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Sept. 26, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:52:04

1755 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show 26 September 2010

Drugs as therapy, empathy for horror, and the perils of beauty!

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Welcome to September the 26th, 2010, just after 4 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time. I hope you're having an absolutely wonderful, wonderful weekend.
	Thank you everybody so much for the plethora of birthday wishes.
	I had a wonderful day and I hope that you had a wonderful day as well.
	Thank you everybody. It's very, very kind, very gratifying, very sweet, very nice, and very, very much appreciated.
	So thank you everybody so much. So, I guess we have people on the line.
	Let's not bother with my ramble tangent intros and get straight to you, the most important part of the philosophical conversation, the listeners.
	My friend, you have a question.
	What can I do to help? Yes, well, first of all, I didn't know it was your birthday and I want to wish you a happy birthday and just wondering, did you do like a birthday dance for your birthday?
	Did I do a birthday dance?
	I think you're assuming that at some time in my life I'm not dancing.
	So yes, there was a birthday dance, but that was pretty much de rigueur for me being out of bed.
	Although I will sometimes dance in bed as well.
	So yes, definitely birthday dancing, and it was a huge deal of fun.
	It was an incredibly warm day here.
	It was about the warmest day on record, I think.
	Other than that, it was maybe 1962, but I don't want to be a weather bore.
	It was so nice that I took Isabella down to There's a conservation area where we live and those who've been up know what it looks like.
	It's beautiful down there. And it was so warm that we could actually wade into the river, Isabella and I. We saw some crayfish and we saw some fish and we threw stones.
	And it was just a beautiful thing.
	Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. And so, you know, life just doesn't get a whole lot better than this sort of stuff.
	So thank you everybody so much for making that sort of thing possible.
	But enough of my rambling.
	What can I do for you, my friend?
	Yes, well, you talked a little bit about drugs last call-in show, and I have a question in regards to that.
	You were asking the question about levels of insight that you can acquire from certain types of psychedelics or mind-altering substances such as LSD or psilocybin.
	What I've sort of found is there have been some studies with psychotherapy, so a junction with psychotherapy when it comes to LSD that was done in the 60s and is actually being done right now.
	Back in the 60s, there's a guy by the name of Timothy Leary who was able to utilize this LSD and Reduced the recidivism rate of prisoners.
	And so I think the recidivism, I don't have the numbers, I'm just going to go off a limb here, but I think the recidivism rate was like 10% and he was able to, or the recidivism rate was like 50% of prisoners.
	And he got down to like 20% or something like that, utilizing this substance called LSD. Well, I tell you, sorry, let me interrupt you for a sec.
	I'm going to... James, do we have another caller?
	At the moment, we have...
	A Miss C. Alright, so listen, my friend, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you, but the problem is that if you don't have the numbers, we're just speculating, and I can't really found that off speculation.
	You know, this may have happened.
	I don't know if it was validated.
	I'm not sure what the numbers are.
	You're not sure what the numbers are. Take a few minutes and Google it, and you can put the link in the chat window, and let's have a look at it together, because I certainly would want to be correct, but I don't want to go off sort of half-remembered stuff from some time back.
	Does that sound like a good plan? Oh yes, I do have the numbers right now, so I can go ahead.
	I just pulled it up. So some studies in the 1950s used LSD to treat alcoholism, profess a 50% success rate, five times higher than the estimates of near 10% of alcohol anonymous.
	So that was one study that they actually did.
	Sorry, could you put the link for that in the chat window?
	Yes, I can go ahead and do that.
	Sorry, is that just LSD without therapy, or is that LSD with therapy?
	It's LSD with therapy.
	And, yeah, I'll go ahead and send a link to your chat window.
	It's going to take me a little bit of time.
	So the argument goes is that if you use it with therapy, you're able to tap into the unconscious and find some things, as you would do, like, dream analysis.
	Sometimes you have dream analysis on the show.
	And that's some of the effects that LSD has is, you know, you can sort of acquire some of these very unconscious zones that are sort of hard to uncover.
	Just like the movie Inception where you had to go down those different layers.
	It's like a shortcut. You can go around, you know, a perimeter of an area or you can just take a diagonal direction and split the distance in half.
	Alright, but let me, I appreciate the metaphors, and I'll wait for that link to come up.
	My first question would be, I guess first a comment, then a question.
	My first comment would be that everyone who has a particular kind of infection who takes antibiotics, just about everyone receives improved health as a result, like the infection is sort of killed off with the antibiotics, right?
	And so that to me is a specific drug which treats infections, and maybe over-prescribed and this and that, but we can sort of agree on that.
	Most people who have a headache who take an aspirin will feel a lot better.
	But I think that you and I both know that most people who take LSD do not end up with significant amounts of self-knowledge and healing of mental dysfunction.
	Is that a fair thing to say? That is definitely a fair thing to say.
	So it's not the LSD itself, right?
	Because a lot of drug users, in my experience, are emotionally stunted.
	At least that's the communications I've gotten from a number of people after I do podcasts on drugs or whatever.
	I get a lot of inboxes of people who are kind of aggressive and contemptuous and kind of immature.
	And again, this is not an argument again, so I'm just pointing out that it's not the drugs themselves, it's the drugs possibly in conjunction with something else that is providing the relief.
	And that doesn't dismiss it, but that's an important thing to remember.
	Right, right. I definitely agree.
	Because, yeah, just to add on to that, yeah, if you...
	Aren't really, yeah, a mature individual and you have these unresolved issues and you don't really know how to maintain and understand your emotions.
	You're not able to regulate it in a healthy manner.
	Definitely, you need a good coach.
	Yeah, a therapist, like you said before, would be a good coach for that to sort of be able to regulate these things that are going on in your life.
	And to further add on to that, I would just say that the idea that so many people that endorse like psychedelic jealousy or psilocybin is you have to be, I guess, in a lightened state of being.
	You can't just sort of be – you shouldn't really use it recreationally.
	I mean, I guess there's nothing wrong with that, but to get sort of this great insight from it, to dive into the unconscious, You sort of have to be at a mature frame of mind if you understand what I'm saying.
	I think I do. My issue is not that people cannot gain insights out of drugs.
	I think that it's quite possible that they can.
	Certainly, I think it would be foolish to argue that people have never gained artistic growth out of drugs.
	Certainly, I would say that myself, I had a breakthrough in my creative writing when I began to smoke cigarettes while I was writing.
	I did that for a couple of years, and I never smoked more than one or two cigarettes a day.
	But I certainly would say that nicotine was an enhancement to my writing, and then I was able to maintain that creativity without the nicotine, but it was certainly associated with, and I'm not going to say it's causal, I don't know, but when I began to smoke while writing, it definitely had...
	I felt like it had an impact, and I think the quality of my writing went up considerably, and of course it's been many years since I smoked while I wrote, but I think it was definitely a charge.
	And certainly people like anecdotal evidence, whether it's true or not, right?
	But lots of people have claimed, Samuel Coleridge writing Kublai Khan claimed that he was on, I think, on opium when he wrote a poem.
	And unfortunately, he was unable to complete it because a self-important person from poor luck came by to interrupt his writing.
	Freddie Mercury began doing drugs and had an enormous boost to his creativity in his songwriting, which is sort of where Bohemian Rhapsody and so on came from.
	And you could argue the same thing for the Beatles, you know, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds being LSD. Sgt.
	Pepper, as Paul McCartney says, was a drug album.
	It was composed on drugs, recorded on drugs, and enjoyed by a lot of people, I believe, on drugs, and myself too.
	I think it's a great album, of course.
	So to me, it's not to say that drugs never have any beneficial effects.
	Of course they have beneficial effects, and those beneficial effects are why people take the drugs.
	And the beneficial effects can be things like euphoria, can be things like the avoidance of the negative effects of withdrawal, eventually.
	And I do believe that the positive effects can include My issue with drugs is that...
	People say, well, I get all kinds of knowledge and insights on drugs.
	And then I ask people what those knowledge and insights are, and they're kind of not able to tell me.
	And that's the issue that I have, that it doesn't translate into something that is philosophical.
	Philosophy doesn't come out of drugs.
	Creativity, artisticness, certain kinds of insights can come out of drugs.
	But philosophy doesn't come out of drugs.
	That's sort of the main thing that I've been talking about.
	And so I don't think that it conflicts with what you're saying.
	And the last thing I'll say is that if there was a hallucinatory drug that provided full-on psychotic hallucinations and delusions with smell, with taste, with touch, with sight, with auditory hallucinations...
	And you could take that safely every single day for the rest of your life.
	And in fact, if you didn't take it, you would be doing very poorly from a mental health standpoint.
	I think we'd all be quite encouraged by that.
	And those, of course, you take when you go to sleep.
	They're called dreams. And dreams are the mind's playpen, and sometimes a nightmare playpen, but...
	That is when you can gain enormous insight into yourself without the aid of these mind-altering substances or drugs.
	And so given that the brain already does this, I don't really think that it's necessary to induce a much lesser state of hallucination and euphoria than that which we experience every night when we're dreaming.
	So I think that a really great therapist, and therapy has come a long way, in my opinion, since the 1960s, But a really great therapist who's working with you and your dreams, your dreams are just going to provide you so much powerful information that you may like or, and certainly in my case, sometimes significantly dislike, about yourself, your environment, your history, the people around you.
	It is an unmasking delusion That is actually closer to reality than most of our waking states that occurs every single night, which is available for analysis.
	So I just don't think you need to supplement the mind's incredible capacity to simulate realities to have these most astounding hallucinatory experiences every single night for hours at a time.
	I don't think you need to supplement that.
	I don't think it's necessary. And I don't know enough about these studies to know whether they did dream analysis or whether it was just something that occurred as a result of the hallucinogens.
	But I would definitely go for dream analysis and in-depth psychotherapy.
	Do the drugs add anything to that?
	Well, I don't know.
	But I don't think that they're necessary.
	But please, that's enough of me.
	It's supposed to be your show as well.
	So go ahead. Well, I definitely agree.
	Those are a lot of good points there.
	I just would like to say that, you know, not everybody is able to dream or remember the dreams.
	Everybody's dreaming, but not everybody is able to remember the dreams.
	And secondly, when you do remember the dreams, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's mixed with what's been around you in your waking life.
