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Nov. 7, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:13:55

1782 Sunday Call In Show November 7, 2010

More answers about UPB, participating in state finances, the childhood origins of philosophical beliefs, and the terror of freedom.

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	Well, thank you everybody so much.
	It is the 7th of November, 2010.
	I hope you're doing very well.
	I had a speech yesterday at the Ontario Libertarian Party's annual general meeting, which was, I think, very well received.
	And people were following me out into the parking lot to chat with me in the car, which was nice.
	I eventually just had to drive over people to get away.
	But I'm trying to work that into UPB. We'll figure out one way or another.
	I just wanted to do very brief follow-ups on some of the questions I received from last week's UPB call, which I thought were interesting.
	The first is to say, people would say, that UPB is sort of a negative theory, in that it says violations of property rights are bad, violations of persons is bad, but it doesn't really talk much about positive And I would agree with that to some degree.
	You can't obviously enforce positive virtues.
	You can't force someone To be courageous because that's a contradiction, right?
	Because somebody would only submit to your force because he was afraid of the effects and therefore you would be using fear to try and create courage which would not be obviously logically sustainable.
	So given that you can't use force to create positive virtues, they do fall into the realm of aesthetically preferable actions.
	There are two main points that I wanted to mention in response to the fact that APA is a negative theory.
	First of all, it's not a criticism.
	That's just people think it's negative or have attached a label called negative to it.
	It doesn't really matter whether it's negative or positive or polka dotted or black or white or sounds fluent in Spanglish or Esperanto or Orkish.
	Those things don't matter at all, whether it's a positive or negative theory.
	All that matters, all that matters, all that matters is whether it's true or false.
	Whether it is internally consistent and whether the evidence supports the theory.
	I mean, it's like saying that Einstein's theory of relativity is rigid because it requires that the speed of light be constant.
	The word rigid has no bearing whatsoever on the truth or falsehood of a scientific proposition and it has no validity in terms of positive or negative on an ethical theory.
	So that's the first thing I would say.
	Okay, there's three points. The second point is there still is a confusion and it's not a confusion that a majority of people have.
	So I don't know that it's inherently flawed within the book but it certainly is confusing enough people that I'll clarify it here again that when I talk about The evidence for universally preferable behavior.
	Because I say that logical consistency is first required for a theory.
	And this is nothing spectacular to my thinking.
	This is just general philosophical principles and science and engineering and mathematics.
	A theory has to be logically consistent before anything.
	But there should also be Some physical evidence for the theory.
	The physical evidence doesn't have to be 100%, but there should be some evidence for the theory.
	If I've got a theory of gravity which says things fall down, I don't want to get overly technical, it doesn't really matter what the theory is.
	If I have a theory of gravity which says things fall down, Then people look around the world and say, yeah, you know, my throbbing toe indicates that you can drop a bowling ball on your extremities.
	Things do tend to fall down.
	Now, without a doubt, some bright spark is going to look at a helium balloon trailing along a ceiling and say, aha!
	You see? Things don't always fall down and therefore your theory is false.
	Well, of course, the theory of gravity fully encompasses air pressure and displacement and helium balloons being lighter than air and moving upwards and so on.
	Now if you have a theory of gravity called things fall up which contradicts just about everybody's just about universal experience it doesn't necessarily mean that the theory is false but it does mean that you've got a hugely high burden to climb and this goes all the way back to Aristotle and Aristotle of course said That if you can prove that murder is moral,
	or if using your ethical theory, it can be proven that murder is moral, it kind of doesn't matter what your reasoning is.
	You've gone wrong somewhere.
	You've just gone wrong somewhere.
	Because every civilized society in the world bans murder, at least under some circumstances.
	Even killing someone's slave in ancient Athens was, you know, was like...
	Bad, because you're destroying somebody's valuable property.
	Certainly killing the masters was very bad for the slaves and so on.
	So almost all societies span theft in certain circumstances and ban murder in certain circumstances, and they allow it in others through taxation and war and so on.
	But in civil law, theft, rape, murder, assault, these are all generally bad things.
	And so when I was talking about universally preferable behavior, I needed to show some evidence that there is such a thing in the world.
	I talked about people prefer to eat.
	Most societies or all societies that I know of ban murder in their legal systems if they have one, theft and rape and so on.
	These are indications that universally preferable behavior is a concept that people have in the world.
	Of course, people then came back to me and said, but anorexics don't like to eat and therefore your theory is invalid.
	Which is like saying helium balloons go up and therefore any theory of physics is invalid.
	The problem I have with people like that is that's hasty.
	That's very, very hasty.
	I try not to debate with people who think I'm an idiot.
	Not because I'm particularly insulted.
	Perhaps I am an idiot.
	But just because if I'm an idiot, then they shouldn't debate with me.
	I don't debate with people I think are idiots.
	I mean, I just don't.
	Because it's sort of pointless.
	It's an embarrassing thing to do.
	It's like me having a drawing contest with my daughter.
	Unless you want one spider leg that wanders all over the paper, you're not going to get much out of my daughter in the way of drawing accuracy.
	Although maybe that would be a Jackson Pollock picture from a certain aspect.
	I try not to have running races with turtles.
	It's an embarrassing and ridiculous thing to do.
	And so if people think that I'm an idiot, Then I don't debate with them.
	I mean, because it's pointless.
	I mean, it's almost for their benefit.
	More for their benefit than for mine.
	It's just not very edifying to say the least.
	So, you know, when I say people don't like murder or societies ban murder, then when people come up with the inevitable exception and then say, aha, this must be news to Steph.
	This must be news to Steph that murders exist in the world.
	It must be news to Steph That some people don't eat.
	People on hunger strikes, people who are anorexic, they choose not to eat.
	It must be news to Steph that people don't respect property rights sometimes and steal apples when they're hungry and the wealth of a nation when they're warlike.
	And the reason that I have a tough time responding to that is that I don't know what to say to people who point out the obvious and assume that I don't know something as simple as murders exist and property rights are violated.
	If people think I don't know that, then they really shouldn't be debating with me.
	Because I think that even people with an IQ of about 85 are aware that bad people in the world do bad things to others.
	I think that if you go to your average four-year-old and say, have you ever seen one child push another and make them cry, they're going to say yes.
	So if somebody's, you know, grandly deigning to inform me that people in the world do bad things, an ethicist, like informing an ethicist that people in the world do bad things, I just don't know what to say.
	It's just an assumption of such primeval ignorance on my part that I'm going to spare them the ridiculousness of trying to debate with somebody who's obviously typing with his forehead because he doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.
	Of course, to tell an ethicist that people do bad things is also a ridiculous thing because the only reason somebody comes up with a theory of ethics is because of an awareness that there are bad people in the world doing bad things.
	It's like saying to a nutritionist, you know, some people don't always eat that which is healthiest for them.
	As if this is great news to somebody who spent 20 years studying, or 25 years studying nutrition.
	I mean, the only reason you study nutrition is because you're aware that you and others sometimes make poor choices in the world about what they eat.
	So I just...
	Of course. Of course there are people who do bad things.
	Absolutely. That's why I didn't say universally preferred, but rather universally preferable.
	So that's...
	And the last thing that I wanted to say about UPB... Ooh, I think I spent too long at that point.
	Let me just pause for a moment and make sure I remember what it is I wanted to say.
	Oh yes, so people say it's a negative theory.
	And let me make the case that it's not.
	I mean, even if that were a valid argument.
	But if people have a problem with it from an aesthetic point of view.
	So let's say that UPB were accepted.
	And that, as a result, we had no governments.
	We had no wars.
	We had no religion.
	Because UPB erases religion.
	Right? In religion we say, my god is true, other gods are false, but that's a non-UPB compliant statement.
	We would have no child abuse.
	Child abuse is hugely against UPB. There would be no rape.
	And there would be no theft.
	Now if all that UPB achieved Was the ending of war and unjust imprisonment and rape and theft and murder and assault and child abuse and through APA things like verbal abuse, humiliation, that kind of bullying.
	Let's say that that's all that UPP achieved and we had a world without the endless stain of these bottomless crimes.
	Is that not good enough for people?
	I mean, what kind of standard do you have for moral theory?
	Then its successful implementation only rids the world of rape, murder, theft, assault, war, unjust imprisonment, torture, and other forms of abuse.
	I think it may be an unrealistically high standard to say, well, if that's achieved, that's only a negative result.
	It's not a positive result.
	Well, I think it damn well is a positive result.
	If we could live to see such a world, we truly believed that we had stepped through the portal of death into the glowing grand fields of heaven.
	In a world where people respected property and personhood and children did not violate the natural boundaries of other people's stuff and flesh.
	My God, wouldn't that be paradise?
	So, just a...
	Oh, okay, one more point very quick and then we'll get to the call.
	Sorry about this. I still get the argument, I got some in my inbox, I got some on YouTube, which says two people in a room can murder each other at the same time.
	They can both stand and point guns at each other and pull triggers and murder each other at the same time.
	No, they can't.
	And it doesn't take a lot of thought to recognize this.
	They simply can't for two reasons.
	One, practical. The second, rational.
	The first is that they can't murder each other at the same time because They're not going to hit the exact same organs, or even if they do, they're not going to cause the exact same damage because of fat composition and age and so on.
	And even if they call the exact same damage, the time of death will never be exactly the same.
	It simply won't be. If you go down to the hundredth of a millisecond, the time of death is not going to be exactly the same for both parties.
	Even if they try as much as humanly possible to kill each other at the same time, it's not going to happen.
	It's just not going to happen.
	So that's the first A response which is pretty obvious.
	Now the other one which takes perhaps another 30 seconds thought is to recognize that two people cannot logically murder each other in the same room at the same time.
	Why? Because murder is an unwanted action on the part of the victim.
	If it's not unwanted, if it's desperately craved, then it's called euthanasia, which is another moral question entirely, but certainly not the same as murder.
	And so if you have Bob and Doug in a room, and they're both magically able to murder each other or shoot each other and have each other die at exactly the same moment, and it seems so ridiculous to answer these kinds of questions, but that's where people's thinking is, so here we go.
	So let's say that they are able to magically kill each other at the same time.
	Well, the problem is that the act of pulling the trigger must be both wanted and unwanted, By both parties at the same time.
	So Bob must want to kill Doug and Doug must want to kill Bob as a positive moral virtue.
	At the same time they must not want to be killed.
	Otherwise it's not murder but rather mutual euthanasia which is not in the same moral category as murder.
	We can all, I think, understand that.
	And so UPB destroys the concept of two people murdering each other in the same room at the same time.
	Because murder is both a positive value in that you must pull the trigger and want to kill the other person, and a negative value in that it must be not wanted in order to be murdered.
	And so it can't be both a positive and a negative value, and therefore it cannot be a good.
	So it cannot be universally preferable because it's not in that situation.
	So I just wanted to mention that.
	And look, people, I mean...
	The book's out there. Just take a moment to think about it first.
	Just draw it out. Don't automatically go into question mode.
	It's worth thinking about it for yourself.
	I just wanted to point that out.
	Let's see here. Question about UPB. The coma test seems to imply that a neutral is equal to a good.
	Maybe it's just me missing the no positive obligations principle.
	In terms of the opposites, as it seems I'm missing a neutral, when the opposite of evil is equal to neutral, as in not stabbing a guy, is good by being the opposite of stabbing a guy.
	But the neutral coma test is of equal value.
	Oh, I see what you mean.
	Right, so this is the idea that respecting property rights is the good and violating property rights is the evil.
	Well, yeah. Of course.
	Of course. I think, and this is a shade different in terms of the coma test, but I think we could all recognize that there is a greater virtue in resisting a temptation that you're capable of achieving.
	Let me sort of say that again.
	There is a greater virtue in resisting a temptation that you're capable of achieving, right?
	So if some guy loses 100 pounds on a strict diet, we may admire his willpower and his resolution and And we say, you know, good for you.
	However, if it turned out that he lost his weight because his plane crash landed on a desert island, we would have sympathy for his predicament and his plight, but we would not necessarily admire to the same degree his willpower because the food was simply not available for him.
	You know, he was on an all coconut and fish diet and therefore he lost all of that weight.
	Somebody who stands up to his boss, the unjust actions of his boss, we would look at some co-worker in a meeting who stands up very strenuously and admirably to a boss who's making unreasonable or unjust or immoral demands.
	And we say, wow, that guy's really got, you know, cojones of molten lava.
	And then we find out that he won the lottery that morning and he's worth $10 billion.
