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May 30, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:49:09
1672 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show May 30 2010

Dealing with sexist friends, overscheduled kids, tutoring challenges, and a beautiful listener testimonial...

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Hi everybody, it's Steph.
It is the 30th of May, 2010, just after 4pm.
Thank you so much for joining us for our regularly scheduled Sunday Philosophy Chittle Channel.
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It's very, very kind and And that having been said, let's move on with the show.
It's so neat.
Isabella has turned into a hug monster.
And what that means is that...
Whenever she sees another child, she will run towards them with her arms outstretched to hug them, producing a wide variety of responses from other children, from outright horror to, I believe, if they had Minnie Mace on them, they would take her down to returning the hugs and so on.
She has, in fact, knocked one boy over in her enthusiasm to hug him because he was quite young and only learning how to walk.
And she has also...
But yeah, it's really, really cute.
Of course, we're a very huggy family, so I guess that's where she gets this from.
But we certainly didn't teach her to do it.
She just spontaneously began running up to people.
I even have a little video footage of her hugging the mannequins in Old Navy.
Maybe it's just a kind of practice or whatever.
It really is quite...
It's just... It's beyond adorable.
So, yeah, I just think that's a neat update.
Other than that, she's doing really well.
She starts gymnastics next month, which we're all looking...
Looking forward to. And, well, when I say looking forward to, I mean I'll be hiding in a whimpering bag of nervousness under a couch somewhere because they do actually walk on the balance beams and they do all these things, which for a parent who spends 17 months keeping her uninjured is a challenging situation for sure, that kind of transition. But, you know, it's necessary and she's already, she's just on the verge of doing somersaults.
She's learned the concept upside down.
And so she'll, you know, we'll be in the mall and she'll suddenly hurl herself at the ground and try and do a somersault, which usually means just sort of falling over sideways.
But I think that we really need to harness that for the power of good.
And she is, she's really, she's trying to learn how to jump.
So we've, you know, we've got the song, half a pound of tappany rice, half a pound of treacle, that's the way the money goes, pop, goes the weasel and unpop.
She throws herself up in the air to jump yet, so she gets very enthusiastic and basically, again, hurls herself.
A lot of hurling to the ground at this phase of her life, and it's just amazing to me.
I mean, there's two things that are going on that are really cool other than the general physical stuff.
The one is this amazing eruption of language.
Like, she learns a word once and it's just there forever.
I mean, can you imagine trying to learn a foreign language and you get the word in its context just once?
And sometimes it's not even something we teach her, it's just something she picks up in passing and it just sticks there.
Like Paul Schaefer on a Velcro wall.
And that is really an amazing, amazing thing to see.
Because I keep thinking I need to teach her, and we really don't.
And she knows what a mirror is now.
And she's really getting some pretty cool concepts.
And she's really abstracting very well as well.
So just this morning, I took her to...
Christina went to an aerobics class, and I... Took Isabella to the pool, and just as I was doing the, oh, you wouldn't believe, trying to get a child out of the house, particularly to a pool, is very akin to getting a man to the moon when it comes to logistics and planning and making sure you have everything.
And so... I was just...
She's learned the word umbrella.
I mean, she doesn't obviously say it quite that way.
Umbra. Umbra.
But she has learned the word umbrella.
And once, a week or two ago, I opened and closed an umbrella.
And when I was getting something from the front hallway cupboard this morning, she kept saying, Umbra, Umbra.
And I couldn't understand what she was talking about because, of course, there was no open umbrella.
But she saw that we have an umbrella hanging in the coat rack that's closed tight.
And so she knew that that was an umbrella just like the open ones.
You know, when we go to the mall, they have this sort of summer stuff that's out there and they have the chairs for the patio and the umbrella over.
So she knew that it was a closed umbrella because she'd seen it once a couple of weeks ago.
And that just blows my mind how quickly that is moving.
And I think it's pretty standard for kids.
She's 17 months.
It is an amazing thing to see that develop.
And the other thing that's really cool as well is her sense of spatial...
Maybe there's a technical term for it that I don't know.
It's not exactly spatial reasoning, although that's doing well too.
But what it is, is her sense of spatial mapping, right?
At the gym that I go to, upstairs, way in the back, there's one of those water dispensers.
You pull the lever forward and the water comes out into a little cup.
And of course, she's fascinated with water.
She can sit there and play in the sink for an hour.
And she loves that little water machine.
And this morning...
She wanted to go up the stairs and then she made a beeline straight to this water machine which she's played with once or twice a couple of weeks ago.
So it really is neat the degree to which she has a map of mental space of where things are, right?
So in the old Navy store in the mall we go to regularly there is a plastic dog which she quite likes and she's trying to learn how to ride it now.
And When we go to the mall, she knows which route to take to get to that dog.
So it really is neat to see the degree to which she is developing a mental map of the world and the things that she likes within it.
And she knows her way.
We have to walk about 10 or 15 minutes to get to the park and there's a couple of twists and turns.
But she knows the way to the park now.
So she'll just start making a barrel.
She'll turn here. She'll turn there.
And it really is just fascinating to see the degree to which her mind is internalizing the world around her and creating a sort of mini-map of things that she likes and where she likes to go.
It really is amazing to see.
I just sort of wanted to point that out.
So these are just...
These are just really cool things to notice when you have kids.
Of course, if you have kids now, I'm sure.
I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but they are just...
I mean, she's just so amazingly precious and cool.
And this phase in particular is just astounding.
Alright, so we have...
That's it for my intro.
I'm happy to take questions.
We have, I guess, a fairly large number of people in the chat room.
Hello, and thank you for listening, and welcome to Freedom Aid Radio's Sunday call-in show.
You can type your questions into the chat window.
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Or you can ask James P. to...
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So the number to call after you've talked to James P. in the chat room is 315-876-9705.
Hello? Hello.
Hey, am I on the air? You sure am.
Well, as far as on the air goes, yeah.
Excellent. I have a question about love.
It seems like in my own personal life that I don't really love anybody.
I'm sorry, can I just interrupt you at the beginning?
I'm sorry to interrupt you right when you're starting, but I just want to make sure I really understand it.
Really, it's one of these words that I don't like, which doesn't mean anything other than I don't like it.
So when you say you don't really love anyone, do you mean that you have strong affection for some people, but it doesn't quite get into the realm of love, or you don't feel that sensation of love or even strong affection?
Well, I have empathy for people, certainly.
I do care about people and I do feel bad when bad things happen to people.
However, for example, if I go out to a bar with some friends, all they'll be doing is they'll be looking at a girl's ass and And they'll say, look at that ass!
And their mouths will be watering over it.
And I really don't understand it.
And that's not really love.
That's like passion. But I don't really have that, if that makes sense.
Actually, I think that's technically called objectification, which is where you're reducing a human personality to two gluteal muscles.
I wouldn't even say that that's passion.
So you've given sort of two examples, which I just want to make sure I'm following what you're saying.
And I appreciate you bringing this issue up.
It's a very important issue. Love is a very, very essential part of life and happiness.
But the first thing you said was you feel empathy when other people are suffering and so on.
And I don't want to reduce it to something simplistic or silly, but the fact that you wince when somebody takes a groin shot in America's Funniest Videos is not particularly close to love.
The fact that you don't want to just talk about a woman's ass is not, obviously, that's not love.
That's sort of a base, dehumanized kind of lust.
So I just wanted to make sure that when you say you don't really love anyone, what your definition of love or what you think you would experience love is.
Okay, I should probably change the word love then.
It seems like everyone...
Okay, let's try this.
It seems like everybody else has a libido and I don't.
You mean a sex drive? Yeah.
Okay. So, in a sense, we're talking about lust, right?
Which is a fine word and well worthy of philosophical examination.
Right. I probably shouldn't have used the word lust.
No, no, that's good. This is why I think it's important to make sure that we're talking about the same thing.
Right, right. So, like, I just don't understand.
And they look at me funny like, did you see that girl's rack?
And I'll go, oh, did you see they have whatever food tonight at the dining hall or whatever?
You know what I mean? It's like I'm completely not focused on what they're focused on.
Right, so they're saying, check out this woman's rack, and you're saying, check out this restaurant's spice rack, baby, because that's what really gets me going.
But anyway, sorry, go on. It's hilarious.
But yeah, that's exactly what will happen.
I remember my friends and I, we went to a club and In New York City.
And they were talking about all the good-looking girls there.
And we were going and we went out to a supermarket afterwards to pick up some food.
And I'm like, you know, guys, look, they have strawberry lemonade, strawberry lemonade and, you know, raspberry vodka.
Look at all these really cool flavored drinks.
And they were like, how come you don't feel that way about women?
Yeah. And it was kind of hard to hear that.
I don't know. But it seems like, you know, I'm certainly friends with women.
I'm friends with men. I'm friends with a lot of people.
I just don't have that drive that other people have, if that makes sense.
Right, right, right.
To be blunt, your friends sound a little horrifying.
I'm not sure how old you are, and I assume that they're not in their 30s yet, or even their late 20s.
I'm 19 and in college.
19 and in college. Okay, so...
Yeah, there is a certain amount of machismo and bravado and a certain amount of conformity, I think, in some of the ways that men talk about women.
I think it is fairly vile.
But I can sympathize.
I had a squash partner once when I lived in a...
In a condo building that has squash courts on it, I had a squash partner who was a real man-whore.
There's no real nice way to put it.
He was a good squash partner and I enjoyed playing squash with him, but the way he talked about women and the way he dealt with women was just astounding.
I've mentioned this in a podcast before, so I'll just touch on it briefly, but he was dating a woman and he was throwing a party at a warehouse and he was dating a woman And he's like, I've got to stay till the end of the party, so you just go home and get comfortable in my bed, and I'll be home when I get home, right? And then he picked up another woman and brought this woman home in the hopes that they could have a threesome, and he fantasized about this, and he thought he would be able to talk his way in, and then the women saw each other.
