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Feb. 13, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:10:20

1850 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show 13 Feb 2011

An open marriage opened up, a mother strains to keep her daughter safe, and how to resist the urge to change others!

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	I hope you're doing very well. It is Sunday, February the 13th.
	Don't forget your roses and flowers tomorrow.
	It is the Philosophy Call-In Show from Free Domain Radio at freedomainradio.com and I hope you're having a fantastic weekend.
	Just to start, a kind listener sent me a book.
	I'll probably do a book review on this.
	It's called Empire of Illusion, The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges, winner.
	of the Pulitzer Prize.
	He also wrote a book which was quite powerful called War is a force that gives us meaning or something like that.
	I think it's an interesting book to read because when you get psychologically astute, when you have dealt with self-knowledge issues in terms of philosophy for a number of years, there are certain things that you can really expect from people and from situations.
	And the first is that the person who's complaining most about propaganda is very likely the person who's most subject to propaganda.
	So whatever people complain about the most, if they lack self-knowledge and philosophy, whatever people are complaining about is whatever they're the most susceptible to.
	Let me give you an example. So he writes on page 44, Mr.
	Hedges, And he's quite the academic, quite the well-rounded scholar.
	He's gone through the humanity.
	He's taught to Ivy League schools.
	He's been a reporter. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
	So this dude knows his shite inside and outside and backwards.
	So he writes, functional illiteracy in North America is epidemic.
	There are seven million illiterate Americans.
	Another 27 million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application.
	And 30 million can't read a simple sentence.
	There are some 50 million who read at a 4th or 5th grade level.
	Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate.
	A figure that is growing by more than 2 million dollars, sorry, by 2 million a year.
	A third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
	Let me read that again. And neither do 42% of college graduates.
	One more time. Neither do 42% of college graduates.
	In 2007, 80% of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book.
	And it's not much better beyond our borders.
	Canada has an illiterate and some illiterate population estimated at 42% of the whole, a proportion that mirrors that of the United States.
	And he goes on on page 45.
	The culture of illusion thrives by robbing us of the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth.
	It reduces us to the level and dependency of children.
	It impoverishes language.
	The Princeton Review analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates of 2000, the Clinton-Bush-Perraud debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.
	It reviewed these transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that indicates the minimum educational standard needed for a reader to grasp the text.
	In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Lincoln spoke at the educational level of an 11th grader.
	And Douglas addressed the crowd using a vocabulary suitable even higher for a high school graduate.
	In the Kennedy-Nixon debates, the candidates spoke in a language accessible to 10th graders.
	So we've dumbed down a couple of grades by this point.
	In their 1992 debates, Clinton spoke at a 7th grade level, while Bush spoke at a 6th grade level, as did Perot.
	During the 2000 debates, Bush spoke at a 6th grade level and Gore at a high 7th grade level.
	This is the astounding thing.
	You know, you almost can't get upset with it.
	It's so predictable, the degree to which this guy, he's written for Mother Jones.
	I mean, he's a complete socialist, was educated at a divinity school.
	So he's an irrationalist and a socialist.
	And so I would like to just offer you a test that helps you to sort of get out of culture, to get out of this massive propaganda pumped at you by the mainstream media.
	And this guy is worse than anyone because he has much, much fewer, many, many fewer excuses.
	I call it the space alien test, right?
	So, imagine you were a space alien, you're just coming to visit Earth to write Don't Panic in the encyclopedia.
	You were coming to, mostly harmless, so you're coming to Earth and you see that people are really badly educated and that the educational standard has declined from the mid-19th century Staggeringly.
	Ridiculously badly. See, it's not that everyone's at a sixth grade level because the people who tune into presidential debates tend to be more intelligent than the norm, but you view this massive growth in functional illiteracy to the point where there are very few people reading books anymore.
	And what you'd say, I think if you had any sanity, if you had any rigor, if you had any philosophy, what you'd say is, wow, education is a real problem.
	Massive illiteracy. Education has declined in the last 160 years, catastrophically.
	So the first question you'd ask is, who the fuck is educating these children?
	Who is in charge of the education of the nation?
	That would be your very first question.
	Educational standards are catastrophic and declining.
	Who was educating the children in 1858?
	And who was educating the children in 2011?
	Well, of course, there was almost no public schooling in 1858.
