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Jan. 16, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:51:50

1830 Freedomain Radio Sunday Call in Show, January 16th 2010

Izzy update, ethics and evil, family choices and circumstances - and a rural attack on maaanlinesssss!

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	Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux, January the 16th, 2011.
	I hope you're doing very well. I have had a fair deluge of requests to talk about this Wall Street Journal article from January the 8th, 2011, by Amy Chua, entitled, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.
	And I'll just read a few excerpts from it and give you my thoughts.
	A lot of people wonder.
	How Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids.
	They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and musical prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too.
	Well, I can tell you, because I've done it.
	Here are some things my daughters were never allowed to do.
	1. Attend a sleepover.
	2. Have a play date.
	3. Be in a school play.
	Complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A, or not be the number one student in every subject except gym and drama.
	They were not allowed to play any instrument other than the piano or violin, and they were not allowed to not play the piano or violin.
	So she says, Western parents who think they're being strict don't know what strictness really is.
	My Western friends, she says, who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day, an hour at most.
	For Chinese, the first hour is the easy part.
	It's hours two and three that get tough.
	So she goes on to talk about some general statistics which are vaguely interesting.
	And you can search for this, why Chinese mothers are superior on wsja.com.
	And so let's see.
	Once when I was young, she writes, maybe more than once, when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me garbage.
	It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done, but it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that.
	I knew exactly how highly he thought of me.
	I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.
	The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable, even legally actionable to Westerners.
	Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, hey, fatty, lose some weight.
	By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of health and never mentioning the F word and so on.
	Chinese parents can order their children to get straight A's.
	Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best.
	Chinese parents can say, you're lazy.
	All your classmates are getting ahead of you.
	By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out.
	Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything.
	But here is, in practical terms, what she's talking about.
	Lulu was about seven, still playing two instruments and working on a piano piece called The Little White Donkey by the French composer Jacques Hébert.
	The piece is really cute, blah, blah, blah.
	Anyway, Lulu couldn't do it.
	We worked on it non-stop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately over and over, but whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other and everything fell apart.
	Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and she stomped off.
	Get back to the piano now, I ordered.
	You can't make me. Oh, yes I can.
	Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay.
	She punched, thrashed, and kicked.
	She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds.
	I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again.
	Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have the little white donkey perfect by the next day.
	When Lulu said, I thought you were going to the Salvation Army.
	Why are you still here? I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years.
	When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposefully working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid.
	She couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.
	My husband took me aside.
	He told me to stop insulting Lulu.
	Which I wasn't even doing.
	I was just motivating her.
	And that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful.
	Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn't do the technique.
	Perhaps she didn't have the coordination yet.
	Had I considered that possibility? You just don't believe in her, I accused.
	That's ridiculous, Jed said scornfully.
	Of course I do. Sophia could play the piece when she was this age.
	But Lulu and Sophia are different people, my husband pointed out.
	Oh no, not this, I said, rolling my eyes.
	Everyone is special in their special own way, I mimicked sarcastically.
	Even losers are special in their own special way.
	Well, don't worry. You don't have to lift a finger.
	I'm willing to put in as long as it takes, and I'm happy to be the one hated.
	And you can be the one they adore because you make them pancakes and take them to Yankee games.
	I've rolled up my sleeves, and I went back to work on Lulu.
	I used every weapon and tactic I could think of.
	We worked right through dinner.
	Into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even, to go to the bathroom.
	The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling.
	But still, there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.
	Then out of the blue, Lulu did it.
	Her hands suddenly came together, her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing, just like that.
	Lulu realized it the same time I did.
	I held my breath. She tried it tentatively again.
	Then she played it more confidently and faster and still the rhythm held.
	A moment later, she was beaming.
	Mommy, look, it's easy!
	After that, she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn't leave the piano.
	That night, she came to sleep in my bed and we snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up.
	When she performed The Little White Donkey at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me and said, What a perfect piece for Lulu!
	It's so spunky and so her.
	Even Jed gave me credit for that one.
	Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem.
	But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up.
	On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.
	Well, I'll read one other Asian woman's response and then I'll give you my thoughts and we'll go to the show as a whole.
	This woman wrote, drawing from personal experience, the reason why I don't feel this works is because I've seen an outcome that Amy Chua, the author, fails to address or perhaps has yet to experience.
	My big sister was what I used to jealously call every Asian parent's wet dream come true.
	She got straight A's, skipped the fifth grade, perfect.
	SAT score varsity swim team, student council, advanced level piano, Harvard.
	Early admission, an international post with the Boston Consulting Group in Hong Kong before returning to the US for her Harvard MBA. Six-figure salary, Oracle, PeopleSoft, got engaged to a PhD, bought a home, got married.
	Her life summed up in one paragraph above.
	Her death summed up in one paragraph below.
	Committed suicide a month after her wedding at the age of 30.
	After hiding her depression for two years, she ran a plastic tube from the tailpipe of her car into the window, sat there and died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the garage of her new home in San Francisco.
	Her husband found her after coming home from work.
	The post-it note stuck on the dashboard as a suicide note saying sorry and that she loved everyone.
	Mine is an extreme example, of course, but six years since her passing, I can tell you that the notion of the superior Chinese mother that my mom carried with her also died with my sister on October the 28th, 2004.
	If you were to ask my mom today if this style of parenting worked for her, she'll point to a few boxes of report cards, trophies, piano books, photo albums, and Harvard degrees.
	And gladly trade it all to have my sister back.
	Research. There are multiple studies that report that despite high levels of academic achievement, Asian-American students report poor psychological adjustment.
	The high level of parental interest in grades solely can create depression and anxiety for youth, and perception of parental disinterest in emotional well-being is significantly associated with depression.
	Asian American women have one of the highest suicide rates in all cultures.
	Asian American women, 15 to 24 year old, have the highest suicide rates among any ethnicity.
	According to the new American media from 96 to 2006, of the 21 students who committed suicide at Cornell 13 were Asian.
	The 61.9 percentage is significantly higher than the overall percent of Asian students, which is 14.
	From 1964 to 2000, the average number of MIT undergraduate student suicides was nearly three times that of many as the national campus average.
	So obviously there's significant mental health problems that will result from this kind of abuse and it is abuse.
	Let's not mince words. I have a huge amount of disdain and contempt for mere manual Dexterity and competence.
	For me, if a robot can be programmed to do it, it ain't a big fucking deal.
	Can you program a robot to play this white donkey piano piece?
	Of course you can. You can program a piano with pieces of holes cut in paper to do it.
	It's really not a big goddamn deal to tinkle some keys, however fast and accurately you may be doing it.
	It is not a big deal.
	Calling somebody who reproduces art an artist is like calling a photocopier a painter.
	The fact that you can copy stuff is so pathetic and meaningless and pointless, it really doesn't matter.
	And don't get me wrong, I love music and I love competence.
	But I wonder how many of these brutalized children who have been turned into a kind of robots and into a kind of reproducing robot, I wonder how many of them can compose music from the flower and beauty and depth of their own individual souls rather than just plink out In a repetitive robotic manner, the pieces of music that have been written by other people who perhaps weren't raised in this kind of way.
	I consider it highly contemptible to focus so much on manual dexterity or even intellectual dexterity like mathematics or science or engineering relative to creativity.
	The other thing that I would say is that the great battle Of the world as it stands is about the necessary intellectual resistance to unjust tyrannies, the unjust tyranny, tyrannies of the state and of religion and of the status educational system of the mid classes of the, um, the banksters.
	The unjust authority needs to be persistently resisted with All of the great furnaces of moral courage that human beings can summon within themselves, and that is an enormous power.
	The power of the roused moral outrage of a plundered citizenry is the greatest power in the social world that can be imagined.
	The future is not going to be saved by hyper-competent, brutalized, empty souls that can rapidly drum piano keys and are terrified of authority.
	It will not matter in the slide to fascism that will result inevitably if we do not fight back morally.
	It does not matter if the slide to fascism is accompanied by a very rapid recitation of the flight of the bumblebee or the white donkey song or whatever the hell it is.
	It doesn't matter if we slide down into fascism and dictatorship with a really rapid and perfectly executed soundtrack.
	In the intellectual barricades that are going to be the near and middle future, which side are these brutalized children, terrified of authority, subjugated to this imaginary standard of excellence, which is mere vanity for the parent?
	Look, my performing monkey is very adept and adroit.
	I'm a great parent because my child Childs plays Carnegie Hall.
	There's no excellence in terms of virtue.
	There's no excellence in terms of individuality.
	There's no excellence in terms of philosophy.
	There's no excellence in terms of moral courage and standing up to unjust authority because unjust authority is used to turn them into rapid performing monkeys.
	So this is the creation of a slave class, in my opinion.
	And it doesn't matter how many concert halls they play.
	What really matters is who they're playing for and hopefully, and they will not be of much use in this fight, most of them, but hopefully in the piano halls of the future, they won't be playing for men and women in uniform who run the world in a Big Brother 1984 style.
	I mean, in 1984, Winston Smith is standing in front of the view screen of the telescreen and the quote is something like, the woman barks at him, you know, Smith, Winston!
	Touch your toes! And he says with a violent lunge, he succeeded in touching his toes for the first time in many years.
	Absolutely. You can yell at someone and make them touch their toes if they're physically capable of it.
	You can yell yourself hoarse and brutalize and keep your child at a piano seat unable to pee, and they will maybe be able to train themselves through terror and through the adrenaline of fight or flight, train themselves to play a piano piece very rapidly.
	But so what? So what?
