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Aug. 1, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:52:13

1716 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show 1 Aug 2010 - How to Find a Great Therapist

Why therapy is so important, the value of self-knowledge, some thoughts on what worked for me, and some listener experiences in the hunt for the great therapist!

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	Well, thank you everybody so much for joining us just after 4pm.
	Pinchy punchy first of the month, August the 1st, 2010.
	Just start with a minor exhortation.
	I did put out a call for some donations at the end of last month and there were a few dribs and drabs which are always appreciated but just a reminder that it is not the cheapest thing in the world to run a two and a half terabytes worth of downloads from the server every month.
	The price of the server Food and books and magazines and technical equipment I had to get.
	A high-quality USB camera for my television appearances.
	I will be back again on television this month.
	And so it's been a fantastic month.
	But the costs, of course, continue to be there, the maintenance and upgrades and all of that.
	And food and shelter is always appreciated.
	so if you have some cash I would hugely appreciate it if you could send some to Freedom Aid Radio at the website freedomairadio.com forward slash donate.aspx so just go to the homepage and click on donate it's on the left hand side if you can subscribe so much the better but summer is a little rough and a lot of people on vacation and a number of listeners have been so encouraged by philosophy that they've gone entrepreneurial and of course entrepreneurial is a challenge
	so if you can do anything to support the show I really really would appreciate it so this is how to choose a great therapist how to get involved in a great therapeutic relationship I'm going to sort of share A few thoughts.
	The short answer, of course, is it's up to you, but I think that there's still some guidance that might be worthwhile, and I certainly invite listeners who've had good, bad, or indifferent therapeutic experiences to share their ideas.
	But to start with, I think it's very important to look at some basic practicalities.
	So how do you find a great therapist?
	I think a little random dialing can be a challenge.
	You can maybe lock onto someone who's good, but a great place to start is with your family doctor.
	Your family doctor should have referral sources that have worked out well in the past because family doctors do send a fair amount of people to therapists and so your family doctor should have some knowledge of who is a good therapist and should put you in touch with someone.
	I think it's worthwhile asking if the therapist you're talking to has specific experience with Whatever it is that you want to deal with and dig into that.
	Ask their experience if they've had any formal training.
	I mean, for instance, if you're dealing with something like a phobia, then there's very specific treatment methods for phobias that are worth pursuing.
	And you can ask for success rates.
	You may not get them. In fact, you probably won't, but it's worth asking.
	And hopefully you're able to talk to the therapist even for a few minutes beforehand just to ask about the therapeutic approach to which the therapist will undoubtedly reply.
	It's eclectic. I do whatever works or whatever.
	But I think it's worth asking.
	You can ask what is the typical length of therapy.
	Some therapists, of course, will focus on more short-term immediate gains.
	Other therapists are more into the long-haul personality renovation projects, which I think is a great idea.
	So I would start with referrals, recommendations.
	Anyone you know who's been to a therapist, you can ask on the Free Domain Radio website.
	We have lots of therapeutically experienced people who may be able to give you good references to therapists.
	So those would be my suggestions.
	It's always a great place to start, of course, with your family doctor.
	So I did sort of think this week about...
	How I knew that I had a good therapist, and I actually think I had a great therapist.
	I had a great therapist for, I think, a little over two years.
	I went for about three hours a week.
	So I went, you know, in my usual intense way, I went whole hog and a half.
	poured myself into it heart and soul.
	I was doing eight to 10 hours a week of journaling and dream analysis.
	I was boring everybody with my experiences.
	I kept a journal and I really, really worked.
	I wasn't assigned any homework, but I think that the more work you put into therapy, the better it is.
	I think a sort of therapy as a coaching scenario and it's not like the only time you practice is when you're standing in front of the coach.
	You practice all week and then you work with the coach to improve.
	And so I don't think that you should think of therapy as something that occurs only in the therapist's office, but rather something that is part of a commitment or a goal that you have towards self-knowledge.
	Of which the coach helps.
	So you have a personal trainer.
	You'll go to that personal trainer and you'll work with them for a bit.
	But it's not like every time you go to the gym, you have to have the personal trainer moving your arm.
	You go to the gym and you tweak and refine.
	So I think it's a self-generated, self-sustained process with the therapist as a helpful coach.
	That's my experience. And again, this is all just my opinion.
	I'm no expert, no credentials, just a guy on the internet talking about my thoughts about it.
	But I think they have some validity, given that I have a fair amount of experience.
	In this area, and I had good and bad therapists.
	So that's the first thing.
	Sorry, the first thing is go to your doctor.
	The second is look at it as a process that you're generating.
	And the third thing is to remember that you're a customer.
	The one thing that I think is really true about going to therapy is that it should be a relationship that is unprecedented in your life.
	So the metaphor I'll use is if you want to go and learn Mandarin, you don't...
	Go to someone who only speaks English, because you already know that language.
	You're looking to speak a new language, you have to go to somebody who speaks both Mandarin and English.
	And if you're looking to To improve your level of mental health and happiness and functionality, you should go to somebody who speaks that new language.
	So the relationship that you have with your therapist should be unprecedented in your life.
	Because, of course, if the therapist is exactly like your mom or your dad or whoever, then you already have that relationship.
	You already know that relationship. You're not paying for anything new.
	What you want to pay for Is a way of relating that you've not experienced before.
	So that you can shake out the dusty cobwebs of old habits and start to explore a new way of being vitally present and in a relationship in the moment.
	So if you...
	I mean, when I went to a therapist and felt that this was not something radical, new and exciting and disorienting and so on, then I didn't go back.
	And when I went to a therapist and...
	I came out of the therapy, the very first therapy session.
	I remember this so clearly. I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but I couldn't find, she worked out of her house, and I couldn't find her house before GPS's, and I have not a very good sense of direction at the best of times.
	And I sort of came in, sat down, and I wasn't particularly nervous, but of course I was not happy at being a few minutes late.
	And I said, ah, you know, it turns out I was just circling this house like a shark.
	And she said, like a shark?
	That's interesting. And she paused.
	And I could see her like, you know how, it's a bad metaphor, but how a cow chews cud very slowly.
	It seems like they just have a piece of gum.
	I could see her mind chewing over what are the implications of me coming in and saying that I was circling like a shark.
	What does that mean?
	And to slow down and to examine, right?
	Because so much of dysfunction is rapidity.
	It is slowing down and trying to find the sources of thoughts and the impression that you're leaving on others and how automatic these kinds of things can be.
	So for me, therapy was a lot about slowing down and examining my own thoughts and examining where my impulses came from.
	What were the thoughts that drove the emotions?
	And they're so quicksilver and they're so embedded in our personality.
	That it's like trying to find your spine by turning around and looking behind you.
	It's a real challenge.
	And if you can do it, then you should probably join Cirque du Soleil.
	So I think it should be an unprecedented relationship, something you've never experienced before, something that slows things down so that you can examine the details.
	And this, of course, is exactly what any coach is going to do, right?
	So if you go in to work on your golf swing, the coach is going to ask you to slow it down.
	Or he's going to take a video, and there are actually specialized video cameras for this, believe it or not.
	Which will record your golf swing and you will play it back in slow motion so that you can see where you're jumping out of your swing or clipping off your kneecap or something.
	I don't know. I don't really play golf. So you slow things down to find out what is actually going on.
	So you're not rushing through all of your interactions.
	Which, whenever there's rushing, there's habit.
	And that, of course, is something that happens with every coach who gets somebody who wants to study and improve excellence.
	Since they already come in with some habits, you have to slow those habits down and correct them and you have to practice the new way of doing things.
	So those are sort of my thoughts about it.
	I really do think that You need to feel a connection with your therapist.
	You need to feel a connection with your therapist.
	And that really comes out of, I think, the therapist having great powers of listening, great powers of attention to detail, great powers of concentration, so that you feel more visible to yourself.
	I mean, one of the reasons I went to therapy was that I did not feel very visible to myself.
	I was a bit of a mystery, a blank slate to myself.
	And in the process of going to therapy for those years and really slowing down...
	How it is, believe it or not, this is me on post-therapy quaaludes.
	Can you imagine beforehand? I basically used this squealing duck fax machine.
	But to sort of slow down and get a sense of who you are and what is occurring within you, so that you're not just stimulus response, right?
	You're not just a knee that the doctor taps where the leg goes up.
	You're not just stimulus response, which is so often how we're trained.
	but that self-knowledge and reflection can occur between the stimulus and the response.
	And it also taught me a lot of humility, which is something I constantly go on and on about in this show.
	It teaches you a lot of humility because once you realize how hard it is to change yourself, to slow down your habits, how scary it can be to change yourself, once you've gone through that process, then you really get how impossible it is to change other people.
	I mean, one of the greatest and most unexpected gifts I got out of therapy was a great deal of humility in terms of changing others.
	It's so hard to change yourself.
	Even though I dropped tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into therapy, and I did, I think, achieve some So very excellent and positive personal changes.
	I got out of a bad relationship, a series of bad relationships and was emotionally ready for meeting my wonderful wife when we met and having a happy marriage and a great marriage and it gave me the courage to To do what I'm doing now and the strength to overcome some of the obstacles and challenges.
	Although I did achieve, I think, a good degree of personal change, growth, expertise through therapy, it is humbling to realize just how bloody hard it is.
	And so when you realize the barriers to change within yourself, you are inevitably going to be drawn to recognize the barriers to change in other people.
	And so if it takes huge amounts of time, money, energy, and effort, and putting my life on hold in many ways for years, then when somebody is just really dysfunctional and is not even able to admit it, let alone admit it, let alone admit it, and work for change, let alone admit it, work for change, and consistently keep working for change, You get that, you know.
	I mean, this is one of the reasons why, you know, there's been a couple of dozen bands that feed the main radio.
	Because I know, if people don't even know that they have a problem, then change is not going to happen.
	Change is enormously difficult, as Jung mentioned.
	There's very little that is as inert as the human personality.
	Change is extraordinarily hard.
	And once you accept that, and once you get it, and there's no way to get it, Except by doing it.
	It always looks easy until you have to do it yourself, right?
	Just change. Just grow.
	Just don't do that. Just don't do the other one.
	But once you get how hard it is to really overcome your history and change for the better, you get that people are going to continue to do what they're going to do unless they work incredibly hard to alter it.
	And there are very few people who work incredibly hard to alter it.
	So I would definitely mention that as a key aspect of change, the humility that comes out of it.
