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Aug. 15, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:15:36

1723.5 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show Aug 15 2010

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	Hello. Hello.
	Is this Steph? Yes, it is.
	How's it going? How are you doing?
	I'm great. How are you? I'm doing good.
	Is this my time to talk, I'm guessing?
	Why not? Let's get started.
	All right.
	Well, I emailed you, I think, a couple days ago about the Army thing.
	Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you watched that video.
	What else would you like to chat about?
	Well, see, the thing is that I've watched most of your war ones, you know, your war podcast and everything on war.
	And I agree with everything you say, you know, about how most people join for financial or educational benefits and stuff.
	Right. And for some reason, that's not why I'm joining, you know.
	Now, have you already joined?
	Is that what's happening? Oh, no, no, no.
	I'm 16. Right.
	And so, what's your reason for joining or wanting to join?
	Actually, I'm not too sure why I want to join.
	That's the thing, but for some reason, it was just this summer that I started really, really, really badly wanting to join.
	Right, right. Now, do you want me to ask some questions?
	Did you want to talk? What's your preference?
	No, that'd be fine. What's your family history with aggression?
	Aggression? Mm-hmm.
	In other words, when you were corrected as a child, how did it go?
	What was the method?
	Oh, okay. Well, my father, he has anger problems.
	But, you know, he's nice whenever he's not angry, but whenever he gets angry, it's kind of like his mind shuts off.
	Go on. And it just goes off. What does that mean?
	What does that look like to you as a kid?
	Um... You know, he used to like...
	Well, he didn't... He never did this to me.
	He did it to my brother. Like, he used to grab him by the throat and lift him up.
	And so... He used to grab him by the throat and lift him up?
	Yeah, that's my brother.
	Oh, my. I'm so sorry.
	How terrifying. Go on.
	I'm sorry. It sounds like I'm not listening, but I totally am.
	So, go on. Oh, no.
	It's all right. Um...
	In our war history, my grandfather fought in World War II, and my dad fought in Korea and Vietnam.
	Right. Now, if we assume that their war experiences had something to do with the way that they turned out as fathers, is that how you want to turn out?
	Not at all. Aw, boo-boo, I'll see you soon.
	Oh, she wants to keep playing.
	Sorry about that. She's still not used to me having a Sunday show.
	Okay, so if we assume that their war experiences had something to do with who they are, and you don't want to become like that, that logically would make you more skeptical about their army experiences, but that's not the case for you, right? And I understand. I think I understand why, but...
	It's not a rational response to what you've seen, right?
	Or what you've experienced? Yeah.
	Right. See, and I thought the anger thing might have, you know, came from that.
	Because, you know, he only shows his real emotions whenever he gets, you know, impaired or drunk, you know?
	Well, and those may or may not be real emotions.
	Again, I'm certainly not going to guess one way or the other, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that they're real, but they may or may not be.
	Yeah. Because he never shows his emotions as a normal person.
	Like you said, in basic training, what they make you, I guess that's a result from that.
	Right. And what is your father's opinion about your military ambitions?
	Oh, he likes it.
	And why does he like it?
	Because my brother really isn't doing anything with his life.
	And his opinion is the military is the best way to kick off your life.
	Okay, so if I understand it correctly, your father's reasoning goes something like this, that your brother experienced a lot of assault when he was a child, a lot of violence when he was a child.
	A little bit. No, no, listen, lifting a child up by his throat is assault.
	I believe it's illegal. That's not a little bit, right?
	No, I know, but it's not like it happens, like, every day or something.
	That's all I'm saying. But, see, but that's, I mean, that doesn't matter.
	I understand that it's your family, but that doesn't matter at all.
	Like, there's no defense called, I didn't kill a guy yesterday, right?
	No, seriously, this is not a, I mean, I understand why, but it's a serious matter, right?
	I mean, I don't get to, I don't get to rape someone and then say as my defense, I didn't rape someone, it's not like I raped someone every day, right?
	I understand. It doesn't matter how often it occurs.
	James, can you get that person...
	Sorry, whoever's breathing...
	We're just getting a lot of background noise here.
	I'm just sort of interfering. That's better?
	Yeah, that's better. Okay.
	So listen, and I understand that everybody has, and myself included, right?
	But everybody has a desire to minimize what has gone on in the family that is negative and destructive.
	But to your father's reasoning, your brother is not making much of his life, and your brother experienced, let's say, an unusual amount of aggression as a child, and your father's solution to this is more aggression?
	In other words, your father threatened your brother as a child, which seems to have stripped him of his ambition, and so he feels that more threats are somehow going to solve the problem.
	In other words, if he gets a sergeant major to yell at your brother instead of him yelling at your brother, that everything will be better, right?
	But that's crazy, right?
	That's like saying, well, I have emphysema, because I've been smoking a lot, so the best thing to do is to double my smoking, right?
	Yeah. I wonder if you might be able to get to a place that's a little less windy?
	Yeah, that's what I'm calling.
	Alright, this should be better.
	Alright. So...
	So tell me what your justifications are or your reasoning is to join the army.
	What my reasoning is?
	Yeah. Mainly because, I don't know, really I never wanted to end up like my brother did.
	And I believe, I don't know, like I said, I might just have the wool pulled over my eyes right now, but I see it as like, you know, it'll make me stronger.
	A stronger hand? I can't really come off a stronger as in...
	I already know that I'm emotionally strong, so I really don't think anything that I see over there will affect me that much, which I've read about it and everything.
	I'm sorry, let me interrupt you.
	Why do you think that you're emotionally strong?
	Just from my past.
	And with all due respect to what you've gone through, that's not my first impression.
	Oh. And that doesn't mean I'm right.
	I'm just giving you my honest first impression.
	To me, an emotionally strong person is able to face up to the moral realities of his history.
	An emotionally strong person doesn't try and minimize lifting a child up by his throat.
	Doesn't laugh about it.
	Doesn't make it a joke. An emotionally strong person is able to look at that, square on, to feel the horror of that kind of abuse, to recognize it for what it is, and not to minimize or deflect it.
	That to me is not emotionally strong.
	And I hope you understand, I'm not calling you weak at all.
	I'm not calling you weak.
	I'm just saying that it takes a lot more emotional strength to face up to that kind of stuff than it does to watch a video on YouTube of what war looks like.
	Yeah. I think that...
	I mean, let me ask you this.
	Do you think that your father is an emotionally strong person?
	That's a tough question for me.
	Because, I mean, I really never talked to my dad about anything like that.
	I wouldn't, no. Well, isn't that kind of an answer?
	Yeah, I guess so. And what's the answer?
	I guess that is an answer that, no, he's not that strong.
	Emotionally. Right.
	Yeah, I mean, look, we equate toughness.
	I mean, a lot of people equate toughness with, you know, there was this, I don't know if you saw, there was this profile of McChrystal on 60 Minutes, right?
	And they said, you know, he rises at dawn, he eats only one meal a day, he runs five miles a day, he works 18 hours a day, and so on, right?
	Yeah. And that is considered toughness.
	You know, like the hard-bitten, flat-stomached, good-postured Marine.
	He's tough. He can go without water.
	He can march for days.
	He's tough. I don't think that's tough.
	To me, that's just masochistic.
	And, I mean, Hitler was a very hard worker as well.
	And, you know, Hitler was very disciplined in his own way as well.
	And so I don't, you know, Hitler set his sights on ruling Germany 15 years or more before it happened.
	You know, he tried having a revolution that didn't work, so then he went the democratic rule and he was patient and he played the game and he worked very hard and he denied himself.
	So that's not tough, that's just insane.
	And that's having a kind of masochism where you can punish yourself.
	And, of course, McChrystal ended up quitting by talking to a Rolling Stone reporter.
	He obviously didn't want to have the job, so he bad-mouthed the president in an interview, and he's not a dumb guy, but that's just what happens when you don't know yourself, and you don't know that you don't want to be there anymore.
	You just find some stupid way, some dishonorable way to quit.
	But that, to me, is not strength.
	That is not toughness.
	To me, a strength in toughness, a real toughness, is around facing up to the truth, right?
	People who accept the truth, people who fight for the truth, that is, to me, the very definition of what it means to have a tough, battle-hardened soul.
	To me, surrendering yourself into a hierarchy that brutalizes you and going along with that hierarchy and going wherever they tell you and shooting at whoever they tell you to and not resisting and not standing up for what is right and not being independent, that is not...
	To me, that is not courage.
	That is not strength of character.
	And so, to me, if you define that somehow inserting yourself into this violent hierarchy and leaving off Money that is stolen from citizens at gunpoint, because that's how the army gets paid, right?
	You don't earn your money. It's not like you're out there being a heavily armed greeter at Walmart, right?
	The people in the military, they don't get paid because they're productive.
	They get paid because other hardworking citizens have that money taken from them at gunpoint.
	And once you're in the army, if the army does something that you think is wrong, let's just say the army, the president decides to go and invade Iran, and you say, well, I don't agree with that, well, that doesn't matter anymore, right? I guess you can try and get conscientious object or you can try and get out, but that's a tough thing to do, though it is possible.
	But once you're in that hierarchy, so much of your decision making is now taken away from you.
	They can choose to extend, as you know, with stop loss, they can choose to extend your contract unilaterally without your say-so.
	Yeah.
	Yeah. That to me is toughness.
	Just thinking that, well, if I go and run around with a backpack on and people yell at me and I do push-ups, that's going to make me tough.
	That is not going to make you tough.
	That is going to break you down.
	And that is going to make you emotionally not accessible to your future wife, to your future children.
	I'm assuming you're not married and don't have kids.
	Correct me if I'm wrong.
	So you want to have your heart open to your wife.
	You want to be available to her.
	You don't want to have these haunted memories of being yelled at and brutalized and abused and maybe even shot people who've done nothing to harm you and having that blood on your hands.
	You don't want to carry that around for the rest of your life.
	You don't want to look your son...
	In the eye 10 years from now or 20 years from now and say, it's really important that you think for yourself and you don't just go along with the crowd.
	It's really important that you stand up for what's right and you don't bend down to what is easier or necessary or approved of by other people around you.
	You want to be able to have that conversation with your son and say, stand up for what is right, stand up for what is true, stand up for what is good.
	And you want to have the emphasis that comes from actually having done it, not just saying it, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, it does. Anyway, listen, I don't want to talk so much.
	Tell me what you think I'm saying.
	Am I way off base? Is there anything that makes any sense to you?
	No, no, no. You're right on target.
	I don't know if it's just that...
	I don't know where it comes from, but...
	I mean, because you said that kids aren't born, you know, they're taught...
	Like, into, say, if they were to join the army or whatever, right?
	Yeah. You know?
	But, I mean, I don't know if I was taught that, if that's why I'm thinking this way, or if I was born cruel or something, which I don't know.
	If you were born, sorry, cool, did you say?
	Cruel. Cruel.
	Like... No, no, no, no.
	You're not born... No, you're not born cruel.
	I don't believe that.
	I don't believe that for a second.
	I don't know. I can tell you what I think, right?
	Because you understand, I'm just some guy on the internet, so I'm just going to give you my opinions.
	I'm not going to say that this is all completely true, but this is, you know, you've called in to ask for my opinion, so I'll give you my opinion if you like.
	Look, you face a very important fork in the road.
	And it's a very powerful fork in the road, and not just for you, but for all of the generations that come after you.
	I want you to get married.
	I want you to fall in love.
	I want you to have a great life.
	I want you to have a great career.
	I want your wife to wake up every morning and wish that there was a God so she could get down on her knees and thank God that she has you for a husband because you're such a wonderful fellow.
	You're so loving, you're so giving, you're so strong, you're so firm, you're so committed, you're so sexy, right?
	I want her to wish there was a God so she could pray and thank Him for having you as a husband.
	She loves you that much. That's what I want for you and you and you and everybody who ever listens to this and everybody who doesn't listen to this.
	That's what I want.
	And I want your children to wake up and say, I am so glad to have the dad that I have.
	I wouldn't trade the dad that I have for anyone, no matter how many toys he came with.
	And I want your children to really love having you as a father.
	And when they're kids, they love it a huge amount.
	But when they get older, they will ten times appreciate who you were as a father.
	Because when kids are kids, they don't know how tough it is to think for yourself.
	They don't know how tough it is to stand up for what is right in a world that so often attacks the virtuous.
	My daughter doesn't know the struggles that I've gone through to be who I am.
	But when my daughter gets much older and she learns, for instance, about my family history, where I came from, what my childhood was like, and how different her childhood is relative to mine, she's going to love me even more.
