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March 21, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:42:53

1620 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show 21 March 2010

Differences between men and woman, and how to survive crappy jobs and build a real career.

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	All right. Well, thank you everybody so much for joining.
	This is the 21st of March, 2010.
	And just a reminder, it is the free Bring Your Empty Belly and Unbruised Liver for the Freedom Aid Radio Listener Appreciation Barbecue, which will be Labor Day weekend in September.
	What's that? The 6th, I think it is, right?
	Or 4th? Something like that.
	And please feel free to come by.
	We have a great deal of fun.
	You can come for half a day.
	You can come for a day. Some people come for a day or two or three.
	And so I look forward to chatting with you.
	And it is always a great, great pleasure.
	Actually, this doesn't happen to me very often because I don't go out very much, but I was at the mall.
	with Izzy and ran into a listener and we had a very nice chat and so that's always a real pleasure.
	Unfortunately, Izzy was a bit tired and so I wasn't able to go for a coffee with him but I hope to, you know, If I see him again, I will be happy to.
	So it's always a pleasure to run into a listener.
	And if you would like to come up, we have.
	I mean, I look forward to it every year.
	So I hope that you will be able to come up.
	There is a Amiando page, which I'm sure someone can give to me because of my rampant preparation for the show.
	And I also wanted to thank Stephen Kinsella for dropping by to chat about intellectual property after a vicious legal battle over who owns the podcast.
	It has been released through Freedom Aid Radio.
	So I appreciate that.
	And you might want to check that out if you are interested in the topic.
	He is a redound expert in the field.
	And you will be shocked by the level of non-tangential coherence in the show.
	So it will be a departure from the FDR format.
	Now, just before we start, I just wanted to just point out a little thing about this healthcare debate.
	I know that, I mean, some people are watching it.
	I don't know if a lot of people at this sort of stage or level of the philosophical conversation are watching it.
	But the one thing I think that is interesting is that whenever there's a break in principle in any society, there are those who say, well, it's a slippery slope.
	You know, like, well, we're just going to help out the people who need healthcare the most.
	It's going to stay small.
	It's going to stay this way and so on.
	There are always those people who say, well, it's a slippery slope.
	If we let go of the principle, no matter how much we may want to help people through the state for this particular issue.
	It's a break-in principle.
	It's an expansion of power that is not huge in monetary standards or immediate power, but it's a break-in principle, and it's a slippery slope because that first thin edge of the wedge will be used to justify further expansions in state power and It will slowly and surely begin to expand.
	And there are always those who say, oh, don't be silly.
	There's no such thing as a slippery slope.
	We're in control of our democracy and it's not going to be a problem and so on.
	But I think that this healthcare debate is, you know, if there's one thing that people can get out of it, it is that the slippery slope argument is actually quite good.
	If you watched Michael Moore's Capitalism, A Love Story, You, A, will not feel the love, or even a clear or coherent definition of capitalism.
	But what you will see is he will say, well, look, we have public libraries.
	And we have Medicare, we have Medicaid, we have public education, so why not public health care?
	I mean, if it's okay to use public money and state power for something as relatively innocuous and unnecessary as a library, then who can really argue against it for health care?
	And... That's a very valid point and that's why I think it's so important to make the argument from principle rather than from effect or from immediate benefit to specific groups.
	There is a break in principle which does lead to a slippery slope and the road to socialized medicine has been Well, it's close to 100 years in the making for America.
	And if you don't oppose something on principle, you can only oppose immediate self-interest.
	and that really can't ever work because there are those people who are very hungry for government money and those people who are paying for it who have no relevant or relative incentive to oppose that grabbing of the wallet.
	If I've got 100 people taking a penny from my wallet every day, who am I going to oppose?
	It's not really worth my while to oppose them, like each of them, because it's one hundredth of one penny, but they each get a penny or if it's a dollar or whatever.
	And so I hope that people will look at this health care debate and say, well, you know, those who said it's a slippery slope, we're actually right.
	And I hope that that's something that people can remember.
	To remember to always argue from principles, not from the argument from effect, not from utilitarianism or consequences or anything like that, but continue to go back to principles.
	We've had some questions in the chat room, which I'm happy to ramble spittle tangent about, but if anybody has a lucky C, can you hear me question, I'm happy to listen in.
	If you'd like to talk now, that would be great.
	There's a great question in the Skype window.
	Could you just read it up? Oh, sure, sure.
	In the recent sibling podcast, you talked about it in terms of the violence moving down the family and ending in the youngest, which is something I remember you talking about before.
	I was wondering what you think is going on when it's the older sibling that makes it out.
	Our small group of frequent chat friends are all older siblings.
	Well, I don't know, and I... I would certainly be happy if these people would like to give me some thoughts about it.
	I would be very happy.
	The theories that I put forward obviously are not absolute because I am no determinist.
	They are trends. And one of the first things that happens when you put forward a trend is people will think of exceptions.
	And that's a perfectly valid thing to do.
	And it's a very fair thing to do.
	And it's a wise thing to do. Because if there are too many exceptions, right, then the theory is not valid.
	Um, I do think that, like, so, I mean, I'm sure we all understand this, so, I mean, an example would be, uh, smoking, uh, causes cancer.
	Well, I know a guy who smoked and didn't get cancer and died at the age of 95.
	You know, the George Burns who had a cigar or whatever, I think he died over 100.
	Winston Churchill died, I think, at the age of 92 after being a lifelong tobacco user.
	Mostly cigars, though occasionally Turkish cigarettes when he could not get his Stomping Tom cigars.
	But, um, So a trend is worthwhile.
	The first thing you'd want to do is think of exceptions, and that's a great way to test the theory.
	I have seen some older siblings who are quite tender and solicitous and kind towards younger siblings.
	I don't know exactly how that occurs or what the difference is.
	The first place that I would look, this was certainly the case with me, would be to look and see if there was any caregiver that was around for the eldest child who was not around for the youngest child.
	So, for instance, there may have been a nanny or an aunt or an uncle or something or a babysitter who had more kindness or kindness, just a great deal of kindness.
	So there may have been exposure to a more beneficial or positive role model.
	That certainly was the case for me when I was a baby.
	And so that would be the first place that I would look.
	There's other things that we could talk about, but that would be the first place that I would look.
	But I really can't speak as to why these people would be different.
	That would be something that would be interesting to talk about.
	So if we want to have an elder sibling conference, I would be very, very happy to chat about that some more.
	Sure. Well, I'm also an elder sibling, and my brother is obviously younger.
	And he...
	Pretty much went on the whole...
	He pretty much went on the offensive as far as, you know, Freedom in Radio saying, I got sucked into the cult thing, you know?
	Right, right. Yeah, for sure.
	There are some younger siblings who don't fit the pattern.
	The other thing that I would mention as well is...
	And this is going to sound all kinds of shallow and maybe it's right and maybe it's wrong.
	It's just off the top of my head, so don't take it with any seriousness.
	But... I think that it's very important to remember what effect peers have.
	And I think it was Gabor Maté who was talking about that recently, that peers are very, very important when it comes to understanding...
	Oh no, I think it was...
	I can't remember who it was. But the importance of peers.
	So what sort of friends did someone have?
	And what influence did those friends have?
	Was there any illness?
	Illness in children which...
	You know, it's sort of lower status.
	Was somebody overweight?
	Somebody wear glasses? Was there something that made them less cool?
	And not that that's something you want for your kid, but if it does happen, then there can be a chance for more introspection or a greater contentedness because you have to learn to live with your own company if you're not as popular with others where you moved around a lot when you were younger and thus had a harder time forming friendships.
	Maybe your younger sibling had a better time forming friendships and maybe those friendships weren't beneficial.
	And so, again, there's lots of things To look at in terms of factors.
	And there is, of course, just the mysterious alchemy of choice.
	So I can't really say for sure.
	I mean, which is good, because if I could, then...
	Right, right.
	Well, I mean, in my experience or, you know, in my history, I mean, I've got a lot of those elements.
	I mean, I had very few friends.
	I mean, there were some years I didn't have any friends.
	Yeah. I had to get glasses when I was 11, and I started gaining weight when I was 11, although my brother did too.
	But in terms of socially, my brother always seemed to be able to have more friends and get along with people better, which, you know, sure has everything to do with our home life, but, you know, the origins of which.
	But, I mean, yeah, I mean, my brother always seemed to sort of enjoy conformity, whereas I was always not so much with that, you know?
	Yeah, I mean, I think that dysfunctional families will often, you know, in my sort of amateur theory, dysfunctional families will often pick on who is considered the least popular and the weakest socially.
	And that may be an elder sibling, if the elder sibling, for whatever reason, is less popular.
	That is often the youngest sibling, and I would say it's more often the younger sibling than the elder sibling.
	But, you know, if the younger sibling is really athletic or really good looking or something like that, then it may reverse that because then the younger sibling will have more sort of social cachet and social power.
	So it really is, in a dysfunctional family, it's the person who has the least power, who is, you know, marked as the victim and so on.
	It is usually the younger sibling, in my experience and opinion, but not for sure.
	Right.
	And I've kind of been aware for quite a long time, before I even started getting into psychology and self-knowledge, that there was a real inversion in my family.
	You know, where my family is the exception in terms of birth order.
	but not like I'm the only guy that has ever experienced this.
	But yeah, you're right.
	It is usually the younger...
	All the movies, it's the younger sibling that's been spit out and whatnot by the elder siblings.
	Yeah, I mean, I certainly knew that there were some exceptions in families that I knew when I was growing up, but it generally was larger, stronger.