	I mean, for me, separating from bad relationships was so much easier after therapy.
	Actually, it was during therapy that I did it, which is why I sort of always recommend people to do that during therapy.
	Because I just got that nobody around me was doing as much as I was doing to improve.
	In fact, nobody was doing a damn thing to change and improve.
	And I was the only one of anyone that I knew who was in therapy or who'd been in therapy.
	and so you get it's a one way I wasn't trying to get out of a wheelchair and walk among everybody else.
	I did not feel that I was broken and needed to...
	But I wanted to become excellent at self-knowledge.
	Now, the last thing that I'll say is, and thank you for your patience with this, the last thing that I will say is the answer to why therapy?
	Perhaps this should have gone at the beginning, but I still think that it's an important question to answer.
	Well, why? Why therapy?
	Why is self-knowledge considered by most major philosophers so essential?
	Why is self-knowledge so important in the pursuit of wisdom?
	Well, The science is pretty clear on this, that we experience the world through the filter of the self.
	We experience the world through the filter of the self.
	And if you don't know the self, if you don't know who you are, if you don't know what triggers you, if you don't know what your thoughts are, unconscious thoughts, unconscious experiences and impressions that precede your emotions and reactions, then you cannot separate the rippled filter of the self from the clear view of the world.
	If you ever remember these old obelisk and asterisk cartoons with chief vital statistics, this is going back a ways.
	So if you're young, I don't know, ask your grandparents.
	But they were not particularly great cartoons, but they were around when I was a kid.
	And in it, the big chunky medieval Gaelic dude was always carrying a huge obelisk in front of him.
	And it sort of struck me that that's like trying to understand the world with a lack of knowledge of the self in front of you.
	Right? All you're doing is groping around a huge rock that you're carrying.
	You sort of hold it with one arm, grope around wildly.
	Hold it with the other arm, grope around wildly.
	You don't know what the hell's around there.
	But you think that you're seeing the world directly.
	But you're not. You're seeing a big blank stone that you're carrying around and you're trying to grope past it to get to the world.
	That's what trying to understand the world is like in the absence.
	Of self-knowledge. Once you know yourself, you can begin the process and it's a process that needs constant refining.
	I'm still working on it and I will be working on it until my last exhalation and my first inhalation of the dirt they throw in my face in the big hole.
	But you can see yourself and you can see the biases and irrationalities and the distortions that we bring to the world.
	I don't think you can ever get rid of them.
	I don't think you can turn your identity into a pane of glass because I think that would actually be to not be present, to be empty.
	You want to bring your passion and your fire, you just don't want to bring unconscious distortions to the world.
	And if you don't know yourself, then you're constantly looking at the world through this kaleidoscopic, crazy funhouse mirror of personal identity that is unknown to you.
	And so you don't know that you're distorting what it is that you're seeing.
	You don't know that because you don't know your own identity.
	You don't see the glasses that are distorting the world.
	You think that is the world. But of course, with self-knowledge comes the knowledge of the distortions that we all bring, cognitive biases, distortions that we all bring.
	To the world. And so you can not eliminate them, but you at least know that they're there.
	And you can compensate for them. You can take them off from time to time.
	You can know that they're present.
	So you're not just reacting to your distorted view of the world as if the world itself is distorted.
	And that is why it is so essential to have self-knowledge if you wish to say something true.
	About the world. So that's my brief introduction.
	I thank you for your patience. I'm certainly happy to ask, to answer any questions and to hear from listeners who may have had different, better or worse experiences of therapy.
	therapy, but that's my sort of quick take on how that works.
	There was a question that was asked.
	There were several questions that were asked during the intro there.
	One was, and maybe sort of touched on this, but why is therapy the chosen path to self-knowledge, you know, being asked by Mr.
	R? Well, I don't know that it's the chosen path to self-knowledge.
	I think that there's a limitation on how much you can achieve in terms of self-knowledge without somebody else's perspective.
	And we've all, I think, experienced this to some degree or another.
	If somebody brings a dream and they sort of say, Steph, what are your thoughts about this dream?
	And I have something usually useful to say.
	It doesn't mean that I'm smarter.
	It just means I'm not looking at...
	At it from inside the dream.
	I have a great deal of difficulty working on my own dreams.
	It can take a long time for me to figure out my own dreams, but it's easier with somebody else.
	I think that in a healthy society, the society that we're all building personally and trying to build collectively in the future, in a healthy society, the reality of who children are are reflected back at them Honestly and directly, right? So if a child is angry, right?
	So if Isabella is angry at me about something, then I accept that she's angry.
	I understand that she's angry.
	It doesn't mean that I'm bullied or acquiesced, not that she does bully or anything like that.
	But I don't sort of flare up in return and stop being upset or whatever, right?
	If she falls and hurts herself and she's crying, I pick her up and I stroke and I comfort and she feels better.
	I'm not like, I told you not to step near that hose or whatever.
	So I'm honestly reflecting back to her own experience.
	So, of course, the hope is that she's going to grow up with a clear view of herself and a clear view of the world.
	But where we grow up with incorrect or non-empirical or bias-driven reactions, To who we are, then we end up with a lot of cognitive distortions because we have to adapt to other people's irrationality in order to at least get by in that sort of environment.
	And so there's a fair amount of loneliness and solitariness that comes out of not having your emotional experiences genuinely and honestly and clearly and accurately reflected back to you.
	And as I've said before, problems that are created in solitude cannot be solved in solitude if we have a lack of ability to connect with ourselves and therefore to connect with others.
	Which comes out of other people having an inability to connect with us when we're children.
	Then we need connection, and we need someone who's skilled at building those bridges with another human being, who's skillful at knowing where the landmines are, knowing how to defuse them, who's got training, who really knows their stuff, so that that bridge of connection can be built between you and yourself, and therefore between you and others.
	It's not the only path to self-knowledge.
	I think it's a very important path to self-knowledge, and it certainly has been just about the best money I've ever spent in my life.
	I mean, if I had to choose between that and a university education, personally, I would choose therapy over university education because it did more to add to my happiness because my greatest happiness is my marriage and my family.
	And so it did more to help me with that.
	Than anything to do with college.
	So I think it's always worth pursuing.
	And particularly if you're into philosophy.
	I think it's less necessary if you just dissolve yourself into the general Borg goop of the mainstream, then I don't think you need therapy as much because you're not really taking on an identity.
	But if you're going to think for yourself, Then I believe you really need some therapy.
	That's why I always suggest it to listeners of this show in particular.
	If you want to think for yourself, if you want to stand on that bucking bronco called philosophy, then you need some training.
	Philosophy is the greatest and most exhilarating and terrifying extreme sport known to mankind.
	And you wouldn't just...
	I hope you wouldn't just go up to the top of some double black diamond ski hill and just say, hey, I've seen this on TV. I can do it.
	You would get some training and you would build up to it.
	If you're going to think for yourself, then you need some coaching.
	You need some training because you're going for an extreme sport.
	And so I strongly, strongly recommend it.
	Somebody says, I have a hard time understanding the podcast where Steph refers to discipline as something that doesn't work in the long run, and that between discipline and self-knowledge, the latter wins.
	However, he makes self-knowledge sound like it's a discipline in and of itself, and it's hard for me to understand how that works.
	But I don't think I ever said that discipline is never to be part of life.
	I don't think I would be shocked if I made an absolute statement like that.
	And particularly since there's discipline involved.
	So like yesterday, I had to spend like three hours pulling podcasts off two portable devices that I use for recording.
	Relistening, remixing, volume normalizing, adding a little bass, removing some of the background hiss, trimming them down a little bit, compiling them, labeling them, uploading them, putting them in the XML feed.
	I mean, that's really boring shit.
	But there's not much point recording podcasts if I'm not going to do that, right?
	So it is...
	Discipline is necessary.
	It's just that discipline itself can't be the foundation of what it is that you're doing in life, right?
	So you can't say...
	I don't think you can reasonably say, I'm going to become a doctor...
	I don't really want to be a doctor at all, but I'm going to make myself be a doctor because, I don't know, that's what dad wants or something.
	And that doesn't work.
	But of course, everything that you want to do is going to have stuff in it that you don't like.
	So if you want to become a doctor, there's going to be stuff in there that's boring or unpleasant or difficult for you in that process.
	And keep your eye on the prize and do that which is important for the larger prize.
	But... So what I'm saying is discipline can't be the foundation of what you're doing, but discipline is involved in every aspect of life.
	It's not going to work in the long run.
	It can't be your core motivation.
	But it is something that you need to...
	We're always going to have to do stuff that we don't want to do.
	And so I'm not... The opposite of a life founded entirely upon discipline and willpower is not a life of hedonism where we avoid anything that's difficult because I don't think that actually works in the long run either because...
	If you avoid anything that's challenging or difficult, you tend not to grow, I think, in life.
	The soul is like a muscle.
	It grows in resistance. Somebody's asked, if you have an amazing relationship with your therapist but would like to move closer to FDR friends, is it worth finding a new therapist?
	I really can answer that for you, but I would talk about that with your therapist.
	Hi, I have a question.
	Sure. I was wondering to apply UPB to the statement, it's immoral to drive cars.
	Oh, I'm so sorry. We can certainly take that on.
	This is a show about finding a therapist.
	The very brief thing that I would give, and this question comes up a lot, but the very brief response that I would get, just so you don't have to wait for another week, is that it's really important to focus on the universally Part of universally preferable behavior.
	And so driving is not universal.
	There's nothing particularly different from driving than there is from a lawnmower, like running a lawnmower or running a little scooter or something.
	So driving a car is not specific.
	Driving is not a specific action.
	Sorry, it's not a universal action.
	It's a specific action. It's like the guy in the book.
	He says, well, isn't it UPB compliant to say I'm not going to eat fish on Fridays?
	No, it's not, because there's nothing specific about Friday that is different from Thursday.
	And there's nothing specific about driving that is different from something else.
	There is something different about stabbing someone, because that is the initiation of force.
	So if you're going to come up with a statement and say, well, this could be universally applied...
	Well, sure, not driving on Fridays could be universally applied, but it is not a universal statement itself, and I think that's what you need to focus on.
	Okay, thanks. So we have a question, a two-parter.
	Number one, what are your thoughts on Gestalt therapy and Jungian therapy, and how important is the age of the therapist when searching for one?
	I don't know that the age of the therapist is very important.
	I'm not going to get into details about my therapist, but certainly not the same age.