	That may change our perception of his courage just a little bit because he is no longer dependent upon the job for his income.
	So I think we can all recognize that having the opportunity is a good thing.
	So if somebody comes up in a bar and verbally insults you in some hideous way and continues to do so, and let's say that we respect the non-aggression principle to the point where we say, well, you can't punch someone for verbal aggression.
	And if somebody walks away, then we would say, well, that was a significant act of self-restraint.
	Verbally taunted, gets up and walks away, doesn't respond with violence.
	That's a significant act of self-restraint.
	However, just walking out of a bar is not a significant act of self-restraint, I guess, unless you're an alcoholic or something, right?
	Similarly, if I'm in the bar next door and I walk out, there's not a big act of self-restraint because I'm not the one being verbally aggressed against.
	So if there's no provocation, if there's no temptation, I think it's tough to say that there's a great virtue in not doing wrong.
	In the same way that, I mean, that was what was so strange about Winona Ryder shoplifting, which is, she's worth a huge amount of money when she did this, I guess, gosh, almost 10 years ago now, I would imagine.
	She stole 5,000 bucks from, I think, Bergdorf's in California.
	I only know this because we were on a bus tour in Hollywood and it was mentioned as we were upstairs in the open air, double-decker bus, ducking tree branches and the occasional raindrop, because it was such wonderful weather while we were there.
	So opportunity has something to do with it.
	We don't necessarily say that a rich man faces the same temptation for stealing as a very poor and hungry man.
	So if a man's worth a billion dollars and he buys an apple, we don't consider that quite as virtuous as a starving man who offers to work for the apple rather than stealing it, because the rich man has much less material temptation to steal.
	The respect for property rights, I think that there is a scale of virtue that goes up and up.
	The greater temptation there is to violate property rights.
	In other words, to overcome the temptation is really, really good if the temptation is very strong according to objective means.
	Now, clearly, the coma test, there's no particular temptation in the coma test because...
	You can't go steal something when you're in a coma.
	So it is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for great virtue.
	So somebody who's in a coma test is not violating anybody else's rights and is not doing any bad things and I think that's good.
	However, as somebody who resists a great temptation to do immorality, as somebody who is offered a great deal of money to betray his values and doesn't do so, then I think we can say that's a good thing.
	Or as a friend of mine used to say, people who are mad at other people selling out are really mad because they never got offered a decent price to sell out.
	So I think that the opposite...
	of the violation of somebody's rights is, at a bare minimum, the coma test.
	But I think that we have just admiration and greater respect for somebody who is actually faced with the moral temptation who overcomes and resists it, right?
	So, a man who is married, who is a lighthouse keeper on an island somewhere, I don't know, for six months of the year, where nobody ever comes, We don't necessarily say that this person is greatly virtuous for resisting the temptation to sleep around because he has no one else there to do such things with.
	On the other hand, somebody who is a rock star, who has women throwing themselves at him night and day, can justly, I think, be more greatly admired.
	For resisting the temptation for infidelity and that is sort of where I would go with that.
	The opposite of an immoral action is at its bare minimum the coma test but in reality, right?
	I don't admire somebody for not strangling some kid in India he doesn't even know.
	I don't sort of say that is the summit of moral achievement because that would mean that the summit of moral achievement is achieved by everybody except that guy currently strangling the kid in India, right?
	But where somebody is facing great moral temptation and through their values overcomes, or who acts with great positive force in spreading morality in the world, who acts with...
	It's certainly how I guide my actions, right?
	In sort of deciding whether I wanted money or the excitement of begging for a loose change on the internet.
	It was about what is better to spread philosophy, what is more important, and what is the greater role that I can play in society.
	In spreading philosophy, that was sort of how I guided my decisions.
	I certainly respect myself more for having made that decision a few years ago.
	I have great respect for that decision and great pride in making that decision and pride in the way that I continue to push forward virtue and truth in the world.
	And yet, of course, I would not have been immoral if I had decided to keep working rather than do philosophy full-time.
	But I think that, for me, at least greater moral self-praise accrues to the gamble that I took, which again, thanks to your generosity, Is paying off so very well.
	Oh, one last thing. I've finished the book Against the Gods.
	I finished reading the audiobook and some kind listeners are checking it out.
	And Greg, did you want to jump on for a minute or two and talk about the book?
	Give people a wee teaser.
	Hello. Yeah.
	Hello. Sure.
	Well, I'm not quite finished.
	I have like 30 minutes left.
	But yeah, it's amazing.
	I really like it so far.
	I mean, at first, kind of impression, this wasn't necessarily my thought, but it was my thought of what others would think of it, is like, oh, atheism, there are plenty of those books around.
	But really, it goes...
	I mean, it takes a way more principled approach, I think, to the problem of God and gods and sort of starts from first principles.
	So I really like it so far.
	And there's some cool stuff about the subconscious and how it relates to God.
	Good. Well, I'm certainly glad that you like it and it should be out this week, I would hope.
	Alright, so I'm happy to take questions.
	Thank you for your patience as I went through some of that stuff.
	I'm certainly happy to take more questions.
	On UPB, but if you have any other questions, that would be great.
	Hi, Steph. Hello.
	Hi. I had the pleasure of talking with you and asking you a question before about buying government bonds and if it was an immoral thing to do or not.
	And that was in FDR... I don't have the number here.
	1745. It's about a month ago or two months ago, I think.
	I recall. Sorry?
	I do recall.
	Yes, well and so you told me that it was not an immoral thing to buy government bonds because firstly the state has stolen a lot from everybody and if you would make a profit on government bonds you're just taking something back.
	And also you said rightfully that The state has destroyed a lot of investment opportunities and therefore government wants can be the only way to have profits in a certain climate.
	you didn't say it with those exact words but that's my interpretation of it which is also true and thus you said that it was okay to buy them I had a big discussion about this with a friend and he is here also and he does not agree and I would love to hear your opinion on his opinions Well, put him on, let's hear the case.
	Okay. Hello, I'm here.
	Can you hear me? I sure can.
	Go for it. All right. Hi.
	Yeah, I did have a long discussion with my friend.
	It's been going on for some time.
	And perhaps my suggestion will be, before we dive into the arguments, just to give you a little bit of background to why I think this discussion is so important.
	I've been listening to FDR for about 12 months.
	I used to spend three, four hours a day listening and I went through four months of therapy and it really changed my life a lot.
	I abandoned quite a lot of toxic relationships.
	I met a A wonderful girlfriend and I'm as happy as I've ever been.
	And these are the things that I have the pleasure of talking to my friend, maybe we can call him Mr.
	Bond, about.
	We talk a lot about personal relationships and those kind of things and how we struggle with our friends and family sometimes.
	But this issue has come up because both of us are professionally involved in giving people investment advice.
	And so maybe this gives it a little bit of a different angle as to how the discussion seemed to have come up when my friend called in about a month ago.
	Because, well, first of all, to us it seems It seems different when you are advocating, for example, purchasing government bonds as an advice because you are promoting and selling it.
	So that was one thing.
	But just to continue on the personal growth avenue, why I think this is so important is that, in my opinion, an investment choice It's very comparable to what you do with your personal life.
	If I make a decision to invest my time somewhere or to invest in relationships, it's a moral choice.
	But I think the same goes for what I decide to do with the capital I earned with the labor I do.
	So, I mean, I did want to pick up again and maybe as a last little bit of background, the contrast was or the initial conflict was that my friend was an advocate of the permanent portfolio of Harry Brown and that I'm much more involved in hard assets investments,
	meaning I'm sorry to interrupt, but just for the sake of time, if you could get to the actual moral argument, I would really appreciate it.
	Okay, I'm sorry. Thanks, no problem.
	The argument you gave was if you make a profit out of something the government offers, then in fact what you're doing is you're taking something back that they've stolen from you.
	Is that still your argument?
	Well, no.
	It's not quite that simple because there's no way to know that you're stealing.
	I mean, the money that gets taken from you in taxation goes into a common pool, is spent on a bunch of stuff, is used as leverage for or is used as assets for foreign lending or borrowing from foreigners or borrowing from domestic banks and so on.
	So it goes into one big whirlpool and then you take stuff out.
	Of course, there's no way to know that it's your money that you're getting back.
	I mean, there's some proportionality, I suppose.
	So what I'm saying is that it's not the same as stealing something back because there's no direct property line to what has been stolen from you.
	But you are in a state of nature, and I don't think it's immoral to invest in government bonds.
	But my fundamental issue was that it's just not that important.
	It's just not that big a moral issue.
	So that would sort of be...
	I don't think it's great to do it.
	I don't think it's bad to do it.
	It is a sort of state of nature thing.
	And of course, there is an argument to be made that if you don't invest in government bonds, it's not like the government then cuts its spending.
	So if you say, okay, I'm not going to take $10,000 and buy government bonds, The government doesn't go, oh, okay, so I'm going to reduce my spending by $10,000.
	Well, it kind of does.
	It kind of does have an effect.
	I'm sorry? Well, I would say that it does not have an effect.
	Well, the government simply prints money or borrows more money, and then that actually hits other people who may be able to afford it less, right?
	So if the government prints more money, then inflation hits people the most on fixed incomes, who are, of course, the poor and the elderly and so on.
	By not buying government bonds, the argument could well be made that just shifting a financial burden to other people who can least afford it, particularly the unborn, because what the government usually does, rather than just print money, although it does that a lot too, is it just goes and borrows money, which creates an obligation for the next generation.
	So you don't solve the problem of immorality by not investing in the government.
	You simply defer it to other people who you could argue can afford it less.
	Well, yeah, but maybe that's, I mean, that's already far down the line because we're arguing a bit from a fact, it seems.
	But one of the arguments you put forward to my friend was that, well, basically you treat the government like you treat the mafia.
	I mean, as much as you can, you try to ignore them.
	And so if you had to pay taxes, you do, because you don't want to end up in jail.
	But if the local mafia is doing a fundraiser and, you know, promising a very steady return, then I do have the choice to not invest voluntarily.
	And I think it's only the right thing to do to say no.
	Why? Well, because it's like you're sponsoring a mob of gangsters.
	Hang on, one sec.
	You made your point. Let me say this.
	So if the Mafia steals all your money and you have no food, and then the Mafia throws a free buffet for everyone in the neighborhood, should you go and get something to eat?
	Well, it's not like that, because if you have...
	No, no, no, no, no. Hang on.
	I'm sorry, I'm not saying...
	Sorry, we can't both talk at the same time, right?
	I'm not saying it's exactly the same.
	I'm just saying, would it be okay for someone if the Mafia took all their money and they couldn't afford food...
	Or let's say the Mafia took all the money and they couldn't afford good food and then the Mafia threw on a big sumptuous buffet.
	Would you criticize the person for going and getting some food at the Mafia's buffet?
	Can I ask to clarify? Because it's all good food.
	It's kind of a fuzzy concept, but I'm going to agree for the sake of argument.
	Okay, so this person is obviously just getting some value back for that which has been taken from him.
	Yes. And he doesn't have to go.
	Let's say he's not starving, right?
	Let's say he doesn't have to go, but he's going, and he's going to get some benefit back for that which has been stolen from him.
	I wouldn't say that.
	See, the thing is, I don't know why the hell you're focusing on the morality of the guy going to the buffet and not the morality of the state.
	I don't know why you'd focus on the moral choice of the guy who's maybe grabbing a few crumbs from the buffet table of the mafia rather than the fact that the mafia stole all his money to begin with.
	I mean, I just think in terms of prioritization.
	That's like being a doctor and someone comes in with a cut-off arm and you say...
	Gosh, let's check and see if they have any hangnails.
	You know, I think in terms of the morality, forget about the choices of the guy who's had half his money stolen.
	Forget about his choices.
	They don't matter. What matters is the fact that you've got this monstrous, bloated, violent entity stealing half his income.
	That's the only thing that I want to focus on in terms of morality.
	Because if you solve that problem, the other problem becomes moot.
	Well, sure, but I mean, the problem is there, and the government is there, so our own options and our own choices that are available.
	So I would argue that it's a valuable topic for debate, definitely, because there are many, many other choices to be made where you can put your capital.
	And I don't see it as something...
	I don't know. I mean, you seem to treat it as something trivial.
	Well, yeah, because I think just logically it is trivial.
	The important thing is that the mafia shouldn't be stealing half of everybody's money, not what people do.
	And, of course, also the argument about investing in government bonds is not specific to government bonds.
	It's specific to any benefit.