	I mean, I want her to have that happiness and joy around me now, but in the future it's going to be even more so when she knows what struggles I had to overcome to become the kind of father or the kind of husband or the kind of person that I am now.
	I want that for you.
	And so this is the fork in the road.
	And the fork in the road is this, my friend.
	If you decide to not go into the military, and I wish there were a God so I could pray that you don't, but if you decide not to go into the military, Then you will have to decide why.
	I mean, you certainly should not go into the military because I don't think you should.
	That would be a terrible reason.
	And you should not go into the military because you just think it's a bad idea.
	You should not go into the military for very clear moral reasons that you agree with.
	That the initiation of force is immoral.
	That there is nothing defensive about the U.S. military.
	The U.S. has peaceful neighbors to the north and south and the largest oceans in the world to the east and the west.
	The U.S. is in no danger of being invaded.
	So there is nothing defensive.
	About the United States military.
	And you know that there's nothing defensive about it because it's called the Department of Defense rather than the Department of Imperialism.
	In the same way that you know there's nothing educational about the school system because it's called the Department of Education.
	It's always the opposite.
	It's always opposite land in the government world.
	So you will be initiating force against peaceful people and you will be paid by money stolen It's no different from being a pirate.
	It's no different from being a hijacker.
	It's no different from being a criminal.
	I'm not saying this prior to the knowledge of it.
	I'm saying this is an argument that is incontrovertible when you look at ethics from first principles.
	However difficult it is for us to accept, it is an incontrovertible argument that if the initiation of force is wrong, Then the current military system cannot be right because it initiates it and relies on it for its pay.
	Now, if you identify that, that is going to put you bang square on a collision course with your father.
	Yeah. Now, I'm not saying that you have to have these fights with your dad about the virtue of the military, because your dad grew up in a time when there was much less information available, when There was, I mean, information in terms of, I mean, the Korean War was propagandistic nonsense and had nothing to do with opposing communism and Vietnam and all of this.
	So they had much less information.
	Your dad had much less information when he was your age.
	He didn't have the internet.
	He didn't have shows like this.
	He didn't have people who were credible who were talking about the ethics of the situation that he was in.
	So in a sense, your dad had no chance.
	To escape that fate.
	Yeah. So I say this with sympathy.
	Sorry, go ahead. No, it's alright.
	Well, I just say this with sympathy.
	It's very important that we don't judge our elders according to the same standards that we have today.
	Yeah. Because it's like blaming my mom for not using email when she was 20.
	There is a certain amount of technology that is available that has made these kinds of conversations possible.
	But it is going to place you on a moral, in your own mind, in a moral collision course with your family history.
	Not just your father, but your grandfather, and Lord knows how far back this goes.
	Where you sit there and say, what my parents and grandparents got sucked into Almost without, not even against their will, but almost without a will, since they were so propagandized, there was so little information.
	I am having to make a different decision because I have a greater knowledge of ethics.
	Things have moved forward since those days, since the 50s, since the 70s, since the 40s.
	And so I'm going to choose a different path from my father, and in some ways it's the opposite path.
	And I'm going to hopefully inspire my brother into understanding that more violence is not the solution to the effects of violence and where he is today.
	And your father...
	I'm guessing, I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that your father is going to kind of get that you're making a fundamentally different choice.
	And in a way, it's only possible for you to make this choice in a way that was probably not possible functionally for your father.
	And he was, you know how you grew up in poverty, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, he was like that.
	He started work whenever he was, I think, 11 on summers and weekends.
	Yeah, me too. Yeah, he picked cotton over and it was in his neighborhood.
	Right. For somebody.
	Yeah, and it was like... And in the South, right, in the South, there's a big tradition of respect for the military, right?
	Mm-hmm. And, yeah, I live in Texas, so...
	Right, right, right.
	Yeah. Right.
	And so, yeah, and I guess...
	And he told me the reason he joined was to...
	Because there was nothing keeping him home, and he had no other choice, really.
	Like, he couldn't go to college or nothing because he didn't have money.
	So, that's why he viewed it as such a good choice.
	Right. And to put myself in his shoes in his day, you know, I'm very sensitive to the fact that I am, to a large degree, a product of my times, right?
	And that I have...
	The capacity to do what I'm doing.
	I mean, it's not like I would have been a big podcaster in 1950, right?
	There was no such thing. It never would have happened, right?
	Never would have happened. So I think with sensitivity to where your father is coming from, this is the challenge, right?
	Which is to make a different choice from our parents and Without necessarily detonating the entire family system, I think it's worthwhile.
	Now, I can't obviously know, and maybe you can't even know either, what's going to happen if you say, this is not for me.
	He's going to say, why? That's a tough spotlight to be put in, right?
	You say, the military is not for me.
	And he says, why?
	Well, the moral argument is pretty explosive, right?
	Yeah. Pretty defensive and stuff.
	Well... Yeah.
	Because he views the military as, you know, like, as this great thing, because, I guess, because it got him out of that, you know, where he was working constantly.
	And, you know, not getting paid for it or not.
	Right. So he's got a view of the military that is very positive, and I would suggest that his view of the military as positive may have had something to do with how he ended up dealing with aggression as a father.
	Well, he was the... He was a...
	My grandfather was an engineer in World War II, and he was a...
	You know how you watch video of Vietnam?
	Like, you know how they had the cameras?
	Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what he did.
	He was a camera guy.
	Oh, man. So he wasn't shooting people with bullets, just film, right?
	No, no, no. But he must have seen...
	He just carried a pistol with him.
	Yeah, he was just a camera guy.
	Right. Right.
	Because he even told me he had no interest in the combat form of it.
	Right. Well, I'm certainly pleased to hear that.
	I mean, that's a good thing.
	I'm glad that he dodged that bullet, so to speak.
	But, of course, in Vietnam, right, two to three million North Vietnamese were killed.
	That's like half a holocaust, right?
	It was monstrous what happened to the Vietnamese.
	They still have health problems from the biochemical weapons that were used over there.
	It's staggeringly horrendous what happened over there, all for this theory of the domino effect, which was never plausible.
	It was never real.
	This is the reality.
	This, to me, is emotional toughness.
	Which is to say, I'm going to make a different choice than my dad.
	And look, I'm not talking out of my ass here.
	I mean, I'm making different choices than both my parents.
	Very, very, very different choices around self-knowledge, around confronting the past, around therapy which they've not done, around raising my daughter without any aggression at all.
	These are diametrically opposite choices.
	So I'm not sort of yelling from something I've not done.
	I'm telling you that this has been my experience, and I think it'll be your experience.
	We'll see. But if you're going to make a different choice than your parents, an opposite choice to your parents, they're going to ask why.
	They're going to ask why. And I don't have any big, intelligent answer to give you, because the most honest answer is very explosive.
	Yeah, it is. And I don't know, I mean, I have no idea how that's going to go down, whether you should say that, whether you should not say that, whether you should just say, I don't know, Dad, I think I might be gay and the military is not the place for me.
	Whether that will be less explosive, I don't know, right?
	I don't know. You know, ever since I started watching So You Think You Can Dance, I find that I'm getting these special feelings that I just can't process, right?
	So... I want to go into the army, but the thing is I want everyone to be topless, so I'm not sure that's really the right motivation.
	Because they all seem very buff and sexy.
	So I don't know.
	No one can tell you what to do with this.
	I just wanted to point out where I think the pressure...
	If you go into the army, then you don't have to deal with that crossroads.
	Or in a sense, you've chosen...
	Those crossroads. Well, you're going to go and do what your father did.
	You're going to do what your grandfather did.
	And you won't face that fundamental moral problem with the family history.
	And that is a... Look, I'm not saying it's easy to go into the army.
	I think I'd be maybe the second worst soldier.
	I don't know. It would be me and Fabio or something.
	But... I'm not saying it's easy, but what I am saying is that it does step you off that train ride towards the train wreck of moral criticism of the patriarchy.
	So if you join the army, you don't have to have this conversation.
	And if you don't join the army and your dad asks why, I don't know what to tell you.
	But I will tell you that that's an uncomfortable place to be.
	And I think that's what's drawing you towards the army.
	It might be. You know, because, I mean, honestly, I couldn't tell you where my interest started, you know?
	But all I can tell you is that it did, you know, start.
	And that was the question I was going to ask.
	Was there ever a point in your life that you thought about joining the military or anything like that?
	Because, you know, you grew up in poverty and bad states, so...
	No, there was no time that I thought of joining the military, but I will be completely honest with you as I always try to be and tell you very openly that I had huge admiration for the military when I was younger.
	I mean, I grew up in England where, you know, we beat the Nazis and the Battle of Britain and our finest hour and no many, so many, so few and all the glories and all that, right?
	I mean, we sacrificed our very empire to save the world from fascism and national socialism and, I mean, and my family members were in the military and it was a huge deal and we got an incredible amount of propaganda.
	When we were kids about school.
	Now, this is particularly true.
	I mean, I was in boarding school, which is sort of a training ground for the future military men of England.
	And so we just got...
	Wave upon wave of pro-war propaganda about the hero.
	It was in the comic books.
	It was in the television shows.
	It was in the movies. It was endless and insistent propaganda about the courage and heroism and sacrifice and nobility of the military life.
	Now, I had never thought about joining the military.
	It's... I, you know, I'm just sort of combing over, because I've never really thought about why it never occurred to me.
	But, yeah, I mean, it could, I think I would just be too, I think I would just be too chicken.
	I'll be honest with you. I mean, I can't think of any other particular, it wasn't like I had these big noble ideals when I was younger.
	I just, I thought the, you know, when I see war movies these days, I literally cannot imagine I was watching, there was one that came out more recently about, it's called The Pacific, I don't know if you've seen it.
	It's a Tom Hanks production and it's pretty typical.
	Oh, he's taking Private Ryan?
	No, he's come out, it's a mini-series on the war in the Pacific between the Americans and the Japanese.
	Yeah. So these guys, they're in these PT boats, right?
	And they're coming from the ships, and they're going onto the shore, and there's gunfire all around.
	And, you know, half of them, they go over the edge of the boat, and they just get the shit shot right out of them, literally, right?
	I think we're talking about the same, but it's just a different name.
	Yeah, so I literally can't for the life of me imagine how these people got out of those boats.
	I can't imagine.
	How do you get out of your boat?
	It's like putting your hand into a blender, like putting your head into a blender.
	The number of people who get killed.
	And this is just, I mean, think about the Eastern Front.
	It was insane. The number of Russian soldiers who died relative to the numbers of American soldiers who died was 60 to 1.
	60 to 1 in terms of fighting fascism.
	And I just couldn't...
	I'm too chicken.
	I think it's a healthy kind of chicken.
	I'm happy to have it.
	And I have courage in other areas, I think.
	But I just, I couldn't imagine walking into a hail of bullets.
	Like if you ever see the movie Gallipoli, you should watch this movie Gallipoli.
	It's a very young Mel Gibson and some other guy whose name I can never remember.
	It's about a World War I battle.
	I won't give anything away, but I mean, these guys are all, they know they're going to die.
	They kiss their crosses and they hang them.
	They know that they're going to go over the trench and they're going to die because there's just streaming bullets.
	Streaming bullets, like three inches apart, each bullet.
	They're just walking into a big, giant human blender.
	And I could never understand how a human being could do that.
	I mean, you must kind of want to die.
	Yeah. And I think I've always been chicken shit or just love life too much.
	I just couldn't imagine that.
	You know, maybe that's two sides of the same coin.
	I don't know. But I wish more people were chicken that way.
	And, I mean, I thought about this once.
	If there wasn't, you know, the propagandize and, you know, like, Yeah, I don't think they'd go back to the draft.
	I think what they would do is they would make prisoners join the army.
	Yeah. Right? So they would round up illegal immigrants and they would say, we deport you or you do two years in the army.
	Or they would take people who'd be convicted of drug offenses, of which there are huge numbers in the US, of course.
	And they'd say, well, you can either do five years in jail or two years in the army.
	They would scoop people up that way.
	I mean, the problem, of course, with a volunteer army is that more than three quarters of people, they never fire their gun.
	Most human beings don't like to kill other human beings.
	So most people in a battle will not fire their weapons at the enemy at all.
	They will hide. They will do what I do.
	What I would do. I'd play dead.
	Whatever, right? You know, I'd...
	Oh, I stumbled and I fell.
	Whatever. You know, whatever.
	But... But most people don't want to shoot weapons at others.
	And so in World War II, I think it was, I can't remember the statistic, it was certainly more than 75%.
	It might be as high as 90% of people that simply did not fire their weapons at the enemy.
	The same thing is true in Vietnam.
	They just, human beings have a huge aversion to shooting other human beings, which is why you need a government so that it's all institutionalized and kept distant from you.
