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May 9, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:38:57

1658 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show, May 9, 2010

How to pursue self-knowledge when you cannot afford a therapist, the general stages of personal growth, and the abandonment of children by modern adults.

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	Hi everybody, I hope you're doing most excellently.
	It's Steph. Welcome to the Sunday Freedom Aid Radio Philosophy Call-In Chat-O-Rama Festival.
	It's Sunday, May the 9th, 2010, just after 4pm.
	And I guess the most pressing announcement is that I will be the opening speaker at the Porkfest Festival, the Porcupine Freedom Festival, June 24th to June 27th, 2010.
	In beautiful Lancaster, New Hampshire.
	You can go to freestateproject.org forward slash festival to To sign up, I've heard they only have 1500 tickets left, so I would do so sooner rather than later, were I to be with the U. And Christina and Izzy and I will come down and I will be speaking Thursday, June the 24th at 6pm.
	And I'm working on a rousing speech that is going to involve Scandinavian throat singers and fireworks.
	And mostly catapulted elk.
	So it should be quite a festival and a spectacle.
	And hopefully after that, the words that I have to say won't seem purely anticlimactic, but it probably will.
	Yeah, the Porkfest, we're not going to switch to Labor Day.
	The Labor Day is still for the free listener appreciation barbecue, so that's still going to be on Labor Day.
	So I hope you'll be able to come up.
	And I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at Porkfest.
	It should be quite an exciting venue.
	I think it's going to be a lot of fun, and I really do love to meet listeners, and it's going to be a great time.
	So I hope that you'll be able to make it.
	I think it will be something that you will be able to remember.
	It may not be quite something that you can pass down to your grandchildren, but maybe your great-grandchildren.
	My planned venues this year?
	Well, there is the Pogfest one in June.
	Nothing on July and August as yet.
	And then we have the list of BBQ early September.
	And then in October, I will be in Hollywood, California for Libertopia, which you can find at libertopia.org.
	I will be the closing speaker there, I do believe.
	In speaker land, opening and closing is good.
	It's not like I'm an opening act.
	I'm not like Jethro Tull opening up for The Who.
	So it's a good deal.
	I think it's quite a compliment to be given the opening and closing spots.
	So I'm looking forward to that.
	And there are a lot of fans of the show who are coming to Porkfest.
	And so I hope that you will be able to come and meet everyone.
	And I certainly, really, I can't tell you how much I look forward to and seriously enjoy meeting people in the flesh.
	Who I have perhaps only met online, or perhaps never met at all, but have had, I guess, endless conversations with, or at least lectures at, in terms of the podcast.
	So I hope that you'll be able to make it.
	It is a great thing to meet people face-to-face, and I really, really enjoyed it.
	Before, the last times that I've met people, and I enjoy the people who come through Toronto and have a chat, are able to stop and have a chat, so...
	If you do get a chance to come, I hope that you will make it.
	And of course, other than me, not that it matters, right?
	But other than me, there is going to be a lot of great speakers there and a lot of great people there.
	So I hope that you're able to make it.
	And yeah, for the people who are getting together in Spain, please let me know.
	I'd certainly love to sit down, have a web chat a couple of times if you guys are around.
	If you give me the page or the times, I'll be happy to pimp Malaga.
	For people who are getting together for the Euro meet, and I'm sorry that I won't be able to join you in person.
	But Spain, it's too sunny, it's too laid back, and it's too happy.
	You know, my bitter, twisted Irish heart just flames like a vampire skull in the sunlight when I hit that much good weather, so it's really not a good idea.
	Alright, while we're waiting for that information to come up, I think that we have somebody on the line who has a question or a comment.
	Is that right, my friend? Yeah.
	Can you hear me? I sure can.
	Okay. Well, I just had a question about what one would do if they cannot afford therapy to sort of gain some more self-knowledge.
	That's a great question. That's a great question.
	Do you want to give me any hints about what sort of self-knowledge you're after?
	Is it self-knowledge in general, or do you want me to just ramble away?
	Just ramble away, I guess.
	You sound like my ecosystem.
	Well, that's a great question.
	The first thing that I would suggest is to look into ways in which you may be able to afford therapy.
	I'm not going to tell you anything Entirely subtle and I'm sorry because I'm sure you've thought of most of this stuff, but if you're employed in a company which has benefits, then it's quite likely that you have benefits for seeing a mental health professional.
	And your first dozen or whatever, it can vary of course, but your first dozen or so sessions can be entirely free.
	And if you've done a lot of prep work, you can get a lot done in 12 sessions.
	So the first thing I would do is see if you have any benefits from anywhere.
	You may even be on a spouse.
	The spouse may have benefits.
	I don't know anything to do with the laws, but maybe your parents have benefits or something like that, that you can go and speak to a mental health professional and have the insurance company pay for.
	Lord knows the insurance companies take enough from you through status policies that – I'm not a big fan of the insurance companies because they just jacked my car insurance by 30% by telling me that I'm in a region where there's lots of accidents.
	Right. Like year over year.
	The accident rate in my small neck of the woods went up 30% because what happened was it rains vodka and everybody just laps up the puddles and then goes and hits the gas on their Toyotas.
	It's a strange phenomenon but of course it's Canada so lots of odd stuff happens here.
	So, look into benefits.
	You can also look into going not to see a psychiatrist or a psychologist, all of whom have PhDs, but the word therapist is not a registered term.
	As far as I know, this is just my amateur knowledge, it's not a registered term, so you can go and see somebody who's cheaper.
	Therapists, the real professionals, those who are accredited and have the PhDs will run you 100, 120, 150, sometimes even more.
	I paid a lot less for my therapy because I went with somebody who was not a PhD, but somebody who I just really connected with and had a great couple of years with in terms of therapy.
	So you can look for For cheaper stuff than that.
	So that's just a couple of options that you can look into.
	If you have issues with your family, you can ask your parents to pay.
	It's a possibility, right?
	I mean, you can all go together.
	And if your parents have some money or they have benefits or they'd be willing to do that so they can help you out with that, I think that would be wonderful.
	So those are some options.
	Go ahead. I'm pretty sure none of those are an option for me right now.
	Yeah, I didn't think they were. I didn't think they were.
	And I'm sure you would have thought of them. I just wanted to mention that for other people who may end up listening.
	Yeah, sure. But you mentioned it's good to journal.
	So could you maybe elaborate a little more on that?
	Like what exactly you journaled about if you did that or if you know people who did do that?
	Yeah, sure. I mean, I don't journal nearly as much anymore, but I consider a podcast to be a form of journaling.
	So I spend a number of hours a week talking about my thoughts and sometimes my feelings, of course.
	So that to me is part of it.
	But I did an enormous amount of journaling when I was in therapy.
	And that's one of the reasons why I made, I think, such significant progress in a relatively short period of time.
	And journaling is just a way of getting into a conversation with yourself and starting to notice things about yourself.
	The one thing that's kind of true for me before I went into therapy is that I kind of worked through life a little bit like a blindfolded pinball.
	You know, there's bing, bing, bing that sort of bounce around.
	Sorry, for those of you who are under the age of 35, it's called video pinball and maybe it's on the Wii, but there used to be these old tables that you'd bing, bing around.
	And what would happen is I'd sort of be up, I'd sort of be down, I'd be happy, I'd be sad, I'd be angry.
	But I wouldn't really know why.
	It was just a chaos of management.
	Perhaps a better metaphor would be a blindfolded guy sitting backwards on a horse that's been shot with cocaine and just running randomly and then stopping and then running and then lying down.
	And so it was not easy for me to figure out the cause and effect of my moods.
	And what I did when I would start journaling is I would say the basics.
	You know, how do I feel? What do I think?
	If I feel sad, when did I start feeling sad?
	What happened? Do I remember before?
	And this is kind of fuzzy. It's sort of going back a ways to try and figure this stuff out.
	But it's figuring out your feelings and then trying to figure out what is causing your feelings.
	And then for me, the next step was to try and figure out Since the events themselves don't cause feelings within you, I mean, events can only cause sensations, like you stub your toe or get shot with a blow dart in the Amazon.
	I think we've all been there.
	Events can only cause sensations, but they cannot cause feelings, so there is an element of perspective, interpretation, thought, analysis, conclusions that is always occurring between the event and our emotions.
	And, for example, the same event can cause two different feelings in different people, right?
	So, let's say someone dies that you hate, well, you might feel some happiness about that.
	Let's say someone dies, the same person, but somebody else loves that person, they're going to feel great sadness and loss and so on.
	So, the same event causes different emotions because people have different value judgments about that event.
	Now, everybody who stubs their toe feels bad, right?
	So, sensations are more objective because they're not subject to philosophy.
	That's sort of biochemically, physiologically, it's your nervous system doing its thing.
	You put your hand on an iron, it's going to be an owie, no matter what your philosophy.
	But for most of the other feelings that we experience that are relevant to our life, they are the result of our interpretation of events.
	So try and figure out what you feel.
	Try and figure out when you started to feel it.
	Try and figure out if there was an event that may have changed your mood from good to bad or bad to good.
	And then try and figure out what you thought about that event.
	And these things sound easy, but it can be quite complex.
	I found some workbooks to be quite helpful.
	John Bradshaw has some good workbooks.
	I've heard very good things about Richard Schwartz's internal family systems therapy workbooks.
	I haven't done those, but I've heard very good things about those.
	Nathaniel Brandon has some workbooks that I started out.
	My therapy journal actually starts out with me working through some of Nathaniel Brandon's workbooks.
	He's very big on sentence completion.
	In other words, that we have knowledge that we can access obliquely, right?
	So they say, you know, when I do this I feel, and you just write it down, and he's very big on that your unconscious will provide you these answers, which is sort of an ecosystem idea.
	And that can be very helpful in helping you to figure out sort of what's going on in your unconscious.