	So you don't have to go To university, but in almost all Western countries, or in all of the ones that I know of, universities are highly subsidized, or highly regulated, or highly controlled.
	And so, would you say to people that they should not go to university because that's a government benefit that is optional?
	Well, it depends if you can achieve what you want to achieve.
	I mean, if your goal you want to achieve is depending on the diploma.
	If it's not, I would argue against.
	Right, so if somebody doesn't want to become a professor, they should not go to university.
	If they don't need the license to practice a profession, they should not go to university.
	If I would argue that?
	Yeah. I'm sorry, are you asking if I would argue that?
	Right. Well, I think so, yeah.
	And you realize that there's literally thousands of examples of taking, quote, benefits from the state that you don't have to, right?
	I mean, people can bicycle rather than drive a car, and that way they don't pay the government gasoline tax or licensing for their cars or whatever, right?
	Yeah, I mean, I definitely would agree that it's a spectrum, and it goes from very minor things to, I mean, like, for example, the other side of the spectrum would perhaps be becoming a politician or becoming a civil servant.
	So, and of course, it's a subjective debate whether these, I mean, using, say you have a million dollars to invest, if you invest half a million in government bonds, well, it's a subjective argument to say, well, how far down the line is it in terms of immorality?
	Okay, so what you're saying with the university thing is that it's an effect.
	There's no principle, it's the effect, right?
	So if you can't be a doctor without going to a government school, then it's okay to go to a government school.
	In other words, it's the effect that matters, not the principle.
	So if you invest in government bonds and use the profit from those bonds to found a free market think tank that does very well in terms of videos and publications, then it's okay, right?
	Well, I mean, I can't hide the fact that this is what I do every day.
	And I would just argue very pragmatically that if you have a long-term perspective, you can get the same and much better returns if you invest in different things than government bonds.
	My friend said, well, he said in 2008 there was a crash and then the bonds did plus 18%.
	And then if you invested in, for example, just pure gold, physical gold, it would only be plus 8%.
	And then I would say, well, it's just like in your personal life.
	If you invest in integrity and truthfulness and all those kind of things, then sometimes you are going to have to take a temporary blow.
	Well, that's the way it is.
	I might make less money in the end by not becoming a banker, for example, and by choosing to give people independent financial advice.
	And then, yeah, it might mean that, materially speaking, I won't be as wealthy in the end.
	But I do think that I will be happier.
	And I would argue that investing in government bonds is going to...
	I mean, you're...
	You're sponsoring an organization that is harming millions and millions of people, if you think about it.
	I certainly understand that argument.
	I think that not buying government bonds won't have any effect on the size and power of the state, fundamentally, because there's just so many other people who will do it.
	I think you're right.
	I think that you have to weigh the effects.
	I certainly agree with you that there's a scale.
	I think there's a difference between Investing in government bonds and becoming a soldier or a policeman.
	I think that those two things are not the same.
	I think that we do have to find some balance about how we live in a statist society, a society that we did not invent.
	I took government loans to go to university and my university education was subsidized.
	By the government, I think that I'm making good use of the education and skills that I got in undergraduate and in the graduate degree field.
	I think that I'm doing a pretty good job of, in a sense, picking up the weapons and using them against the masters.
	I am completely comfortable with my decision, though it certainly could be argued that my degrees were not necessary to do what it is that I'm doing.
	Harry Brown did it without his degree.
	Mark Stevens does his stuff without a law degree.
	Or I guess Harry Brown had an investment degree or an investment certificate.
	So it certainly could be argued that it was not necessary for me to go to government-sponsored school and therefore I was supporting in some manner the state or justifying the state and so on.
	So I think everybody has to make that decision about where that line is for them.
	There's no line that can be drawn very clearly and very objectively about that sort of stuff.
	And I think that there's some degree of aesthetics, there's some degree of necessity, there's some degree of circumstances, and those circumstances can change over the course of your life.
	So I think it is a tough question to weigh and to balance.
	My only suggestion is I just don't think it's that important a moral issue.
	I just don't think it is.
	I think that I sit to myself and say, well, I gave the government a whole bunch of money by driving out to give a speech on the evils of statism.
	I used government roads only one way.
	The other way, they were too bad. I had to use private roads.
	Of course, I paid government gasoline taxes.
	I have a license for my car that gives more money to the government.
	I paid when I bought my car, oh, those 12 years ago, I gave a lot of money to the government in terms of taxation.
	And of course, to earn the money to buy the car and to pay for the gas, I have to pay taxes and so on.
	So I'm giving the government a lot of money to go and give speeches when I fly down to California or to Phoenix or whatever.
	I pay hundreds of dollars in taxes for my airfare, so I'm voluntarily giving the government a lot of money.
	In order to, I don't know, spread the word about freedom.
	But let's say I wasn't going to spread the word about freedom.
	Let's say I was just going to go and get a tan and lie on the beach and play with my daughter.
	Well, am I going to sit there and say, well, I'm not free to go and fly to a beach because it's going to give the government some money.
	Well, fuck that. I don't mean fuck you.
	I just mean fuck that.
	I'm not going to sit here and say, well, I can't leave my house.
	I can't use the roads.
	I can't go on an airplane.
	I can't buy gasoline.
	I can't do this, I can't do that, because that's giving the government money.
	Well, that seems to me to be surrendering a whole bunch of freedom that I don't actually have to surrender.
	So for me, it's like I make my rational calculated decisions.
	I try to live as if there is no government.
	Now, you could say that means buying no government bonds or whatever.
	But no, if I want to go on a vacation and I have to pay off the thugs to leave the airport, okay, I'll pay off the thugs to leave the airport and I won't think twice about it because that's called having freedom.
	If I sit in my house and I know I'm arguing from absurdity and I'm not saying this is your position.
	But if I sit in my house saying, well, I'm not going to give one thin dime to the government in taxes or benefits or whatever, I'm not going to buy any government bonds, even if that's the only decent return that I can be guaranteed of, to have some kind of retirement, because the government is stripping me of all of my money, so I'm not going to have enough for retirement if I don't get some sort of security, and the only security I can get I'm not going to sit there and say, well, I can't take government bonds.
	I have to risk a retirement catastrophe and having no money and living on cat food because of my principles.
	Well, I personally think it's too soon for that in the movement.
	I know that's an odd thing to say, but it's earlier than most of us think in terms of this movement.
	When I was at the Libertarian Party yesterday, thanks to everyone who came out, they were very grateful that so many listeners came out to see me speak, as was I. But outside of the FDR listeners who came, a guy was giving a speech, he was a professor, and he was saying, yeah, I gave a speech to the Libertarian Party about 20-25 years ago, and you were about the same size back then.
	It's still really early.
	In the movement.
	So if we had more people, if we were a significant portion of the population and mounting some campaign against government bonds would have some sort of practical effect, I think maybe you could make that argument, but I just don't think it's particularly important.
	I mean, you may want to say to people that the practical consequences of government bonds is that you're going to get an increase in taxation, right?
	Because the interest in government bonds is paid for through increases in taxation.
	So you can say to people, look, if you buy government bonds, you're simply signing up for future tax increases.
	But if you don't, you're probably going to have those tax increases anyway, because so many other people are buying government bonds anyway.
	So I think you can make a practical argument.
	I just don't think that there's a moral argument to be made one way or the other.
	But I can certainly understand why you'd want to not buy those bonds.
	I don't buy them, so I can certainly understand that.
	Well, that's a lot. That's a lot to digest.
	Let me just, if I may, if there's time...
	Oh, hang on just a sec.
	I just want to make sure we get to other people because we spent quite a bit of time on this.
	Let me just ask if there are...
	Other people who wanted to pick up.
	Look, I'm not saying that I've closed the case or that you're wrong or anything like that.
	This is just a debate back and forth about perspective.
	So if we end this, I just hope you don't think that I've dusted my hands with the whole topic and emotionally victorious.
	I don't believe that for a moment, but I just wanted to.
	I'm sorry, we do have some people in the queue, so if you don't mind, mull it over.
	Just a very brief point about where I do think it has an indirect effect, if I may.
	I think it's one minute maximum.
	Sure. Okay.
	Well, I do think indirectly it has an effect on personal happiness and I think in the end I agree definitely with you that that's the most important thing is that if I, as an investment advisor, if I advocate with people that they purchase,
	you know, real things, real tangible things in the real world that are productive and actually give psychological profit to people You know, give them whatever they need for their lives, then I'm going to have a harder time these days to sell my things than my friend who might be advocating government bonds.
	And I might have a harder time selling things, but the big benefit for me will be that I can be honest about what You know, what the government is doing.
	At least I think.
	I feel that I would feel less restrained to be very critical about what's really going on rather than...
	Because if I sell my permanent portfolio, I'm going to have a lot of people aboard who, you know, might not be into these kind of hard-nosed arguments.
	So that would just be just a small thought that I can actually select my customers, be more selective with who my customers are, if that makes any sense.
	I quite agree. I quite agree.
	Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.
	And James, if you wanted to queue up the next person.
	Hey, I had a comment on the current conversation or the one you just had with that one person.
	It sounds a lot like something that you could apply to your parents or something.
	You know, because the government and parents are pretty...
	The government is a projection of parents.
	My idea was that it sounded a lot like something that I was thinking about recently, which is that I started talking to my mom again to get money for therapy and stuff, and I was struggling for a bit with guilt over the decision.
	The argument for my guilt was much the same as the caller's argument, which was that by taking subsidies from my parents I'm sponsoring or excusing their behavior, their abuse of me and my siblings.
	Right, right.
	It could be. It could be for sure.
	And there's lots of practical consequences.
	I mean, if the only reason you need therapy is because of the abuses of your parents, having them pay for it, there's an argument to be made for the sort of restoration justice of that, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah. Yes.
	Yeah, like, why not?
	If your parents are going to Yeah, look, I mean, you would much rather have had the kind of parenting where you didn't require therapy, right?
	So this is not something you would have chosen.
	And we would all rather live in a world where we didn't have to choose about whether to invest in government bonds or not because there would be a free market and we'd be so wealthy that we wouldn't need to think about those kinds of things.
	So in a sense, we're debating about the lesser of a whole series of evils.
	And my focus is, say, let's not put the moral onus on ourselves.
	Let's remember to focus on the true source of the evil rather than focusing on how we're responding to it.
	You would have much rather, of course, had parents where you didn't require extensive therapy to recover from their, quote, parenting problems.
	But that's not the reality of the world that you have.
	And therefore, I think the moral choice has become...
	I wouldn't need therapy or need to figure out where my career is going at the age of 20 or whatever.
	Or I would much rather not have a government that steals my money to where it's like...
	Like, having stolen 30% of my income or whatever.
	To where, like, I need food stamps or something.
	Yeah, no, I quite agree with all of that.
	And I think that's, again, as we sort of wrestle with these dilemmas, I just think it's just very important to remember about all of that stuff and to keep it in focus.
	Sorry, we still have some talking from somebody else.
	Was there anything else you wanted to mention about that?
	No, that was it. All right.
	Thank you very much. I believe we have somebody else on the horn.
	I think that's me, Stefan.
	How are you? I'm great.
	How are you doing? A lot of your streams going nonstop.
	I'm in agreeance with a lot of it, but that would be kind of a boring discussion if I talked about the economics that I've actually advocated for a while.
	What I really wanted to ask you about, and if it's okay to keep wet on cue as far as our conversation, I watched a thing that you had up in New Hampshire about atheism.
	Sunday morning might be – or actually afternoon might be an appropriate conversation.
	I've met a couple atheists, and I've just been – I haven't been as convinced as – At the logic behind their stance, would you, you know, maybe just provide me with your basis for the belief in it?
	From what I gathered from the interview or radio show that you did up in New Hampshire, I think it was Porkfest, it sounded like you were an advocate of it, and I just, I don't know, maybe we could begin a discussion based on your stance and I could give you mine.
	Is that appropriate? Sure, I would be very happy to talk about that.
	Can you tell me what's not convincing about what you've heard, just to make sure that I'll avoid stuff that hasn't worked for you already?
	Certainly. I've met a few atheists and I've almost prided myself on the ability, without forcibly trying to convert them, but being able to try to find a bit of a flaw in the logic in which they advocate the lack of a god.
	What I would usually start out saying, and please point out if this makes sense at all, You know, I would typically ask, you know, okay, so you're an atheist.
	Excellent. How would you explain, you know, the universe?
	And actually, let's just have the conversation right now.
	That would be your cue to, you know, aside from a God.