It didn't, you know, because the world isn't a penthouse magazine, so it didn't go, of course, that way.
And one of the women ended up storming out.
He talked the other woman into staying the night and had sex with her, and then And then he got sick.
And then this woman who'd stormed out kept calling him back.
And because he didn't call her back because he was sick, she got increasingly frantic and then begged him to call her back and apologized for...
And this world...
And I went to one or two social gatherings with this guy just out of curiosity more than anything else.
And... The way that these men, and I don't know if you or your friends are good looking, but it seems to cluster a little bit around good looking men that they really do treat women in the most appalling manner.
But the only thing that's more appalling than how they treat women is how the women allow themselves to be treated, which is a whole other story, of course.
But I think that is one of the problems with physical attractiveness.
Would you say that you and your friends are a good looking crew?
Oh, absolutely. Now, when you say absolutely and laugh, I don't know whether you're being serious or not.
Well, alright.
I'm being overly serious, I guess, just for comedic effect, not to sound arrogant or anything.
But they could look at guys, right?
Yes. Right.
And good-looking guys.
And, you know, I speak as an anthropologist more than an inhabitant of the tribe, if that makes any sense.
But good-looking guys have this particular approach towards women.
And unfortunately, they can get away with it because the women will continue to throw themselves...
at these guys quite often and so they have a kind of arrogance that comes from beauty and a kind of...
But see, beauty has used them.
Physical beauty uses you and so in a sense then you want to use others because we get very strong responses from people when we have physical attractiveness that has nothing to do with who we are.
So in a sense other people use us and so we use others and beauty although it's something that we always think about and desire and it certainly is very culturally strong physical beauty Is a great alienator.
In the same way that great wealth can be an alienator.
Like if you have to show up at every party driving a Maserati, because you can't ever not show up looking good, right?
I mean, because if you look good, you look good.
Like a rich man can hide his wealth.
A beautiful man can't hide his physical beauty.
And so if you always had to show up and flaunt your money everywhere you went, that would put a distance between you and those around you.
And some people would be impressed and some people would roll their eyes, but it would always be there as something between you and the other people would be your great wealth and great beauty has that.
Sorry, go ahead. I think there's something missing or something that may have changed since you were on the dating scene.
It seems right now men are going after women and women kind of expect that men do it.
In my time, like, at college, I don't really notice any women going after men.
It's always men going after women.
Oh, that's the same as it was.
Maybe it's my limited perspective.
Go on. I think I just may have a limited perspective, but, like, I know that I have...
I have certain physical features that are better looking than other guys, yet these other guys are getting a lot more women than I am.
And maybe it's because they don't have the same standard of rationality that I do.
I think women might be intimidated by me, especially because, I don't know, I'm a voluntarist and I love having intellectual discourse about private property rights.
Maybe it's because I articulate myself well, I don't know, but it seems like even though that I'm just as good-looking as everybody, all of my other friends, maybe they dumb themselves down?
I don't really know what's going on there.
Sorry, the they is your friends?
Excuse me? Sorry, when you say they dumb themselves down, do you mean the women or your friends?
My friends. I mean, I'm certainly just as good-looking.
We're not all great-looking.
We're not models, but we're all pretty good-looking, yet they seem to get a bunch of women and I don't.
Maybe it's just because I like the whole Oh, do I see it?
My god, I think every man with an ounce of sensitivity between his ears And an ounce of restraint between his legs understands exactly what you're going through and what you're experiencing.
And I went on a vacation with someone once, and I was chatting up this woman.
This was in... The Dominican Republic, I think it was.
This is many, many years ago.
And we were having a great conversation.
She was very interested in politics.
So we were talking politics and we talked some philosophy and all that sort of stuff, right?
And she was a good-looking woman.
And I was thinking like, oh, my God, you know, not to be overly cliched, but, you know, a woman who's attractive and intelligent and, oh, a good conversationalist and so on, right?
And then some guy sort of came and sat down near us.
And he was, you know, six foot three and ripped and, you know, had that bushy blonde.
I guess it was a bushy blonde, beachy kind of hairdo that was in vogue back then.
And, of course, I was hanging on to my few remaining hairs, like, I think, actually with my fists at the time.
So it wasn't quite a competition as far as looks went.
And I could feel her...
You know, it was like the smoke monster ripping through the island of lust, right?
I could see or feel her attention move towards this guy because he was a high-status, physical alpha male.
And I could feel, like, me slowly parachuting, resisting and kicking into the friend zone.
And I could see her hormones coursing like a whitewater raft towards this guy.
And sure enough, right, they ended up hooking up and ended up for that week.
You know, she was there with some friends and we hung out with friends, but she was vanished for the whole week because she was basically, I think, I don't know, I assume just they were banging each other senseless and feeling very pristine and alpha physicality all the time.
And I thought it was a real shame because, of course, this guy was, you know, and again, not to slight the profession, but, you know, just some construction worker who I tried having a conversation with him one time when they showed up for dinner and he was, you know, about as intelligent as a bag of dead squirrels.
Live squirrels, not even.
And so it was, and I remember thinking, like, well, this guy doesn't know what her opinions are on politics or opinions are on philosophy or anything like that, but that is a kind of fever that takes over people sometimes in the presence of physical beauty.
And so I think that when you say your friends get girls, I think it's important to recognize that the girls they get, frankly, aren't worth very much.
Because if they're just, in a sense, so empty and vacuous that they're throwing themselves at the most attractive man who will have them, then they're using their vaginas as a kind of pathetic coinage.
It's a very sad thing.
I don't know if that's what is making...
not making me upset.
This doesn't really make me too upset, but it's just slightly concerning because if you're in a room where everyone says that a line is a circle and you're the only person who disagrees, it causes like...
not anxiety, but it causes discomfort when you're the only person who...
Doesn't really see what they see.
If that makes sense.
You know what I mean? I understand that, but tell me what the value is of these friends.
I'm not saying there's no value, but help me understand, because the portrait that you're painting is of a bunch of vacuous Guido meatheads, right?
So tell me, if you like it, forget about the women you might want to date, what about the friends you're actually friends with?
If they don't get you, or they feel like you liking things other than bits of women, like some sort of cadaver, No, they don't put me down.
They're very respectful. They're very respectful.
I just feel like I can't...
Because you know how there are certain friends that you can talk about certain things with, and other friends that you can't talk about certain things with, but they're still all friends?
Like, there are certain topics of certain friends that you'll talk about, for example...
Tell me, and I have no skepticism here, I just want to understand, but tell me the value of going to a bar with these friends.
What is good about it?
Well, okay.
I guess maybe because I'm not going to, for me, I'm not going to be going anywhere else that night anyway, if that makes sense.
And I enjoy spending my time with them.
Look, that doesn't make sense because it's like, you know, to take a silly example, if they were going to a drive-by shooting, you'd find something on TV, right?
So the fact that you don't have anything else to do is not a very ringing endorsement of, you know, of the quality of the time you spend with them.
Okay, well, all right.
The most time that I spend with them is usually eating at dinner in the college dining hall.
And we all have, you know, common interests.
So that's, I guess, a common interest is a better answer to your question.
And what are the common interests? Running.
We have similar classes together.
We all run every single day, 5 to 10 miles.
There's one friend in particular that I run with every single day.
So we have that bond established.
I'm sorry, what's the bond?
I mean, you run together. I'm not sure what the bond is.
Well, the bond is that we have, you know, 500 miles this year logged with each other.
So what? So you're running next to someone.
Again, are you talking during these runs about important things or things at least that are important to you?
I mean, running next to someone doesn't, right?
I used to ride the bus with people to work every day.
That doesn't mean that we were friends, right?
Proximity is not, right? So I just want to make sure.
No, no, no. We talk.
We talk to each other.
We have classes together.
You know what I mean? And especially when I talk.
Sorry, but what do you talk to each other about that's meaningful?
Well, see, they'll never bring up anything that's meaningful to me, but I always bring up things that are meaningful to me, and they will always listen to me, and they will always give their feedback on what I have to say, but usually I'm the one initiating the conversation where we talk about meaningful topics.
So why don't you go dig up some nerds?
Dig up some who? Nerds.
Some geeks. Well, I have friends on both ends of the spectrum.
These are the more athletic friends.
Okay, but you have, sorry, I'm just going to have to keep interrupting you because I want to make sure we get to the heart of the matter.
So you have, I mean, because in my experience and as a longtime geek slash nerd, I think I can speak with some authority on this, right?
I mean, the people who aren't the pretty empty-headed jocks, which, you know, it sounds like who you're talking about, they tend to have a little bit more depth and richness to them because they've had to develop more of an inner life because they can't get by on the shiny exterior so much.
So, I would imagine that your more nerdy friends wouldn't be out there, you know, saying, oh, I'd hit that ass, you know, or whatever, right?
Right, that's correct.
Okay, so why don't you spend more social time with the geekers?
I find it very difficult to spend time with the nerdy geeky people.
And I don't really...
I don't really understand why.
It's just these nerdy...
Because I guess you could call me a nerd because I run FreeBSD.
I'm a server administrator. I know a bunch of programming languages.
So I have my fair share of nerdiness knowledge.
And I guess I'm wanting to branch out from...
And I want to get a different taste, if that makes sense.
Because I... I like computers.
I like, you know, technology and nerdy things.
At the same time, I don't want to be obsessed with that all the time.
I want to get Other ends of the spectrum.
Because if you were to put me on the nerd bar, I'd be all the way at the polar opposite from athlete.
And what college has shown me was, because before college, when I was extremely nerdy, I was almost racist against athletes.
And now that I'm friends with these athletes, they kind of broke that prejudice and they got me to do athletic things myself.
And that makes me feel like I've had personal growth.