	So writing down things a lot can be really helpful.
	Reading books on self-knowledge.
	I found Jung, personally, I found Jung to be very helpful.
	I found Freud's Interpretation of Dreams to be very helpful.
	And that dream analysis was a very core part of my therapeutic process.
	And you understand, I'm just talking about my process.
	I don't know what else is, right?
	Sorry, go ahead. That actually brought up another question in my head.
	Are you done answering the other question?
	Well, let me just put one or two more things in.
	So, you know, reading and writing is key.
	I think that it's important to talk to people in your life about what you think and feel.
	If you have explosive, difficult or abusive relationships in your life, I personally would not suggest having confrontations or honest conversations with people like that without the support.
	Of a therapist.
	And this doesn't mean just any therapist because there are good therapists and bad therapists.
	Like there are good philosophers and bad philosophers and good dentists and bad dentists.
	There are good therapists and bad therapists.
	Maybe I should do a show about my idiot opinions about what would be a good therapist.
	If you're dealing with abusive relations, if you're dealing with really historically difficult explosive relations, then I would not do it without a therapist.
	If there's any potential for violence in confrontations, I wouldn't do that at all myself.
	So really, if there's any fear towards being honest, you should just not do it?
	Oh, no, no. There's always fear towards being honest.
	Trust me, listen. I mean, I do podcasts where I'm very honest.
	I'm still afraid to release them, even after all these years, because I'm always nervous about the response that people might have, or whether it's too much, or whether it sounds crazy, or whatever, right?
	So... So, no, it's not a question of fear.
	If there's a possibility of actual violence, then that's not a situation.
	Philosophy can't help you in the face of violence, right?
	Philosophy doesn't help you if you're going to get mugged, and philosophy doesn't help you if you're going to confront, I don't know, some drunk and aggressive dad who's going to yell at you and throw things or try to beat you up, right?
	I mean, that's a pretty extreme example, but that's not a place where honesty does you any good.
	In fact, I think it's just dangerous.
	I think fear, in terms of being honest, is natural and inevitable, and that can occur even in long-term healthy relationships.
	But, I mean, in my opinion, I don't think violence...
	If there's a potential for violence, I don't think it's a relationship that should be...
	Descartes doesn't work with that kind of stuff.
	Okay. And talk to friends and just try and get a supportive group of people.
	And if you can't find them in the real world, then you can at least chat with people on the message board at Free Domain Radio or any other place that you find on the internet that can give you that kind of support and openness and honesty in bringing the truth to your relationships.
	So those are all things that I think you can do.
	And I actually did have a listener, and I've had a number of comments like this from listeners over the years that They've listened to FDR, they've done a lot of self-work, and then when they go into therapy, their therapists comment and they say, well, have you done therapy already?
	Because you seem to be really fluid in terms of self-knowledge.
	You make very fast progress, you get things really quickly.
	So, I think that you can do a lot before going into therapy.
	To make therapy faster.
	And faster is cheaper, right?
	Therapy is a big overhead in terms of time and money.
	So the quicker you can get it done, the better.
	And so you can do a lot of self-knowledge.
	It's like going to the dentist.
	Then you only have to have a cavity maybe filled rather than 10 teeth yanked or something.
	So you can do a lot of work in self-knowledge.
	Then when you get the money, it'll be that much faster and cheaper to do your therapy.
	So that's the end of my brief spiel.
	I'm certainly happy to talk about anything else that might be of use to you though.
	Yeah, sure. I've heard you say before that dreams are a way of your subconscious revealing information to you or something like that.
	Is that accurate at all?
	Yeah, I think so.
	Okay, so what about lucid dreams?
	Because recently I had a lucid dream where obviously I knew it was a dream and it was probably the most liberating thing I've ever felt.
	It was just a feeling of pure freedom.
	I just wanted to know what effect the subconscious would be having on that as opposed to a dream where you don't know it's a dream until after.
	Right. Right.
	Well, look, that's a great question.
	And of course, I'm sailing way into pure speculation as I usually am in these topics.
	My own experience has been that lucid dreams occurred for me.
	And for those who don't know the term, and this is my understanding of it, lucid dreams are composed of two main key components.
	The first is that they're unbelievably vivid and detailed.
	And shockingly so, to the point where when you wake up you feel half blind because you can't see things with the same level of detail and vividness and accuracy that you could in your dreams.
	And the second is that you can be aware that you're dreaming while you're dreaming, but it doesn't wake you up.
	Because that's what often happens when you're aware that you're dreaming, you'll wake up, but you can be in the dream.
	You may even be able to manipulate the dream to your own particular preferences, although that's a very delicate process, and I never had a huge amount of success with that.
	I had some, but not a huge amount.
	So there's this sense of vividness and this knowledge that you're dreaming and in an alternate state of consciousness which doesn't wake you up and you have some control.
	Those are the two aspects.
	Was there anything else that I'm missing about that?
	No, that's basically what it was.
	Well, I can tell you I haven't had lucid dreams In nine years or so.
	But I definitely had lucid dreams during therapy and they were absolutely astounding.
	And some of them were completely banal.
	I remember in one dream, I woke up, I was in a hotel room and I went out into the hallway and the hallway was bathed in sunlight and the wallpaper was just absolutely beautiful.
	I could see every little detail almost down it seemed to the atomic level.
	Of the wallpaper and the fibers in the carpet and there was such an extent of vividness.
	I remember every little dust particle hanging in the air and when I breathed they moved towards me and it was just an amazing thing.
	I was actually in a hotel room because I was on a business trip and when I woke up and went out into the hallway it was like Looking through an old aquarium, everything was so murky relative to how it was in the dream.
	That was just a moment and I had another dream where I was flying over a city and could see every hair on everyone's head, every pixel on every advertisement billboard.
	I could see every hair on every tire, every crack in every tire, every tiny little piece of quartz and bottle caps in the pavement and so on.
	And that was just an astounding thing.
	And I did have all of these and I talked them over with my therapist.
	I did not find them to have massive amounts of meaning in them relative to my regular dreams, so to speak.
	But they certainly did occur when I was going through very, very big changes.
	And I think it's like parts of the brain lighting up.
	It's like parts of perception lighting up that weren't there before.
	To me, they were important in terms of change that I was going through, but I didn't find that they held the key more so than other dreams about what was going on in my life, though I certainly found them to be fantastic, and I wish I had more of them, but they were a brief phase during my therapy that hasn't returned.
	I guess I just wish that I had known about Freedom in Radio during the time, because there was a period of about I guess two or three months and this was about a year ago where I was having these quiet regularly like once a week at least and I guess the only one that I remember that had any particular significance or sound felt like it could have was one where I was on this cliff side and Everything went blank for a minute,
	and then later I ended up at the bottom of that cliff, and I knew it was a dream the whole time.
	So I just kept looking for a high place to jump off of, but I couldn't find any, and it was really discouraging.
	Right. And why did you want to jump?
	It was more like flight than suicide, right?
	Yeah, yeah, it wasn't suicide.
	It was definitely for flight.
	Right, right. Fascinating.
	Fascinating. Well, I will say this about physics in dreams.
	I've had lots of dreams, and I think this is sort of how you know that they're dreams, is that the laws of physics are violated in those situations.
	So you can fly and you can do all of this kind of stuff that you can't do in real life.
	My dreams of physics violations generally had two phases.
	The first phase was I could fly in a sense, but I was helpless in my flight.
	And so what that meant was I would be trying to run from some monster And I would be in a very low-gravity situation.
	And so I would try to run, and in order to get some speed, I needed to be able to push off from the ground, right?
	But unfortunately, every time I pushed off the ground, I floated like a little helium balloon into the air, and I couldn't do anything because I was just floating in a very low-gravity environment, and thus was very susceptible to whatever winged, beastly predator was pursuing me.
	And so those situations where violations of the laws of physics had to do with an insubstantiality and a weightlessness and a lack of contact with the earth and therefore a vulnerability, to me, I sort of recognized that these had to do with not being grounded within myself, not having a good relationship with myself, not living the kind of life that I could respect in myself.
	And therefore not having any weight, any substantiality, any contact with the earth that would lend me protection.
	That every time I tried to do something because I was so insubstantial to myself, I would go into the air and be vulnerable to predators.
	And so those dreams were occurring.
	Now the second dreams, the second series of dreams that occurred for me in terms of physics law violations was I think closer to what you're talking about when I was able to fly and could direct my flight and I was not fleeing.
	Because flight is one of these words that has two great connotations in the realm of dreams.
	The first is flight, like fighter flight, like you're running from a predator.
	You take flight from the lion that is following you.
	But the second is directed flight, which is, of course, a fantasy as old as mankind and possibly some animals, how cool it would be to actually fly.
	So flight has both fear And a predator is pursuing you.
	But flight, if you have some control over it, then flight has freedom and like the end of the matrix, right?
	It takes off into the air and that's a beautiful image.
	And so I found that dreams that occurred for me later in therapy had a lot more to do with being in control.
	And what that was was breaking free of rules that I had set for myself beforehand.
	And that to me was a great step forward in terms of therapy.
	Because when you outgrow yourself, when you surmount yourself, when you overcome your own history, you do feel a little bit like one of a superman and a god.
	You just really do feel that kind of strength and that kind of power.
	To do unprecedented things that look amazing to other people because you have got the superpower called self-knowledge and self-acceptance and rational pride in who you are.
	And to other people, that seems incomprehensible and they fear it and they label it, you know, arrogance.
	You know, he's so high on himself and he won't take criticism because you don't listen to irrational criticism.
	So people then say, well, you know, he just rejects all criticism and they try to claw you down for themselves, right?
	And it doesn't matter because you've learned how to fly and you no longer are prey to these petty little predators who will always try and pull any grand soul down.
	So those are the two aspects of flight that I had and it sounds to me a little bit Like you're contemplating the second one where you can really take flight and do some amazing things relative to your history that will be challenging for you and seemingly impossible to others.