	And there's almost nothing but public schooling in 2011.
	So that's the first thing you do, is say, if the culture...
	If the culture is insane, if the culture is into spectacle rather than content, if the culture is full of people who can't think, the first place you would look, particularly in a book that complains about education, the very first place that you would look is who is educating the children.
	And does he ask that question?
	No! He starts talking about television and commercials and advertising and all the usual boring propaganda.
	You almost can't blame the guy how he just can't think objectively.
	If you're going to complain that the population is uneducated, the first place you would look to is education and you would compare it to a better time and ask what the difference is.
	The difference is private education versus public education.
	And the book is full of this kind of stuff and the media is full of this kind of stuff and the world is full of this kind of stuff.
	People claim to be interested in solving a problem but they're just making propagandistic statements.
	About that which they fear and hate.
	People fear and hate the peaceful market.
	I'm going to start calling it the peaceful market rather than the free market because it comes with less baggage and that's an accurate description of it.
	It's the non-violent market, the peaceful market.
	Well, all of the people, all of the parasites making all their money off selling illusions They can't look in the mirror and say, what kind of illusions, what kind of propaganda am I supporting through my politics, particularly public school, particularly religion?
	What kind of delusions, what kind of parasitical illusions am I supporting through my work, through my life, through my education?
	No, what they have to do and say is, the problem is, you see, that Barbies are sold.
	That's the problem. It's not the fact that the government controls 12 years of the children's life or more, really, when you think about how many kids are forced into government-controlled daycare.
	The government controls decades of children's lives.
	But that has nothing to do with it. You see, the problem is that you see Play-Doh on television and say, that's, that's the problem.
	The problem is not the Department of Education.
	Department of Public Education was its original name until they realized the acronym was just too accurate.
	The problem you see is not brain deadening state indoctrination that pumps out functionally retarded adults.
	The problem you see is the fact that you get an ad for Toy Story 3 on the television.
	See, that's the problem. The problem is the peaceful market that's attempting to Entertain children.
	That's voluntary. Television is voluntary.
	Commercials are voluntary.
	Buying toys is voluntary.
	School is violent.
	School is enforced.
	School is predatory. School is destructive.
	And they just can't see it, my friends.
	They just can't see it.
	So when you have these kinds of questions, the way to break out of propaganda, imagine you're a space alien coming and saying, well, this culture is really delusional.
	This culture can't think. This culture can't separate fact from fantasy.
	Well, who's responsible for teaching children to separate fact from fantasy?
	It's the educators. So what the hell is going wrong with government education?
	Can't even entertain the question.
	He makes one mention in the book of dysfunctional schools towards the end with no comment.
	It's just in passing. But he can't even remotely consider An objective rational...
	And this is the danger of life without philosophy.
	All you're doing is reassembling the idiot Lego blocks of prior propaganda in vaguely similar shapes.
	That's all you get to do without philosophy, without the space alien test, without working from first principles.
	All you're doing is reassembling the same old stupid jigsaw puzzles in a slightly different way and calling yourself original.
	And it's a real shame because he is a fantastic writer.
	I mean, some of his sentences are just jaw-droppingly great.
	But, like all great communicators without philosophy, he can't think outside the little rat's maze of his own prior prejudices, so you get the same socialist nonsense that you've gotten before, which is to blame people in the peaceful market for the effects of everybody engaged in the control, indoctrination, bullying, and enforcement of miseducation on the young.
	It's tragic. It's inevitable.
	And it's got to change.
	Well, that's it for my intro. I am now all happy, happy to hear your fine listenerships to set me on the right path and give me the good, old, juicy hamburger tasty questions.
	Hello? Hello.
	I guess I'm the only one with a question at the moment.
	I don't know. Let's see if we can get James EP on the line and see what the story is.
	So far, that's it right now.
	Alright. I am all with the ears.
	What can I do for you, my friend? Well, I talked to you two weeks ago.
	I'm the moral nihilist.
	So I think you've been paying attention to my thread.
	Dipping in here and there.
	Yeah. Well, I guess, well, maybe today, I don't know, it's like 18 pages long, the thread, so I'm not sure if we could actually tackle that subject in a discussion.
	But I was also, in my first post in that thread, I had a problem with your argument for property rights.
	I don't particularly want – I don't feel a strong impulse to do that, and I'll sort of tell you why, and then you can tell me what you think.