And it's in that way that I feel like that's why I enjoy spending time with these people is because they've really broken that prejudice that I had throughout high school that athletes are all stupid or unfriendly or whatever.
Well, I've got to tell you, you're not doing a lot to break that stereotype in what you're reporting here.
But let me ask you another question, if you don't mind.
Yeah, go ahead. Would you say that your parents had a healthy romantic relationship?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, they talked to each other, and I think that's the key.
Okay, so your parents have a healthy sort of love romantic relationship, right?
Yes. So, dude, I mean, how can there really be any question as to why you have difficulty objectifying women when your father treats your mother as a whole person?
That's a great point. It just gets me worried because people have even asked me before if I'm gay.
People have asked you if you're gay?
If a really cute girl walks by and they go, oh, look at that ass, what do you think?
And I go, eh. Now, his ass, on the other hand, is like two apples in a sock, his ass.
Sorry, just kidding. You know what I mean?
The thing that concerns me is that everyone, it seems, is doing something different than I am, and it's like I'm the odd man out.
No, no, no. Not everyone.
The people that you're choosing to hang out with, these shallow, physical-obsessed, objectifying, hollow, empty-headed jocks, by your description, they're the ones who have something wrong with you feeling uncomfortable.
Looking at someone, like to me, looking at a woman and saying, oh, great ass, is exactly the same as looking at a black guy and using some racial epithet.
It's reducing someone to a single aspect of accidental physicality.
Whether it's the color of the skin or the shape of an ass, it is a dehumanizing thing to do.
Now, if you choose to hang out with people like that, of course they're going to have a problem.
With you not doing that cold and ugly thing of dehumanizing another person.
Now, don't get me wrong. I know a great ass when I see it, and I'm very happy to see it, but I'm aware of that, right?
So I'm not trying to say all I ever see is the inner soul of a human being, and whether they're 90 or whether they're 20, it doesn't...
I mean, we're all human beings, and we look at that, and we have that attraction to the physical, but you have to put it in context and not let it run your life.
I also think that we all know that physical attractiveness tends to be genetic.
And so it could very well be that your friends have physically attractive parents who were attracted to each other because of their physical attractiveness and therefore did not have that sort of whole human-being interaction that your own parents have.
So, you know, the thing to do is to try and get to the root.
If I were you, right, I would try and get to the root of these people's behaviors, right?
And I would say, yeah, you kiss your mother with that mouth, right?
No, I would say something like, well, you know, tell me a little bit about your mom, right?
mom or your dad, tell me about your parents' marriage.
You know, I don't think it'll take you long to find out that there are problems in those families which result in this kind of objectification.
Because you didn't come from this kind of family, more power to you, I think that's fantastic, And if you get a chance, please congratulate your parents for me for giving you such a great example of a whole person marriage and a good romantic relationship.
But because you weren't trained in this kind of dehumanization, because you weren't broken down, because you were exposed to positive role models in romance and love, then you can't objectify and reduce people to mere bits of flesh.
And so if you're going to keep hanging out with people like that, I think it's important to try and get to the root, just out of your own curiosity of why they are the way that they are, to try and pierce the machismo to find out something real underneath, something that's true underneath.
And if your friends have any soul to them, and I hope that they do, then they will probably in the long run be grateful.
for just that kind of attention.
But I wouldn't extrapolate.
I mean, you know, if I hang out with a bunch of, and I'm not equating your friends to this, but it's just a metaphor, right?
If I hang out with a bunch of racists, and they, you know, keep making up making these horrible statements about, about people based on ethnicity or race.
And I say, well, you know, I don't really think that's a just or fair thing to say, or whatever.
Then, of course, at some point, I'm going to face this challenge of like, well, on the one hand, I don't think that what they're doing is On the other hand, I'm still hanging out with them.
And I think at some point, you either have to take a stand for that which your parents taught you around loving the whole person or at least thinking about it more than...
Let me tell you what's tough.
What's tough is being the fifth wheel.
That's one thing for me that is just...
It makes me not want to, you know...
Do anything with those people when it's, you know, him and his girlfriend, him and his girlfriend, and then me, if that makes sense.
Right, sure. You know, that's one thing that's always very tough.
And I see everybody, and it seems like to me, everybody I know has a girlfriend.
Everyone is hooking up with somebody except me, you know?
And I don't want to seem like, I don't want it to make myself seem like I have a problem.
But everyone else seems to be doing something that I'm not.
And it makes me concerned.
Right, right. Well, then I would suggest you either need to adopt the standards of the people you're hanging out with, or find different people to adopt your standards, if that makes any sense.
That would be my suggestion.
So if your friends get women by objectifying women, and that's what you envy, which I can understand, then you need to start objectifying women, or you need to get them to stop objectifying women, or you need to Just live with the situation, but I don't think there's any other approach that will do anything.
All right. Well, I appreciate you having this discourse with me.
Maybe I'll call him next week.
I would always be happy to chat.
Thank you so much for bringing up a very important and interesting topic.
Thank you, Steph. All right.
Alright, we have time.
Oh my god, we have nothing but time.
Time is on our side.
Yes, Mr. G, go ahead. Yo.
So, yeah, I had a quick question.
I had a question about, well, I didn't tell you this, that I've begun for some supplementary income tutoring.
I'm tutoring mainly small children.
I've only been doing one, but I may have two more this week.
And I've run up against some challenges when tutoring, and I wanted to kind of run them by you and see if you had any perspective.
Sure, go for it. So the girl that I've been tutoring is nine years old, and she's Muslim.
She's raised by Muslim parents.
And they are in a not great part of Philadelphia, but also not a horrible part of Philly.
Like, it's not like an absolute hellhole, but it's a poorer neighborhood.
And I've gotten the sense, I've only been tutoring her for about three sessions, and I get the sense that it is not a lack of intelligence in this girl, or in really a lack of, like, it's not that she's being belligerent and just not wanting to study, she's just really stressed.
Like she goes to a charter school, so she wakes up at 6 or 7, gets to school at 8, and stays until 5, and then she has to go to the mosque for a few hours.
And so she doesn't get home until 8, and then she has to do whatever homework.
Like she's just like stressed.
So I've had like an unstructured approach to the lessons, and I just kind of say, hey, what do you want to do today today?
What are you having some trouble with?
And I've found that I've not even really been Having to teach her much, as much as just give her positive feedback and maybe teach her some math tricks on things that I do to make division easier or multiplication easier.
But I just get a sense that I'm not doing much in the lessons.
As far as teaching, I'm feeling...
I guess frustrated around like what I'm bringing to the lessons and I'm also feeling some sort of like how do I structure the tutoring lessons in a way that can help her with the issues that are really causing her problems which are the stuff like I mean having to work longer than most people work In a work day, like in the white-collar world.
Like, she's putting in longer days than most adults do.
So, do you get what I'm kind of going at?
Yeah, I really do.
And it's a huge issue, I think.
I mean, the mask thing is pretty horrendous, but the over-scheduling of children's lives is an epidemic these days.
And it is...
I mean, I think it's pretty bad.
I mean, I think it's very important for children to have a lot of unstructured time.
That way they can figure out what their own interests are.
They can figure out what their own thoughts are.
And so, you know, this over-scheduling of kids results in stress and tension.
And, you know, there was this...
This guy up the road, Isabella likes his daughter.
She does these gymnastics on the lawn.
So Isabella, of course, being fascinated by anything that goes upside down, will go up and knock her over with a hug, of course.
But this guy was saying to me, oh, you know, sorry, we gotta go.
She's got dance, and then she's got something else, and then she's got this and that.
And you'll understand when your daughter gets older, you'll spend your whole time driving her places.
And I'm like, I really won't.
I really, really, really won't.
I mean, there's a lot of things, of course, that I have issues with regards to my own childhood, and I'm not going to go into any of those here.
But what I will say is that the opportunity to experience boredom was really important for me as a child.
I think that it is really, really important.
Boredom is the spark that ignites the inner life.
And I think this is so well established, even if we just look at things anecdotally, right?
That a lot of people who became famous writers, like Robbie Louis Stevenson and so on, experienced significant bouts of childhood illness back at the time where there were no video games or internets or iPods or anything like that.
And so they had to sort of make up their own.
Boredom, I think, is a really, really important thing for children to experience, but it is something that the rather hysterical pace of modern families doesn't seem to allow for too much.
I mean, children are just really herded around at near light speed these days.
There's not a lot of relaxation and unstructured time and so on.
And so I think it is a big problem.
And of course, it comes from the regimenting of childhood that comes through parents not being home for the most part, but rather having to drop their kids into daycares and so on, where everything is regimented and the child has to follow the schedule.
Like if the child isn't nappy when the nap time is there, then too bad, the child has to lie down.
And if the child is nappy sooner or later, too bad, you've got to play.
And I certainly know that Isabella's schedule changes on a daily or weekly basis.
So I think that this overcommitment of children to activities and so on is...
I don't know what the root cause of it is.
I just remember when I was in my early teens and my brother was still in England and my mom was at work and during the summer I was home when I was 12 and I had a job in the evenings but during the day I had no money.
I had nowhere to go and so I spent a lot of time just reading or thinking or I started to learn how to paint and draw and other things just because I was really bored.
I sort of go to the library and read books there.
I'm not saying it's ideal, but I think that the boredom was very important in terms of developing a certain amount of inner life and so on.
So, I don't want to go a lot into that other than to say that I think that it is really important.
Now, what I thought was interesting, and it was just a thought that struck me, so, you know, you don't place any stock in it, of course, but it was a thought that struck me where you said, well, I don't feel like I'm doing much with her, but isn't it sort of important to give her an example of what not doing much looks like?
Right, yeah.
Well, like one of our sessions, I think on maybe the second session, because I've had three with her, we just kind of chatted for 20 minutes.
Right, right, right, right.
You know, I also wouldn't, I'm sorry to speechify, but I also wouldn't underestimate the degree to which children are amazingly thirsty for adult conversation.