	Where is the moral excellence, the moral courage, the individuality, and the love of your fellow man, and the capacity, desire, courage, and will to resist the escalations of unjust authority that's spreading across the world like a dark soup?
	Well, it's not going to be present in these children, which is very tragic, which is very tragic.
	Chinese culture needs to overcome communism, needs to rise up spiritually, intellectually, morally against The unjust tax farmers of the Chinese mainland.
	Are they going to do it if they're terrified of authority in this kind of way?
	No, of course not. They're going to play pretty melodies for their ruling classes and call themselves excellent.
	All right, that's it for my intro.
	Thank you everybody so much. I am all kinds of interested in what people have to say, so I'm all ears.
	Who do we have? Hello, Steph.
	Hello. Well, I thought if nobody else has anything to say, I might ask you a question.
	Very well. Because I noticed that you're doing the UPB talk tomorrow, I think.
	Yes, I am.
	And I was just thinking about the...
	I don't know if you've seen Walter Bloch's writings about morality on the Mises website, but there is this whole sort of libertarian morality that they talk about on that site.
	And I wondered if you'd read it and if you had any thoughts about their sort of take on things over there.
	I haven't, but if you want to give me a summary, I would be happy to give you some off-the-cuff comments.
	Sure. Well, I haven't read it for a while, but I remember that he summarised it, so I could be getting this wrong, but he summarised it by saying that, and this is interesting that he uses a biblical reference, but he says libertarian morality is, sort of summarises two eyes for an eye or two teeth for a tooth.
	Which is kind of a creepy way of putting it.
	But I think what that means is that if somebody...
	I suppose this isn't really foundational.
	It's not like... It starts from the point, what do you do if someone's aggressed against you?
	And I guess it doesn't go further back than that into the philosophical rules as far as I understand.
	But the basic idea is that if someone's aggressed you...
	against you, then they need to pay some kind of, you know, reparations or damages or whatever.
	And so the question is, well, what basis do you determine what those damages should be?
	And the idea is, well, if they've stolen your iPhone For example, first of all, they need to give you back the iPhone.
	So that's just simply restoring the property that was yours.
	But then they need to pay you some kind of damages.
	And I think the idea is like, well, what level of damages should that be?
	Well, it should be essentially the same again as whatever they stole.
	So essentially, they have to give you back You know, the equivalent value of another iPhone plus all of the transaction costs or whatever.
	And I mean, that seems to be the sort of The basic idea.
	And he then goes on to talk about, OK, well, that's fairly straightforward if it's an iPhone or a TV or a car or something like that.
	But what happens when it's things that you can't actually provide restitution for?
	Like, for example, murder or, you know, some kind of physical violence or something like that.
	And then... I don't remember exactly where it ends up, but there's this whole kind of discussion about, well, you know, should the guy who commits grievous bodily harm, should he be beaten up?
	You know, is that like, does he get back what he's supposed to have done?
	And so it goes, I think there's a bit of debate around that, but it definitely, well, at least in my memory, I'm confused as to where he got to with that.
	But I just wondered, what do you think about the sort of libertarian take on restitution and morality?
	Yeah, I have a tough time looking at that as a moral theory.
	To me, that seems like the distinction between theoretical physics and engineering.
	So engineering, of course, is the implementation of certain kinds of maths and physics.
	And so that seems to me more like engineering.
	There doesn't seem to be a lot of moral theorizing there.
	I think it's sort of accepted, and I mean, from a common sense standpoint and a common law standpoint, that makes sense, right?
	So if I steal your iPhone and you spend 10 hours getting it back, then I owe you an iPhone.
	And at least 10 hours, if not a little bit more, in terms of restitution, you're going to have a lot of money.
	Yeah, I mean, you break something, you make it whole.
	I think we all understand that.
	I'm learning a lot about ethics from Isabella's media.
	It's something that's really...
	Really interesting. She likes a British show called Timmy Time, which we first came across when we were in Phoenix.
	It was on TV. It's about a little lamb in a daycare center with a bunch of other little animals.
	The little lamb breaks a sandcastle of the little kitty cat.
	This is my level of moral reasoning.
	The little kitty cat cries, and the lamb goes back and Initially, he just sort of piles up some sand and sticks a leaf on top of it, but the kitty cat keeps crying and then he goes back and actually recreates the sand castle that he broke.
	And the kitty cat is happy and they, you know, play about something else and there's more music and dancing and all this kind of stuff.
	But that is a, I mean, this show is, there's no dialogue in it, which is of course partly for international appeal, but it's also partly because it's aimed at kids who are very young.
	So, to me, if a two-year-old can understand it, it shouldn't be that hard.
	And so, this idea of restitution.
	There's also a great one, which is that Timmy is a little lamb.
	He starts taking stuff from other kids.
	And he takes a hat and, I think, a trolley or whatever.
	And so, what happens is they ostracize him, right?
	So, they won't play with him.
	So he comes down to sit with them at lunch, and they all move to the other side of the table.
	And then he sort of shifts around the table, they all shift away, and then they do their keystone cop things running around.
	And that is a very powerful argument for a stateless society, of course, and about everything that we talk about in terms of they don't need to beat him up and steal stuff back or whatever.
	They just need to ostracize him, and he'll fall into line, as he does.
	And so I'm getting a lot of moral education in terms of implementation, and also in terms of How easy this stuff is to understand.
	It's interesting because Isabella doesn't yet have a good predictive mechanism for figuring out where a ball is going to land.
	She's still working on it. But she can perfectly well understand the concepts of reciprocity and ostracism.
	It's really fascinating to see just how deeply programmed in our capacity is for ethical thinking.
	So, I hope that's not too long-winded an explanation, but I would look at this as more questions of implementation rather than questions of theory.
	And the danger, of course, with talking about questions of implementation, in other words, how is restitution going to be solved in a free society, is it accepts as its central premise that these things can be predicted and that these things can be explained, which is, of course, a status premise. is it accepts as its central premise that these things
	That someone's smart enough to figure out how these things should occur 200 years from now with the mass genius and entrepreneurial drive of a liberated humankind in hot pursuit of the optimal solutions.
	I mean, nobody in a billion years will ever be smart enough to figure out.
	You know, I'm sure Walter Block, as libertarians are as a whole, is aware of iPencil, right?
	That no human being knows how to build a pencil.
	No individual human being knows how to build a pencil because there's so many pieces and graphite.
	So the idea that any individual human being is going to know how to build a justice system or predict how it's going to be built.
	When we don't even know how to build a pencil, right?
	So we don't know how to build a pencil in the here and now.
	How is justice going to be administered worldwide 200 years from now?
	I mean, it's a kind of lunatic question.
	And again, I'm not criticizing him.
	I've certainly taken my stab at responding to these things as well.
	But it's really important to recognize that there is no answer that will make any sense.
	But what I will say, fundamentally, is that The execution of justice is to me not primarily, it is tangentially, but it's not primarily a philosophical question.
	In the same way that nutrition or medicine is only tangentially about cure, ideally it's about prevention.
	And the same thing is true of philosophy.
	Philosophy is ideally about the prevention of evil, not the cure for evil.
	The cure for evil is It's what happens when philosophy doesn't work.
	Because philosophy is about both encouraging and creating the conditions for virtue.
	Encouraging virtue and creating the conditions wherein virtue is going to be the most achieved or the easiest to achieve.
	And so in a free society in the future, of course, we're not going to have a free society ever if we don't get the degree to which people need to parent better and more peacefully.
	And even if we do, if people then start parenting badly, we will just end up with a non-free society.
	Given that we're only going to have a free society when children are raised without violence, aggression or authoritarianism, then we know from science that this is going to produce brains and minds that are peaceful and cooperative and non-aggressive and productive and collaborative and negotiation-based and so on.
	This is all well known scientifically.
	And so the degree to which we're going to have to deal with things like psycho axe killers in a free society, it's going to be extremely, extremely rare.
	It may happen, of course.
	Somebody might get hit by lightning and it scrambles their neofrontal cortex so their inhibiting mechanisms in their brain go awry or somebody gets a brain tumor which turns them into a serial killer or something.
	It's going to happen. There's going to be physical injuries to the brain that reproduce Or mimic the effects of child abuse, and that's going to cause lots of problems for those very localized and very rare and very specific instances.
	And naturally, we all understand that if somebody has a brain tumor and kills someone because his brain is going haywire, we can no more prosecute that person Then we can prosecute somebody who has his very first epileptic seizure and accidentally hits a guy because he has no warning, had no idea, he just has a seizure and hits a guy.
	It's unfortunate, but he's not morally responsible.
	So that sort of would be my answer.
	We're just not going to have a free society if murder is going to be common because if murder is common or theft is common or rape is common, Or sexual abuse or physical or emotional abuse of children is common.
	That's only gonna be there if parenting is bad.
	And if parenting is good, then the amount of crime that we're going to need to deal with is so tiny that it's something that it seems like we're expending a lot of effort on trying to deal or manage the symptoms of a future society based upon the standards of the present society.
	In other words, there's a lot of crime and a lot of aggression in the present society.
	But there won't be in a future society because if there is, we won't have that society.
	And I hope that's not too weird an answer, but that's sort of what came to mind.
	No, I think that makes total sense.
	I completely understand what you're saying and I think it also makes sense that it's from a sort of engineering type perspective because it's actually...
	It's always bothered me a little bit when people talk about the non-aggression axiom as opposed to the principle.
	Because as far as I understand, the axiom is just something that you can't really get any further than that.
	It's just something that you just sort of accept.