	All other things being equal, it's almost always the elder sibling who's more dominant and the younger sibling who's less dominant, but there's lots of other factors that can alter that, of course.
	Yeah. There was something else I was thinking about, and just sort of a, I guess a confirmation of the sibling abuse theories you've been putting forward.
	Excuse me. I have a little bit of a harder time pinning the religion side down.
	Like, how the projections work in that way.
	But the political side... Just for those who haven't, you mean the idea that God is the parent is...
	I mean, it's almost too obvious to even mention, right?
	So I think that you're okay with, right?
	But the idea that Satan is an abusive sibling?
	Yeah, that is much less clear to me.
	Although, when you come to the political aspect, after I deconverted from Christianity in 2002-2003, I mean, I was pretty much...
	You know, corporations are good.
	The poor are the ones at fault.
	And the government, of course, is really, really bad.
	So, I mean, that fits very well.
	I'm just personally more foggy, more unclear.
	Well, sorry, but this stuff only works if you're not philosophical.
	I mean, these trends only work, in my opinion, if you don't have reason and evidence as your guide.
	Now, it doesn't mean that reason and evidence immediately makes them all vanish.
	But if you come to your position through reason and evidence, then you're much less likely to have it as a sort of trauma-driven ideology, as I talked about in the Bomb and the Brain series.
	Part 4, right, where ideology follows trauma.
	So if you have self-knowledge, or at least if you have a sort of recent argument from philosophy, then you're much less likely to have that be an ex post facto justification for your existing avoided states within you or whatever, right?
	So that would sort of be – but people who have that perspective and then come up with the philosophy afterwards or come look for that which confirms their prejudices afterwards would be more likely to fall into this.
	That would sort of be my response to that.
	Well, I mean...
	I would say that I didn't have a whole lot.
	I mean, I had more self-knowledge when I escaped from religion as opposed to when I was still embedded within it because I realized God doesn't exist, among other things.
	Oh, but you, so sorry to interrupt, right?
	And this is just leaning on a couple of podcasts.
	I think you and I did one or two conversations about this.
	But with you, right, I mean, the external attacker is, you know, for the left is the corporation and for the rightist it's Satan.
	But when you didn't have a place to project that internal attacker onto, what happened to you?
	Well, I got depressed.
	Well, self-attack, right? Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, self-attack was a huge problem for you two years ago, if I remember rightly.
	No, no, that's right.
	That's very true. And that's one of the reasons why people prefer to project internal states onto the world through ideologies and religions because it gives you relief.
	You can have a ritual that calms the attacking voice, right?
	So if you have the attacking voice in your head and you cross yourself three times and spin in a circle or read Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein, then you have that get the behind me Satan, you get some relief.
	It's something that doesn't solve the underlying problem.
	It's like somebody with obsessive compulsive disorder washing their hands for the 300th time in the day.
	It does quiet the immediate anxiety, but it doesn't deal with the underlying issue.
	So if you don't have a place to project that stuff into, it collapses in on yourself, and you become, like, that's when you discover, in my opinion, the ecosystem, because you don't have a place to project it all.
	And you realize that, you know, the god that you've been praying to is an aspect of yourself.
	And the devil that you're afraid of is what Jung would call the shadow, or the darker shadow.
	The dark side of the self.
	So that would be, I think, why your self-attack escalated during that time because you didn't have a place to put those psychological difficulties.
	Yeah, I mean, it definitely got worse as I got older, for sure.
	But yeah, that makes sense.
	And certainly, you know, I mean, it certainly matches in some ways, but I guess the question of, or the observation that I'm in philosophy now, which means that I had some sort of brain back then, right? To put it one way.
	Does that mean that the projections don't work?
	You know, like, there would be some mismatch because you're talking, like, in your theory you're talking about people who have no self-knowledge whatsoever?
	Well, little self-knowledge.
	I think it's possible to have no, but people who don't have a very strong understanding of their thoughts and where they come from, then yeah, I would say that those people are locked in that loop of managing internal anxieties through addiction to projected ideology.
	Yeah, for sure. Oh, and I sort of wanted to add one thing that I forgot to mention.
	I just put out sort of part five, and this is like part 5.1.
	It's the Dolby version of the sibling abuse stuff.
	It struck me because I've certainly met people like this, and you can let me know if it makes sense to you.
	They are atheists, and they are anarchists.
	But they don't have peace of mind.
	And if you think about...
	And some of these people have, you know, sort of brushed past FDR over the years.
	They are survivalists, right?
	They are, you know, I'm going to go live in the woods.
	I hate people. Everyone's a sheeple.
	blah, blah, blah, right?
	And they're really hostile towards the world, and they think that the world is composed of, you know, illiterate, propagandized scum who aren't worth the freedoms that heroes can bestow upon them.
	And so in that sense, I would say that they don't have the receptacle of the fear of horizontal attack, which is the sibling issue.
	They don't have God or Satan for that.
	They don't have corporations because they're atheists and they're anarchists.
	And so what happens is it goes into the people, right?
	It goes into your fellow citizens and still remains, I think, fundamentally undealt with.
	But I thought that was one other way of looking at it that might be of use.
	Yeah, the anarcho-primitivists, also the anarcho-primitivists.
	I think that if you come up with an ideology that is fundamentally impossible to And opposed to reality and human nature and the necessities of our biological development.
	I don't think that anarcho-capitalism is that at all.
	I think that it's entirely in line with human nature, our evolution, and rational UPB-style virtue.
	But why would you set up something like anarcho-communism?
	Which, not only is it impossible in the world, but you can't even do it in your own life.
	At least you can do anarcho-capitalism or voluntary association and peaceful relations within your own life.
	But you can't do no property in your own life.
	So I think what that is a way of doing...
	It's a sort of update of the St.
	Francis of Assisi, I'm too good for this world kind of thing, where you set up this ideology of virtue that is more about pomposity and hatred than it is about...
	motivate others to be good.
	So you set up the standard of virtue, which is impossible and distasteful and weird for people.
	And then what happens is you get to get angry at them for not hitting your lofty moral standards, not getting your lofty moral standards.
	And so you get to vent all your disgust at the world, on the world, for not meeting your high standards.
	And And that is, to some degree, certain types of religion are that way as well, that they have these impossible standards, like in religion, sorry, in Christianity, you have, you know, that the thought is the same as the deed, right?
	So if you look laviciously At a well-toned female haunch that is exactly the same as adultery.
	Well, that's of course an impossible standard to maintain.
	And what it does is it leads you to forever be monitoring your own thoughts and forever feeling guilty and forever confessing and running back for absolution.
	And boring everybody with the minutiae of your every imagined crime during the day and apologizing to your wife for looking at a billboard with a Victoria's Secret model on.
	It's boring and it's repetitive and it's annoying.
	It's a standard that no human being can ever reach.
	I think that people who have those kind of utopian ideals, which are very counter to that which has worked in history and that which conforms to human nature, I think those people are partly setting it up just to feel superior to other people and to get to unleash their anger.
	I think that can also happen with animal rights people as well, but that's something I've just sort of touched on a little bit.
	That makes sense as well.
	I was kind of in that kind of soup, that kind of swampy, soupy, goopy place pretty much right before coming to FDR. Right.
	It's a very dangerous place to be.
	I mean, the one thing I think that's great, one of the things I think is great about this conversation is we can actually do stuff in our lives, right?
	We can actually do stuff in our lives.
	And for some people, when you have the opportunity to bring philosophy to life in your own social and familial and to some small degree work environments, that's very exciting, right?
	But for other people who...
	Want to have an ideology to make them feel aloof and superior and to Create a poison container called every other citizen on the planet who doesn't follow me off the cliff, then when someone says, well, you can just apply these principles in your own life, they kind of freak out because the purpose is not to apply the principles in their own life, but it's more of a defense mechanism to feel superior and to have a place to discharge old wounds.
	So I think that's one reason why people can get a bit squirrely when confronted with If honesty is a virtue, then be honest with the people in your life.
	Really honest with the people in your life.
	If the initiation of violence is a vice and supporting it is corrupt, then bring that crossroads to the people in your life.
	That's really scary. I mean, we all know how scary that is, those of us who've done it.
	But for people who are sort of using violence, So moral ideology as a form of superiority, what that does is it puts them in a position of vulnerability, which is exactly what moral superiority is designed to help you avoid.
	And so I think that's why people...
	But at the same time, they can't say, well, I don't want to be honest with the people in my life because then they lose their illusion of moral superiority.
	I mean, when you actually try to be moral, genuinely moral, like virtuous and stand up for your principles in your life and in this world, it is a...
	It's a very, very scary and humiliating and frightening and low-status thing to do.
	It just feels like you're begging the world for table scraps when you try to bring virtue.
	I think it takes a lot of strength and it takes a lot of guts to be able to weather that storm and continue to be honest with people.
	It takes a lot of ability to withstand some of the resulting cynicism and hostility that can result from a genuine commitment to honesty in your own life.
	And so people would, you know, much rather worry about what's going on with the Republicans and the Democrats rather than really open up their hearts and minds to those around them.
	But the first virtue, in my opinion, is always honesty.
	Because without that virtue, nothing else is possible.
	So, yeah, that's my sort of thoughts on it.
	Alright. Cool, thanks.
	you're welcome do we have other questions or shall I browse the chat for material looks like it's time to graze Time to graze.
	Oh yeah, we did atheist anarchist bigotry.
	What is a good way?
	Somebody says, what is a good way to make new friends if you don't have many?
	Because it doesn't happen automatically.
	I gotta tell you, I'm really not the best person to ask that.
	You can have kids.