We, this weekend, no, sorry, this week I went down to Toys R Us with Izzy and I bought her, she loves sand, right?
So I bought her a fairly big sand pit.
And we were having a discussion of should we put it in the backyard or the front yard?
And we ended up putting it in the front porch.
Because if it's in the backyard, then other kids aren't going to see it and come and play.
But we found that we've been pretty regularly swarmed by kids.
And when we take Izzy out, kids swarm her and swarm us.
And I think one of the reasons is that I actually enjoy having conversations with children.
I feel very much at ease with children.
And I'm sort of curious about their thoughts and what their experience is.
And I think just having a relaxed and natural conversation with an adult may be something that is not particularly common because we get fairly swarmed when we go out.
And so I wouldn't underestimate the value of just having a chat with a child, how important that can be.
And this also used to happen when I was teaching daycare.
Or assistant teaching daycare as a teenager that the kids would actually...
I don't even remember how this came about and I'm sure it would be allowed now.
But they would call me at home and we would chat about things and have conversations about stuff.
And so I think that is...
I think that's actually really, really important.
I think that there is this drive towards structure rather than interaction.
But I think what children are most hungry for is interaction.
Well, you know, I think when you were saying that, I was...
I think it drove home to the deeper problem of what I guess is bothering me, which is that...
I guess I'm worried that if I keep on with the unstructured, what do you want to do?
Do you want to do math? Okay, let's have a chat.
Let's joke around a little bit.
I'm kind of worried that the tutoring might end, if that makes sense, or that her mom might try to step in and structure it more.
You know what I mean? Oh, I totally understand that, for sure.
And it comes down to two very basic philosophical positions that I think are well worth clarifying, and I promise to do it briefly.
But the two basic philosophical positions are, I mean, it comes around the question of how do you, quote, So there's one idea, which is fundamentally religious, which is that children are born selfish and bad and greedy and violent and so on.
And they need to be civilized, like the way that you would need to domesticate some wild animal through training, through positive and negative reinforcements, and it's just a lot of work to civilize the Lord of the Flies wild animal spirit that is a child.
And you need to refine them and you need to turn them into civilized human beings and it's a battle and it's a struggle and they resist it and blah blah blah.
And I think that that is just unbelievably abusive bullshit.
And I'm not talking about these kids' parents because I don't know anything about it, but I'm just saying that I think that that whole perspective that children are born savage and need to be domesticated and civilized through a lot of external cues is completely ridiculous and entirely disrespectful to, and I think in the long run, abusive to children.
And it certainly has not been my experience of a father at all.
Isabella has never hit anyone.
She has never snatched anything from anyone.
She has been a, she is a perfect little lady.
And, and I mean, 17 months, right?
I mean, so she is, and this is another reason why kids, I think, like her so much because she is, you know, good natured and, and will, will joke and, and likes to be hugged and so on.
And of course, we've not given her any positive or negative advice.
I mean, positive reinforcements.
We've not given her any negative reinforcements or any punishment at all.
So a child in her natural state, at least our experience has been...
My experience has been that a child in her natural state or in his natural state...
Is an absolutely gorgeous and perfect human being.
And it is the attempt to civilize children that actually turns them feral and resistant and difficult.
You think you're solving a problem, but you're creating the problem that you're trying to solve.
And so I think that...
The amount of structure that is heaped upon children has a lot to do with the feeling that if left to their own devices, children will be either selfish or violent or lazy.
You know, like, ah, if we don't make her do her homework, then she's just going to want to sit and play video games all day or she's just going to sit there and chat on the computer like she doesn't want to do her homework and we have to make her do her homework.
And so the degree of overscheduling that this kid is receiving may have something to do with this belief that...
If left to her own devices, if not managed and controlled, then...
And of course, the parents are right.
As all religious and nationalistic and culturally bound parents are right.
Which is that, yeah, if you don't bully kids into becoming Christians, they're not going to become Christians or Muslims or Jews.
Of course not. I mean, one of my experiences is to see whether Isabella comes up with the idea that a 2,000-year-old carpenter got nailed up to a cross for her sins to see if she comes up with that on her own.
Because I'm kind of curious.
She shouldn't need to be told about it because, you know, God is everywhere and God should come and tell her, right?
Have your God come and talk to my kid, right?
So in a way, culturally bound parents are entirely right.
The children who are born knowing nothing of all of the nonsense that adults are addicted to and believe all of the false and abusive crap that clutters adult brains, they're right.
If you leave those kids alone, Culture is replaced by philosophy if you leave children alone, which is why children can't be left alone, because there's far too much profit on harming them through culture.
Right, right. Yeah, well, thanks for that feedback.
That was enormously helpful.
And I think my next session with her is on Thursday.
So I'll maybe post something on the board afterwards and keep you posted.
I think, I mean, I'm no tutor, right?
So this is just amateur hours always.
But I do think that...
Children are like camels.
They're like cacti in that they are lumpy and prickly.
No, because they can survive on such little nutrition and sustenance.
I can remember maybe two adults in my life That I had an actual conversation with when I was a child.
An actual conversation.
One was a, I think I was 12, and I went to summer camp for a week.
And the one camp counselor, I remember staying up late with him, and I actually wrote about this in The God of Atheists, because I remember that conversation so vividly, that he said that everybody thinks that Frankenstein is the monster, but Frankenstein is not the monster.
Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monsterer.
And I remember that for reasons that, of course, are pretty clear in the novel.
And there was a teacher who was actually fairly good at talking to us.
I didn't actually have many conversations with him, but he did actually teach us some things that were interesting, and he did treat us not as complete idiots, and he was quite engaged.
He was quite young, and he didn't last very long, of course, right?
But... And I also remember when I was six having a quote debate with someone when I was in Africa in the backseat of my dad's car where I was talking about how cool it would be to have a factory that ran on electricity but also produced electricity.
And he was explaining to me that that was impossible because of blah, blah, blah, right?
And I remember that.
That was a 10-minute conversation where I actually had a conversation with an adult.
And those little scraps you can live on for a long time where you're actually having a conversation with an adult who's treating you with dignity and respect and curiosity and not talking down to you but speaking at an appropriate level and so on.
So I think that you will do a lot of good for her, not in terms of the content so much as the form of simply having a conversation, asking her her preferences and showing some interest in her as an individual.
I think that is... That is really a powerful thing that I remember very vividly experiencing.
Cool. Well, thank you so much.
I really appreciate that. You're welcome.
I hope it helps, and do keep us posted.
I will, absolutely.
All right. Do we have anybody else?
Aw, Q. Hi, Steph.
Hello. I have something related to what Greg brought up.
Arr. I experienced that kind of over-scheduling in my life when I was a teenager during high school.
It was...
I think that it affected me really awfully.
I'm not sure, but it was like this program that was advanced and they'd give you tons of homework, tons of projects that you do at the same time.
I was staying up late all the time.
I was stressed all the time.
Do you got this so far?
Oh, totally. Yeah.
I was enthusiastic about learning when I got in the program.
When I got out of the program, as soon as I finished high school, I just stopped doing anything.
Most things.
I just think it affected me in ways that I still haven't processed.
Well, I mean, it is, you know, one of the things that you can read about if you ever read about literature to do with totalitarianism.
One of the things that it's in 1984, it's in the Gulag Apicalago, it's in just about anything that you can read, Viktor Frankl's Search for Meaning and anything else written about concentration camps, is that when you are in a totalitarian situation, You are always busy.
And in the Soviet Union, of course, this is true from very, very young children, just toddlers and up, that they would be constantly scheduled with something.
And so you would have, I mean, in Nazi Germany, there was, of course, you would be up in the morning for prayers, and then you would go to school, and then there would be Hitler youth, and then there would be homework, right?
So you're just on this constant merry-go-round of planned activities.
And it is fundamentally totalitarian in nature because it does not flow from the desires of the child.
It does not – it tells the child that you are owned.
Your time is not your own.
You are owned for the pleasure and vanity and profit of others.
And the child is – now, children may sometimes be enthusiastic about certain aspects of this, but it is not something that is child-generated.
It is something that is generated by authority figures, and the child is very often put in a position where the parent is either emotionally or financially or both invested in the child pursuing some particular thing.
thing, the parent may get a certain amount of ego gratification and vanity, sort of satisfaction out of that.
But there's this feeling that you can't quit, right?
It's a quitter.
Don't be a quitter.
Or, you know, you've invested so much, right?
And I certainly, you know, if the kid really wants to do stuff, you know, if Isabella's like, I'm dying to do gymnastics, then great, you know, we'll do gymnastics or we'll do dance or whatever it is that she wants to do.
But the really, really important aspect is to continually remind the child that it's They can quit any time.
I'm a big fan of quitting.
I think quitting is entirely underrated in society.
I think that Free Domain Radio comes out of a whole series of quitting that I'm very, very happy about.
And I think that there is a sense of stickiness, right?
So something starts and then you can't stop it.
You feel like you're just kind of swept along in a river, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Um, I got an idea that, uh, from what you were saying, like, I'd like to tell you, uh, a lot of the parents in this program were, like, uh, they were overbearing kind of parents.
They were really, like, on their kids' butts about everything, and, uh, it was, like, it was a lot like that.
Like, they were managing their kids' lives for them.
Um, And I think that it's very harmful for children because it does not teach the children to be self-directed.
It does not teach the children to respond to their own inner cues.
It teaches the children to respond to external cues and external pressure, which hollows them out inside.
It does. It does. And the thing about quitting, there was this humongous pressure.
If you were in this program, you were the smart one in the school.
If you leave, you're not smart anymore.
You're just another person.
You're just dumb. You quit, and you're a loser.
I mean, that's how I experienced it, and I think that was reinforced within the program.
People... Sure.
And that's a hell of a lot of pressure, right?