	And I think that maybe the way that sort of thinking about morality in that writing by Bloch and others goes is that, well, we just start from the non-aggression axiom or principle, I prefer to call it, but in this case, you know, an axiom.
	And then after that, it's like, okay, well, how do things work beyond that?
	How do we just now engineer outwards from that?
	And it's not actually...
	In that sense, it is sort of starting, in a way, mid-argument, if you see what I mean.
	And so it's focused on technical solutions when, if you like, the fundamentals are just taken as given.
	Well, and of course, that is one of the most basic problems of moral thinking, in my view, which is that, okay, if you and I accept the non-aggression principle, how do we deal with the problem of evil?
	It's like, well, we already have a problem, right?
	Because If you and I accept the non-aggression principle, then we kind of don't need morality as much.
	So morality, people who are interested in morality, for the most part, tend to be people who are kind of peaceful and kind of into negotiation and non-violent to begin with.
	And the problem, of course, is that people who are stone evil, they don't spend a lot of time working out the non-aggression principle and its effects on society if consistently applied.
	So it's like a nutrition that you can only apply to people who eat really healthy to begin with.
	The whole point of nutrition is to improve the diets of people who eat badly.
	It's like weight loss for thin people.
	It's not a very useful approach.
	And if you don't mind me descending into a few choice Anglo-Saxon words for the moment, we have yet to develop an ethical system that fucks up evil people.
	And that, of course, is one of my major goals, is to develop an ethical system that fucks up evil people, that short-circuits their assumptions, and short-circuits their bullying, and short-circuits their manipulations.
	We talked about this just briefly on a call the other day, so I'm just touching it briefly here.
	But there's been this general idea throughout Almost three millennia of Western ethical thinking or ethical thinking as a whole, which is, well, what is evil?
	Evil must be a lack of knowledge of virtue, right?
	So if only we could find evil people or people who were amoral and talk to them about virtue, then they would understand that virtue is better, that reason is better, that happiness is better, and so they will become better.
	So immorality is a deficiency of knowledge, and you need to reason people and fill them with knowledge of philosophy and virtue in order to make them better.
	And this is just not true.
	It's not even close to true.
	It's one of these things that is the opposite of truth.
	And the reason for that is that evil people know virtue incredibly well.
	And the metaphor that I use is you and I can identify a pound note or a dollar bill or whatever.
	I say, oh, that's a dollar bill.
	But we don't know it in any great detail.
	We haven't sort of poured over it and tried to figure out where all the little whirls and circles and watermarks are and so on.
	And so we know what dollar bills look like and what they're for and so on.
	But if you're a counterfeiter, then you need to know what kind of paper is used, what kind of ink is used, where the watermarks are, where all the little curls are, where the counterfeit devices are.
	You have to know that dollar bill in a way that somebody who's not a counterfeiter would never ever need to know.
	And it's my very strong belief with mountains of evidence that it is not We don't say that somebody's a counterfeiter because they lack knowledge of the value of money.
	Of course, they have extreme knowledge, deep knowledge, sophisticated knowledge, post-doctoral knowledge of the value of money, because that's what they're faking in order to prey upon everybody else,
	right? So, evil people Constantly use moral arguments, constantly use ethical approaches, constantly appeal to and inflict on guilt and obligation and the desire for virtue in children and others.
	So I don't believe that it's a lack of knowledge of virtue that is why people are bad, that they know virtue far better than the virtuous do because they know how to use it to achieve their ends in the same way that a counterfeiter knows currency far better than the average person does or even Better than the average anti-counterfeiter does.
	And so, they're not ignorant of virtue and need to be taught virtue.
	They have a great knowledge of virtue and use it to control and manipulate others.
	And so, for me, and this is why I get accused of being combative and aggressive, and I'm sure that that's true from time to time, and it may even be from time to time inappropriate, but The basic argument that I'm working from, or the basic acceptance of reality that I'm working from, is that you can't teach bad people to be good because they already know everything about goodness, because they use it to be better at being bad.
	Every nasty and verbally abusive public school teacher always talks about the need to respect others and to be polite.
	And so the way that you combat evil is not through educating bad people to be better, which is not possible because they already know more than you do about virtue.
	But the way that you fight evil is simply turn the goddamn light on and show it for what it is and give people the tools to see evil and to give them the shield against evil, which is the belief that it can be reformed and improved through any effort on the part of the virtues.
	Yeah, it's possible. Evil people can reform themselves if they have some sort of awakening or some sort of see-the-light moment or whatever.
	But it's so exceedingly rare that it's like saying, well, we don't need to have an oncology discipline in medicine because occasionally cancers spontaneously heal themselves or vanish.
	Well, no. Yeah, maybe they do, but you don't take that for granted.
	You go for treatment nonetheless, right?
	And so, yeah, for me, it's flip the light on, show the twisted machinations behind We're good to go.
	And then they will plead victimhood if you see them for who they are.
	This is natural and inevitable, right?
	So a guy who's going to mug you puts a gun against your ribs.
	But if you yank the gun away from him, suddenly he's all on his knees and he's sorry and he had a hard childhood and he's just trying to get by and his dog died, right?
	So it is to see evil for what it is and then harden your heart against the second defense of evil.
	I guess the first aggression is outright aggression, plunder, and theft.
	When that is exposed as evil and irrational and immoral, then evil will switch to an appeal to sympathy, either on behalf of evil itself or on behalf of the poor, who are going to be harmed.
	So if you say, well, welfare is immoral, but the poor people are going to be harmed by what you're doing.
	And you have to harden your heart against all That evil is going to manipulate you for.
	And I know I promised a short answer.
	That wasn't even close.
	But that is really the essence of my approach.
	That's great. Thank you very much.
	And I just wanted to say it might be at one of these conferences that you go to or something, it might be fun to do a debate with Bloch about morality.
	I don't know of many other libertarians who've written about morality, but that could be an interesting event.
	I would be extremely honoured to have a debate with Walter Bloch.
	He's a very, very smart guy.
	And, you know, as far as libertarian economics go, I mean, there's not a lot of peers in the land.
	But also to put out a pimp for, Hans Hermann Hoppe has also written about libertarian ethics quite a bit, and I am not an expert on his ethics.
	I have barely touched upon them, but his argumentation ethics is...
	I have some ideas about how it relates to UPB, which I'm not expert enough to go into here, but that's also somebody that people can read if they want more on that.
	Thanks very much, Steph. Thank you.
	Great, great questions. Hi, Steph.
	Hello. I have a question about Gordon Ramsay.
	Do you know him from Kitchen Nightmares?
	Gordon Ramsay? Yeah.
	The chef? Yes.
	Is it Hell's Kitchen?
	Yes also.
	And so he has Hell's Kitchen which is with a group that wants to become also a chef.
	But then he also has kitchen nightmares and there he goes into restaurants that are almost broke and he turns it around.
	But the question I have for you is, he uses screaming and he can insult even, but he does achieve great results.
	And so my question is then, what do you think of him and his tactics?
	I've never seen one of those shows.
	I am not a fan of reality television, which is one of the great modern oxymorons.
	There's no such thing as reality on television.
	But, I mean, this is very similar to the topic that I brought up at the beginning.
	I have no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that you can scream at people and bully and threaten them and you can get them to comply.
	Of course you can. I mean, why do people pay taxes?
	Because they believe in the government?
	Of course not. If they believed in the government, the government wouldn't need the overhead of a tax code and tax collectors.
	So, people will comply.
	To force. And I have no doubt that restaurants do better when he comes in and screams at people.
	No question. No question whatsoever.
	If an unemployed lazy bum gets drafted by the army, I bet you he turns into a pretty hard worker in many ways because he's threatened and bullied.
	I think that it's wretched.
	And it's an argument from the fact to say, well, the restaurant's doing better after we screamed and abused these people.
	Therefore, Something good has occurred.
	Well, the fact that the restaurant's doing better to me is completely immaterial.
	Because when you scream and bully, when you scream at and bully people, what you do is you put a band-aid on the cancer, right?
	So the question to ask, to my mind, is why is the restaurant doing poorly to begin with?
	The restaurant is doing poorly to begin with because people People are depressed, because people are unhappy, because people were probably abused as children, and so they can't negotiate, everybody's afraid of everybody else's will, and so they all undermine and undercut each other, and it's all a big dysfunctional echo of a pretty brutal history for just about everyone involved.
	And to answer that question, to answer the question of how do you improve A restaurant that is failing because of dysfunctional and broken human beings, to answer that question takes a little bit more intelligence and insight than simply being able to yell at people and bully and intimidate them.
	If you have an employee who's constantly late, you can fire, you can scream, you can bully, you can yell, you can threaten, or you can sit down and try and help that employee figure out what's going on for that person, why he's late.
	Aggression and violence will cover up the symptoms of abuse, which is why it's so often used.
	But it will not free people from that abusive history.
	In fact, all it does is trap them in that abusive history forever.
	And I think that sympathy and patience and understanding and generosity would be the way to deal with that.
	But that's time-consuming, right?
	People just want to slap a new paint on Adam Sandler's And they just want to drive it away thinking they've got a new car.
	Nobody wants to get under the hood and really fix stuff.
	And that's because you can't fix anyone more than you've been fixed yourself.
	And people don't want to look at their own shit.
	And so they don't want to deal with other people's shit.
	And they just want to scream at them and get them into a line and get them into uniform, thus implicitly blaming them for the dysfunction that they're experiencing, which is a result of bad childhoods.
	So again, having never seen the show, and I think I've seen like a couple of...
	He's got this...
	I think it's a triangle-shaped head with this big shock of hair and these red fists and screaming at people.