	That will give you a chance to meet quite a few people.
	You can, of course, join groups that have interests that are similar to yours and just chat with people.
	But it's weird, you know.
	It's something that you don't really notice when you're younger.
	Of course, you have friends when you're a kid because you're just around other kids.
	And as a teenager, you hang around for the most part with other people that you know and so on.
	But, you know, people move and they get older and they get married and they, you know, are less available.
	And this sort of struck me when I was, I guess, 18 or so, when I first went to go and work out north as a gold panner and a claim staker.
	I was stationed in...
	I lived in Thunder Bay, or I was based in Thunder Bay, and we'd go out into the bush from there.
	And I was living with a Japanese woman who was my work colleague.
	And we sort of would go into the bush and get our samples and do all this sort of stuff and look for gold.
	And I would head to the gym and she just wanted to stay home.
	She wasn't much of a going out, but I was like, I was 18, man.
	I wanted to go out. I wanted to go.
	We are going to another disco, disco after disco.
	I wanted to ride the shoulders of Nina Hagen into the Berlin gin-soaked dawn.
	And so I wanted to go out and...
	It was weird because, like, you're in a city, you don't know anybody, and how do you meet people?
	So until I realized better, I would try and chat up men in the sauna room until I sort of realized that I was making them more edgy than curious.
	And so, you know, I would actually talk to women in bars and go out with women, but mostly just because I wanted people to chat with because, you know, I was Always been a pretty gregarious kind of fellow.
	So it's tough to meet people when you're in a new environment in a new place.
	I mean, you can meet people through work, but they already have their whole set of established friends and they all get together and talk about stuff that they all know.
	And it's kind of tough to wedge yourself into that kind of situation.
	So... I've certainly made some great new friends through this conversation and I still have some friends from back in the day but it's not easy to meet people as you get older.
	It is much more like dating than it is like just hanging out.
	Of course, the easy frisbee familiarity of college is not the case anymore.
	My family and I went to A university here in...
	I guess it's not quite here.
	It's in a town near here. The university is called McMaster.
	It's actually where... It's got a hospital and that's where Izzy was born.
	And we were sort of walking around and it's a beautiful day.
	It's just been fantastic up here this last week.
	It's cold as a witch's tip right now, but it was really nice before.
	And there were, of course, you know, all these young 20-somethings who were, you know, they were playing frisbee and they were walking around with their dreadlocks and their army shorts and all that kind of stuff.
	I mean, I'm 43.
	I'll be 44 this year.
	I will be a cult this year.
	And looking way back, it's almost a quarter century now.
	I guess 23 years or whatever since I went to college.
	And you could see everybody has the time to hang.
	You know, you've got 10 or 15 hours of classes a week and you're sort of on your own schedule.
	And it was a beautiful day.
	So everybody was just out hanging around and shooting the shit.
	And it was a nice thing to see.
	It's actually a really nice thing to look at it, to enjoy it and not feel any sense of nostalgia.
	I'm so glad I'm not in college anymore.
	I enjoyed it mostly when I was there, but I'm glad that it's all done.
	But it's tough. It is tough to meet people.
	The only thing that I can suggest is, you know, just be as positive, as curious and as friendly as you can and see who responds.
	But if you have some social anxieties, which I think we all do, I certainly do.
	If I'm going to a new gathering and I don't know people, it takes a little bit of screw my courage to the Macbethian sticking place to plunge into the waters.
	But if you have some sort of social anxiety, plus your head is full of radical, consistent, rationalist philosophy, it can be a real challenge.
	But I would just say keep the conversation light and easy.
	And talk about movies and so on.
	There was a woman who was in the park.
	I was there with Isabella a week and a half ago.
	And... There was a mom who was just being pretty wretched to her son.
	Just, anyway, we don't have to get into that.
	And I did chat with another mom who was there.
	I was like, well, that wasn't very much fun.
	And we sort of talked about our experience of that situation.
	And so, you know, there can be things that you can talk about that you have in common with people.
	And we shared a little bit of our philosophy of parenting.
	And that was nice because we had sort of the same sort of approach.
	I think a similar approach to parenting, which was great.
	So, Sorry, it's not a particularly great answer, but there are lots of nice people in the world.
	It doesn't mean that they're philosophically consistent or they understand things from root principles or anything like that, but that's fine, right?
	I mean, if you're a cardiologist, you could be friends with people who aren't cardiologists, right?
	It's just a different kind of thing.
	But you can have fun conversations with fun people about things that aren't involved in philosophy.
	Yeah. Somebody's asked, my wife and I are listening and would like to know, what would you consider to be a good reason to have kids?
	Well, somebody's got to wipe your ass when you're 90, right?
	You know, the only thing that really drove me to having kids was, you know, life is such a beautiful thing.
	Life is such an exciting, scary, exhilarating, wonderful thrill.
	And I find life to be this great even when I had a childhood that was nine layers of crappy hell, right?
	And so for me, it's like, well, if I'm so happy and so enthusiastic about life, even with all the trials that I went through, well, if I could raise a kid who doesn't have those trials and tribulations, isn't that kid going to be even happier?
	than uh than i am and i i've got a little video i'll post it um if people are interested of izzy sort of her first playtime with some other kids uh how she's interacting with them and i mean she's got more social poise and confidence in her little finger than i think i'll ever have in my whole body and that's a beautiful thing to see and i think if if you love life and you know whether you had a good childhood or bad or whatever
	if you love life then to me it's like if you order a great dessert and your wife is sitting across from you and you you put your fork into this dessert and you put that dessert in your mouth and it's just all 19 kinds of explosion sugary goodness that just is like you know your your your tongue rotates and have 12 little orgasms that Then you're like, oh my God. The first thing you want to do is to share...
	That dessert with your wife, right?
	Or if you hear a great song, a song that you just love, I mean, don't you want to share it with someone and say, oh, listen to this singer, listen to this musician, listen to this note, listen to this oboe.
	It's just fantastic.
	And so when we experience something beautiful, when we experience something that is of great treasure and joy and depth and excitement, the first thing that I want to do is really enjoy it.
	The second thing right afterwards I want to do is I want to share it with my loved ones.
	And we can do that, of course, with children.
	We can share, we can create, and thus share in how wonderful and amazing and exciting life really is.
	And I think that that's where the desire for children, you know, taste this dessert called being alive.
	And the amazing thing is you can take this dessert called being alive from the dessert fork out of your mouth.
	You can put it in an empty chair and like...
	Like a red-suited spaceship man zooming in on Star Trek, a human life can materialize around that desert.
	And can enjoy the taste of life.
	And so I think if you love life, then create life and share the joy of life with your children.
	I think that's a great reason.
	I don't think it can be anything that you want.
	I mean, obviously, you want it, but it can't be to make me happier, to make me feel better, to conform to expectations because my mom wants me to have kids, because my wife wants me to have kids.
	I think that it fundamentally should ideally come from I love the taste of this dessert called life.
	Here, have a heaping 90-year-long forkful of it.
	And that would be my suggestion on how to approach it.
	Oh, it is. You know, if you can be the kind of parent that you didn't have as a parent, it is a great thing.
	Somebody's asked, if I had to choose, where do my sympathies lie the most in the mainstream political spectrum?
	Who are the most well-intentioned?
	I don't think it's a trick question like you're trying to trick me, but to me, it's a question that I would reject the very premises of.
	To me, it would be like saying, where do my sympathies lie with my local mafia?
	Who do I think is the most well-intentioned?
	Well, I don't think any of them are well-intentioned.
	I genuinely don't think that any of them are well-intentioned.
	I certainly, you know, at an abstract, non-theological economics level, I think that Ron Paul has a great understanding of fiat currency, inflation, the Federal Reserve System, the evils of government control of currency, and he has...
	Great conceptual knowledge of and arguments for the free market.
	And I think that is some good stuff for people to get their hands on.
	I think it comes with too much of a cost, of course, in terms of integrity.
	And if the approach that I take, which is that the road to freedom is through the thorny thickets of self-knowledge and no other way, I think that the people in the political side don't have any good evidence.
	In fact, I think they have Some pretty bad evidence or evidence against them.
	So I think that if you are a strict empiricist, then you would look for other solutions than the political solution.
	And if you start to look for other solutions, you very quickly run up against self-knowledge as the solution, right?
	If you start to just say, just a blank slate, right?
	I mean, I was into the political solution for many years, and I was an objectivist for many years, and I still am largely an objectivist, right?
	But you have to be willing to cast the illusions overboard if you want to be a philosopher.
	You have to be willing to reinvent your...
	Reasoning based on new evidence and new information and an accumulation of evidence against your theories.
	And it became pretty hard in the 90s to escape the fact that politics...
	A, politics wasn't working after Reagan.
	I mean, for those who weren't around for the Reagan thing, I mean, Reagan was the shining white knight of libertarianism.
	I mean, he was a big fan of Friedman and he read, you know, all of the libertarian literature and he was going to be the one who turned all of this around.
	And there was a popular mandate.
	Government is the solution.
	Sorry, government is the problem, not the solution.
	And, you know, for the people who are the Ron Paul people or the other people who think politics is going to work, I just assume most of them weren't around for the Reagan thing.
	And I was already an objectivist just starting out in objectivism when Reagan got in and objectivists were all crazy for Reagan.
	And although they had some hesitations about his religiosity.
	And if you haven't been through that, then, you know, I don't think you get that this has just all been done before.
	And it became pretty hard to sustain the belief in political solutions when that amount of rhetoric for a smaller government ended up with that massive increase in the size of the government through Reagan.
	I think it's tough to maintain that.