	For me, the quality of the therapist is more important than the age or the gender.
	For me, I think it was important to have an older woman.
	Thank you.
	If he'd been an older man, then I would have worked on some different sorts of issues, or at least would have been in a different sequence.
	I'm sure that father stuff would have come up.
	But my more particular issues were my relationships with women.
	And so it was helpful for me to have a therapist of the opposite sex, but I would for sure say that it's the quality of the therapist that matters more than anything else.
	Now, somebody's asked on gestalt therapy and Jungian therapy.
	I don't know enough about Gestalt therapy to provide any kind of even amateur opinion.
	Not that it's all amateur, but Jungian therapy is a very inward-driven therapy.
	It is a very dreams and collective unconscious and very inward and mythological.
	He's big on Mandela's and not of the Nelson variety.
	And I think...
	I mean, to me, what worked most powerfully for me was a combination of psychology and philosophy.
	To me, psychology is the handmaiden of philosophy, and that's not just my opinion.
	That's been around, really. Psychology came out of philosophy.
	Philosophy is the love of wisdom.
	That is the root of the word.
	So philosophy is the love of wisdom.
	And as Socrates pointed out, The unexamined life is not worth living.
	Know thyself.
	You can't have wisdom without self-knowledge.
	But there are significant barriers to self-knowledge, notably trauma and cultural bad habits masquerading as empirical habits.
	I think that for the Jungian stuff, I sort of view that as going down a well.
	And I found it very helpful to go down a well in terms of really trying to get down deep into the roots of my identity.
	But I found that it was very important to keep...
	The thread to keep the rope.
	I wanted to go down the well, but I didn't want to fall down the well forever.
	I wanted to go down the well and come back up.
	And for me, the thread of philosophy was the rope that kept me stable and got me back out.
	So that's maybe a metaphor that's helpful or not.
	My therapist, I've mentioned this before, she was mystical, very mystical.
	I think that in the absence of philosophy, I think it could have been spelunking without an exit strategy.
	You can get lost in those caves.
	Jung himself Was an untreated victim of child rape.
	I think it was a friend of his father's who raped him as a child, if memory serves me right.
	It's been a while since I read his biography.
	And of course, so was Sigmund Freud.
	Not the same guy, but also a victim of child rape.
	And I don't believe that Jung solved this.
	I think that his relationships were problematic, and I remember that he went on a trip through Africa for no particular purpose, wherein some of his standard bearers, some of his Zulu attendants, Sherpas, I guess, of the Sahara, were eaten by lions.
	And to me, this would be a completely horrifying thing, that a decision that I had made to go on a trip through the jungle for no particular purpose resulted in people being...
	brutal and horrible way.
	And from my reading of his writing about that, he didn't seem particularly bothered by that.
	And that seems to me to indicate a kind of coldness.
	I think one of the dangers of going inwards and deepwards in the Jungian model is that we do need to go in and find our humanity and we need to come out and plug our humanity back into each other.
	That's where the real empathy is.
	And to me, there can be a kind of narcissism and selfishness and navel-gazing in simply looking at yourself, going inwards.
	And I don't know that Jung developed a great deal of empathy and sympathy for others.
	He seemed to be a bit of a psychologically cold and a little tough, in fact, very tough and harsh in many ways.
	And that was my issue.
	Now, if you are a listener and you've had experiences with therapy, I certainly would be happy to hear them and turn it over.
	Well, I just wanted to chime in with my experience.
	I think I mentioned it before, but if not.
	In any case, I bounced around to several therapists for a while before finding one that really did work for me.
	And, of course, the biggest aspect...
	of the therapy that works for me is her curiosity and her just openness to asking the question like you know something else something I'll say something and should just be completely open it's not so much that she's not judgmental but it's that she you know doesn't jump to the judgment right away and that's really really helpful and I only found that out Actually,
	I found that out pretty quickly. I think I found that out in the first session or two, if not before the first session in the intro call.
	The other thing I want to mention about that was she does the IFS approach, the internal family systems therapy.
	That's the Richard Schwartz stuff, right?
	Yeah, that's by Richard Schwartz.
	And I find it's really helpful, especially since it assumes, I think other approaches do this as well, but it assumes from the beginning that you have all these multiple parts.
	And it takes a while to really get them differentiated, but, I mean, it's really, really helpful.
	And, of course, it's the case that they are so many different parts, and...
	I get a sense of calming and slowing of processing information and it's not immediate responses after being in therapy for eight months.
	I found that helpful.
	Can you think of a specific time that that occurred or a specific interaction?
	You don't have to get personal, unless you want to, but a specific time where that occurred just because some of these concepts can be pretty abstract for people?
	Sure, no problem.
	It's a big part of the approach in general that we're going through.
	Let's see, one example was...
	Oh, there's an example.
	Let's see if I try to remember a good example and walk through it.
	So, well, okay.
	I have a problem with being late.
	Frequently late. And the easy answer, just go to sleep early.
	Make sure you go to bed on time.
	Make sure you have your alarm set, all this stuff.
	And... I still have struggles with being late and not even just being late but also getting really, really, really irritated and angry and frustrated and all these other things coming up around being late.
	And so, when my therapist was sort of asking me to step through all these feelings, and we actually identified six parts, six different parts contributing to this feeling.
	There was a part that was angry about being late, there was a part that was responding to that angry part, there was a part that was saying why we were late, and there was a part that was saying those excuses are Not valid, or, you know, they're just excuses, they're not explanations.
	I don't remember the other two at the moment, but that was a...
	And then, sorry, and then what we could do, once we identified those parts that were in this, you know, basically in this...
	They're all locked in this role, this position, this posture, this scene.
	And once we identified that they were all in this role, we could actually go to each one and say, okay, so try to address what's going on for each one of these parts.
	Is that helpful? Is that to help answer the question?
	Yeah, I think that has to do with the idea of slowing it down.
	So you experienced a kind of irritation and something that was counter to your goals.
	I mean, if you're paying for therapy and just showing up late, I mean, you're not harming the therapist, right?
	You're just harming yourself.
	It's like showing up too late for dentistry to get any Novocaine.
	It's like, well, the dentist is still going to operate.
	You're just going to be in a lot more pain, right?
	So what you're talking about is trying to unpack the density of that emotion.
	Right, right.
	Right, and in a similar way, I mean, we spent probably half an hour talking about my comment about circling her like a shark.
	You know, what it meant in terms of my level of aggression or hostility or, you know, whether I was conscious of that or not and whether I was conscious of the impression that that might give somebody else and what I was feeling and so on, right?
	And because I was late, I was feeling anxious and what was happening was that I was expecting an attack.
	You know, like an authority figure, right?
	Like I remember when I took singing lessons when I was a kid and I got stuck on the bus, got stuck in Toronto, there's street cars, right?
	So if there's an obstacle on the road, they can't go around it.
	So I ended up really late and she was mad.
	Mad because I was late. And of course, we've all had that, you know, you're late and it's bad.
	And of course, if you work, it's the same thing.
	And so, because I was late, I was panicking, I was feeling anxious, and I was feeling, I was self-attacking, and I was feeling that she was going to attack me, so I was expressing a kind of hostility towards her, as if she were attacking me.
	And of course, she wasn't.
	And so that was the very first session that we spent, not the whole session, but we spent some time talking about that.
	And that was just amazing.
	And so I came out of there thinking like, wow, you know, like one chance comment when you unpack it, when you unpack it, it's like those Russian dolls within dolls within dolls.
	There's so much in each one of our statements and each one of our pauses that learning to unpack that is like slowing a film down to normal speed.
	You don't just get this blurry squeal.
	You actually can see the frames that go into it and learn a lot more about things besides.
	Oh, this question.
	You said conscience scans conscience.
	I'm not sure what that means. Malcolm Gladwell's Blinky.
	You can get a gut read on people quickly.
	Based on these, you can pick out a therapist quickly.
	Are there any good ways to use that to speed up therapy?
	Concept of no secrets.
	I think that you can, but it's a bit of a catch-22.
	One of the things that therapy does, or at least did for me, is it really started to help me to trust my own instincts.
	I was a terrible second-guesser of myself.
	I remember when I first read Nietzsche's instruction, do not leave your actions in the lurch.
	In other words, don't do something and then just sit there and gnaw your fingers about whether you did the right thing.
	And look, I could never have done free-domain radio if that was still my habit, if I still had that...
	Nail-biting, self-critiquing.
	Should I do this? Should I do that?
	Did I do the right thing? Oh my heavens, somebody's upset I did the wrong thing.
	Oh God, blah, blah, blah. I simply couldn't do it.
	I couldn't take these kinds of risks in extending the possibilities of human communication and philosophical progression.
	I mean, I simply couldn't do it if I was second-guessing everything that I was doing.
	So I think you can, and I'm pretty good with this now.
	I'm pretty good at figuring out.
	Like, if somebody joins the boards, I can tell in their first post.
	I mean, I'm pretty good at that by now.
	And people who haven't gone through that process of learning self-trust, it just looks like I'm jumping to conclusions.
	But it's not the case.
	I mean, I've had a lot of experience in this now.
	You know, if you're a really well-trained tennis player, you just go and hit the ball, right?
	And if you're not really good at it, it looks like a kind of magic.
	And so you can get that kind of read, but usually the people who most need to go to a therapist are people who don't have that level of insight into their own instincts and level of access to their own instincts and level of trust in their own instincts.
	But that having been said...
	I think you want to walk out of your first therapy session with the experience that you've not had anything like that before.
	You've not had anything like that before.
	So with my therapist, when we unpacked a particular comment that I made, she wasn't upset, she wasn't angry, she was just relentlessly curious.
	There was no negative or this, and was just relentlessly curious.
	And I had never...
	You know, when most people focus on you, if you've gone through a rough childhood, when most people focus on you, it's like the cold, blazing yellow eye of Sauron boring into your spine and the base of your brain like a laser beam or more like a cruel kid with a magnifying glass and you're the ant in the desert.
	And so I had always been alarmed at somebody focusing on me because that usually meant that I was being body scanned by a sociopath to find weaknesses to punish and hurt.
	And so when I experienced somebody really focusing on me, and I actually enjoyed that rather than feeling alarmed, I was like, damn, I have never experienced that before.
	That was radically new for me.
	And that's exactly the kind of mind-blowing shit that I think, not every session necessarily, but it needs to be like, I've never experienced that before.
	And that, it doesn't have to be a big, huge revelation.