	And so an old volunteer army is a huge amount of training and equipping and all of that for just a few percentage points of people who are actually going to shoot to kill.
	And so it's really not very efficient.
	So they would find some other way.
	But the propaganda seems to be working for the moment, although I think it's beginning to diminish now.
	But yeah, they'll find some other way, or they'll just come up with robot armies or something like that if people won't kill.
	Yeah, and the thing, like...
	What do you think makes people...
	Because, you know, other than that 90%, there are 10% that will, you know, be on the front line shooting.
	What do you think makes people like...
	Do you think it is the government that makes them, you know, turn into where they're killers?
	No. No, it's not the government.
	Because the government's propaganda applies to everyone, right?
	Whereas there is...
	I mean, I don't know for sure.
	I don't think anyone knows for sure.
	But I think the most credible theory runs along something like this.
	If, as a newborn baby, you don't get affection, and you don't get held, and you don't get fed regularly, you don't get played with, you don't get eye contact, then you grow up with a black hole in your brain where your empathy center should be.
	If you're not shown empathy, empathy is like a language.
	You and I wouldn't learn English if we were just dropped as babies on some island and grew up somehow on our own.
	We wouldn't learn English.
	It's a language that needs to be taught.
	Excuse me, the same thing is true for empathy.
	Empathy is a language that needs to be taught by parents to children.
	If the language is not taught, then people just don't, they grew up without it.
	So if it's an infant, you don't get that kind of mirroring, or if you get abused.
	I mean, infant abuse is one of these things that people don't talk about, but it's much more prevalent than people think.
	Where infants get hit, where infants get burned with cigarettes, where infants won't have their diaper changed, they won't get a rash attended to, they'll be left hungry, they'll be punished, they'll be shaken.
	Infants can get severely aggressed against and that is such a terrifying and overwhelming and mind-altering experience.
	For a baby, that the baby grows up with a huge amount of aggression and fear and anger and almost no empathy.
	And it's those particular people who I think grow up with a capacity to kill.
	Because if you lack empathy, then shooting another human being is sort of like you and I stepping on a bug.
	Or you and I shooting some varmint, to use a term that you may be more colloquially familiar with than I, shooting some varmint who's going through your garbage.
	It's not like you want to do it, but it sort of has to be done.
	So I think that's where those people come from.
	You might want to watch a series called The Bomb and the Brain, which you might want to watch.
	It talks about this stuff in more detail.
	The Bomb and the Brain?
	Yeah, it's on YouTube.
	Oh, okay. I'll put the link in the chat.
	I've watched a couple things on YouTube, but they were like...
	I don't know if you've seen them.
	I looked up the army, and they were talking about how to pay out of the army or something, and they show actual video of soldiers doing...
	You've heard of the rapes and stuff that go on over there?
	Yeah. And everything?
	Yeah, they showed statistics and stuff.
	Yeah, I personally, I don't think that stuff convinces anyone, myself.
	Because if you're not overly horrified by that stuff, it's not going to turn you off.
	And for some people, it may in fact turn them on.
	Like, hey, free rape! Yay!
	Where do I sign up, right? So I don't think that stuff is going to be particularly helpful.
	I think that if you understand that if you make an opposite choice than your father or your grandfather, that you...
	You're going to have to come up with some reason why you're making that different choice.
	And that reason is either going to be a moral choice, which is explosive, or it's going to be a choice which is kind of fudging, in which case they're going to get suspicious.
	Either way, it's an uncomfortable situation.
	And for a lot of people, it's just more comfortable to forget about the moral realities.
	Let's just... I would rather face bullets than parental disapproval.
	I mean, seriously, a lot of people feel that way.
	I mean, that's one of the reasons why you still get people going into the military, because they're less frightened of people with improvised explosive devices than they are of a scowl and a frown from a patriarch.
	I mean, I understand it.
	It's a terrifying thing to go against your family history.
	Oh my God, it is a terrifying thing.
	To go against your family history.
	And it's tougher for you than it is for me.
	So I want to give you that kudos and that props for even considering this.
	Because my family was so fucked up That there was not this big social approval for what they did.
	I mean, nobody intervened to save me from my family, but there were no fucking parades for my family.
	There was no abusive family day, right?
	There's Veterans Day, right?
	The 11th of November.
	There's no, let's celebrate moms who beat on their kids.
	There's nothing like that.
	There's a highway near here called the Highway of Heroes, right?
	There's no highway called the Highway of Abusive Moms.
	So what you're facing in terms of going against your family history is much deeper and much more powerful in many ways than what I had to face.
	Because your father and your grandfather, and however long it goes back, they have a huge amount of social support for what they do.
	That's not the case. That was not the case with my family, so I just really wanted to point that out, that it takes, you know, stiffer balls than I have to do what you're doing, or stiffer balls than I have, right?
	Well, I appreciate it.
	There was a couple more questions about, you know, about the Army.
	One was, I just, the main thing that turned me off from it was just how the war in Vietnam and Iraq, you know, they I never thought they were going to end.
	They can't unless we pull out.
	Because they'd rather die than be slaves over there.
	And they're like, what do you call it?
	Like a gang, kind of.
	They're not like World War II or something where there's an actual army.
	They're more like spread.
	And a lot of times, like that I've seen, they look just like the civilians.
	Right. And so that was like the main thing I had against it, was I don't see a point in fighting a war that's not, you know, like, that, you know, you're basically trying to chase down some, I guess, thugs or criminals in the view of the government.
	Right. And of course, you don't know, right?
	There's this shadow war that Obama has expanded after George Bush, this shadow war where basically the CIA is being turned into a paramilitary organization where they're going around the world stuffing drone bombs down the chimneys of people that they suspect.
	Are being... of terrorism.
	I mean, they don't have a fucking clue.
	Excuse my French. I'm sure you don't mind.
	They don't have the first fucking clue who's a terrorist and who isn't a terrorist.
	Do you know that the conviction rate When people go back and actually check DNA samples and so on, the conviction rate, the accuracy of the conviction rate for the government, even in something like rape, where there are eyewitnesses, there's testimony, there's lineups, there's physical evidence, the conviction rate is pathetic.
	When the government tries to catch criminals.
	I mean, the government couldn't catch Bernie Madoff, right?
	The government can't catch all these Wall Street assholes who are profiting from the...
	In fact, they're paying them off with these huge subsidies.
	The idea that the government fights crime is insane.
	Washington, D.C. has one of the highest crime rates in America, and that's where the government is located.
	So they can't even control crime in the actual neighborhood outside the goddamn Capitol building.
	And so they can't identify, catch, and control criminals three blocks from where they all meet to pass laws.
	The idea that they can do it in Yemen or Iraq or Pakistan or Afghanistan is completely insane.
	What happens is some guy who's got a grudge says, my neighbor three doors down...
	Who slept with my wife?
	He's Al-Qaeda, baby.
	And then that floats around and it floats around and other people who want to get in on it who don't like the guy, then they go kill this guy.
	But there's no trial.
	There's no court of law. There's no establishing.
	It's always suspected terrorists.
	Well, based on what? Maybe the evidence is manufactured.
	Maybe the evidence is manufactured.
	Maybe this is a guy... Who's speaking out against the government.
	And then the government manufactures evidence.
	They hand it over to the CIA because the CIA will put a hit out on the guy.
	And they'll also get subsidies to further their, quote, investigation.
	So they get well paid off for marking some guy for the CIA to kill.
	The same thing happened in Vietnam.
	There was an assassination squad that was set up to supposedly kill the communist leaders.
	And all that happened was 50,000 to 60,000 people got assassinated.
	And they were all people that other people didn't like.
	It was like free hitman plus get paid for your information.
	So people would just talk to – they'd just, oh, yeah, that guy.
	You give me $100 to that guy.
	He's a communist higher up and they'd go shoot the guy.
	And then his family would say, well, that guy's brother.
	He's higher up and they would all just bounce back and forth.
	So it's – there's no justice in it.
	There's no court of law.
	I mean – Afghanistan, as you know, was invaded, despite the fact that, I mean, what happens, like, Bin Laden is a criminal.
	I'm fully happy to accept that he's a criminal.
	So what happens is, when you have a criminal, you extradite him, right?
	So you have the Afghanistan government sends Bin Laden to the United States, and then he is held...
	I'm sure if the evidence was strong enough that he would get the death sentence and so on, right?
	That's how you deal with a criminal in another country.
	And of course, what happened was, as you may know, America said, give us Bin Laden.
	And the Afghanistan government said, listen, we need some evidence.
	We don't just hand over people for you to kill, right?
	Because we need some evidence.
	We need some supporting evidence that he was responsible for 9-11.
	And the US government refused to produce any evidence that bin Laden was responsible for 9-11.
	And they just declared war.
	But that's not how you deal with crimes in another country.
	So the entire basis of the war is immoral.
	It's wrong. Even if you accept international law, even if you accept the UN or whatever, right?
	It's all immoral and wrong.
	And you're right. Fighting an insurgency is killing children.
	Fighting an insurgency is throwing bombs and hand grenades into the houses of pregnant women.
	There is simply no other way to do it.
	They blend in. They're not in uniform.
	There are no lines. And everywhere you go, you have no idea Who's got explosives strapped to his chest?
	Who's got a bomb under his cuff done?
	You have no idea who's got a gun under his robe.
	So you're living in complete paranoia, trigger-happy.
	You're going to do things that are just going to haunt you and your children and your children's children until the end of goddamn time.
	There's no way to fight that kind of war and come out without your conscience having been shredded.
	Yeah. And that's like the...
	I don't remember what it was called.
	It was on YouTube. It was one of your videos.
	I think it was Standing in Blood.
	I'm not sure. But you said...
	Man, I just lost my train of thought.
	You said that I think it was 120 veterans are killing themselves each week.
	Yeah. More veterans, I think, died from suicide.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Because, like, you know, committing suicide because they couldn't handle it.
	Yeah, you know, I believe this is, sorry, I believe that this is a fundamental truth, that if you murder another human being, you die too.
	I don't believe that anyone gets, and nobody walks away from the murderer.
	There's one corpse that's on the ground, and there's another corpse that's walking away.
	And I mean, if it's an extremity of self-defense, which happens about once every hundred years, fine.
	You know, some ex-murderer lunatic is coming at you, then you shoot him, then I think that's, you know, not something you want, but you can live with it.
	If you go to Afghanistan and you kill someone, it's murder.
	The guy in Afghanistan has not threatened you.
	You're over there killing people.
	They say, we can't show pictures of the bodies coming back from Afghanistan or from Iraq.
	But every time you see a photograph...
	Of a soldier who's killed someone, you are seeing a dead body.
	It just happens to be up and walking around.
	And that's why zombie films are so big these days, because everyone is getting that we're bringing back all of these soul-dead killbots that are so dangerous to society.
	And I don't want you to find that out after the fact.
	Yeah. Do you think we'll still be in...
	I don't know if it's true or not.
	I heard on CNN today, this morning...
	That we've, oh, Barack Obama has, like, issued the last of our troops to come out of Iraq today.
	You know, something like 55,000, or 50, yeah, 55,000.
	To leave Iraq?
	Yeah, the last of them.
	Well, that may be the case, and nobody can for sure predict the future, but if I were Al-Qaeda, I would simply stage another attack so that the troops wouldn't go.
	I would give the U.S. military a credible pretext to stay, because the American economy has not...
	Their goal is to bankrupt America, and so far...
	They're doing a great fucking job.
	I mean, America thinks that it's winning the war on terror.
	It's ridiculous. They're completely lost.
	They've done exactly what the Russians did in Afghanistan, which is to spend themselves into oblivion and to corrupt the entire society and to, of course, they've destroyed people's faith in government and so on, right?
	So Al-Qaeda is winning hands down.
	And Al-Qaeda is not done.
	They're not done.
	What they want is for the U.S. to be completely bankrupt.
	And so if the troops are going to leave Iraq, all that they will do is they will stage some attack somewhere somehow.
	That will be a pretext for the troops to stay in Iraq.
	Unless they know more about the US economy than I do, which is certainly possible, and maybe they know, maybe they feel that their job is done.
	Maybe they feel that the US is in such debt now that its economy is going to collapse and they don't need to keep pushing at the wall because it's going to fall over next year or next, you know, two years anyway.
	And so they don't mind if the troops leave.
	But my guess is that something's going to happen that's going to cause the troops to have to stay.
	And of course, the US is not leaving Iraq.
	The US is not going to leave Iraq at all.
	Yeah, I mean, they've got permanent bases.
	They've got the largest embassy in the world, in the U.S. empire is in Iraq.