	So I hope that sort of helps to answer that.
	I don't think that there are people who have genuinely empirical and good intentions in the political system.
	What do I think of libertarian pundits like John Stossel?
	Other than his amazing ability to play Freddie Mercury in a feature biopic, I think that John Stossel is interesting.
	He's very much around the argument from effect.
	Isn't this crazy? Isn't this silly?
	Isn't this ridiculous? But he doesn't deal with good and evil.
	And I can sort of understand why.
	I mean, he's a mainstream media guy.
	I think he's a good public speaker.
	He seems a bit sort of wide-eyed and breathless to me.
	And I always get a little frustrated because his interviews where he's going to go for the jugular always cut off before he gets there.
	And that's what happens when you can't use the argument for morality, which is not because he's dumb or anything.
	He just don't think he's ever heard about it.
	But, you know, I will occasionally watch a video of his if I'm at the gym and I don't, you know, I didn't bring anything with me.
	I'll watch a video of his on YouTube.
	But I can't say that I'm particularly impressed or enthralled.
	It's all just, you know, this doesn't work and the government is silly and this is inefficient and things worked before the government.
	But those are all just arguments from effect.
	And the argument from effect is just a modern religion because you can cherry pick whatever you want.
	To prove whatever you want, just the same way that you can pick something in the Bible to agree with any perspective that you want.
	Steph, what are your thoughts on the only child?
	I don't have any particular thoughts on the only child.
	I don't think there's any particular problems having being an only child.
	And I also don't think that there's any problems having more than one child.
	I think once you start to get into – you're running out of fingers to count your children.
	I think that starts to become a problem because you just – children are such resource hogs that I think you start to run out of time and energy.
	But once you start to have too many kids – I certainly would think that more than three would be...
	I think three is pushing it and more than three, to me, would be pretty crazy.
	But, you know, it's still better to be alive, right?
	So... Somebody's asked, a question about the female psyche.
	What is the deal with women and Jane Austen stories?
	It all seems sort of pointless and uninteresting.
	I just don't see the attraction.
	Well, let me go completely out on a limb.
	Why not? Why not?
	Let's talk a little bit about Jane Austen.
	A woman... Oh, I can already see the emails come sliding in.
	Anyway, this is just my opinion, right?
	So, you know, I apologize for anyone who finds it offensive.
	I don't mean it that way. But this is sort of my way of thinking.
	Why do women like soap operas?
	And why do women like Jane Austen stories?
	And why do women like romantic comedies so much and so on?
	Well, because the fundamental question...
	The fundamental question of a man's life is, who am I going to be with?
	Right? I think the fundamental question of a man's life is, what am I going to do?
	These are all ridiculous generalizations, right?
	The fundamental question of a man's life is, what am I going to do?
	The fundamental question of a woman's life is, who am I going to be with?
	And that is not because men are better or women are better.
	It's nothing to do with that. That, to me, is just how the brains have evolved, right?
	So a man says, what am I going to do?
	Which is, how am I going to provide, right?
	That would be how nature would have developed the male brain.
	Now, the woman's brain will be, how am I going to find a good provider?
	Because if you're a woman and you get pregnant and you have a bad provider, that is very bad for your reproductive success.
	This is all amoral, just biological optimization.
	So, men would be into war and would be into sports and would be into hunting and would be into all of these sort of, what am I going to do to provide for my family?
	And women would be all about, how am I going to find a good provider for my offspring and for myself?
	Because a woman would be, you know, pregnant eight times and then dead, right?
	And so, she would be in a pretty helpless state for much of her youth, at least in terms of having children.
	And so, a lot of stories hook into this, right?
	Because the great danger of a woman's life, historically, is to choose the wrong guy.
	If you choose the wrong guy, that is really, really bad.
	That is really bad, like fatal, right?
	Because if you choose a guy who's just going to have sex with you, get you pregnant, and then take off, then you're stuck with a baby, which makes you that much less marriageable for other people.
	For other men. And so your life is kind of over.
	And you can see this from Samuel Richens' Pamela onwards, which is one of the very earliest novels, where a woman is trying to keep her virtue with a sort of predatory nobleman who's after her.
	The great problem for women is the problem of love and sexuality and an appropriate partner.
	And so if you look at Jane Austen, Jane Austen novels...
	Sorry, here the call was dropped, but we pick it up again.
	Alright, so to continue, and just give me a shout, James, if we lose me, but to continue, a woman becomes less manageable if she has a kid and the guy takes off.
	And so women, again, prior to the rise of birth control and women with independent incomes and so on, Women had to be continually warned about players, right?
	About the, yo, how you doing?
	You know, those guys who would come in, be flashy and tell the women whatever they wanted to hear in order to get them into bed and who would then take off.
	So women would want to have the most physically attractive man.
	That's just basic biology.
	But at the same time...
	The most physically attractive man can be a real player because of his very physical attractiveness.
	And so there's a tension in that, right?
	You want the physically attractive man, but you don't want the player who's not going to be there for you.
	And so a lot of times, women's fiction is to try and join these two together.
	What they want is they want to have the very attractive man who is also stable and loving and mature and so on.
	In the same way, men complain about if she's hot, she's crazy.
	That's something that you hear about in men's conversations as well.
	And so I think that Jane Austen and to some degree soap operas and romantic comedies are all about warning women about this peril, right?
	That the very physically attractive guy who tells you everything you want to hear is a great danger.
	And whereas the guy who is, you know, maybe your best friend and sort of quieter, maybe not quite as flashy, but he's more stable, he's the guy you want to marry.
	While at the same time, you can't give up on physical attractiveness because that's an indicator of good genetic health, such as it is.
	So I would say that women are drawn to these kinds of stories.
	And I mean, this is true even now.
	It's not like we've all overcome our evolution because men and women have achieved greater economic equality.
	And so I think women are drawn to these stories because that's just the fables that they would have to be taught.
	You want an attractive guy, but you don't want a player because a player can literally cause your life to be destroyed.
	So I think that would be why women would be more interested in I think because men would be more into the conquest, sort of attack, predatory conquest, that's why men are into watching sports and men are into sports movies which are equally incomprehensible to a lot of women because that's not about making sure that your loins are protected from the flashy player who's going to abandon you with child.
	It's more about what are you going to do, who are you going to conquer, how are you going to get your resources because, of course, the primary resource is In history was not nature, external nature, but other human beings are slaves and so on.
	So I think that would be why that divide would occur.
	So again, that's just my thoughts, which have no particular bearing.
	They're just random little tangents that I have mulled over over the years.
	A question. Do you think women would still use makeup and have their ears pierced in a largely psychologically healthy society?
	That is an interesting question.
	I will have to think about that.
	I don't think I could say anything too intelligent about that just now.
	So that's a very, very good question.
	All right. Any other thoughts?
	Oh, some of these are. Steph, I wondered about your first exposure to philosophy.
	Was there a teacher, a relative, or a friend, or just that painful shelf in the library?
	Did you understand that philosophy was going to open up your post of things right away or just grow over time?
	Well... I've mentioned this before, so I'll just touch on it very briefly.
	It came to me through Neil Peart, which for those who are not Rush fans, and I'm not a big particular Rush fan, I've seen them twice in concert, but I'm not a huge fan of their music.
	To me, it's like, yes, got even squeakier, even squeakier voice singer and never stopped with jazz rock interpretation, but...
	Then the drummer for Neil Peart is a big fan of Ayn Rand.
	And so a friend of mine who was a big fan of Rush read The Fountainhead, passed it along to me.
	And The Fountainhead was an amazing story for me and has astounding relevance and resonance even now, right?
	I mean, in my own way, I view myself as mildly Rourkean, right?
	Insofar as I'm trying to build this architectural structure called philosophy.
	And yeah, there are some...
	Bad Randian villains out there who don't like what I'm doing.
	And there is the challenge of maintaining your integrity in the face of opposition and so on.
	So the story has resonance for me and much more resonance to me than Atlas Shrugged, which I also think is, of course, a fantastic book.
	So I started through that and then shortly after that I got into Nathaniel Brandon and through him started reading about psychology and self-knowledge.
	And I was really drawn to the psychology and self-knowledge because I really felt that was something that I could do in my life.
	Whereas the Randian stories were not things that I particularly felt I could do.
	Like I wasn't going to be an 18-year-old kid, wander around the world and convince industrialists to...
	Quit! Oh, spoiler alert!
	Anyway, so that's how it all started.
	And through RAND, I got into Nietzsche and started taking courses on philosophy at the undergrad and graduate level through college.
	And I got into other kinds of Russian writers.
	This is more through my theater, right?
	Because I did a lot of theater when I was younger and I was in theater school for a couple of years.
	And in theater, you can't escape the Russians, right?
	So I was in The Seagull, which is a Chekhov play.
	Oh, those comedies, those Russian comedies.
	It's like being slowly suffocated under a wet cat.
	And I started reading Turgenev and started reading Dostoevsky and really got into that kind of writing.
	And so I wasn't very narrowly constrained in the way that some objectivists end up being.
	I viewed objectivism as a fantastic, fantastic philosophy, and I still do.
	But to me, it was a gateway to a world that I could bring rational principles to in the realm of art and self-knowledge.
	So I was very much drawn to that.
	And I tried over the years to...
	And I'll do a podcast series on this soon in my list of things to do.
	I was absolutely fascinated by both the success and the failures of the Ayn Rand movement.
	And I don't know what to call it.
	It's not really fair to call it a movement.
	But... I really sort of vowed to myself that if I was ever in a position To have some influence in a wider sphere, particularly in the realm of ideas, that I was going to be damned if I was going to replicate any of the mistakes that Rand and Brandon made.