	You wake up from a dream and as Daniel Mackler explained, you know, you have to write it down immediately.
	And how many people actually do that?
	And how accurate are these dreams in the first place when you do actually write it down immediately?
	I mean, there's going to be stuff missed out.
	But in the case of using these psychedelics, you can have this waking dream experience and have some sort of professional be able to try to interpret them while you're actually experiencing them.
	And that's one of the things that's beneficial about some of these drugs.
	And I would like to make the distinction between LSD and psilocybin and like heroin and alcohol.
	You know, those are very dangerous drugs right there, heroin and alcohol.
	They have a lot of side effects.
	The therapeutic index is very narrow.
	And do you want me to elaborate on the therapeutic index?
	Yes, somebody has posted this.
	Again, I'm not sure if it's verified, but it says, Some studies in the 1950s that used LSD to treat alcoholism professed a 50% success rate five times higher than estimates near 10% for Alcoholics Anonymous.
	These studies were criticized for methodological flaws and different groups had inconsistent results.
	M. Mangini's 1998 paper reviewed this history.
	She concluded that the efficacy of LSD in treating alcoholism remains an open question.
	So, again, I don't know the facts.
	I don't know the background. Maybe what I should do is I should try and dig up somebody who's an expert in the field of psychology and have an interview with them to see if I can get to the root of it because it certainly is an important question, I think.
	I certainly don't want to oppose substances that have therapeutic benefits.
	And about dreams, you can train yourself to remember your dreams, right?
	So you can drink a big glass of water so that you wake up halfway through the night and you can write your dreams down and And so on.
	So there's ways that you can train yourself to remember more of your dreams.
	I think the number of people who simply have no capacity to remember dreams at all is pretty small.
	But, oh, yeah, Gabor Mate.
	Okay, I will talk to him.
	So, yeah, but I think it's an important question.
	If it has therapeutic benefits in terms of mental health, then I think it's an important question to raise.
	And, sorry, you were going to go into more detail about something that I've forgotten about in my own rambling, so...
	Right, the therapeutic index.
	So if you look at alcohol and heroin, the therapeutic index is the ratio of ED50 over LD50. So that is effective dose, 50% of the population, over the lethal dose, 50% of the population.
	And so let's say the effective dose of alcohol to get you drunk is one beer.
	70 pounds or so, maybe that's going to get you drunk right there.
	But let's say it's one beer to get this individual drunk.
	Well, the lethal dose for 50% of the population will be 10 beers.
	That's a small, you know, a gap between the effective dose and the lethal dose.
	And it's even smaller when it comes to heroin, which is a one to five ratio.
	So one to get you that buzz and five that will actually kill you.
	Five times the amount will actually kill you.
	In the case of psilocybin and LSD, you know, The ratio is far, far higher.
	I mean, I don't have the exact numbers.
	What I'll do is I'll post it up later on the chat window so that you can see the numbers.
	So I'm not going to throw anything out there.
	I'm sorry, can you just explain to me why we're talking about this?
	I'm a little confused. Well, the reason why I'm saying this is because there have been...
	Some concerns about utilizing a drug and the dangers of the side effects.
	So you have Prozac. And the dangers of the side effects of Prozac may be it may give you some sort of heart palpitations or something like that.
	There's like side effects to drugs.
	And there's a certain threshold that you don't want to cross, and it will be very harmful.
	You may die from it.
	And so just looking at this through the lens of what is the healthiest way to sort of approach these things when it comes to resolving these unresolved issues in your life, definitely I would endorse the idea of doing it drug-free.
	But I do see the benefits of certain drugs that are virtually harmless.
	And so, yeah, I mean, as Daniel Mackler has explained and as you have explained, why not do it the natural way?
	You can tackle schizophrenia without using drugs, without being dependent upon these substances.
	Why not do it the natural way?
	But I do see a sort of value to some of these drugs that are labeled illegal and harmful drugs that aren't actually harmful and actually can be used.
	I mean, of course, not here in the United States because they're illegal.
	But they actually can be used and with virtually no harmful effects.
	But definitely what I do is I look for this information so that I have the facts at hand and I'm not just like talking out of my armpit as you would say.
	Just additionally...
	Sorry, let me just make sure.
	Can you tell me why this is important for you?
	It's important for me because, well, I've listened to a lot of your podcasts and the...
	The thing that I get from your podcast is being able to sort of live a life that is free from all of these contradictions and live a life that knowing thyself and become an enlightened full potential individual.
	And the ultimate question for me is finding ways, finding a Yeah,
	but sorry, what does this have to do with things in the present?
	Because right now, all this stuff is illegal.
	Well, in the present, I mean, yeah, here in the United States, yeah, it's illegal.
	No, I mean, just about everywhere, it's illegal, and you may have, in fact, everywhere that I know of, it's criminal, right?
	Sorry, it's illegal, which doesn't mean that it's criminal, in the same way that speeding is illegal, but it's not a criminal offense, right?
	So even the Czech Republic and Amsterdam, or Holland, I suppose, and Portugal and other places, it's decriminalized, but it's still illegal.
	So, you know, what I would say is that if you want to find ways to improve your mental health, I think that stepping outside the law and taking substances whose quality is questionable because it's all in the black market, right?
	So there's no sort of public corporate entities whose reputation and income rests upon the quality of their product.
	I mean, it could be mixed up with some bad stuff.
	It could be you don't exactly know the dosage.
	It's risky.
	So it's risky from a medical standpoint to take drugs at the moment because you don't know what's in there or what dosage is there specifically.
	You have very little recourse if not no recourse to any kind of bad product that you get and it's illegal.
	So it's stressful from that standpoint.
	So I think put all of that together, it's just not the way to go as far as trying to have a happier and more relaxed life.
	Just do it in a way that you're not breaking the law or wondering what the hell you're putting into your body.
	Right. So I guess I could say that right now, at this point in time, I guess the best thing that can be done would be to expand the awareness of these things and try to No, no, no, no. I don't agree with that because it doesn't matter whether drugs are beneficial or not.
	It doesn't matter.
	That's an argument from effect.
	It doesn't matter whether heroin is good for your mental health or bad for your mental health.
	The only thing that matters is are you initiating the use of force if you take heroin?
	And of course you're not. The reason the drugs should be perfectly legal is that it does not require the initiation of force to grow, to refine, to transport, to sell, and to ingest these drugs.
	To say, well, it depends whether it's beneficial or not, doesn't matter.
	Because it may be beneficial to some people, it may be incredibly harmful to other people.
	I believe that drugs are very harmful to the majority of people, but that's, you know, that's just my opinion, and I've got some evidence for it, but I'm not going to say it's a closed case.
	But you can't sort of say, drugs, you know, we should try to improve the...
	The perception of the value of drugs, because it doesn't depend on that.
	I mean, Twinkies are almost universally bad for you, I'm sure, and so does that mean they should be legal or not?
	The benefits don't matter. The only thing that matters, at least from a philosophical standpoint, from an ethical standpoint, the only thing that matters is does the activity violate the non-aggression principle.
	If it doesn't violate the non-aggression principle, then people should just leave each other the hell alone to do what they want.
	And if it does violate the non-aggression principle, then there should be sanctions against those people in a free society.
	I doubt that they would be the police and the prisons and so on.
	But I think if I were you and you wanted to sort of advocate for the legalization of drugs, which is certainly something I'm for, I don't want to get into this study or that study.
	It's just simpler than that.
	Is anybody pointing again at anybody?
	No? Then get your nose out of other people's business.
	Not yours, right, but other people.
	Right, yeah, I definitely understand.
	I agree, I agree. It's definitely, yeah, I mean, I shouldn't be sort of, yeah, I shouldn't be taking that route because, yeah, that's the most immediate thing I should be looking at is, yeah, just using the non-aggression principle and Yeah, there is an old saying that Puritanism is the nagging terror that somewhere, somehow, someone is having fun.
	And I think that a lot of people don't like drugs because people clearly have a lot of fun on drugs.
	I mean, people clearly have a lot of fun at raves.
	People clearly really enjoy the mellow that comes out of doing marijuana.
	People clearly enjoy the thousand orgasm hit of heroin.
	People really, really enjoy that stuff.
	And I know that when I was younger, I always had this nagging fear that I was just way too much of a tight ass, that I was just way too uptight and responsible and straight-laced and middle-of-the-road and square and boring, and that there were these people just having this ball out there, you know, and that there were these people just having this ball it's the train spotting thing, you know, where just people are...
	They don't try to fit in.
	They don't try to live life like everybody else.
	They just go and do their thing.
	Like a friend of mine, when he was younger, he just went and traveled around the world.
	And he lived on...
	He picked garbage... And he would go to pizza places when they were just shutting down and he would find usually a pizza that somebody had ordered but not picked up or whatever that they'd give him for free.
	You know, he just did this thing where, and to me this was mind-blowing, savagely irresponsible.
	But I had to sort of recognize that that's his choice.
	There are benefits to it. There are costs to it.
	I was, you know, Mr. Responsible, Mr.
	Get an Education, Mr. Get a Career, Mr.
	Keep Money in the Bank, and I'm still that way in a lot of ways.
	But I really do kind of envy people who can do that into the wild thing.
	There's just stuff that I couldn't imagine.
	Like a guy I worked with, he was a sailor, and he took his children for three or four years sailing around the Caribbean And he's homeschooled them on his boat.
	I mean, this shit blows my mind that people do that kind of stuff.
	Now, of course, I yell at the internet for money, so who am I to talk?
	But I think that if you're happy with your own choices, then it's a lot easier...
	I think if people fundamentally aren't happy with their own choices, then other people's fun bugs the living shit out of them.
	And there is a lot of fun in having drugs, and I've certainly thought about it, I've contemplated it, I've certainly been encouraged by many people to do them, but I don't think it's going to happen.
	But I think it's much more of a deeper phenomenon than do they help certain people with mental health issues.
	I think it's a really deep phenomenon around most people are not very happy with their life choices because they've made very few of them, right?
	They've just gone on these train tracks of societal expectations, you know, like you...
	You go to school, you go to college, you get a professional career, you do whatever, right?
	You get married, you have kids. They're just on this kind of track laid down by society, whether it's religious or professional or whatever.