And then you never sort of sit there and say, do I want to do this?
Or if you ever have a strong desire not to do it, then you end up self-attacking.
Because it's like, oh, I must be a quitter.
Everyone's put so much effort into this.
Don't end up respecting your own feelings.
Yeah, like, I must be unintelligent.
I'm not smart enough to handle this.
If I was smarter, I would be able to take on all this work.
I should be able to do this or something.
Yeah, when I think of the number of things in my life that I've been interested and curious about pursuing, you know, I mean, I could go on the list.
It would take forever, right? And I've quit most of them because, you know, it turned out to be something I really wasn't that interested in.
Like, oh, I'm going to pick up the guitar.
I'd really love to learn how to play guitar.
Yeah. I learned three songs on the guitar, and then I just didn't really find it to be that interesting anymore.
Whereas other things I've picked up, like philosophy, which has become a lifelong passion, and those things are things that stick with me.
But the vast majority of things, you know, it's fun, right?
Try a little bit here and there, and then you find that it's not particularly to your tastes.
The amount of experimentation and casting aside that goes on throughout childhood is enormous.
And if children... Aren't allowed to quit, then I think that they get stuck in things that they may not enjoy, which is obviously bad enough, but what's even worse is they don't get to find out what the hell it is that they really would enjoy.
Right. I really regret going into that program.
I might even have... Well, I hope it's not...
Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
How old were you when you went into the program?
I was 14. Right.
And was it all your choice?
Was it something that you were given the choice to do or the choice to leave?
But you said there was a lot of pressure put on you, right?
Within the program, yeah.
But my parents weren't like those other parents.
My parents were like, they didn't even pay much attention to me.
I wanted to be seen as smart and special and stuff.
Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I personally, I mean, if I were you thinking about my 14 year old self, I would not, I would not say that, you know, I really regret my choice of X, you know, particularly since you were raised in an environment where choice was not exactly encouraged, right? Yeah, yeah.
So you're just trying to battle your way through and survive and sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, but I just keep thinking, what would have happened if I hadn't have gone through that?
Like, maybe I wouldn't have so much trouble with motivation.
Like, I don't even take very good care of myself anymore.
I just, like, I have trouble getting jobs because I just don't want jobs, you know?
Like, I'm finally in a situation where I can choose, and I just, I don't even do very much.
Right, right, and I really do sympathize with that, but I would say that that's not primarily the fault of this program, but this program was a symptom of other things to do with your family, and my guess would be.
Yeah. I would look at it as a symptom and say, well, gee, because if you say, well, gee, if I'd made a different choice when I was 14, maybe my life would be different right now, but I don't, I think you need to, it's not like you had a lot of choice before 14, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So you want to look back at the lack of choice that you had that may have had as its symptom going into this program and feeling unable to quit.
But it is all the stuff that goes on beforehand.
I always hammer this point, and I hammered it before I became a parent, and I'm hammering it even more strongly now that I have become a parent.
The degree of personality development that occurs in the first two years of life Will blow your mind when you experience it.
It will blow your mind how much of the personality gets formed.
So far, my daughter is 17 and a half months.
So much of the personality is formed before you and I can remember a damn thing.
So much of the person.
It's not just my opinion. I mean, this is the opinion of science as well.
Psychology, right? But seeing it, seeing it.
Isabella is a person.
She's not a baby. She is a person.
She has her likes. She has her dislikes.
She has things that she's passionate for, things that she's passionate against.
She has things that she's interested in that are very specific and they will sometimes change, but she is a full-on personality who asks for things, who rejects things, and so on.
And she is very strong-willed, but she is never aggressive.
She's never been aggressive the entire time.
That I've known her. And of course, how could she?
She wouldn't be aggressive anymore than she's going to burst into fluent Mandarin because she never has experienced aggression in the home.
She's never experienced a raised voice.
She's certainly never experienced any physical aggression.
She's never heard a raised voice and she's never heard a harsh tone.
So she just doesn't speak that language.
So I think it's safe.
Well, 14 is where it kicks in.
14 was where the problem occurred.
I'm just telling you. It is so much earlier.
It is so much earlier than that that occurs.
I mean, to me it's kind of tragic that literally 90% of the children that Isabella wants to go up and give a hug to, like, run away.
Or run and hide.
And the parents always say the same thing.
Oh, she's shy. Oh, she's so shy.
Oh, he's shy. It's like...
I don't believe it.
I don't believe it. But anyway, just to focus on you, I wouldn't pick up the mantle of responsibility for where you are now with you at 14.
I wouldn't if I were you.
Okay, you know, that might even be my parents because I remember my parents being like, you should quit this program.
You're going to go insane or you're going to suffer big problems or something like that.
So it probably is the case, yes.
Well, yeah, but, you know, to me, a parent would say, Why are you in this situation, right?
A parent should say, why are you in this situation to begin with?
You know, tell me what you felt and so on, right?
To try and sort of figure out why the child is in this stressful situation.
Because just saying you should quit the program is not...
I know that's not the sum of the conversation, but that doesn't help the child learn anything, right?
Right. So, you know, I just go back to your very earliest memories, go back to your very earliest things that you experienced, and just try and figure out what you learned about choice, what you learned about self-care, what you learned about self-motivation, what you learned about responsibility.
No, responsibility is something almost that's inflicted.
It's used as a punishment for children, and it's not.
Responsibility is a pleasure.
And so, anyway, I would go earlier, and I wouldn't take ownership for a choice that I made when I was 14 and say, well, this is a large part of why I am the way I am now.
I would go earlier and deeper.
Okay. You're very welcome.
I hope that helps.
Do you brush a one- to two-year-old's teeth?
Oh, man. No, that's a challenge, and I've talked to a number of different people about that.
The best we can do is we can get Isabella to hold a toothbrush in her mouth.
She won't let us brush her teeth, but we don't really give her sugar, so it's not too big a problem.
So we do try to brush her teeth, but there's not much you can do until she gets a little bit older.
You can do your best to try and brush her teeth, but you simply can't force a child.
You certainly can't force an infant, and we would never dream of trying.
You just can't do it.
So, you know, we've tried getting different kinds of toothbrushes, right?
Stuff that are little buzzy things and, you know, non-fluoride toothpaste that tastes good and so on.
And we brush her teeth in front of her so she gets the idea.
So we try to get as much as we can.
But, yeah, it's definitely a challenge.
Someone has asked, is it possible to be affected by frequent abuse before one-year-old?
Well... You should do research with anybody who's got any real accreditations, because I'm just some guy on the web, but my understanding is that yes, it absolutely is.
In fact, it is foundational to the personality, what goes on in the first one to two years.
The personality appears to be largely formed within the first three to four years, and the first one to two years is the largest portion by far of that.
Oh yeah, sorry, we've tried with our toothpaste as well.
So yes, to be affected by frequent abuse before one year, yes, I do believe that is the case.
I'm just scrolling back up to see if there's any questions I missed.
Somebody has asked, do you believe there should be a national curriculum in schools that are derived by experts in particular subjects or give children free reign?
Well, that's a great question.
I don't know yet.
There's still something that I'm exploring.
I don't believe there should be a national curriculum in schools.
I don't believe that there is such a thing as a nation.
And I certainly don't believe that public schools are anything other than evil mini brain-deadening prisons for keeping children away from their parents so their parents can go to work and pay taxes.
But... I don't know.
There's two schools of thought in this, right?
So there's homeschooling and then there's unschooling.
And unschooling is where you don't have a curriculum.
You simply follow the child's interests.
And I would suggest looking up School Sucks.
Brett Venat does a podcast, a very good podcast, I think, called School Sucks.
Still waiting for him to look at the family, but that may just be my specialty.
But it's something that's very interesting.
I'm very curious about unschooling.
I must admit that it is close to the edge of my comfort zone because it is just so far from anything that I ever anticipated in terms of schooling.
But... I don't know.
I don't know. I'm still 50-50 about whether schooling is going to work out for Isabella or not.
Right now, I don't believe it will, and we may homeschool or unschool, but we will see as it goes forward.
I'm more keen to put her in school if she enjoys it than I am to homeschool, but I certainly will homeschool if she doesn't like school.
What about teaching children good manners, the proper way to eat, talk, and address others?
Well, I think that the only way you teach good manners is you have good manners.
I think that's the only way that you can teach is to show.
You certainly can't teach a child conceptually much at the age that she's at, but I find that Isabella has very good manners, and I think that's because she sees good manners.
Okay. We always want to, and I'm a subject to this, I think, as most other people are, but with probably less good reason.
We always want to To sort of inflict our conclusions or our desired behavior on others or on children in particular.
But it's very important to understand that children will repeat what they see long before they ever understand how to name it.
And so you can't teach a child, at least in the first couple of years of life, through much other than example.
So that, I think, is...
In printing machines, they're not conceptual receptacles, so to speak.
So I think that's really important.
Somebody's asked, if you have abused your kids, what can you do about it?
I've done a podcast on my thoughts about that 1642, so I hope that you will...
Well, first of all, I want to say, look, I mean, if you did harm your children as a parent and you recognize that now, first of all, I mean, amazing kudos and congratulations.
That is a very, very difficult thing to do.
And so, good for you for recognizing and accepting that and wanting to work on that.
So... Somebody's asked, Steph, at what age will you allow Izzy to listen to your podcasts?
That is a great question.
I'm not sure that I would accept the premise of allowing her.
I mean, at some point, she's going to ask me, what do I do?
And I... I don't know what to tell her.
I don't know. First of all, I think it's going to be a while until she asks that question because I don't really podcast in front of her anymore.
I guess she hears me yowling away up here Sunday afternoons, but I try to do podcasting outside or when I'm at the gym or away from home.
I don't think she thinks that I do anything now other than parents.
I don't know. Maybe I'll tell her I'm unemployed, Which is actually kind of true in a way.
But I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know that I will...
