your house and your family.
	You know that it's bad for you.
	You're obviously a highly intelligent and highly verbal person.
	You're smart enough to enjoy my podcast, so I'm going to put you in the very smart category.
	So there's no intellectual argument that is going to solve this problem for you because that would be an insult to your considerable intelligence.
	You know that you need to not do this.
	I know that I need to not do it.
	I can't understand why I'm doing it.
	I can't understand why I'm punishing myself.
	No, I got it. I got it. I got it.
	I got it. And until you understand why you're doing it, you simply won't be able to stop it.
	The way that we stop negative or self-destructive behaviors is not willpower.
	Because willpower doesn't work.
	The problem is not a lack of willpower.
	It's not because you're weak that you gamble.
	It's not because you're stupid.
	It's not because you don't know the consequences of gambling.
	It's because you do know the consequences of gambling.
	And that which we have not processed from our childhood, we repeat, we repeat, we repeat.
	And I think that you're putting yourself into a situation that if you go into therapy you will find is directly analogous to a huge number of childhood situations and experiences that you had which remain unprocessed.
	And again, I'm not saying that they remain unprocessed because you're dumb or stupid or don't want to know about yourself or anything.
	We just don't live in a culture.
	We don't live in a culture where people look at dysfunction and say, what happened to you as a kid?
	Which is a completely obvious question to ask.
	And you don't have to be a psychologist to ask that question.
	That is a question that a friend should ask.
	Because, you know, we are like glaciers, right?
	We have this life that we live as adults, which is like 10% of who we are.
	And underneath is our entire history.
	The bulk of which occurred early on in our childhoods, and that is what is really, that is really who we are.
	We look at these tiny saplings and we don't realize that they have the basis and the roots of oak trees, a thousand years old, right?
	What is going on in the present is a small after effect of what went on in your early childhood.
	At least that's where I would go to begin with.
	And that's why willpower can't solve you this problem.
	You can't will yourself out of something that you didn't will yourself into.
	I can get off a bus because I chose to get on a bus.
	But you didn't choose to have a gambling addiction.
	You didn't choose to have the childhood that you had.
	You didn't choose to have these highs and lows and these stressors.
	And you didn't choose to live in a culture where an obvious question like, how is it for you as a child, is never asked by anyone.
	I mean, as you say, you've never thought about it in this way before, right?
	Definitely. And I have had therapy for gambling.
	You've had? I've had therapy for gambling.
	Right, okay. And again, all amateur, all the time.
	It's more to do with the present problem.
	Yeah, sorry.
	They're going to focus on, you know, don't gamble in the present.
	And my idiot advice would be, That you need to look at early childhood stuff with a therapist to figure out what trauma repetition is going on.
	Because a gambling addiction is highly traumatic, right?
	I mean, you've got highs and lows.
	You've got this whole inner medieval drama scape going on.
	You know, like I'm a bad person because I gambled.
	I'm going to be a good person and never gamble again.
	And then you're up and you don't want to gamble.
	And then bam, you gamble again.
	It's like, oh my God, I'm the worst person in the world.
	Why can't I beat this? Right?
	It's a real roller coaster.
	You liked gambling the first time that you did it.
	And that means that you already knew this rollercoaster before you ever went into a casino or online.
	And I'd say if you understand that rollercoaster from your childhood, you will no longer feel the need to recreate it as an adult.
	Okay. What I'll do is I'll explain to the therapist that I need to talk about the highs and lows of my childhood.
	Right, and maybe my theory is completely wrong, right?
	But I would go and not talk about gambling.
	I would go and talk about childhood, early history.
	I mean, I'm telling you, it's completely heartbreaking.
	The significant rejection of not being seen by a father who lives a half hour up the street is...
	I mean, man, my heart goes out to you.
	That is something to process.
	That really is. And again, as I say, the repetition occurs, right?
	Well, the repetition has occurred with your daughter and your ex-wife.
	And, you know, so I would really, really focus on childhood stuff.
	I think that the gambling is an effect on that.
	That would be my thought.