	I felt that we had reached a frustrating impasse when we talked before and weren't able to make any progress, and also when we were in the chat room, we had an interaction that was not wholly positive for me.
	And what that means to me, just sort of on my fairly significant, though certainly not conclusive experience in these matters – Is that it's usually better to talk about anything that may be blocking communication between two people rather than pretending that the communication gates are open, if that makes any sense?
	Yeah, sure. Okay.
	So I wonder if you could just tell me, just so it's more than a sort of disembodied voice in the wilderness, if you could just tell me a little bit about yourself and your history and why these issues are so important to you.
	Let's see. I read Ayn Rand when I was 16.
	I became an objectivist.
	After that, I was trying to follow things to the logical conclusion and I ended up smack in the middle of libertarianism.
	And from there, I was doing some more research on that because it's important to me.
	I ran across your videos on YouTube, so I became an anarchist and I discovered FDR and showed it to my sister.
	She's a member of FDR and a few months after I The arguments of UPP and whatnot didn't hold up for me any longer, but they still held up for my sister up until, you know, up until now they're still holding up.
	So I know it's just important to be able to debate things and think through things logically.
	That's why I'm here.
	Yeah, that's not telling me anything.
	I mean that's an intellectual description and I have no problem with hearing that.
	I assume that that's usually the case.
	But just a little bit about – so what are the moral issues that you're dealing with in your life and what's going on for you personally and what was your childhood like?
	These are things that I find because, I mean, everybody knows my – Okay, I'm not really sure exactly what you're looking for, but I can try. I used to listen to your podcast a lot.
	So I'm not sure I have much of your history, but I think you had sort of crazy parents and you've defoad from them, I'm pretty sure.
	But I've sort of had, you know, not the best of parents, I suppose.
	I've basically been...
	I've been separate from my mother for a long time and I'm glad about that because she's just kind of a broken person.
	But my childhood was a little, or a lot rather, it was Uh, dramatic.
	There were, you know, fights.
	My parents divorced.
	But then luckily, my father got custody and raised me and my twin sister together.
	And he did the best that he could when he didn't know how to cook, didn't really know.
	You know, he couldn't be around because he had to work all the time.
	So I don't know what exactly you're looking for there.
	But I always had my twin sister.
	That part of my childhood was great.
	And just if you tell me what you mean by your father did the best that he could given that he didn't know how to cook and so on.
	I'm just not sure what that, I'm curious what that means.
	Well, it's not like he could afford a babysitter or something like that.
	He was just trying to do the best that he could.
	He would leave us with his parents sometimes when he could or my mother's parents, my grandparents, when he could because they knew how to cook, you know, nutritious meals and that sort of thing and keep us entertained and whatnot.
	When we When we were kids, he was great.
	He would play games with us and spend a whole lot of time with us.
	But when we started turning into teenagers, he just couldn't really discuss boys and things like that with us.
	It was a little harder for him.
	But I think that's kind of usual because it's just different priorities at that age.
	What do you mean kind of usual?
	Well, I think most teenage daughters don't exactly have the closest relationship with their father if they're trying to do things like begin to date and sort of try and find their selves outside of their family life.
	More spending time with their friends and, you know, the father's trying to rein them in saying, no, no, you can't just do whatever you want.
	You have, you know, their rules, stuff like that.
	So you weren't particularly close to your dad when you were a teenager?
	No. Thanks.
	And your mom? What was the story with your mom?
	My mom, we didn't live with her anymore.
	It was a good thing.
	She's an alcoholic and whatnot.
	So yeah, she was just out of the picture.
	When did you stop seeing your mom?
	Well, we still had to see her.
	We were still ordered by the court to see her about once a week, but she didn't make it all the time for visits, which is a good thing.
	The less we saw of her, the better.
	And I know I'm good with that.
	I'm happy about that because she's just not a Not a good person to be around.
	It's easier for me to be around her now because I can handle it.
	I understand and I can just distance myself from any of that.
	I can just, you know, it doesn't matter to me anymore because I'm an adult.
	And just roughly how old are you?
	I don't need an exact year.
	I'm just curious. I'm 22.
	22. Okay. And when was the last time you saw your mom?
	Well, actually I had to go to a funeral last Sunday.
	That's why I didn't call again last Sunday.