	Yeah, I have no doubt that that works, but it doesn't do anything other than paper over the massive holes in people's souls and get them to conform and comply in a profitable way.
	If you want to profit from people...
	Okay, I'll just sort of mention this briefly.
	Employees are employees because they were bullied as children.
	Bosses are bosses because they were bulliers as children, and that's a bit complicated thing, but just sort of very briefly.
	So if you're a boss, the way that you maintain your value in the economic marketplace is you minimize your competition, right?
	Brad Pitt can charge $20 million for a film because there's only one Brad Pitt.
	There's zero competition for Brad Pitt because there's only one of him.
	And so if there are fewer people capable of being managers, then the price of managers goes up, right?
	Because there's a barrier to entry called, you know, reasonable levels of abilities to negotiate, reasonable levels of, quote, self-confidence.
	And I'm not talking just about abusive bosses, but the good bosses that are out there, too.
	And so the managerial class has a negative incentive To help the workers to grow.
	And what happens is you have an incentive to groom one person to replace you, because you can't move up if no one can replace you.
	So you need to find someone and pick them and groom them to replace you.
	But as far as helping people with the effects of early abuse in the workplace, if you were able to help 100 people to gain the capacity for management through maturity, through dealing with the past or whatever, Then all that happens is managers end up making less money because more people can become managers.
	And so what you want to do is you want to break people down or keep them broken down.
	I mean, if you're not a particularly good person, right?
	And so the managerial class does not want to extend the two things that abused people need to grow, right?
	Moral clarity, which is a condemnation, an explicit outright condemnation of the abuse, and Genuine sympathy, right?
	Moral clarity and genuine sympathy are the one-two punch, so to speak, that takes down abuse.
	It's not simple and it's not fast and it's not easy, but that's...
	And so, what incentive do most managers have to provide that kind of validation and relief and empathy for employees?
	Well, it just means that more employees can become managers, which drives down the price of managers, whereas if you keep them broken, Then they'll continue to work for you and produce some good results in a mere economic sense without having the self-esteem to compete for your job.
	So I just sort of wanted to mention.
	Thanks. Does that help at all?
	Yes, it helps.
	But still, in the restaurant, those people are much better off after he came in.
	They had a successful business before they were going broke.
	And so, he does achieve good things.
	Like you say, he puts the plaster on the cancer wounds, but the problem is that the cancer persists.
	I'm sure that the cancer persists with those people that they still have a bad childhood and they still have serious problems, personal problems, but at least their business is running well again, I would think.
	I don't know. I think even though he screams and he insults, those people are still better off with him than without him.
	Well, but you're defining better off as making money.
	Also, you're defining that the making money that is occurring is occurring not because they have internalized some principle.
	If you take someone who's procrastinating and you put him in the army, he'll probably stop procrastinating as much.
	But not because he's internalized anything of value, but only because he is now going to be violently punished for his procrastination.
	So without dealing with the source of their economically poorer performance, all that Gordon Ramsay has done is he has now made them completely dependent upon an external bully to achieve better economic performance.
	He has now trapped them In having a need for a bullying authority figure so that they can do better rather than actually helping them figure out why they're doing badly, giving them some empathy and moral clarity about what happened to them in the past that left them in this kind of situation.
	Then they have internalized something.
	They can pursue excellence as a pleasurable goal in and of itself rather than now forever be On that bloody hamster wheel of running round and round at the feet of some abusive asshole so that they can get things done.
	They have internalized nothing.
	They have learned nothing except fear and obedience.
	I do not consider that success and I do not consider that sustainable.
	The question is, how are these restaurants doing without him two years later?
	And I don't know the answer to that.
	Maybe great. I doubt it, though.
	Yes, you helped me a lot.
	Thank you, Steph. You are welcome.
	Room for one more.
	Oh, yeah, sorry, just to remind everyone, there's going to be a...
	There is a presentation, a UPB presentation tomorrow.
	Now, listen, you should come and see it live because it's going to be a long time until it becomes...
	Public. It takes a long time for them to get this kind of recording done.
	So I just wanted to mention that.
	That you should come and see it tomorrow night, 8pm Eastern Standard Time.
	I will put the link in the chat window.
	But you can come to the chat window at FDR and we'll get the link there.
	It's open to everyone. There's already 150 people signed up.
	I hope that you will come. It's going to be a new presentation.
	Again, I don't do anything live that I've done in books or podcasts before, so it's a new approach and a new presentation to help understand ethics.
	Hello. Hello.
	Oh, hi. Hello, Steph.
	Thanks for taking my call. My pleasure.
	Yeah, I called on December.
	I was talking about having some problems, trying to get a job and things like that.
	Would you like to follow up on that?
	Sure. Okay, I've currently looked for some establishment places such as fast food restaurants like McDonald's and Burger King, but unfortunately I haven't been able to Seal the deal,
	basically. So, I'm hoping if you have some advice, try to find ways to improve my skills so I could.
	It would be easier for me to find one.
	Okay, and skills in what area?
	Oh, as in, say, presentation or interviews, things like that.
	The basics. And what do you think is missing from your skill set?
	What do you think is missing from your skill set?
	One would be confidence.
	Sometimes I get a little shaky sometimes when I try to talk with people that I haven't met before, so I try to focus on that first.
	And why do you think that's the case?
	Well, I guess it's just...
	I'm just not used to socializing with people as much, so it's just that...
	I could say I could get scared trying to talk with people.
	I couldn't explain why, but it's just that unknown factor, I could say.
	Okay, so when you say you don't know why, what do you think I'm going to say to that?
	Maybe I do, but I'm not telling you.
	Well, I'm not saying that you do and you're not telling me, but I don't believe that you don't know why.
	This is the great thing when you've called in before.
	This is the great thing with non-new listeners is I can just cut straight to the chase.
	It's beautiful. Sorry, go on.
	I would say that Maybe that I don't like talking with new people, basically, because I don't like to socialize as currently most people do.
	I think maybe that's why.
	Well, but you're just saying the same thing in different words, right?
	Yeah, yeah. I'm saying, why don't you like talking to people and you're saying, I think it's because I don't like talking to people.
	It's like, well, but that doesn't actually give us much new information.
	I would say that my past interactions with people I did have, especially with family, they never turned out well.
	They usually went sour, so kind of refrained from making new relations with other people because of that fear.
	Does that make sense? I think it does.
	I just want to make sure I understand.
	Tell me about how they went south for you.
	Sour, sorry, you said sour. How did they go south?
	Oh, well, okay, sorry. Well, for example, I used to, before, like when I was younger, I used to get along with, you know, my cousins and uncles and aunts and my parents, but the thing is that...
	They've made many promises and painted this picture of a good life, etc.
	But the way things turned out later on was the complete opposite of what they promised.
	So it's that trust that I didn't have with them.
	That's kind of why I try not to get too close with people.
	And can you give me some specific examples?
	Okay, for example, before I immigrated here in 2002, you know, my dad used to say that, you know, that we have, like, living a good life, you know, go on vacation, stuff like that, and have, like, a nice place, and I wouldn't have to worry about much stuff, just, you know, go to school and go to college, but none of that actually happened.
	And I put a lot of faith into their words.
	I kind of felt betrayed.
	And why didn't it happen?
	Excuse me? Why didn't these things happen?
	One of them was the divorce.
	Two years later, we moved here.
	And then after that, everything else fell apart.
	Alright, so let me just make sure I understand.
	You're saying that your dad said that, you know, go to college, go to school, and all of this stuff's going to happen, and your parents got divorced and that didn't happen.
	Is that right? That's the gist of it.
	There were some more other factors as well.
	Well, tell me about those other factors, because with all respect to your considerable intelligence, I don't think that It would take a pretty dumb person, which is not you, right?
	I mean, so it would take a pretty dumb person to say, well, things changed and what I was expecting or what I was promised didn't come to pass.
	Look, that happens in life, right?
	Yes. I mean, we all understand that events outside of people's control or even events that are inside of people's control, that you can make all the promises in the world, but sometimes you're simply not able to To fulfill on those promises, right?
	So the fact that you were given a commitment, and I'm not saying it wasn't important, it was very important, and it was a very big deal.
	But I don't think that you would say, well, I was given a commitment about education, it failed to materialize, and now I don't like talking to people as a whole.
	Because I think we're all mature enough, and you're certainly intelligent enough to know, that sometimes that sort of stuff can happen.
	Does that make sense? Yeah, I understand.
	I guess it's just an impulse.
	So I don't think that's it. I'm sorry.
	Give me the other symptoms or the other things.
	I would use a specific example because I think that they could have fulfilled their promises if they were responsible.
	One example would be before I moved to the United States, my father Cheated on my mom and At first when I was told that I didn't understand like what was going on But right before we moved my uncle sponsored my family here to come to the United States and his And he rationalized that by saying that if we moved here,
	then things would, you know, materialize and all these problems would be gone because of the lifestyle here.
	So the stress and anger and frustration would go away.
	So I'm kind of mad at him for that.
	Because he knew my father cheated.
	But he brought us here anyway, hoping this would all go away.
	But it just got worse.
	And then once we moved here, I lived with my relatives for, I think, two years.
	But there was a fight with my aunt.
	My mom was kicked out of the house and they had to live with my other relatives.
	My father has two brothers here.
	I lived with one of them and my mom lived with the other.
	You could say they were separated.
	But this got together again in an apartment, but that didn't last long.
	Once we moved to the apartment and then a year later, There was another fight and my mother called the police and my father was arrested.
	A month later after that, we left to this, you could say a shelter place.