	Yeah, yeah. When you started describing the second one, I definitely felt that that was the feeling I felt in the dream.
	Good, good. Well, that's probably it then.
	In which case, I just, you know, keep working, keep doing what you're doing.
	Okay. Well, I guess that's it.
	But thanks a lot.
	Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for calling in.
	It's a great question. And you can do an enormous amount to prepare for and to even move yourself forward.
	Or at least you can stop doing the bad things, right?
	So even if you can't afford a nutritionist, you can at least stop eating junk food.
	And that can help out a lot.
	So metaphorically, I guess.
	So thank you so much for your question.
	I guess we have time for 7.2 more.
	All right. Thanks, Seth.
	Thanks, man. Next!
	I have a short one. I think you need to check your inbox for emails on how to solve that.
	I'm sorry, maybe I misunderstood the question.
	Okay, let me start over.
	I was reviewing some old podcasts a few days ago, and I heard you quote Winston Churchill about democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.
	Yes. And then I heard it again this morning in your Greek meltdown video.
	Yes. Sorry, just for those who haven't seen it, the meltdown is Greek, not mine, for once.
	But sorry, go on. So I was wondering if you had heard of Hans-Hermann Hoppe's arguments about how monarchy is actually a superior form of government compared to democracy.
	This was the foundation for his book, Democracy, The God That Failed.
	I have actually heard these arguments.
	Do you mind if I give a very brief summary and then you can tell me if I'm completely off?
	Go for it. Well, Hoppe's arguments are roughly along these lines that a monarchy is like the permanent owner of a building rather than a temporary tenant, right?
	So if you're a temporary tenant of the building and you face no consequences for pillaging it, then you're going to rip out the sinks, the faucets, the bathtub, you're going to sell the curtains, you're going to piss on the carpet and stuff like that and leave smoke burns on the lampshades and stuff because you're not there for very long.
	And so democracy has a series of pillaging tenants coming through, whereas a monarchy has to maintain the long-term value of the system of power that they inhabit and therefore they have to not pillage the house that they have actually bought rather than the house that they're renting.
	And so that they tend towards more long-term stability, they tend towards less and lower national debts and that sort of stuff.
	So is that sort of a rough paraphrasing of where he's coming from?
	Yes. He also mentioned that taxation rates in traditional monarchies never even came close to those in modern democracies, which I thought was interesting.
	Well, it is interesting, of course, but I think...
	I mean, it's a tough call, right?
	But you'd have to find a monarchy that had great property rights.
	Because you could say that one of the reasons that taxation was much lower in the Middle Ages was because there was just that much less money to tax.
	So if you took half of people's, you can take half of people's money when they have $100,000 and they can still live on $50,000.
	Even if you take half of $50,000, they can still live on $25,000.
	But if somebody's only making $5,000 a year and you take half of it, they probably can't live.
	So it probably had a lot more to do with the fact that If you had tried to tax at 25 or 50% in the Middle Ages, you'd have had a rebellion, I guess as Marie Antoinette found, because people simply would starve to death and starving people will do crazy things like spring people from the Bastille and provoke Charles Dickens to write extraordinarily lengthy and dull novels about you.
	So I think that may have more to do with it.
	But again, I'm no expert on his theory, but that's the first thing that I would think about.
	That's actually an excellent point.
	I guess we would need to be able to point to monarchies that existed after the agricultural and, most importantly, industrial revolutions to really see the test of that.
	But that's an excellent point I hadn't thought of.
	But the main purpose, I think, of the book, because obviously Hoppe is not a monarchist.
	He's an anarchist. Because he's, you know, in the Rothbard tradition, he's one of the top guys at the Mises Institute.
	What I found valuable in the book, though, was that we're taught so many things in school, and one of them is, you know, democracy's best form of government.
	And I was able to make the transition to an anarchist without ever having to question that.
	I was able to abandon all forms of statism and say, yeah, anarchy is better, without ever having to readdress the question of, was democracy really the best form of government?
	What I found valuable about this book was that it just absolutely demolished this one last sort of vestige of mythology about democracy using the ownership argument that you have an incentive to maximize the capital value of the assets that you own.
	In many ways, I would agree.
	With his argument, right?
	And of course, I'm no expert on the topic, but I would agree with the argument in many ways.
	And I would sort of relate it in this way.
	So if you own your slaves, then you're going to be more invested in their health than if you're just renting them and you don't care where they go.
	And I think that's...
	There's an old economics example that sort of ties into this, that...
	When they used to ship convicts from England to Australia, or they would ship slaves from Africa to America, what happened was they initially would pay for the number of slaves shipped, right?
	So if you could cram a thousand slaves onto your ship, you'd get paid for a thousand slaves, but then only half of them would arrive alive, because there were so many of them, you know, one guy gets a cold and half of them die in food for sharks, right?
	And so what they did was they said, okay, well, this is stupid.
	What we're going to do is we're going to instead pay for the number of live slaves that get delivered.
	And of course, that changed everything.
	The shipping practices changed.
	There was more air, there was more food, there was more comfortable, I guess, or less hellish living arrangements on board the ship.
	And so if you change the incentives, you will absolutely change the behavior in terms of treating people, quote, better, right?
	So if you pay the slavers for the number of slaves that they deliver alive and healthy rather than the number of slaves they can cart across the ocean alive or dead...
	Then they will absolutely change their behavior and treat the slaves more humanely in a way.
	And I think that's his argument, which says, well, if you own your people rather than rent them, in other words, if you're a monarch rather than a democratic leader, then you're going to have more interest in the longer-term health of them, in the same way that you and I don't do oil changes in cars that we rent, right?
	We just let them handle that because we don't own it.
	And I think it's an interesting argument.
	I have... This is an argument from effect, so it doesn't mean anything in terms of what he should or shouldn't do.
	But I have a bit of concern with the libertarian movement as a whole.
	And I know that Hoppe's in there, but he's not a libertarian in the sense that he's a minarchist.
	But one of the things that I've really tried to focus on in this show...
	Is to turn this fixation on history that libertarianism seems to have, turn it towards the future.
	I think libertarianism needs to be futuristic in the way that the Venus Project already is.
	Not that I necessarily agree with it, but at least they're not saying, our perfect society existed 300 years ago, we just need to get back to that, right?
	Because that's fundamentally conservative and historical and wrong, right?
	The American Society of 300 years ago was friendly to landholding white males who couldn't get drafted, but to just about everybody else, which was about 98% of the population, 99 if you count all of the natives who were exposed to this culture briefly and its smallpox.
	It was not a good society and I think enough historical revisionism has occurred that the idea of let's get back to the republic, let's get back to the constitution doesn't work.
	And so my concern is that there seems to be a lust for history, a nostalgia for a golden age in history and that comes from the religious elements which are very strong within libertarianism, right?
	Every religious system in the world has a big problem with the fact that a lot of life is pretty crappy and a lot of the world is pretty crappy.
	And so if God is so great, why is everything so crappy?
	And what they have to do is they have to say, well, there was this golden age back then, but then we screwed it up, you know, Adam and Eve or Cain and Abel or whatever.
	And then we screwed it up and now the shit that we have to live in now is the punishment for us having screwed it up in the past.
	And so whatever, you have original sin and that sort of stuff.
	And in the same way, you have that myth in libertarianism that there was this great free society and here come those piping three guys with the head wounds or whatever.
	But we weren't vigilant with the government.
	We let the government take over things.
	We let the government grow and it's the fault of the people.
	And that's why things are so bad.
	And we need to take back the government and so on so that we can get back to the time when things were just great.
	And I'm concerned that when somebody says democracy is bad, monarchy is better, that in a sense that's just looking backwards rather than forwards.
	And that's sort of my concern.
	I've really tried to focus our conversations here on the future with reference to the past, but not with the fantasy of some golden age in the past that we need to get back to, which I've just never believed in.
	I don't disagree with any of that, as I'm sure you probably know.
	I guess I didn't see it that way, and I still don't think it was delivered in that way.
	I don't think the purpose was to advocate monarchy, but the purpose was to—I mean— The Austrian school has already basically trounced democracy with a superior alternative of free markets and narco-capitalism, etc.
	I saw this book as just a way of shoving democracy deeper into the mud.
	Like, it's not even better than monarchy.
	Right, right. No, and I think that's right, and I think that's interesting.
	Now, you may know more about the Austrian school than I do, because I only know some of the Austrian theories.
	I don't know the history of the Austrian school, and I've read Mises' autobiography, but that doesn't have much to do with the school as a whole.
	Is the Austrian school anarcho-capitalist?
	I hate to speak on behalf of them.
	I'm no expert either. Based on your understanding.
	There are a lot of anarcho-capitalists in it, but I would not say that...
	I mean, Mises himself, I don't think, was completely an anarchist, and he's Mises.
	So I don't think you could say that the Austrian school is entirely strictly anarcho-capitalist, but the arguments of the Austrian school directly lead to anarcho-capitalism, whether or not any of the individuals practicing it have managed to follow it all the way to its conclusion.
	Yeah, I mean, Rothbard was and Hayek wasn't.
	So I certainly know that both camps are included in a way that objectivism doesn't have that same embrace, right?
	I mean, I've tried to get a number of objectivists to come on and talk about various aspects of objectivism that I think are great.
	And they're like, oh, you're an anarchist.
	I don't want to talk to you.
	In fact, I've even had accounts on objectivist forums killed because I'm an anarchist.
	And I would never imagine killing an objectivist account over at FDR. So you're saying that the Austrian theory is more inclusive, so to speak, in that it will accept minarchists and it will accept anarchists in a way that, say, objectivism doesn't.
	Somebody has said Mises was absolutely not an anarchist.
	So thank you for that. I didn't think he was, but that's a very good clarity.