	I saw her then. Yeah, and do you see her sort of regularly or is it pretty infrequent?
	Yeah, now she lives close by to where I live now and so she drops by every so often.
	I don't see her a great deal, but just sometimes.
	And is she still drinking?
	She is now, finally she's joined AA and she's in groups but she does sometimes slip up so I've made it a rule and I've made it very clear to her now that when she's drinking I will have absolutely nothing to do with her and I've made that clear so if she's drinking I don't see her.
	Right. I'm so sorry.
	I know what you mean when you say it's better to not see her in those situations but You know, that's sort of making the best of a bad situation.
	It would be much, much better to not have to have those choices, if that makes any sense.
	You mean to not have to choose to see her?
	Like, you mean to not see her at all?
	Sorry, to not have a mother who drank, to not have a mother who, you know, there was all these kinds of dysfunction.
	Like, I just sort of wanted to point out that, I mean, I'm so sorry.
	I mean, this is... You're certainly brave, I think, in making the best of a difficult situation and saying, given the choices, this is the best option.
	But boy, I mean, nobody wants those choices at all, right?
	Yeah, but I do think I don't really blame her for her drinking because she is bipolar.
	She was born with obvious psychological problems.
	By the time she was 13, she was already into heavy drinking and drugs and Bipolar people go from depressive to manic.
	She's been like that all her life, where everything will be fine.
	For times in her life, she'll have stopped drinking for months.
	She'll have a job and she'll be, you know, just the greatest, you know, just always helping us and doing everything right.
	And then for no reason at all, she'll just completely flip and she'll turn to depressed and drinking and ruin her job.
	And, you know, that's just how it goes for that sort of disorder.
	And I think, you know, she never really had a choice with that.
	So you said that she was born with these psychological problems?
	Yeah, my grandmother told me that when she was a child, it was already obvious that she had...
	I don't know, she didn't tell me really specifically, but she said that she always knew that my mother had some sort of problems that way.
	So... So what's your belief or perception about the effects of early childhood experiences on later mental health?
	Yeah, I believe it can definitely have an effect.
	For different people, I'd say it's different.
	I think that makes sense.
	But for some people, it might affect them more.
	For some people, a bad experience, for example, might motivate them to become a better person.
	They might learn from a bad example.
	Some people, however, are affected negatively by the bad example, obviously.
	But I think when you get to become an adult, you can sort of...
	Once you find, you know, love in other places, friends who actually care about you, and you work through what happened back then and you realize that, you know, things weren't perfect, you know, everybody's human, even your parents.
	Everybody has problems.
	So I just think that when you're an adult, you can separate yourself from that and Maybe it's very hard for some people and some people maybe they never get over it, but I do think there's an effect and it just depends on if you can get over it and how quickly you can get over it.
	So, if I understand this rightly, from your perspective, I'm not criticizing it.
	I just want to make sure I understand. I'm not praising it.
	I want to make sure that I understand where you're coming from.
	So, from your perspective, neither your mother nor your father bear any responsibility for the dysfunctions or destructive aspects of your childhood.
	No, I wouldn't say that.
	I'd say I don't blame my mother for her mental illness, since that was...
	It's like a brain thing.
	It's the chemicals in the brain thing.
	That's not something she ever had any control over.
	It's unfortunate. I do think, you know...
	Well, sorry, but the scientific jury does not say that.
	I mean, the science, at least.
	I just had an interview with Dr.
	Thomas Sass, who's... A pretty famous psychiatrist and I've talked about this with other – he just wrote a book.
	He's written a book called The Myth of Mental Illness in 1960 and so on and he's sort of updated it more recently.
	The science does not support that there is a physical difference in the brain for people with bipolar or even people with schizophrenia and so on.
	That's – obviously I'm no doctor and I'm just sort of repeating what – What I've been told by a number of different researchers in the field that there is no evidence, no scientific evidence that there is a physical disorder that produces these sorts of things, which again doesn't answer anything.
	It just means that the idea that there is a physical disorder remains unproven.
	Okay. No, I'm just sort of pointing that out.
	I mean, just throw my two cents in again as the amateur.
	But you had said that your mother wasn't responsible because of this, and you also said that your father did the best he could, which would indicate that there was no possible way he could have done any better, to my understanding.
	The best that somebody can do is blurry.