	I mean, I just had a comment about circling her like a shark.
	It wasn't a big, huge revelation.
	Like, oh my god. You know, that's why I named my puppy Satan or something, but it does need to be something that is unprecedented because you are trying to learn a new language, so you do want to hear some words you've never heard before in a sense.
	I know I'm putting a lot of pressure onto the therapist for the first session, but you know, hey, they're well paid.
	Hey, Steph, I had a question.
	Sure. Hey, this is Boris calling.
	This is Mr. B from like two weeks ago.
	Oh, hey, how's it going? Yeah, it's going good.
	I actually, when I was preparing for the Sunday show, I didn't realize it was a therapy show.
	I framed my question around philosophy, but I was looking over it, and it does have some self-therapy aspects to it.
	Is that going to be okay for the show?
	Well, I can't know before you ask, so ask away.
	Right, right, yeah.
	Just let me know if it's not on topic.
	Basically, I wanted to...
	Well, I guess a little backstory first.
	I just recently quit that job you and I talked about, the server job, and I did that to start pursuing what I would consider a more rational life.
	The way I kind of see it, I have these two sort of life paths that I was going to pursue, and one of them is a life of sort of For lack of a better word, a preferentiality, a life of kind of what I want to do versus a life of rationality, of what I rationally should do.
	And my question was going to be, do you think that either through therapy, through self-therapy, it's possible to control what it is that you prefer so that, you know, you could say In my example, my preferred life would be to become a musician and an actor, something I'm really deeply passionate about, but I don't really see that as objectively rational.
	I was just thinking, is it possible, do you think, through therapy to change your preferences?
	Yes, yes.
	I do believe that very strongly, but I would reword it in my annoying way.
	You can't change your preferences.
	You can't change your preferences.
	So, to break it down to its most elemental aspect, a preference is an emotion, and it's a persistent emotion around ambition.
	So you can put your hand in a fire, and you can take your hand out of a fire, but you can't control whether you feel pain while your hand is in the fire, right?
	Yeah.
	Right, so the captain of a ship, if he wants to turn it around, he doesn't jump in and swim against the front of the ship, right?
	He turns the wheel and then slowly the ship turns.
	He only has control over the wheel.
	He doesn't have direct control over the ship, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	And so, to me, there's no amount of self-knowledge that will get me to not...
	Feel pain if something is painful.
	In fact, self-knowledge will make that pain sooner and more exquisite, which is exactly what I want.
	I want to feel...
	Pain, where pain is appropriate, and I want to feel it sooner rather than later.
	In the same way that if you put your hand on the stove, you don't want to wait for three minutes for the pain sensations to hit, because then you've just got a smoking stump where your hand should be, right?
	The way that it works, of course, in your body is that if you put your hand in something hot, you will jerk it back before you even feel pain.
	The stimuli will go to your spine and then back to your hand to move it, and only then will it more slowly go up to your brain.
	And so you want to feel pain and pleasure as soon as possible in interaction.
	You don't want to feel it later.
	You know, like the caller from last week who had two kids with some woman who did not sound particularly like a good mom or a good partner to have children with.
	So he feels...
	Not happy about who she is as a person, but he feels that after he's had two kids with her.
	Well, you want to feel that when you meet her at the party, right?
	You don't want to feel that down the road.
	So you want to invite your feelings in and have them almost yell in your ear because that gives you a much more nimble way to navigate.
	Imagine if you were trying to drive a NASCAR, if you were trying to race down a racetrack really fast, but you had a little helmet on that gave you the course and the track of the other cars with a five-second delay.
	You'd last about five seconds and then you would blow up.
	So you need to get as much immediate stimuli as possible to navigate through this tricky and treacherous aspect called life, particularly the philosophical life.
	And so you can't get rid of your feelings.
	In fact, you can't change your feelings.
	What you want to do is invite your feelings and create an open channel to your feelings.
	As wide as possible.
	Now that may alter things for you.
	I was in your position, not so much with the music, but of course I went to theatre school for a couple of years and I really wanted to be an actor and a playwright and then I wanted to be a novelist and then I wanted to be an academic and I was in the park the other day and struck up a friendship with a nice couple who lives by the park who have a daughter who's almost Isabella's age and they Isabella's sort of playing together.
	And by that I mean that she gets upset when any other kid picks up a toy that she may want to play with at some point before she's dead.
	She says, no, no, no!
	So we're slowly teaching her that Cher is not just a singer, but also a concept that can be of value in the social life.
	And this woman made the comment to me.
	She said, you know, I can't remember, I made some joke or another.
	She said, wow, you're really quick.
	And I would think I was telling Isabella a story, and she's like, you know, you're really expressive.
	You should be an actor or something like that.
	And I said, oh, I sort of dabbled at that.
	And she's like, oh, you should have stuck with it.
	I mean, you're really good or whatever, right?
	Now, if I wasn't living a life that was important to me, if I was working in Starbucks, then I'd sit there and go, oh, man, I really should have been an actor.
	Oh, what am I doing? Blah, blah, blah.
	And that wasn't the case.
	I mean, it's like... I couldn't possibly be doing anything more meaningful and more valuable than what I'm doing.
	That doesn't mean that there aren't more important and valuable things to do in the short run, right?
	I mean, people who are surgeons, who are taking out people's appendix, are doing things that are great for those people.
	But in terms of my particular skill sets and what the world needs in the long run, there's nothing more important and powerful than what it is that I'm doing.
	And so someone can say, you should have been an actor.
	And what that means to me is I could have taken all of the gifts that I have in thought and expression and communication and philosophy, I could have taken all of those gifts, pushed them all to one side, And then spent my life as a high-priced mannequin spouting other people's words.
	Well, I have enough words of my own that I think are very important without needing to be a mouthpiece with the hand of the playwright shoved up my ass making my mouth move.
	And so I did not feel any regret over my decision to not pursue a life as an actor.
	But if I had made different decisions, if I was unhappy in some dead-end job, or even if I was in business and doing well, but had really felt that I betrayed my calling by not becoming an actor, then that would have really stung.
	So that's sort of a long way of saying I can't control whether someone's saying, oh, you're really good, you should have been an actor, whether that's going to sting or not.
	But I can control how much commitment and energy and passion I pour into what it is that I'm doing.
	And so... I didn't feel that it stung.
	I sort of thought that was nice, and it's nice to hear that, and I'm sure that was a course of action that I could have taken, was to be an actor.
	It really helped me to understand how much more valuable it is that I'm doing now.
	And that's my main thing.
	You can't control, obviously, whether you're going to succeed or not as an actor.
	You can control how much you prepare for an audition.
	You can control whether you film yourself and play it back to see how realistic it is.
	You can control whether you ask people to watch your audition piece and give you feedback.
	You can control whether you take acting lessons and so on.
	But you can't control the end product of your success because that's coincidence and talent and opportunity and so on.
	But you can control whether you succeed in trying to be an actor.
	You can't control whether you succeed in trying to be an actor.
	And so, of course, if you give it everything you've got and it doesn't work out...
	At least you don't look back and say, damn, I should have done more.
	I don't look back and say, I should have done more podcasts because I really don't think it's possible I could have done more podcasts without resolving into self-parody, which is always a danger for me.
	So I think that you can't control your feelings.
	You can control your commitment.
	You can control your courage. You can control what you do.
	But you can't control how you feel.
	But you really want to invite those feelings in.
	If you try and control your feelings, you tend to chase them away.
	You don't want to treat your feelings like the Soviet commissar treats the free market.
	If you want to be an entrepreneur with your own feelings, your feelings are your customers, which means you want as much feedback as possible.
	From your customers. You don't want to tell your customers what you think they want and tell them to shut the hell up and take it.
	So you want to have a very free market relationship with your own feelings, which means interaction, negotiation, feedback, taking suggestions, offering new things.
	And that, I think, is the most important thing.
	Was that just a complete ramble fest or was that remotely useful to what you were thinking of?
	Well, you know, I was kind of harvesting the little nuggets of information.
	It was a big pile of sand.
	There's got to be a few little pieces of dirt.
	But I agree with what you're saying, and I experienced a sensation of intrigue over one aspect of what you said.
	I really agree with letting yourself feel the emotions and to not stifle them.
	Like you said earlier in the show, they're jam-packed with Self-knowledge fodder, evaluation fodder, to learn more about yourself.
	But when you said, as you grew, your preferences changed from being an actor to being a playwright to being a novelist.
	What would you say was the instigator of that preference change?
	Why did that happen?
	That's an excellent question.
	That's an excellent question.
	I'm just going to try not to give you too glib an answer.
	This is back in the early dawn of my self-knowledge.
	And I'll share with you something that I know about myself that I haven't shared before, but I think is useful to what it is that you're saying.
	I don't want to make this sort of about me and my history, but when I was green and young in my self-knowledge, I thought that I failed at things.
	But in hindsight and in therapy, I found that this was actually not the case.
	So when I was no longer morally elevated by my environment, my ecosystem, my self, my creativity, stopped functioning.
	and I dried up, and I became mechanical, and I didn't know that at the time.
	I would just think, oh, man, I guess I'm not that talented.
	I guess I've reached the end of what I can do.
	I guess, gosh, I thought, right?
	I thought it was great.
	It's fascinating.
	And this happened to me in academia.
	This happened to me in business.
	It happened to me in the arts.
	It has not happened to me in 25 years of philosophy.
	I've never sit there.
	I've still got a list of like 100 podcasts I want to do.
	At some point, I may run out before I'm dead.
	But this is not the case.
	There's so much to talk about that is of value in terms of philosophy and self-knowledge.
	And so what happened was, for me, I would pursue something, and then I would become disgusted.
	I mean, the very first day when I was at theater school, the theater school director was this...
	But he basically said, oh, you know, you're young, white, and bourgie.
	And what he meant was that we were young, white, and bourgeoisie, right?
	Middle class or whatever. And he said that on the very first day.
	He didn't know us.
	He didn't know me. I'm far from bourgeoisie.
	I'm freaking working class all the way, as far as my upbringing goes.
	I am like stone-cold proletariat.
	Now, I did go to boarding school for two years, but that was a bit of a blip and was more traumatic than elevating.
	But other than my sort of gene pool, which is more aristocratic, I guess you could say, but my circumstances were entirely.
	And of course, I got some loans and some grants, which went through the school.
	And I remember the same guy saying to me, it's like, holy crap, you had it really hard looking at your family's finances.