And I don't know that I will ever forbid her from listening to my podcast.
I think, of course, I'm going to face the challenge because, you know, I guess Jon Stewart faces this challenge too, that he can be a bit cussy and I can occasionally be a bit cussy.
So I'll have to have that conversation with her.
And that is going to be a challenge, right?
But, you know, that's just...
Part of the excitement of parenting.
So I don't think I will ever forbid her from listening to my podcast, but I can't imagine she's going to have any interest in her for many years from now.
So I guess we'll just cross that bridge when we come to it, but I don't know.
When will I start to write children's books?
Oh, I don't know.
Looking at my life as a whole.
You know, so let's just say four years, right?
Four years as a full-time parent and part-time philosopher.
And again, thank you everybody so much for your kindness with regards to supporting what it is that I'm doing.
Four years out of 80 years is 5% of my life.
I spend 5% of my life being a full-time parent.
That's assuming that Izzy takes to schooling.
5% of my life being a full-time parent.
I mean, I spent four years doing an undergraduate degree.
Do I regret that?
No, of course not. Is being an at-home involved parent more important than getting an undergraduate degree?
Well, yeah, absolutely.
And so, for me, when I look at these next couple of years, first of all, people say the time goes by so quickly.
That's not true. For me, that's not true.
And from what I've figured, the only people who say that they grow up so fast and time goes by so quickly are people who aren't parents much of the day, right?
So if you only see your parents while trying to get them out of the rocket-propelled daycare sled in the morning and then getting them fed and changed and bathed and homeworked and this and that in the evening, then other than weekends, you don't get to really interact with your kids much at all during the day other than management and planning.
And I would imagine that if you don't see your kids, or at least don't have any relaxed time with them for 8, 10 or more hours a day, then yeah, of course it's going to seem like it goes by really quickly.
In the same way that if you only get to see one out of every 10 frames of a movie, then it looks like it's going by really quickly.
Whereas I find that parenting, when you're actually in there, in the trenches and doing it on a daily basis, it does not go by so quickly.
It actually is the perfect balance.
I'm thrilled when she learns something new, and I'm also thrilled that she's also tiny and absolutely adorable, as I'm sure she will be adorable forever, though not tiny.
So, and I'm also, when she's finished with the phase, I'm ready for the next phase, right?
So, I'm happy now that I don't have to walk around like some bow-legged Frankenstein so that she doesn't fall over all the time because she's, you know, very stable and when she falls, she's perfectly fine and she hasn't hurt herself falling in months and months.
So... I was thrilled that she learned how to walk and then it's like, oh no, here comes the bow-legged Frankenstein mode.
And then when she started to become more steady on her feet, I'm like, well, this is great and I'm really glad that that part is done.
So I don't find that time flies in terms of being a parent at all.
But I can totally imagine how it would if your kid is in daycare and other people are raising your kid and you get that one frame out of every 10.
That's going to seem like a massive fast forward, but I don't find that to be the case.
And so for me, you know, 5% of my life to create a great foundation for my daughter, it doesn't really seem like, I mean, why would you rather do anything like that?
All right. Sorry, I just...
So yeah, I'm not going to get many books written for the next couple of years, but so what, right?
I mean, so I wrote, what, five or six books in two years?
So I think that's perfectly fine.
I wouldn't want to be 12 podcasts into FDR and becoming a full-time parent, but I think at 1700, it's not too bad.
So somebody has written, a while back somebody posted this on the forum under the topic, what is the proof of the validity of the non-aggression principle?
And I was wondering if you could talk about its significance.
There is no proof of the validity of NAP. And UPB doesn't prove that it is.
UPB only provides a basis that the NAP is logically consistent.
It does not provide evidence that the NAP is objectively true.
In order for something to be true, it must be both logically consistent and evidence to back it up.
Logical consistency is not enough for something to be true.
Well, I completely agree with that.
I mean, you could create a bunch of nonsense symbols that all internally reference each other and were valid, but didn't have any particular reference to objective reality.
So, I agree with that.
So, this is good.
A nice meaty philosophy topic.
Let's take out our brain carving knives and go to town.
So, the non-aggression principle is UPB compliant and it is the only approach to coercion that is UPB compliant, which means that if anybody is going to talk anything about the preference or non-preference of coercion, then they have to go with the non-aggression principle or their theory is logically inconsistent and impossible to put into practice and so on.
Now, the question then becomes, what about the empirical validity behind the non-aggression principle?
And that's a tough thing.
That's a tough thing. You can take this kind of empiricism in two ways.
And the first is the empiricism of the moment, right?
So, if somebody stabs a guy and then says, it is morally unprovoked, just goes and stabs some guy.
Not self-defense. And then says, it is morally and logically justified for me to initiate force, then their statement is incorrect.
And if the statement is incorrect, then the actions that flow from that statement cannot be valid.
It cannot be valid.
I think that's just really important.
So if the statement, if the justification is incorrect, Then the statement that flows out of that justification is invalid.
The actions that flow out of that justification is invalid.
So, for instance, if somebody says, I stabbed the guy because the initiation of force is morally good, then we assume that if that person had understood that the initiation of force is not morally good, then they wouldn't have stabbed the guy.
So, in a sense, there is the empirical evidence Of their belief in their action, and we assume that actions flow out of beliefs.
Why? Because people always justify their actions with reference to beliefs, with reference to ideas, with reference to philosophy or religiosity or nationalism or whatever, right?
I mean, the guys who...
Terrorists, they have their ideological justifications.
And so the empirical evidence is that somebody who believes that the initiation of force is justified will end up stabbing someone using that as their justification.
So the evidence that the belief is invalid is the fact that somebody died because there was an incorrect application of an incorrect belief.
Or I guess you could say a correct application of an incorrect belief.
So that's number one. Number two is, and this goes all the way back to the Intro to Philosophy series, There is considerable, and I would say overwhelming, and in fact conclusive evidence that societies that found themselves on the initiation of force are not successful in the long run.
Societies which found themselves on the initiation of force are not successful in the long run.
In other words, they collapse.
And their collapse is either military or economic or both.
And so as, for instance, the violence escalated in the ancient world, either between Athens and Sparta or Rome and every other bipedal life form on the planet, those societies did worse and worse and ended up collapsing, which was very much against the desires and wishes of its inhabitants. those societies did worse and worse and ended up collapsing, If you look at the European slow, quicksand sucking hole of their finances eating themselves, you can see that the welfare state,
the socialist welfare state that is the norm in Europe is causing the death of their economies in the socialist welfare state that is the norm in Europe is And it is an irreversible terminal illness at the moment.
It's utterly irreversible.
Because the only way that...
The hidden violence of the system can be combated through explicit violence which is never going to be palatable.
So you would cut the pensions of the people on welfare or people who've retired and then they would be out and you'd have to keep the streets clean using force.
So the inherent or implicit violence within the system which taxation is designed to hide would become explicit And people being the shockingly corrupt hypocrites that they often are, if not generally are, would be shocked and appalled that a system that was founded on coercion would actually be violent.
And they would then say, well, this isn't what we wanted.
You see, we wanted the government to steal money and give it to us without anyone, quote, getting hurt.
And if people actually did get hurt, they would be shocked, shocked that there was violence in the system, because that's just the way people are, sadly and unfortunately.
So there is empirical evidence that the NAP is valid.
So, for instance, if we look at the NAP as blueprints for a bridge, and we say, look, every time this bridge gets built along the NAP principles, it stays up.
So the mathematics of the NAP principles are valid.
And then if somebody uses an anti-NAP blueprint for building a bridge, and every time they do that, that bridge falls down, then we have all the proof you were ever going to get in the realm of philosophy.
Logical consistency, empirical evidence, and a reason behind why the empirical evidence has to flow from the logical incompatibilities of the theory.
That is the only proof you're ever going to get in the realm of philosophy.
There's nothing more conclusive.
Expecting anything more conclusive is to start to enter into the realm of philosophy.
Psychotic religiosity, which I'm not saying you're doing.
I'm just saying that that would be to demand, right?
To say, well, we can't find God until we look through every single atom simultaneously in the universe is to create a standard of proof that is completely impossible, of course.
The only proof you're ever going to get in philosophy is logical consistency and empirical evidence.
The empirical evidence is not going to be conclusive because...
There are always people who benefit from a violent society.
And you say, well, they benefit. That's why the violent society exists.
People in the public sector get paid 50-100% more than people in the private sector.
So it's great for them until the whole thing comes crashing down.
So I would say that...
That's all you're ever going to get in the realm of philosophy.
If you want more than that, then you need to go to the Vatican and have half your frontal lobe removed.
I'm not saying this to you personally.
I'm just saying that if people want more than that, then that would be my approach to that question.
Oh, I don't swear in front of Izzy.
Somebody's asked, what are your thoughts around swear words with Izzy?
I don't swear in front of Izzy.
She's never heard a swear word. I mean, I very rarely swear.
I will swear occasionally in a podcast if I'm very passionate about some wild injustice, because the evils of the world sometimes can only be matched by good old base monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon words.
And so, but I don't swear around Izzy because Izzy can't differentiate between swear words and non-swear words.
And it's absolutely not cute for a child to stub her toe and say, shit.
She needs to understand the context of that and the appropriateness of that.
In the same way that we don't teach her to take a shit in the front yard, right?
I mean, that's just not... I mean, she might want to, but it's just not an appropriate thing for her to do.
So, yeah, I don't swear in front of her.
Somebody's asked, do you think that the Northern part of Somalia will ever be modernized with their tribal...
Leo Dudero-esque model.
I don't think that Somalia will become any kind of anarchist society or voluntaryist society because of the brutality of the child, the way that children are treated so brutally.