	Okay. And listen, I really wanted to thank you.
	I know that it was perhaps...
	I'm sure you weren't too shocked about the conversational direction, but I just wanted to really applaud you for talking about this stuff.
	I know it is a challenge and obviously your intelligence and self-knowledge is considerable.
	So I really wanted to thank you and appreciate you bringing this topic up.
	I know it's really, really tough. No, thanks.
	I wanted to bring it up because...
	You know, I explained as well that you've got a lot of great stuff on anarchism and atheism, but you also do other things as well.
	And, you know, I think probably is, you know, I don't know.
	There's obviously people in my situation, so, you know, if there is anybody else and you're talking about and they respect what you say, then hopefully it helps them as well.
	So, You know, if anything I can do to get people to talk to a therapist, I'm happy, right?
	If I'm just a sort of little redirect on the line to get people to talk to, I mean, you know, I'm a huge fan of professional therapy.
	And I think it's a fantastic topic.
	We really haven't talked about it that much.
	I know that I also did not give a very great description because it's a complicated topic about this repetition thing.
	But you can pick up a free PDF copy of my book, Real-Time Relationships.
	On the website, there's also an audiobook version.
	And in it, you can do a search through the PDF for a section called Simon the Boxer, where I talk about how this repetition stuff might work, and it may be something that will be of use to you, because I think I go into it in more clarity and detail there.
	More detail. Okay.
	All right. Thanks, man. Keep us posted.
	Again, massive kudos and congratulations for bringing that up.
	I'm always amazed and impressed when, particularly British people, you know, who like to talk about feelings as much as I like to talk about sports.
	But I just wanted to mention that thank you so much for bringing that up.
	It's a fantastic topic. And I really wanted to just appreciate your courage for bringing it up.
	Okay. All right.
	Thank you. Thanks a lot again. Thank you.
	Bye. All right. All right.
	The only addiction that is officially sanctioned by the goddess of philosophy is addictions to FDR. Alright, we have time for another question for the Frenchies Among Us.
	It really is amazing, just as we wait for the next caller to come in, I mean, it really is amazing that we can go through our lives without people just asking us those basic questions, you know, about, hey, how was your childhood?
	You know, tell me the good and the bad.
	There's always good and bad in every childhood.
	It's not always proportional. But...
	It's amazing that we just deal with people so much in the present.
	So much in the present.
	I think about this, you know, in my own sort of OCD confession.
	I think about this, oh my god, it's got to be 20 times a day.
	I think about this when I see anyone, right?
	Like I was sharing a hot tub with an elderly gentleman in the gym today, because, you know, we all have hobbies.
	You see him getting out of the hot tub, not always the prettiest sight, but because I'm a dad, you think if this guy was once on a swaddling table, he was once being changed, he was once either cooed at or snapped at or both, and how has his entire soul been shaped by these massive thunderous imprints for good and ill of early experiences?
	It's something that I just think about all the time.
	When you meet anybody, you think about them all the way back to the swaddling table, to whether they were cuddled or cursed as children.
	And it really is something that's hard to miss the effects of.
	And it's really, I think, hard to know anybody with any degree of real intimacy without talking about stuff that happened early in their lives.
	All right, we have time for Inno more.
	Hello, Steph.
	Hi. I had a question or two for you.
	Yes, I'm sorry. Just before we do that, just so I don't forget, because I am a bad internet radio host at times, please, too, remember, if you are listening to this, and it's still before the 18th of October 2009, to drop past podcastawards.com.
	And vote for Freedom Aid Radio.
	You can vote in one of the two top categories.
	People's Choice and Best Produced.
	I'm guessing People's Choice. And also if you could vote for Freedom Aid Radio.
	In the Education category, I would really appreciate that.
	It would be nice to get to the top ten for the third year in a row.
	Although, it is of course quite a challenge to unseat Grammar Girl, Sue, who's been on Oprah, which I am not due to be on.
	Well, never. I will never be on Oprah.
	But... Sorry.
	Thank you so much for your patience.
	Please, go ahead. Yeah, definitely.