	I don't know. It was a government shelter place.
	And then that's basically where everything else went downhill.
	Such as the poverty, homelessness, things like that.
	Right. So it's that trust in people.
	And even after that, after we went to those shelters, my mom even got kicked out of that because of her illness, mental illness, her schizophrenia.
	So she moved somewhere else.
	And then there were even government employees who made promises to me that, don't worry about it, just keep focused on what you're doing, etc., etc.
	And then also when I went to foster care, one of the child protective services agents told me this is the only time it's going to happen, but it happened again next year.
	Sorry that you would go to foster care, you mean?
	Yeah, my mother went to the hospital for three days, I think, while we were in the apartment.
	And our neighbor was watching us, but CPS came over and took us to a foster care.
	And then when we came back, I asked the agent, will this happen again?
	They're like, no, don't worry about it, we'll take care of it.
	But then it happened again, but this time for three months.
	Right. So I just have bad experiences with people when I try to put faith in their word, but it just never materializes.
	Right, right, right, right, right, right.
	Yeah, see, that's a little bit more significant than I didn't get to go to college in the way that I was promised, right?
	Well, it's not the college.
	It's just that good lifestyle that I always promise.
	You know, just the worry-free lifestyle.
	You know, just parents work, you go to school, and everything's fine.
	Or you could say generally. Yeah, because when I lived in Bangladesh, I was pretty well off, even though it's a developing nation or third world country, whatever you say.
	And I'm kind of angry that I was better off there than here.
	Sure. Even though I have stuff, but I don't have any good relationships with people.
	You mean in Bangladesh?
	Yes. Right, right, right.
	That's a lot of stuff to process.
	I mean, I remember, of course, talking about this with you before.
	It's a huge amount of shit that you had to go through and that's going to leave you kind of battered, right?
	Yeah. It just creates this, what you talked about in your videos, this passive aggressiveness.
	So where you build these mechanisms, you know, like being told what to do, etc., etc.
	So, when I watched those, I could relate with that because I did similar things to Cope, I could say.
	Sure. Now, do you mind if I sort of give you my thoughts and impressions?
	These are only my thoughts and impressions, so don't put any stock in them if they don't fit your experience, but I'm just going to give you my honest experience of what you're talking about.
	Okay. I get the sense...
	That you're really, and I mean this in a very good way, but you're really angry.
	And I also think that your anger is paralyzed because you focus on the circumstances rather than the behaviors of the people around you.
	What I mean by that is, let's say that I promise To take my daughter swimming, and this is a stupid example relative to everything you've gone through, but just for the, you know, bear with me.
	I promise to take my daughter swimming tomorrow, but I wake up with a bad cold, and I can't go swimming in a public place with a bad cold because it's not allowed, and it's kind of rude because you give other people your cold and that kind of stuff, right?
	And my daughter wakes up with the expectation of going swimming, And I can't take her swimming because I have a cold.
	I didn't know I was going to have a cold.
	It's nobody's fault. But the reality is that she doesn't get what was promised to her, right?
	Yeah, okay. That is not traumatic.
	In fact, it would almost be bad if that never happened, right?
	Because disappointment is a natural part of living, right?
	Yes. It's a natural part of aging.
	I mean, I'm in my mid-40s now and I'm like, Damn, I wish I could do the same weights I did when I was 20.
	I wish I could stay up all night.
	I wish I could eat whatever I wanted, but I gotta change a bunch of stuff up because I'm getting older, right?
	I mean, limitations and decay, disappointments, and not getting what you expect.
	That's almost the norm, right?
	I mean, people date, like, dozens of people before they find the person they're gonna marry, usually.
	So that's dozens of, like, disappointments compared to one, hopefully, not disappointment.
	So this is...
	Because you keep talking about the circumstances.
	And I'm going to tell you, in my opinion, the circumstances don't matter at all.
	The circumstances, circumstances is another word for excuses.
	If you focus on the circumstances, you are providing excuses for the people who are responsible for your care.
	And if you provide excuses for people who are responsible for your care, then you can't get angry.
	It's a way of diffusing your own anger.
	Because you were treated badly.
	See you next week.
	And to focus on the circumstances is not to focus on the individual choices made by the people in those circumstances.
	So if I promise my daughter a swimming outing, and I can't provide it, and she gets angry or upset with me, she's perfectly right to do so.
	It's perfectly healthy for her to do so.
	And I have to deal with her perception of disappointment that I have broken my word.
	Not just keep repeating to her that the circumstances have made it impossible.
	I need to mention the circumstances so she doesn't think that it's just me.
	But I need to deal with her feelings as they are.
	And not say, you have no right to feel this way because of these circumstances.
	Because the reality is that she does feel disappointed or hurt or angry or sad.
	And if I feel guilty or bad, then I'm going to want to minimize those feelings in her.
	Now, if it's not a cold, but something I've done, like I said, we're going to go swimming tomorrow morning, and then I've forgotten that I have a really important interview to do for the show, then it's my fault that she can't go swimming.
	Now, I can say it's because I have this interview, but that's not why.
	The why is because I forgot or whatever, didn't, right?
	So it's my responsibility, it's my fault that she's not able to go swimming.
	And she should get upset with me and she should get angry with me because I want her to react in a negative way to a negative situation.
	Otherwise, how the hell will she know how to avoid negative situations in the future?
	If I say to her, well, if I don't keep my word to you, you have no right to be upset because there are all these circumstances, then all that means is that she then has no way emotionally to resist or avoid untrustworthy people.
	If that becomes a pattern, right?
	Right. And so I think it's like the sense that I get from your description of your history, my friend, is like you were caught in this big machinery of circumstances, and you didn't reference many, if any, individual moral decisions that people are responsible for in the midst of those circumstances.
	Does that make any sense?
	Like you're in this big machine, this piece of fluff caught in a giant cog machine of circumstances.
	And of course, in a sense, you can't get that mad at circumstances, But I think there's room to get mad at some people in there.
	Well, I am.
	I don't think I was clear with the choices they made because they could have kept their word, but it's the way they acted and that resulted in them not keeping their promises.
	Does that make sense?
	Well, it does, but there still doesn't seem to be any connection with anger.
	Okay. To me, if people in the chat room are hearing something different, please let me know.
	But there doesn't seem to me to be a connection with anger, and I think that you've got some stuff to be pissed about, in my opinion.
	Yes, and also on the last call, you recommended that I would see a therapist or a psychologist, correct?
	I think I remember that.
	I'm absolutely positive that I made that recommendation.
	I'm sure that I would have.
	Yes, so I contacted my cousin because you asked who was helping me and I said there was one person giving me advice and that was my cousin and she knows somebody in Canada who's a psychiatrist.
	I'm not very keen on psychiatry, the profession, so would you think that's a good idea if I met with that psychiatrist?
	I don't know this psychiatrist.
	I just heard that they know it's probably going to be free, so it's not going to cost me anything.
	So should I try that and see what happens?
	Yeah, I mean, look, I think I share your awareness about psychiatry.
	I think that it is, and this has been my opinion for many, many years, that I think it's a A bit of a dicey.
	Look, I think the degree to which psychiatrists do talk therapy, they're heroes and fantastic as long as they're good at what they do.
	I think the degree to which they see you for 10 minutes and give you a fistful of prescriptions, they're not doing good stuff.
	So I would personally get in touch with the psychiatrist and say, you know, I'd like to see you, but I mean, if this is your approach, I would suggest it.
	I'm more interested in talk therapy than I am in medication.
	And, you know, what's your approach to that?
	Some psychiatrists do talk therapy and more praise to them.
	I think that's fantastic. They're not the pushers.
	So maybe that would be the case, in which case you get free talk therapy.
	That's good stuff.
	One last thing I would like to touch on before I go.
	On that last conversation, I was talking about not taking out You said it was not a political decision for me.
	You're just telling me if the mafia took all the beef and if they're having steak, I should get my burger or something like that.
	Yeah, like if they steal all your meat and then they're throwing a free barbecue, I would say go get a burger myself.
	Right, okay. Well, I would like to go further into that.
	See, I applied to a program for this community college in this area, and they have a campus Uh, that's farther away from home and they might be able to house me.
	Would you think that would be a good idea for me to get out of the house?
	If I... Yeah, I mean, I... I mean, in a sense, I'm not the best guy to ask about this kind of stuff because I've been sort of mostly on my own since I was about 15 or so.
	So, um, but I, you know, I think if you're going to college, I think it's not a bad thing to...
	To be away from home, and certainly if you can get grants or subsidies for housing, I think it's a good thing to do.
	I generally think that adolescence is pushed way too long in modern culture.
	I think that these people who are in mid-20s and still living at home and going to college, to me this is I don't know.
	I mean, it just seems kind of ridiculous to me, but I can sort of understand why people do it and want to go into debt and all that kind of stuff.
	But there's no such thing as a free lunch, right?
	You're either going to go into debt to live away from home, which is going to grant you certain benefits that I think are really important, or you're going to stay at home and save some money, but pay with your sense of independence and your sense of autonomy and your sense of maturity.
	And so it takes a mature parent to To get behind and really encourage the burgeoning adulthood of a young man and woman.
	And a lot of parents, unfortunately, find it very hard to let go of that, I'm bigger, I'm older, I'm wiser, parental authority thing, which is a real ceiling that prevents people from growing.
	And so, depending on your situation and so on, I would guess it's a little bit more towards the latter, but I would certainly think that if it's not going to break you financially or give you monstrous debts, that Being away from home for college, I think it's a pretty good thing.