	They're not going to walk away from all of that oil.
	They're not going to walk away from that history.
	And of course, if they do walk away, then Iraq is going to reformulate itself according to ethnic lines, which is unacceptable to the U.S., although it claims to be about self-determination.
	Iraq, of course, is an entirely artificial country, like Czechoslovakia after World War I, who was simply created by the Allies with no reference to the ethnic tensions and populations that were around.
	It's as artificial a country as Israel.
	And so the U.S. is not going to leave in any way, shape, or form.
	They're going to keep a presence there, and the troops will either stay or head back when some other attack occurs.
	You think we'll still be at war with Iraq?
	Like, say I did join in two years, you think that they'd still be at war with Iraq?
	Oh, yeah. Look, I mean, Iraq is not going to stop fighting the US. I mean, first of all, it's not a war.
	It's not a war. I mean, it's a slaughter.
	I mean, there's no war.
	I mean, it's an invasion with a counterinsurgency, right?
	So when Germany invaded France in May of 1940 and won in 12 weeks or whatever the hell it was, After Germany occupied France, there were resistance fighters who fought against the Germans.
	But we no longer said that it was a war.
	It was an occupation with the French resistance, right?
	The last time the French apparently were tough.
	That's what they say, though I prefer them not being tough in that way.
	And so it's not a war that's going on in Iraq.
	It's an illegal and immoral occupation and there is a resistance that is going on.
	That resistance is not going to change.
	Iraq has been fighting foreign imperialists for about 12,000 years.
	So this is part of their culture.
	This is what they do. Like Afghanistan, they've been fighting foreign occupiers for hundreds of years.
	Iraq has been fighting foreign occupiers for hundreds of years.
	And this is what they do.
	This is their culture, right? People come and they occupy a country and we fight against them in order to get into heaven.
	That's the deal. They're not going to stop.
	So I don't think there's going to be an easy ride in the US military in the future.
	And I also would be enormously surprised if the US was able to keep its obligations to its...
	I mean, the veterans are already receiving pretty terrible health care.
	They're certainly not receiving the kind of mental health care that they need to in order to process if it's possible, right?
	So you might get wounded.
	You might have post-traumatic stress disorder.
	In fact, you very likely would.
	And you would not get the treatment, and you would be unable to work, and you might spiral into poverty.
	I can't remember again. I'm sorry, my head is not good for statistics, but the number of homeless people who were ex-Vietnam veterans was incredibly high.
	I think it was one-fourth.
	Yeah, I mean, and that's just Vietnam veterans.
	What about the first Gulf War?
	All the people who got sick with the Gulf War syndrome, right?
	Who knows what the hell that is, but it may have something to do with using depleted uranium as shell casings.
	And so you don't get the healthcare, you can't work, you go through your savings, and then what happens, right?
	I mean, this is in some ways the best case scenario.
	So, even if you go in thinking that the government is going to be able to cover its obligations for you five or ten years from now, I just don't think that's the case.
	It's just too heavily in debt.
	Yeah, very true.
	I just, I don't...
	I have a lot of mixed feelings on war.
	And like, you know, the reasons why it's comms and everything.
	Because, I mean...
	Which, of course, I know you know a lot about the history of the world.
	I mean, whenever you look back at the history of the world, there's not much peace as to war, you know?
	Like, if you put it together and compare the two.
	That's true. That is true, but there are also situations where there is peace, right?
	So, US and Canada haven't gone to war since 1812, right?
	There's been no war in Western Europe For, what, 50, 60 years?
	Yeah. I mean, if you look through European history, except for the 19th century, I mean, that was pretty unprecedented.
	And there's no imminent war in Europe.
	I mean, they're not all gearing up for it.
	In the Scandinavian countries, in a lot of the socialist paradises of the Scandinavian countries, they've extended maternal leave to a year or two years sometimes.
	And this has been for quite some time.
	And as a result, they pretty much disbanded their military because nobody wants to join up.
	So if you get good enough, peaceful enough parenting, if you don't grow up in this atmosphere of stress and rage and violence, which I'm sad to hear had some impact on your childhood, if you don't grow up like that, you just don't have any interest in going to war.
	You don't have the wiring for it.
	And you may have the wiring for it or not, I don't know, but it doesn't mean that it's for sure and it doesn't mean it can't be changed.
	But so there is a progress towards peace in the world.
	It is slow, it is painful, it is difficult.
	And I'm telling you, my friend, it comes right down to the decision that you're going to make with your life.
	This is the decision, not just for you, but for humanity as a whole, between war and peace, between voluntarism and violence.
	It comes down to these little choices that people make.
	These little choices that people make.
	Not two or three generations ago, the Scandinavians and Finland was being invaded by Russia and was fighting this ski war of death in the mountains and so on, right?
	I mean, they had all of that.
	And then their parenting changed.
	Germany. I mean, when I was a kid...
	My cousins were all German and they would come over.
	They weren't allowed to play with guns.
	I'm not saying that's the best thing.
	And that's sort of, in a sense, saying to the kids, the problem is that kids played with guns.
	The Nazism did not come because kids played with guns.
	But there was such a sensitivity towards violence that it was to that extreme.
	And that's one of the reasons why Germany, the parenting became better.
	The Germans, after such a catastrophic century, finally realized that they maybe should stop Binding up their babies in these incredibly tight swabs and hanging them on a hook to half-drown in their own feces for the first two years of their life and beat them black and blue like Hitler's dad did.
	Maybe if we stop beating the living shit out of our children, we'll stop wanting to go across borders and kill other people.
	And so parenting improved, and parenting improved even in the South, right?
	You all call it a whooping and a licking and so on, but it's just assault.
	It's just assault. People say it's tough to deal with it.
	It's okay and it's good. It didn't do me any goddamn harm.
	Well, of course, there's a direct correlation between the corporal punishment in schools and the enlistment within the army.
	Children who are more frequently beaten in schools are more prone to go into the army.
	I'm not saying it's a direct – but there's a correlation for sure.
	I'm not saying it's directly causal.
	But aggression against children leads to people who want to get into the army.
	And that's why when I asked you, I knew for sure, I knew with 150% certainty, my friend, that when I asked you about your family history with aggression, that you weren't going to say, I was raised in a non-violent household.
	You understand, there was no possibility you were going to tell me that.
	That's right. And so you don't want to take the shit that was heaped on you as a kid and go and inflict it on others.
	That is only to repeat and to escalate the cycle of violence.
	I mean, this is what's so insane.
	I don't want to spend all show on this, though.
	It's a huge topic. But I just want to sort of end with this.
	Let's say that the thesis that better parenting leads to a more peaceful world, which I've been working with for the past 10 years and in this show for the past 5 years, better parenting leads to a more peaceful world.
	Do you get how insane it is for...
	Do you get how insane it is for...
	America to invade Iraq, to kill a million people, to shatter the schools, to shatter the social support networks, to shatter families, to murder people by the hundreds of thousands, to deny children medicine, to force people to live in these tent cities on the borders.
	Of Iraq and other countries with no future, no possibility, and no education.
	I mean, in a fucking desert.
	You do not want to live in a tent city anywhere, but you sure as hell don't want to live one when it's 9 million degrees outside, right?
	And so, what do you think has happened to the quality of the experience of children in Iraq since the invasion?
	Look, I'm not saying that the quality of Iraqi children's experience was fantastic under Saddam Hussein.
	I understand that. But there was some social stability.
	And there was some slow progress towards better parenting.
	What do you think has happened to the trauma level of children in Iraq since the invasion?
	It has gone up about 12 quintillion percent.
	This trauma is now going to be carried forward.
	This massive trauma is now going to be carried forward where children have been displaced, where they've seen people blown up, where they've stepped over bodies in the street.
	Where they have bathed in rivers of blood and they dream about it every night and they are traumatized and they are scarred and they are broken.
	And they've gone completely the opposite direction of what you need for even a remotely civilized society.
	This has destroyed The future of Iraq, if the future was savable at all, and certainly I believe that it was heading in a better direction.
	But since the 1990s, since 5 million Iraqi children died as a result of the US and UK-led sanctions, illegal sanctions against Iraq, the quality of children's experience under the invasion, under the occupation, has been so traumatic that you might as well kick the entire fucking society back to the Stone Age.
	And so the idea that somehow out of all of this trauma and murder and displacement and bloodshed and explosions and dislocations, that out of this is going to emerge a peaceful, free, and democratic society is completely insane.
	I mean, when children were having much more healthy childhoods in Iraq, you had Saddam fucking Hussein, right?
	What are you going to get now that they are a million times more traumatized than they were under the old regime?
	Well, you're going to get a society that's far worse.
	But you can't bomb a place.
	Bombing a place into civility is, to me, exactly the same as your father's argument that your traumatized brother should join the military because more trauma will help cure earlier trauma.
	It doesn't work. Next up.
	If you want to make the world a better place, and I really think that you do, and I can't tell you how much I admire you having this conversation, you are a braver band than I, Gangadin, because at your age, in your circumstances, I would have had the courage to do it.
	So I really wanted to give you massive praise, props.
	I absolutely kneel and bow down before your courage in having this conversation.
	But if you want to make the world a better place, my friend, stay away from violence, stay away from blood-soaked hierarchies, Learn self-knowledge.
	Come to peace with your history.
	Recognize what happened. Get to the moral reality of it.
	And love and love and love and love your wife and your children in the future.
	That opens the gates of heaven to a peaceful future.
	There's no shortcut. There's no scimitar that we can hack through these chains.
	They have to be... It sounds completely gay, and I recognize that, but they have to be eased apart through flowers.
	And I'm sorry. I know it's gay and it's British, but it is...
	It is the truth, but it is really only love that will melt this stuff.
	It is only love that will melt this stuff, not violence.
	Well, Jeff, I really appreciate you talking to me about this and everything.
	I really need someone to talk to you, and I really appreciate it for you taking your time.
	I would say it's not only my pleasure.
	I will tell you, my friend, it is my complete honor.
	I am absolutely honored that you would open your heart to me in this way and that you would even ask these questions and that you would choose me to ask them.
	I am beyond humble and beyond honored.
	And I hope that you will keep me posted.
	And I hope that if you do feel the urge to join, you will let me take one last shot at it before you do, if that's where you're heading.
	Okay. I'll keep you posted.
	I'm going to start writing down the boards, too.
	Yeah, so I'm going to keep you posted.
	Thank you. I just wanted to say that I have the utmost respect for you of everything you went through and everything.
	You mean even after my gay hippie stuff?
	No, I appreciate that.
	I appreciate that.
	After everything you went through and everything, I really respect you.
	That's all I wanted to say. Thank you very much.
	I really do appreciate that.
	Well, you have a good day.
	You too. Thank you so much.
	Just a correction from somebody in the chat room.
	They say, It's a great example of this.
	And just try to question the current social system.
	That will make people go ballistic.
	That is an entirely excellent and valid correction.
	I appreciate that. I was talking about war and foreign aggression, but without a doubt, the socialist countries have switched to more subterranean statist aggression.
	But I prefer that to war.
	I really do. But that's a great correction, and I really do appreciate that.
	All right. Next up, we have SotoGio, who is going to tell me how to get a better cap my jeans, I think.
	Hi, Steph. I've got a question about self-worth that's been bugging me a lot lately, and I was wondering if you'd be able to help me out with it.
	I hope so. Basically, I've been struggling for a long time to get self-esteem, but every time I attempt to do it, it's just short-lived and end up completely undermined.
	I recently read some of Nathaniel Brandon's books where he explained that self-esteem is a combination of feeling competent to face life's challenges and having a firm conviction that you deserve to be happy.
	It's that second one that I never knew about, that I never really thought was important.
	I only found out about that recently.
	I've always just tried to be good at things, to try and learn new things, but it's not enough.
	I just feel like I don't deserve I'm sorry, you try what for a bit? Oh, I'll try some new thing that's going to help me.
	I'm getting a bit of an echo.
	I'll try some new thing that's going to help me just act with more integrity or start going to the gym or do any of these things that are just meant to boost my self-esteem in some way or another.
	Be more honest with people.
	But there's a certain point where I don't feel like I deserve it or try to achieve any of my dreams, any of my goals.
	None of that is holding.
	So I have two closely linked questions.
	Can I ask them together? Sure.
	One is, what kind of thinking or actions will allow me to build a stable sense of self-worth, like feeling worthy of happiness?
	And two, what can I do to heal my past so that this new self-worth holds, that doesn't just get scattered?
	Good questions.
	Good questions. Right.
	I'm going to start asking questions if that's alright.
	Who doesn't want you to be happy from your history?