	And you cheer for this sports team, not that sports team, right?
	You cheer for this country's flag, not that country's flag.
	You respect the troops, not the philosophers, whatever, right?
	And so people don't really make choices.
	And if they don't make choices, we are what we choose.
	If we're not making choices, we don't actually have an identity.
	And then people get kind of depressed.
	I think it's true that most people live lives of quiet desperation because they just haven't made choices or made commitments to anything or served anything higher than themselves that wasn't invented by priests or politicians.
	So they're just not happy with themselves.
	They haven't made decisions.
	They haven't self-actualized.
	So then other people who are often making different decisions, whether it's to be an artist or whether it's to be, not that it's a decision to be gay, but who are gay or who are doing drugs or who have done, as Timothy Leary suggests, you know, tune in, turn on and drop out.
	People who take these different approaches, they really do threaten this.
	I'm sorry for the speechifying.
	I'll just end up with, you know, there's a scene in Easy Rider.
	When Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson and the dude from Speed.
	Dennis Hopper. They go into this bar and they've got, you know, long hair and they're hippies and they're riding their bikes around and they're having a whole lot of fun.
	I mean, it's a whole lot of fun. Who wouldn't want to just get off on a motorcycle and ride around the country and, oh, do drugs and sit by the firelight and sing songs and, oh, you know, bed women.
	That's a pretty sweet deal, if you ask me.
	And they go into this bar and there are all of these rednecks who are just incredible.
	You can smell the hostility coming off them.
	This hatred, and it's been years and years since I saw the film, so I'm sure I'll get this wrong, but one of them turns to the other and says, you know, this is supposed to be the country of freedom.
	This is supposed to be the country of choice.
	This is supposed to be the country of opportunity.
	But the moment you take a choice or an opportunity or make a decision that's different from everybody else, everybody comes down on you like a ton of bricks.
	Everybody praises freedom in the abstract, but the moment they come across it In reality, they freak out, and they want to clamp down and lash out.
	And so I think that America, because of its highly religious society, and it has a problem with people making different choices.
	has a problem with people dropping out or taking alternative lifestyles.
	And religion, in many ways, particularly the West, has a problem with religion because...
	Sorry, religion has a problem with drugs because drugs reveal that you can have incredibly vivid quasi-religious experiences that have nothing to do with God, that God is in a single dose of LSD, not in history or in the clouds or all around us.
	I'm sorry for the long speech, but this was just some of my thoughts on the subject.
	Thank you.
	Really so, and I appreciate that.
	I really do. And I appreciate your show, and I'm going to do a lot more research into this and look at this issue in more of a different perspective, not going towards the argument of the fact, but more of those principles that you're talking about,
	because that is important right there, and it's better than sort of researching this, like libertarians, some libertarians would do, they kind of have like What you can do is if somebody is anti-drug, hopefully you're at their house, just go through their CD collection.
	If they've got any country music, it's mostly grass and alcohol.
	If they've got any hip-hop, there's other kinds of drugs involved with that.
	A lot of pop and rock have been heavily influenced by drugs.
	If they have just about anything from the 60s and the 70s, particularly symphonic rock, if they've got any Queen, it's like, okay, so let's scour your record collection for any music that was created under the influence of drugs, and you're left with, I don't know, Perry Como and, I don't know, Casey and the Sunshine Gang or something.
	Actually, probably not even those guys.
	I think the Sunshine Gang was a metaphor for something.
	It's like, okay, so let's ban all of the music that was created under the influence.
	But people don't ever want that kind of stuff, but you can't get one without the other.
	Right, right. Absolutely.
	All right, so listen, I'm going to move on, but thank you so much.
	A very, very interesting topic, and please let me know when you have more info, and we'll talk about it some more.
	Hello. Hello.
	I'm very well, thank you. How are you?
	I'd like to say good, but that would be a bold-faced lie.
	Listen, I've had a rough life, and the bottom line of everything is I self-abuse.
	To be more specific, I'm anorexic, severely, and also I cut.
	Right, right. I'm sorry to hear that.
	I'll give you a quick background.
	I was raised by a worst-case scenario alcoholic.
	I was sexually...
	Well, I was raped by my first stepfather when I was 13, by my second stepfather when I was 15.
	I did cocaine with my mother when I was 14.
	I was beaten.
	I was starved.
	Life wasn't great.
	And when I turned...
	At 16, she basically said to me, well, if you don't like it here, you can move out.
	Hello? Yep.
	Say, what? Can I move?
	Really? And I packed all my underwear into my purse and I left and I never went back.
	Okay? I grew up.
	Nobody loved me. How did I fix that?
	I fixed it. I fixed it.
	I had an army of people who loved me.
	I do. I have the greatest kids in the world.
	I have nine kids. I had ten.
	I lost one. Anyways, so now I've been going to therapy for nine months.
	I've been locked up more than once.
	Sorry, when you say locked up, do you mean involuntarily?
	Involuntarily restrained because I'm a danger to myself.
	Right. And is that because of self-mutilation or is that because of suicidality or something else?
	Well, both. To be honest with you, both.
	But to me, they're one and the same, really.
	Anyways, I've started to pull things together and I started to put on weight and now I don't understand why I can't get the evilness of my mother out of my head, but I started self-abusing again and it's driving me crazy to the point where I want to spontaneously combust.
	And I can't stop it. I can't Stop it.
	And going to therapy and sitting there, my doctor's great, but it's not helping.
	It's not helping. I need some kind of tool or tip.
	How do I get these people out of my head?
	How do you do that?
	How do you break free? Right.
	That's a big question.
	And you've certainly given me an exciting challenge.
	And obviously, I'm no therapist, I'm no psychologist, I'm no doctor, but I can give you what I think, or ways that I've found helpful to approach these kinds of issues.
	But do you mind if I ask you a few more questions first?
	Go ahead. Sure.
	So, well, first a comment.
	Like, holy shit.
	That's fucking terrible.
	Like, that's so terrible.
	That's, like, one of the worst stories I've ever heard.
	So, really bad luck with your family.
	Really, really, really, really bad luck with your family.
	So, I just wanted to start with what a war zone, what a rapacious, murderous regime you were born into.
	I'm so sorry. I just wanted to express that.
	I'm so sorry for that accident of completely shitty circumstantial luck that you ended up in that hellhole.
	So I just wanted to say that up front.
	It's monstrous. Everything that you're talking about is completely monstrous.
	It is the exact opposite of what children need, deserve, and should have provided to them.
	So I just really wanted to put that moral light bulb in the center of the room first.
	Thank you. Now, you said that you were putting on some weight and you were not...
	Is it cutting that you do?
	Yes, I'm bulimic anorexic and I cut.
	Right, right.
	We'll just call it back.
	Okay, no we won't. Okay, and do you cut your...
	Like where people can't see, most people like your inner thighs or something like that?
	Oh no, everywhere. Everywhere.
	Yeah, I don't care if you see or not.
	To me, it's a release.
	It's, you know... I have to do it.
	I can't even stop myself. I have to do it.
	And then I feel great.
	You know, most people go, oh, my arm, I'm bleeding, I'm gutting.
	You know, not me. It's like, wow, I feel so much better.
	Right. Yeah, of course. All those endorphins.
	And it beats the alternative of not cutting, which is an emotional void, right?
	Well, it's like you're going to spontaneously combust if you don't.
	Right, right, right.
	And you said you were gaining weight and your cutting was either you'd stopped it or diminished at one point and then you said that it sort of came back and do you know what those two markers are?
	Was there anything going on in your life that may have moved you towards something better and then moved you towards something worse?
	Well, I went back to work.
	I was off work for a while and I went back to work and I feel great inside.
	I feel great inside.
	But my weight got a little bit higher than in my safe zone and I lost control.
	That's it. It's all control.
	I know this. I know it's control.
	I just can't stop.
	What do you mean you know it's control?
	I know that if I lose control of my feelings, of my weight, then it spirals.
	And then that's when I start cutting again.
	I mean, I haven't eaten in a very long period of time now.
	And, you know, everything that I eat now, it comes right back out.
	It's control. But why?
	Why do I have to control it?
	You see? And my psychiatrist, she can't answer that.
	You know, my therapist is great, you know, but she can't answer that.
	And I don't feel like, to me, I'm not going to get any better until I can understand why.
	Why? Yeah.
	Is the question, sorry, is the question why do you control or is the question why are you locked into this?
	Why do I have to control?
	Right. And I think you can't answer that until you ask what it is that you're controlling.
	Because until you know what, the why doesn't really help.
	So the question is not why do you control, the question is what are you controlling, right?
	So if I'm sent a box, right, and I don't know what's in it, I'm just going to open it, right?
	I don't care, right? If I'm sent a box and there's growling and it's shaking, you know, like one of those crates at the beginning of Jurassic Park, then I'm not going to open it, right?
	In fact, I'm going to close it really shut and call animal control or something, right?
	So, the question is, what's in the box?
	If you know what's in the box, then you know why you're doing what you're doing, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah. You sort of sound skeptical, and I can understand that.
	It wasn't the best metaphor in the world, but we'll try another swing at it.
	You know, for the weight and the control there...
	I was good. I was doing really good, but then I got a little bit higher.
	I know it's because I'm back to work.
	It's muscle. I'm not eating anymore.
	It's muscle. I've regained all the muscle I used to have.
	And I don't even care if it's gold freaking bullion.
	I don't want it on.
	Why didn't...
	I mean, so your parents, crazy, evil.
	I mean, I think we're not going out of much of a moral limb there when we're talking about starvation and abuse and rape.
	I mean, that's just concentration camp crazy Tarantino shit.
	So I think we can all stay on the same page as far as that goes.
	What was the environment that nobody intervened when you were a kid?
	Well, I'm a little bit older than you.
	Not a lot. Back when we were younger, Steph, and you have to agree, people turned a blind eye.
	I ended up in emergency with a broken jaw because the woman beat the shit out of me because I wouldn't eat maggots in her fucking zucchini.
	The woman being your mom? Yes.
	I wouldn't eat the zucchini with the maggots in it.
	You know, and I had my jaw broken.
	And then I had to have it re-broken later because the people in emergency...
	Anyways, never mind that.