	And of course, Mises spent a lot of his years slaving away, trying to get the government to do better in terms of its regulations and currency and so on.
	Alright. Sorry, I think the guide got dropped, but he said that's all he wanted to say, and thanks.
	If anyone's out there who hears this and would like to help me to clarify some of the more detailed history of the Austrian school and its relationship to free market anarchism, I would certainly be interested in hearing that.
	Peter Peter, Philosophy Eater, had a question.
	Well, I guess while we're waiting, we did have a comment.
	It was funny. At least a funny thing.
	I thought it was kind of funny. We were at the mall the other day, the three of us.
	And, of course, we're going past the bra section.
	And his villa points at the bra section and says, Mama.
	And right next to that is...
	It's the men's underwear section, but you know, they have all those ripped male torsos with the briefs inside, the boxes of the pictures on the outside.
	Oh, I must say that after Isabella pointed at the bra section and said, Mama, I was sort of hoping she'd point at the male model section and say data, but no such luck.
	Right after that, there was a Pillsbury Doughboy exhibit, and she did say data to that.
	Because, you know, the perceptiveness of babies can be a crushingly difficult thing.
	Anyway. Somebody has said, when did you know when to quit therapy?
	Well, to quit therapy, you just know.
	I mean, I know that sounds weird because if you don't know, know how you'll just know.
	But the whole point of therapy, of course, is that you gain self-knowledge and you're supposed to get sustainable things out of it that you can bring to all of your relationships as a whole.
	And you'll just know.
	You will just know. You'll have less to talk about.
	Your life will be better. And you will just know when it's time to quit.
	Keep going, I would say, until you know.
	And remember, of course, therapy is a great range, in my opinion.
	It's a great range of things that you can work on, right?
	Some people go into therapy just for, you know, an emergency.
	Like, I'm going through a divorce, I'm going crazy, and, you know, 6-12 sessions, they may be on their relatively merrier way.
	Other people, and so this is sort of like nutrition and diet and so on, right?
	Some people just kind of want to, you know, I've got high cholesterol so I just want to change a few things and they'll just change a few things and go on their way.
	Other people really get into it and really want to eat well and exercise well and get all of the benefits of that.
	And so they'll kind of want to go for the gold medal rather than just get off the couch once in a while.
	And so I think it's important to know what you want to get out of therapy, but I would just keep working at it until you get closure and you'll just know when that is.
	Alright, somebody has asked, Hi Steph, I know that you talk about this just as an example, but I'm having trouble with it, so if you can clarify this.
	You said that a forest is just a concept and doesn't exist in reality.
	You don't do accept that a forest can be a mini-ecosystem with some forms of interactions between animals and plants that don't exist with only individual trees.
	And so a forest is not just a concept only in our minds.
	I'm sure you're sure about this.
	Can you scratch the itch? I'd appreciate that.
	Well, anything I can do to scratch your itch, baby, I am happy to do.
	I absolutely accept...
	That a forest is not just a bunch of trees.
	In fact, I think if you saw, you know, like when I worked at North, you'd sometimes go through areas where they had cleared and then replanted trees, and they were all sort of in these rows.
	And what it was, was a whole series of rows of trees, like rows of corn.
	In a cornfield.
	And that didn't seem like a forest to me.
	It didn't look like a forest to me.
	Because a forest to me is that beautifully jumbled mess of trees and undergrowth and sloths and spiders and bushes and old growth and new growth and all that.
	So I agree with you that a forest is more than just individual trees and there's lots of complex interactions that there wouldn't be a forest if those things didn't occur.
	And so yes, I know that it's just an example where I say a group of trees.
	It is more than a group of trees.
	And there is an area, like there's an interesting, it's sort of academic, but it's an interesting thing where you say somewhere between the rows of trees that I saw when I was prospecting up north, at some point that's going to be halfway between a full forest and rows of trees, and at some point it's going to look like a forest.
	At some point it's going to look like a forest, That you knew was planted.
	And at some point, maybe in a hundred years, it's just going to look like a forest and you'd have no idea that it was ever planted by human beings.
	So I agree with you with all of that.
	However, one way to figure this out is to look at it this way.
	What would exist...
	Without human beings, right?
	So every human being in the world vanishes tomorrow because Tim LaHaye was right and we all get taken up to the rapture.
	We don't even leave our bodies behind.
	And we all go up to the rapture and suddenly there are no human beings in the world.
	Well, clearly the forest would still be the forest.
	The jungle would still be the jungle.
	There'd be a few less pygmies, but they're small to begin with, so it doesn't matter that much.
	But the forest would still be the forest.
	The jungle would still be the jungle.
	And yet, there would be no concept of forest in the world because all the human beings had gone.
	And this is one way, I think, to think of it.
	So, to take another example, let's say that you're the last guy in the world and you're looking at a forest and then you get hit by a meteor.
	Well, the concept forest exists in your head, you get hit by a meteor and the concept of the forest has now vanished completely from the world.
	What you were looking at has not changed at all, assuming it wasn't a very large meteor.
	So what you're looking at hasn't changed at all.
	So the forest itself hasn't changed at all, but the concept of forest no longer exists in the world because you're the last guy who got hit by an asteroid.
	A small asteroid. And that's to me the way to figure out the difference between a concept and an entity.
	Which is, would it still be there?
	If there were no people left.
	And I think that's hopefully a shortcut way.
	There's sort of two shortcut ways of looking at it that hopefully will be helpful.
	Alright, we have another big font question.
	Is that a question? The principle that adults are responsible for the consequences of their actions?
	Yeah, but the concept of tree is also banished from the world in that example.
	That's exactly right. All concepts are banished from the world when the last person gets hit by an asteroid.
	No question. All concepts cease to exist, for sure.
	And that's how we know that they're different.
	I mean, if you got rid of all the trees, like if Tim LaHaye was right about the rapture, but wrong about God's chosen people, and it turned out that God's chosen people were trees instead of people, I can't believe the examples that I come up with, but let's say that that's the case, and all trees suddenly vanish from the world rather than the concept of a forest, well then, clearly the forest would be entirely different, and you'd have some very surprised flying squirrels that would suddenly thud into the ground and not know what the hell was going on.
	So, That's another way of looking at it.
	That when the entity vanishes, the collective that it's part of radically changes.
	But when the concept vanishes, the entity and the collective that they're part of don't change at all.
	Somebody says, the more that I get in contact with my inner child, the more fear I feel and anxiety.
	I'm careful with exposing my feelings with people who have a lot of childhood traumas unexamined, but I'm wondering if there are any general stages you go through in this kind of process.
	That's a good question.
	I mean, that's a big meaty question.
	I'm happy to answer it, but I don't want to, or at least I'll give you my answer, but I don't want to interrupt anybody else who may have a question.
	This is supposed to be a conversation rather than yet another monologue from their staff.
	But I will give it a shot if nobody else has something they want to bring up conversationally.
	I will say this, just before we move into that other question, which is to say Happy Mother's Day to all of the great moms who are out there.
	I just wanted to say the work that moms do in this world to make this world a better place, if that's their chosen goal and achievement, is second to none.
	And I just hope that everybody appreciates the work that you're doing to make the world a better place with the love And care and happiness and devotion and sensitivity and frankly, carbs and sugars that you bring to your family.
	So I just wanted to say a very, very happy Mother's Day out there to people who are doing all of the wonderful stuff to make the world a better place.
	The world will be as happy in a sense as mothers allow.
	And I think that is very, very important.
	All right. Well, I guess we'll take a swing at The question of general stages we go through in the process of self-knowledge, that's a great question.
	I think in general, there The people who I have found to be most responsive to therapy tend to be people who take on too much responsibility for themselves.
	People who take on too little responsibility for themselves, in my opinion and experience, don't end up in therapy because all they do is project.
	So if there's any problem, it's immediately somebody else's fault.
	If they're ever upset, it's immediately somebody else who is doing it to them.
	So they don't end up in therapy because they're the They're the puppets, right?
	Any more than if the puppet master is feeling sad, he sends his puppet to therapy, right?
	No, he goes to therapy, right?
	And so people who have this Keflon force field from hell that deflects any negative experience they're having to the responsibility of other people, they don't have a self, right?
	They only have a big, huge, explosive blame-thrower that they coat everyone else with the regular napalm of discontent and often abuse.
	And so they don't actually have a self that makes decisions.
	They have a self or an anti-self that justifies and blames any negative experience on other people.
	And so I don't think those people are particularly good candidates for self-knowledge of any kind.
	There's really no self to have knowledge about.
	And also because they've done a lot of harm to other people.
	And if you've done a lot of harm to other people, self-knowledge seems to be what you give up.
	If you smoke two packs a day, becoming a good runner is one of the things that you give up for that.
	And if you harm other people, particularly if you harm children, self-knowledge is just one of the things that you don't get as a surprise in life.
	You just don't. And so, if you take on...
	Too much responsibility.
	And that certainly was my pattern when I was younger.
	If there was a problem, it was my fault.
	It was my fault. It was my fault.
	Now, that's not healthy, but it's healthier than saying it's everybody else's fault.
	I've never been very good at externalizing things.
	Things tend to stick to me like, I guess, Paul Schaefer sticks to the wall in a Velcro suit on Letterman, right?
	They stick to me and I have to sort of fight to dislodge them.
	Like a guy with an afro sprinting through a burr forest.
	I just come out with an afro the size of...
	Some very large thing.
	Sometimes the metaphor machine is not working.
	So I think taking on a lot of responsibility weighs you down with too many burdens and too much ownership of everybody else's problems.
	And what happens is that your steps get slower and slower and your back gets bowed heavier and heavier and eventually you just go splat down on the ground and you can't move.
	That certainly was my experience and maybe that's the case for others as well.
	And what occurs then is the process of setting up boundaries.
	Boundaries are one of these Aristotelian mean things, right?
	So the people who deflect all blame for their own actions onto other people.