	You also asked me what I would like to do, and I said engineer, but I just said that because I thought that was a good career path, but in honesty though, I really don't have any idea what I would like to do.
	Sorry, I just wanted to mention before you go on, just to clarify, somebody's posted in the Mr.
	Ford, he said, my therapist is a psychiatrist.
	We've done nothing but talk therapy for over a year and established early on that drugs only treat symptoms.
	And I just wanted to point that out, that there are psychiatrists doing fantastic work out there without drugs.
	So I just wanted to mention, but sorry, I'll go on with engineering, yes or no.
	Oh, yeah, and honestly, I don't know what I would like to do as a living because I haven't really thought about it much.
	I mean, I wasn't even planning on going to college.
	I even thought about dropping high school until that call the first time we had when he said I should finish high school.
	So, but I... I'm thinking about going just to get away from here and collect my thoughts and bring down my frustrations, etc.
	That's why I'm not keen on college itself because it just looks more as a scam to me, if that makes sense.
	Even though if I'm not paying, but overall people have been getting huge amounts of debt and getting all these degrees, yet they can't get a job.
	Well, it's important to know statistically that the unemployment rate I don't know where you are, it doesn't particularly matter, but the unemployment rate, say in the US, is close to 10%, even officially.
	But that's not the same for all levels of education, right?
	So it's much higher in poor black and Hispanic communities, and it's much lower For people with college degrees.
	So, yeah, there certainly are people who, you know, if you go and get a job, you go and get a PhD in English literature with no idea what you're going to do with it, and you don't want to become an academic, then, yeah, you're digging yourself into a big hole of wasted time and wasted money, though, I'm sure a very enjoyable thing to do.
	So there's nothing wrong at all with not going to college right out of high school at all.
	And I say, I mean, look, I'm talking from my own experience, so take it from whatever it's worth.
	I had no money to go to college.
	I mean, and so I took a year and a half off and I worked as a gold miner and prospector up in Northern Ontario.
	And I had no problems with it.
	I knew I was going to college. I went to college with the money that I saved up from living in a tent for a year and a half.
	And so that's certainly fine and no problem.
	It can be a challenge to go to college when you don't know what you want to do, because it's a pretty expensive way to find out, right?
	Yes. But what I've been told by my cousins who did go to college, one of them has a full scholarship, yes, and my older cousin, she took out loans and she's in debt, but she said it was a good experience, it's a good place to learn.
	So I don't know exactly what's the best choice for me even.
	It's just I can't make up a decision.
	Right. Right now.
	I mean, look, I started off in English literature, did a couple of years of that.
	I did a couple of years of the National Theatre School.
	Then I finished my undergraduate in history, did a graduate degree in history.
	And so, I mean, I enjoyed it for the most part, but it was a pretty, you know, and it didn't do me any harm.
	But, of course, the reason that I ended up with a business career was because of my interest in computers and programming, which started at a very early age.
	And so, school certainly isn't, college certainly isn't necessary for success in life and many very successful people have, you know, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and people like that dropped out of college to pursue their dreams or whatever.
	And so it's not necessary, but you have to have a yearning-burning desire to get something done which college is in the way of, you know, like starting a company or whatever, if that's going to take precedence over college.
	If you genuinely don't know what you want to do, it is an expensive thing to do to figure it out in college because you've got not only the tuition and the living expenses and the books and all of that, but you've got the lost income from not working.
	And so...
	So it's a pretty expensive way.
	And if you've got to switch majors and so on, it's very expensive.
	That having been said, if you go and work, I think it's important to go and work with the idea of figuring out what it is you want to do.
	And obviously, I think you're far too intelligent a person to work at a high school level for the rest of your life.
	So I think college could be very valuable for you.
	It's all just my opinion.
	You don't have to go.
	I don't know whether you should go or not.
	Nobody can tell you that. Whether you should or shouldn't go based on where you are right now.
	You have some time, I would assume, now to figure out what it is that you want to do, what it is that you'd like to do.
	And I would pursue that as much as possible.
	Certainly going to college sooner rather than later is better.
	But I'm not convinced that it's better when you don't know what you want to do yet.
	Because you're talking about having ambition, you're talking about it's better to have high ambition and not completely reach that goal than rather having low ambition and then never staying where that level of mission is.
	I think that's what you said.
	I think it's very hard to figure out what you're capable of when you come out of this kind of history.
	Yes, and I'm having trouble exactly doing that.
	And I can completely understand that.
	It would be crazy if you didn't have trouble with that because that's perfectly natural and perfectly healthy that you would have trouble with that.
	You know, I'll just give you like a little rant here and then we should move on to another caller.
	I appreciate your questions.
	I'll give you a little rant here and you can sort of see if it makes any sense.
	It's hard to find People who achieved great things who did so in opposition to their families of origin, whatever shape those families took.
	I mean, even if you want to think about America as a giant family separation from England, right?
	I mean, everybody who came over here sort of got out of that sort of family structure.
	So if you have the kind of family that is encouraging of greatness and of big things and of ambition, fantastic.
	I think that that's the best situation to be in by far.
	Now in my situation, and it may be true for yours as well, in my situation, my family had a lot invested in keeping me small.
	And certainly recognizing my talents to the degree to which it was economically and emotionally productive for my family.
	But my family, my friends, as of, I don't know, six years ago or so before FDR, were all heavily invested in keeping me small.
	And it wasn't like it was a personal thing, like they wanted me to be small because of something to do with me.
	But that was just the world that I was in.
	And when I started FDR, I started it with some pretty lofty ambitions.
	And I have met or exceeded those ambitions, at which point I promptly upscaled them.
	But I have achieved what I so wanted to achieve in Free Domain Radio.
	And that, of course, is largely due to the support and generosity and investment of you, the listener.
	So a million thank yous, kisses and hugs for all of that.
	But When FDR began to grow and began to become a viable something, then it's like I began to grow.
	But I lived in a very small social house back then, very cramped.
	And the only way that I could live in that doll's house, to take a play from Ibsen, the only way that I could live in that doll's house was to stay the size and depth of a doll.
	And as I began to grow and go from Pinocchio to boy, so to speak, then what I hoped for was that the house was going to grow with me.
	But that's not what happened, unfortunately.
	And I either had to stop growing and shrink again or step out of the house because it could not accommodate what was happening in my life.
	And I don't just mean that free-domain radio.
	I mean my marriage as well, which is...
	The greatest glory and treasure of my life.
	And, you know, the ease and delight and comfort and intimacy and passion that I have with Christina was troublesome to people around me who were in dysfunctional, I would say dysfunctional relationships.
	I would say pretty objectively with dysfunctional relationships.
	That's a challenge for people. It's a challenge.
	Because people in dysfunctional relationships generally tend to find dysfunction as normal.
	It's the problem with a lot of psychology, right?
	And when they come across something that's not dysfunctional, they have to pronounce it illusory or a phase that's going to pass or a honeymoon period and then soon you'll get back to living on the planet of Bickertons like us and all that.
	And when that didn't happen, people got sort of uneasy and there were problems and so on.
	So my counsel, such as it's worth to you, is if you are thinking about what it is that you want to do with your life, I think that there's no harm in aiming high, but I would strongly advise you to consider the possibility that you fundamentally cannot be any bigger or any more successful or any happier.
	Than the people around you are willing to let you be.
	Because humanity has a thousand million billion tiny little hooks and tiny little threads that like Gulliver and the Lilliputians they can hook into your flesh and drag you down in a way that you can't even see really.
	You just feel kind of enervated and tired and demotivated and cynical and skeptical of yourself and so on.
	And If you are thinking about what it is you want to do with your life and you are taking the invitation to do something great and grand and powerful with your life, which I think is so desperately needed by rational thinkers,
	we all need to be on these barricades, then really keep an eye on the relationships that you have and find the degree to which people have either achieved what you want to achieve or are unselfishly going to get behind what it is you want to achieve just as hopefully you can get behind what they want to achieve but if you're surrounded by people who want to live small who want to stay in the doll's house and shrink with it almost to nothing then you should really know that you can't be bigger than the people around you You can't have a richer and deeper and more powerful life than those around you.
	You can't be bigger than the smallest person who's in your life.
	That is a conflict that needs to either be resolved by the other person getting on board the growth train or you getting out of the doll's house.
	That's my hard-won experience.
	Maybe it's not true for everyone.
	So far it's holding 100% from the people I know.
	But that's just something I wanted to mention.
	Okay. Thank you for taking my call.
	You're absolutely welcome, and I hope it works out.
	All right. Thank you. Bye. You're welcome.
	All right. We have time for Uno von Morrieville.
	Hello. Hi.
	How's it going? Hello. Hi.
	Hi. I'm calling to...
	Is this me?
	I'm just hearing somebody calling.
	Just girlfriend. All right.
	I'm calling to ask you for some advice with my relationship.
	I've been with my girlfriend now for almost 10 months.
	Things are going very well.
	But there's an issue that we've been bumping into quite often.
	And it brings us to the point where Or at least it brings my girlfriend to the point where she begins to doubt whether there's a future in the relationship and maybe she should better end it and confused about how she feels about me, whether she loves me or not.
	Yeah, we've been talking a lot about it, but maybe there's some...
	This is the question about foreplay.
	Sorry, just kidding, go on. Not really.
	Well, I'll maybe try and summarize it and then see what angles there are to ask a little further into it.
	The thing is that she comes from a background where her parents are farmers, basically, so...
	They're very, very, very able to work with their hands and very practical in solving problems in the house and those kind of things.
	And my background is very different.
	Those are things that I haven't acquired.