	And so I think that...
	And I'm pretty satisfied with the list of things that I have pledged not to do and the list of things that they didn't do that I have done that I think has really helped this conversation grow.
	And such as, you know, curious...
	Don't have sex with listeners.
	It's quite important, I think.
	Number one, do not have sex with listeners.
	But yeah, obviously affairs and things like that are completely incomprehensible to me anyway.
	But yeah, have a sense of humor about yourself.
	Deal with... Things which people can actually achieve in their lives rather than big windy abstractions that seem to crush people like slow-moving road crushers.
	And there's a bunch of other things that I've really tried to do.
	And for heaven's sakes, I mean, I think this is a mistake that Rand made out of vanity.
	I don't have a movement where all the roads lead to you in terms of virtue and desirability and all these kinds of things, right?
	So the Randian axiom that what is rational is the most attractive, you know, sexually and romantically and from a friendship standpoint.
	Whoever is the most rational is the most attractive.
	Ayn Rand is the most rational.
	Therefore, Ayn Rand must be the most...
	I mean, that to me was really terrible.
	I also vowed to never name what it is that I do.
	And that's also been really important to me.
	I'm not going to... Not just because I have a silent X at the end of my name, but Stephan-esque philosophy.
	I don't want to name what I'm doing because to me, what I'm doing is philosophy.
	It's not a type of philosophy.
	It's not a school of philosophy because I don't think there should be a school of philosophy any more than there should be a school of science.
	So I didn't want to name anything.
	The other thing I wanted to make sure was that people did not come to me as the arbiter of truth.
	That was really important to me, to teach as many principles as possible that I have found valuable and useful, rather than have people come and say, what's the answer?
	Which I think would be a terrible thing. And I think Rand did that to some degree.
	And some of the stuff that happened later in the group, you know, these mock trials and expulsions and so on.
	I mean, I think that all stuff was very unhealthy and not good, so...
	So I wanted to sort of deal with those sorts of issues.
	And I, you know, if people are interested in going into this in more detail, but that's sort of the approaches that I wanted to take that were, you know, with enormous respect to the...
	Graceful, brain-crushing Russian genius.
	I wanted to make sure that I did not replicate her mistakes, just as I'm sure I've made mistakes.
	And, you know, those who...
	You, perhaps, right?
	But those people who continue on from where I'm able to go will correct mistakes that I have made.
	So, that's that.
	Oh, what a great ending.
	Somebody's asked, how did you manage to go to three Ivy League schools and found a business without therapy?
	Was it primarily your work with Brandon that got you that form of motivation?
	Well, yeah. I mean, I think to some degree, that really was the case.
	It wasn't just Brandon, but there was a number of other people who I've mentioned over the course of these shows.
	But it's just doing the work.
	You know, it's keeping a journal.
	It's talking with friends about what's going on in my mind.
	It's, you know, sitting.
	It's meditation. It's massage.
	It's yoga. It's the body work that I did in terms of gymnastics and dance and stage fighting and all of that that I did in theater school.
	Yeah. For me, it was really reconnecting with the physicality, which is dissociated brain activity.
	To me, it was one of the hallmarks of a traumatized youth for me, which led me to be Hyper-intellectual, abstract, and out of touch with my feelings and the physicality of life.
	So it was a lot of that work.
	It was, you know, the sentence completion exercises.
	It was trying to figure out my own dreams.
	It was reading a lot of Freud, reading a lot of Jung, Adler, and the other, even Bradshaw, to a large degree, can be helpful.
	Doing the exercises that are in those books.
	You can do, I mean, it didn't get to me to the core of the issues, but it really did help Quite a lot in terms of getting me through.
	And also, I mean, I have a pretty ferocious willpower, which I guess at 1800 podcasts, that may not be particularly shocking, but I have a pretty ferocious willpower, which is a blessing and not a blessing.
	It's a blessing when you're young to sort of power your way through things.
	But it is not a blessing when you get older, because it can lead you to be less sensitive and empathetic than you need to be.
	So it was learning to temper that sort of scud-like, locked-in willpower of mine that I think was really important.
	Yeah, you can do some great stuff.
	I just got an email from a fellow who's actually seeing, well, it doesn't matter, but he's seeing a therapist and the therapist has said that this guy is really, really far ahead because he's done a lot of work on himself beforehand.
	So I think that's great.
	Somebody has said, Steph, I've recently started working on my own mecosystem.
	I currently have 10 characters I've discovered thus far.
	Do you think there can be too many or too few characters in a person's mecosystem?
	I don't know. I would not go that route.
	What I would do is I would, if I were you, and this is, of course, just amateur to amateur, right?
	But if I were you, what I would do is I would look at that voice which says, maybe my ecosystem is wrong, as another character in the ecosystem.
	That would be my approach. It's like, hey, come sit down by the table and tell us, are there too many?
	Are there too few? What's the right number?
	Should we have pi? In the ecosystem, should we have the square root of a negative number?
	In our ecosystem, you tell me what the correct number is and why, right?
	And I think that would be the way that I would approach it.
	Which of Steph's books would be recommended for a newbie, for a non-libertarian?
	You know, people say on truth, and I think, I mean, I'm very happy and proud of it on truth, but I think that...
	If the person's interested in society and politics, I wouldn't start them on truth.
	I would start them on everyday anarchy, which I think would be the way to get them interested in some of this stuff.
	Or UPB. No, I'm just kidding.
	UPB. It's like shitting a torpedo sideways, getting that book out, I'm telling you.
	Oh yeah, don't forget, Revolutions is back, baby.
	And so I hope that you will pick up a copy of that.
	Sorry it was out of print for a while.
	But it's back, and you can order it less than 20 bucks, in fact.
	What do you say to someone who says something like, the NAP is just a made-up sort of thing based on faith?
	That's a... Oh, sorry, somebody who's just said, a great ecosystem theorist, explains his approach, selfleadership.org.
	So if somebody said to me, the NAP is just a made-up sort of thing based on faith, what I would do is I would...
	I mean, the temptation is always to start responding right away.
	Oh, it's not, and here's the arguments, and this and that.
	Why? But...
	What I would suggest instead is to check with yourself.
	I mean, to me, that's a pretty aggressive and ugly thing to say.
	Because it's so contradictory.
	It is an aggressive thing.
	And somebody who's against the non-aggression principle might be against it because he's aggressive, right?
	He doesn't like a principle that would countermand his impulse for aggression.
	So I would check with myself and I would say...
	Do I want to get involved in this debate with this fellow?
	Do I feel good about it?
	Do I think that it could be valuable?
	Do I think that it could be useful?
	Do I think that it could be enjoyable?
	And I think that's important.
	I mean, there are some people I debated with like years ago who still, you know, whenever my name comes up, they've got this knee-jerk, rampant little hate on for me.
	So you can be sort of stepping into a quagmire of prickly dysfunction when you get involved in debates about fundamental issues with people.
	So I would just check with myself and say, hmm, you know, like I do this when I see trolley stuff on the boards, which, you know, hasn't been around for a while, which is great.
	But it's like, hmm, do I want to?
	Do I think it's going to be valuable?
	Do I think it's going to be helpful? Do I think it's going to be enjoyable?
	Like life is too short to fight with irrational people.
	Because it's what they say about, you know, if you're going to wrestle in shit with a pig, right, all that happens is that you end up covered in shit and the pig enjoys it and you don't, right?
	So I would first check with myself and say, do I want to?
	Now, if I did want to, like if I thought this person was not an aggressive freakazoid, but was somebody who was, you know, just genuinely repeating something that they accepted without thinking, then what I would say is, well, what is your definition of faith?
	What is your definition of the non-aggression principle?
	What is your definition of truth?
	What is your definition of falsehood?
	How would we know the difference? Start with the basics.
	Don't start philosophizing in midstream, as Rand used to say.
	So I would say that I would start with definitions.
	Without definitions, all you're doing is you're like, You're like two wizards wielding words.
	You're not doing anything particularly real.
	You are just wielding words back and forth, and you're just striving for mastery through the manipulation of language, not through any sort of empirical fact-based thing.
	So, you know, find out people's definitions.
	And listen, I mean, it's a tough thing to do.
	But if you ask people for definitions, like 999 times out of 1,000...
	We live in a fiction called democracy, called America or Canada or...
	We live in language, and so people don't really have a sense of reality.
	And so you ask people for their definitions, and you'll find out whether they can handle something called humility, right?
	Because if somebody comes up to you and says, NAP is just faith-based crap, right?
	And you say, oh, that's interesting.
	What is your definition of faith and true and false and all that?
	Now, if that person has some maturity, they'll be brought up short.
	And they'll look and they'll say, gosh, you know what?
	No one's ever asked me that before.
	And I must say that I don't have a clear answer just now.
	Isn't that interesting? I wonder why I would believe something that I've never really figured out.
	Huh. Right? And you would have, I think, a very interesting conversation.
	Say, well, when did you first hear the idea?
	Why do you think it's true? Why do you find yourself believing it?
	Or whatever, right?
	I mean, did somebody ever tell you that when you were young?
	A teacher, a priest, a parent, or whatever?
	Did somebody ever treat you that way?
	That you would end up with that belief.
	You can have a very interesting discussion.
	But you have to first find out if somebody's capable of admitting ignorance or faults or a problem.
	And if that is the case, like if you could have that great conversation, then I would say hold that person fast, become great friends, because that is a diamond in a sea of, let's just say, non-diamonds.