	But, you know, I'm there, my mouth is wired shut, and my mother says, oh, well, she fell down the stairs.
	Yeah. Yeah, and you knew, right, that if you spoke up...
	We didn't have stairs, you know.
	Right. We lived in fear of this woman.
	That's your mom, right? Yes, and my parents were divorced when I was four, and I asked my father later in life, maybe about six, seven years ago, why didn't you help?
	Why didn't, you know, why?
	And he says to me, well, you know, I only really care about myself and my wife, his new wife, you know, and nothing else matters to me.
	Thanks. Thank you.
	You know? Right.
	My mother's dead.
	Why does she have so much control over me?
	They're never dead. As long as we're still alive, they never die.
	Right? Because they're in us, right?
	And good! But I can't get her out.
	I can't move past it.
	And now the biggest problem is not even me, because if I were to die tomorrow, so, you know, the problem is I have nine kids.
	Well, hopefully that's not a problem, but I know what you mean.
	You have a responsibility to raise these kids and to be there for them, I understand.
	I have. Nobody loved me my whole life until I had children, but I love them, you know?
	I mean, as much as you love your little Lizzie, you know?
	Even more. Even more.
	You know, I get up early and I make the lunches for school and, you know, I have to leave for work, but no, I'm doing it, you know, and it's great.
	And I come home and I think, geez, I've had a crappy day.
	I'm in the door five minutes.
	They're all on me. Hi, I missed you.
	I loved you. And I feel great.
	You know, life is good.
	Why can't I get this horrible woman out of my head?
	Well, my guess, and it's only a guess, of course, but my guess would be it's because you still haven't understood her.
	And by understood, I don't mean sympathize.
	God help me, no, I don't mean sympathize.
	But I mean understood.
	My own mother, my therapist said, and it was after we were in therapy for quite some time, that my mother had an unlived life as a murderer.
	As a murderer. And...
	That really began to help me to understand my mother from a real danger standpoint.
	And I've told this story before.
	And I'll just keep it brief here.
	But the last time that I rebelled, until I became a teenager and I was big enough to take her on physically, or at least to prevent her from attacking me physically, when I was, I think around three, maybe four, after my mom had beaten me up and screamed at me and terrified me, after my mom had beaten me up and screamed at me and terrified me, then I went and snuck into the kitchen in the middle of the night, like two in the morning, and I grabbed some cookies and I went to go
	Just, I didn't know where I was going, I just knew that anywhere was better than where I was, and my mom heard me and came out and picked me up and beat my head against a door.
	And I didn't remember feeling any pain, but I did remember feeling, and it's similar to what you read about if somebody gets attacked by a shark or a bear, you don't feel any pain, but you feel this hyper-awareness of the danger that you're in and of what you need to do to stop the escalation of the attack. but you feel this hyper-awareness of the danger that you're And I just went limp.
	Because I understood that if I had continued to resist or to fight, that my certainty, which is not proof, but my certainty at that age was that if I resisted, I could get killed.
	She could hit my head so hard that I could die or become brain damaged or something like that.
	And once I began to understand that, In my experience and opinion, she would not have stopped short of murder.
	That I grew up in the Sopranos, like I grew up in the Mafia, in a sense.
	Then my choices as a child, as far as what I had to do to survive, became blindingly clear to me.
	And, I mean, if your mother was starving you and Beating you and breaking your jaw.
	To me, you lived under the threat of murder.
	I don't think that's...
	Anybody who hits somebody hard enough to break their jaw can very easily, slightly miss or hit from the wrong angle and kill you.
	But I don't want that from my kids.
	We're not talking about your kids.
	No, no, we're talking about you.
	We're talking about you when you were a kid, not your kids.
	I mean, do you get that...
	This is all my opinion, but I'm pretty sure about it.
	Do you get that you lived under threat of murder?
	Well, yeah. Because if you get that, then you understand that you had to internalize that murderousness in order to survive.
	If a rat is in a maze and every single wall on that maze is electrified to the point where a single touch might kill the rat, you understand that the rat cannot navigate by feeling its way around.
	The rat has to navigate incredibly slowly, incredibly carefully, and the rat had better damn well internalize that electrified murderous map within its own mind if it's going to survive and navigate the maze, right?
	You have to internalize the murder map if you're going to navigate through it alive.
	In other words, you have to internalize the murderer.
	You have to obey your inner murderer so that you don't provoke the external murderer who has provoked that.
	You have to internalize the violence.
	You have to self-aggress In order to appease the external aggressor.
	I get that fully.
	I'm sorry? I said I get it fully, but she's dead now.
	No, she's not dead because you've internalized her.
	Look, if I've raised this rat in this death maze, and the rat has been in that death maze for half its life, does it matter if I then Destroy the maze?
	No, it doesn't matter because the maze is in the rat's head.
	It doesn't matter. That's like saying if we burn down Auschwitz, the concentration camp survivors are all going to be fine, but they're not.
	So this is my guess, right?
	It's all nonsense, amateur idiocy from the internet, but this is my guess.
	I'll put it forward strongly because I'm strong about the guess, but still just a guess, right?
	So you have a maze in your head that you had to navigate for many years, right?
	If you go down this road, there's rape.
	If you go down this road, there's a beating.
	If you go down this road, you get...
	If you touch this wall, you get your jaw broken.
	If you touch this wall, then you get raped, right?
	It's a completely terrifying, absolutely overwhelming mind...
	It's overwhelming. It's terrifying and you can't put a foot wrong.
	It's like literally spending your childhood walking on a very, very thin sliver of rope over a chasm.
	You can't put one foot wrong or you may fall to your death.
	So, in order to avoid external annihilation, you have to keep the threat of self-annihilation close.
	I mean, this is something you know as a parent, right?
	This is completely different, but it's something that we all know as parents.
	At least half a dozen times a day, I imagine something terrible happening to my daughter.
	And I have to, because that way I can avoid terrible things happening to my daughter, right?
	So I've got this game where I swing her up in the air.
	It's great fun, right?
	So the other day I was swinging her up in the air and I suddenly thought, oh my god, if I turn around and swing her that way, she might hit The light that's in the living room.
	The light that's hanging from the ceiling.
	So I have to imagine that so that I don't do it.
	We all have to imagine dangers in order to avoid dangers.
	That's a healthy thing.
	So if you're going on your bike down a hill and you're going too fast and you start to feel anxious and you feel like, oh my god, I'm going to flip and I'm going to break an arm or bash my head on the cement or something, you need to feel that fear so you'll hit the brakes.
	So we all have this imagination Of extinction, this imagination of maiming, this imagination of if this goes wrong, it goes really wrong.
	I think we've all been there.
	We all understand what that's all about.
	That's a healthy part of living. That's how we keep ourselves and our children safe.
	Because we have to let them risk, but we also have to anticipate when the risk is too high.
	So we have to extrapolate to disastrous outcomes at all times so that we can keep ourselves and others safe.
	Now, that healthy part of us, when we're exposed to too much danger, to too much attack, when it is no longer something that is helpful and a guide to us, but something that is overwhelming and destroying us, then we internalize this incredible danger, this incredible risk, not just of tripping down the stairs and bumping your head, but of being beaten to death.
	Or raped to the point of internal bleeding.
	I'm sorry to be so graphic, but it's nothing compared to what you actually went through.
	So in my opinion, you have internalized these disasters to the point where if you flourish, if you do well, if you become normal, if you had tried to do that when you were a kid, it's my guess that you would have been attacked.
	Is that fair to say?
	Yeah, same thing with me.
	If I'd have acted normal as a kid, in other words, if I'd have just chatted about my day, I mean, when you come from an abusive household, you have to have a self-censorship that makes the Russian secret police look like the Boy Scouts.
	You have to self-censor all the time.
	So you got beaten up last night, right?
	You go to school, and your friends are all talking about the movie that they saw, the TV show that they saw, the game that they played, and you've got to shut the fuck up.
	Or you've got to make something up.
	Because if you just act normal the way that everybody else acts, you just say, oh, well, this happened.
	I got beaten up. It might get back to your parents.
	And then you might die.
	So we can't be normal.
	Because normal is incredibly dangerous.
	Normal is just like telling the rat to just go...
	Put their head straight into the chopping block, straight into the blades, straight into the X marks the death spot electric fence.
	So my guess is that when you begin to approach normal, and I don't mean normal like everyday normal, this quiet desperation stuff I was talking about earlier.
	I mean normal like not cutting yourself.
	I mean normal like having three meals a day.
	I mean just the minimum of normal.
	That it provokes these attacks.
	Because that's what you had to do to survive as a kid.
	You could not be normal.
	And so normal provokes attacks, murderous attacks, because that's what you had to do as a kid.
	You couldn't approach normal.
	You couldn't be normal. Because normal could have gotten you, well, probably would have gotten you, incredibly injured or even killed.
	But now, I mean, it's okay to be normal.
	Right? You can have food.
	You don't have to cut yourself.
	I know it's easy to say, and I'm not saying this solves anything, right?
	But the reality is that you're not in the murder maze anymore.
	You're not in the electrified fence murder maze anymore.
	I know it really feels that way when you reach out.
	You think you're going to touch something, because we're kind of blindfolded, right?
	You reach out, you think you're going to hit.
	A shock or a voltage that might kill you.
	But that's not true anymore.
	As you say, your mom is dead.
	But the mom within you that you internalized for exactly healthy, perfectly normal, good, positive reasons, that you were trained to self-attack because that was the only way to survive.
	And that would be my approach to working with these issues.
	That when you feel the urge to cut, that when you feel the urge to starve yourself, that was survival mechanism for living in the electrified murder maze.
	Constantly shifting walls and standards and rules that require the nimble mental agility and self-mutilation of a psycho ninja, which we And I'm not even putting myself in the category of what you experienced.
	It's far worse than what I experienced.
	But you had to self-attack in order to survive because it was the only way to appease your attackers.
	If I punch myself, I can control how much damage I do.
	If somebody else is punching me and I'm concerned or terrified that they're just going to go psycho on me, And just, you know, kick me until I fall apart, physically fall apart, get broken up into my component bits, right?
	If somebody says to me, I can whip you and I might lose control, or you can whip yourself, either way you're going to get whipped, what am I going to choose?