	Yeah. I think my mom had like $8 in the bank or something, right?
	So I didn't like that there was this socialist prejudice, right?
	Oh, you're all just young, white, and bushy.
	And that seemed to me, of course, I was a capitalist at this point, and it seemed to me that it was very left-wing and very socialist, and I was right.
	And we had some teachers who were harsh and cold and mean, which I did not think was productive and positive.
	And we had a director who threw chairs at people, and this was entirely abusive.
	And so I began to withdraw emotionally from the environment.
	I did not feel, like in hindsight, it makes perfect sense to me, because I was in an environment that had some significant cultural problems, to say the least.
	And that happened to some degree in the business world when I came across corruption in the business world, right?
	So I remember working at one place where the salesmen all went out to a strip club.
	I think that's pretty seedy, myself.
	And so, there was certainly just environments or places where I found myself kind of disgusted by the environment.
	And I did not know enough, I did not have enough self-confidence at the time, or self-knowledge at the time, to know that, you know, my moral sense, I don't want to sound like Jane Austen heroine, but my moral sensibilities were offended.
	And I did not flourish in that kind of environment.
	And so I really just found out.
	And the plays that we did were...
	I mean, we did some Shakespeare, and of course Shakespeare has got fantastic language, but it's all statist, child-abusing crap, right?
	I mean, as far as the moral message of Shakespeare is hideous, right?
	That... We need kings and abusers at all times to rule over us.
	So the moral message of Shakespeare is pretty hideous.
	And do I really want to be part of spreading that kind of propaganda?
	No. No, not really.
	Shakespeare, there's no such thing as a bad monarchy.
	There's only a bad king who needs to be replaced by a better king and all is well.
	It's understandable at the time.
	Or we would do Chekhov, and Chekhov is having like a wet, farty elephant slowly sit on your esophagus.
	It's just grim, dissociated, depressing, hideous stuff.
	And... I remember we were doing the Seagull, the Chekhov play, and I remember we brought a guy in to give us a short course on Russian history before we did the play so we could put the whole thing in context.
	And he was just a lunatic.
	I remember him saying, you know, the people of St.
	Petersburg, they ground up the foreigners into a paste and they put them in a cannon and they fired them across the The border to Poland or wherever it was and he was screaming at us and it's just like, you people are insane!
	You people are insane! And all that everybody was talking about was how they could get government grants to put plays on in various places throughout Canada.
	Which, of course, I found kind of gross as well.
	Why not try and write something that's mainstream?
	Why not write something that can go to Broadway or become a movie?
	But no, it was all about if you write something about The native Canadian experience, or if you write something about the Métis, then you can get a grant for sure, and you can go and perform it at X, Y, and Z place.
	And it was kind of just sleazy politicking and grant grubbing, and I just thought it was like, I thought, oh my God, I can't spend my life around these people.
	I can't hold my nose for 50 years in the artistic community.
	I just thought it was gross.
	So I didn't know that at the time, and I'm sorry if we diverged a little bit, but that was sort of what happened for me.
	It's kind of like, even though you weren't aware of it, even though you weren't consciously doing it, some part of you was involuntarily tending towards self-evaluation and the sort of pursuit of rationality.
	Yeah, I would recoil from the irrationality and corruption of my environment to the point where my ecosystem would just vanish.
	It was amazing to me.
	It literally felt like, you know, in the cartoons, like the guy's in a biplane, like Snoopy's in a biplane or something, and his plane gets shot away from under him, and he just stands there in the sky and then falls.
	Well... That's what happens when I was first in this creative environment.
	I was really creative and bubbling over with ideas and I was writing scripts and I was getting actors involved in play readings and so on.
	And then after a while, it really felt like I was going to a bad job with people that were just kind of weird.
	Now I was more aware of it when I got older.
	I just dry up.
	My fertility, so to speak, just evaporated from underneath.
	That's how it occurred for me.
	I didn't have the knowledge.
	It was years still before I went into therapy, but I didn't have the knowledge at the time.
	The same thing happened in In grad school as well, and I don't want to go into more boring details, but I found that my enthusiasm just dried up and vanished for the environment, and my creativity went with it, and there was nothing really to do then.
	That's really interesting. I mean, it relates a lot to my experience as well.
	I feel like I have this sort of involuntary trend towards self-evaluation and rationality.
	It's kind of like I figured out that that's where I was going.
	But it's like throughout my entire life, it was sort of mildly on autopilot, but when I figured out that that's what I was doing, I kind of sped it up a little bit more.
	But I guess my final sort of core question would be, do you think that the reason we have this sort of automatic trend is biological, or do you think something happened to us to set us apart from what seems like a sea of people who Don't care about self-evaluation or adamantly oppose it.
	Hmm. I don't know.
	I don't know. I don't know.
	And in a sense, I'm not sure that it matters, right?
	So, the first person who was horrified at watching a child being beaten...
	We don't know why he was horrified.
	I mean, people used to kind of enjoy it, or at least just view it as something that you had to do.
	But the first person who was horrified by it Was horrified by it.
	Why was it environmental genetic?
	I mean, I don't know. And in a sense, it doesn't really matter, because the reality is that it is horrifying, and we should be horrified by it.
	And if you read 18th to 19th century literature carefully, you can see the emergence of this new psycho class of people who actually have sympathy, right?
	So if you've ever read...
	Gosh, I should know this.
	It's in Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, of course, where Raskolnikov is talking about a dream that he was having where the peasants are beating a horse.
	He's with his father.
	And he's a little boy, and the drunken peasants are beating the horse and jeering as they flay the horse's skin and laughing.
	And it's coarse. It's a horrifying coarse scene.
	And Dostoevsky's alter ego as a child, you know that this is something that Dostoevsky experienced.
	There's no doubt. It's so vivid.
	And he felt hideous.
	He felt horrified. He was weeping and trembling and saying to his father, why are they beating the poor horse?
	Why are they hurting the poor horse?
	And his father was like, they're drunk.
	And Dostoevsky was horrified by that which the peasants' sadism was exalting in.
	And as somebody pointed out in the chatroom, this is true.
	Nietzsche, of course, embraced a horse very tenderly just before his final breakdown, which may have been psychological, may have been syphilis.
	I think that the jury remains out and probably will remain forever out.
	I've read, two or three years ago, I read a short biography of Herman Melville.
	And Herman Melville, of course, spent quite some time at sea before writing himself into exhaustion and spending the last 30 years of his life wasting away as a customs inspector.
	And one of the times that he was at sea, his ship sailed past a ship that had half sunk and there were a few people standing on it.
	And the sailors on his ship, they all laughed and jeered and threw things at these poor people, these poor men on the ship that had mostly sunk.
	And went sailing on, laughing at their misfortune.
	And Herman Melville was shocked and appalled and horrified at these people sailing on and leaving these people to die and be eaten by sharks and die of thirst and starve to death and just die this horrible death rather than just stopping and picking these people up, which they could have done, of course. He didn't have the power.
	He wasn't the captain. He couldn't make them go back.
	But this tormented him, this cruelty.
	And you can see a lot of this.
	Going on. It doesn't really show up in Shakespeare, because Shakespeare was still too primitive a psychoclast for that to occur.
	But how these people emerge, there are, of course, a variety.
	You could just say genetics, which is not saying anything, because there's no proof for it.
	Or... You could say that it is some tender kindness that they experienced when they were younger that got passed along and accumulated until a generally sensitive conscience appeared.
	I don't know. I couldn't tell you.
	I have some thoughts about it within myself, which we don't have to get into here because I've talked about it before.
	But... Yeah, somebody put the quote in.
	Sorry, he says, Father, Father, what are they doing?
	Father, they're beating the poor horse.
	Come along, come along, said his father.
	They're drunken and foolish. They're in fun.
	Come away, don't look. And he tried to draw him away, and he tore himself away from his hand, and beside himself with horror ran to the horse.
	The poor beast was in a bad way.
	She was gasping, standing still, then tugging again and almost falling.
	And the child is horrified.
	At this cruelty. I don't know what causes this kind of progression.
	I don't know. I don't think anybody does.
	But in a sense, it doesn't matter because I can't eliminate my horror at violence.
	I can't eliminate it.
	I think I was doing some research for a video that I'm working on.
	I've never seen the movie, but I saw a scene from...
	Road Warrior, where some guy tries to catch a boomerang with a blade on it, and his fingers get cut off.
	Horrible, I felt like throwing up when I saw that.
	But of course, all of his companions in the movie, they just jeer at him and laugh at him and so on, like, ha ha ha, sucker, kind of thing, right?
	Well, I mean, this is predators versus human beings.
	This is like sociopaths versus human beings who actually have some sort of emotion.
	And so it is a chilling transition that has occurred.
	I don't know.
	I don't know. Okay, okay.
	As you pointed out, it definitely is a progression towards More rationality, more empathy, more sympathy and love and all of that.
	So do you think that there's something for you after FDR? Do you think that the same progression that you've gone on is going to continue and you'll lose the steam for FDR and move on to something more rational, I guess?
	No, there's nothing beyond FDR for me.
	No, I mean, because philosophy is everything.
	I mean, philosophy is everything.
	I get to...
	I mean, the thing I do miss is working on fiction, but that's just not possible with being parenting.
	I do miss fiction, but no, there's nothing bigger than philosophy.
	Philosophy is everything.
	So there's nothing I could do that would be bigger.
	I'm going to think, ooh, he'll be a news anchor, you know?
	Well, so I get to read other people's news, but I have too much to bring to the intellectual realm to be a mouthpiece for other people.
	So it's like, oh, he'll...
	I don't know. He'll narrate nonfiction.
	He'll narrate documentaries because he's got a nice voice or whatever.
	It's like, well, that's just putting other people's words in my mouth.
	And I think I'm, you know, I have too many Bohemian Rhapsodies to be a cover band, if that makes any sense.
	So, no, I don't think there will be anything.
	And also, I mean, and I was very much aware of this when I went down the road towards FDR, that particularly going full-time, I mean, it was a one-way street.
	It wasn't like, oh, I'll give it a shot and if it doesn't work out, I'll just go back into software.
	Because, of course, these days, I mean, what do people do when they want to hire you?
	They'll Google the shit out of you, right?
	Yeah. And like, hey, he's an atheist.
	Hey, he's an anarchist.
	Hey, he's whatever, right?
	And so I knew that it was sort of a one-way street, which is one of the reasons why it was so tough to make that decision to jump out of the plane, because you may not hit something hard at the bottom, but you sure as hell aren't going back into the plane, right? Yeah, yeah.