	The problem in my life, someone else has caused it, right?
	And those people, they have boundaries in a sense that are just completely deflecting and rigid and so on, right?
	Nothing gets through. Whereas I didn't have those kinds of boundaries.
	In fact, I almost had an invitation for exploitation and predation and ownership of other people's problems.
	And so for me, it was a process of setting up boundaries.
	And it was to say that I am not responsible for a relationship.
	And this is a basic fact, right?
	You are not responsible for relationships.
	I mean, imagine if you're carrying a 10-foot plank with someone else at the other end.
	Are you responsible for keeping that plank up?
	Well, no. Because you're both holding up the plank.
	You're not responsible. You have responsibility in holding up the plank, but you're not responsible for the plank.
	And it took a long time for me to figure out that I was not responsible for how other people treated me.
	I was responsible for being honest and open and so on, but I'm not responsible for how other people treat me.
	And of course, that was a very useful thing to get into, to understand before I started FDR because, well, people on the web can be petty and cruel and silly.
	And so, for me, it was a process of pushing those boundaries back.
	I tended to view the world as if I had much more ownership over things and people than I actually did.
	And when I began to place responsibility on other people for how they were treating me, I encountered a lot of resistance.
	And I think that was very important.
	And it was my inner child who helped a lot with that.
	Because when I would consult with my inner child, do we want to play with such and such a person?
	And he would just shake his head.
	Like, I don't like that person.
	I don't feel safe there. I don't feel happy.
	Who do we want to play with?
	I mean, it was sort of that back and forth thing.
	But it was accepting that if I don't like someone, it's not because...
	I have a problem, right?
	So there's a clichéd thing that happens in conflict, right?
	So let's say somebody is being really harsh or negative towards you, and you say, I'm going to leave this situation, right?
	You see this all the time in cheesy soap operas and bad dramas, right?
	So you leave, and the other person says, yeah, go ahead, go on, run away, that's what you always do, right?
	And so what they're saying, and sorry, I shouldn't laugh, because it's actually a very cruel thing to say, right?
	But what they're saying is...
	That you can't handle conflict when you in fact just don't accept abuse.
	And that you have a pathological habit of avoiding conflict and not taking ownership and running away from problems and so on.
	And so they're blaming you for leaving rather than taking any ownership for how they're treating you that is causing you to leave.
	And that is something that of course I heard a number of times when I would try to avoid people or would in fact avoid people as a result of their bad treatment of me.
	I would be accused of being cowardly, of running away, of not wanting to deal with conflict, of not wanting to be honest and confront people and so on.
	And all of that was just not true.
	And I had to sort of detach that.
	People will always try to blame you for the problems.
	Most people will try to blame you for the problems that occur in your relationship with them.
	And the key thing is to say, I don't own this relationship and you don't own this relationship.
	It's a mix. And I think that was very helpful to me.
	Those were some of the stages that I went through that I think will be useful.
	I hope that helps. If you're a subscriber, there are 8 Steps to Freedom is one of these subscriber podcasts.
	So let me know if you're a subscriber and you didn't reach that or didn't get that.
	They go out every couple of months. Somebody's asked, how will society cope with the void left when the state flushes itself if there is not a gradual process but it happens in a matter of months?
	Will the mathers who are not prepared, will their minds overload?
	The first thing to pop into my mind is someone will step up.
	Sorry, old habits die hard.
	Well, Yeah, look, I mean, the state is an effect of the family, as I've always argued.
	The state is an effect of our first experience with authority in terms of parents and priests and, to some degree, teachers.
	Or, of course, these days, it would be more accurate to say that the state is an effect of daycare, because so many kids are put in daycare.
	It's ridiculous and crazy.
	We can talk about that another time.
	Yeah, look, if the state collapses tomorrow, we're not gonna have a free society.
	There's no possibility of it whatsoever.
	There's no possibility of it whatsoever.
	I mean, put that completely off your list.
	Freedom will not arise like a phoenix out of the flaming ashes of a status collapse.
	Absolutely not. That's not how it's going to work.
	It's going to work, as I said before, in a multi-generational situation.
	It's going to work because people will slowly begin to treat their kids more humanely, because rational ethics will supply parental authority and power and control in how to raise children.
	That's the only way that it's going to happen.
	The only sustainable way.
	Yeah, if the state collapses tomorrow, people will feel an incredible amount of anxiety and will look for a new leader.
	People are so loose and flabby and jangly that they need the container of state control around them in order to have a semblance of a self.
	They need, in a sense, to be bound in the straitjacket of a flag to have any shape at all, because they don't have boundaries, they don't have self-knowledge, they don't have wisdom, they don't have philosophy.
	So, that's not going to happen that way.
	I mean, I don't know how exactly it's going to happen, but if the state collapses in any significant way in the near future, we're not going to get a free society out of it.
	No way in hell is that ever going to happen.
	And so that's why I'm trying to get as much information out so at least people can say when they rebuild the state, they can say, well, the state failed because it had too much control.
	That was the controls that were the problem.
	Because if they think that it was freedom that was the problem, then they'll scrub freedom out of their system.
	I mean there's a very interesting thing that is important to understand about modern society and about children in particular.
	There have been some enormous steps backwards in terms of child raising from the 1950s.
	At least in the 1950s you had one parent who stayed home and you had a relatively stable economic situation.
	One person working could provide usually a house and a car and some reasonable savings.
	There has been massive steps backwards in so far as now and I think the legal requirement for maternity leave in the US is six weeks and many countries will give you a year or sometimes even more.
	But I mean I can tell you a year is not enough.
	A year is not enough to be a full-time parent.
	I mean it's unbelievable to think.
	That four months ago we would have handed Isabella over to a daycare and resumed our lives.
	I mean, she needs us now, in a sense, more than ever.
	And she is very strongly now developing reciprocity in her relationship with us.
	She will come and give us a hug.
	She will show significant signs of affection.
	She will show significant distress if one of us leaves the room and goes.
	Now, it's almost like hand them over to a daycare for the first year and take them for the second year.
	I think the second year is so, so important when it comes to developing parent-child relationships.
	Rather than just the primeval and primordial bond of oxytocin-driven motherhood, you need to have the actual relationship that evolves in the second year, I think, is so important.
	So important. She's starting to develop her sense of humor, like she'll pretend to feed me and then pull it back and then giggle and all of these things that are occurring, the amount of repetition that she needs from the same people to learn words and to learn songs and so on.
	She's starting to sing a whole line of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
	It's amazing, but that's only because we've gone over it about 10,000 times.
	So to put a kid into daycare in a year, It's something that is so...
	I don't want to say destructive.
	I think that's too strong.
	But... Do you know that the average child has 60 hours of peer interactions a week and only 16 hours of adult-child interactions?
	We have a whole fucking generation of kids out there who are entirely Lord of the Flies situation.
	Children are separated from adults.
	They're put into daycare and children interact.
	And I've worked in a daycare. I know this.
	Children interact with each other all the time in daycare.
	They rarely interact with adults unless they've done something wrong, which is a negative interaction.
	Children are incredibly segregated by age these days.
	And so people wonder why bullying is such a big problem.
	Well, because children get very little adult supervision these days.
	They get very little adult interaction.
	They're raising each other.
	And children are not competent to raise each other.
	And this is why we have these Lord of the Flies situations with gangs and bullying and drugs and shootings and problems because children are unsupervised.
	by adults so significantly in society.
	The moment you put your kid into a daycare, you're basically saying to him, you are now going to be raised by other two-year-olds and other three-year-olds and other four-year-olds.
	Those are going to be your parents.
	You can't even hire a babysitter who's not 16 or 14.
	But the majority of the interaction that these kids have is not with an adult who's going to do something sensible and useful with them, but with other kids.
	Who were going to be other kids and snatch and pull and push and pinch and bite and tease and all of that stuff.
	And the only thing that kids will see adults do is prying other kids off them when it gets too bad and that's it.
	That's a huge step backwards in terms of society as a whole and that's why you have these lost boys growing up, these lost girls growing up.
	That's why drug use is up.
	That's why promiscuity is up so much.
	That's why bullying is such a problem because children are raising each other Because the tax cattle have been yanked off to be milked by the state.
	It's just hideous.
	All right. Well, listen, I don't want to do a monologue.
	I can do those anytime.
	So we can have a shorter show if people don't have any questions.
	Last call. Do I think some people are naturally introverted or extroverted?
	And if so or not, how does this relate to the true or false self and learned behavioral adaptations?
	Do these traits become exaggerated due to adaptations?
	Well, that's interesting. There is a series of studies that I've been reading recently about language acquisition in kids, which, of course, based on where I am as a parent, is a fascinating topic to me.
	About 25% of language acquisition can be chalked up to innate ability or intelligence or capacity, but a significant majority of it, 75%, is directly correlated to the degree of investment and involvement that parents have in language acquisition in their children.
	So, for instance, when a child says a word that you don't understand, you have a choice, right?
	You can say...
	If your kid is saying ba, ba, then you can say, oh, you want your bottle.
	And then you go and get the bottle, but the kid doesn't want the bottle.
	And so you've misinterpreted what...
	What the kid wants.
	But if you keep persisting and trying to figure out what the kid wants in terms of the word, and you don't jump to a conclusion, this is RTR, right?
	If you don't jump to a conclusion about what your kid wants, but in fact, you are sort of patient, try and figure it out, and you mirror back and so on.
	Then the child will have multiple numbers of extra words by the time they're 18 months.
	I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's hundreds as opposed to dozens.
	It's a significant improvement in terms of that.
	Another example is, you know, these baby videos where someone is speaking these words and there's these images going on on the screen.
	And very often, and certainly in the Baby Einstein videos for a long time, if not still, they were multilingual, right?
	So they would have Chinese and Spanish and Japanese and so on.
	And sorry, you know what the word multilingual means, I apologize.