	I can't know.
	But he, to me, put in A good effort.
	That's what I'm willing to say.
	He put in a good effort.
	Maybe not his best, I don't know, but a good effort.
	No, I'm sorry. I'm not trying to catch you out, but you did say he did the best he could.
	And I'm not trying to catch you out.
	I just want to make sure that I understand what you mean by that.
	Okay, I don't mean the best he could, since literally I can't know, but he put in a good effort.
	I would imagine that, you know, based on your philosophical approach, that you don't hold them morally responsible.
	Morally responsible for their actions?
	Of course I do.
	Of course I do. Oh, sorry, go on.
	Maybe I must have misunderstood something there.
	I realize that they could have done different things, tried different things, and maybe he could have, you know, put all his energy into learning to cook, but You know, that's not most guys, perhaps.
	I don't know. It's, you know, there are only so many things a person can do.
	Like, you have to focus your energy somewhere and, you know, a person can always improve.
	They can always be a better dad, be a better citizen, be a better whatever, you know, whatever standard you're trying to hold them up to.
	I think he tried to, you know, He definitely had his flaws.
	He definitely had his areas that made me and my sister both not very close to him for a long time.
	I'll definitely hold him responsible for that, for his parenting, and that it wasn't perfect, of course.
	I'm not sure what's wrong with that necessarily, if you're trying to say that.
	I don't know. If I'm sorry, if I'm trying to say what?
	I don't know if you're trying to say that my father wasn't a good parent exactly or didn't do the jazz.
	I'm sorry, honestly, I'm just asking questions.
	I haven't said anything. Okay, well, I just wonder what you're getting at.
	I mean, to me, it's not really important because it doesn't really have much to do with who I am now.
	You're 22 and you're saying that some of the dysfunction and chaos in your childhood doesn't have much to do with who you are now?
	Well, how do you think it's still affecting me?
	Like back then, maybe it limited me in ways and maybe it hindered my social skills or, you know, you can make all kinds of, you know, guesses about what it did.
	And it affected my relationship with my father, yes.
	But now, you know, my father is, you know, encouraging.
	He's He tells me to do whatever makes me happy.
	He's always there for me if I need help with something, like an assignment for school, and the printer's broken, then he'll just come over and drive me downtown somewhere to get it printed and done and whatever.
	I don't know. I consider him a friend now.
	Right. Well, I mean, just to go out on a ridiculous limb, and again, just this amateur idiot hour here, as usual, my guess would be that this kind of history may have had an effect on adult romantic relationships for you.
	It's possible. You know, at least that would be the first thing if you were to say, well, how might it have affected me, that it would have had some effect on your adult romantic relationships.
	Well, if it did, I don't think it negatively affected me.
	Since I'm in a good relationship.
	And can you tell me a little bit about the relationship, if you don't mind?
	Okay, well, I've been in the current relationship that I am for over four years, since I was 18.
	It's long distance, but we talk every day, and yeah.
	I don't know what more you want to know.
	Okay, so it's just a big standard boyfriend girlfriend kind of stuff?
	Sorry, what? It's a standard boyfriend-girlfriend kind of stuff?
	Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a little unconventional, but I don't know what you really need to know about that.
	Well, I don't need to know anything.
	I mean, I'm just trying to sort of get a sense of where people are coming from because I always find that's much more helpful if you reach an impasse in communication to learn more about the person.
	So again, you don't have to answer any of this stuff at all.
	I just want to make sure that if we talk about philosophy, I sort of know a little bit more about you.
	What's not standard about your romantic relationship?
	Well, it's an open relationship.
	I know you disapprove of those, but for me, I find it's really healthy for me.
	I mean, it's not for everyone.
	I agree with that.
	But for me personally, I'm happy.
	I'm not jealous.
	I love the relationship.
	It works for me and it's good.
	And open relationships mean different things to different...
	And I hope that you understand my approval or disapproval means absolutely nothing about your relationship.
	I mean, it's just my opinion. But what do you mean by an open relationship?
	Because again, some people, I've heard sort of different definitions of it.
	Okay, well, he's married.
	So that is why...
	That's sort of how I even considered...
	Possibly having an open relationship was that we fell in love online and after months and months of talking every day, it was just obvious.
	And we discussed the moral implications and he told his wife and she knows about us.