	So you would ask me how I would explain the universe?
	Right, exactly. You know, just, I mean, a couple of words.
	Most people say, you know, well, God created it, or if they're an atheist, they have some other explanation.
	I was just looking for yours.
	Well, I would reply that I'm not sure I see why the universe needs to be explained.
	Tell me what you mean by explain the universe, because I don't know what that means.
	The existence of it, and forgive me, to ask for answers on any of these questions is not necessarily appropriate.
	No, it's perfectly fine.
	I'm just not sure what explain the universe.
	Again, I'm just not sure what that means.
	It's a broad question, and I don't blame you for asking for clarification.
	As far as what limited answers you might provide and get by with on your day-to-day for where all this came from, I'll give you an example.
	A lot of people that I've discussed this with will say something, you know, well, if it wasn't a god, then Then it's all steamed from chaos or random events.
	Oh, sorry. Do you mean sort of the scientific explanation as to the origins of the universe?
	Right. That can go hand in hand.
	I find that, you know, science is often linked with philosophy.
	So, you know, any of those things.
	I've actually just been very curious as to what other people's explanations are as far as they can take them are, and especially with atheists.
	Yeah. Well, again, I'm not an expert on sort of early universe physics.
	My understanding is that, you know, there's a lot of debate about the scientific origins of the universe.
	And some say that there's a big bang, others say that matter can't be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another, so there's more of an eternity in the origins of the universe.
	So I sort of withhold my judgment as far as the origins of the universe go, simply because it's like I withhold my judgment about time travel, right?
	It's like, how do you explain time travel?
	Well, it's in the process of being explained.
	I mean, to take a silly example, I don't know where that comes from.
	I do know that the honest admission of a lack of knowledge has far greater integrity than the pretensive knowledge.
	And when people say, a god created the universe, they're talking entirely...
	I think we're good to go.
	us, right?
	So if you say to me, where do babies come from?
	And I say, some incomprehensible being that can't ever be explained, who lives in a dimension that has never been experienced, can't be explored and makes no rational sense, creates babies in a way that can't ever be explained and can never be known about and can never be scientifically explored or understood, you would recognize creates babies in a way that can't ever be explained and can never be known about and can never Exactly.
	It would be a deity on top, right?
	Right, exactly. And, you know, this might be a conversation that's better had over a beer, you know, off live radio, but as far as voicing what you might be thinking, but I completely understand.
	And I've actually found that in most cases, if I ever, you know, bring this discussion up, it's the definition of what a God is, you know, as you said, an alternate dimension or something.
	I was actually really thinking the mere act of having someone creating it is in it Having a God create anything would kind of, in a sense, be a bit of a flaw because if you were to think of something that was eternal and kind of an all thing, it would not need to create because it would already be and have always been.
	So I feel like the definition...
	It's basically if we accept that something could exist without being created, which is God, then we don't need God because we can accept that the universe exists without having been created.
	And so injecting an eternal thing Which does not need to be created to explain how an eternal thing that is created gets created.
	It's logically ridiculous.
	I don't mean your position. I'm just saying that it doesn't answer anything.
	And the question needs to be left To science.
	And fundamentally, it has no bearing on our current lives.
	Where the universe came from has no bearing whatsoever on our current lives, the moral choices that we need to make.
	I think it's a huge distraction.
	And as I sort of mentioned in the debate, what happens is God always gets pushed further and further back in time to something we don't know.
	So wherever the edge of human knowledge is, God is just over that horizon.
	So if we don't know, What causes epilepsy?
	Then it's the devil, right?
	It's possession, right?
	And that's where the supernatural beings live.
	And once we figure that out, then we go somewhere else.
	And if we don't know where morality comes from, then God wrote some shit down on a tablet and threw it at a bunch of Jews.
	And that's where morality comes from, which doesn't answer a goddamn thing.
	Or if we don't know where the animals come from, then we say God created them.
	Now, once Darwin explains, or evolution explains where animals come from, Well, God moves off there and he goes somewhere else that we don't know about.
	And now we know where the world came from.
	We know where the solar system came from.
	We know how physics operates in deep space.
	We know what makes the sun go.
	It's not God on a big mountain bike cranking up the flames.
	It's a permanent nuclear reaction.
	So wherever the edge of science is, wherever the edge of human knowledge is, these goddamn theists just push God right over the edge and say, well, that's where he is.
	But for me, there have been about 10,000 goddamn things where God has been, and then the moment we switch the light on and find there's no God there, he just moves to the next dark space.
	And so the only dark space that's left is...
	The three milliseconds before the Big Bang or whatever happens back there.
	And you know what? That's just 10,001 places the light's going to be switched on and no God is going to be found.
	I'm just tired of this, not yours, but I'm tired of this repetitive argument that, you know, God lives in the clouds.
	Oh, wait, clouds are just water vapor?
	Okay, God lives in the lightning.
	Okay, lightning is just electrical charges from static in the clouds?
	Okay, God lives in the constellations.
	Oh, wait, the constellations are just distant stars?
	Okay, it's a sun god. Oh, okay, the sun is just a nuclear explosion?
	Okay, God lives in it. It just goes on and on and on, right?
	And so I just get tired of this stuff and I recognize that it's just a kind of con game.
	Not your con game, it's just a con game in general that theists keep...
	Wherever we don't know shit, that's where they stuff a big bag of God.
	And then whenever we find that out that there's no God there, they just move that bag somewhere else.
	And so I don't care what happened at the beginning of the universe.
	It's a technical question that has no bearing on our daily lives.
	Let's say that there was a God. We find there was some supernatural being who created the universe.
	Well, by definition, then, he's no longer supernatural because he's explored by science.
	What the hell does that have to do with the price of tea in China or how we need to organize society or how we need to raise our children?
	I mean, I really don't care what happened 20 billion years ago in some distant galaxy.
	It really doesn't matter in terms of how – it certainly gives no justification.
	For an interventionist, vaguely hippie, bearded Jesus dude with nice abs who walks on water and raises the dead and drives pigs off cliffs and heals lepers.
	It has nothing to do with any of that.
	So it doesn't matter.
	I don't care. Let's leave it to the physicists to figure out.
	But I guarantee you there's going to be no God there that has anything to do with organized religion.
	Interesting. I'm in agreeance with a lot of things that you just said.
	I'm curious though, the fact that we couldn't find it or the fact that it doesn't impact our day-to-day lives as far as us being able to get by and ordering a cup of coffee every morning, does that necessarily mean that it doesn't exist?
	I kind of correlated the universe itself to being sort of a god-like thing.
	Having the two as separate doesn't really make any sense at all.
	Sorry to interrupt, but the word God is a very specific thing, right?
	The word God doesn't mean, you know, soap dish or tripod or wall picture, right?
	Wall hanging. The word God is a very specific word.
	So when somebody says that consciousness can exist without matter, it's a self-contradictory statement.
	That cannot work, right?
	Consciousness is an effect of matter, right?
	Is it? Yeah, because you need a brain, and then you have consciousness.
	Can you truly really be aware of anything else as consciousness?
	No, I'm just playing devil's advocate and asking this question, because you can't really know much else except for what you really feel, right?
	I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean.
	The one thing that really got me into philosophy was the fact that you can truly really not know anything except maybe how you feel.
	So to kind of say that something else does not happen...
	Sorry, but you can't know anything. Right, exactly, which is why this whole argument is going to be cyclical, but I was really just trying to pick your brain on it.
	This is the Cartesian argument, right?
	From Discourse in, I think, Second Meditations, where he says that He stripped away every certainty he had until he had only the one certainty that he himself was uncertain.
	Everything in the universe could be controlled by a malevolent demon and manufactured for his delusion.
	All other people could be a dream and so on.
	But the one thing he was certain of was that he was thinking, right?
	This is the root of, I think, therefore I am.
	And this is a sort of, I guess, a radical skeptic.
	That's the only one I've ever really been even convinced of, just because the curse and the blessing of being able to ask questions is that if you ever find an answer, it's never really truly an answer, because another question could be asked.
	Are you saying that 2 plus 2 is 4 is not an answer?
	Well, I don't know.
	That's kind of tough. Is it really?
	Is it really tough? I mean, didn't we all get this right in great view?
	Well, the thing is, I always ask, you know, questions as far as, you know, two material things adding into two other material things.
	No, no, no. We're just talking about the mathematical argument to two and two make four.
	Right. No, I can agree with that.
	So you're 100% certain of that?
	From my perspective...
	Sorry, what do you mean from your perspective?
	As in, I don't know, someone who might not understand math would not accept that as entirely true.
	Well, but that doesn't have anything to do with the actual truth of the matter.
	There are people who think the world is flat.
	That doesn't mean that the world is flat, right?
	There are crazy people who think that bat wings are sprouting out of Barack Obama's armpits.
	That doesn't mean that we should go and check, right?
	Right, right. But those are ridiculous.
	But ridiculous is not a philosophical argument, right?
	Exactly. Right, so look, I appreciate the skepticism, I really do, and I think skepticism is a very healthy mental attitude to have, and Lord knows I've managed to pull down enough false gods in my lifetime to know that philosophy is literally littered with the bones of deities and cultural delusions and nationalism and all sorts of nonsense that I was trained into growing up.
	So I appreciate your skepticism, but I think that you want to be careful about taking too much of that medicine, right?
	I think that no antibiotics is good.
	A thousand antibiotic pills will strip you of all useful bacteria as well, and you know, you will be dead, right?
	So I think that you want to take those skeptical pills in measured doses, and I think that you do want to try and root yourself in things that are true.
	And if you have doubt about that, which again I can understand as a radical skeptic you would, Then you need to be an empiricist.
	And I've got a whole introduction to philosophy.
	It's on the podcast page.
	It's a whole separate feed if you want to go.
	Again, my arguments, you may disagree with them, but this is how I sort of overcome the skeptic position.
	If you have doubt about what you believe, then the first thing you can do is look at your actions, right?
	So, for instance, you are talking to me now in this conversation.
	Which means that you accept, at least for the moment, at least during this conversation, you accept that I exist, right?
	Certainly. I mean, you don't think you're having a conversation with a very bald head puppet, right?
	I assume so. I assume that's not.
	And we know that because you couldn't predict what I was going to say next.
	That's not proof because I can't predict what's happening next in my dreams, but that doesn't mean that my dreams are real.
	But it's an indication, right?
	So you're having this conversation You also accept that electricity is objective because that's what's being used along with some other mechanics to transmit our conversation.
	You accept that computers exist.
	You accept that quantum mechanics, at least to the degree to which it supports the operations of the computer, is valid.
	You agree in physics. You agree with gravity because I assume you're not currently clinging to the ceiling having floated up like a helium balloon.
	So if you have doubts which are perfectly reasonable, about existence, reality, other people, and if you get sucked into the giant flaming jaw of the Cartesian demon, the way that you can escape that, the grappling hook that hooks you back to reality is to look at what you're actually doing and say, well, what are the things that I have to accept in order to do what I'm doing?
	Now, I can say that those things aren't true, but I'm acting as if they are true.
	And if I'm gonna act as if something is true, I at least have to accept while I'm doing it that it is true.
	So if I see a car bearing down on me on the road and I jump to one side, then I have to accept in the moment of jumping that I believe that the car is there.
	Because if on the other hand, I'm just watching a movie where a car comes screaming down the road, I'm not going to dive off the couch and through my plate glass window because I'm afraid that the car is going to drive out of the screen and over my chip-stained body.
	Or disbelieve its existence when you're seeing it in real life, right?
	Right, right. It's just an integrity thing for me, and I hope I'm not accusing you of a lack of integrity.
	I'm just talking about ways in which I approach this.
	It's just I'm not going to act as if something is real and then say to myself that it's not because that creates a contradiction between action and belief.
	And a contradiction between action and belief is a lack of integrity or in moral matters hypocrisy, a moral hypocrisy, which again, I'm not accusing you of.
	I'm just saying this is my solution to the problem.
	So if I'm going to have a conversation with you, which I'm very much enjoying and I hope I'm not going to say to myself, I don't think he exists.
	Because if I don't think you exist, I'm not going to have a conversation with you because that would be crazy.
	That would be insane, right?
	So I try not to do things...
	Don't be crazy is sort of the motto of the show, I suppose.
	So that's the way out, is to simply look at what you're doing and everything that is required for you to act as you act must be true.
	Otherwise, you would be doing something different.
	And if we have that uniformity or conformity, I suppose, between...