	I mean to insult the smartest group of listeners on the planet.
	And they found that this actually retards children's language development significantly and in the long term.
	And one of the reasons that Disney, I think it was Disney who put out these Baby Einstein videos, one of the reasons that they were made multilingual was that babies are born able to understand the nuances and language differences between all forms of pronunciation.
	And all languages. And then they, around sort of eight to ten months, they begin to whittle down what they can understand to their own language.
	And this was considered to be a bad thing by the people who put together the Baby Einstein videos, and so they made them multilingual.
	And of course, any time you question what Mother Nature has developed over a couple of billion years, you're in for a pretty rough ride.
	And so they have found that this specialization was actually really helpful and important for children to learn language.
	You really do need a specialization.
	The other thing too is that people would put their kids in front of these videos and think that they were learning how to speak because they were watching these videos.
	But what they found is that children learn how to speak significantly better when they can see someone speaking, when they can see you speaking.
	Because they need to see when words end by how your lips move.
	Otherwise it's just a whole series of randomly generated babble noise to them.
	They don't know when words begin and end because they're not actually seeing someone speak and do things with the words.
	The pause between the words, the way that the plosives form and close and the other glottal stops and all those kinds of things.
	And so they actually found that Kids learn much slower if they're exposed to these videos.
	And of course the claim was that the videos make your kids smarter, but they actually make them dumber.
	And it seems to be a pretty significant and long-term effect to this.
	And so the reason I'm sort of bringing all that stuff up, which may sound like a tangent, and perhaps it is to some degree, is that I'm sure that there are some Innate characteristics of extroversion and introversion in general.
	So people who enjoy engaging more with others and people who enjoy engaging more with themselves, right?
	I mean, it's a very general way of putting it, but it would be something like that.
	And I think that there may be some aspects that is built into the personality towards that, but I don't think it's much.
	Maybe it's around 25%, the same thing as natural language acquisition.
	But What I think is true, and what I know is true, is that children are pleasure seekers.
	So let's say that you're born with more of a tendency towards introversion, but interacting with others is so much fun that you just overcome that.
	Let's say Isabella was born with some tendency towards introversion, But she found that interacting with my wife and I to be so much fun that she just overcomes that anxiety or that slight preference for engaging with herself rather than others.
	And now she's an incredibly friendly and happy kid.
	When she sees a kid who gives her a big smile and who she really likes, she just walks right up and gives them a hug.
	I mean, it's the cutest thing you've ever seen.
	And it's just a beautiful thing.
	She's still wary of people who give her the willies and I applaud her for that.
	But she's very open because she's expecting positive interactions with people because she has so many positive interactions with us.
	On the other hand, I think you could have a tendency towards extroversion but find that interacting with other people is painful or frightening or difficult or unpleasant or ugly, in which case you will tend towards more trying to find sustenance within yourself.
	And I think that would be my way to suggest it.
	I'm just reviewing here looking for some questions.
	Oh yeah, somebody here is writing.
	My daughter is very smart, but her school has to dumb her class down to the dumbest.
	Instead of trying to raise her class up to her level, I tried to work with the school with no luck.
	I ended up taking her out and now I have to do the work at home and have her meet at the library with a resource teacher to hand her work in and do her tests.
	Oh boy, I mean I completely sympathize with you.
	You know, one of the things that has been quite tragic in the sort of recent developments in the public school system, and mclean.ca has more articles on this if you're interested, but the degree to which a cutback in funding has caused a jamming together of more extreme abilities versus inabilities in cognitive skills is really brutal.
	When you have a cut in funding, it is the brightest who are going to suffer the most.
	Because the brightest will survive.
	And the brightest will tend to understand the consequences of their actions and not act out.
	Whereas some kid who's cognitively deficient will act out and be difficult.
	And so resources...
	are going to flow towards those who are going to cause the most trouble if those resources are not there.
	And that's not the brightest kids, that's the kids who are the most difficult, either emotionally or cognitively, the least advanced.
	Certainly up here in Canada, the gifted programs have been cut.
	I actually worked as a teacher's assistant in a program for gifted kids when I was 21, I think I was.
	The kids were very precocious and very bright and all came from great in terms of intellectual families.
	And those programs have just been slashed.
	And I know that some parents have had to take their local school boards to court to threaten them with suing if they're not going to provide gifted programs for kids who tested the top couple of percentile.
	And this has just been brutal.
	So if you have a smart kid, and I have no doubt that most if not all of my listeners will end up, if they have kids with very smart kids, then...
	Yeah, it is a real challenge to try and find a school environment.
	I mean, I think the public school system is just wretched.
	I mean, it's just wretched.
	And so I would try and avoid that as much as possible.
	And yeah, homeschooling, I'm a fan of homeschooling.
	I am a fan of a good private school.
	I mean, so far, I mean, it's all just my opinion, but I'm slightly more of a fan of good private school than homeschooling.
	But I really sympathize with you.
	It is... It is very difficult.
	If you don't have the money for private school and you don't have the resources for homeschooling, then of course you're going to have to put your kid in public school because money's been taken from you by force anyway.
	And the best you can do is hope she gets some practical skills out of it and try and work with her to get her homework and try and get some intellectual content into her during homework time as best you can.
	That's the only thing that I can really, really suggest.
	Is it possible that with philosophical parenting, the percentage of child prodigies will skyrocket?
	Well, prodigy is a tough word, even though it's a band that I've been compared to the lead singer in terms of looks.
	But it is a tough word.
	I think that there is an enormous, enormous, enormous amount of intelligence that is entirely dependent upon Environment and the appropriate stimuli for the child.
	A huge amount of intelligence, particularly in terms of verbal abilities, a huge amount of verbal intelligence is entirely dependent upon the environment and the stimuli.
	And so yeah, with philosophical parenting, of course, you won't be teaching your kids a lot of bullshit.
	In fact, hopefully you'll be teaching them very little to no bullshit.
	And so the kids will be smarter.
	You will really work with them in terms of using a phonetic alphabet like the A, B, C, D, E, F, G, which is a stupid way to teach a kid how to read.
	So kids will be reading earlier and they will not encounter the same kinds of problems that come with the whole word learning and all that kind of nonsense.
	Yeah, I think so. Of course, the challenge is, and I don't know what the hell is going to happen to Izzy when she gets old enough for this, but the challenge is, I mean, if you really want to bring down public school, it's pretty easy to stay home with your kids and don't raise them to be afraid of authority.
	And if you had, you know, a couple of million kids floating into the public school system when they weren't afraid of authority, the whole system would have to change.
	I mean, that's the most revolutionary act that you can do to bring down the existing shit public school system, is to raise your kids to be intellectually curious, very intelligent, and unafraid of authority.
	Because then the public school system simply won't work because you cannot control 10 out of 30 kids who were raised that way.
	The whole system would have to change and adapt and work into something saner.
	If you want to bring down public school system, if I can quote statistics about how bad public school system is, just raise your children to be unafraid of authority and the system will have to adapt.
	Somebody's asking a follow-up on the UPB and the Ethics of Self-Defense article.
	I'm going to hold off on responding to that until I read the article as a podcast.
	My favorite color is bald.
	Do I have experience in energy work, i.e.
	the chakra system and meditation?
	I do, in fact, have experience in energy work, the chakra system and meditation.
	And I have found the chakra system to be more or less nonsense, but I have found meditation to be very helpful, although I really don't do it as much as I should.
	I'd like to get back into it more, but it's been really tough to find the time to do it.
	Somebody's written, I'm a public school science teacher.
	Yesterday, we had a day-long professional development meeting in which we sat and listened to folks from the district to explain new standards.
	The whole system is wrought with problems.
	Most teachers don't want to be there.
	Most are not curious, and we are all stressed with little tasks.
	Teachers go into teaching because they're passionate about kids.
	From what I've seen, it doesn't take many years to kill that passion.
	I agree with you.
	I have a lot of sympathy for people stuck in the bowels of statism.
	I really do. And I think that a lot of teachers, you're right, they do want to go into teaching because they're passionate about teaching and want to help the kids.
	But... It's just not possible.
	The stuff they teach is boring and disconnected and alienated and propagandistic and because the stuff that they're teaching and I don't mean you in terms of science but a lot of stuff that's taught in public schools is so intellectually fragile and seeped through with such cosmic irradiated bullshit that teachers have to kill curiosity that the students have because curiosity will cause the whole house of cards to come tumbling down.
	And power corrupts.
	And teachers have an enormous amount of power because if they decide to, you know, I guess with the principal or whatever, if they decide to kick a kid out of class or get the kid suspended, then the parents have no options, right?
	The parents have to go to work.
	The parents then have to find someone to take care of the kid during the day so they can really mess up.
	People's lives. And they can mess up the kids' lives.
	They can mess up the parents' lives.
	And of course, they're paid through money that is taken through force.
	That doesn't mean that every public school teacher is immoral, of course, right?
	But it does mean that there is a lot of power in that system that the teachers have.
	And at the same time, they have a lot of power over the kids, but they don't have any power over what they actually want to do, which is to find ways to teach the kids in ways that are...
	In ways that are exciting and stimulating and so on.
	So I have a lot of sympathy for public school teachers.
	And I do believe that the very best, and this is, I think, fairly true, that the very best and the very brightest get kicked out of the system pretty quickly because they won't stand for less than the best for the kids.
	And then they run straight into the weird statist bullshit that goes on in terms of administration and They get threats and they're just like, you know, there's an easier way to make a living than fighting for something that you can't win and watching the kids that you most want to help get less intellectually curious every day.
	It's like being a doctor or going to an OR and have to stand there with your hands tied behind your back as your patient slowly expires.
	Yeah, I mean, I think anybody who's a good teacher is going to end up having to flee if they want to keep up their good teaching or they end up in this cynicism.