	Well, you know, I'm just looking at how I feel and I feel very intrigued and very sort of I really want to keep talking to you, but I mean, I really also don't want to step on anyone else's time.
	So, I don't know. Let's just take a pause and see if people are enjoying our chat, or if there's other people who have questions, if you want to talk, speak up, or if you're not this guy, if you want to talk, speak up, or if you want to type a question into the chat, we can work on that, or, you know, I'm certainly enjoying it, so you can...
	Yeah, I mean, I really have, like, a few more questions I feel like that are I feel like we're just, I don't want to say scratching the surface, but we're like 40% into it, at least that's what I'm experiencing emotionally, and I don't know, I really want to continue, but you know, there's like 59 other people, so...
	We've had two questions, but if you want to talk for another few minutes, I don't think we have anyone else who wants to talk just now, and I can do the questions later.
	I'm certainly interested in talking about this stuff, so if you have any other questions, we can go for another little while.
	Okay. Sure.
	Thank you. Oh, sorry.
	We do have a question? No, we did have another guest.
	Had some therapist-specific questions to ask.
	All right, well, dude, hang on, and we'll do this thing, and maybe we can come back.
	Which dude? Hang on. Sorry, dude I'm talking to.
	Hang on. And let's do the other question.
	All right, let me just connect him up here.
	Hello? Hello.
	It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Hi. Yes, it's Ash.
	Oh, hey, how's it going? Hey, it's going well.
	I'm really enjoying the show.
	The reason why I wanted to contribute was because you were talking about therapists and different techniques.
	Right. Yeah, go ahead.
	Yeah. So there was an early...
	On experience I kept having with this therapist and I didn't understand it.
	I thought she was like a bad therapist or something.
	But what I've learned after sticking with her for about two years now is that her technique is a lot of listening and a lot of slowing down like you had earlier mentioned.
	And this is something that has really taken me as a her client out of those weird cycles where the therapist does turn into the person that I had never confronted or I'm holding unprocessed stuff with and for some reason it doesn't happen and like it might happen but she doesn't let it slide like we slow down as soon as she starts seeing it happening and It's almost like we acclimate back to the session rather than staying within weird cycles like that.
	Does that make any sense?
	It does. And I think what you're saying is that your therapist has to trust her own instincts that things may be awry, circle back.
	And so a therapist is demonstrating the kind of behavior that is valuable to you, right?
	So like when my therapist is like, that statement about circling her like a shark felt odd.
	It felt like an odd thing.
	And so she felt that.
	She paused.
	She circled back.
	She explored.
	She primarily was exploring not what I said, but her own emotions, which led to what I said.
	And so if I understand what you're saying, your therapist will pause when things are getting oogie because she feels that something is awry.
	And so really what she's doing is showing you that instincts are important.
	Because when my therapist would feel something was awry, and she could be quite sharp with me at times, not often, but quite sharp with me at times, when I was attempting to manipulate or control her, she would really, like, stop, stop.
	So she would get angry and she would be assertive, not aggressive.
	And I would learn from that that her instincts were helpful to her.
	And what that translated into was my instincts could be helpful to me.
	Because, you know, bad people will always try and tell you that your instincts are prejudice or foolishness or unimportant so that they can just, but I think your therapist is.
	is trusting her own instincts, which causes her to pause and explore things, which helps you and also shows you the value of those instincts.
	Absolutely.
	I think even further, when we first met, there was a lot of talk about what I learned at FDR.
	There was a lot of me doing RTR in front of her, and she would identify that as something So after being with her for so long, it was just like I would start RTRing right off the bat, and most of the time with her is her physical experience.
	It's almost like I'm journaling.
	I'm like journaling out into space and then I'm getting her expressions and then I'm bouncing them back to myself so I can examine how I feel about those reactions she's having and we talk about them.
	It's really interesting.
	It was disorienting not to have somebody examine everything that I was saying That's what a lot of other therapists had done and I felt kind of like I wasn't experiencing therapy the way I should be because it wasn't the same thing that I had experienced and I'd been through many,
	many therapists. But I do think the reason why I've stuck with this one therapist is because of how different it has been and the course of my personal change It has not been like any other course I've ever felt, so I do feel like I'm well out of the cycle type thing.
	So I just thought that was an important thing to contribute.
	I think that's great.
	And I also wanted to just sort of follow up with that by saying that, and this comes out of a lot of movies where there's this dramatic, like so in Good Will Hunting, he's got all these problems, this Will has got all these problems, and then he has this big emotional breakdown, And then he's fine.
	And there is this idea that you have these secrets.
	There's a few films which don't do that, right?
	So Girl Interrupted with Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie.
	She has no secrets.
	You don't even know what the hell's wrong with her, which I think is a bit of a cop-out.
	But there is this sort of belief that you have, and this is true of ordinary people as well, where he's got one going to the secrets, but he's got the secrets and you're hiding things and then the therapist breaks through and you vomit out your secrets and then you're fine.
	And that may work fine in film.
	But that's not what therapy is.
	That's not what therapy is, at least in my experience and anyone I've ever talked to.
	It's true that people have secrets, and it's true that those secrets come out and there's some emotional release, but you don't just blur out your secrets and then you are fine.
	What happens is you may come across certain secrets, although most people know what they're going into therapy for, and then what happens is it's a slow and painful process.
	just changing your habits of, of becoming more self-aware, more self-attentive, uh, more curious about yourself, more patient, less reactive, slowing yourself down.
	It's, it's just a slow and painful process.
	Like we don't say to somebody who's got a bad tennis serve that you just yell at them until they vomit up their bad tennis serve.
	And then they're a great tennis player.
	No, they have to go overcome their old habits slowly, repetitively, exasperatingly, painfully, uh, And I don't want people to get that impression that therapy is you just vomit up your secret and you're fine because then people are like, well, why is this taking so long?
	And I did vomit up my secret and I'm still not fine.
	And I know that wasn't directly related to what you were saying, but given that you were talking about two years, it is a patient and slow process.
	We would not expect to become an expert snowboarder In less than two years and it takes time and there's no big vomit that you feel great afterwards and everything's fine forever.
	Right. I think the greater empathy the therapist has and the more trust they have in themselves and their own emotional experiences, like you were just saying, the trust they have about their intuition or something like that.
	I think It leaves more opportunity for the client or the patient to make mistakes per se, but maybe lead down the less obvious paths.
	In Good Will Hunting, Will wasn't opening up and being vulnerable and accepting the type of conversation that he was involving himself in.
	Then he had the breakdown, but with With real therapy, I think, when you're doing the service to yourself, you're slowing down to a point where you can examine things that aren't obviously pressing, like child abuse.
	You may be talking about different topics when your therapist knows that deep down somewhere you're talking about direct You may be dealing with issues corresponding with your abuses, but you may be dealing with things on the surface of your current life.
	It feels like in Good Will Hunting he was saying, well, this is not good enough.
	This is not what we're here to discuss or you're not, you know, you're not a good enough patient or something like that.
	Like we all viewed Will like...
	You're a good person, you're a victim, but you're not a good patient yet.
	And you'll be a good patient when you break down your barriers or something like that.
	Yeah, this idea that you...
	Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but I think it's a specifically religious notion.
	And the religious notion is that inside everyone is a pure, God-given soul that you just have to break through to that and then you have this great person.
	And that, of course, is nonsense.
	Physiologically, scientifically, materialistically, biologically, it's just not true.
	If you grow up with trauma, you have a different brain.
	There is no non-traumatized, original, God-given brain that you just have to unlock and let loose in the world.
	I mean... Good Will Hunting, although it was an entertaining film, is full of the most unadulterated, pie-in-the-sky bullshit.
	And you simply know for a fact that the writers, I guess Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, never went through therapy.
	Because Matt Damon's character is kind of sociopathic, right?
	I mean, he gets involved in brutal fistfights.
	He punches walls when he's with Milly Driver's character.
	He gets thrown in jail.
	I mean, he's really disturbed.
	He is really grim.
	He is a very, very broken human being.
	And we know, I mean, the evidence is pretty clear, that that's, you know, a very powerful amygdala.
	That's a shrunken neofrontal cortex.
	The inhibition mechanisms are simply not present.
	There's a great deal of rage that is literally hardwired into his brain.
	There's no impulse control.
	I mean, I'm no expert, but it seems to me pretty much textbook sociopathy.
	And what happens?
	Well, he says, I was abused.
	And he cries a little.
	And then suddenly he's great.
	He's having a relaxed chat with his therapist.
	And he's going off to have a great relationship with this woman.
	But the symptoms that he shows are pretty close to not easily treatable.
	And it takes many, many years for somebody like that to even begin to have a stable relationship.
	But they don't say that that's the beginning.
	It's just like one.
	I was, you know, I cry because I was abused.
	And now I'm no longer a sociopath.
	And I can go and have a great relationship with this great woman and have a great career.
	And everything's fixed.
	That is ridiculous fantasy.
	That's like saying that somebody who's going through brutal rehabilitation to get the use of their limbs back, that all they have to do is cry once and then they can do the ballet.
	I mean, it's a slow and grim process.
	The only thing that's more grim is not doing it.
	What somebody said, I think maybe James just said it earlier, Was about how a lot of...
	Oh, no, you were saying that the majority of the work happens outside of therapy.
	And I think a more accurate movie would really...
	You know, a lot of the scenes would take place outside of therapy.
	And you would...
	You know, I mean, that would be my movie.
	That would be my experience.
	All this crazy shit that I go through, you know, in between my sessions.
	All those thought processes and analyzing and...
	And then you're prepared for what you want.
	You feel like you're prepared for what you want to talk about.
	Then you hit therapy and you say something about, you know, circling around the building like a shark and that's all you end up talking about, you know?
	Right. And it's really important to talk about it.
	Exactly. Yeah.
	Anyway. Thanks.
	You're very welcome, and thank you for sharing that.
	Again, these are just people's experiences.
	I'm pretty strong with that one, but of course, other people may have different experiences.
	All right. Thanks.
	Have a great rest of the show.
	Thank you. Somebody's written, I know I had a violent childhood, but I can't remember any specific instances.
	Is it my job to convince people The therapist.
	First of all, I'm so sorry that these memories have carved their way into your head and those experiences have occurred for you.
	It's not your job to convince your therapist because Your therapist is not a court of law.
	Proof is not required for therapy.