The children are treated so brutally in Somalia because it's part of Africa rather than anything to do with Somalia, and African children are treated enormously.
brutally you may be interested in seeing a documentary called babies which follows the infancy and toddlerhood of some babies around the world if you end up seeing it post on the message for maybe we can have a review of it because i i found it to be quite a disturbing but a revealing film about people's perceptions of parenthood but um yeah somalia i mean they're raised it's primitive it's tribal
it's incredibly superstitious and religious which means it's abusive which means that uh there's a lot of violence or emotional or physical or verbal abuse within the society in order to get children to conform to all of these crazy tribal systems So no, Somalia won't.
Somalia is not an example of philosophical anarchy.
I mean, if there was some freak earthquake that knocked down all of the churches in the world, that would not be an atheist society.
And there was a freak earthquake, so to speak, that knocked down the government of that society.
But it was not because people had discovered philosophy and voluntarism and rejected violence.
The government just collapsed.
And that's not the same as...
It was not a controlled demolition.
Shit just fell over.
And that's not philosophical, but it is still revealing the degree to which it is successful relative to its neighbors.
Somebody has asked, do I believe that abortion is selfish?
I'm not sure exactly what selfish would mean in that context.
I think that abortion is a tragedy.
I think that abortion should be absolutely minimized, and it would be much easier to minimize abortion without the welfare state.
It would be much easier to minimize abortion without religiosity, and it's the completely twisted, though...
Inevitably twisted relationship that religiosity has with human sexuality.
Human sexuality is a natural and beautiful and healthy and wonderful part of life that is something that religion takes great offense to, for obvious reasons, right?
Because religion claims that there's all this divinity in the world, but babies come out with water and blood in a very earthy, a very non-God kind of way.
And so childbirth and sexuality is...
It's an affront to religion because it reminds everybody that we are just mammals with pretensions, and that is highly offensive to the rarefied and beautified Platonic ideals of religiosity.
Yeah, I think it is a tragedy.
I think it should be minimized.
I don't believe that it is murder.
I don't. I think Walter Block's argument that what would be best would be to find some way to keep the fetus alive outside the mother sooner.
And I think this is true of crime in general.
As philosophers, we focus on prevention, not cure.
I mean, when it comes to violence, philosophy only works in terms of prevention.
It does not work in terms of cure.
Because I can't...
UPB is not thick enough to hold a bullet.
I can't hold that book up.
Maybe if I fold it over and it's a weak bullet.
I don't know. But syllogisms do not stop bullets.
So philosophy is useless at curing violence.
It's completely pointless and useless.
In the same way that...
There's no point changing your diet nine minutes before you have a heart attack.
I mean, you're done, right?
20 years ago was the time to prevent it, or 10 maybe, but now it doesn't really matter.
Like quitting smoking three minutes before you die of lung cancer does not do you any good.
So philosophy is perfectly useless when it comes to curing the world of violence.
Philosophy can only work in preventing violence.
Violence within the world through rationality, through the good and positive and benevolent and peaceful treatment of children and all those kinds of good things.
So I don't think that philosophy has anything useful or intelligent to say about abortion as a result.
I think that philosophy recognizes that abortion is a tragedy and of course it is a complete tragedy for the fetus, but it is also a complete tragedy for the mother who, if she has any sensitivity, is going to You know, of course, remember it with sadness for the rest of her life.
And philosophy can't cure that.
But philosophy can work to elucidate the principles that will result in far fewer abortions in the world.
And I think that would be a great thing.
Changing your diet nine minutes before your heart attack.
Add more bacon. Right.
Absolutely. I mean, if you're going to go out, go out with a smile.
Yeah, look, I mean, nobody wants to have an abortion, obviously.
I mean, people don't wake up and say, you know, this painful and traumatizing procedure is my best way to spend my day.
I really don't think that's...
I really don't think anybody...
And no sane human being wants an abortion.
And I think that the best thing we can have is a society where the incentives are going to be such that abortions will be minimal, if not mostly absent.
And to some degree, of course, it's a scientific issue, right?
If you can have birth control that can be implanted and more permanent rather than a pill which can be forgotten or condense which can break, then that will help.
That will help, of course.
Somebody has said...
I'm sorry, let me just pause for a second here because I don't want to keep reading questions if anybody has anything they want to say verbally.
Yeah, hey. I was wondering if it would be alright to read off the three years post.
Oh yeah, that would be great, great, great, great idea.
This is something I just posted.
I've been at Freedomain Radio for three years, this past Friday, and sort of took a stock and spent some time writing this up.
Three years ago, I was barely surviving.
I had no relationships in my life, only unavoidable associations.
I had no love, no joy, no dreams that I could entertain without falling into savage self-attack.
I had managed to cling to life only by virtue of yet another upheaval, yet another distraction, yet another drive into the wall at a hundred miles an hour with your eyes shut.
The anchors and spears of history threatened even the slightest movement.
Rattled and clanked at the faintest spark.
Inertia was my destiny.
And then I was introduced to Free Domain Radio.
Steph's metaphor comparing the trajectory of life to that of a supertanker is right on the money.
It's tempting to say that nothing changed three years ago when I started listening to the podcasts.
And yet in the depths, but not far beneath the surface, a light shone through the cracks, a course to take, was revealed and my life began to turn, almost imperceptibly, toward happiness.
I believe that I wouldn't be here without Steph or those that supported him.
I wouldn't have lost sixty pounds and kept them off continuing to lose weight.
I wouldn't have gotten the toxic relationships out of my life.
I wouldn't have gotten a good job.
I wouldn't have ever come close to acting.
I wouldn't have had the quality of friends that I do now.
I may never have found the help I have been receiving in therapy.
I wouldn't have been able to change without being able to see truth and falsehood, without the happiness and passion and compassion that Steph brings to bear through his podcasts.
I still have work to do, but my life is forever changed.
My life is now alive.
That's a beautiful, beautiful thing to say, and I really was very, very moved when I read it, and I'm moved now.
Just what a beautiful thing that is to hear, and thank you so much for that.
It is tough for people...
When they see people get into philosophy or therapy or whatever, and they say, well, this person is now unhappier than they were before.
And people understand it.
It's skeptical. They feel skeptical about it.
And they don't understand that it is.
Change is brutal. Change is hard.
Change is work.
Change is...
It's sort of like one of those Tarzan movies where he's swinging from vine to vine, Jane just letting go of the vine, flying through the air and saying, I really hope there's another vine there because it really doesn't feel that way sometimes.
So, you know, your courage to me has just been amazing throughout the time that I've known you.
And you've just gritted your teeth and done the most amazing kind of work.
And I know, I know, I think I know how hard that has been.
So, When you emerge from the other side of that subterranean jungle of those mines of Moria, it is something that's hard for people to see.
Because like anybody who's quitting particular kinds of destructive habits or addictions...
If you're with a bunch of alcoholics and you quit drinking, people are going to say, well, he's miserable now.
He's lost most of his friends.
He sits home. He used to be the life of the party.
Now he doesn't say boo to a mouse.
So clearly it's bad to quit drinking because he's miserable.
But they don't understand that you don't look at that snapshot 10 minutes into it or 10 months into it, but rather years into it.
What is the person's life who quits drinking relative to those who keep drinking?
3 years from now, 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.
Like quitting smoking. Oh, he's nervous, he's tense, he's snappy, he's irritable, he's much less happy now that he's quit smoking.
It's like, well, yeah, of course. Of course he is.
But what's going to happen in 20 years to general health of the people who stay smokers and the people who quit smoking?
So in the short run, yeah, it looks like you're taking a turn in the wrong direction.
That's what people don't understand about self-knowledge and philosophy is...
So I just think that it's beautiful to see those starbursts, those flares that go up over the horizon for most people, so that they can see the party that's possible once you cross the mountains or once you go through the desert or once you go through the caverns, however you want to use your triple-decker metaphor.
So I think it was a beautiful thing that you posted.
I think that it is a great thing to give people a sense of where things can go.
And I talk about it, but I mean, my mage passage was before FDR, so it's less credible.
But I think watching people emerge from the other side, you know, shaken, dazed, bleeding, triumphant, and overjoyed is a great thing to see.
So I really wanted to thank you so much for posting that.
Yes, and I mean...
There's... It's...
Not to go overboard on the praise at all, but...
I mean, there's nothing I can do to repay you.
And in a sense, it's not about repaying you, but...
I mean, I'm tremendously grateful for...
Oh, and I appreciate that.
And I don't want to turn aside that gratitude.
I mean, I appreciate that.
I will accept that gratitude with great joy and great humility.
Yeah, you're right. There's no repaying me.
This is about the world.
This is about the future. This is not about you or me fundamentally.
The only repayment that means anything to me is that you have a happy and joyful and enriching and powerful life where you spread the light, spread the joy.
That is the payment.
That is how the world is going to grow and how the world is going to emerge, shaking, broken, bleeding, and triumphant into a more peaceful society.
I think that's fantastic.
Well, thanks for letting me throw it out there.
Thanks. You're very welcome.
You're very welcome. And thank you for posting it.
All right. And James, was there anyone else who wanted to talk before I go to the last couple of questions or two?
I don't know.
All right.
Then just give James, if you're a ping, I'll answer a couple more questions as best I can.
Somebody said, would you advise not to move to the US due to its emerging police state?
I can't really, I mean, I can't speak with any authority in this as in most areas, but I'm glad that I didn't move to the United States.
I was considering it at one point.
I guess we were considering it, but I'm glad that I didn't.
I think the United States is definitely going to go through some challenges.
I mean, this is not to say that there's any place that's not, right?
But for me, it would have been a whole lot of hassle to go.
I think for people in the States, you know, you can ride it through and there'll be things to ride through up here in Canada as there will be in other areas of the world.
But for me, it would have been...
I mean, if I was in the States, it wouldn't be like, oh my God, I've got to leave.
But to move there... And then to see what's going on with the military-industrial complex and to see what's going on with the deficits and all of that.
So I think that would be a challenge.