	Also, I'd like to express my gratitude.
	Freedom Man Radio has really helped improve my life.
	But yeah, to get on, the last Sunday show or two ago, I was listening to it as a podcast and Chan Helfeld came on and was, I don't know, I guess I sort of interpreted him as kind of almost bullying his way into Controlling your call-in show,
	and I felt that you really expressed a lot of maturity and self-confidence in the way that you dealt with him.
	And I have a lot of trouble in that area.
	Sorry, is this where he wanted to reopen the debate?
	Yes, yes it is.
	And I find myself having a lot on my mind.
	That I feel a need to express and, you know, I guess I have like a lot of self-doubt sometimes or I always kind of tell myself I'm more introverted or whatever it may be and I am kind of working my way through a lot of Miller and Bradshaw right now and I was just wondering if you had any suggestions on working with self-confidence and being more assertive I guess Especially in the realm of having boundaries like during that Sunday call-in show.
	Right, right. So what you mean, and I just want to make sure I understand what you mean with regards to the call-in show.
	This is when Jan called in and wanted to reopen the debate, and I said, no thanks.
	Yes, and he continued.
	It just seemed like he wouldn't really let it be.
	Right, and then I said, you know, I've got to move on because this is not a show where we're debating this and we move to the next caller.
	Is that right? Yes.
	Well, I did a podcast recently on self-esteem.
	If somebody can recall the number and throw it into the chat room, I will read it off.
	Yeah, I gave that a good listen, too.
	I really enjoyed it. Okay, good.
	I think it's hard to work with terms like assertiveness and boundaries, because I don't really know exactly what they mean, if that makes any sense.
	Okay. I try to go with something simpler when I'm in a situation of conflict with someone.
	And so to me, all the things like assertiveness or self-confidence or self-esteem or boundaries or this and that, it could just be my innate density or whatever, but I just can never figure out what those mean enough to be able to put them into...
	It's FDR 1470.
	It's a self-esteem one just for those who haven't heard it.
	So if I'm in a situation of conflict with someone and I think about Well, what would be appropriate boundary setting combined with appropriate assertiveness, but not aggression, with a nice little dash of self-esteem, you know, and self-confidence, but without being pushy?
	Like, I just end up not being able to speak, because I don't know what the hell's going on, right?
	You know, I don't know how to translate that into any kind of practical action in the moment, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, that makes sense. So, I go with something a little simpler.
	Because to me, the faster you have to respond, the simpler things should be, right?
	Okay. There's no tennis game where one person has to finish their taxes before returning the game, the ball, right?
	Because there would be no game. And the whole point about expertise in something is to increase your response time, right?
	So somebody comes on the show, like Jan comes on the show and wants to reopen the debate, which I don't want to do.
	If I have to say, listen, I need a few minutes just to figure out what the appropriate response is, that doesn't really work, right?
	No. So...
	This is a question to those, we have what, 53 people in the chat room.
	What is the simpler thing that I was doing in the conversation with Jan?
	Any guesses? What is the simpler thing that I was doing?
	What is the simplest thing that I was doing?
	It just seemed to me that you were really listening to yourself and just letting it come out, that you were confident in it.
	Well, people have said, RTR with self, gut check, how do I feel about this?
	How do I feel? And that's useful.
	How do I feel about this is definitely the first step.
	I mean, you can't be assertive or have any kind of self-confidence if you don't even know what you feel or what you think.
	Because then you're just making stuff up and you will end up conforming or being aggressive or whatever.
	You know, the opposite of authenticity is aggression or conformity.
	But the virtue that I was practicing in that moment...
	Wonder where's got it.
	It's honesty. Right?
	He said, do you want to do this?
	And I did not want to do that, and I was honest.
	I don't want to do it. You sound enormously unimpressed.
	No, of course not.
	I totally understand what you mean with the honesty.
	I guess I'm also kind of experiencing...
	If I were to put myself in your situation, I guess I would also kind of experience some sort of anxiety linked.
	I mean, I've been able to improve my, I guess, self-honesty in the last couple of months through some work I've been doing.