	The fact that you experience this, that you have these feelings, that's what needs to be explored.
	In a sense, the truth of falsehood, I'm not saying any of it is false, but the truth of falsehood is irrelevant.
	If you feel angry at someone, whether it's justified in some objective sense for you to feel angry at that person is not part of therapy at all, in my knowledge.
	Again, maybe there's therapists who do that, and I could be completely wrong, but in my experience and people I've talked to and so on, that is not what it's about.
	What it is about is trying to understand why you feel what you feel.
	If it turns out that it's an unjust redirect from some earlier abuser or whatever, then that will come out during therapy.
	But it's not the job of the therapist to say, this is true, this is false, that is just, that is unjust.
	That is not the job of the therapist.
	In fact, I would say it's the opposite.
	Somebody has asked me what my opinion is of Tony Robbins.
	Do you think his approach has any value or do you think it is all mumbo jumbo self-help crap?
	I don't know enough about Tony Robbins.
	I think I've only watched one of his speeches at TED where he made fun of Al Gore.
	I thought that was all junk.
	But I don't really know enough about Tony Robbins.
	About Tony Robbins to know whether he does good or bad stuff.
	Given that he is chatty-chatty with Al Gore, not anything particular against Al Gore, but he's a statist, which means he's not a philosopher, which means that anything that is true that he says is only accidentally true and only accidentally helpful.
	You know, like a broken clock is right twice a day.
	People who don't start out with philosophy will only give you accidental help.
	Somebody may finally whip out the checkbook because this call has been extraordinarily helpful so far.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	I really do. Tony Robbins has great charisma drive and confidence, but not really much else.
	No. Come on. Come on.
	Tony Robbins is a giant with a jaw the size of Peru and banana hands and teeth that look like glinty gravestones all in a row.
	So, no, he's a giant of a man and he's, I guess, traditionally good-looking and so on.
	And I mean, I think he's full of fairly unadulterated bullshit, but he should put his stuff out for free, in my opinion.
	Anyway. And his banana hands, yeah.
	Question. Are negative emotions always a sign of illogical philosophy in the mind caused by early influences from the parents?
	Can you just write what you mean by negative emotions?
	I'm not sure what is meant by negative emotions.
	Somebody's asked if I would put FDR on my resume.
	That's not... Since I'm not going to be stopping FDR. I mean, you understand, I'm selling kidneys before I stop FDR. I don't think you all get just how committed I am to this philosophy show.
	I mean, I'm driving 14 hours to do a one-hour speech.
	I'm going to fly into Philly.
	They're not paying me.
	I'm spending... FDR income to fly out to Philadelphia for one day to address 200 student youth leaders in the liberty movement.
	I'm the opening speaker.
	I'm not getting paid for doing these speeches.
	I'm not getting paid for going on television or on the radio.
	I am simply doing it because it reaches more people.
	And so I think you all get just how committed I am.
	To doing this.
	Even more so now that I've become a parent.
	I absolutely owe it to Isabella to do what I can to make the world a better place.
	We either win or we're going to lose.
	But when I was a kid, there was a poster that you'd sometimes see in textbooks or whatever.
	And what it was, it was from the Second World War where I think there was not a draft or in England there was a volunteer.
	And there was a kid who was sitting at the knee, his son, sitting at the knee of his father, who was smoking a pipe.
	And I think the wife was lurking in the background.
	And the kid was saying, Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?
	And underneath it was like, what will you say?
	You know, what will you say, say, say to your child, child, child, about what you were doing in the Great War?
	Well... That's my resume for what I'm doing in the great war between reason and prejudice, between truth and culture, between fact and fiction, between integrity and exploitation, between intimacy and livestock ownership.
	Between voluntarism and violence, that's the Great War.
	And they will have to pry the weapon of reason from my cold dead hand, so to speak.
	I am not backing down.
	I am ferocious, full throttle, full forward.
	So, no, there is no FDR on my resume because there is nothing.
	I'm going to live in a tent now.
	And podcast into a piece of wood, if I have to, to keep going.
	I'm not stopping.
	Somebody, is it possible, could you talk a bit about journaling?
	What it is, and what its purpose is?
	The self is a fiction.
	Identity is a fiction because the self is a singular.
	The truth is it's selves.
	It's what I call the mycosystem and other people have called it other things, internal family systems.
	I don't call it a family system because to me a family is only part of what goes on But journaling is entering into a conversation with yourself to recognize that you are not a single entity, but you are a multiplicity.
	So it is my fundamental belief that society cannot be any different in its organization than our relationship to ourselves.
	If our relationship to ourselves changes, then society changes as a whole.
	And the model of society is that you get a vote and others make the decision.
	And they can bullshit you as much as they want to.
	So Obama can say he's going to do all of this stuff.
	You'll get one out of a couple of million votes and he'll get in and then he'll do whatever he wants.
	And in the model of the psyche...
	Which is the basis for how we look at...
	See, this is... When I talk about looking at the world through the filter of the self, the only reason that an insane fucking system like democracy makes even the slightest shred of sense is that that's how people treat themselves.
	Which is a step up from dictatorship.
	Right? The only reason that a status society makes any sense is that people are looking at it through the distorted fucked up lens of personal...
	Dictatorship, of personal statism.
	So the ego is the president and the voters are the alter egos, the emotions, the impulses, the instincts.
	And yeah, maybe you'll listen to them a little bit, maybe you'll bullshit them a little bit, but the ego gets the final say.
	And that's how people treat themselves.
	And they treat themselves that way because that's how they're treated as children.
	You may get a little bit of say, but the parent makes the final decision.
	And the teacher makes the final decision.
	Cub Scout leader. He makes the final decision.
	Yet birds manage to fly in a flock without a single leader.
	And monkeys do not have a single leader.
	And when deer or antelope are grazing, they do not have a leader who tells them to go and drink.
	They all just slowly drift over that way.
	So if we can simply approach the social organization skills of your average flock of starlings If we can at least evolve as the most intelligent and accomplished species to that level of social organization achievable by...
	Birds with brains the size of a goddamn pea, then we will be far, far ahead.
	So, no, I do not think that...
	Sorry, let me rephrase that.
	Journaling is entering into a conversation with yourself so that you can get a sense of the multiplicity of your own being, so that you can have...
	There's nimbleness in your response.
	Various aspects of the self are better at dealing with various challenges in life, right?
	There are times when we need to be delicately empathetic and there are times where we need to be harshly assertive.
	These are not the same parts of us, right?
	We don't use our little finger for everything, right?
	We can use our little finger to get a particularly deep booger, but we don't use our little finger for that much.
	And the idea that I'm going to type with my little finger, I'm going to cook with my little finger, I'm going to, you know, wipe my ass just with my little finger, oh, that's a puncture and a thing we don't want to get into, right?
	Right? But the little finger is just useful for a couple of tiny things, mostly in conjunction with the other fingers.
	In the same way, we don't use a particular aspect of ourself for everything.
	We want to have all of the organs, all of the aspects, all of the limbs, all of the things...
	Within ourselves that are applicable to various circumstances.
	So we need to have that flexibility with ourselves.
	But in order to have that we need to be in a conversation with ourselves.
	We need to have respect and negotiation with ourselves.
	We need to trust our various selves.
	so we have that fluidity to change to change gears so to speak to meet the challenges in life all right do we have any other questionies or should we go back to our earlier combo in the few minutes we have left
	Going to meet a listener for dinner tonight, so that should be a lot of fun.
	Are you still on the line?
	It's a virus, right? Yeah, hey, what's up?
	I thought maybe you were still looking for a question.
	You know, actually I was looking through, I think you might have missed a question by C.G. Perbaugh.
	I think he asked a question about whether or not negative emotions are stemming from irrational philosophies and he asked him to define negative emotions and he said, Despair, irrational hatred, and a few other things.
	Yeah, I'm not sure. You might have missed that one.
	Oh, okay. Well, I don't think there are negative emotions.
	There are emotions that we experience as negative, but that's entirely...
	That's entirely helpful. So the traditional example is you want your tooth to hurt when it first gets infected.
	You don't want it to hurt when the infection is entering your bloodstream and heading towards your heart.
	So yes, it hurts when your tooth gets infected and you damn well want it to hurt so that you can get the tooth looked at.
	So we have emotions that we experience negatively but they're not negative emotions any more than the pain of putting your hand on the stove is a negative emotion.
	You absolutely want Stephen R. Donaldson used to have a series with Thomas Covenant who was a leper, and he used to have to do a VSE, a visual search of extremities, because he could not feel, and so he'd need to check his hands and his feet to see if he stubbed himself or cut himself because he couldn't feel those things.
	That's a lot of work.
	That's what life is like without those sort of negative emotions.
	Despair is a hugely helpful emotion because despair tells you that you should give up.
	And giving up is an absolutely essential part of life, knowing when to surrender.
	It's absolutely important, right?
	So when you've been in a relationship and the relationship is dysfunctional and you've worked as hard as you can to try and change that relationship or at least change yourself and hopefully the other person follows suit...
	If they're not, at some point you're just going to feel despair, and it's like, damn, that's a good, good feeling.
	Now, there are certainly destructive emotions, right?
	So people can hate someone in proxy, right?
	So a racist, you know, is going to hate blacks or whatever, right?
	But that's not... Really what's going on, of course, what's really going on is that he was taught racism by those around him when he was young.
	And he was threatened with punishment if he did not fall in line with that particular and peculiar set of bigotries.
	And that's so he needs to get to the original feeling for sure.
	You don't want to have stand-ins for stuff, right?
	So when people are looking, right, so let me just sort of give this very brief sketch, right, of the relationship.
	So people, let's just say you have an authoritarian father, you get a little bit of a say, but then he just tells you what's what.
	You have an input, but then he decides what's actually going to happen.
	And so what happens?
	Well, then you just get used to that kind of conformity, you get used to that kind of delegation, or rather having that responsibility taken away from you.
	And infused into an authority figure.
	And that's how you grow up.
	That's how you treat yourself, right?
	So when you have emotions that are inconvenient to the people who have power over you, who want power over you, then you repress and you avoid them.
	And you banish them.
	Because that's what has happened to your thoughts and feelings and instincts in your relationship with authority.
	Since that is how you treat yourself, because that's how you were treated, when you look at society and you see this crazy situation where people are lied to and bribed and so on, and then the voting is a ridiculous act that means nothing, and then the rulers just go ahead and do what they're going to do anyway.