	I'm willing to learn and it seems that this and some other things attached to that, like being I'm sorry, I'm going to have to interrupt you just in the interest of time and just ask you to give me an example of the specifics of the conflict.
	It's very abstract and I just want to make sure I understand this.
	A specific example would be...
	I'm just looking at her with her...
	Oh yeah, like we had the lamps in my apartment that could be replaced or that they're not really like nicely placed now and so we would need to replace that.
	And she knows that her brother, for example, he would do it like in a whiff and I don't have the experience so that's something she tends to take as a proof that I'm not able And then stuff like that brings her to doubt whether I'm really, well, the kind of guy she's looking for.
	But then apart from that...
	Oh, sorry, it's questioning your masculinity because you have trouble fixing a lamp?
	Well, yeah, that's something I've been talking a lot about.
	I want to make sure I understand.
	Yeah, I mean, yeah, it boils down to that...
	Sometimes she sees it as...
	and then she sees more evidence and then we talk about how...
	What I'm always wondering is how can you have your respect for somebody as a person hinge upon something like that because it's something I've simply not learned...
	You know the answer to that. You know the answer to that.
	To what, I'm sorry?
	The answer to the question How can your respect for someone hinge on whether they can fix a lamp or not?
	You know the answer to that. Yeah, it shouldn't.
	It can't. No, not it shouldn't.
	It can't. It can't hinge on that.
	Yeah, okay. Because that's like saying, look, your value as a woman is determined by your knowledge of Kierkegaard, right?
	Yeah, right.
	I mean, it's ridiculous, right?
	Yeah, and this was so frustrating that, you know, I'm...
	I'm willing to learn, but it seems that there's always different things that I can't do.
	Well, it's confusing because it turns on and off.
	And then luckily the moments where she feels it's really an issue are like, well, maybe 5% of the time.
	But then, I mean, then they come to some kind of climax and then there's really the fundamental thing like, is this relationship really working?
	Whereas my own perspective, there's things about her that I don't really That I think could be better, like some things she does that I would look upon differently or whatever.
	And then I tend to see that as just, well, I love her and then this is something we can grow and this is something we can learn from each other and perhaps we can talk about it.
	But it seems that these issues she has with me, I mean, she looks at it differently, apparently.
	Well, look, I guarantee you that you could become an An expert PhD lamp fixer and it would be something else.
	Yes, I agree. Yeah, yeah.
	Okay, so we understand that it's not about the lamp, right?
	Yes, yes. And I've been talking a lot about, we've been talking a lot about my parents and her parents and I tend to think that there's a connection because her parents, I mean, I don't fit in with the You know, the son-in-law they had in mind, and they've been very disapproving of me, although it seems to be a little better lately.
	But they've been very tough.
	What do they disapprove of?
	What are they negative about?
	Well, even before they met me, just learning.
	The fact that I'm already the third boyfriend and not the first, and the fact that I didn't come and Meet her parents first.
	I'm sorry, are you calling from the 1400s?
	I mean, where the hell are you in the world?
	You're not in Armenia, are you?
	No, but the countryside where I live, well, I have to say that her father is 70.
	So it is like a generation ago, yeah.
	What are the pluses about the woman?
	What do you love and respect?
	She's amazing. She's very open.
	She's very intelligent. She's funny.
	We can talk about anything.
	We can be very honest about things, also about this.
	I mean, it's just been a blessing all the way through.
	It's just this thing we keep on bumping into.
	And she's also been very open to...
	I mean, her parents have a dairy farm.
	Like, they grow cows and...
	Okay, wait. I think I can understand why they might be bothered by the...
	Sorry, I think I can understand why they might be bothered by the fact that you refer to it as growing cows.
	Exactly. I'm on their side now.
	I'm a city boy.
	Yeah, I'm getting that.
	I really am. Well, yeah, but I mean, like, it's been, it's been, I mean, she's been so open to the fact that even, I mean, she's now practically vegetarian and, but I don't mean that, but I don't mean she's adapting to me.
	I just mean that she's so open to discuss these things.
	Also, the family issues, it's something we've been working hard on and it's been really tough, but she's been, you know, tagging along.
	It's been really wonderful.
	So this is just an issue.
	Are you thinking of marrying the woman at some point?
	Yes, definitely. Right.
	Okay. And does she recognize that this questioning of masculinity, does she recognize that it's a problem that needs to be worked on and not by you learning how to fix a lamp?
	Yes. Yes. And it's something, I mean, just yesterday, just today, I think, she said it's a problem for her and she wants to figure out What is causing it?
	Why she's not feeling the way she would like to feel?
	Look, okay, here's my gift, because this isn't even that hard.
	And I mean by that, not that you're dumb, but because you're in it.
	That's not hard to see from the outside.
	I'll tell you what it is.
	I'll tell you what it is, and then you can tell me if I'm full of shit or not, right?
	All right. And it goes like this, and it's just related to what I was talking about.
	So when people are in circumstances, everybody's born into a kind of circumstance, right?
	So you're born into a city, or you're born into a country, you're born into the third world, or the first world, or whatever, right?
	You're born in a country, you get a big inheritance, you're born pretty, or you're born not pretty, or whatever, right?
	Now, approximately 99.9999% of people define virtue as their circumstances.
	Yeah. Right?
	So you've seen, I'm sure, a million and one bullshit Hollywood comedies where the boss is a know-it-all weasel and the working guys on the line are all tough and passionate and there for each other and they're all good guys and the bosses are all bad guys,
	right? Right. And so people, what they do is they say, okay, well, I'm born into this situation where, you know, I'm a worker, and so being a working man is good, and being a boss is bad.
	And if you're born into a family that fixes cars, then guess what?
	Knowing how to fix a car is good, and not knowing how to fix a car is bad, right?
	Right. And so she's born into a farming community, a farming family.
	So working with your hands and knowing how to fix stuff, that's good.
	And reading books and talking to people on the internet, I don't know about that.
	That just seems kind of weird to me.
	There's something wrong about that.
	Real men don't do that. She's laughing really hard now, so I think she agrees, yes.
	Okay, okay. And it's the same thing with sports, right?
	I'm born here, so this sports team is really good.
	You're born over there, so your sports team is really bad.
	I'm an American, so it's good.
	And you're British, so you're kind of gay.
	I mean, I sort of...
	Yeah, it's groupthink or whatever.
	No, it's not just groupthink.
	It is the circumstances that I was born into.
	They're not accidental.
	They're good. We're salt of the earth people.
	We work with our hands.
	We're up to our knees and shit, and that's how things should be.
	Real men can eat a cheese sandwich knee-deep in manure.
	And if you hold your nose, well, I don't know about you either.
	You're kind of a pussy, yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, kind of a pussy, right?
	And so... It's the same thing.
	I'm born into a family of Marines, so being a Marine is being a man, and being a mime is not.
	Well, whatever, right? We all understand this.
	And it happens, you know, at deeper levels and more serious levels.
	I'm born Jewish, so we are the chosen people, right?
	Sorry, I don't mean to use a manly voice for the Jew.
	That's probably not too stereotypical.
	The Jew Marine! But you know what I mean, right?
	Or, you know, I'm born white in the South, and therefore white is good and black is bad.
	Or, I'm born black in the Bronx, so black is cool and white is nerdy.
	Whatever, right? I mean, there's all this kind of nonsense.
	Black is the new white.
	Yeah, so people just take their circumstances and turn them into a virtue.
	And rather than saying, well, what is virtue?
	I mean, she understands, and she's in the room, right?
	So you understand, my fair lady, right?
	You understand that if you'd been born in the city, and my friend, the listener here, had been born in the country, that he'd be saying, well, what do you mean you can't wrestle three sows to the ground with one hand tied behind your back?
	That's what real women do.
	What are you doing with that Cosmo magazine?
	What's the matter with you, right?
	It would be the exact opposite, right?
	Mm-hmm. And then you'd feel like, well, if I can't wrestle two pigs to the ground with one head, I'm not a real woman.
	Whatever, right? But it's all just a bunch of accidents that we then elevate into these good, universally good things, right?
	Right. I definitely agree.
	That's exactly what we've been talking about.
	I felt it was just unjust of her to...
	I'm fine with being criticized about something I'm not doing the right way or whatever and then I can learn more.
	That's all fine. But I really had a hard time when she started conveying that she didn't respect me as a person as much because of that.
	And then, you know, obviously it's her parents are, I think, and then often she agrees and sometimes she doesn't, are a big factor in it.
	And what I've kind of, I mean, I think it was even today that I told her that in my opinion, the more she felt like she wanted and had to please her parents, it was kind of a communicating vessel with How much she would disrespect me because they, as a kind of a starting point, disrespect me.
	So if she wants to earn the respect of her parents, she kind of needs to disrespect me.
	Right. I don't know if that makes any sense.
	You know, that makes sense for sure.
	It's like a seesaw, right?
	Like a stick with a plank with kids on either end.
	One goes up, the other goes down, right?
	Yeah. Right.
	Right. And look, fundamentally, this is a choice that is between the past and the future, right?
	I mean, if she wants a future with you that's happy, then she needs to stop defining your manhood as fixing lights.
	Right. I mean, the whole question of manhood is itself questionable, right?
	Like, manhood is this, and femininity is this, right?
	I mean, as the father of a girl, it drives me crazy that you flip through these goddamn toy magazines, right, like the flyers for toy stores, and it's like, all of the blue pages are for boys with trucks and cars, and then you flip to the pink pages where there's, like, Little pink ponies with Liberace's hairdo and all this kind of shit.