	I'll do it myself. I'll do it myself, thank you very much, because I can control it and I can pretend to be more hurt than I am just to satisfy your sadistic, shitty bloodlust, right?
	Mm-hmm. Can I ask you something, though?
	Sure. Do you ever have that secret feeling inside yourself that, shit, I could do this to my kids?
	I could do this to my kids?
	What our parents did to us, we, you know, I'm so afraid of hurting them.
	That's why I want to keep control.
	But I can't, I have to, ugh.
	No, but you see, but...
	I would rather die a long, horrible, slow, painful death than harm one hair on any of my kids.
	But you do know, right, that when you're not eating, when you're self-mutilating, they are affected, right?
	Yes, I know. I know.
	That's how your mom gets to them, right?
	Through you, through your head, through what you had to do in order to survive.
	But are you afraid of ever doing to Izzy what your parents did to you?
	I would say that I was more afraid of it before I became a parent.
	And I certainly...
	I would tell you this, you know, I'm always trying to be as honest and open as I can.
	I can completely understand how my mom ended up the way...
	That she ended up. Right?
	Like, I can see that path.
	I can see that fucking path.
	Like, I've taken a different path and I'm damn glad for it, but I can totally see the steps that ended up with my mom being the way that she was.
	So I can understand.
	I can sort of say to myself, if I were my mom in this situation, I can totally see how she would react and what she would do.
	I don't feel that urge to do it myself, but I can really get how my mom would react and how she would have ended up that way.
	Now for me, to me that's come about because I don't believe That human beings are that complex.
	Like, you know, there's this old theory that says there's good in the worst of us and there's bad in the best of us and we're all just a mixture of grey and blah blah blah blah blah.
	I don't... I don't really...
	I don't believe that. I just don't believe that.
	I think that good people have complexity, but evil people, in my mind, are...
	They're just...
	They're just empty murder robots.
	That's all they are. If they have power over you, they will fuck you over in ways that Satan himself could not imagine in his nastiest mood.
	If you have power over them, they will cringe and lick your boots until such time as they can gain power over you, and they will strangle the shit out of you, but not let you die, because they don't want to lose their victim.
	That's the only thing that restrains those kinds of parents, in my opinion, is the consequences because they're cowards and because they don't want to lose their victims because they love having power over their children.
	And so for me, I don't view my own mom as some complex, confusing mixture of light and dark and good and bad and choice.
	It's just one color for me.
	I don't view her...
	I mean, yeah, she had a terrible childhood.
	Absolutely. I'm sure that she did.
	I'm sure she had a worse childhood than I did.
	I'm sure of that. But, so what?
	Does that mean that there's no such thing as virtue for people who've had bad childhoods?
	I don't believe that's true.
	I mean, look at what you have done.
	Look at what I have done.
	We all, you and I both know how freaking hard that is to live a better life than the one that was inflicted on you against your will.
	When you were young. We know how it's like climbing up a mountain using only your toenails and your teeth to make a better world than the one you were born into.
	So yeah, I can understand.
	I understand more so as a parent how it came about, but I would not say that I experienced the same impulses.
	I make a conscious effort not to be like her.
	Like, she was a worst case scenario alcoholic.
	I don't drink. Yeah, no, that's important.
	I don't take drugs. I don't, you know, I try and I discuss things with the kids.
	I don't just give them an edict and expect them to follow it.
	You know, I try to encourage them.
	I try to support them.
	It's just...
	Why can't I do that with myself?
	But you have answered it.
	Well, I don't know if I've answered it.
	I've provided some perspective that may be of help, but may be the beginnings of a place to start looking.
	But I would, you know, if I were in your shoes, well, first of all, I'd get a sandwich about the size of a small Aston Martin because I'd be so hungry I couldn't think of anything else.
	But if I were in your shoes, I still think that you may need to work on On sympathy for yourself.
	You can only act out this way against yourself if you still are feeling sadistic and cruel towards yourself, which means that you can only fight sadism for yourself internally with sympathy for yourself.
	Right, which means just continually going back to childhood and saying, my God, I was...
	A two-year-old kid, a three-year-old kid, a four-year-old kid, I was stuck in a situation of intense physical danger, the kind of physical danger that adults don't face in wartime or prison.
	I was stuck with intense physical danger, with no external resources.
	In fact, every external resources appeared to collude with my mother and stepfather to enable the abuse.
	I had no options. I had no alternatives.
	I had no help. I had no skills.
	I had no independence. I had no money.
	I had no job skills. I had no chance.
	I mean, even a guy on death row can continue to write for a reopening of the case, can continue to write to the governor, can do something that he genuinely believes might have something, and he's not subject to entirely arbitrary punishment.
	But children...
	In these kinds of environments, you understand that you had no hope for salvation.
	You had no hope for escape.
	And every day, you were face to face with sharks and lions and spears raining down from the sky.
	What an unbelievably wretched and awful, insane person.
	Wretched and evil situation to be stuck in.
	And stuck in a society that constantly proclaims its love for its children and its desire to do nothing other than protect its children.
	Not when we were young.
	They turned a blind eye.
	It's not changed.
	It's not changed.
	It's not changed substantially since then.
	Well, it's more than my opinion.
	I know that for a fact. It's not changed.
	Or if it's changed, it's almost imperceptible.
	It's not just when we were young.
	But the reality is that that's the situation that you were in.
	And if you knew of a child in that situation, you would never think of harming her, would you?
	If I knew of a child in that situation, I would risk life and limb to get them out.
	Right, but you understand that you are...
	I understand that, but you need to universalize that ethic then, right?
	I completely agree with you, but you need to universalize that ethic and show the same respect for you as a child that you would for any other child in the world.
	But it's hard, you know?
	I mean, my whole life, you're not worth it.
	You're the shit on my shoes.
	You don't deserve to live.
	You should have been in an abortion.
	I don't know why I didn't abort you while I was pregnant.
	This is what I grew up with.
	How can I love myself?
	How can I even like myself?
	Look, if you want to listen to your mom, then that's what you're going to get.
	If you want to think that a crazy, insane, evil bitch like your mom is someone that you want to listen to, then this is what you're going to get.
	But why would you want to listen to her?
	I mean, has she earned your respect?
	Has she earned your ear?
	Has she earned you listening to her?
	I was programmed.
	I am hard to hear her.
	I know. I know.
	And that's what I mean when I say that sympathy.
	Look, moral outrage and anger, I'm a big fan of, obviously.
	But incredible, deep sympathy for what you had to experience is, to me, the key to unlocking.
	Self-abuse. Sympathy, sympathy, sympathy.
	If you're having trouble having sympathy for yourself, imagine that you are somebody else.
	Imagine that you are reading about you in the newspaper under a different name, right?
	Imagine how you would feel.
	Oh my God. Would you want to go over and yell at that child and take her food away and stab her in the leg?
	Of course not. Well, why would you do it to yourself then?
	It's the same principle.
	I'm programmed that way.
	I hate her. I don't doubt it.
	And I think that's a perfectly healthy reaction.
	I hate her and I didn't even meet her.
	I hate her for what she did to you.
	I hate her for what she did to you and for what she exposed you to.
	It's hard to break free of the programming.
	It's very hard to break through the programming and that's why you need to imagine that it's one of your kids who was kidnapped and subjected to what you were subjected to.
	Would you want to bring one of your kids home and starve them and stab them?
	Of course not. Of course not.
	You would be incredibly tender and you would be incredibly kind and you would be incredibly gentle with them and you would continually reassure them that it wasn't their fault, right?
	But why are you not allowed the same break as you would provide to every other child in the universe?
	Why are you not entitled to the same sympathy and the same moral outrage as every other child that exists, that will exist or has existed?
	Why are you the single only exception that is not deserving of that tenderness and kindness and compassion?
	I don't know. All I know is I want to stop hurting myself.
	I want to be normal.
	I've never done normal.
	I wouldn't know where to start.
	Sure. Sure.
	And I'm telling you, it's In my opinion, it's real compassion with yourself.
	Looking at yourself as somebody you'd read about in the newspaper, you'd just want to scoop up that child and hug and kiss and hold them and reassure them that it wasn't their fault, that they were safe now, that bad people are gone, they're not coming back, that you're incredibly proud of what...
	She did to survive that situation.
	How full of admiration you are at her incredible intelligence and cunning to survive that situation.
	How proud you are of everything that she had to do in order to survive.
	How she's to blame for none of it.
	None of it! And how brave she was.
	And how resourceful she was.
	And how unbelievably shitty it was that everybody saw it and nobody lifted a goddamn finger.
	And you would be on her side and by her side for as long as it took for her to feel better, right?
	If it was one of your kids or if it was a kid you'd read about.
	My kids are left.
	That... That is...
	Universal ethics.
	If that's what a stranger deserves, my friend, is that not what you deserve?
	If you would provide that to an anonymous stranger, should you not provide that a million-fold for your own tender, younger self?
	Well, the answer is I should be able to, and I don't seem to be able to.
	Yeah, look, I mean, I'm just introducing the idea, right?
	So it's not going to just, yeah, boom, yay!
	You know, everybody thinks there's this big emotional blurp, and then everybody's better.
	That's not how it works. We both know that.
	But just, I would work on imagining that you read about somebody like yourself, how much tenderness and compassion you would feel for that helpless victim of savage parenting.
	How much tenderness and compassion and admiration and respect and love you would feel for somebody who managed to survive that as a helpless and dependent and terrified little child.
	Well, that's what you deserve.
	That's what you deserve from me, from everyone in your life, from you.
	You survived literal hell.
	And I can't tell you how much I respect and admire you for what you survived, and for how you survived it, and how you grew, and how you have people who love you in your life, and how you didn't succumb to drink, to drugs, all the other shit that so often awaits people who crawl out of these bloody trenches of history.
	I don't just tell you how much I admire what you've done and what you've brought.
	And for having this conversation, which I know is not easy.
	What you've done to me is incredible, amazing, awe-inspiring, admirable, in ways that I couldn't even express.
	It's heroic, what you've done.
	If people did what you did, we would have a world without war and a world without abuse and a world without prisons in a single generation.
	And I think that there should be statues built to you.
	And there should be songs written about that kind of courage and that kind of heroism.
	Those songs will take a little while to come, but they'll be there eventually.