	And so, yeah, he's married and we're both allowed to see other people.
	But yeah, that's basically it.
	And is his marriage an open marriage, like his wife is able to see other people and does she pursue that?
	Yes. Okay, and is he around your age or is there an age difference?
	There is an age difference, yes.
	And what's the age difference? 26 years.
	Sorry, I just want to make sure I understand that.
	You mean he's 26?
	No, no, no. He's 48, yes.
	He's 48, okay. And his wife is around his age?
	She's a bit older. She's 54 or something like that.
	Right, right, okay. And does he have kids?
	Yes, three. And how old are the kids?
	One's younger than me, one's my age, and one is 24.
	And the one who's your age, is it a boy or a girl?
	It's a girl. Right, right, okay.
	Interesting. Have you ever talked to his wife?
	No, she doesn't want to talk to me.
	Knowing about me is all she wants.
	She doesn't want to talk to me, no.
	Do you know why? She wants a close relationship with him and she would prefer that he only saw her.
	So she doesn't want to be in an open relationship?
	Well, she's...
	I'm sorry, and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth.
	I just want to make sure I get a map of this.
	She sways back and forth.
	Sometimes she says yes, sometimes she says no.
	She sways back and forth because when he originally told her, she said, yes, that's fine.
	But I think her opinion changed because I'm planning to move closer and I guess she wasn't threatened by a long-distance relationship, I suppose, and now she feels a bit threatened, although I wish I could talk to her and tell her that I'm not threatening her relationship with him in any way, but alas, she doesn't want to talk to me.
	Right, right. And are you moving closer to be closer to the fellow?
	Yeah, eventually, yeah.
	Sorry, what do you mean eventually?
	Well, I haven't started moving yet.
	I'm still in school.
	I want to finish school here before I move.
	Right, right. Okay.
	But the goal is to be closer to the fellow?
	Yeah. And what are your...
	I don't know. I mean, you sound to me like a person who lives in the moment, which is something that I admire in many ways.
	So, you know, if that means anything to you.
	But if you do think about...
	Sorry? Sorry? Well, I would not describe myself that way at all.
	I'm a very shy person.
	I usually plan everything out and think about things for a long time before actually making a decision, so I'm not sure I would define myself as living in the moment at all.
	Oh, okay, good. Well, that's actually easier then for the next question, because the next question that I would have then is, what do you see the relationship going with this fellow?
	Well, lately they've been seeing a marriage counselor just to dissect their own relationship because they both have been displeased with their relationship in various ways.
	So they're trying to work that out now and she might decide eventually that she isn't getting what she wants from him and never has.
	I don't know. If she does that, then perhaps eventually I'll be able to have a, you know, maybe even, you know, live with him and that sort of thing.
	But I don't need that.
	I'm fine with living close to him and just seeing him all the time.
	I don't want children, so Well, I mean, you don't want children at the moment, right?
	I mean, that may be something that changes over time.
	It could. It could.
	I agree with that.
	And if that was the case, then yeah.
	But I don't think I will want to.
	If you did want children, say, in 10 years or whatever, I mean, you're young, that you could make that decision, he would be, what, close to 60?
	Yeah. Yeah, but I wouldn't be having children.
	He may be less likely to want to go.
	I mean, because I'm enmeshed in a sort of infancy babyhood stage at the moment, it's quite a stress even on my moderately ancient 44-year-old body, so he may not want to go around again.
	It's just a thought. Well, I wouldn't be having children with him anyway.
	If I wanted to have children, I'd find somebody else to do that with.
	Right, right. And what about his children?
	What's your relationship like with his kids?
	Well, his daughter knows about me.
	His sons don't know about me that I'm aware of.
	He's closest with his daughter.
	They sort of talk more.
	His sons are a bit...
	Well, now he's talking to them more.
	But they're sort of, you know, kind of...
	I don't want to say...
	Well, a stereotypical male sort of in...
	They don't talk much.
	They're just sort of like one-word answer kind of thing.
	I guess. And since he told his wife about me, she doesn't want the kids to know about me and he respects that.
	And so do I. But that's definitely a barrier to intimacy, right?
	I'm sorry? If he has to keep you as a secret with his kids, that's a barrier to intimacy.
	I assume, obviously, that you're an important part of his life.
	I'm just sort of pointing it out, right, that it means that there's a huge subject in his life that he can't talk about with his kids, right?