	But I guess it's coupled with a fear at the same time, I guess.
	Well, okay. So let's say you're in a situation of conflict and you don't know how you feel, right?
	Honest response. I don't.
	I guess the honest response, if I didn't know what I was feeling, is, you know, I'm not really sure how I feel about this.
	Bingo! See, this is honesty.
	It's irresistible. It's scary.
	Don't get me wrong. It's scary, because people will always want you to hurry along.
	Right? Yeah. The fast-talking guy.
	Like, the guy who wants to pass you a counterfeit bill is going to be fast-talking.
	The magician that wants to distract you is going to have a patter and a busty chick up there in spandex, right?
	Oh, wait. Sorry. That's my Monday show.
	But... So people will always want to hurry you along, but you just say, I don't know how I feel about this.
	I'm confused. And what would happen if, I guess sometimes I do understand like, you know, oh, this person is kind of making me angry or maybe I see someone overstepping their bounds, but I'm still reluctant to express that.
	Well, you cannot express it, right?
	You're perfectly free to not express things, right?
	Yeah. Philosophy is not about replacing musts with shoulds or have tos, right?
	The philosophy is about being conscious of the choices that we're making, so that we have choice, right?
	Yeah. So, if you see someone overstepping their bounds, then you can say, I don't want to say anything.
	And that happens, right?
	If someone cuts in line ahead of you, I think we've all been in this situation, right?
	Somebody cuts in line or somebody does something kind of douchey or dickish, you know, like this one person waiting in line for a movie and then they have 12 friends join them ahead of you.
	That's kind of douchey, right?
	Or, you know, the people who were like saving 12 seats for people in the theater, you know, just that kind of stuff.
	It's You know, sometimes I'll say something, and sometimes I'll let it go.
	I'm free to do either.
	It's not like I have to go and do it, because I want to have a choice.
	I just want to be conscious of the choice.
	So you can choose to not say anything.
	But as long as you're conscious of that choice, that's okay, right?
	Yeah, definitely. If you feel like you want to say something, or, and again, I know it's a difficult thing to do, right?
	If you feel like you want to say something, Then you can say what it is that you're feeling or what it is that you're thinking.
	I feel angry at you.
	I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong.
	I'm just saying that I feel angry at you at the moment.
	Yeah. Because the great trap, the reason that people mess up in this area is we try to express our feelings as just conclusions.
	And then we're challenged on those conclusions and we feel like our feelings aren't valid, right?
	I'm mad because you did X, right?
	Well, I did X yesterday and you weren't mad at all.
	Then we're immediately wrong, right?
	Whereas if you say, I feel mad because you did X, I'm not saying that you're wrong.
	I'm just saying that I feel mad.
	Nobody can tell you that you're wrong, right?
	I mean, they can, but it's ridiculous, right?
	If I say, I feel hot, At the moment and someone turns to me and says, no you don't.
	Wouldn't that be a rather insane thing to hear?
	Yes. I've just been at the, I went to the gym for like an hour and a half this afternoon and I came home and I'm like, I feel tired.
	And would somebody say to me, no you don't.
	I mean, that would be crazy, right?
	Yes. Now if I say, I feel tired because it's Sunday, then somebody would say, I'm not saying you don't feel tired, but I'm telling you it's not because it's Sunday.
	Because last Sunday you weren't tired at all, right?
	Yes. And so we try not to...
	So the fundamental thing, I think, around honesty and assertiveness is to say, I feel X. It happened because you did this, but I'm not saying it's because of you, right?
	Yeah. Definitely.
	And so that is the kind of honesty...
	Unless you absolutely know for sure, and there are situations where you will absolutely know for sure why you're angry.
	If somebody does something totally stupid when you're driving, you're going down towards a light that's green and they start to make a turn in the sort of lane that's opposite from you, which is the turning lane.
	Yeah. And you have to swerve and like, then it's like, you know, I don't know if it's because of you that I feel like, no, you just endangered both of our lives.
	I'm really angry at you. Yes.
	You just did something totally stupid and selfish and ridiculous and I'm angry at you.