	We only have songs for war heroes and pretty people.
	But this is where the real heroism in the world is.
	This is where the real courage in the world is.
	And I feel such admiration for what you've done and such incredible sympathy for what you suffered, for what you went through, and for what you've had to carry for the The carnivores, the invisible carnivores sitting on your shoulders and pecking at you all these years.
	I'm so sorry for what you went through.
	I'm so admiring of where you've come.
	And I would stop you from cutting yourself if I could because that's not what you deserve.
	That is not what you deserve.
	You do not deserve a moment's more starvation, a moment's more cutting.
	You deserve praise and hugs and celebrations for what you have survived.
	Not more abuse.
	Enough. Enough.
	Enough. Enough. Enough.
	You've paid enough. You've suffered enough.
	You've cut enough. You've starved enough.
	You've bled enough. You've broken enough.
	Enough. You have the rest of your life to celebrate what you have achieved and survived.
	And to be weighed down with the medals of admiration from good souls in the world.
	But enough self-punishment.
	It won't save you.
	And all it does is keep a ghost alive that should be damn well rotting in hell.
	I want to think about...
	I appreciate the conversation.
	I appreciate your input.
	Thank you. All right.
	Keep me posted if you can. Let me know how it goes.
	Okay. All right.
	Take care.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	Well, thank you so much for the caller.
	I know that those conversations are tough to hear.
	I certainly do appreciate it.
	I'm glad that she called.
	I'm glad that we had that conversation.
	Do we have other topics in the chat room or other people who want to chat?
	Hi, Steph. Hello.
	Can you hear me okay? I sure can.
	Just something that I noticed as I was listening to her story, one person in the chatroom was extremely upset and angry and had a very strong reaction to it.
	And I was just wondering, why is my reaction different?
	And is it...
	My immediate assumption was that the person identified with the person that was talking and projecting or something.
	But then I thought, well, it could be the reverse.
	Maybe I just haven't processed something and that's why I'm numb to this when I hear this.
	I'm sorry, can you just break down the question a little bit more?
	Are there one too many twists and turns for me to follow?
	Okay, sorry, the question is why such different reactions emotionally?
	And one being you said that you felt numb and the other one that somebody was upset with the caller?
	Not upset with the caller but like the story was just so upsetting for them and like he was like so angry at the people who hurt her and stuff, you know?
	Geez, why shouldn't we be angry at people who hurt children?
	I think that's perfectly fair.
	Look, I mean, I'm not going to speculate because I don't know, but there's lots of reasons why people would have different reactions to a conversation like that, maybe.
	And I don't know, right? But let's just imagine there's a guy named Bob.
	And Bob maybe knows somebody like this in his life, maybe his niece or his nephew or someone who was mistreated as a child and he didn't do anything about it.
	So maybe that's bringing up a lot of anxiety or guilt for him.
	And maybe that's one of the reasons why he's reacting to it that way.
	Somebody else might be an abuser, right?
	And might feel a great deal of anxiety, right?
	Abusers don't like it when people stick up for their victims, right?
	They really don't, because they've kind of planned their whole life on that never happening, and for the most part, they're right.
	But, you know, things are changing a little bit now, so that's an issue, right?
	Yeah. There could be any number of other reasons.
	If other people have unprocessed trauma, then there's going to be a short circuit that comes in where they're going to numb out and dissociate just so that they don't have to deal with that overwhelming material.
	I mean, this woman has been in therapy.
	She's done a lot of self-work. She's in therapy right now.
	She has the capacity to talk about this stuff and handle it with some degree of emotional connectivity, although obviously there's some spots where it's missing.
	So there could be lots of reasons why people react in very different ways.
	It's hard to make it about somebody else.
	It's hard to make a conversation about somebody else.
	Because, right, we all have our own issues and our own histories that interfere with our listening and being there for somebody else.
	Right. Yeah.
	That makes sense.
	And so that's important.
	And I always try to say, I try to stay conscious, because you have to listen to yourself at the same time as you're listening to somebody else, right?
	That's the challenge, right? If you just focus on somebody else, then you're not listening to your own instincts about what's going on in the conversation, because it's much more than just verbal, even in a phone call like this.
	So you have to stay aware of yourself At the same time as you are deeply listening to somebody else.
	So it's a complicated thing to do, in my opinion.
	It takes some work, some, you could say, training or some experience.
	A practice is probably a better way of doing it.
	So I think we've all had it where we're talking about something that's important to us and somebody else barges in with all their own stuff and makes it all about them and it's frustrating and it's alienating and so on.
	And that's because they haven't got used to the idea that you can listen to someone even when someone is saying stuff that's stirring up a lot of stuff in you, which is what happened with me in this call.
	But you can still stay present to the other person.
	You just have to say, look, this is my stuff.
	This is how I helped. It may not be the same as yours, but be honest about what I'm feeling and so on.
	But you can have that blend of two people in the same conversation.
	But it takes some real practice and it takes some real concentration.
	And that's why RTR is so important.
	Yeah, like both people existing at the same time.
	Yes, both people existing.
	Yeah, I listen to you, you listen to me.
	We both can have feelings without one person's feelings displacing the other person's identity.
	That happens a lot, right?
	It does, it does.
	This connects to something I was thinking about the other day.
	Exactly, yeah. Sorry, you're breathing a little into your mic there.
	You can just move it further away.
	Sorry. No-win situations were very common in childhood.
	The kid couldn't exist while the parent was existing and That kind of thing.
	Right. Like if my mom is feeling something strong, then I have to kind of blank out and accommodate that.
	Like we can't both feel something strong, either positive or negative.
	We can't both feel something strong at the same time, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, exactly. And then people everywhere kind of are like that.
	It's depressingly common.
	Once you start to see it, it really is...
	It's everywhere. And it's sad.
	I mean, it's sad because, to me, if you can't both have feelings at the same time, then you're kind of not both there.
	It's a very lonely existence.
	I don't think it's that popular anymore, but there used to be this thing a number of years ago called the talking stick.
	So if you had a family gathering...
	You'd have a stick, and whoever had the stick got to talk, but you couldn't talk while somebody else had the stick.
	If you wanted to talk, you'd ask for the stick, you'd get the stick, and then you'd get to talk.
	And it's like the talking stick.
	And I don't know, I don't think it's actually that good an idea.
	It seems a bit regimented to me, but I haven't really thought that much about it.
	But what just popped into my mind while you were talking, it's almost like families have the identity stick, you know?
	It's like only one of us gets to exist at any given time.
	Only one of us gets to have an identity or feelings at any given time.
	Damn, that makes sense.
	Yeah. I'm glad I asked this question.
	Yeah, see, sometimes even when you don't know why, it's useful.
	Yeah. I think that answers my question, though.
	Thank you.
	Oh, you're welcome.
	All right.
	Do we have somebody else on the line?
	Thank you.
	There's a couple of questions in the chat room if we don't.
	Somebody says, Steph, give an example of me paying attention to myself.
	Well, I mean, just in this last call, I had to listen a lot.
	I knew that if I expressed my outrage, that the caller would likely...
	Shut down emotionally. But at the same time, I didn't want to pretend that I wasn't outraged, so I talked about it and asked questions and listened some more and saved my big sort of passion for the end, which I knew was going to Short-circuit her a little bit and be kind of overwhelming because I'm, you know, talking about a lot of sympathy, which is very much counter to her life experience.
	But that's okay.
	I mean, she'll get a chance to listen to it again later, so hopefully it will show up a little bit more there.
	That's sort of listening to myself, making sure that I'm aware of what it is that I'm feeling, and also saying, you know, here's what I'm going to talk about myself, not to the exclusion of you, but here's how I approach the problem, which might be of some use to you.
	And you've all heard me say this a million times, right?
	These are not my conclusions.
	These are just my opinions. This is just my thoughts.
	There's some stuff that I'm certain about that I'll go to the wall for, but a lot of stuff is much more slippery and subjective, and it's just a part of a conversation rhythm.
	So that to me was staying in touch with myself, but also judiciously in touch with myself and making sure that it didn't speak to the complete exclusion of the woman, at least I hope not.
	How does self-pity differ from self-sympathy?
	That is a genius question.
	Miss CC, brilliant.
	I will tell you what I think.
	I don't have a dictionary on hand and I'm not sure it would be that useful.
	Self-pity occurs when we blame others for the effects of our actions.
	That's self-pity.
	If I drink and scream at my wife, and then she leaves me, and I feel that she has done me wrong, that is self-pity.
	Because I am blaming my wife for the effects of my actions.
	But self-sympathy is when I accept that I was harmed by the actions of others that I did not provoke.
	And children cannot provoke parents.
	Children cannot provoke parents.
	I think that's really, really an important thing to understand.
	And so that's why I'm always siding with the kid.
	So what parents do to children and what teachers do to children and priests, wherever that massive power imbalance from adults to children, it's never the child's fault.
	It's never the child's fault, in my opinion.
	And so that would be self-sympathy.
	James, I'm getting a lot of background here, so I was wondering if you could just tamp down somebody, maybe mute somebody on the server if you can.
	Or if you're listening to this through Skype, if you could just mute.
	Ah, thank you. Somebody has asked, what are my thoughts about Canada legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana in November?
	I don't know much about it.
	I don't know much about it. I've gone back and forth on this.
	I think that what it's done to drug users is just unholy and abusive and so on.
	But gosh, I don't know.
	If I would actually be, nothing the government does will solve the problem.
	So if they decriminalize marijuana, I think that there's some benefit to that.
	I mean, obviously, some people will not go to jail, who otherwise may have gone to jail or ended up with records and so on, and I think that's a good thing.
	Of course, I don't imagine that they're going to get the mafia out of it.
	I don't imagine that they're actually going to legalize the sale and distribution of drugs.
	It's going to be just, I assume, end-user personal consumption, which is completely ridiculous.
	I mean, it's completely ridiculous.
	It's like saying it's perfectly legal for you to have a phone in your home, but it's completely illegal to run any kind of connectivity to your home.
	I mean, it's just completely deranged, but this is where the world is in terms of its, quote, solutions.
	I think that California is doing it.
	Because of money, right?