	The thoughts that we have, that which we accept, and that which we are doing, it brings us a great deal further to, I think, a very productive kind of certainty without throwing the skepticism out of the window, if that makes sense.
	Right, no, certainly. It's like Lou Reed.
	I don't know if you listen to him at all, but you need a busload of faith to get by.
	Faith, excuse me.
	But all these assumptions that we have to make in order to keep ourselves from rocking and drooling in the corner and not Not thinking that the ground is going to fall out from under us every moment we take a step.
	Completely agree with that.
	And I, you know, for one, continuously try to convince myself not to pursue this.
	But my curiosity is always just, you know, looking a little bit further.
	Maybe we could find some answers.
	I seriously doubt it.
	I've actually, that's the one thing I'm almost certain of.
	Well, sorry, let me just interrupt you for a sec.
	I just want to ask a more personal question, if you don't mind.
	Mm-hmm. Sorry, I wasn't sure if you do or don't mind.
	Look, when you have beliefs that are troubling to you, and look, I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb by saying that radical skepticism is a troubling belief, right? Yes.
	Because as you say, how do I know the planet is that gravity isn't going to just reverse itself or the planet isn't going to turn into, I don't know, one of Joe Montana's sweaty flaming balls or something, right?
	I don't know, right? So it's a troubling belief.
	And it may be that this is a justly earned philosophical perspective coming from a neutral place, which is something that I've yet to experience or see in this world, but let's just say it's possible.
	But there is another possibility, which I'll just talk about very briefly, ask you some questions, and maybe it leads nowhere, maybe it leads somewhere.
	Great. How was certainty portrayed to you, or how did you experience certainty when you were a child?
	That's an interesting question.
	The definition I've been wrestling with for my whole life, basically, is something that's certain is something that cannot be disproved, essentially.
	Let me ask the question, because you're looking at it in isolation with yourself, right?
	When we were a kid, we have parents, we have priests, we have extended family, we have teachers.
	And depending on the constellation of beliefs that we encounter, they can reinforce or Disenforce, I don't know about the opposite of reinforce, weaken.
	It can reinforce or weaken particular perspectives, right?
	So if you grow up in a Muslim family, clearly Islam is going to be reinforced and Zoroastrianism is not, right?
	Atheism is going to be weakened and theism is going to be strengthened, right?
	Right. So the particular constellation, and it's individual to every child, even within the same family, because there are siblings, and of course each the birth order and Parents' level of energy or exhaustion, depending on the birth order, depending on family circumstances.
	Even within the same family, there is a different constellation of factors which strengthen and weaken certain beliefs within us.
	And this is what we arrive in adulthood with, is a constellation of Encouraged and disencouraged constellations of belief.
	And I think that it's very hard, if not impossible, to gain real wisdom and self-knowledge by merely looking at the philosophical perspective as if it came from nowhere, as if it didn't come from particular patterns of enforcement and weakening of Belief structures we were exposed to or which perhaps were inflicted upon us when we were children.
	Does that... Am I making any sense at all?
	This does make sense.
	Okay, so when I'm talking about what your experience was of certainty when you were a child, what I mean more is not what you thought of it, but what were you exposed to in terms of certainty and skepticism as a child?
	Interesting. Well, I had a...
	I had a pretty stable childhood.
	My parents actually had a bit of foresight as far as, as you mentioned, the energy going into each different child.
	With having a great amount invested into myself, I'm completely in agreeance with all the things that you mentioned as far as how important a childhood is in terms of developing a mind in its adulthood.
	And I think I was blessed with With a really caring family, there was a lot of certainty and stability in my life.
	Am I answering this correctly, or should I? There's no correct or not.
	I'm just asking. I mean, this is not even multiple choice.
	I'm just curious what you're saying.
	All of the above. No, as far as certainty goes, it's been something that I've...
	My family was never late to pick me up and I was uncertain of a time.
	I was stuck at school or something like that.
	I'm trying to figure out how to answer this.
	This is a tough question. I feel like I might be missing it right now as far as how I can...
	Do you mind if I ask you some questions to jog you along?
	Perfect. Yes, please do.
	Alright. Were you exposed to religious teachings?
	Yeah. My mother was a Catholic, but I spent most of my time in church actually thinking about how it didn't make sense.
	So I took those stories as a kid and went back and forth between atheism and something, and I just ended up finding some sort of neutral path as far as believing that something must have created it because it was greater than myself.
	Alright, so hang on, let's again, I just want to draw back from the philosophical perspective, which sounds odd from a philosophy show, but again, I think the roots of belief need to be examined before rational conclusions can be drawn.
	Is your mother certain of her religious faith?
	Yeah, I think she's the one in my family who is certain of that.
	Right, okay. So again, this is just Marcus and things in terms of self-knowledge.
	I think Socrates' first commandment, know thyself, is essential.
	So you were exposed to a certainty which was wrong.
	Right. I mean, that's important, right?
	And not only was that certainty wrong, but it was transmitted to you as if it were true.
	Yeah, but...
	I'm sorry, and let me explain what I mean by that very briefly, which is that I am an atheist, I am an anarchist, which are all conclusions, I think, of rational philosophy, but...
	I am not going to send my daughter to atheist anarchist summer camp.
	Do you see the difference?
	I mean, I think I have really good empirical, objective, rational arguments for my opinions, but I'm still not going to inflict my certainties on my daughter because she needs to think for herself.
	So not only was, like, is your mother wrong in her faith, but she...
	She was so certain of it, not only for herself, but she was certain of it to the point where she sent you to church to be told these things as if they were true.
	Right. Well, that's something that I should interject as far as how the whole dynamic was.
	One thing that is prevalent in my family is a good sense of humor.
	And while she did want us to learn the lessons of the Catholic faith, it was never something that she demanded of us.
	She was just something that she liked us to join her on some Sundays, but it was something that we all kind of joked about.
	So it was never really Really forced upon us or anything like that.
	Wait, wait, wait. No, no, this doesn't quite fit.
	This sounds to me like a bit of a story.
	And I say this not knowing you, so I apologize for the presentation.
	But you say that you spent your time in church thinking that this was not true, right?
	Right. I actually just, you know, thought they were stories.
	Right. But you also knew that that's not what they were being presented as, right?
	Right. Your mother didn't say, let's go to Rapunzel camp, right?
	To learn about Grimm's fairy tales, right?
	Exactly. But that's coming from people, from other people.
	And I necessarily believe that even though they believed it, that I was necessarily, that it was true.
	Because everyone believes different things.
	I kind of learned that early on.
	Well, no.
	It's not quite what she, because your mother's wasn't just a belief.
	It was a certainty. And again, how can I be certain of that?
	I feel like I might have answered prematurely.
	Well, let's again, I'd want to stay away from the philosophical and personal, if you don't mind, because I mean, the philosophical, I've got tons of arguments out about that.
	What was your relationship to your mother's certainty in terms of your own communication with her, right?
	So did you say to her, when she'd say, how was church?
	Did you say, well, I don't believe this stuff, but, you know, they're fun stories.
	We never actually really talked about it.
	It was something more that we would attend her with, and nothing was really said, and afterwards it wasn't really discussed.
	Is that strange? It wasn't really discussed makes it sound like a third-party thing.
	My question is, what would be the consequences of being honest with your mother when you were a kid about your experiences in church?
	Oh, right now? I don't...
	No, no, when you were a kid. If you said, like, did you want to go to church?
	Oh, no. Right.
	Okay. So if you said, look, I don't want to go to church.
	I don't believe this stuff.
	It makes no sense to me. And so I'm going to opt out.
	Oh, okay, so that happened all the time, and I have two younger brothers, and we were actually more often than not not going to church, so it wasn't like a ritual thing.
	It was something that every once in a while we'd get out there, and afterwards we'd get some donuts or something to incentivize us to go, but it wasn't really something that there were consequences for if we didn't attend.
	Okay, so a lot of times you wouldn't go to church, but sometimes you'd get donuts to go to church.
	Exactly. Yeah, sugar form of heaven in the here and now.
	Okay. Did you have conversations with your mothers about your skepticism about what was being said in church?
	Not really. More with my brothers.
	And why didn't you have those conversations with your mother?
	Because I felt it was important to her.
	Okay.
	So you felt that she would be upset or if you were honest about your experience?
	Not even upset, just more sad.
	I mean, I've never really seen it as something that I needed to bring up.
	It's like, you know, shaking the faith of someone who's lived most of their life with something like this just because, you know, you've been born into an era where there's free thought ranging everywhere.
	Oh, come on. Look, I mean, don't tell me there was no such thing as atheism before you were born.
	Come on. Oh, no, no. But I mean, it's just...
	It's an old and noble tradition of skepticism about religion going back 3,000 years.
	It wasn't invented with you or I, right?
	Right. But I mean, you know, she grew up in an Italian family with like seven sisters.
	I don't know how much choice she had, you know, going into that.
	Well, I think people have choices.
	I really do. I think that no matter what circumstances or environments, there are still choices that people can have.
	Although I do understand what you mean about sensitivity and so on to upsetting someone.
	But I think what you said was that this is her belief and everybody believes different things.
	And so for you, your mother believed in religion and you didn't.
	But it was kind of like, if I understand it correctly, it was kind of like...
	I like chocolate ice cream, she likes vanilla.
	That's a good way of putting it, actually.
	Right. And you see how this kind of compromise, and we may even call it a necessary compromise, would have pretty profound effects upon your philosophical views.
	Right. The fact that it was kind of nonchalant, and I see what you're saying.
	And that, I think, is an important thing to know, because you don't want to start building your edifice of philosophy on a sort of black hole absence of self-knowledge about the factors influencing your philosophical preferences.
	Sorry, that's a shitty way of putting it.
	You know what I mean, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, you want to make sure you build your castle on rock, not on sand, to use a biblical metaphor, which may be appropriate.
	And I think if... The fact that in order to maintain your own perspective, you had to, in a sense, downgrade your mother's faith to a mere personal preference.
	In other words, certainty was downgraded to mere preference in order for your preference to have any room, right?
	Because if your mom was right about religion, And, you know, God existed and you were drinking the blood of Christ and eating his flesh in that weird cannibal ceremony that the Catholics do.
	And if, you know, Jesus did come back from the dead, smelling all kinds of three days old and stuff, then you would need to change your skepticism to, right?
	In the same way that when I was a kid, I thought the world was flat.
	I found out it was round. It blew my gourd.
	Like, I think, oh my God, I'm going to fall off.
	I looked at that picture. In the textbook.
	And I found England and it was like, dude, we're on an angle.
	Why doesn't it feel like we're on an angle?
	It didn't make any sense to me.
	And then I went to Africa when I was six and I thought I'd need gravity boots or something so it wouldn't fall off the bottom.
	I mean, it just blew my mind, right?
	And I think as kids, you know, you find out the sun's going to burn out and it ruins your whole day, if not your whole week.
	And so those were examples of My perspective or my belief was that the world was flat.
	I was told that the world was round and I abandoned my belief as incorrect and adopted the correct view of the world being round, right?
	Right. One of them had to go.
	Yeah, one of them had to go.
	But in your family structure...
	All of them had to go, right?
	Well, yeah. In order for you to have a perspective, you either had to conform to your mothers if it was the truth.
	You had to either...
	Or downgrade both theism and skepticism, or theism and agnosticism, or whatever you had as a kid, to opinions, or the reverse would be true, in which case your mother would have to conform to atheism.
	Right. There's only those three possibilities, if that makes any sense, right?
	Right. If I cared enough to push myself onto her beliefs, but I was really just thinking about myself.
	No, no, no, no. See, you've gone back to relativism again, right?
	Because you said, to push myself on her beliefs.
	In other words, damn it, mom, you really should like chocolate ice cream and not vanilla.
	Like, impose my subjective preferences on my mom in a fundamental act of primordial bullying, right?
	But we're not talking about that.
	I mean, people didn't impose the world is round upon me.
	They told me about it, they made the case, I accepted the case, and it was true.
	It wasn't an act of imposing personal bigotry upon me to tell me that two and two made four.
	It was just the identification of an objective fact, right?
	Right. But you see how, and this is why even though we're talking about it and you're beginning to see the effects, which this has nothing to do with whose argument is right.
	This simply has to do with exploring the factors that may have led you to this kind of skepticism.
	And so even while we're talking about it, and I say, well, then you would have to have your mom conform to the reality that there is no God, or try, then you immediately went back to, I would then be pushing my personal preference upon her.
	Oh, interesting. So...
	In order for one truth to hold forth, I would have needed to show her the light?