	Right? So there are situations where that is the case, right?
	Yes. I think even when I am, I've been a little bit better about communicating, I guess, the feelings that I'm experiencing.
	And sometimes I just feel the need to really express my honesty about a situation and I still feel at the same time I feel like a really, I guess like a strong feeling in my, like a reluctance, kind of like a feeling in my stomach that is almost like would be gone if I just took the first step.
	Just like, I don't know, a lot of resistance.
	I don't know if that's just because I haven't put it into practice enough.
	I'm not confident through my actions.
	Sorry, you're saying there are times where you feel great resistance to being honest?
	No, not to being honest.
	I guess to potential conflict.
	I'm sorry, I do apologize.
	I just missed the thread of what you were saying.
	If you could indulge me and just repeat it, I think I just want to make sure I answer what you're actually saying.
	Yeah, definitely. So, I've had a lot less problem recognizing how I really feel in a situation.
	It's expressing that feeling that will differ with whoever I'm communicating with and the potential, I guess, outcome of that communication to the other, I guess, that makes it difficult for me to express that honesty.
	Right. So you feel that if you're honest, the other person is going to be upset or is going to feel like it's a win-lose situation?
	Yeah, I think it's very much win-lose.
	And yes.
	Okay, sorry. I just want to make sure that we're talking about the...
	I want to make sure because I think I have a good answer, but I don't want to have a good answer to a question you're not asking, right?
	So just to make sure that I understand what you mean, you're saying that when you have that desire to be honest...
	To be honest, do you feel that there's some reluctance on the part of the other person because they're going to lose out if you're honest?
	Yes. Either they will become, I guess, uncomfortable.
	I can draw a lot of connections to the way my parents behaved when I was a child with that.
	My concern that I would upset them or even that I will lose out For interacting with the people who will get mad at me just being honest?
	Sure, sure. Well, it is...
	I mean, I think your instincts are bang on.
	I think that there's a great deal of threat and upset that people have around emotional honesty, right?
	Because, I mean, for six million reasons, of which I'll only go into five million, but I'll just touch on a few.
	When you are emotionally honest, other people get really tense.
	For a lot of reasons.
	A, because it's new and people get alarmed around new things.
	At least certain kinds of people and certain kinds of things.
	I don't know how to handle this.
	This isn't part of the script. You're either supposed to yell at me or you're supposed to obey me.
	You're not supposed to be honest, right?
	And I remember, and I think I've mentioned this before, but I'll just mention it again.
	I used to bike everywhere.
	I used to bike, like, 15 miles to get to work, because I didn't have a car until I was in my 30s.
	So I used to bike everywhere. And so, of course, I became a bit of a demon biker, right?
	And I was biking on the sidewalk, and a guy stopped me, right?
	And he said, you know, when you bike on the sidewalk, I can jump out of your way, but there are older people and people who, you know, kids or whatever, they might step out.
	They may not be able to avoid you.
	I just think it's important to be really cognizant of that when you're biking, right?
	And I didn't know what to do, because I was used to people saying, get off the sidewalk, asshole, or just jumping out the way.
	And again, I mean, I don't want to say I was some demon biker riding up on people's wheelchairs and something like that or whatever, right?
	But occasionally I would take some shortcuts, I think, like most people did.
	This guy, whoever he was, it was an incredible experience to me, because instead of people just getting angry or just conforming, he stopped me and said something quite reasonable.
	Yeah. That freaked me out, because it's like, this has never happened to me before.
	If people have a difference of opinion with me, they either yell at me, or exercise some power over me, or they comply.
	They either attempt to silence me, or they silence themselves.
	They don't simply express what they're thinking and feeling.
	Now, this guy was a little pompous, a little luxury or whatever, but that's a smudge on a beautiful picture, right?
	Yeah. And it freaked me out.
	And I thought about that for days.
	I thought about that. This is how one little thing that you do in life can trigger a huge effect in someone.
	A tiny, stupid little thing.
	Like just saying to me, there is some risk with you doing this.
	Right? You should think about it.