	And it's like, can we not do a little bit better than this as a species that was still cramming people into these ridiculous pigeonholes and so on, right?
	And they're not really selling to the children.
	They're selling to the parents who think like, oh yeah, this is the way it should be.
	Yeah, my daughter, she loves her little pink pony, but she uses it quite often to drive the garbage truck that she likes even more.
	So I like the fact that she believes that unicorns should deliver the garbage, because that's really how an anarchistic society is going to work.
	We're going to rope in all the unicorns.
	I've sort of yet to put out this theory because I still want to keep on to my listeners.
	But yeah, let's try and stay away from these cliches about stuff.
	Now, I understand that her dad being 70 and growing his life like a toadstool in the earth is going to have a particular perspective about what's valuable for his environment, right?
	Look, having a guy who knows how to talk on Skype is not particularly valuable to her dad, right?
	But having a guy who could fix a light is more valuable to her dad, right?
	Like, if Monet the painter grew up on a farm, And his dad said, I want you to paint the barn.
	And he starts doing this little pointillism mural that's beautiful.
	His dad's going to be like, well, fuck, can you not just paint the goddamn barn like a normal person?
	What the hell's the matter with you, right?
	A real man would have finished the barn with his own blood and sperm if he had to.
	I don't know what, right? Like whatever he would come up with, right?
	I want to see fingernails on that barn and sweat.
	I don't know. Anyway, but...
	But of course, the guy who paints the barn who can't paint like Monet has forgotten the history.
	So for an art museum or an art collector, he wants Monet.
	The guy who wants to paint a barn wants the guy who just will paint it in a really simple way.
	And it's all just circumstances.
	It's not a universal value.
	Her dad is totally right that you would be more valuable on a farm if you knew how to fix a lamp.
	No question. But I'm not applying to go and work on his farm.
	I'm just loving his daughter.
	And she's not living there.
	Right, right, right.
	But she has imbibed, and I'm sorry, talking about the lady in the room, like she's not here.
	She has imbibed, like we all have, the vanity of accidents.
	I was born accidentally on a farm, so let's make being a farm.
	Could you rephrase that? What is to imbibe?
	Oh, she has absorbed, through growing up, the vanity of accidents, right?
	Like, I'm born in Russia, and Russia is the best.
	You know, I'm born in Manhattan, and Manhattan is perfect, right?
	Gay men have so much style, it's beautiful.
	You know, like, whatever it is that they're going to come up with, people just make their accidents the best thing ever, and that's how they think that they're valuable.
	But we know, we all understand, right, that...
	These are just accidents that there's no innate virtue in fixing a goddamn lamp.
	Like, if this lady's dad has a heart attack, right, and a doctor is standing beside him, is he going to say to the doctor, don't touch me!
	You can't fix a lamp!
	Right? Of course not.
	He's going to say, I hope you're good with heart attacks, because that's what I've got.
	I don't care about whether you can fix a lamp or not, right?
	Yes. So, yeah, maybe, you know, you can talk to the lady's dad or be better if she could.
	Just a little bit about the stuff that you're good at, assuming that you're good at some stuff.
	Making his daughter happy should be pretty important.
	But it's natural and it's...
	And please don't refer to him as growing cows.
	Meet him halfway.
	Learn a little bit about a dairy farm.
	It was just my bad translation.
	I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just picking on you for no reason whatsoever.
	I'm sure they've been talking behind my back that there's some questions I've asked that are so obvious.
	Like, how could I not know those kind of things?
	Yeah, and look, do her and you a favor and, you know, rent a couple of all creatures great and small or, you know, rent a movie about a farm or read a book about, I know it's boring, about, you know, farm mechanics.
	Well, actually, we're going to start growing chickens next year, so that should work in our own little garden here.
	I don't think it's growing chickens either, but I'm just saying.
	And then we're going to breed some salad as well.
	Yeah, look, my mom, we bought her a CD player, and she still referred to it as a gramophone.
	Now, it doesn't mean that she's dumb.
	My mom's actually very intelligent, but it doesn't help, you know, in terms of that.
	She doesn't turn the CD after half an hour?
	Yeah. Don't use a knitting needle on it, mom.
	It doesn't work, right? But the reality is you could help him out.
	Right. And I would say the same thing to him, right?
	So if you're into, I don't know, you run a computer company, it would be important for him not to refer to you as an abacus manager, you know, or something like that, right?
	So I think it's good to learn a little bit about what he does, you know?
	And yes, he's going to lord it over you.
	But I think, I mean, like...
	Sorry? I'm sorry. I'm going to speak for myself.
	My issue is the relationship.
	I'm not too concerned.
	I'm being nice and friendly and all that, but I'm not, for the moment, not too concerned about how exactly those parents think about me.
	No, I'll tell you what to do.
	Sorry, let me just interrupt.
	I want to make sure I get this in before the end of the show.
	Let me tell you what I think you could do, right?
	Right. It doesn't sound malicious, in my opinion, but it does sound like you're getting some ribbing, some jokes at your expense, right?
	Well, no, no, it's more backtalk.
	I mean, I just hear things said...
	What I've found is give it back.
	Just hand it back to the person.
	So if you hear somebody making fun of your manhood or you can't collect bull ejaculates in your armpit or whatever it is that they're talking about, and I can't even imagine what you would say, but it's something back.
	Give them something back that indicates that you think it's funny.
	That they're being ridiculous, and it's not intimidating.
	Right. Yeah, that's interesting.
	I'll be thinking about that.
	That's interesting. Right.
	I mean, you call yourself a man, your cows aren't even wireless.
	I don't know. It doesn't matter, right?
	But whatever it is that you come up with that makes fun of, say, their technological lack of expertise.
	You've got a lot of balls for a guy whose VCR is still flashing 12 three years after he bought it.
	Whatever it is, right?
	You can make fun of them in return.
	You know, it's easy to learn skills that human beings have been doing pretty much the same for about 20,000 years, you know?
	Something like that where you say, yeah, I get it, you're good at this stuff, but it doesn't really matter.
	Or, you know, so they say, well, you can't fix a light.
	It's like, well, yeah, that's because I want to be rich enough to pay people to fix my lights.
	I think that's a better way to do it, right?
	Right, well, I get your point.
	I get your point. And I'm sorry, that's not even remotely funny, but you know what it is.
	You just give it back a little bit.
	People who are kind of aggressive that way, in my experience, tend to respond.
	It's almost like a macho test.
	They tend to respond fairly well if you give it back, right?
	So I was having dinner with a listener and his family when I was in Phoenix, and he said something that was not particularly bright, and I've known the guy for a while, and I can't remember why, but I made some sort of fun of him.
	And unfortunately, and this was bad timing, just as I made my brilliant and witty riposte, a piece of bread flew out of my mouth and onto the tablecloth.
	And unfortunately, that did undermine the sophistication of my one-upmanship because he made then a very cutting comment about, you know, this is a very intelligent comment coming from a guy who has trouble keeping his food in his mouth or something like that.
	And I thought that was kind of funny.
	And I appreciated him making fun of me back.
	And it wasn't, I mean, we weren't being aggressive about it, but I have sort of found that it's a useful and helpful thing to throw this stuff back, to not take it personally like it's negative towards you, but it's kind of like locker room humor, you know, where you make jokes at people.
	And I think that could be okay in small doses, but that would be my suggestion.
	Just, you know, just hand it back, you know?
	Right. Well, thanks so much for the advice.
	It's been a delight, and it lightened up my night.
	Well, not that it was very dark, but it was kind of tough, I have to say, this morning.
	Oh, look, and I understand that.
	And attacks on masculinity are tough.
	And I haven't even talked about my whole experience with an Armenian woman, which is why I asked you this Armenian question.
	I don't need to get into it now.
	But I've been in this situation.
	And it is tough.
	And so I don't mean to belittle your sensitivity.
	It's important.
	And I'm just trying to think whether I should make one last joke or not.
	I'm just mulling it over.
	Go ahead. Shoot. Are you sure?
	Are you sure? Yes, I can take it.
	Well, sir, I don't need to fix lamps because your daughter glows when she has really good sex.
	And that's all that I tell you. Okay, maybe not that one.
	That's going to work. Maybe not that one.
	You may want to do that by phone rather than in the room.
	But that would be my response, which is probably why...
	All right. Well, have a good day.
	All right. Thanks. Thanks so much.
	That was a very enjoyable set of questions to get.
	Likewise. But yeah, thanks, everybody.
	And look, I should probably get back my daughters up and I'm going to go do some parenting.
	But thank you. Thank you, everybody.
	I know I say this every week.
	I can't say it too much.
	But thank you so much for your continued support.
	Please look up fdurl.com forward slash cruise and sign up for the Liberty Cruise in November with myself and some other Liberty speakers where we can all float off in Libertopia and have all of that.
	And I also go to Libertopia.org.
	I'm going to be the emcee at Libertopia in San Diego.
	I'll be speaking too, but you'll get more stuff than a sane person should want.
	Um, but it's going to be October 15th.
	Oh, I'm sorry. No, it's going to be October 21st to 23rd, San Diego in California.
	And, uh, it is going to be, uh, I'm actually involved in the, um, uh, in the planning for it.
	And it is going to be a balls to the wall load of fun.
	And so, sorry for the cruise, you can go to ameander.com forward slash FDR 2011.
	Sorry for the barbecue. Please check out the barbecue.
	And I hope that you will be able to come to that.
	And please remember that I'm going to be also speaking and doing some other microphone style stuff at the Porcupine Freedom Festival, which is also this summer.
	And I will post a picture or two of Izzy in the chat room just before I sign off.

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