	If anyone. Mostly, I'd say the vast majority of it was school.
	I went into the school environment.
	I was raised very peacefully at home, but when I went to school, I didn't have any clue about what things were going to be like.
	Yeah, basically, I didn't understand the way a lot of other people were, and over the years, they started treating me with more and more contempt, and I started feeling more and more strange, different, until eventually, it was like, in high school, it was just a mess.
	It was basically everyone's dumping ground for all of their crap.
	I'm so sorry. Yeah, I kind of had a way of compensating for it where I would try and escape into fantasies or just try and disappear, not be seen by anyone, but that wasn't really any fun.
	I just wanted to really know what I have to do to...
	Deal with that stuff so that I don't have that undermining everything in the future.
	And also, yeah, what I have to do now.
	Right. Okay, and these questions are part of what I think you should be doing, so I'm not trying to dodge the answer.
	Just giving you an answer is not going to help that much, so at least giving you my answer for what it's worth.
	Okay, so help me, and look, I completely get, I think, I think I really get what you went through.
	I'm sort of trying not to project my own experiences onto you, but I absolutely understand what it is like to have those kinds of situations escalate, where you feel like a stranger, like an outsider, you feel odd or weird, and then you get treated as odd or weird, which only makes that feeling worse, which intensifies that alienation and that hostility from people.
	I get that. I really, really get that.
	That is such an avalanche, right?
	It starts with a little thing, and then it gets bigger and bigger, and then it becomes irresistible, and then it becomes part of your identity.
	And then you flinch when people start talking to you, which means that it signals they can bully you further, and oh, I get how that snowballs.
	I get how that snowballs.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I felt like I was treading water.
	I liked the confident people in school.
	They were nice, they were fun and so on, but they didn't really like me so much because I didn't show that kind of confidence myself.
	And I just kept trying, trying, trying.
	And eventually I got somewhere with a couple of them.
	But it was really like just...
	I felt like I was barely treading water and that there are all these forces trying to pull me down.
	Yeah, that's pretty much my experience of school.
	Nice. Yeah.
	Now, I'm sure you know what I'm going to ask next, but maybe you don't.
	Family. Yeah, yeah, family.
	And the reason that I ask that is that you said that you were raised mostly peacefully.
	And I'm not trying to dig up any dirt here.
	I'm just genuinely curious what that means.
	And my second question after we deal with that is, well, what happened with your parents when this was occurring for you?
	Did you talk about it with them?
	What sort of support did you get from them and so on?
	Well, at home, my mom probably spanked me a few times in my life.
	Probably three or four times in total.
	Overall, her approach was...
	It's like if someone who hadn't really gone through the self-knowledge process just had a very traumatic childhood and she wanted things to be different, but she didn't really know What she was doing.
	I don't think. She just wanted things to not be traumatic.
	That was her. And so she restrained herself if she had experienced physical aggression.
	She restrained herself in terms of physical aggression, which is a good thing in many ways.
	And, you know, I think something to be respected is that it's like, I don't know how to quit smoking, but damn it, I'm going to just stop smoking.
	You know, it's sort of like...
	Also, like, she kind of compensated, like, the other way, where I felt...
	She's the nicest person from my childhood, by far.
	I mean, just on an objective level, she was nice.
	Other kids also wanted to be around her and so on.
	She was very warm, empathetic, kind in that way.
	But there are certain things about people that she just didn't get, certain things about responsibility and making good choices in her life.
	And mine, that she didn't get the bigger things.
	She got the little things, if that makes sense.
	All right. Give me some specifics.
	Well, she married a guy who was just not father material.
	He was kind of an intellectual, shy, awkward, workaholic type.
	He was a lawyer and...
	Also, in terms of just teaching me how to be responsible in life, how to build my own self-esteem, any of these kinds of things, I was kind of left to figure a lot of stuff out for myself.
	She showed me a lot in some areas that she knew, but there are some things that she just...
	She doesn't know them herself, but still, I am angry about those.
	What happened to your birth father?
	My mother found out that she was pregnant after they broke up, and she didn't want to have a relationship with him.
	Why not? She didn't think he was a good person.
	She didn't think that he was very vain, very selfish.
	These are just things that she told me recently.
	I'm sorry, but did you have a relationship with your birth father?
	No, no. I didn't even know that my stepfather wasn't my real father until I was around 10 when my parents divorced.
	My mother and my stepfather divorced, sorry.
	Huh. It was after that that I found out, and I kind of wasn't really that surprised, but I was kind of cold towards that, if that makes sense.
	And how old were you when your mom married the lawyer?
	One, one and a half.
	So you don't remember, like he was just, like you don't have any particular memory of him not being there, right?
	I guess you were so young. No, no.
	Yeah, he was always there as far as I know.
	Yeah. Yeah, I, so do you, do your birth father, did he even know you existed?
	Um, I think, yeah, yeah, he knew.
	But, um, yeah, my mother just, uh, was like, no, you don't have to be involved.
	Don't worry. Uh, I, and she didn't want him to be involved.
	Um, I'm sorry, maybe I'm missing something, and I've not been in this situation as a parent, but is that really your mom's decision?
	I mean, sorry, tell me if that's a bad question.
	I don't want to be insensitive.
	I'm just genuinely baffled about how that would be your mom's decision.
	Oh, do you mean like it should be more in my interest than hers?
	Well, not interest. I mean, did you ever want to see your birth father?
	When I found out that my stepfather wasn't my real father, I didn't really care.
	I just thought it was blood ties.
	I didn't believe that there was such a thing as family.
	I didn't believe that family gave anything special from a young age.
	I thought that it was who you were as a person.
	So you didn't particularly want to see him, right?
	No, no, I never had any desire to see him.
	Oh, okay. So that's not such a big deal then.
	And you've not felt that desire since?
	No, no, no. Maybe for us to find out what diseases I might get if I'm older, but that's about it.
	And so your birth father knew about your existence from the beginning?
	Yeah, yeah. Or I think maybe a few months afterwards.
	No, sorry. It was after I was born that I think he was aware.
	My mom had told me this story recently.
	But yeah, it was after I was born that he found out.
	And do you think that he wanted to see you and that your mother didn't let him?
	Or do you think he didn't want to see you?
	Or why did you end up not seeing him?
	No, he wouldn't have wanted to see me, I don't think.
	If he had, she would have let him.
	But he was, from her description, fairly vain, selfish, concerned with image, and just a player kind of guy.
	I kind of feel like I'm taking her side in a lot of things, if that makes sense.
	I'm not actually trying to do that.
	It's just, yeah, this is my understanding of the situation.
	And this is a weird question to ask, and I'm sorry for asking it.
	Feel free to not answer anything, of course.
	But do you know how she ended up getting pregnant?
	She was on the pill, and she was on it for some time after that as well, without realizing that she was pregnant.
	She just needed a bigger dose, I think, or something like that, as she was telling me that.
	Right. Our man's got some powerful swimmers.
	It's good. It makes you strong.
	My swimmers overcome the pill.
	I can lift a car. And how do you feel about this, I don't know what to call it, but this story that your stepfather was your biological father?
	Well, I was never really lied to about it.
	It was just this assumption that I had.
	I called him like Papa and so on.
	And so that was all just...
	I didn't really feel...
	I don't know. I felt kind of just cold.
	From a young age, when I was around six or seven, I tried to be as logical about everything as possible.
	Whenever I saw kids being emotional about things in a way that I thought was...
	I put a judgment on a lot of the emotions that I saw other kids having in terms of sensitivity to these kinds of things, especially when it came to...
	Sorry, I'm being vague.
	On TV, what I would often see is...
	I felt like I learned a lot from TV and movies, but on TV, I saw the stereotype of...
	Kids being overdramatic when their parents divorce, things like that.
	Whereas I had always felt like my father wasn't really there.
	Sorry, my stepfather wasn't really there.
	He was just some guy who I felt like had some – he was there sometimes, but it didn't really – I don't know.
	I didn't want to be a needy kid, if that made sense.
	And I get now that's not a good thing, but I prided myself on that.
	Yeah, I mean, the only thing that's worse than a divorce where you really miss your father is a divorce where you don't really miss your father, right?
	Yeah, yeah. I mean, sorry, just to jump in, I just wanted to mention, I don't know if this is relevant, but this is just something that occurred to me that I was doing some weeding in the garden today, and a memory came back to me that I haven't thought about in I don't even know how long.
	I was spraying some weed killer on a few weeds and whatever, right?
	Nothing particularly exciting.
	And I remember that when I was a little kid, my father had me...
	I can't remember if this is before or after my parents' divorce.
	It doesn't really matter. But I think it was...
	but I can't remember.
	My father was taking care of me.
	My father wanted to play tennis and I couldn't stay in the area where he was playing tennis because I guess he was worried that I'd get hit by a ball.
	So he put me on the outside fence where I was crawling around and he really got into his tennis game and I crawled into a garden shed and I swallowed some weed killer.
	I just remembered that, but I was spraying weed killer and I could have died.
	And in hindsight, looking back on this, I can sort of understand why my mom had to not have my dad around because he was dangerous to children.
	I remember being with my dad when I was three years old or so in Ireland.
	This is after they were divorced. And we were walking around to town and he lost me.
	I was three years old. He lost me.
	I remember I went up to a policeman and I said, I'm lost.
	And I was in the police station.
	I remember the smell of coffee.
	I remember the color of the walls.
	And I remember the bustle at the police station.
	And my dad's showing up an hour or two later, relieved.
	Like, he was just... As you say, not father material.
	Your stepdad sounds better than my dad, but there's a difference between being inattentive and downright dangerous towards children due to that inattentiveness, if that makes any sense.
	And it doesn't sound like your stepdad was in the latter category, and I'm sorry if I hijacked, but it just popped into my mind today.
	Well, no, I see that like just not paying attention to what's actually happening around him.
	Well, my stepdad was kind of the hyper-responsibility.
	He was an objectivist.
	I didn't know any of this, but he introduced my mom to Ayn Rand novels and all that sort of thing.
	I'm kind of annoyed that she didn't give that to me in high school.
	I think that could have really helped.
	He was basically very cold and I guess not in a vindictive way, more in just a petty anal way, if that makes sense.
	He was very fussy about little things.
	I didn't really feel close to him.
	I think I was around 12 when the thought occurred to me that if either of my parents died, I would feel really sad if my mum died, but I couldn't make myself I couldn't feel sad if the thought of my stepfather dying.
	It just didn't affect me at all.
	I was worried about that for a bit, but I was like, hang on.
	Why should it? Do you know why your parents split up when you were 10?
	My mom thinks that my stepfather was having an affair, and their marriage was kind of, I guess, Coldly breaking down.
	I don't think I was consciously aware of it.
	Basically, we ended up going to Australia, I thought, on some trip.
	And then it turned out like a month or so later that my mom told me, yeah, actually we had a divorce.
	So you went to Australia, you thought it was a trip, and then you ended up living there?
	Yes. Are you kidding me?
	No. I'd moved all around a lot.
	I mean, hang on. Wait, wait, wait, wait.
	Wait, what? You were 10, right?
	Yeah. What the fuck?
	I know. Yeah. No, seriously?
	Doesn't that seem...
	Well, what do you think about that?
	I was kind of used to it because I'd been...
	I'd moved around five times before that, between Australia and another country.
	And did you know that you were moving around, or it was like, we're going to go out for a bus ride, which happens to be an airplane, and I mean...
	Yeah, I basically just thought, yeah, we were moving somewhere again.
	Actually, I think I might have been aware that we were moving somewhere, but it was kind of like a holiday at first, and then it kind of became, oh yeah, we're living here now.
	And yeah, at that point, I was pissed off to be leaving my friends, but aside from that...
	Yeah, I interpreted it as just another move until I understood them a bit better.
	Right, right.
	Now, as far as social skills go, what was your experience of that within your family?
	I mean, did you see your parents socialize much?
	Did they sort of give you that give and take of socializing?
	Well, my mom treated me like a grown-up from a young age, basically in personal interactions.
	She made choices for me in the bigger sense, which I had no real power in.
	But on a day-to-day level, she basically would try and reason with me at any time that she was trying to convince me of something, rather than just saying, parents are right because I said so, or anything like that.
	Well, those aren't the only two options, of course.
	Oh, sure, sure. I'm just saying, inappropriate reasoning or blind authority, those aren't the only two options when it comes to parenting, but that's neither here nor there.
	You sort of posited it like a dichotomy.
	I don't think it is. But anyway, go on.
	Well, basically, her approach was to give me a lot of choices about, like, not to impose her will on a, I guess, on a day-to-day level, but in terms of moving me around, that was kind of imposing a will.