	Well, it's not show her the light.
	You would just, I mean, it's sort of hard to say how to put, just tell her the truth.
	There are no gods. Right.
	But see, that's the word God and we come back to it.
	I really have appreciated this, you know, delving back in because who else am I really going to be talking to this about as far as, you know, where the core beliefs stem from.
	But the belief in nothing or even, you know, no God still kind of makes me think that there's something, whether or not it's something that controls the one, the one, what is it?
	No, look, I understand, right?
	So this is like a deism, like there may be something out there or the origins or whatever.
	Even if we accept that that's true, that has nothing to do with the interventionist, formal Roman Catholicism that you were exposed to.
	Okay. Right.
	So even if we say there's some higher intelligence that we can't totally rule out, that may exist somewhere in the universe, that we may come in contact at some point in the future, that has nothing to do with Jehovah and Jesus and Moses and company, right? Okay, right.
	Does that make any sense? That's like saying, well, we may come across some space alien in the future that has really long hair and lives in a castle.
	That doesn't mean that that's proof that Rapunzel was prophetic, right?
	Right, right. It has nothing to do with the historical transmission.
	Whatever happens in the future, whatever we discover that there's hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings ordering the moons of Sirius' third planet, it has nothing to do with what sun-baked Bedouins wrote down 5,000 years ago, right?
	Even if there's something that's coincidentally true, it has nothing to do, other than coincidence or perhaps tourism from those guys visiting our planet 5,000 years ago, it has nothing to do with the religion that is taught to children, right?
	Right, right. So her faith in that religion is, even if we accept the deist argument, your mother's faith in that religion is not rooted in reason and evidence.
	Yeah, I would assume.
	And in fact, reason and evidence detonates it, right?
	Right. And that's the challenge.
	And so what I'm saying is that your philosophical perspectives Well, you know, I'm not saying I've closed the argument for rational empiricism, uncertainty, blah, blah, blah.
	I mean, I've made some case for it and you can review that at your leisure as you like.
	But I think if you don't know the degree to which there was a pressure upon you as the free thinker, or maybe your brothers as well, as the free thinker that there was a great pressure that in order to maintain your own beliefs, you had to downgrade the beliefs of others to opinion because you were not in a position Emotionally or just in terms of the family hierarchy,
	you weren't in a position to bring the truth to those around you, that is going to have a huge effect on your philosophical.
	And again, it's not proof or disproof.
	We're just saying that if you don't know that influence, then you can't really be objective about your beliefs.
	Interesting. So the relativist perspectives that I hold, Would stem from the fact that I saw others as just perspectives?
	Well, that was all that was available to you as a child, right?
	That you disagreed with your mom, and I assume your dad, because it doesn't sound like your dad did a whole lot of agnostic interventionism either.
	He was more the philosopher, actually.
	I'm sorry? He was more the philosopher, so he's where I got the sense of humor from.
	Well, I would say that the job of a philosopher is to fight error, the same way that the job of the doctor is to fight disease and the job of the nutritionist is to fight bad eating.
	So if your mom escaped unscathed with her religious fantasies and your dad did not intervene in order to correct those, I would not necessarily say that he was a philosopher.
	Now, again, that's just my perspective.
	Right, right. And not necessarily not intervene.
	He just did it in his own sense by discussing science with us and philosophy afterwards.
	But to try to change my mother's opinion over something might have just gotten him some fight that he didn't necessarily need to go into it with.
	Sorry to interrupt you.
	I just wanted to point out something that you did again.
	I don't know if you noticed the word that you used about your mom.
	What was it? How did you describe your mom's faith?
	Did I say certainty or something?
	No. You said, to change my mother's...
	What was the word you used? Belief?
	Perspective? Opinion.
	Right. Do you see how you have to downgrade her certainty to a mere opinion in order to have room for your own?
	Right. Difference of belief.
	In other words, you have to downgrade...
	God exists and loves me and we're going to heaven and here's the rituals we use to get there, the moral obligation for obedience and fidelity to the Word of God, which I assume is more than just an opinion of your mothers.
	You didn't go to the camp called You Must Worship Chocolate Ice Cream, right?
	Because that's a mere preference.
	That is a mere opinion. But this faith of your mothers, she would, I doubt, characterize it as a mere opinion.
	Because opinion is sort of by its very nature an unfounded assertion based on prior prejudices or based on personal tastes that have no binding relevance to others, like I like ice cream.
	As opposed to this is.
	Yeah, so I just sort of wanted to point out that the language that you use is to downgrade certainty to opinion.
	And that's a consistency since you and I started talking about 40 minutes or so ago.
	Your constant undertow, and I would say it's unconscious because you're doing it without realizing it, which is why I'm sort of stopping and pointing it out.
	Your unconscious tendency, if not you could say mania, again it's not a negative thing, it's a very strong tendency, is to, whenever you come across a fixed opinion, is to downgrade it in your own mind, sorry, to a fixed certainty, is to downgrade it to a mere opinion.
	Because it's unconscious, it means it comes from something quite early and quite consistent in your life.
	And I think it's worth examining that.
	And through that, you can come to a more objective framework as to your philosophical beliefs.
	I think if it's stuff that we've just adapted to within our family, and adaptation within a family is not always bad.
	I mean, my daughter has to adapt to certain things in this family, and I don't think that that's necessarily bad.
	I mean, we also have to adapt to her, and so I think adaptation is not necessarily bad.
	I think adaptation to religious beliefs is not healthy, and I've made arguments about that.
	I'm just about to release a book on atheism, which makes this case, so I won't bore you with it now, but you're welcome to check out the book.
	But I would say that it's a really great challenge to own our own certainties.
	And if you have these perspectives which arise from or you have sympathy for as a result of adapting to your mother's religiosity, then in a sense, in a very real sense, they're not your beliefs.
	Right? If I choose to learn a language, I own that language.
	If I just happen to be born in a culture that speaks English, I don't really own English.
	That's just what I happen to be I don't own being born in Ireland.
	The piece of dirt in proximity to, you know, mom's belly, right?
	And so I think it's really, really important.
	This is what psychologists, I think, call individuation, right?
	Which is where we begin to own the contents of our own consciousness, which means that we don't act on the momentum of history and we try to examine and understand the sources and roots of our particular perspectives so that we can evaluate them consciously rather than having us Having them run our lives in a way that we're not aware of, because that is, to me, not an act of self-ownership, but an act of rolling down the hill, in a sense, of prior necessity, not present choice.
	Interesting. Wow.
	I didn't think it was possible, but I think I have to break the base down even further to get to the philosophical groundings that I'd need to then build up You know, everyday thought on, but I really appreciated this.
	I don't want to take up too much more of the other guys' time because I know we've been talking for a while, but I've really appreciated this and I got to do some more thinking before I come back to you.
	Yeah, I appreciate that.
	And this is, again, I just want to reiterate, this is not to say that my arguments are true and your arguments are false.
	Prejudice can be true, right?
	I mean, people threw rocks and were able to catch them long before they understood the mathematics of physics.
	So the fact that you have this prior perspective does not invalidate the truth or falsehood of your beliefs, but I still think that they're not quite your beliefs in truth until you understand where they came from.
	So I just want to mention that at the end.
	No, that's great. I... I really like that perspective, and I'm going to take another look at it and get back to you.
	All right. Thanks, man. I appreciate it.
	It's great call. Excellent, Stefan. Have a good one.
	Thanks. All right. Sorry for the last caller, but we do have a little bit of time if you would like to jump in.
	Oh, did we lose him? Oh, caller!
	Hello. Okay.
	Hi. Do you want to do this a few more times, or do you want to ask your question?
	Okay, so is it sound okay now?
	It's alright. Sorry about that.
	I just realized what was happening.
	I had two different things.
	I was listening on the chat and on the Skype as well.
	Okay, can you hear me now? Is it well now?
	How about you just ask the question?
	Yeah, I know. Okay.
	So, hey, Steph, it's Juan. We talked on the barbecue.
	I remember. How are you doing?
	Yeah, I'm good, I'm good.
	It's been a crazy month.
	It's been a crazy month. I actually wanted to call in and just like fill you in or fill just whoever's interested or the people that I met there and everybody just kind of what happened.
	And you know, honestly, I'm not really sure exactly why I'm calling, but I just really had this, I was like daydreaming about calling and just telling what's been happening for me and just seeing what happened.
	I'm all in. All right, so about a month and a half ago, I got into a really bad fight with my dad.
	It got over some really silly, just stupid thing.
	And I'm not sure how much detail I'm going to get onto this, but basically he hit me.
	It wasn't too hard, but he hit me.
	And I was just so frightened and so scared that I was like, I was just so afraid of what was going to happen, whether he was going to attack me again or I had to fight him back or something.
	I even got images of just jumping up the balcony of my room and shit.
	It was just so horrible that I was like, okay, I need to leave.
	And so I grabbed the backpack and I put a couple of jeans and I left.
	I basically just moved out.
	I just moved out about a month ago, and it's been a fucking adventure, man.
	It's just really, really, really, really intense.
	I got an apartment. Well, I'm living right now with a friend of mine.
	He's a good friend of mine.
	He actually went to the barbecue, too.
	It's Kevin. I'm sure you met him, or just...
	Yeah, you guys said hi to each other there.
	Yeah, I think I talked to everyone at the barbecue.
	And listen, just before you go on, I'm so, so sorry to hear about what happened with your dad.
	That is a terrifying...
	And of course, as I remember from our conversation with the barbecue, it certainly wasn't the first time that you'd experienced this kind of aggression.
	I just wanted to extend huge and deep sympathies.
	That is a terrible, terrible thing to face, and I'm so sorry.
	Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.
	Yeah, there's more detail to it all, and I'm not sure.
	I'm really not sure how much I want to go into it, especially in such an open conversation.
	I would like to talk more about it, but I just basically, I don't know.
	I've been going through a lot of challenges.
	I've heard a lot from people saying that people who've done the same thing, where they leave their abusive parents and all this kind of stuff, saying that there is a backlash to all the abuse and a backlash to the offenses, and that they show up later on in their relationships and all this kind of stuff.
	I definitely have been going through a lot of Sorry, let me just make sure I understand what you mean.
	So you're saying that people have said that if you leave or take a break from an abusive relationship with a parent, that it doesn't solve all of your problems, that you still have issues to work through.
	Is that right? Yeah, dad, and I guess kind of the way that I see it is that the defenses are still so fresh and have...
	Sorry about that?
	No problem. Okay, could you repeat that?
	Yeah, I mean, you're saying that the effects of the abuse go with you when you leave.
	It doesn't solve everything just to take a break from the relationship.
	Right, yeah, that's right. That's very true.
	That's very true. I mean, that is very true.
	It certainly is, in my opinion, healthier to not be in a situation where there's violence.
	I mean, I don't think that even needs to be said, but it is sometimes confusing for people when it comes to family members.
	Violence is unacceptable in a relationship in any way, shape, or form.
	And so, but yeah, so getting out of the situation of violence is not the same as healing all of its effects.
	Right, right, right, right.
	Right, so yeah, I agree, I agree.
	Yeah, that's basically what I thought about.
	See, I'm not sure why I'm calling, but I have had some, like yesterday, I just had something really, really strange happen to me this week.
	I think it relates to this, what I'm talking about, to the effects of the abuse and the defense, all that kind of stuff.
	I worked all week. I worked eight hours every day during the first Monday to Friday.
	And throughout the whole week, I was like, okay, I'm gonna go on Friday, I'm gonna have a conversation with my friends on FDR, and then I'm gonna listen to the show, and I'm gonna go meet with my friend, I'm gonna have all this fun.
	And then I came home on Saturday, I woke up at, let's say, at two or something.
	And then my friend, who I was gonna hang out with, she was like, oh, sorry, I'm not going anymore.
	And then I just thought, oh, how unreliable and disrespectful that she would just Like, not call me earlier and tell me.
	Like, I had to text her and then she told me that it wasn't happening anymore.
	And I was like, oh, how disrespectful. Like, why would she not call me earlier and be like, oh, I'm so sorry.
	I'm gonna have to miss and let's do it or some other time, right?
	And then I thought, wow, like, this has had a huge effect on my friendships.
	Like, I have some friendships and people who just don't, I just, there's just very little respect, right?
	And I just, like, I just got depressed and just got into my head for, like, Three or four hours just thinking and thinking.
	It's just horrible, right? And then, oh my god, it's like my emotional status is just up and down, up and down.