	You say to yourself, why can't people think about things that are different?
	Well, they can't think about things that are different because they are not different.
	That's how they treat themselves.
	So your dad is authoritarian and then you look at an authoritarian state of society and it just makes sense because that's how you treat yourself.
	It would be weird.
	It would cause great hostility and anxiety in you to even approach something different because it would make your chains of your prisoners in the basement of your brain begin to rattle and crank and that's anxiety provoking for everyone.
	And so then what happens is when you criticize the authoritarian structure of society as an anarchist looking at a state of society, that immediately translates into, so, so you're saying my dad's an asshole.
	You're saying my dad was just a bully.
	Now, they don't know that because if they knew that, they would recognize that and that's why therapy is so important.
	You slow things down and you figure out where's this emotion coming from, but they react to you when you criticize the state or you criticize God.
	They react to you with exactly the same emotional template as you criticizing their mom or their dad or whoever was their authority figure as a kid.
	I mean, this is stuff we've talked about from the very beginning, or at least close to the very beginning of FDR, and this is all I think, borne out psychologically and scientifically.
	I mean, this is the way that things work.
	So that is a negative emotion that is unjust, for sure.
	Sorry, that is an emotion that not only is it difficult to experience, But it also puts you in the wrong direction.
	So it's like if your tooth was sore, but for some weird reason it gave you the symptoms of appendicitis, that would be a bad thing, right?
	So worse than almost if your tooth wasn't sore.
	So I would not view the emotions as negative, but they certainly can be misapplied through a lack of self-knowledge to the wrong thing or the wrong entity or the wrong person.
	I hope that helps a little bit.
	So it's kind of like, just to paraphrase, these painful or destructive emotions are kind of like your body's way or your subconscious way of telling you that your operating software for your brain is wrong or something.
	Would that be an accurate summary?
	I would say that negative emotions are indicative of a threat.
	In the same way that negative sensations in the body are indicative of a dysfunction, right?
	An infection or stubbing your toe or something like that.
	So they're evidence of a threat.
	And there are two things in your mind that can be threatened.
	Only two. Only two things in your mind that can be threatened.
	The first thing in your mind that can be threatened is the truth.
	Right? And so, this is what occurs for me when I get into those bullshit debates where, you know, the people make all these self-detonating statements like determinists demanding that I change my mind towards the truth, right?
	I mean, people make all this nonsense.
	And so, what's being threatened is the truth, is valid arguments by manipulations and language.
	So, I get angry or I get annoyed.
	These days, I just kind of get bored.
	It's too obvious.
	I mean, it's not even worth it, right?
	And so there is a threat to the truth.
	And that elicits in me, you know, quote, negative emotions, which I'm glad to be having.
	Otherwise, I'd still be having the same damn debate, but the same damn determinist who started it all.
	I don't know, Francois or something like that, right?
	And so I want those emotions, like to the point where it's just like, oh my god, I'm so tired of going around and around this mulberry bush that I'm just not going to do it anymore.
	I want that. The truth is being threatened.
	It's not being resolved or it's not moving forward.
	So I want to feel annoyance and despair and boredom and all that.
	So I just don't waste my time.
	So the truth can be threatened in your mind.
	But that's very rare, because for the truth to be threatened, you actually have to know the truth.
	But most times, what is being threatened in people's minds is not the truth, but a lie.
	But a lie. Right?
	So, as I've made the argument many times before, God is not something that people believe in.
	God is just the fear of other people's disapproval and attack for not saying you believe in God.
	God is simply the fear of attack from others.
	And so, when you say, there is no God...
	What you're saying to people is, you were lied to.
	Your parents and your priests and your teachers, they were all liars.
	And they all know that, deep down.
	And I don't mean conscious liars, not necessarily, but they all know that.
	And so what is being threatened in their minds is the lie.
	And, you know, like, you can think about the two things, right?
	So, two examples, right?
	So, in one example, your appendix bursts and so you get it cut out.
	Well, that's sort of like... You've got something which is threatening the health of your body and you get it removed, right?
	So that's like something attacking the truth or the health.
	On the other hand, you have a demonic possession where you need like 12 priests and a fire hose of holy water and 12 or 13 burning popes or something to get it out of the little girl's body who's spinning like a top or something.
	And the demon, of course, resists the efforts to cast it out in the mythology, right?
	But the demon doesn't exist.
	The demon is a lie. The demon is a supernatural projection of epilepsy or mental illness or something like that.
	And so in that metaphor, you're trying to cast out something that is false from the body, which is strongly resisting it because it wants to stay there.
	And philosophy, of course, is a kind of exorcism wherein the demons of people's irrational and traumatized superstitions are confronted.
	And those people will begin twisting and biting and, you know, doing all of those cheesy horror film moves that they possess to do because those demons are put in there to exploit people, right?
	So people put the demon called God into people's bodies so that they can continue to reel money out of them so that Mormons will give 10% of their money to the church.
	And we'll go on two years of piss-poor paid...
	Missionary work to go and recruit helpless primitive people from Africa or less likely primitive people from South America.
	And so you put these demons in people so that you can have the demons pick the pockets and send you the money.
	And so there's a lot of resistance to those demons being cast out because other people's parasitical livelihood depends on it.
	So that's my approach.
	That's really interesting.
	You know, I was just...
	I was just thinking we're kind of coming to the end.
	Maybe you and I could schedule some sort of private call, make it a podcast out of that instead of doing the Sunday show thing.
	Sure. If there's more that you want to talk about, I'm certainly happy.
	Maybe we could make it an open call.
	I think some people said that they were enjoying the questions, so if people are interested, do that too.
	Yeah, because I feel like there's a lot more to talk about than the three minutes left before the call's over.
	But see if you can get, I think you're on a phone, right?
	See if you can get, you know, just like a $20 headset and Skype because the sound quality would be much better.
	Oh, yeah, you know, I'm not, I can't.
	Yeah, yeah, for sure.
	I'm going to go see if I can find something like that.
	Yeah, but hey, listen, thank you so much for talking to me and talking to me for so long.
	I mean, I feel really privileged.
	It's a lot of fun.
	You're definitely the most intelligent I've talked to in my entire life.
	It's illuminating.
	It's exciting. It's wonderful.
	It's such a great experience talking to you personally.
	So thank you for that. Well, I appreciate that.
	But remember, based on the theory of the ecosystem, I'm the most intelligent people that you've done.
	I'm the most intelligent town that you've talked to in your own life.
	We appreciate that, and we all take a bow, I suppose.
	But that's very kind, and I certainly do appreciate it, and I think that your questions are excellent.
	So I'm going to volley that compliment back to you, and thank you so much.
	Cool. Well, I'm going to shoot you an email.
	Just look out for that and we'll set something up.
	Alright. Well, thank you everybody so much.
	It was a very, very interesting conversation.
	I would strongly, strongly urge you to...
	To give therapy a shot.
	I think it is essential for people who are trying to buck.
	Even if you grew up in a fantastic household, bucking social prejudices is a real challenge, and I think you should not try and do it alone.
	If you have a support group of friends, of like-minded friends who you can work with, I think that's fantastic.
	Listen, in particular, in particular, in particular, this particular philosophy is a great challenge.
	It's a great challenge. I was listening to, and I would highly recommend it, shoot, what was it now?
	I don't have to remember it.
	It's a new Noam Chomsky book where he is interviewed, and...
	It's called What We Say Goes or something like that.
	Somebody promoted it on the board and I got it from audible.com, which is a great place for websites.
	What we say goes, the Middle East and the New World Order is the combo.
	And when you listen to Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein or any of the other thinkers who are somewhat more on the left, in fact considerably more on the left, versus some of the more right-wingers like Dershowitz and so on.
	But when you listen to the left-wingers, there's a group of them.
	There's an identifiable group and they are, you know...
	Pro-socialized healthcare and anti-Israeli apartheid, and they are for expanded social security and for a minimal role in the military, and they're skeptical of right-wing propaganda, though they seem to pretty much fall for left-wing propaganda.
	But they form a readily identifiable group in the same way that If you're into Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich and those loonies, then you have a readily identifiable group.
	And if you're into Ron Paul and so on, then you have a readily identifiable group.
	We don't have that.
	We're too spanking, squalling, new, fresh, young, and baby-faced.
	And I say this not particularly relative to my own Lance Hendrickson craggy visage, but I would highly, highly recommend.
	Don't do it alone.
	I think we really need to do a lot more.
	As a community to try and meet up.
	Oh! That having been said.
	We've got almost 50 people coming to the barbecue.
	And I'm sure there will be some more.
	And I'm sure there will even be some drop-ins.
	So we will order some extra grub.
	And we are, of course, expanding the compound where we'll be keeping all the fertile women.
	Just kidding. But I hope that you will be able to make it.
	Go to amiando.com forward slash FDR2010. To sign yourself up so that we won't be caught short, but that is happening Labor Day weekend 2010 up here.
	Yeah, just kidding. They're not fertile.
	But yeah, it's going to be a fantastic time.
	You know, it's so obvious that I never even thought of it, but it is true.
	This is our Galt's Gulch, right?
	This is where you get to come up And be entirely who you are without having to hide a single one of your philosophical and well-reasoned and empirically verified arguments and understandings.
	You can just come up and you know what it is?
	It is a tiny, tiny peninsula slice of the future.
	Because in the future, you won't have to dodge questions immediately.
	Around families, if that's an issue.
	You won't have to dodge questions around God.
	You won't have to dodge questions about your allegiance to the flag.
	You won't have to dodge questions about your allegiance to bullshit sports teams.
	You won't have to dodge any of this stuff because this will all just be generally known and accepted.
	So this is your tiny time travel bubble device to go into the future and to have a relaxed and enjoyable and a huge amount of fun social gathering.
	And if you haven't seen...
	FDR people do karaoke.
	You really can't claim to have lived at all.
	But I would strongly recommend that you come.
	It is going to be a fascinating and enjoyable time.
	Great conversation.
	Great singing. Hopefully Carl will bring up his cello and give us a lovely recital, as he's been doing for the past few years.
	It is very civilized, very enjoyable, a great deal of fun.
	And it is a little landmark slice of time and space that reminds us Reminds us what the hell we're actually building.
	What we're trying to create.
	What we're trying to build towards.
	And that is an oasis in the desert of the now.
	And I hope that you will be able to come up and join.
	Have yourselves an absolutely wonderful week.
	Please remember to donate if you can.

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