	But, yeah. Does that make sense?
	Or am I being...
	It's pretty vague. I'm not quite sure.
	All right. So, she would sort of say, do you want spinach or broccoli?
	I mean, is that what you mean by choices?
	What do you want for dinner kind of thing, or what TV show do you want to watch, or what do you mean?
	I guess I didn't really feel like I had to fight for my choices.
	I didn't really feel like there was much imposing of will.
	I guess that's what I wanted to say.
	I didn't feel like there was much imposing of will.
	Alright, let me ask you another question, because I want to make sure that we get to someplace useful, because I want to make sure we don't have a lot of time in these kinds of shows, so I want to make sure I get to someplace useful.
	How did you see your parents in the context of society?
	And I'm not trying to sort of prime your response or anything, but I'll sort of explain to you what I mean.
	It's that I always knew that my mom was not exactly normal.
	I always knew that. Even when I was a very, very little kid, she was just really different from the other parents.
	And I could also tell by the reaction of the other parents that my mom was someone that they kind of had to keep an eye on, so to speak, right?
	So I was aware when I was a child that...
	My mom was not the cutout dictionary definition of normal.
	You wouldn't look up average citizen and see a picture of my mom.
	And that was very clear to me, even when I was a little kid.
	And I'm not saying this is true or not true of your parents, but where did they fit in terms of society as a whole for you when you were a kid?
	On two levels.
	One, I didn't see them socialize that much with other people.
	But in terms of how I thought of my mom compared to what a mom ought to be, she seemed like...
	At first, everything was good because I guess there wasn't that much required of her in terms of life skills.
	But later on, when it came to actually teaching me more complicated stuff, I knew pretty clearly that from the age of five or six onwards that she wasn't really going to give me useful information for how to interact with the real world.
	And that's sort of what played out, right?
	That's what I'm sort of trying to understand.
	Socializing is a language, right?
	And I used this before with the guy, the military guy, the potential military guy.
	Socializing is a language.
	Knowing how to socialize, knowing how to negotiate, knowing how to take a joke that is at your expense, that's complicated shit, right?
	Because somebody can be making a joke At your expense, that's funny.
	And then the appropriate response is, ha ha ha, that's funny, right?
	But somebody might also be making a joke that seems to be funny, but is really a dick.
	Yeah. And...
	They may be making a joke that seems to be funny, but it's really a dig.
	And you may be in a situation where other people are sophisticated or aware or intelligent enough to see that, in which case you can point it out.
	Or you may be in a more primitive group where if you point it out, you will get castigated for not being able to take a joke, right?
	Or taking yourself too seriously or whatever, right?
	Yeah, sure. And you have to process this in a split second.
	Yeah, I see that.
	Somebody may be trying to befriend you or being nice to you because they really like you as a person.
	They may be doing it because they want something from you.
	They may be doing it to build up your hopes so that they can crush them and humiliate you.
	Yeah, I've been through that.
	Right? So, when somebody approaches you and wants to be your friend, right?
	Yeah. It's really complicated, right?
	Sure. If you want to be in with the cool kids, you have to want to be in with the cool kids, but you can't be seen by the cool kids of wanting to be in with them.
	It has to just kind of happen even though you want it without you trying to make it happen, but you still have to do things to make it happen.
	It's all really complicated, right?
	Yeah, yeah. And these are just three things that came off the top of my head.
	And this is just one of 10,000 hyper-complicated social situations that children need to be trained in.
	So if at the age of five or six you didn't feel that your mom was going to be a valid source of social instruction, you were kind of doomed.
	In my opinion, right? As far as that goes.
	I'm not saying your mom was evil or anything, but it just means that it's like if your mom stops teaching you math at the age of five or six and no one else is teaching you, you're not going to be a mathematician.
	Right? And math is a hell of a lot easier to figure out because you've got time, you've got rules, right?
	Then social interactions, social situations are crazy complex.
	Right? I'll give you two examples that popped into my head, just to give you a sense of how complex these things are, right?
	So, I was considered to be quite a nerd, and then I spent a summer exercising, and I came back, and we have this every year in school.
	This is when I was maybe 12 or 13.
	Every year in school, there's this...
	I did a strength test.
	Literally, when puberty hit, I bulked up.
	I was a pretty small kid. I exercised and so on.
	I literally went from hanging on the bar like you do a chin-up.
	You hang there. I could do maybe 10 or 15 seconds when I was 12.
	When I was 13, I could do almost two minutes.
	This was one of the highest scores in the class.
	I suddenly became a strong guy.
	I was strong. That changed a whole lot.
	Who the fuck would have ever imagined that All I needed to do was lift some weights.
	And suddenly, you know, and there was another thing that happened.
	I was still considered somewhat nerdy by the cooler kids, but I went to discos starting from when I was sort of 16 or 17.
	I was a club kid for, I don't know, maybe two or three years.
	And I would go to discos, you know, once or twice a week, and I loved it, loved to dance, really had a great time.
	And anyway, so when I was maybe 17, some of the cooler kids were actually in the disco, and they saw me there, you know, disco dancing, and I didn't say disco, because I mean, this was, I think by the 80s, this was the 80s then.
	And suddenly then it was like, oh, that guy's been going to discos, which I guess was considered a really cool thing, and that changed everything.
	So who would have known it was about going to discos and hanging from a bar for longer than other kids, right?
	I mean, this is all crazy shit that I never would have guessed, right?
	I mean, if you'd have given me a million years to answer what would have made me more cool, I wouldn't have come up with those things.
	So it's really, really complex, and particularly if your parents...
	I don't want to mean your parents.
	This is a general statement, right?
	And this is going out to everyone who's listening to this show.
	Because if you're listening to this show, you are not in the mainstream.
	If you are not in the mainstream...
	Your children need extra special with sauce on top, marinara on the side and sour cream smeared all over it.
	They need that amount of extra attention to social interactions.
	Because if you're going to not be in the mainstream, if you're going to be philosophical or individualistic or anarchistic or atheist or voluntarist or whatever, your children need extra special with cookie dough help.
	to navigate in society because it's tough enough even if you're in the mainstream it's tough enough to navigate all these complex social situations if you're not in the mainstream Then you need extra special help.
	Like if I suddenly, you know, let's say when Isabella is five, you know, I just say, hey, we go to China for a trip and then we don't come back.
	She needs extra special help to learn Chinese because we're now in a language where the language we speak at home is not the language that is spoken in society.
	If you're philosophical, if you're an objectivist, if you're anarchist or whatever, if you just plain damn well think for yourself or have been to therapy or have self-knowledge, you no longer speak the mainstream language.
	You do not speak The mainstream language, which is sophistication and aggression and passivity and hostility and manipulation.
	That's the language of the mainstream.
	And so, I would say that given that your family situation was different, if not unique, given that you were moving from culture to culture, from country to country, I would guess...
	That any objective observer would say that you needed extra care to help to fit in, extra over and above the normal course of helping children to succeed or at least interact in a positive way socially.
	You needed extra special care because of your family situation, because of the movements and so on.
	And I just really wanted to point that out because I think that we naturally have self-esteem.
	So I haven't completely forgotten where we started, right?
	But I would invite you to look at it this way.
	It may be right, it may be wrong, but it's a perspective that I think is true, for whatever that's worth.
	I think that self-esteem does not have to be earned, it does not have to be gained.
	Self-esteem has to be recovered.
	Children are born with self-esteem.
	They are born with a desire to learn, they are born with a desire to master things.
	I don't consider my daughter unique in any way, shape or form.
	She absolutely wants to get things right.
	She will do things over and over and over and over again without frustration usually with great patience until she gets them right.
	Going up and down stairs.
	We have a little swing in the back with a slide and she is very focused on learning how to climb up steps to get to the top of the slide.
	She will do it over and over and over again.
	And she is more confident of her abilities than I am sometimes.
	As I've mentioned before, she will, you know, I think she needs help climbing the stairs.
	She throws my hand aside. It's assertive.
	It's never aggressive. And then she climbs.
	She knows how to do it. She knows when she's ready to go down the slide on her own.
	She knows when she's ready. She would not, we bought her a baby swing, which is the one that has like a seatbelt in it, a bucket seat, because we thought, because that's what she does at the playground.
	She refused to get into it.
	She would not get into her baby swing.
	We put on the big kid swing, which is just that little plastic seat, little strip of plastic, and she's swinging like crazy.
	No problems. So we didn't know she was ready for it, the bigger swing, but she did.
	So she has natural confidence.
	She has natural patience.
	She has natural, I'm going to figure this out.
	She absorbs a huge amount.
	She just did her first color today.
	It was very exciting.
	She pointed at a green bath towel and said, bath towel, green.
	And it's like, woo, we're so excited, right?
	She's putting together words now.
	So she'll say, dada hug or eat ice cream.
	She's starting to understand.
	She's so cool.
	Sorry, getting into parental pride mode.
	She's really interested in Band-Aids at the moment because I think Christina's got a Band-Aid on her toe, Christina's toe.
	And so there's Band-Aid, Band-Aid, Band-Aid.
	And one of her crayons broke, and we put tape around it.
	And so she comes down, she sees the tape on the Band-Aid.
	She sees the tape on the crayon, and she says, Band-Aid, because that's what she uses, things that are broken.
	So she's getting these concepts.
	And we're not teaching her to do this.
	We try to slow her down.
	She absolutely wants to master these things.
	She's working so hard to figure out language.
	She's working so hard.
	She used to call birds...
	Now she's gone 30, which is, you know, she's really trying to mimic.
	She's trying to understand language.
	She works very, very hard to do that and to master things physically.
	And so her self-esteem is natural.
	It is buoyant. It is, you know, it is growing.
	Like a children who... That's not a good metaphor.
	I was going to say children who are fed naturally grow, but I don't even need to feed her.
	I kind of need to slow her down, so to speak, so that she's safe because I want to make sure that she stays safe.
	But she struggles so hard to sing songs.
	So her favorite song is Itsy Bitsy Spider.
	And for the last couple of weeks, she's been going, Tower Rain!
	And we couldn't figure out what she was talking about until we realized that she's trying to do Itsy Bitsy Spider.
	Down Came the Rain is Tower Rain.
	And so she's starting to get that.
	She can sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, pretty close to on key, and she's working really hard to figure that out.
	The reason that I'm saying all of this is that...
	Her self-esteem does not need to be built up.
	I need to facilitate what she's doing, I need to keep her safe, and I need to sometimes just stay the hell out of her way while she's figuring things out.
	And so I would not look at your self-esteem like it's a weight that needs to be lifted.
	I would look at your self-esteem like it's something that needs to have a weight lifted off of it.
	Yeah, because I remember I had it when I was little.
	I remember it took a while for it to be stripped away.
	It took a long time, but eventually it was.
	I agree with what you're saying.
	I feel like I might be able to do something to get that weight off.
	No, it's undo something.
	I'm going to be very specific and clear about this because I really want to make sure that I at least communicate what I mean, which I'm not doing a great job.
	I'm all over the place.
	But let me sort of be very, very clear.
	If I were you, and I've been you, I think, in this particular situation, right?
	So let me just talk about myself and then it will make sense.
	Let's talk more about me.
	Yeah. I was not trained for society, which has some strengths and it has some weaknesses.
	I can think more for myself, but it is a challenge.
	And so because I was not trained for society, I made lots of mistakes in society, and society as a whole wants me to take responsibility, wants me to take the blame for those mistakes.
	Right? So when I was in China for business, I'm not a bad ping pong player, but I'm, of course, ridiculously incompetent relative to your average Chinese person, right?
	So they invited me to come and play ping pong with them, and I was thoroughly beaten, right?
	Because you got people doing the ninja backflips and hitting things off the soles of their shoes and using some sort of freaky mental willpower to bend the ball in the air or whatever, right?
	And so I get my ass kicked in ping pong and they feel superior to me because they can kick my ass in ping pong.
	The reality, of course, is that they simply trained a lot harder than I have.
	Obviously, this is their national sport and it's not like they're distracted by consumer goods or other things, right?
	And so I simply – I didn't feel that I had been beaten.
	I simply feel that they had experienced more.
	They had done it more.
	Like somebody who studied French and can speak French, they're not smarter than me because my French is pretty bad.
	They've just spent more time studying French.
	And it's the same thing in society.
	Yeah, so I had the social skills of a traumatized fruit bat.
	But that's just because I had not been spoken.
	I hadn't been taught that language.
	Other people had been taught that language.
	Their parents socialized easily.
	Their parents helped them out in social situations.
	When they had a problem with social situations, they came home.
	They talked to their parents.