	There's days when I'm happy and just jolly and just socially hot talking to everybody, and there's days where it's just like, psh, downhill, right?
	And, oh man. It's real unstable.
	And I don't know, and also just having moved out and just like not knowing, like I don't even know how I'm going to be eating in two months, right?
	It's like a huge adventure, but it's like, it's really uncertain.
	Like I don't have, I don't know where the safety is going to be, right?
	Also, I don't even know what I'm going to be doing for Christmas.
	That really scares me and makes me really sad too, but, oh, fuck.
	- Right, right.
	What happened with your friend, the woman who cancels? - Okay, I texted her, I was like, hey, I'm really pumped for today.
	I'm really excited. How about you, right?
	And she was like, oh, sorry, it's not happening.
	Something happened and I'm not going there anymore.
	Sorry, that's basically what she said.
	And then I was like, ooh, that bugs me, right?
	And then I sent her a message.
	I was like, oh, I have... I have something to tell you and I was like, oh, I need to apologize to you for something.
	It just got into this really awkward and uncomfortable comment because I wanted to RTR with her and be like, okay, I realized that I've been doing things in the relationship that I don't know.
	It's pretty big. I don't know.
	I don't know if I want to get into it.
	How much has to do with this, but it just, it just, I wanted to RTR with her, but I guess I wasn't, I guess I wasn't, I didn't, I knew that she was incapable of doing RTR because she hasn't read RTR, right? So I was like, okay, I can't RTR with her, so I want to have this deep conversation.
	But we were texting, and I was like, okay, I'd like to have the conversation, but I don't want to do it through text.
	And then she was like, okay, well, just whenever you want to tell me what you want to tell me, come and find me.
	And I was just like, ugh. So I don't know.
	I don't know if that answers your question.
	Well, yeah, I mean, what...
	Certainly. Did you feel that you were sort of being like your dad when you got that angry?
	I didn't really get angry.
	I don't think it was anger. It's more like disappointment and just like...
	Yeah, I felt disappointment and I felt like that's really annoying, really disrespectful.
	I think it did anger me a little bit.
	I noticed that, I don't know how this looks from other people, I'm just gonna I don't know if sometimes I'll feel like I'm angry and then I'll clench my jaw, but I don't know, I don't feel the anger, like I just wanna punch something or like I wanna yell or something.
	I just feel like I'm clenching my jaw and I don't know how, from other people, if it looks like my face is red.
	Have you answered that, Kevin?
	No, right? I don't think it was anger.
	I really don't express anger as much, which I think it's understandable given the environment.
	But I don't think it was anger, no.
	Right. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that somebody has to have read RTR for you to have sort of that kind of honest conversation about your feelings.
	Right, right. It's not like, you know, somebody has to, if they don't speak Spanish, they have to have studied Spanish for you to speak Spanish with them.
	I don't think quite the same is true with RTR. I wouldn't necessarily limit yourself to, well, they haven't read the book, therefore I can't have that conversation with them.
	Right, okay. Because you can lead people by example.
	They can say, wow, that's really great communication, blah, blah, blah.
	And then you can say, well, here's how I got around to doing it and so on.
	Right, that makes sense. Yeah, you're right.
	You're right. Lead by example from that standpoint.
	You're right. Okay.
	And so you were saying that you don't know exactly how you're going to deal with things.
	You said in two months, is that sort of like where to live and what to do kind of thing?
	Yeah, yeah. It's really uncertain right now.
	I have some money saved up, so I have kind of like a cushion to fall on.
	I probably have about three months of rent, for sure.
	I'm also going to school.
	This is the thing. I'm starting school in like two weeks.
	Again, it's like eight hours a day.
	It's pretty heavy, heavy workload, right?
	It's like a four-year course, you know, in a one-year course, and there's like 10 months left still.
	And I'm like, okay, I don't have a steady job right now.
	I have a job, but it's going to end soon, within a few weeks.
	The factory where I'm working right now, it shuts down in December the 4th.
	So by that time, I'm not going to have a steady job.
	I know that there's some job opportunities, like I could go do painting.
	I have a lot of resources and a lot of people helping me out, which I fucking love and appreciate so much.
	And people just helping me out with like and just give me resources and tell me, oh, apply here, apply there, right?
	So I know that I can make it.
	I know that I can make it. I know that there's no fucking way that I'm going back to my dad's house.
	But it really is a little scary, I guess.
	Totally. Has your dad contacted you at all?
	Right. We've talked for like three times and it's all been like, He works at the same place that I work right now, so the only conversation that we've had was to be like, oh, hey, you work next week, right?
	Okay. Or, hey, you got some mail, so come pick it up whenever.
	Like, okay, right? But there's been no reference to it.
	And he told my mom, and my mom lives in Colombia, right?
	I'm not sure if you knew that, but she lives in Colombia, and he told her that I moved out, and that's it.
	And my mom called me later and was like, oh, why'd you move out?
	What happened, right? And of course, I asked her, did he tell you what happened?
	And she was like, no, you just said that you guys had a fight and you left, right?
	And I was like, well, right, of course, he didn't say that he hit me, right?
	Or he didn't say why he told me, right?
	Which was a fucking nasty, horrible fight.
	Like, he said some things that I just, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right.
	And my friends just reminded me that there's something that I think this has really been stuck with me.
	He said a few things during the fight that just really got burned into my head and have been the source of a lot of despair.
	They just triggered despair in my life, just every once in a while.
	This might be somewhere that I want to go, but it's really important.
	I'm just going to go through the little fight real quick.
	I was sitting down, my dad had a, there was like Thanksgiving, we didn't go to Thanksgiving, so he was a little angry, but he was just like, he wasn't like expressing it.
	And then I laid down on the couch where I was sleeping, and my sister asked me for my laptop, so I just gave it to her.
	And she went inside her room, and she locked the door.
	And then my dad came out and saw that I didn't have the laptop, and then he turned to her, to her door, and he said, oh, turn off the light before you go to bed, and don't break the laptop, because you always break everything, right?
	And at that point, I just got pissed off because I felt like that's what he had done for four years and just crushed little by little.
	I just got angry at that point.
	I was like, don't worry about my laptop.
	I trust that she won't break it.
	I trust her with it, which is completely true because I wouldn't give it to her.
	And he just got like, oh, you know, just got red and angry, right?
	And he went around me and he said, oh, let me raise my daughter however I want to raise my daughter.
	She's my daughter, all this kind of shit.
	And as soon as he said that, I just laughed.
	I was like, that's how you raise your daughter?
	That's what I thought, I just laughed.
	And then he said, laugh again and I'll punch you, right?
	And then he came, he like speed walked towards where I was and then he just hit me and I looked at my arm and all this thing happened and then he just kind of, We can like cat fight and you know, he just went back and then I was just like clenching my fist and just pumping adrenaline and then he started saying some things like, you anarchist, the whole world hates you anarchist.
	You're not gonna be happy like that.
	Don't you see that you're like destroying everybody's lives?
	You're destroying the lives of everybody around you.
	And I was just so fucking ugh.
	I was just like listening. I was just listening and being like, wow, that's this horrible, this terrible, right?
	And he left, and then I just had like three or four cigarettes in a row, and then I just tried to sleep, but it was just barely possible.
	And then the next day he said something, he said some really nasty stuff too.
	I actually can't remember exactly what it was right now, but those things, like every once in a while, they come back up to me.
	Come back to my memory, it's just like...
	Everybody hates you, anarchist.
	It's like, oh, fuck. Like, I know that he's talking about himself in a way, but him hating what I've done, like, just showed him how fucking abusive and crazy he is, but...
	And he said that anarchists destroy everyone around them?
	Yeah, basically. He said that I was...
	He said, don't you...
	You're not going to be happy.
	He said... Everybody hates you anarchists, because we've had anarchist debates for fucking years.
	Like, since I got into FDR, I've been debating politics with him.
	And, you know, I got to a point where I was like, okay, I'm gonna give up because this is just pointless.
	And would you say that your father is an expert on happiness, that he has achieved happiness and good nature and goodwill and love in his life, and therefore he has a good basis on which to lecture you about how to achieve happiness?
	No, not at all. I don't think happy people assault their kids.
	I think that's not really a good standard for happiness.
	I also think that people who are particularly parents who are violent and verbally abusive in this way have a pretty tough time saying to other people that they are destroying the people around them.
	I think that violent and abusive and assaulting parents are doing a lot more to destroy the people around them than somebody who has a preference for non-violence in human relations, like yourself.
	Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
	You're right. So it was him that was destroying people's lives, and he was just sort of like a projection, I guess, right?
	Well, I mean, that would be my guess.
	I mean, it's tough to analyze these things from a distance.
	But yeah, I mean, when people insult you, let me sort of give you a tip here.
	As somebody who's, I mean, I've been the recipient of my share of insults in the world.
	When people insult you, what they're doing is they're telling you the hell that they believe in.
	Right? So they're telling you the hell.
	Right? So I remember my brother once said to me, these things, you know, this was like, God, I was, this is almost 30 years ago.
	And I still remember it.
	I still remember where I was standing.
	I remember him saying, you're just drifting away from everyone and you're going to end up completely alone.
	Oh my God. Because of my philosophical beliefs.
	Right. Right. And this was a culmination of a long and ugly fight.
	I remember that. I remember the peculiar intensity of his words.
	And the truth is, though, that what he was describing to me was the worst thing for him.
	Does this sort of make any sense?
	Now, somebody can only tell you the worst thing for them if they've actually experienced it themselves.
	Okay. Right, so if I want to wish the worst pain on somebody else, it has to have been a pain that I myself have experienced.
	Right, right. Right, you know, like, I don't know, take a football straight to the nads, right?
	I mean, that's a pain that, you know, or having a kid of my daughter's age where at least once a day I get a good old canasta fest on my nuts, right?
	Right, right. You have to have experienced the insult that you inflict on somebody else.
	Otherwise, it's all theoretical and it doesn't have that visceral impact, right?
	Right. So when people say to me, Steph, you are X, and they have that branding in your brain intensity that comes from that kind of certainty, I know that they're describing or cursing me with the hell that they are currently living in.
	Yeah. Does that make sense?
	Yeah. Yeah, it does.
	It does. So I'm just trying to write that.
	Yeah, the curse we give is the one we're living.
	Right, right, right.
	And so, I can't...
	Maybe this is a maturity thing.
	I don't think so. Maybe it is.
	I'm certainly open to that argument.
	I'm not quite at the place where I feel nothing but pity for such people.
	Right. But I do feel some pity when people describe to me, even in this oblique way, they describe to me the hell that they have carved out for themselves and the prisons and the guards and the devils and the pitchforks that they have burrowed and are now trapped within.
	The most hatred that you get flung at you is an attempt...
	To cage you in a cage that somebody else is already living in.
	And I feel...
	Look, the insults don't bother me as much anymore.
	I'm not a zen cloud being that have no effect.
	But mostly I'm just like, oh, how sad.
	Like, how sad that somebody...
	That that's the only option that somebody would have.
	Like, how pitiful it is that your dad only has violence and verbal abuse...
	Yeah. In an attempt to resolve, quote, resolve differences.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	That is pretty sad.
	Look, I'm not saying pity.
	I'm not saying pity the guy because, look, I mean, that's ridiculous and unreasonable and not healthy.
	Yeah. But it's a way of depersonalizing what he is telling you.
	Yeah. I mean, his ex-wife lives in another country.
	He's just driven his son away from home through bullying and verbal abuse.
	I think that to say that the only problem in his relationship with you is your dedication to non-violent solutions to social conflicts is insane.
	Yeah, I agree. You know, it's like me punching out a friend of mine and then say, it's your goddamn gardening that's keeping us apart.
	The only problem is not the bruise of my fists on your face.
	It's the fact that you like the cranberries as a fruit and a band.
	But in a way, he's actually quite right.
	When there's an essence of truth...
	In people's insults, that's when they have the most power.
	He's saying that your devotion to non-violence is destroying someone around you.
	Is that not somewhat true?
	Yeah, it is.
	It is.
	It is so much true.
	It's not the fault of my belief, but it is true.
	It is since I started to listen to FDR and just try to be honest and With him and just not take his bullshit arguments and not take his bullying and just actually not let him manipulate me with arguments.
	Like he would... I don't know.
	I could try to get an example.
	But it was after when I started to work on myself and work on my emotions and work on what I wanted and just not let him control my life.
	It was then that the fights just started to get absurd, right?
	And the relationship just started to crash, right?
	So, does that make sense?