	I mean, that never happened to me before.
	Of course, when we're kids, we get it in school.
	School is win-lose, right? You don't want to be there.
	You don't want to study this stupid shit, right?
	You're right. You don't. You don't want to be there, right?
	I remember a couple of times that I really enjoyed school was when we threw away the books in the last couple of days of school just before summer.
	Nobody taught anything because there were no more tests, right?
	So what the hell would you... And we just did quizzes.
	We did games. We actually had fun at school and we were learning stuff.
	Because they got to throw out the book for the last couple of days.
	But I swear to God, for 99.9% of my education and I went to public and private school on three continents, it's just mind-numbingly dull and dumb.
	You don't want to be there. School sucks, right?
	And so it's win-lose, right?
	They win and you lose.
	You're just stuck there in your veal patent-fattening pen with all the other Slaves, right?
	Just sitting there while some teacher scrapes squeaky shit on a blackboard and drones on and on.
	Anybody? Bueller, anyone like this?
	Ben Stein is like the perfect high school teacher, right?
	And this is the prize of the culture that they throw to educate the children.
	The most important thing that any culture does is educate children and this is how they do it.
	It's completely win-lose and it's win-lose for your parents because if they don't pay the taxes they go to jail, right?
	So win for the teachers and lose for the children and for the parents.
	So the whole educational system that we have It's win-win-lose.
	And so the educational system can in no way, shape, or form teach win-win negotiations, which is a fundamental thing that any educational system should be doing, is teaching win-win negotiations, not win-lose negotiations.
	Because win-lose negotiations are all about the exercise of power.
	Now, there is great power in honesty, and when you bring honesty into a conversation, people feel That sense of power, like a huge generator got turned on two floors down.
	The floors hum a little, there's a little crackle in the air.
	Static rises, the hair rises up.
	It's like pulling out the Harry Potter wand, you know?
	Just electrifying it. And so they feel great power, but people associate power with the infliction of authority in win-lose situations.
	I don't want to go to school. You have to go to school.
	Okay. Right?
	That's win-lose, right?
	I don't want to go to school, tell me more, is win-win.
	I don't want to go to school, let's explore our options, is win-win, right?
	Yeah. But as children, we're just herded around like a bunch of drugged sheep, right?
	Yes. And so society cannot teach us win-lose.
	Sorry, society can only teach us win-lose.
	Society cannot teach us win-win negotiations because the whole foundation...
	Of educating the young is predatory and violent win-lose exercise of authority and violent power, right?
	So, of course, school can't teach you win-win negotiations because then you would try and exercise that win-win negotiation with the teacher and you'd say, I'm not interested.
	You know, we took a vote and we're not interested in this approach.
	We don't like this, right?
	I mean, children are the fucking customers and they have no voice.
	Did you ever have a survey in your high school about what you liked and didn't like?
	Did they ever consult you about what you wanted to learn?
	Wanted to be taught by and how you wanted to be taught?
	Oh, we were. We're desperate to say, can we do the class outside so at least I can get some fucking oxygen?
	Because we had the kind of school, at least towards the end, where the windows didn't even open, right?
	Yeah. Right?
	So we don't grow up with win-win negotiations.
	And so when you bring out honesty, people...
	They freak out. They shit themselves.
	Because it's like, oh my god, he's bringing out the heavy guns now.
	Oh, shit.
	He's bringing out honesty.
	I'm fucked. Right?
	Yeah. I know that I had...
	When I first started listening to FDR, I was in a position where the honesty was kind of alarming to me.
	And I did take...
	I don't know why I chose...
	To learn more about it.
	It seems like most of the time, or not most of the time, but often when I confront people when I'm being honest with myself, their reaction is supposed to run.
	Mine was, that hurts, but maybe it hurts for a reason.
	Right. But I'm not really in the business of trying to change other people anymore.
	It's not a good business to be in.
	It doesn't pay.
	Right. And it's irrational, right?
	You can't change people. No, you can't.
	Again, I know it's a big, big topic, and I appreciate you bringing it up, but does that sort of help as a way of approaching it?