	I had a listener convo, and listen, I'm able to, the demands of parenting are beginning to diminish a little bit and my schedule is becoming a little bit more regular.
	So if you do have listener convos that you'd like to have with me, please send me an email.
	I know I've been a little bit somewhat unavailable for the last year or so or more.
	But things are sort of coming back into a little bit more of a regular pattern now, so I would like to resume, if people are interested, resume more of the listener conversations.
	I really, really do enjoy them.
	I think that it's a very uplifting thing to speak to Free Domain Radio listeners.
	It's a very exciting and enjoyable thing, because it just reminds me just how many great and smart people there are out there.
	Yes, please. Just send me an email at hostoffreedomainradio.com.
	It generally has to be evenings, 10.30pm or so, Eastern Standard, but that is the way to go.
	Somebody has asked, in your opinion, what is the FDR canon?
	We can sit here and ask you thousands of questions, but if you were asked, which are the most important works on free domain radio based on which your whole work would be reconstructed by using Methodology is a formula.
	UPB, the argument for morality.
	True news. In your opinion, what is your most important work?
	Well, that really depends.
	I think the work that is in the long run going to have the most impact is UPB. And the work that is going to have the most short-term impact is the combination of OnTruth and RTR, which is about honesty in personal relationships.
	OnTruth and RTR are about historical relationships and UPB is about future relationships.
	Particularly with your children.
	I really, really wanted to give educators, parents and teachers a way to instruct children on ethics without having to use power, without having to use aggression or bullying or authority.
	And I think it's been a tragic, tragic catastrophe for the history of the human race that philosophers have not Bent their backs in two to try and create a rational system of ethics because without that we have no choice but to substitute authority in bullying or simply force in terms of instructing the young because we don't have a good answer as to why to be good and so we end up having to just bully children or threaten withdrawal or manipulate them or whatever.
	And so I think a dishonesty on the part of not knowing about ethics and a lack of focus and work on explicating ethics for the masses has been just catastrophic.
	And that's why when I'm going to go and do some talks next year, it's going to be really around UPB and ethics.
	I think in terms of either getting honesty into your existing relationships, your historical relationships, or having the option to escape those where honesty is not possible, RTR and OnTruth are very helpful.
	And I think for the future, for the short-term future it's UPB, for the long-term future it's practical anarchy and everyday anarchy.
	But yeah, you can get a good deal of what I talk about from the books, and I certainly do suggest the books.
	I know that they're fairly dry relative to some of the more entertaining podcasts, but I think that they are very useful.
	Somebody said, I'm writing a DFU letter.
	What pointers do you have? My therapist said it could be helpful to go into examples of abuse inflicted.
	But when I wrote it, I found it to be pretty short, with no examples.
	It contained just the bare basics of information.
	I didn't find I wanted to go into details at all about the therapy, etc.
	My sympathies, my deep, deep, deep sympathies.
	I've talked about this before, so I'll just touch on it very briefly.
	If you have decided to take a break from your family, my suggestion is not to go into examples of the abuse inflicted.
	I think if you have a desire to talk about that with your parents, then you should sit down and talk about that with your parents.
	The separation from any long-term relationship occurs when you simply don't have a desire to communicate anymore.
	When there's nothing that you can say.
	And the way that you earn that is you say everything that you want to say to the people in question.
	Assuming, again, there's no danger of physical violence.
	You say everything that you want to say.
	You sit down. You bring up all the issues.
	You try to listen. You try to, you know, don't jump to conclusions.
	Don't just attack. But talk about your thoughts and feelings in the relationship.
	Talk about what you want.
	And you keep doing that. And you keep doing that.
	And you keep doing that. Until you get, if it's not going to work, that it's not going to work.
	It's just impossible. People are too defended.
	They don't have a self left. They're dead inside.
	They're just vampires.
	They're whatever, right? This is not going to work.
	And then if you decide to take a break and you want to send a letter, then just, you know, to me, it's like I've decided to take a break, work on personal issues, I'll let you know if and when I want to reestablish contacts, right?
	But if you still have a desire to say, well, you did this and you did that and this bugs me and that bugs me, then I suggest to sit down and have that conversation and keep having those conversations until you just don't have anything more to say.
	I mean, I still get the occasional email.
	From my dad. And he sends me just this nonsense, right?
	And I just wrote back to him and said, look, please stop emailing me.
	I have no interest in my historical family.
	I have no interest in my... And I don't.
	I don't want to know.
	It's not like I never... I don't care.
	I never think about it. But it's just not part of my life.
	It's... To me, going back to my family would be like going back to grade 2.
	I guess I could wedge myself into the desk, but what's the point?
	There's nothing there that I can learn.
	There's nothing there that I can get that I don't already have a million fold in other areas.
	He wrote me back and he said, just for the record, I just want you to understand that I am very sorry for all the things that happened to you.
	And I just sort of wanted to point that out.
	I don't mean to diss on my dad or anything, but I just sort of wanted to point that this is how intransigent this stuff is.
	This is how impenetrable these defenses are.
	Because that is a very unreal thing to say, and it's not at all accurate.
	Because these weren't things that happened to me.
	Going bald happened to me.
	But these aren't things that happened to me.
	These are things that people did to me.
	And these are things that my dad participated in doing to me.
	So if I get drunk and I run you down with a car and I put you in a wheelchair for six months and then I write you a letter and say, I'm very sorry for what happened to you.
	Then I clearly don't get it.
	Or I'm avoiding getting it.
	Because the real apology is, I'm sorry what I did to you.
	What I did to you.
	Not what happened to you like in the third person.
	Mistakes were made. No, no.
	You made mistakes. And the only reason I bring this up, it's not a big burning issue for me or anything, but the only reason I bring this up since this question came up is that I'm 43 years old.
	My dad is in his 70s, right?
	And the defenses are exactly the same as they were 20 years ago when I first brought this stuff up with him.
	It's exactly the same.
	Never underestimate people's capacity to not change, right?
	If you're somebody who has the capacity to change, it's easy to project that capacity into other people.
	But this is exactly the same nonsense and avoidance that has occurred forever.
	And it's not going to change tomorrow.
	It's not going to change the day after tomorrow.
	If it hasn't changed for the last 20 years, it's not going to change in the future.
	It's just not going to change in the future.
	And so I just marked his email as spam and moved on.
	I don't want to write it back to him and say, this is not stuff that happened to me.
	This is stuff that you people did to me.
	Because what's the point?
	There's no point.
	It's like yelling at a retarded kid who doesn't speak English.
	It would be completely irrational and it would be to ignore the evidence of the past 20 years.
	And I'm all about reason and evidence.
	There's this thing where Oh, tomorrow such and such a person in my life who hasn't gotten it for 20 years, they're going to get it tomorrow.
	But that's exactly the same as saying the next political party is going to make the government into a good thing.
	It's just not going to happen.
	So yeah, I really do have deep sympathy and continue to work with your therapist and I'm very, very sorry that it's come to this.
	But I can certainly tell you that it was one of the best decisions that I ever made.
	It's important to think about the future.
	If you have abusive people in your life, I'm telling you and telling you, my marriage is the most amazing thing in my life.
	And I genuinely do not believe that my wife would have married me if I'd been around abusive people.
	I genuinely believe that for two reasons.
	One, I mean... She would have seen through it.
	And two, I would have been a different person if I had been around people who had harmed me as a child, if I'd been consistently around them.
	I would not have been the person that she fell in love with.
	There are significant costs to the future.
	If you keep abusive people in your life and if they don't change and you keep them around in your life, it radically changes who else is in your life.
	It has a huge ripple effect.
	It's a domino effect. It completely colors who you are, the choices you make, the values that you represent or the non-values that you represent and you bring.
	It will completely change everything else in your life.
	So that's, I think, important to understand.
	Yeah, it is the real butterfly effect.
	That's exactly right. I say not only physical abuse but verbal abuse that can run just as deep.
	In fact, verbal abuse has been proven, I think, fairly well established scientifically or at least psychologically.
	Verbal abuse has been proven to be much worse for people than physical abuse.
	And I can certainly say that that is the case for me as well.
	The physical abuse that I experienced, which was fairly savage but certainly not the worst it's ever been, I did not leave the same kind of difficulties with my sort of relationship with myself and others as the verbal abuse did.
	Physical abuse is a bruise that will heal or whatever, a cut that will heal, but what goes on in your mind sticks with you.
	It really, really sticks with you.
	And it's been pretty well established that verbal abuse is much worse.
	Also, the thing that's true is that verbal abuse, when you get older and bigger and your parents get Older and weaker, they can't hit you, if they ever did, right?
	But they can still cut you down verbally.
	And so I think that, yeah, verbal abuse is...
	Do you know what?
	I mean, to me, verbal abuse, physical abuse is like there's a lion in the house, right?
	And you're like, oh shit, there's a lion in the house.
	Maybe out of the house, right? Verbal abuse is like carbon monoxide poisoning.
	You don't notice it, but it still gets you.
	It's much more dangerous.
	Somebody has said, I think the problem is people do not understand the potential consequences of their actions or words.
	Do you mean verbal abusers?
	Yeah, I don't think that's the case.
	Verbal abusers absolutely understand the consequences of their actions and their words, without a doubt.
	Because if somebody doesn't understand the consequences of their actions, then they act randomly.
	So if you and I are somehow trapped in a nuclear sub that's going down and we're the only people there and we don't know anything about nuclear subs, we're going to just start, you know, rather than just die because we're going to go down and get crushed at the bottom of the ocean, we're going to start flipping switches and trying this and that because we genuinely don't know what the effects of our actions are going to be.
	So we're going to try all this random shit, right?
	But that's not what verbal abusers do.
	Verbal abusers are very precise and very focused in sniffing out weakness.
	There's a study that's been done that has shown that bullies have very high social skills because they have to know who to pick on.
	They have to know where the weaknesses are.