Move to Canada? Well, I think Canada's got some good stuff.
You know, the one thing that I do like about Canada is that we don't have this constant conveyor belt of army sociopaths coming back from overseas.
I mean, we've got a few, but the American population of ex-military members is...
It's a real challenge.
I mean, you keep going out and training people to be lunatics and dangerous lunatics and then they come back into society and kind of need to be reintegrated.
Of course, a lot of them will go into law enforcement, which means you better not speed and you better turn and you better stop fully at stoplights and you better hit your turn signal when you're turning and so on.
So that would be my recommendation.
Stay as far away from the cops because a lot of them have been out there doing terrible things to foreigners and have a lot of guilt And the stink of death and blood on their hands.
And they're not going to be happy when they come across a voluntarist or somebody who, you know, so just stay away from the cops.
And if you get entangled, you know, smile and yes or no, sir, three bags full for the sir, because I think that they're going to be progressively more dangerous.
All right, we'll just wait for one.
While we're waiting for one, I listened to an econ talk today.
That I thought was good.
And let me get that.
So, this is...
If you go to econtalk.org, I think it is.
Russ Roberts did a recent podcast in early May on the financial crisis.
That I think it is a very good...
It is a very good podcast.
I will give a link to the full paper.
It is mercatus.org, M-E-R-C-A-T-U-S, sorry, M-E-R-C-A-T-U-S.org forward slash publication slash gambling dash other dash people's dash money and I'll put this into the chat window.
I think it's a very good podcast and it's a very good paper.
And I will just give you the argument very summed up.
So his basic question is, was it the free market that failed in 2008 at the beginning of this recession?
And he says that, as Milton Friedman said, capitalism is a system of profit and loss.
Profit provides the incentive and loss, the potential of loss, or potential for loss, provides the caution, provides the restraint.
And when you have a system that really crashes...
The restraint obviously hasn't been followed.
The caution hasn't been followed.
And so the massive over-leveraging of these banks was not following the profit and loss model of capitalism because loss was not perceived to be valuable.
And so he says, if it isn't too big to fail, that's the problem.
It's the rescue of creditors going back to 1984, which has encouraged and prudent lending allows large financial institutions to become highly leveraged to the point where it was 30 to 1 or more in terms of the amount of money they had in the game versus the amount they were leveraged.
Shareholder losses do not reduce the problem even when shareholders or the executives making the decisions, which I think is an excellent point, which we can go into more detail another time perhaps.
These incentives allowed executives to justify and fund enormous bonuses until they blew up their firms.
Whether they planned on that or not doesn't matter.
The incentives remain as long as creditors get bailed out.
And I would, with ridiculous audaciousness, correct Russ Roberts a little bit here and say that if you can give yourself a $5 million bonus in any particular year or even a $1 million bonus, you don't really care about the long-term health of your firm.
Because if your firm goes bankrupt, nobody's coming after you for the salary that you paid yourself.
So you don't really care. There is a tipping point.
I say this as an entrepreneur with some authority, but there is a tipping point.
When you make enough money in a particular year, it gets rid of your long-term goals.
It evaporates your long-term goals.
Nobody's going to sit there and say, well, I'm not going to pay myself $5 million bonus this year because that may have a negative impact on my company in five years.
Because with $5 million invested at 10%, you can live really comfortably for the rest of time, right?
At least until the economic system collapses.
So there is a certain amount at which executive pay and bonuses means that people have no stake in the continued long-term health of their company.
People say, well, these executives made decisions that caused these companies to fail.
Well, who cares if the company fails?
If you get $5 million out of the rubble, you don't care if the company fails.
And in any sane economic system, in any voluntary free market, truly free market economic system, this would be a well-recognized issue that if you overpay your executives, they're no longer going to be interested in the long-term health of their company because there's no such thing as a company.
There are only individual actors making individual decisions.
And if an individual decision harms an abstract entity called a company in a few years but gives you $5 million in your pocket right now, well, that's the decision you're going to make.
So... He says, changes in regulations encourage risk-taking by artificially encouraging the attractiveness of AAA-rated securities.
And this is a more technical thing, that you could get higher leverages based on government regulations if stuff was AAA-rated.
And so what happened was people just began to bribe the ratings agencies and so on.
But it started always in government regulations.
Changes in U.S. housing policy helped inflate the housing bubble, particularly the expansion of Fannie and Freddie into low down payment loans.
What happened was when people could get a $100,000 loan with $3,000 down and very sketchy employment histories, the so-called liar's loans, what happened was this drove up the value of low-income housing.
So people would say, well, the housing price is going up 10% every year.
So it doesn't really matter if people default because we're going to sell whatever they default on for a lot more than it was worth originally.
And also, people are able to get greater lines of credit on these housing prices if these housing prices are going up because the value of the assets continues to go up.
So it hides the risks and the losses.
So that's another issue.
The increased demand, he writes, for housing resulting from Fannie and Freddie's expansion pushed up the price of housing and helped make subprime attractive to banks.
But the ultimate driver of destruction was leverage.
Either lenders were irrationally exuberant or were lulled into that exuberance by the persistent rescues of the previous three decades.
And he goes all the way back to the rescue of the Mexican peso a couple of decades ago.
But it happened, I think, long-term capital management also had a bailout in the 90s.
So... But remember, there's no such thing as an economic actor called a corporation.
The corporation is a piece of paper sitting in a vault somewhere.
It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't do anything.
It doesn't act. It doesn't make choices.
Only individuals make choices in an economic sphere and only for their own particular interest.
Now, their interest, if it's rationally tied to the long-term interest of the firm, well, great.
But if it's not, and certainly in Wall Street it's crony capitalism, it has nothing to do with the free market.
In fact, it's quite the opposite. The furthest thing from the free market is not communism, but Wall Street.
Because nobody mistakes communism for the free market, but Wall Street is consistently mistaken for the free market, which means it is the true opposite of capitalism.
So, anyway, I'll be getting a little bit more into that in the next week or two.
Alright, I think that we have...
Any interviews coming up?
I have a few in the pan.
I've had to postpone them.
One of the problems I was having with the interviews was the preparation for an interview is enormous.
And, you know, I don't know how Jon Stewart does it, reads a book a day.
I guess he gets his time during the summer to read.
But... If I'm going to interview someone, I need to read at least one or two books and a couple of papers.
It is a massive amount of preparation, and I have just not found myself able to keep up with the preparation.
So I will do some more interviews, and I have a few in the – some pretty exciting ones, actually, on deck.
But they're not – until I get a little bit more time, I'm not – Oh, yeah.
Okay, so meetups. Okay, we'll date ourselves.
Malaga starting June 20th.
I have speaking engagements at the Porcupine Freedom Festival.
What is it? Is that June 26th?
June 24th? Let me check.
Let me pretend to be a professional and actually check.
Yes, Thursday, June 24th at 6pm at the Porcupine Freedom Festival.
I am the opening speaker and I will be down there with wife and child and I hope to meet as many listeners there as possible.
I'm mulling over a couple of options for speeches which I will drop by interested parties to see what they think would be good.
And I am also speaking at Libertopia at Libertopia.org, which will be in October in Hollywood, California.
FDR is going to be on Labor Day, the listener appreciation barbecue, where we shovel as much free food and drinks at you as we can.
So that's going to be Labor Day weekend.
I hope that you'll be able to drop by.
There's more information.
Oh, James, what's the Amiando link?
Amiando, A-M-I-A-N, Emiando.com.
Wait for it. When am I going to be on the Jon Stewart show?
I don't think anytime soon.
I really don't. I think it would be fun.
But, yeah, it's Emiando.com forward slash FDR2010.html.
So I hope that you'll be able to drop by.
That's a huge amount of fun, and I look forward to it every year, as I look forward to chatting with you all wonderful people every Sunday.
No, listen, I mean, I don't fit with mainstream media.
And I'm not... I mean, I think Jon Stewart's show can be enjoyable.
Philosophically, he's a ridiculous confetti of nonsense.
But I think that...
You know, when you're a kid, if you're going to be controlled, right?
When you're a kid, the control is usually physical and it's aggressive.
But when you get older and you get bigger, then if there's going to be abuse, the abuse turns to verbal.
And to me, school is the physical abuse and restraint and confinement and still in many places in the world, physical corporal punishment, beatings.
A school is the physical punishment, and then the media, when we get to be adults, is the verbal abuse.
So I really don't fit, because of my strong opposition to verbal abuse, which I actually consider most modern philosophy to be, I really, really don't fit with the media at all.
In fact, I'm quite the antithesis of the mainstream media, which is perfectly fine with me, and I think that is actually a good place to be.
So I would not...
I can't wait for FDR to be embraced by the mainstream media at any time, certainly within my lifetime, but that's okay.
Future generations will have a different appreciation of what occurs here in a way that we have a different appreciation of what happened to other philosophers who had their trials and tribulations, I guess you could say.
All right. Well, thank you, everybody, so much.
I guess we will call it a day for today.
And I hope you have an absolutely wonderful week.
I hope you get a chance to enjoy the summer.
And I'd also, just as a reminder, I try to remember this myself as well.
Involve yourself in the delicious and physical aspects of life as well.
And by that, I mean, of course, hookers and blow.
But, you know, go for a swim and enjoy the wonderful feeling of water on your skin.
Sunkist is an overused phrase, but it's a beautiful thing when the weather is warm.
Run some sand through your fingers, dig up some weeds, do something earthy and physical, and remember that it's important to live in the body as well as enjoy the life of the mind.
And don't let the body starve for sensation in front of a computer.
Don't let the body starve for sensation in front of a television.
Go out and Enjoy the richness and beauty of the world.
Rub a leaf against your cheek and scratch yourself with a piece of wood, gently, just to remind yourself of the beauty of flesh on nature contact.
Go get some with Mother Nature, and I hope that you have a wonderful week.
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