	Now, if the person, when you ask for definitions, just starts getting aggressive or avoidant or evasive or manipulative or whatever, you know...
	There's no profit in the conversation.
	There's no profit in the conversation, in my opinion.
	And so I would not engage in that situation.
	But, of course, it's up to you, of course.
	You can do whatever you like, but that would be my approach.
	Let's see. A guest has asked, would you call people who constantly speak aggressively about violence, even if you ask them to stop, to be abusive?
	Are threats breaking the NAP? Well, threats certainly do break the NAP. Absolutely.
	If I threaten to hurt someone, physically hurt someone, there's no question that that breaks the NAP. Absolutely.
	But if somebody, you know, just basically says...
	I want to beat up short people but never does anything about it.
	I don't think that's abusive.
	I think that's not aesthetically preferable behavior but I don't think that's abusive with one exception.
	I think that verbal abuse Only becomes abuse if the relationship is involuntary, right?
	So if you have just some guy, let's just say some guy on the internet starts talking a bunch of trash, you know, close your browser, come back later or whatever, right?
	They're not inflicting something on you in that way.
	If you're a parent and you are constantly speaking about hurting other people and your kids are around, well, they're not there voluntarily and so they're going to get the infection of those dysfunctional thought patterns involved.
	And it's going to harm them, right?
	Because they're also going to be frightened for themselves.
	So I think that verbal violence, assuming it's not a direct threat against an individual, but verbal violence only becomes, to me, fundamentally abusive if the relationship is involuntary.
	Somebody has asked, would I agree that men are inherently more inclined towards aggression than women?
	I would not, in fact, agree with that.
	I think that male and female aggressions show up differently.
	I think that people, in general, in a non-philosophical mindset, in a mindset where they do not have self-knowledge and weren't raised with kindness and curiosity and empathy, I think that they are frightened.
	I think that they are aggressive.
	I think that they are unstable.
	And I think that they are biological power seekers in the true Nietzschean model.
	And they try to achieve power over others using language for the most part.
	Because language is a more effective and productive way of enslaving others than force.
	Because with language you can get people to enslave themselves.
	And so I think what happens is people will look at those who have less power Who are around them.
	And they will then dominate those people.
	And for men throughout history, that has tended to be women.
	And for women, that has tended to be children.
	And I think that's important.
	That's an important distinction.
	I think that you can't say are men more aggressive than women for the fundamental reason that men are raised by women.
	And so if women were, you know, peaceful, kind, curious, and pacifist parents, men would not grow up to be aggressive.
	So I don't think that you can finger, so to speak, one sex more than the other and keep your jokes to yourself.
	But I don't think that you can pin the blame on one sex, one gender more than the other.
	Somebody said, speaking up about beating up short people constantly, you'd call that dysfunctional but not aggressive.
	I would call that dysfunctional.
	I would talk to someone about that.
	Look, I don't feel comfortable when you keep talking about beating up short people.
	It indicates to me that there's something quite unhealthy and dangerous going on and I don't feel relaxed and comfortable.
	And so I'd like it if we could talk about that or if you could talk about that with a counselor or whatever so that you can deal with that.
	But, you know, if somebody kept doing that, I just wouldn't particularly want that person to be in my life because, to me, that would be evidence of a lot of stuff that I would really have to keep my eyes out for.
	And the other thing, too, is that as a parent, this is sort of just by the by, but as a parent, you have to be very careful, of course, about who you allow in your life because who is allowed in your life is going to be in your child's life.
	And you have to be, I think, a pretty consistent and strong gatekeeper for that kind of stuff.
	Worst joke ever. Oh, come on.
	The show is not over yet.
	I'm sure we can do worse than that.
	You clearly haven't listened to a lot of podcasts if you think that's the worst joke ever.
	Hello? Hello?
	I have a question. Um...
	And this is final.
	Um... I want to say, I want to quit my job, and that's what it's about.
	Would you be willing to talk with me about that?
	Of course. Okay.
	I... For the first time, I guess, like yesterday or last night at work, I broke down and I was crying because I was serving some customer and they were like mad at me and I don't know, my job sucks.
	I'm just going to summarize like that.
	Well, first I want to say, when I was thinking about talking to you about this here on the Sunday show, I got a rollercoaster kind of feeling and my heart has been beating rapidly for like throughout the whole hour, the whole hour of listening and still doing it right
	take your time let's know rush Okay. I hate my job and I hate the people at my job especially because they're just...
	I want to quit and I want more money and I want to afford therapy.
	I want a job I'll like.
	I don't know how to...
	What I can do to get myself in that direction.
	Can you help me like...
	Could you ask some questions?
	Sure. Your job is an entry-level job, right?
	Yeah. They all suck.
	Yeah. I mean, they all suck.
	They do. Every job that I had that was entry-level, which I guess I had I mean, I first started working in a bookstore, putting together the New York Times on a Sunday morning when I was 11.
	And I would work there some Saturdays, you know, shelving books or whatever, right?
	And it sucked. You know, it's boring and so on.
	And I got a job cleaning offices.
	I worked in a hardware store.
	I, you know, I just got a bunch of, they were just crap jobs, right?
	They're brain dead. They're full of mean and nasty people.
	Often, not always, right?
	But often, right? I mean, I had a job where when I was working in a hardware store, I mean, hardware stores are huge and complicated.
	And, you know, someone comes in and asks for a particular kind of wrench.
	I don't know where the hell it is, right?
	So I'd have to, when I first started there, I'd go to some guy.
	for five or six years.
	And I'd say, hey, where's this thing?
	And after a while, he'd be like, well, you should figure this stuff out by now.
	It's like, dude, it's my second week.
	This is like a 10,000th worth of store, you know?
	I'm supposed to find a thing, right?
	And it was boring.
	We'd be so bored at that hardware store that a customer would come in and we'd just swarm them.
	It's like, please, dear God, I hope that you want me to mix paint because at least that's fun.
	Or my job for the evening would be they'd get all this stuff delivered and my job would be to spend four hours...
	Breaking down boxes.
	I mean, in the basement, you know, with no airflow and all this cardboard dust in the air.
	And it's like, I think I'm still coughing up boxes in my sleep.
	And we don't have to go into details, but, you know, all those jobs suck.
	That's why you want to outgrow them as quickly as possible.
	That's why you want to, you know, get an education or get a skill or start a business or whatever it is that you're going to do.
	But they all suck.
	That's why they don't pay much, right?
	Because they're easy to produce.
	And the other thing, too, is that the people who stay in those kinds of jobs and who end up with some kind of authority in those kinds of jobs are people with that.
	They're all corrupted. I swear.
	Corrupted or not, I don't know, but I will say that they're not people who have a lot of social or intellectual skills, right?
	So, I mean, of course, when I first started working, I think I was 14 or whatever.
	Oh, yeah, I worked in daycare. The daycare was a little bit more fun, but even that was tough.
	I had weird co-workers in the daycare who would sort of snap at me in front of the kids.
	You know, I had to sort of talk to them and say, no, no, no, you know, can't be doing that, right?
	But... With the people who work at these kinds of jobs, if they're sort of, quote, higher up on the food chain, They're usually not...
	I mean, they're usually kind of weird, right?
	So the guy... I can't even remember.
	He'd been working there for a long time.
	So he'd been working there. I think he was in his...
	Like this was his job, which was to walk around a hardware store and help customers find screwdrivers, right?
	And so, you know, he's coming across like, hey, I'm all kinds of important because I know where the screwdriver is in this hardware store, right?
	And it's like, but you've been working here for five or six or seven years.
	This is now your job.
	You know, so that's not very successful, right?
	That's not a very successful human being.
	And so you just have to recognize that people who have authority in crappy work environments tend to be kind of petty, tend to be kind of weird, tend to be kind of ridiculous, can be kind of nasty and kind of stressful.
	Like I worked at a pizza hut.
	And Vinny, Vinny was the manager.
	It's such a cliche, right? Vinny was the manager.
	And I mean, he was really hysterical.
	I mean, this was a crazy time in retail.
	Like they had just put in these...
	Clocks on the table. You get your drinks and your food within five minutes at lunch.
	And you'd have like eight tables.
	It was completely insane. Everyone would come all in at once and you would have to try and get everybody their drinks and food within five minutes.
	And they had timers on the table as their promotion, right?
	So everything was completely insane and hysterical.
	And like this guy was so stressed that he would actually sometimes throw up after the lunch rush because he would be so stressed about whether the restaurant was going to make money or not because he didn't have a lot of power.
	It was a chain decision, I guess, back then.
	I don't think it's... I don't know if it's still the case or not, but I don't think so.
	But I mean, so he was, you know, he'd be screaming at people and stuff and it's like...
	But he's 40 and he's running a Pizza Hut.
	You know, that's not...
	Bill Gates territory, you know?
	So I think it's just important to understand the environment that you're in, right?
	And what it helped me to do was to say, hey, you know what I don't want to do?
	Is be here in five years.
	You know, I'll do anything to not be working in a restaurant or a...
	A hardware store or some other sort of retail thing.
	I will do anything rather than be working here.
	And that's why I really polished up my computer skills and decided to get temp jobs and so on, so that I could at least get out of the mall and into an office, which was sort of the beginning of a sort of better career for me.
	I mean, I hate to say it, and maybe there's lots of exceptions that I never experienced and don't know about, but entry-level jobs, by definition, suck because anybody who's got any talent, skill, kindness, or intelligence is long gone by the time they're picking managers, right? Mm-hmm.
	So, maybe it's, to some degree, it's just around expectations.
	You know, if you have an expectation that's different than the environment you're going to be in, then I think that's going to cause you a problem.