	I assume that they're going to save money on policing or they're going to save money on prisons or whatever, but California, this is the same state that put this crazy three strikes and you're out thing where people have gone to jail for 20 years for stealing a slice of pizza.
	They have a pretty savage penal system.
	So it has nothing to do with freedom or liberty.
	And my concern is that it's going to end up with just a different kind of money flowing into the government coffers, which they can then use for other kinds of oppression.
	So I don't know.
	Maybe I'd have to do some more research on it, but that's my...
	Oh yeah, they are taxing it, right?
	Yeah, I mean, look. I mean, there's going to be a lot of changes in the US and in England and in other countries, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain.
	There's going to be a lot of changes in these countries because they're completely out of money.
	Even in the US, the value of the dollar has fallen by 80% over the past few decades when you compare it to gold.
	The only reason that it hasn't completely collapsed is because nobody's on the gold standard anymore, so you're just comparing fiat currency to fiat currency.
	So the world economic system is dead.
	It's just hanging on by...
	It's like looking at a corpse still twitching after it's come down 12 stories off a building.
	It's dead. It's just twitching.
	And that's the world economic system at the moment.
	I mean, it's dead and gone.
	And we are, at the moment, I think, on the edge of an abyss.
	People in charge, I mean, this is going to be a true news, so I'll just keep it really brief here, but what the hell can they do?
	I mean, you can't do anything.
	If you decommission the military, you're not going to save any money because they're just going to go on unemployment because there's no jobs for them.
	So you're going to get a whole bunch of people on unemployment who know how to use arms.
	That's not exactly what the ruling classes want.
	If you try to cut...
	Unemployment, well, that's illegal. If you try to cut pension plans, well, that's illegal.
	What happens then if you try to cut pension payouts or try to raise the retirement age, you get sued by the unions, and then you end up in court for a number of years, and you can't do anything until then, and then you're probably just going to end up paying a whole bunch of damages from a legal action.
	So the entire system is set up so that it simply cannot save itself.
	No matter what you do, you're going to run into some legal or special interest barrier That is going to prevent you from solving the problem.
	Say, oh, if only there was a political will to solve the problems.
	No, no, no. The problems are insolvable.
	The entire system is paralyzed in this ridiculously contorted position of discomfort.
	What do they call them? Stress positions and all.
	It is a ridiculously paralyzed system.
	There's nothing that can be done to solve the problems because the entire system is set up to stifle problem solving.
	Government is the opposite system.
	So, you know, if Ron Paul gets in tomorrow, I get in tomorrow through some bizarre, I don't know, my head on Joe Biden's ass transplant or something, then there's nothing that could be done.
	Every solution that you would try and come up with would simply be stopped by some special interest group wielding some legal power, by some contract that you couldn't get out of, by some federal restriction.
	I mean, why didn't Portugal just legalize Marijuana or heroin or cocaine because it's illegal for them to do so because it's part of the EU charter that they can't do it.
	And so these are just the facts that the system as a whole has been so set up and so paralyzed with these incredibly complicated interlocking legalities and restrictions and controls that there's nothing that can be done.
	There's nothing That can be done.
	I mean, again, we're like a nutritionist stepping up to somebody who's eight minutes away from a fatal heart attack.
	Change your diet? I don't think so.
	Maybe if you'd done it 20 years ago, but not now.
	Like, I genuinely believe that Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to cut the California budget.
	I genuinely believe that he wanted to do that.
	I think that he was very keen on that.
	And he can't do it.
	He can't Do it.
	Everything is so locked in.
	Everything is so regimented.
	Everything is so legalized.
	You say, oh, we'll fire a bunch of government employees.
	Well, you run the numbers. What happens?
	You've got to pay them these big payouts of packages, which means that your budget is actually going to get worse.
	And then what happens? Well, Your unemployment numbers go up, because these people are all out of work now.
	The private sector is too strangled to create new jobs for them, and even if they did, who really wants 20 years of public service on their computer's desktop, right?
	Well, probably not many people.
	And so they go on unemployment.
	Then you have to pay for training programs.
	See, there's no way to cut the budget.
	There's no way.
	To cut the budget. Let's say you cut your defense spending.
	Well, a whole bunch of people go out of work.
	You may have to break some contracts, which will result in you getting sued.
	The people who are out of work, hey, they go on unemployment.
	They need training programs.
	So you have to spend more.
	And more. There's just no way to cut the budget.
	So I'm a bit, you know, this is just a money grabbing thing, which is not anything moral or anything like that.
	All right.
	Oh, tell us about your newest book.
	And how can we get it?
	I tell you this, my friends.
	This is a fine, fine book.
	I'm very pleased with it. I'm very pleased with it.
	It's very different. It's been a very different book for me.
	It's called Against the Gods.
	Because remember, I'm all about the modest claims.
	And I'm going to upload it right after.
	I'm going to upload it right after this.
	And I'm going to post it in general.
	It's just the computer voice reading it at the moment because I really want to get some feedback.
	But I'm very pleased with it.
	So I will upload it. I will post it on the message board.
	You can download it and listen to it.
	I'm very happy to get feedback.
	I do want to get community feedback before I do the final reading, just in case.
	Well, not just in case, because I'm sure there's stuff that I've missed or stuff that could be improved.
	So I really want to get people's feedback, but you'll have a chance to listen to it, I guess, after the show.
	Is there a good form of narcissism?
	No. I don't think so.
	No, I don't think so. Self-confidence springs out of utility.
	I think self-confidence springs out of utility to people.
	And narcissism is about using people for your own needs.
	So I don't think you can get...
	Narcissism is not self-confidence plus one.
	Narcissism is the complete opposite of self-confidence.
	Self-confidence is I am of use and utility and benefit to others.
	I know that sounds all kind of second-hander, and I want to get into a whole complex theory here, but I am confident in my relationship with my wife because I continually ask her how her day was, how she's doing.
	I continually ask her if there's anything I could be doing to making her happier.
	I continually am monitoring my daughter to find out if she wants to spend time with me, if she is showing affection for me.
	Is she running into my arms?
	Is she kissing me?
	Is she hugging me?
	Does she grab my finger and pull me to wherever she is so that I will play with her?
	Is she showing pleasure in my presence, in having me around?
	And so, I mean, I'm confident in my relationship with my daughter.
	I'm confident in my relationship with my wife.
	I'm confident in my relationship with most of the people at FDR because I hear, and people donate, and they support the show in other ways, and so I know that the show's of value, the downloads keep increasing, and I guess I'm doing more public speaking engagements and so on.
	So confidence comes out of being of utility to others.
	And bringing them pleasure and bringing them happiness.
	Not through manipulation or empty praise, but, you know, in a sustainable long-term way.
	Whereas narcissism is about other people's utility to you at their expense.
	It's not mutual. So it's the complete opposite of self-esteem and self-confidence.
	I'm sorry, I don't know enough about hypnotherapy to pass an opinion on it, but I will say that I'm skeptical.
	You know, it's like the guy earlier who was talking about drugs.
	You know, I think everybody wants a shortcut.
	I don't know of any shortcuts to self-knowledge.
	I think you just have to dig in and do the work.
	Steph? Yes.
	Hi, can I ask a question, please?
	You were waiting for me to take a breath.
	Good call. Go ahead.
	I have called in on the previous shows also and I had a question about...
	Well, first of all, congratulations for the lady you helped in this chat before.
	I'm really impressed how you handled that.
	And you gave me the insight of self-sympathy that you can really solve self-abuse through self-sympathy.
	And I really liked your metaphor of seeing yourself in the newspaper Really, I'm going to apply that too.
	But I had a question about something else.
	I have one long time friend that I liked a lot because she was from other sex.
	And so you advised to be honest with her and to tell your feelings.
	And I found that a good idea.
	Yeah. It's always nice when it's a good idea.
	No, no. It was a very good idea.
	And like so many ideas of yours, I'm really enjoying all your shows and it's helping me a lot.
	But so I also applied some of those ideas.
	And well, this one, maybe I didn't apply it very well because she came over.
	We had a very nice afternoon.
	We talked a lot about things.
	But I really couldn't tell her the feelings I had for her.
	Again, I couldn't tell it because it has been several times now.
	So after she left, I sent an SMS to her, a small message, in which I told her that I had those feelings.
	And then she replied to me and she said, I'm sorry, Mark, but I don't have those feelings for you.
	I still love my ex-boyfriend.
	I was kind of surprised because when we talked, she talked a lot about her ex-boyfriend that she didn't like this and didn't like that and some of those stories were quite shocking.
	You couldn't really talk about love.
	For example, She discovered that she had a very bad disease and he really rejected her on that.
	He really couldn't handle that.
	And that was something very important for her.
	And she also broke from him.
	She moved out and she moved back with her parents.
	So I really had the impression from all the talks that she didn't love him.
	And then when I told my feelings for her, suddenly she did love him.
	And so I replied on that one with the message, look, you're not happy with him, but still you're attracted to him.
	So you cannot be happy like that.
	You will never become happy like that.
	And then I told her in that message I think the explanation for that is that your boyfriend is a lot like your father and you have always continued to accept the shit from your father and so that's why you still accept the shit from your boyfriend today also.
	And I think I believe a lot in that theory that is from Alice Miller And I sent that message.
	And she replied on that one very angry.
	And she said basically to fuck off.
	So I was kind of surprised.
	But I would like to have your opinion about how I handled that.
	And did I make a mistake according to you?
	Or yeah, what is your impression?
	You're not asking me for real, are you?
	Yes, I am. No, you're not.
	No, you're kidding me, right?
	No, you're kidding me.
	You're kidding me. Is it obvious for you?
	Yeah, no. I think I hear you.
	So, this woman was in this relationship with this guy who, according to you, was kind of a shit, right?
	Well, on some levels, yeah.
	Well, yeah. I mean, I'm just going by what you're saying, right?
	Has she done a lot of self-work, self-knowledge work to get over that?
	She talked a lot about all the problems she had with him.
	No, no, no. Complaining about your ex is not doing self-work.
	Taking responsibility as to why did I choose this guy, that is doing self-work, right?
	Oh, yeah. Well, obviously, she did not.
	Yeah. Right.
	So she chose a guy who was like her dad, let's say.
	I mean, let's just say your analysis is right.
	I have no idea, but I have no reason to disbelieve it, right?