	They have very high verbal skills because they have to know how to formulate the language so that it is the most hurtful and the most crippling to others.
	And they have to make sure that they don't pick on people who are going to outclass them in terms of abuse.
	So, yeah, you know, verbal abusers are very aware.
	I'm not saying consciously. It doesn't really matter, right?
	But they're very aware.
	Because... I mean, if you were suddenly put in China and you were told to verbally abuse someone in Chinese or Mandarin and you don't speak Mandarin, you'd just make a whole bunch of cliched and vaguely racist sounding Chinese phrases and hope that somehow an insult came out.
	Because that to me would be to act without knowledge of what your consequences of your actions would be.
	But that's not what verbal abusers do.
	Any precision strike cannot be accidental.
	Somebody's asked, is sexual sadism the result of childhood trauma?
	Bye.
	Thank you.
	Well, I don't know for sure, but it's certainly the first place that I would look.
	It's certainly the first place that I would look.
	It may be that I left my keys on an airplane, but the first place I'm going to look is the last pocket I had them in.
	So that's really what I... Well, but not consciously, if somebody's not conscious of his or her own motives, that is not an excuse for their behavior.
	It's not. It's genuinely not.
	I mean, so for instance, if you're a kid and you're supposed to do something and you didn't do it, and you say, I forgot, right?
	Do people in authority, parents or priests or teachers, in general, do they say, oh, that's okay, everybody forgets, no worries.
	Because to forget is to be in an unconscious state, right?
	You're supposed to do something, but you completely forgot, which means you were no longer conscious.
	Now, you know it was unconscious because when you're reminded, it all comes rushing back and you're like, oh shit, I did have this thing to do.
	So it's not like you completely forgot, like, I didn't have that appointment, or I didn't need to do that, or I wasn't supposed to see the dentist.
	You genuinely don't remember at all, which would be a sign of A significant problem with your cognitive abilities, but you completely forget, like you, dum-de-dum-de-dum, doing this thing, and then suddenly it's like, oh shit, I'm supposed to do this, right?
	So it was unconscious, and then it becomes conscious.
	But in my experience, it was never really an excuse that adults accepted, right?
	Adults, when I was a kid, and you said, I forgot, or it never occurred to me, or I just didn't think about it, or whatever, they'd say, well, you should have.
	Well, you made a commitment and you're responsible.
	I forgot it's not an excuse, right?
	I forgot my homework.
	I forgot when the test was.
	It was never an excuse. It was never an excuse that was acceptable when I was a kid.
	And so I think that unconsciousness, first of all, if adults don't let little kids use the unconscious defense, then adults can't use the unconscious defense.
	I mean, of course not, right?
	Of course not. If I have a moral rule that I'm applying towards some little kid, Who has much less cognitive ability, like orders of magnitude less cognitive ability than any even average adult, then to say that I can use the unconscious defense as an adult while kids can't use the unconscious defense with their kids is to have much higher standards for those with much lower abilities.
	And that's insane. I mean, that's just embarrassing.
	I'm not saying it's your perspective, but that's just ridiculous, right?
	And that's the first thing. And the second thing, too, is that to be truly unconscious would also be to act against your own self-interest.
	So sleepwalking, right?
	If you sleepwalk, you can sleepwalk off a cliff.
	You can sleepwalk into traffic.
	So then you're genuinely unconscious and you're acting randomly.
	But as I've always sort of thought about, you know, parents who yell at their kids, right?
	But you say, well, I yell at my kids because I'm frustrated.
	It's like, well, are you ever frustrated at work?
	Well, yeah. Do you ever yell at your boss?
	Well, no. So, it's not entirely unconscious.
	It's just where you have power, you may abuse it.
	And where you feel powerless, you will magically be able to restrain your own negative or hostile behavior.
	It's like, I yell at my kids because they make me mad.
	It's like, yesterday I was stopped by a cop because he thought I was speeding when I wasn't.
	It's like, did that make you mad? Yeah.
	Did you yell at the cop? No.
	Well, then it's not being made mad that makes you yell.
	It's something else. Right?
	And So that's another reason.
	The last thing I would say is to me, the unconscious defense is the drug defense.
	It's like, yeah, you're unconscious.
	So at the moment, you're not that aware of what you're doing at some level, but you are also responsible for remaining in an unconscious state.
	So if you do something that you think is not good, right, and you yell at your kids or whatever, and you say, well, at the time, I just didn't know.
	But afterwards, you know that you did it, and you know that it wasn't a great thing to do.
	And then you're suddenly responsible for You suddenly become responsible for figuring out why you did what you did and finding ways to avoid it.
	And if you then don't do that, then you're choosing to remain in an unconscious state.
	You're actively choosing to avoid the knowledge that would give you the chance to act in a better way.
	And then you stay unconscious.
	But that's like saying, well, I'm not responsible for being a bad parent because I was drunk most of the time.
	Well, yeah, it's true that if you're drunk, you can't be a good parent, but you're still responsible for staying drunk all the time.
	And that is where the unconscious defense also falls down as well.
	So if you're actively avoiding self-knowledge, which you are, anytime you do something that you weren't pleased with and then you avoid figuring out why, you're choosing to remain in the drunk state and you're responsible for that.
	Somebody has written, given the fact that biologically you are not an adult till your mid-twenties.
	Don't you think that out of proportionality there should be a double standard for the legal of age of adulthood where parents are bound to certain obligations up into the mid-twenties despite whether their children want to live with them or not?
	Something similar to child support or alimony for young adults.
	Sure I know that is phrased in a status way but add DRO to it as a contractual coverage obligation in order to have child rearing services provided.
	I don't think so.
	I don't think so.
	I don't think so. I mean, when you say biologically you're not an adult until your mid-20s, what that means is that there are certain aspects of your brain development that don't finally complete until your mid-20s.
	But I don't think that that is...
	I don't think that's any legal obligation or even moral obligation for your parents to continue to support you in that time.
	Because we're talking about a percentage point or two of final construction on your brain.
	We're not talking about the difference between a five-year-old and a 20-year-old, and I'm not suggesting you're saying that.
	But it's like a few finishing touches.
	You know, it's like, I can move into the house if there are three roofing tiles missing, right?
	And, you know, get by.
	I can move into the house if there's still one wall unpainted.
	In fact, I moved into my house when there was no lawn.
	And we were the only people in the house for quite some place around.
	We still had a security guard go by, and we were the only people here for quite some time.
	So it wasn't finished, but we were still able to live in it.
	And I think that, yeah, there's a few little things that are finally put in place in your mid-20s, but I think the moral responsibility accrues before that.
	Where I think parents would be liable in a free society is clearly if you fed your child a toxin, Then you would be liable for the medical costs of fixing that, right?
	So if I put poison in your coffee and you get sick, then I would be responsible for your medical costs.
	That would be a clear situation where justice would be required.
	Sorry, restitution would be required for justice.
	And... If parents act in such a way that they have caused significant health problems for their children, if they have been abusive, right?
	Statistically, the most toxic substance that most children will ever be exposed to is abusive parenting or abusive authority figures.
	Statistically, just look at the Bomb and the Brain series if you have any doubts about that.
	Statistically, that is the greatest toxin that children are exposed to.
	It's not freaking lead toys from China.
	It's domestic parents in the home that is the problem.
	And so in a free society, if you harm your children, Then that's pretty easy to figure out when it comes to the new sort of brain scan imaging and so on.
	You'll be like, oh, okay, so unfortunately you've done things to your children that have caused them to have these cognitive or emotional deficits.
	And so now, as a parent, you have to pay to get that fixed as best as possible.
	So that will be the case.
	So if your parents have harmed you, then yeah, they'll have to pay restitution, you know, therapy and whatever else would occur.
	Maybe it's lifelong medication.
	Who knows? But they would have to pay for that, for sure.
	I mean, why would it be any different?
	In fact, it would be even worse to put poison into the cup of a child than it would be some other adult.
	So, because the child is not there by choice and you have to have some motive and some reason to go attack some stranger with poison in his cup, but many people will do it to their kids without that same provocation.
	Somebody has written, you talked about your brother giving you a book about two devils, the older one trying to lure the other one into darkness.
	It wasn't exactly that.
	It's a book called The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, which is an older devil giving advice to a younger devil who's attempting to tempt a Christian into bad things.
	Yeah, that stuff shows up everywhere.
	It shows up everywhere all the time.
	People will be amazingly honest, and it can be quite chilling, but people will be amazingly honest.
	I had a guy who was a friend of mine who fell in with a bad crowd and was sort of dragging him back to his old ways of drinking and dissolution.
	And the guy who was luring him back at one point said to me, it's just like, well, we're fighting over this guy's soul, and I'm clearly winning.
	And it's like... This was not an educated man, but he totally got what was going on.
	So yeah, people can be amazingly frank and amazingly honest, and you can even look for that kind of stuff.
	You can look for that kind of stuff everywhere.
	In hindsight, it's very clear what people are saying, and I think hopefully it's a way of getting that to be, not in hindsight, but straight up.
	Oh yeah, the stuff that my mom said about Ayn Rand was bang on, I think, in a recent Microsystem Self Convo I had.
	Alright, well I think we'll stop, I think.
	Do I watch the news?
	No, I don't watch the news.
	And thank you everybody so much for watching, listening.
	If you have a few bucks in your pocket, the economic uncertainties continues to grind around the world, which has its effects on donations to Freedom Aid Radio.
	So if you haven't donated for a while, I would hugely appreciate any support.
	And it would be useful and helpful, and I would really appreciate it.
	So if you'd like to go to freedomainradio.com forward slash Donate.aspx.
	I would really, really appreciate that.
	So thank you everybody so much for listening and asking some great questions as always.
	And I will talk to you next week and have yourselves a fantastic, fantastic week.
	And I hope to see you in New Hampshire in June and in the barbecue in September and in Hollywood in October.

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