	And they all suck.
	I mean, if you're on the board, we got, I don't know, a lot of people, 62 people in the chat room.
	If you have a...
	If you have a story about an entry-level job that didn't suck, and it didn't mean that that was never fun, but when I worked at that hardware store, we'd have to do, I think once a quarter, we'd have to do inventory.
	And I always seemed to pull the plumbing section and the nuts and bolts section.
	And that was just, it was horrible.
	Is there a counter bucket of screws?
	I mean, this is like some curse from an ancient Greek deity.
	It's like Sisyphus, but without even the excitement of getting your fingers crushed by a rock.
	Or I guess my Prometheus without even the physical sensation that you're alive because you're getting your liver torn out by a vulture.
	So, yeah, they just suck.
	They just suck.
	I kept trying to get a job at a record store, but I don't think I was near cool enough for that.
	But, oh, I've worked in a convenience store, you know, just take and pop out of Boxes and putting pop into cases.
	And, you know, awful things happen.
	You know, like someone had stepped in gum and had stepped the gum all the way through the store.
	And so, you know, the manager is like, hey, clean that gum up, right?
	I'm like, oh, great.
	Yeah. Oh my god, how exciting is this?
	So, you know, I'm sort of down on my knees, scraping up gum with an old knife.
	And of course, I look up and there's this girl that I was interested in, right?
	Who's come to buy, I don't know, another unnecessary bucket of cuteness.
	And I'm sitting here like, oh, it's awful, you know?
	And scraping up gum on the floor is like, hey, how you doing?
	I mean, it's just horrible, right?
	I knew that it would be horrible.
	And I'm not trying to sort of say don't feel bad.
	I mean, of course, feel bad. But I don't think there's any, you know, other than to adjust your expectations and to say, I don't really, I don't want to be, like, I want to be out of here as soon as possible, which is, I think, a sensible and intelligent and ambitious person's first reaction when they're exposed to the living hell of, you know, grunt underpaid, or not underpaid, but sort of grunt laborer.
	It's like, holy crap, this is a great incentive for me to start climbing that ladder, right?
	I don't want to go to work.
	I go every day and I have to take a taxi just to get myself to work.
	And what's the worst thing about it?
	When people are angry at me and Say something like, you know, kind of biting and stuff.
	And it's not even my fault and I can't even control, like, because I'm waiting on some manager or something, you know?
	Oh, sure. Yeah, that's the hell of retail is that you are the face of the company, right?
	And so who's got any kind of problem is someone who just, you know, they're going to take it out on you because they can't talk to anyone else, right?
	Right. And I also really, really hate when people bring in their kids and nine times out of ten they treat them like shit.
	You mean the people who bring their kids in, they treat their kids badly?
	Yeah. I'm so sorry.
	I'm so, so sorry.
	It's an absolutely horrible thing to watch.
	I mean, philosophy and I have had words before, but if there's one thing that I could take away, if I could, sometimes it is the horror that I feel and the obligation that I feel when seeing children being mistreated.
	That is the thing that is the hardest, I think.
	And so I really do.
	I completely sympathize with that.
	That is just awful.
	Yeah. Let me think.
	I was having, like, sometimes I was having daydreams of going back to my parents' house just because I had room and food.
	Right. Yeah, and you wouldn't have to go back to the job, right?
	Yeah. And you can totally do that.
	No, I'm not going to do that.
	No, but you can. I'm just saying, right?
	Don't feel trapped, right?
	You have options. There's some options you may not want, but you can, right?
	Yeah. I mean, that makes where you are more of a choice and less of a prison sentence, I guess.
	Yes. And, um...
	What do I do to get out of here?
	I... Go on.
	What do you think I'm going to say to that?
	Self-knowledge.
	Come on, that's a bit general.
	I don't know. Some damn things do with self-knowledge, I'm sure, right?
	I'll go to therapy. I'm sorry.
	That was a pretty generic answer.
	Yeah, I need to get in touch with myself and talk to her.
	Yeah, some damn general thing, right?
	Okay. Well, no, look, this is more of a practical problem, right?
	Which is that you don't want the job that you have, you know, for a variety of reasons, which I completely understand.
	It's a recession, right?
	So it's tough to find work.
	Your skills are not the greatest, right?
	I mean, you're obviously very intelligent, but you're young and this is your first real job, right?
	Right. And if I remember rightly, you didn't feel particularly well prepared for adulthood from your parenting, right?
	Yeah. Right, right.
	So you have to do a lot of inventing the wheel here.
	You have to do a lot of inventing the wheel.
	And it's very painful.
	It's very painful. I wish, obviously this wasn't an issue.
	I wish you had been raised with greater preparation for adulthood.
	I wish that people were nicer.
	I wish the economy was better.
	I wish that you got better paid.
	And I wish you didn't have... I wish that your boss didn't have to pay taxes so they could pay you more.
	I wish that people treated their children better, and I wish that they didn't take out their frustrations on innocent frontline employees.
	And I really wish all of that.
	But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, right?
	And we don't have that.
	As a situation, I will tell you that you're not alone in this.
	I also will tell you that I went through exactly the same thing.
	At least, I believe it's exactly the same thing.
	I won't get into any details because I've already talked enough about myself, but oh yeah, it was horrible.
	I would be tense and rigid about going to work.
	I would feel resentful and frustrated at the kids I knew who had money and parents who were functional and didn't have to go to work.
	I felt like a Dickensian kid because I was working so hard.
	I had three jobs when I was...
	I was 15 and, you know, I had a paper route.
	I cleaned offices at night.
	I mean, I worked really, really hard when I was a kid.
	I mean, Jesus, talk to me about, you know, government laws against child labor.
	I don't know what the hell was going on.
	And I'm glad that they weren't those laws because I don't know what my options would have been given my family situation.
	felt like they were populated by people who were slightly improved versions of my family.
	And it took a while to come across more functional people.
	I think that in general, more functional people can end up in offices, which is not to say that they're perfect by any stretch of the imagination.
	But I think if you go for something more professional, you will have people who are kinder and not quite so nutty.
	At least that was my experience.
	Or at least they're more polished nutty.
	You know, it's like nut with spit shine, which is, you know, a little easier to take.
	Yeah. So, and it is, right?
	It is tough because there is this terrible feeling that the whole world is your family, right?
	Yes. There is no escape.
	Yeah, there is no escape.
	And, um, it's not true.
	There is, right?
	There is, uh, there are ways out, but, but you need to eat and, uh, you need to have a job and this, I mean, you can keep looking for work and I'm not saying that's a bad thing to do.
	I mean, I, I always had to, you know, one foot in looking for something else and, uh, jobs did get progressively better over time.
	I mean, I preferred working in a hardware store to working in Yeah.
	Yeah. So, it does get progressively better, but yeah, I mean, those first jobs are, you know, they're brain-crushingly dull, and they're full of a lot of dysfunctional people, because as I said, the managers with skill and empathy and ability are not going to want to end up running a hardware store in a little mall or something, right?
	Right. So, you know, it's just something, it's like going to the dentist, and it's like going to the dentist every day for eight hours, so I completely understand just how awful it is.
	But you're not alone in it.
	It's not weird in a way, like it's sort of predictable.
	It is tragic that, of course, that there are this many dysfunctional people in the world, but you really are looking at the most dysfunctional aspects of the free market, so to speak.
	And it does get better from here.
	If you are patient and get your work skills up and try to remember as best you can that it's not about you.
	It's not about you. Like, I don't really, you don't have to give me any details about your work because I don't know how factual you want to get.
	But I mean, the guy who was Laura to get over me in the hardware store, I can't even remember his name.
	But, you know, when I went back five years later, he was still there.
	I was already working an office job.
	I was going to college. He was still there.
	And you're just like, it's not about me.
	How bad does this guy feel about his life and his, quote, career if he's still padding around a dusty little old hardware store 10 years after starting his job?
	Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, so he feels so crushed and humiliated by his life that, of course, he's going to try and lord it over some fresh-faced 15-year-old kid who doesn't know where the screwdrivers are, right?
	Right, right.
	And the people who are coming in and complaining about this, that, and the other, it's not about you either.
	It's not about you. They don't know you.
	You're just a poison container, so to speak, right?
	You're just someone, you're just some piece of flesh to vent at.
	It's got nothing to do with you.
	They don't have power over you in the way that people did when you were a kid, right?
	You are there to some degree by choice, and it is a kind of grit your teeth and get through it kind of choice.
	And the thing that helped me, and this may be, you know, overdramatic, but, you know, won't be the first time, won't be the last.
	This is sort of what I thought about it, and maybe it'll help you a little bit.
	Okay. I thought, look, the trials that people had to go through in the past involved things like Adult circumcision.
	You know, if you look at what primitive tribes would do to their children, you know, they would slice them up pretty bad, right?
	Some tribes cut their ears off and stuff like that.
	That used to be what would be called initiation, right?
	Or there would be horrible blood rituals in the sort of ancient religions.
	And for me as a young man, I would think, hey, it's not World War I, you know?
	Like, so I have to work in a hardware store with some crap fest of an older guy who's bitching at me half the day, but I'm not getting shelled or gassed in a trench.
	You know, this is progress. This is what we call progress in human society, that all people do is snarl at you rather than shoot you.
	Right. Yeah.
	You know, that's progress.
	And I mean, it's a weird thing to think of in terms of progress, right?
	But I mean, if you were born in either another culture today, a more primitive culture, or 500 years ago, I mean, you'd beg to work wherever you're working for a day, right?