	So she chose a guy who's just like her dad.
	I assume her dad is not the best guy, in your opinion, right?
	Mm-hmm. Is that fair to say?
	Yes. She talked about him also, yeah.
	Yes. Right. And so she chose a guy who's like her dad.
	She broke up with him or he broke up with her, I think.
	And so she's not done any self-work to figure out the connection or why she's doing what she's doing or how she's responsible for choosing this guy and where it might lead.
	Is that fair to say? Yes, that's my impression too.
	So what the hell is attractive about her?
	She's pretty, isn't she?
	Yes. Come on, you can tell me.
	She's pretty, isn't she? Yes, yes.
	Oh, you can't be asking me this seriously, right?
	Well... She's hot and crazy.
	Well, she's...
	She's a hot bag of crazy in tight jeans.
	No, but she was...
	She's very beautiful, but...
	The thing is that with her I could talk about the problems I have with my family, close family, with my friends.
	We're not talking about your self-knowledge.
	We're talking about her self-knowledge.
	Okay, you know my theory of love, right?
	That love is our response to virtue.
	It's involuntary if we ourselves are virtuous.
	So I'm going to assume that you're virtuous, right?
	Maybe thinking with your dick, but virtuous.
	And so what are the virtues in her that you're attractive?
	Well, um...
	Okay, um...
	Let me throw out a few, and you can tell me.
	Is she courageous in the face of injustice or whatever?
	Does she stand up for what's right and what's good?
	Yes, she does.
	Oh, good. Okay, so perhaps you can give me an example of that.
	Yes, she's a teacher and she teaches in a difficult school and she talks then about, for example, a child that was in her class, a new child, and that was very aggressive to her, that really threatened to attack her.
	But she handled that with love, but also with discipline, the combination of both, so that she is the boss, but she does it with love.
	And in that way, she really succeeds in becoming a favorite teacher to those kinds of people.
	Oh, wait, sorry. So she interviewed the parents to find out where the child's aggression was coming from inside the hole?
	No, she did not do that.
	Is she very honest?
	Even when it's difficult?
	Or perhaps especially? That I'm not sure about.
	Because of what just happened, of course.
	Well, I think you can be sure about it.
	I think you're not sure about it.
	Well, okay. I called you to get your opinion because I asked a friend.
	Look, I'm saying you don't need my opinion because you already know the facts.
	I'm not giving you my opinion because you're...
	Well, I guess I did, but you already know.
	Yes, I think I know, but...
	And you knew ahead of time.
	I knew before I called you but somebody else said something else and I was confused.
	That's why I wanted your opinion.
	Somebody that I know from FDR had another opinion and that's why his opinion was that the way I handled that was wrong and I don't think that.
	I think it's very obvious also.
	Let's say you handled it wrong.
	Let's say that, right? You didn't handle it maliciously.
	You weren't trying to be mean to her, right?
	I mean, let's say you were indelicate.
	Let's say that you were undiplomatic.
	Let's say that you maybe phrased things wrong or you did it not perfectly, which is true of everyone all the time, right?
	That's not the issue. So let's say you did it wrong.
	Then somebody who's a good friend, who's a good person, will say, listen, I didn't like it when you did this.
	I'm not sure why, but it felt a bit off to me.
	What were you experiencing when you said this or whatever, right?
	I mean, that's what I think a virtuous and honest person who would be, I think, worth falling in love with or worth all that kind of stuff...
	I think that would be the response, right?
	If something goes completely wrong, it's not just because one person did something a little wrong or could have done things a little better or whatever.
	It's either because one person or both people are just crazy.
	So you know what my next question is going to be, right?
	No. Okay.
	Well... How pretty is your mother?
	Oh, good question.
	Very good question, because she was indeed very pretty.
	You know, I'm just randomly shooting.
	It's amazing when I hit a bullseye, isn't it?
	So you see, right? Yeah.
	Now I see. Right.
	Right. Right.
	So anyway, that's what I would mull on if I were in your shoes.
	I'm so sorry because, I mean, you asked for this question and, you know, we're close to the end of the show, but I just wanted to...
	It's great. Thank you very much.
	Thank you very much, Steph.
	It's really helpful for me.
	Thank you very much. No, listen, and I say this, I hope you don't think that I'm, you know, looking down on you.
	Like, I say this is, I chase so many big bags of crazy over the cliff of hot sex that I don't even want to tell you.
	So, and my mom was gorgeous.
	I mean, just a beautiful woman.
	And so, I say this from battle-scarred experience, which you won't even approach, I hope.
	So, I hope that you understand I'm not sort of saying this from like a, oh, this was so obvious and this and that.
	It was... I've done it, and so I understand it.
	Yes, and that's also how I felt it, and I'm very happy that you see it the same way.
	So people are in the chat room saying, oh, what's wrong with beauty?
	People are attracted to beauty. There's nothing wrong with beauty at all.
	I think my wife is gorgeous, and I think my daughter is stunningly beautiful.
	There's nothing wrong with beauty whatsoever.
	It's just that we are hardwired to value beauty, physical beauty, Over and above virtue.
	And I say this for men.
	Maybe it's true of women. I don't know.
	They all swoon over Brad Pitt and there seems to be a whole lot of Justin Bieber photos staring at me in the supermarket checkout.
	But we are hardwired to be susceptible to physical beauty and often we can elevate physical beauty to the status of an ideal to the exclusion of the actual attributes of the person's personality.
	That's really all I'm saying about it.
	Oh, look, I can only speak as a hot girl, frankly.
	But I mean, I can only speak sort of imagining this from the hot girl standpoint.
	But I mean, if you're a very attractive woman, it's really tough.
	I mean, you have to really pump up your attractiveness because you want to get the alpha male.
	But unfortunately, it draws a lot of other people to you, a lot of other males to you that you have to say no to.
	So you spend a lot of your time both attracting people and being aloof.
	Like you're trying to attract the one guy, but you get the other 50 guys swarming you.
	You've got to bat them away. You've got to...
	You know, and you want to be liked for who you are, but there's this shell that people are attracted to.
	It's like, you know, being beautiful.
	It's like being really rich.
	There's nothing wrong with it. It just means that it can really be confusing in terms of relationships because there's this thing, right?
	Is it my money or is it me?
	Is it my boobs or is it me?
	You know, that's definitely going in the next remix, I'm sure.
	But that's just a challenge.
	Well, thanks a lot, Steph.
	Your response was very helpful for me.
	I'm so glad. Somebody asked, just as we're ending up here, if I have any advice about moving to a new country.
	I don't really.
	I mean, the last new country I moved to was Canada, which was 33 years ago.
	Is it right? 33 years ago?
	Oh my god, I'm old!
	But I don't really have any experience moving to a new country.
	What I will say though is try and find some FDR people where you're going so at least you'll have some people that you can chat with and be in contact with.
	so I hope that would be my suggestion what do I think of pickup artists?
	Do you mean like players? Guys who go and pick up girls in bars?
	Is that what you mean? Any advice in creating?
	The FDR market where you live.
	If there aren't any free-domainers around me, yeah.
	Yeah, absolutely. What you do is you find message boards that are dedicated to local events and you post some free-domain radio material.
	Should be doing that anyway.
	But yeah, I mean, find your local whatever-whatever, right?
	There's going to be some atheist group or some, and you post a couple of videos and see if people get interested.
	That's my suggestion. I mean, if there's no market, create a market, right?
	Oh yeah, so pick-up artists, girls, guys who pick up girls at bars.
	Well, I think it's, I mean, I think it's understandable from a sort of physical sex feels good standpoint, but I think that it's not, I mean, it's not a particularly good idea for a long-run occupation.
	You know, you ask yourself what kind of women are going to go to a stranger's home.
	They know nothing about him, really.
	I mean, they've yelled a little bit at each other in the car, in the bar, and it's impossible to have conversations with people in most bars.
	I don't think it's a high self-esteem situation.
	In fact, I think it can be quite dangerous.
	Looking for Mr. Goodbar territory, it can be quite dangerous to go and sleep with some guy you don't know.
	I mean, STDs, not all of them.
	I think crabs bypass condoms, so there's that challenge.
	Could be some Jason Bateman lunatic, who knows, right?
	So I don't think it's a high self-esteem thing.
	I think that men and women who pick each other up in bars, and it's a big habit, it's just balm in the brain playing out a dysfunction.
	It's a form of self-medication akin to, well, a kind of drug use, so I don't think it's a particularly healthy thing.
	To go to. The new book?
	Yeah, it's going to be free.
	Against the God, it's going to be free. Look, I mean, I was talking to someone about, hey, you should get a publisher and so on.
	It's like, dude, we don't have time.
	We don't have time. I contributed a chapter to a book that is coming out.
	I contributed this chapter, I swear to God.
	It was three years ago, and the book already had a contract, and it's only now just coming out.
	I don't have three years to wait to get the message out.
	I just don't. I don't think society has three years to wait to get the message out.
	There's a lot of people in the agnosticism fence that I would really like to rope into the liberal hunting grounds of philosophy.
	So no, I'm not going to charge for the book.
	It's going to be out and about and able to walk free.
	I just have to find the time to do a good job of recording it.
	Did we reach the 5% donators?
	We absolutely did not reach the 5% donators.
	But I certainly do appreciate the people who sent in donations.
	I was going to say something else, but it has slipped my mind.
	I am not going to have my own TV show or network.
	I do not want my own TV show or network, and I have no plans to pursue that whatsoever.
	And I just wanted to mention that.
	But yeah, of course, if you like Against the Gods, donations are always welcome.
	It was an exciting challenge to write.
	And I really... All right.
	Well, sorry. I just got disconnected there.
	We're back! And I'm back just to say goodbye.
	Thank you, everybody. So much for dropping by.
	It was a big spike today in the number of people listening, which I hugely appreciate.
	Thank you everybody for your support.
	If there's anything, anything, anything that I can do differently or better or less of or more of, just let me know.
	I really, really want this conversation to fit you like one of Shania Twain's body suits.
	So just let me know if there's anything else that I can do that's better.
	I would absolutely appreciate that feedback.
	I really want this show to work for you.
	That's the most important thing.
	For me in this conversation.
	So please let me know if there's anything else that I can do.
	And I will talk to you soon.

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