	Yeah, it does.
	It does. I mean, when we genuinely live a life of non-aggression, it really does expose the aggressions of people around us.
	Yeah. When we live a life where we simply will not put up with abuse in our personal relationships, it does expose abuse in our personal relationships.
	Because abuse is so often covered up through compliance, right?
	Yeah. Yeah.
	That's why people say, well, no, I'm not going to get thrown in jail if I don't pay my taxes.
	It's like you're only saying that because you pay your taxes.
	Right. Because when you comply with abusers, it doesn't look like abuse because you don't get into those fights when you don't stand up for yourself, right?
	Right, right, right.
	And if you stand up for yourself and you get into a fist fight with you, you punch him back and stuff like that, then the aggression gets so muddy that each person can blame the other and it becomes a sibling fight, so to speak, right?
	Yeah. Right, right.
	Whereas if you stand up for yourself in a non-violent way, the aggression of the other person, the abuses of the other person becomes visible, even to themselves, right?
	Yeah, yeah. That's the bigger one.
	That's the biggest one. Yeah, you're right.
	And, I mean, there is a truth, right?
	So, I mean, if I were to guess, and of course this is just amateur guessing, but if I were to guess, you know, he's saying, I am unraveling because...
	Your devotion to non-violence is holding up a true mirror to myself.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Yeah, it's a great way to put it in.
	Yeah. And it's also a prophecy as well.
	I mean, certainly my brother's was, right?
	It's true. I mean, what he said 30 years ago was true.
	People are incredibly knowledgeable about the future.
	Self-knowledge is an oracle, right?
	So my brother was saying, your philosophy will cause you to dissociate from everyone who is around you when you're 16.
	And he was exactly and precisely right.
	Mm-hmm. Yeah.
	Yeah. Because, of course, you had to break those relationships, right?
	Or what happened? Yeah.
	I mean, the way that I frame it for myself, I mean, I try to be as accurate.
	I'm saying this, you know, I know this, but hopefully it will be of some use to you.
	It's that I did not break any of my relationships.
	Right. I did not break any of my relationships.
	That's like saying, you know, when I dream that I have a million dollars and I wake up, I've lost a million dollars.
	Sorry, you're getting a little choppy there.
	I'm going to miss the last phrase.
	If I dream that I have a million dollars in gold buried in my backyard, I have that dream at night.
	Right. If I wake up in the morning and I realize it was a dream, I haven't actually lost a million dollars, right?
	Right, right. I didn't have it and then I lost it.
	It was a fantasy.
	It was a dream. Right.
	So I did not break any of my relationships because if they were relationships, if we were related, if we were close, they could not be broken.
	I would not break them anymore.
	I would throw out a million dollars in a trash bag.
	I did not break any of my relationships.
	I recognized that there was no relationship.
	There is no such thing as a defu.
	I mean, we use the term because we need something to call it, so that it's different from divorcing your current family or your current wife.
	But there is no such thing as a defu.
	It's a description of something that is not real.
	because if you have a relationship with your family then you will not separate from them because you have a relationship it has some degree of mutual benefit it has some degree of intimacy it I mean all relationships have their flaws and imperfections but it's overall good like you know I don't shoot myself when I have a cold and I don't consider it a bad relationship if I have a disagreement with my wife right right and
	But what we're looking at is to say, what is it to be related to someone?
	Well, it's not to be afraid of them.
	It's not to defer to their whims for fear of violence.
	That is not a relationship.
	Yeah, you're right.
	You're right. You're right.
	Yeah, it's just...
	When you break up with a girlfriend, you don't end the relationship.
	You recognize that there is no relationship.
	The relationship can't be finished.
	It can only be revealed as non-existent.
	That's the way, I mean, in terms of separation, that's the way that I have experienced it, and I just sort of throw that out so that...
	It's more about a calm and rational, you know how I say, I don't say, there is no God.
	I say, I accept that there is no God.
	I accept the fact that there is no God.
	It is a calm, you know, it is a calm reflection.
	And for me, it was almost like I was in my body, but also outside my body, like an observer, when I was in these, at the ends of these illusions of relationships.
	It was like I was looking at a scene Of me talking to someone and saying, is this a relationship?
	Am I visible?
	Am I experiencing anything other than petty, false self, hysterical manipulation on the part of the other person?
	Am I experiencing anything other than aggression and defensiveness?
	Am I even in this person's thoughts as a sovereign human being, or are they just manically defending against anything that I'm bringing to bear?
	Is there a relationship or not?
	Or are they only having a relationship with their own defenses and avoidances?
	And irrationality.
	Right, interesting. So for me, I was just looking at it saying, is this a relationship?
	Because by God, whatever we define in the past becomes a sure path for the future.
	As long as I define that as a relationship, that's all I was ever going to get in this life.
	As long as I defined that shit as a relationship, that's all I could ever get in relationships.
	Because that's what being related is.
	But the moment I raised my standards and said, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	It has to be a mutual exchange of value.
	I have to be visible.
	I have to like the other person.
	I have to respect their beliefs, admire their integrity.
	I have to be passionate about who they are.
	I have to be curious. I have to be enthusiastic about seeing them.
	I have to have all of these things that by any reasonable standard would be what a relationship actually is.
	Right, right, right.
	And you have to look at that and say, well, you don't have to.
	It's damn worth it to look at it and say, well, is this a relationship?
	Because if this is a relationship, then that's what relationships are.
	Right, right, right.
	Thank you, thank you for that. That's really great.
	I'm definitely gonna try to, just gonna apply that to my current quote relationships and see how that fits.
	Give it some time. I mean, it takes a little time for people to get used to a new way of doing things, but yeah, for sure, I think it's very important.
	Right, right. A few last thoughts are coming to mind.
	I know that we're over time, but a few last thoughts are coming to mind.
	I think I'm kind of getting what I wanted to ask you or what I'm calling right now.
	Throughout the past six or ten months, even maybe a year, all I've been doing since I couldn't leave Was just introspect, introspect, introspect.
	We go deep, deep into my family issues, all this kind of stuff.
	Just half my time during the day, when I was not talking to somebody, was just introspecting.
	And at this time, I feel like it seems like it's taken a lot of energy from my life.
	Like, it seems like...
	Like, I just wanted to ask you, like...
	Like, for example, right before I said that, I was wondering I remember a podcast where you mentioned that it was really important to empathize with the enemy, I guess, or empathize with people who have no empathy.
	That was a really important thing.
	I think you portrayed it as a great feat of strength.
	Just to be clear for those who are newer listeners, empathy is not the same as sympathy.
	Empathy is understanding where somebody is coming from emotionally.
	A sympathy is having tender and gentle and compassionate feelings towards that, right?
	So if some guy is coming at me with a knife, to empathize with him is to say, he really wants to hurt me.
	Right, right. To sympathize with him is to say, I'm a bad guy, he should stab me, he's right in his feelings or whatever, right?
	So I just want to mention that.
	Okay, okay, right, right.
	So, yeah, I mean, and then after I thought about that, I was like, okay, but is this really what I want to be doing?
	Like, I guess my question is, from your, like, whatever you think about this, since I have so much stuff to deal with and so much stuff to worry about right now, what would be the best way, what could I do to make my next few months easier for me emotionally?
	And just, because I'm really trying to concentrate on my motivation, what makes me happy, because...
	I was really on the edge.
	For me, leaving my house and my dad was really a thing of life or death.
	It really felt like...
	I remember when I was grabbing...
	I had a backpack and I had two backpacks when I was walking out of the apartment and just going to get the bus and go to my friend's house.
	I really felt like I just left a dragon's den.
	I was just thinking, wow, I just fucking defeated a dragon.
	I just survived this huge battle for so many years.
	And so I really want to keep my motivation going and I want to be happy and I want to enjoy my life and just start living, right?
	But at the same time, there's so much stuff to worry about and I don't know, I just want to, I just, I guess I'm afraid of feeling despair, just falling into depression and just not, you know, being like stuck, you know?
	No, I hear you.
	And look, there's no magic wand that is going to make everything okay.
	And I know that's not what you're asking, but if you have that expectation, then it's going to be worse, right?
	Because it's a tough transition for sure.
	The way that I... I can only tell you my own experience because I haven't generalized this into a theory, but I'll tell you what sort of keeps me going.
	Is that when I encounter difficulties in my life, and Lord knows I do, like everyone...
	What I do is say, would I rather be six again?
	Because there's no fucking problem in my adult life other than dying.
	There's no adult problem in my life that is even close to the kinds of problems I had to deal with when I was four, five, six years old.
	Now that kid, me as a kid, he had some heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy burdens.
	And he had a long way to go before he got some freedom.
	yeah so what I say to myself is you know I'm never going to face bigger problems in my life than I faced when I was five years old and that helps me to keep things in perspective as far as difficulties go yeah uh
	Particularly since, I mean, gosh, for me now, I mean, it's a decade, I think, since I last had anything to do with my mom.
	Right. And I still, to this day, will think sometimes when I'm having some troubles, I will sit there and say, hey, at least I don't have to go to mom's place.
	Right. And that sounds weird, but it's like it puts things in perspective.
	Right. Because my troubles now are troubles that I have chosen.
	The troubles when I was five...
	We're troubles that I did not choose.
	Right. Right.
	That makes a lot of sense.
	So, to savor the freedom from aggression that you have from your decision, it's a bittersweet thing and there's times when it's hard and there's times when it's complicated and there's times when it's depressing and there's times when it's anxiety-provoking and there's times when it's enraging.
	Yeah. Right.
	But the reality is that you have drawn a line in the sand around yourself saying, I don't do violence anymore.
	I don't do it.
	It's off the table.
	I don't speak that language anymore.
	I don't go to that neighborhood anymore.
	I don't do that.
	Now, hey, if your dad goes into therapy and your dad comes around and, you know, yay, fantastic.
	Maybe that's something that could be resolved and maybe that's something that would be good.
	I wouldn't hold my breath, but who knows, right?
	Yeah, I'm not going to.
	So, the troubles that you have now are the troubles of adjusting to peace.
	Excellent. Of adjusting...
	To non-aggression. Of adjusting to non-abuse.
	Adjusting to freedom, right?
	Adjusting to freedom.
	And yeah, adjusting to freedom sucks.
	Yeah, it's hard. It sure beats the alternative, which is not adjusting to freedom.
	That's right. That's right. Which is continuing to appease aggression.
	Right. Right.
	Right. So it's sort of like somebody says, you know, you can get out of this wheelchair you've been in your whole life, but you're going to get some shooting pains in your leg as you learn to walk.
	How many of us would choose to stay in the wheelchair?
	Yeah, no. No.
	Now you'd get up and you'd say, fuck, my leg hurts like a son of a bitch, right?
	Yeah. And occasionally that wheelchair would look pretty good.
	But fundamentally, the choice is to walk and walking hurts.
	Yeah. But who would trade that kind of freedom for staying in a wheelchair?
	Yeah, I know. I don't want that.
	I wouldn't. No way, yeah.
	Yeah. Yeah, that's great.
	That's really great. Oh wow.
	Oh wow. Yeah, thank you.
	Thank you for that one, too. That's excellent.
	I'm definitely going to keep that tool in the belt buckle.
	I hope so. And with that, I'm afraid I have promised my daughter we're going to take her for Chuck E. Cheese, so I'm afraid I must stop talking about good parenting.
	So thanks for the call, and I'm so sorry about what happened.
	Man, good for you for not putting up with that kind of violence, and I wish you nothing but the best.
	I think that you're on a good path.
	Thank you so much, Steph.
	I really appreciate everything that you've done and just this conversation.
	It really keeps me moving.
	It really helps me a lot.
	It keeps me motivated. Thank you so much.
	I just wanted to ask one last quick question.
	This might be complete gossip or I don't know where this came from, but I got the idea that there was going to be some sort of reunion or something with you guys on Christmas.
	If that's happening, I'll buy the tickets right now.
	Oh, thanks. Yeah, no, we've talked about that.
	Unfortunately, because of the amount of travel that we've got going on this fall, we're not getting back until sort of mid-December from Phoenix, and so we won't have time to plan.
	It's a lot of work and a couple of thousand bucks to have people over for Christmas, so we probably won't do it this year.
	But we certainly will hopefully do something before the barbecue next summer, so probably something late winter.
	Okay. Okay, that's great.
	Keep everyone posted about that.
	All right, awesome. Thank you so much, Stefan.
	You had a great day. Okay. Thanks, man.
	All the best. All right.

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