	Their parents gave them good advice.
	And so their parents taught them that language.
	I was not taught that language.
	So I don't take ownership for those failures at all, any more than I take ownership like I did something wrong by losing to a ping pong game in China to the local champion or whoever the hell he was.
	I think he was. Anyway, the fact that you ended up in these humiliating situations, and I really don't want to diminish or pretend that they weren't.
	I get that they were completely humiliating, but this is not your ownership.
	This is not your fault.
	This is the inevitable result of not being trained socially.
	You didn't speak the language, so of course you didn't know what the hell was going on, and of course you made lots of mistakes, and of course it got worse and worse because you couldn't go home and say, Mom, this is what's happening to me.
	I feel really bad. I feel like it's getting worse.
	What can I do? It's because you didn't have that option.
	You just had to fucking battle your way through it, taking hit after hit after hit.
	And I know it seems personal, but I hope that you understand that it's not to be taken personally.
	It is not a personal failing of yours any more than if you're dropped in the middle of China and you don't speak Mandarin.
	That is not a personal failing of yours.
	It's a fucked up situation that you just have to try and battle through.
	But it doesn't make you dumb if everyone around you speaks Mandarin and you don't.
	You just don't know the language.
	And that's what I mean when I say take the weight off your self-esteem.
	Now society as a whole will always try to make us feel that that which we were not instructed on is a personal failure of ours.
	Hmm. Everyone said that, and it was implicit in everything.
	The worst was this look of just contempt that had no content, but I had to imagine what it was for, and I got it for so many times.
	And do you know why people did that?
	I know now why.
	I looked like some weakness that they felt, and that they just wanted to deal with that in me rather than in themselves.
	No, I think that's a bit of a patent generic answer.
	I think it's more specific than that.
	I mean, you could say that about anything, right?
	But I think it's more specific to, you know...
	That's the idea that everyone opposes that which they're secretly ashamed of and all that.
	I just don't know how that's testable or specific to your situation.
	Okay, yeah... I think they kind of, when I would try and be friends with them or whatever, or when I would act insecure, they just kind of felt disgusted and awkward and expressed that pretty much.
	Like, I mean, if I see someone who's very insecure, a part of me feels like a bit of aversion there.
	But, I mean, I do feel sympathetic, but I don't think that they felt that sympathy.
	I just think that they felt the aversion.
	Right. But the question is, why did they feel the aversion?
	Um... I don't know.
	It's false pride, is what it is.
	Oh yeah, I get that, totally.
	They happen to have been taught that language, and you weren't.
	And if they had been in your situation, they would be where you are.
	If I grew up in China, I'd speak Mandarin.
	It doesn't mean that speaking Mandarin makes you smarter, it just means you happen to have been born in fucking China.
	It's not special to have been taught something.
	Right? So, as I've said before, when I was a teenager, some guy's parent had to finally take me aside and say, basically, you stink.
	You hit puberty, you're sweating up a storm, you need to shower every day, here's some deodorant, because you smell, right?
	Now, he was actually fairly nice about it, and I'm very glad that he did that.
	But, of course, the other kids were like, you stink, right?
	And what they don't understand was that their parents had taught them personal hygiene, and my mom hadn't.
	And if they'd have been in my situation, they'd be the ones who smelled.
	And if I'd have been in their situation, I'd smell good.
	It's just, it's the luck of the draw, what kind of parents you get, right?
	It's not a personal virtue.
	Like, there was a guy in my school whose father was very high up in the finance industry.
	Guy got a red convertible for his 16th birthday.
	Drove it to school and parked it prominently and so on, right?
	He always had the flashiest clothes and rings and, you know, he was a good-looking guy and all that, right?
	And he strutted. He owned the damn place.
	And it's like, well, that's great.
	So you happen to get those parents.
	And I happen to get these parents.
	And if the situations were reversed, you'd be here and I'd be in the fucking Corvette.
	It's accidental.
	It's freak fortune.
	And so everybody gets that.
	Everybody gets that the hierarchy in high school is almost complete chance.
	Oh, you happen to not have acne.
	That moves you up 10 spots.
	Oh, you happen to have nice hair that feathers in that way that whatever is popular, the hairdo, right?
	So in the 70s, it was sheer straight hair.
	And then in the 80s, it was the Farrah Fawcett feathered hair.
	Oh, you happen to have that kind of hair.
	Lucky for you, you move up 10 spots.
	Oh, your parents happen to be rich.
	Lucky for you, you move up 10 spots, right?
	Oh, you happen to be athletically inclined and your parents had the time and the money to get you training.
	You move up ten spots, right?
	Oh, you happen to be musically inclined and your parents could pay for guitar lessons or saxophone lessons.
	You move up ten spots, right?
	Oh, excuse me, you have a beautiful house and people want to come to your house and your parents will let you have parties.
	You move up ten spots, right?
	Oh, you don't have a foreign accent.
	You're not from Pakistan. You move up ten spots, right?
	You're tall. You're not.
	Ten spots, right?
	I mean, you understand, it's all complete random bullshit.
	And everybody knows that.
	And so, when people look at you and they see social awkwardness, they know that it is pure chance that they're where they are and you are where you are.
	Now, that pure chance, if they embraced it and accepted it, would give them compassion and this fucking hierarchy would begin to fall apart.
	And if that hierarchy began to fall apart like dominoes, down and down, other hierarchies in the world would also begin to fall apart.
	Because empathy and humility, humility of circumstance, humility of accident, humility of chance, that is what gives us compassion.
	I happen to have been lucky enough to X, right?
	Yeah, I see that. I mean, you've heard me say it a million times.
	I'm not smarter than people who came before me.
	I just happen to have this amazing technology that helps me to communicate in the way that I do.
	I'm lucky. Maybe philosophy's lucky, but it's not smartitude.
	It's just...
	I mean, if I'd been born 200 years ago, I wouldn't be a philosopher.
	If I'd been born... Sixty years ago, I wouldn't be a philosopher, or it's unlikely, but right place, right time.
	Malcolm Gladwell has a book called Outliers, where he talks about this, that all of the people who became very rich in the IT world all happened to be born within eight months of each other.
	He also talks because they just happen to be graduating at a time where the IT opportunities were the greatest and they were pre-family, pre-marriage.
	People who become hockey stars are all born early in the year.
	So they have a year's advantage because they all get drafted from the same year.
	They're a year older than the kids who happen to be joining from December.
	It's luck! And that doesn't mean that there's not hard work and talent and skill and blah, blah, blah.
	Of course there is, right?
	Right. But the reason that Pavarotti is an opera singer, and I'm not, is not because he worked harder.
	He just happened to be born with a golden voice.
	It's just incredible fortune.
	It's incredible luck. Or bad luck, depending on your relationship to fame, I suppose, right?
	But what I'm saying is that everybody gets that there's a huge amount of luck.
	I mean, if you and I were born in some...
	Shit scrub African village, we wouldn't be having this conversation, we wouldn't be speaking English, we would have primitive tribal views, and we'd have the lifespan of your average goat, right?
	Yeah, I've thought of that before.
	And so we're incredibly lucky.
	And I think with humility, we try to bring as much good fortune as we can to others.
	I happen to have been born with some very good verbal skills.
	I have done something to improve those over the years, but it's kind of in me.
	I happen to have been born with a peculiar desire for an ability to get to the root of philosophical issues, whether those are around self-knowledge or other things.
	I think it's important to try and share those goodies.
	I think I try to approach it, because I genuinely feel that way, I try to approach it with humility.
	You've heard me say, and I've said in this conversation too, I struggle with the same issue.
	I'm not talking from a mountaintop.
	I'm not casting down pearls of wisdom from perfect nirvana.
	I'm in the trenches fighting with everybody else with the same issues.
	Because I'm just lucky to have certain skills to have been born in a certain time.
	I've done a lot to earn and I'm very proud of those things, but I try not to place my self-esteem in the accidental, in the transitory.
	And what happened to you in terms of your social skills, my friend, was bad fucking luck.
	Bad luck! You got hit by lightning on a clear day.
	You weren't doing anything stupid.
	You weren't dumb.
	You weren't mistaking anything.
	You didn't have the same education as everyone else, but you just failed for some random reason.
	And that's what I mean by taking the weight off your self-esteem and letting it rise.
	Letting it rise by refusing to take ownership for the accidental.
	Do not own the accidental.
	I kept telling myself for so many years that I'd only be worth something once I'd achieved all these things that they said I lacked.
	Once I had all those things, then I'd be worth something.
	I tried to ignore all that, but I think I need to think about it some more.
	I knew that what they were doing was wrong, but at the same time, Yeah, yeah.
	I understand where you're coming from.
	I see what you're saying there. Do you?
	Yeah. It's kind of like...
	It's kind of like I've...
	So much of my personality is about...
	Or has become about...
	Dismissing everything that I am...
	And focusing on what I'm gonna be.
	Um... And just doing that again and again and again, like constantly for 14 years now, it seems.
	The forms changed here and there of what it's for, but that pattern, I think, is stuck for now.
	And I'm working on trying to deal with that.
	And it's only in the last two years that I've gotten really that it was undeserved.
	But on some level, though, I still feel like I could have done better, even though I know rationally that, as you say, I couldn't have done much better than I did.
	Well, I don't think that you could have done much better than you did, because I think every human being tries to do the best they can with the cards that they're dealt.
	Yeah. I should say not everyone, but it's certainly everyone who listens to this show.
	I've met almost no exceptions to that.
	I mean, there are malevolent people and people who just shit on others rather than deal with their own issues, but you're not one of those people, right?
	No. Never.
	So, I think it's really, and we'll go a little bit over, because I really don't think you've got this emotionally yet, which doesn't mean you haven't.
	No, it's always been hard for me. Yeah, okay.
	So, there are a thousand million voices in our heads That tell us that our deficiencies are the result of failure.
	And that is the vanity of people who did not have to earn that which they are competent at.
	Those people who are born on third base and think they've hit a home run will always say to everyone, home runs are easy.
	Home runs are easy. Well, if you're born on third base, it's easy to get a home run.
	Just got to get one base, right?
	If you're born... A hundred miles from the baseball diamond and never taught about baseball, it's a little fucking hard to get a home run.
	Right? Everybody who is born with privilege, almost everybody who's born with privilege, will try to pretend that it is a virtue to have what they have.
	And that you have made a mistake.
	And that you are deficient by not having what they have.
	Everybody who inherits a million dollars imagines that he's an entrepreneur.
	Everybody who is born good-looking imagines that other people just need to work out and eat better.
	Right? Yeah.
	I mean, I started losing my hair when I was 16 or 17, right?
	I had people tell me, well, you just need to switch your shampoos.
	You know, that's crazy shit, right?
	Are you nuts? I'm going bald, and you're telling me that I'm somehow responsible for this?
	Come on! Oh, guys, yeah, guys who have great hair, they think that they've, you know...
	God liked them. It's like, okay, so you got the good hair gene.
	Great for fucking you.
	You must be really proud of that wonderful thing that you earned called hair on your head.
	Right? It's sad.
	It's sad. It's sad.
	And I do it too.
	And you do it too.
	We all do it.
	It's something that we have to fight.
	It's something that we have to fight.
	Yeah, I've seen that in myself.
	I've tried to stop it. Yeah, you said that you see somebody who's socially awkward and you feel some of those feelings too.
	I understand it.
	I mean, I have to fight it too.
	Sometimes when I'm at these libertarian conventions and heavily-armed, tattooed guys come up, I have to remind myself that they have their own histories.
	I don't know those histories, but if I did, I bet you they'd make a whole lot more sense.
	No, I definitely see that.
	We all want to feel the pride of the accidental, but the moment you feel pride in the accidental, you feel contempt for the accidental as well.
	This is something, yeah.
	I did this with...
	I did this with intelligence.
	I took pride in my intelligence until I was maybe 15 or so, when I realized that, yeah, it wasn't working out so well, just investing everything there, because I was like, well, I didn't really do anything to get here.
	I just, yeah, I'm coasting.
	I saw how hard other people worked as well on exams and so on.
	So that kind of made me feel like, hey, they're doing something that's better than just, hey, I'm smart.
	You know what I mean? I do.
	And you don't earn your intelligence.
	I mean, that's to some degree physiological.
	And of course, you had an example in your stepdad of somebody who has considerable intelligence but is not happy.
	Yeah. It's not warm.
	It's not joyful.
	It's not loving. It's not, right?
	It's cold and distant and all that kind of stuff.
	And divorced, right? That sucks, right?
	So yeah, intelligence doesn't cut it.
	Looks don't cut it.
	Money doesn't cut it.
	Success, material success doesn't cut it.