	Yeah. Right? So what I would think is like, oh, I've got to go spend another four hours breaking up boxes in a dusty basement.
	Oh, my God, right?
	Right. And, but what I would say is I would say to myself, because I was really interested into reading the history of war, I'd say to myself, well, if I were born, you know, if I were this, you know, a little older than I was,
	and it was World War I, and I were given the choice to go to the front, you know, and get my freaking arm blown off, or gassed to the point where I'd stay in a hospital for the next 50 years, Or somebody would say, you have to go and break boxes in a basement for a couple of hours.
	I would say, oh, I'm hysterical with relief to be able to go and break boxes in a basement for a couple of hours.
	What an amazing thing is.
	I would kiss the feet, the hands and the ring of anybody who gave me such an option when faced with, you know, pretty high probability of death, dismemberment or maiming.
	Or shell shock, permanent PTSD, I'd be like, oh man, I get to go and break boxes in a basement?
	Yay! You know, fantastic!
	I'm just the happiest guy on the planet, because all they have to do is this boring or annoying thing.
	Or, you know, it's like, well, you know, five million Germans would be shooting at me, or some guy gets to bitch at me about not knowing where the screwdrives are in a hardware store.
	I'll take this. I'll take this.
	So that was my particular motivation.
	The other thing that I would say is, well, if my mom was still living with me, I may not have to work three jobs.
	I may only have to work one or two.
	So the price of the second or third job is not having my mother live with me.
	And for me, that was motivation enough.
	Mm-hmm. And I'm not saying it makes everything better.
	It doesn't, of course, right?
	But it is a perspective that really, really helped me to get through those very dark, very long, and often very dismal days.
	Yeah. What got you...
	What helped you to move up?
	Well, I mean, I always loved computers, right?
	And I bought a computer.
	I got a little bit of money when my grandmother died.
	And I bought a computer and I spent days in the computer labs and so on.
	And so I started to learn how to use computers.
	And of course, when I was in university, I learned how to use word processors and computers.
	I think it was just WordPerfect 5.1 was the only thing that was really popular or I knew that was valuable back then.
	And so what I did was I went for attempting jobs and they gave me a test about how well I knew the word processor and I knew it fairly well.
	Typing is helpful and important, knowing how to type, knowing how to use a word processor.
	And so I started getting jobs just doing that.
	And so that was sort of how it began for me.
	And I was just...
	It's a horrible thing to do, but I was just persistent.
	I would call them up every day.
	Is there anything for me in an office?
	Give me a shot. You won't be disappointed.
	And I did great jobs.
	I was always asked to come back and all that.
	So I just have to be persistent.
	You just have to be that person who...
	It's easier to put them on a job than to take another phone call.
	Oh. Okay.
	Okay. And I guess I could just go for any other job that isn't as crappy as this one.
	Yeah. You can certainly look for other jobs, for sure.
	For sure, of course, right? And that way, if you find another job, fantastic.
	If you don't, at least you can be reconciled with, you know, this is all I can get, so I have to find some way to make it at least somewhat bearable.
	Oh, yeah, but what I mean was, like, moving up in terms of jobs, like, find whatever.
	Oh, yeah, everybody starts at some point with no experience, right?
	I mean, so when I started working in an office, I had no experience.
	I had no experience. I had a dress.
	I mean, I had no experience. So everybody at some point has no experience in that job and somebody gives them a break.
	And you have to be that person that someone's willing to give a break to.
	Yeah. I mean, just don't be picky with the job that I'm going to love to.
	I mean, I was just so thrilled to get any kind of office job.
	I couldn't... I mean, I was like, hey, you know, anything, right?
	I ended up getting my first professional gig, my first job as a programmer.
	I just had completely run out of money.
	I couldn't borrow from anyone for a variety of reasons.
	I had no money. I had been talking to this headhunter, but I have a history degree and no formal programming training or experience.
	I remember I called her up and I even remember her name to this day.
	I called her up and I just said, look, I so need a job.
	I really want it to be something to do with computers.
	I don't care what it is. I'll move computers.
	I'll dust computers.
	I'll dust around computers.
	I'll put computers together.
	I'll take them upon whatever it is.
	If there's anything that you can...
	I'm very glad that I did.
	I just really needed it and I was just open and honest about what I really needed.
	I couldn't go back down the food chain and there was just no work and she ended up sending me on a job interview.
	And, you know, I practiced in front of the mirror, you know, all of that kind of stuff, right?
	And ended up with a good job.
	I worked there for a year and then during that time I started up a company and after that just moved on.
	So, you know, that's just honesty, right?
	Yeah. It's very hard for people to not be motivated by honesty, right?
	But I wouldn't assume that you can fix your work environment.
	That would be my particular...
	I wouldn't assume that you can fix your work environment.
	Or that you're responsible for it.
	Okay. It's just...
	It's just getting myself there.
	Yeah, look, there's no easy answer.
	I mean, there is no easy answer.
	So I really do sympathize with where you're coming from.
	There is no easy answer.
	I mean, obviously, if there was, you would have figured it out by now because you're a very smart woman, but these are all just things that helped me, and it doesn't solve everything by any stretch of the imagination, but hopefully it will help a little.
	Okay. Thank you.
	Okay. All the best. Somebody has asked in the chat room, I am 17 years old, and I want to drop out.
	I think of high school and don't want to go to college.
	What do you think I should do?
	Well, nobody can tell you what to do in such a particularly important arena.
	But what I will say is that...
	I think high school is pretty essential.
	And I know I sound like some cheesy after-school program, but I think you've got to have high school.
	I think if you don't have high school, it raises so many questions in terms of where you want to go in life.
	To me, it's one thing if you drop out of college.
	I mean, I think to complete the degree is almost always worth it, though.
	Obviously, Bill Gates, who dropped out of college, and Steve Jobs, I think, who dropped out of college.
	Would disagree with me, and rightly so.
	I think that the degree is worth...
	A college degree says I can plan and execute something for four years.
	I have some writing and reasoning skills and so on.
	I can navigate in a professional environment with intelligent people.
	Even if that's the only thing that your college degree says about you, I think that's worth quite a bit.
	If you don't complete high school...
	If you're 17, it's not far to go.
	But if you don't complete high school, I think you're going to regret it.
	Oh, how annoying. How annoying is it for somebody to say, hey, you're going to regret it in the future.
	But I think that if you can find any way to complete what you're doing, I would go for it.
	I know high school is freaking purgatory for a lot of people.
	And so, yeah, and as somebody has said here, I dropped out of high school at 16 five years later.
	He considers it the best decision ever.
	And I will, I'm going to defer to that.
	I mean, I, you know, if you consider it a great degree, you can complete high school outside of high school, right?
	I mean, as far as I understand it, and of course, look, Look into that.
	Of course, wherever you are, you can take, I guess, remote courses and so on.
	But, yeah, you can take the GED. But, yeah, GED. What is it?
	Chris Rock calls it a good enough diploma.
	Somebody says, my friend took the GED and got out in mid-11th grade.
	I assume that's great. And is now a doctor.
	Somebody has asked, sorry, just to finish it up, if you can find any way to get through, I would get through.
	I took a year and a half off after high school before I went to college, mostly for economic reasons, but you can give yourself that break and say, I'm going to take a break from education after high school, but I would really go for that.
	I'm sorry that those are the rules, but those are the rules in society right now, and I think it's...
	I think it's worth gritting your teeth and getting through.
	So that would be my suggestion.
	Somebody's asked, Steph, if there's time, could you talk a little about what you mentioned briefly in the Excellent Sibling podcast about how the younger sibling can really struggle to go in for promotions at work?
	I've struggled with this. I'm the youngest sibling of three older sisters.
	Yes, it is in the resources that I posted on the message board.
	It was touched on in a report, and I only read the abstract of the report, not the report itself.
	So if you do a search on the message board for that topic, it should be there.
	If you can't find it, just let me know, and I will dig it up for you.
	But the important thing to do would be to read the full report on that.
	And I'm sorry, I can't give you anything more useful than that.
	But that's all I picked up on.
	Alright, well I guess we are coming to the stage of winding up and I hope that it's been a great show for you and I just really, really want to thank everybody so much for listening as always.
	I know I do this every week but I just really want you guys to know you're all incredibly important to my life and my thinking and to what it is that we're doing here.
	Now, I just wanted to mention as well as what struck me, I did get out of high school half a semester early by taking some extra courses.
	I took a couple of summer courses while I was working, and that can help as well.
	So there's things that you can do to try and accelerate your exit strategy.
	And of course, back then, it was an extra year of high school relative to what there is now.
	Yeah, your school grades don't reflect your future potential.
	That's very true. Remind me if I don't do the makeup question.
	This is pretty far afield from my experience because I only wear mostly kiss makeup on Thursday nights.
	So we'll have to mull it over.
	But remind me if I do forget about it.
	Yeah, I didn't do that well in high school.
	My marks were not stellar.
	I always got A's in English because I am a language-based life form.
	But math and science were pretty bad for me.
	And so I did well in history.
	But I was pretty much specialized in the arts.
	And I did fine in university.
	So... All right.
	Well, I guess we've hit that time.
	So thank you so much for listening and have yourselves a wonderful week.
	And remember to check out ameando.com forward slash FDR 2010 for information about the free listener barbecue.
	I hope that you'll come up and meet everyone.
	And I look forward to meeting you if you do.
	And have yourselves a great week.
	And I've got some great interviews coming up, so I hope that you will tune in for those.
	And thanks again for all of your support, your enthusiasm, and, of course, your massively generous donations, which keep all of this flowing.
	And have yourself a fantastic week.

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