	Yeah, I think that's a great way to approach it.
	I appreciate it. All right.
	Well, keep us posted. And remember, when in situations of conflict, try not to overcomplicate things with these big Highfalutin $20 terms, which I can never figure out, and maybe you can, but I just find that stuff's kind of paralyzing, and I just go back with, I'm going to be honest about how you feel.
	And the reason that I think it's so important, sorry, I said it was done.
	Ah, never. The reason I think it's important is, you know, just to take this example with Jan, the reason why it's important is, if I say, I don't want to do this to someone, Then what I'm really asking is, do you notice that I don't want to do this, and do you care?
	So we've all had the situation where we're thinking of buying something in a store.
	And someone comes up and says, the store person comes up and says, you should buy it.
	And you say, ah, I don't know.
	Now a good sales clerk will say, okay, well tell me what you're, you know, and we'll see if we can address you, blah, blah, blah.
	Right? But the bad one will say, no, you should just buy it, right?
	And you get really suspicious there, right?
	Yeah. Right, so when I say to Jan Hellfeld, I don't want to continue the debate, what I'm curious about is, is he going to say, oh, I'm sorry that you had such a bad experience.
	Could you tell me what you didn't like about it?
	Definitely. Right?
	Does he even notice that I don't like it?
	Is he even registering that I didn't like the debate that we had?
	Yeah, it sure didn't seem that he was taking your experience into account whatsoever.
	Oh, he obviously didn't care about it one way or the other, right?
	And so there's nothing to talk about, right?
	If I'm honest and the other person just completely ignores what I'm saying and just keeps talking about themselves, it's like, okay, so there's nothing to talk about, right?
	Yeah. In that case, there wouldn't be anything to talk about because it's not really much of a conversation.
	Well, it's not any kind of conversation, right?
	So, that's fine. I mean, that's the last-ditch thing, right?
	Do you even notice that I did not enjoy this interaction, right?
	Yeah. You know, it's like someone calls you up after you had a bad date and says, do you want to go out again?
	And you say, I really didn't have a good time.
	And they say, when can I pick you up?
	Right? Then it's just like, never.
	Because you don't even listen to what I'm talking to you, right?
	Yeah. So that's the value, but the challenge of honesty, right?
	Definitely. Well, thank you very much.
	Appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
	And I will talk to you soon.
	All right. Any last yearning burnings from people or anything that came up during the actual chatty chat itself that you would like to have cleared up or perhaps have more confusing metaphors applied to?
	these can both be supplied.
	All right.
	Well, I think if everyone could please unmute their microphones.
	comments.
	Everybody please unmute your microphones.
	Hello? Hello, alright.
	We have two birthdays in the house.
	And so, we have Finn Golfin, and I think we have Phil.
	Is Phil on the call?
	No, I don't think he is, but he will certainly be happy to not be on the call once he hears us droning like the damned.
	All right, so we have, I guess, happy birthdays that go out to, let's just say, Finn and Phil.
	Finn and Phil. And we'll do this in the key of E-flat major minor with a round-robin kind of harmony in the key of Frere Jacques.
	So we'll go with Finn and Phil.
	And I think Finn's a little older, so sing a little louder for him.
	Are we ready? Sure.
	All right, track it, babies.
	Happy birthday to you.
	Happy birthday to you.
	Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Finn and Finn.
	Happy birthday to you.
	And many more.
	Oh, we've had lots of requests to mute again.
	And Hero Fact, whose birthday is the 12th of October?
	All right. Is this the real life?
	No, just kidding. All right.
	Well, thank you everybody for a fantastic Sunday show.
	I really do appreciate everybody dropping by.
	Happy Thanksgiving to those who live in the peaceful land of Moose and Beaver.
	And I will talk to you guys this week.
	We have a couple of new, great new conversations that are coming out this week, which I hope that you will enjoy.
	And I guess that's it.
	We will talk to you soon and thank you so much.
	And thanks again, James, for doing the Skype stuff.
	It was really, really helpful. And we will talk to you soon.

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