	You know, the shit that we, out of humility, work to build...
	I think we can take pride in.
	I can't take pride in my abilities.
	I can take some pride in how I've applied those abilities to, as best as I can, figure out, help the world to a better place.
	I can't, you know, in terms of the things that I've been able to achieve, which I have great pride in, especially given where I started from, the things that I've been able to achieve in my life, a stable, beautiful, and happy marriage, parenting that I'm incredibly proud of, a wonderful, happy daughter.
	A wife who loves me more and more every day as I love her more and more every day.
	Without a template, I'm amazingly proud.
	It's more impressive to learn Mandarin if you've never spoken it than if you just grew up speaking it.
	It is more impressive, right?
	And so the people who grew up speaking Mandarin who are proud of it, to me, is ridiculous.
	It's like, well, you just grew up with it.
	There's nothing to be proud of. That's like being proud of having five toes.
	Wow, I really worked hard for that, you know?
	I saw that choice.
	I was like, six? That just seems like too many.
	Four? I won't be able to climb trees.
	Five? It's just right.
	So the stuff that we can take pride in is the stuff that I think we've earned.
	But in order to focus on what we've earned, we have to focus on what was accidental and let go of any shame that we may feel.
	accidental right so when i was younger i was like i felt ashamed that i smelled i felt ashamed that i went to school with holes in my clothing i felt ashamed that i had to pretend i'd forgotten my lunch money and asked for little bits of people's food because there was no food i felt ashamed oh man that i couldn't uh i couldn't join a I had to keep showing up to a swim team and pretend that I'd forgotten the $6 it took to join every week.
	I felt ashamed when somebody wanted to come over to my house for lunch and there was no food in the place.
	I felt ashamed on the rare times where we had...
	Like, store-brand Coca-Cola that friends would ask for a drink, and I'd have to put a lot of ice into it because there wasn't enough Coca-Cola to go around, and then my friends would say, what, you just put ice in because you don't have enough Coke?
	Well, this is all ice.
	I felt ashamed of all of that, and I could go on and on, and there's no particular point everybody who's been in those situations knows what that's all about.
	But, you know, and I'd go over to friends' places, they'd have, like, Houses with pools and literally pillars of Coca-Cola cans in the basement freezers or the basement fridges.
	And as I got older, I was like, well, it sucks, but that was the accidental stuff.
	That's where I happened to be born.
	That's where they happened to be born.
	Given that I want to be myself and nobody else, I can't completely reject the circumstances as uniformly bad because...
	It had something to do with who I became.
	And so I had to reject all of the stuff that was just accidental.
	I mean, the poverty, the instability, the having to move, the being evicted, the threatens with evictions and so on, the having to get a job at 11 and support myself from 15 or 16 onwards.
	I mean, that was harsh, harsh stuff.
	And the people who didn't have to go through that had a hell of a lot of an easier time.
	But for them to take pride in the easier time they had is as irrational for me to take shame in the harder time that I had.
	Those were just the fucking breaks.
	And I won't give them a shred of admiration for their good fortune and I will not accept a shred of shame for my circumstances because their good fortune and my bad fortune It was completely accidental.
	I will not give somebody props for being rich or for being pretty or for being successful or for being tall or having a great head of hair or any of the things.
	I will not give somebody props Respect or admiration or envy.
	I will not spend my money that way.
	I will not throw my gold down a well that way.
	I will not give people respect for the accidental because I know the moment I do, I will end up having to swallow shame for the accidental, which I will not do.
	I see that. That's something that I've slipped into a little bit recently.
	I've noticed that the more insecure I've been, the more I've been just desperately grabbing to place any sort of pride in the accidental, and that just made it worse.
	It will make it worse.
	It will. It will.
	Everything that we cling to as an accidental positive will only invite the accidental negatives back and harsher.
	I guess I have a question about the emotional side of it.
	Alright, but it has to be quick. I do have to get on with Mike Mason.
	The show's over, but we're a little in overtime, so I'm happy to answer it, but just if you can keep the question quick, that would be great.
	One thing I've been doing is, yeah, just really going back and feeling, pretty much just remembering how I felt back then and also filtering it through the idea that It was really wrong of them to do that to me.
	And feeling just a kind of horror at the fact that all of these people made that choice and that they would rather have done that than show any kind of kindness.
	The fact that so many people as well were involved with this, just that Really, that makes me cry.
	That makes me feel this horrible but really good at the same time pain that goes right straight to my core.
	Is that the kind of thing that's helpful in getting over this?
	I'm not sure. I'm not that good with figuring out that kind of thing.
	Well, I think if it's a genuinely true experience that you're remembering and you have an objective and valid moral appraisal of it, which I think you do, it sounds like you do, then I think that it's very healthy myself.
	I'm going to make my usual pitch, which I'll keep brief because you've heard it before, my usual pitch that philosophy cannot help you process emotions.
	For emotional processing, you need psychology, you need a therapist.
	Oh, good. Okay. So, I mean, I would bring these feelings up with your therapist.
	I would absolutely not.
	And Nathaniel Brandon is very big on this.
	And I, you know, for what it's worth, as an idiot amateur, I completely agree with him.
	That when you reject emotion, you reject identity.
	You reject the self. You cannot carve yourself up and be healthy.
	And you cannot carve yourself up into this feeling good, this feeling bad, this feeling healthy, this feeling sick.
	That is a kind of self-fascism.
	This citizen good, this citizen enemy of the state, right?
	And this is where statism comes from.
	It's this despotism that we have with ourselves.
	The free market has life-saving miracle goods, and it has...
	Sex with animal magazines, right?
	Because there's a market for both, right?
	No, seriously. Let's just say, for the sake of the argument, that this is true of the self as well.
	We have impulses that we all consider to be wise and honorable and noble and good, and we have impulses that we would have trouble confessing to our greatest friend, right?
	And this is natural.
	I think. And we have, because of our histories, the desire to carve ourselves up into good and bad.
	This is good and this is bad.
	This feeling is I like and this feeling is bad I don't like.
	Absolutely. I don't believe that that's healthy at all.
	I don't believe that that's healthy at all.
	I don't take ownership for my feelings in that way.
	I don't consider myself morally responsible for every thought and impulse that comes into my head because then I have to be some sort of Gestapo self-censoring asshole.
	Which is only going to make...
	If there's bad shit in me, I want it to come out.
	I want it to befriend me.
	I want it to have a seat at the table.
	Because it's not like it goes away if I repress it.
	It just goes underground, and then it's going to fuck me up in ways I can't even imagine.
	It's hard, but I try not to when I have...
	Quote, negative or destructive impulses, as we all do.
	I mean, I try genuinely to say, well, that's scary but interesting.
	I wonder where that's coming from.
	Like, if I have a horrifying dream or something, I need to know that shit.
	Especially given this fucking high-wire act that I'm doing in this show.
	I need to know that shit.
	If I don't know it, it doesn't go away.
	The rebellion does not vanish if you banish it.
	It simply goes underground and you can't see it anymore and then it hits you from the blind side in some bad way.
	Hmm. So, yeah, but philosophy, I mean, you know, I think philosophy is really good for, I mean, obviously, I think philosophy is really great for some things.
	Philosophy is really good for moral clarity.
	Emotions are not very good for moral clarity, because emotions are confused and infected by other people's self-interest, right?
	So if we've been raised by bad people, I'm not saying this is your category, but for me, I was raised by bad people.
	And so bad people don't want me to discover that they're bad people.
	And so when I start thinking about things in the family, if I only rely on emotions, I don't know what the hell is mine and what the hell is the bad people's wanting to hide from me, wanting me not to find out that they're bad people.
	And so it all gets confusing and mucky and mucked up and if I just use emotions to try and achieve moral clarity, I'm trying to clean a window with mud.
	It just gets worse. So philosophy is essential for moral clarity, but philosophy and for understanding the negative consequences of placing self-esteem or a lack of self-esteem and accidents, right?
	It is as unhealthy to place low self-esteem on the accidental as it is to place high self-esteem on the accidental, right?
	Yeah, I absolutely get that.
	So philosophy will give you the rational basis for empathy, but it will not create empathy in you.
	Philosophy will give you moral clarity about your family or your education or your country or your culture or your religion or any of that shit.
	It will give you moral clarity, but it will not process those emotions for you.
	That is something that you need to do with a therapist.
	Which is why I just constantly pound the moral clarity argument, give my sort of feedback, but I don't sit there for weeks and months helping people process emotions, because that's not what I do.
	I'm not trained for that. That's not my job.
	That's not anything close to my job description.
	I will point out the philosophical truth, which is why I talked about, you know, the philosophical truth about your history.
	But philosophy, and this is where intellectuals, particularly objectivists, get confused and get messed up, right?
	Because they have the moral clarity, which exposes a lot of emotional bullshit, but then they don't follow up with therapeutic help to process those emotions.
	And anybody who is swimming against the mainstream of society needs therapy.
	I genuinely believe that.
	I genuinely believe that.
	Anybody who wants to go to the Olympics needs a coach.
	If you're just a weekend warrior, you play hockey once a week, you don't need a coach.
	And if you just have some mildly different opinions from people around you, like they're really hardcore Republicans and you're only a semi-hardcore Republican, you don't need therapy.
	But if you are going to question the fundamentals of your society, that is going to kick up a whole bunch of emotional shit.
	Other people's unconscious, other people's ecosystem is going to be pounding down on you.
	Like, high bomber command, you need a coach in your corner because philosophical opposition to irrational cultures is the goddamn Olympics of the mental gymnastics that we can ever achieve.
	And nobody can do it successfully without therapeutic help.
	Nobody can do it successfully without a coach in their corner.
	And nobody can do it in a way that's going to make them happy without that kind of support system.
	And so that's why, particularly for listeners of this show, I just, I mean, I say it a million times and I'll say it a million and one more.
	You need that coach. So I just wanted to mention that.
	Well, thanks, Steph.
	You've been really helpful. And thanks for going over.
	That was really useful for me.
	I guess I was confused about what else I had to do now.
	I thought there would be like 10 steps, all these different things that people are saying.
	But if it's just stuff that I can really go back and deal with in the past, then at least I know where to focus.
	Let me give you a practical thing just before we sign off.
	This is all stuff that I've done, so I'm not trying to advise you from things that I haven't done.
	So get a big sheet of paper, the biggest sheet of paper you can find.
	Draw a line down the middle of it.
	Draw a line down the middle of it.
	On the left-hand side, write down accidental at the top.
	On the right-hand side, write down earned.
	Yep. And then list everything you can think of in your life.
	What is accidental? What is earned?
	Accidental doesn't mean that it doesn't have value.
	No, no. I mean, parents are obviously accidental, but you might love your parents.
	So accidental and positive, right?
	So you can do accidental and then just do a little plus or a little minus, whether you like that or not, right?
	So I like my body.
	I really do. I think I'm a fit guy.
	I think I'm a good-looking guy.
	I'm happy with my body. I like my teeth, right?
	So that's all accidental.
	I mean, I've done some stuff to be fit and I go to the gym and all that, but some of it's accidental, right?
	So it's accidental, but it's a positive.
	Now, the fact that I go to the gym is accidental, and it's a positive.
	Now, under-earned can be the negatives, right?
	I could lose my temper.
	The fact that I lose my temper and act in ways in which I'm not proud of later, that is earned.
	I do that. And it's a negative, right?
	Yeah, because I have some choice over my temper, right?
	But my temper also partly comes from the fact that I had lots of rage modeled for me as a child.
	So there's some accidental, but there's some earned.
	I'm trying to move it more towards earned so I can have it be less of a negative, right?
	Yeah. So this is just something that you can start to clarify.
	I think you will be completely shocked at how much is in the accidental column.
	And the degree to which stuff is in the accidental column that is important to you is the degree to which your self-esteem will remain low, in my opinion.
	Oh, wow. Okay.
	I think I'm getting this, yeah.
	Seriously, do that. Don't just think about it as an exercise.
	Like, hang out, write it down.
	And if you can, post it on the board.
	I think people would be really fascinated to see how that goes.
	All right, great. Thanks for that stuff.
	You're welcome. And it's a good thing to talk about with your therapist too, but that's what philosophy can help you with.
	Sure. Well, yeah, it's been great chatting with you.
	Thank you for that. You're welcome.
	And listen, great work.
	I mean, I just really wanted to, I know it's only been two callers, and sorry for the people that we didn't get to, but I really do appreciate the trust and the vulnerability that people have in bringing this stuff up.
	I'm glad that I could be of some assistance, and I really do appreciate you bringing this up, and great work today.
	All right. Thank you, Steph.

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