	Well, yeah. Yeah, that's true, I guess.
	And it also means that—sorry, and again, these aren't criticisms.
	I'm just trying to get a lay of the land.
	It also means that you can't ever be integrated into his family, right?
	So you can't ever join them for Christmas.
	You can't ever join them for— Thanksgiving or birthdays or, you know, if there's a grandkid who comes into the picture, you can't be part of that, right?
	I mean, you would definitely much, you would remain outside the orbit of the family.
	Is that a fair statement?
	Yeah, that's a fair statement.
	It's not my family, it's his.
	So, I mean, I think any sort of loved one might have, you know, friends and family members that They only do family things together.
	I think that's, I mean, or I guess, you know, I guess a married couple, yeah, but like a dating couple, the person doesn't necessarily attend all family functions and, you know, like, You know, things like that.
	But usually, after a four-year relationship, things do tend to blend in a little bit, right?
	I mean, if I was dating a woman for four years, and she couldn't be part of any of my family functions, I mean, to me, that would just be a bit strange.
	But, you know, I mean, I'm trying to walk a mile in your shoes, and since you say that you sort of think about and plan about things, that's sort of what I was trying to understand.
	Well, I don't feel the need to be included by them if It's sort of like just if you married somebody and their parents and family didn't like you and didn't want to talk to you, then you wouldn't have anything to do with them.
	And that wouldn't necessarily have, you know, that wouldn't necessarily be a barrier between you and the person you're in a relationship with.
	They could still go see those people and even tell you what happened at the certain functions.
	And it's not necessarily a barrier, I don't think.
	To me, and I'm not saying this is any philosophical principle.
	This is just sort of a personal principle that for me, if I have to keep secrets from people I love, that's a barrier to intimacy.
	And the more important the secret and the more I have to keep it from someone, the more of a barrier to intimacy it is.
	Yes, but that's her choice.
	She's choosing to pull away from him and say, I don't want to hear about her.
	I don't want to meet her.
	I am closing this off.
	It's on her side.
	Well, I'm not thinking about her so much as him, that he's now accepted the rule that he can't talk about this very important part of his life, which is his affair with you.
	Sorry, affair is not the right word because it's an open marriage.
	But his relationship with you is something that's obviously very important to him, but he can't talk about with his kids or at least not all of them.
	Yeah.
	Well, I guess it could sort of be a barrier, but he still isn't that close to them and hasn't been close to them before he ever met me.
	Their relationship is just not that way yet, and he's trying to work on it, and they're trying to work on it.
	But having a big secret isn't going to help them get closer, right?
	Well, I don't really see that as...
	You know, I don't really see that as important.
	I mean, why is who you're dating that important?
	Well, but see, if it's not important, then he should be able to talk about it, right?
	I mean, if I stub my toe, and that's not very important, I can talk about it with my wife like, damn, I stubbed my toe, ow, or something.
	Please help me find my toenail.
	But obviously, a love affair that has gone on for four years is pretty significant.
	It was very significant, right?
	I mean, it may be the most important relationship that's going on in his life at the moment in terms of his passions.
	And I'm just pointing out, again, I'm not talking about anything from a moral standpoint, but these are the consequences, right?
	Which is that this huge part of his life he can't speak about.
	Well, it is important to him.
	The relationship is important to him, but that doesn't mean that it's important to talk about it with his kids, I don't think.
	I mean, why would it be?
	I mean... Why would something that's very important to him not be important to share with his family?
	Well, he has other important things that he wants to talk about, but I don't see why making his kids sort of, if they're uncomfortable with it, I don't see why he would need to talk about it with them in order to be close with them.
	I think he can definitely be close to them without ever talking about it.
	Yeah, I don't agree with that. I think if you have a big secret from people, you can't be close.
	And also, we don't know if the kids are uncomfortable with it or not because the choice to be comfortable with it or not has been taken away from them because the information is not being presented, right?
	Well, it was to his one, his daughter.
	Well, his kids as a holder, right?
	Yeah. And now, is his daughter not supposed to talk about it with her siblings?
	No, no. He didn't say that she couldn't talk about it.
	So possibly they do know, but I don't know if they know.
	Right. Sorry, go ahead.
	She's not that close with her brothers, I think.
	So I don't know if she would have talked to them about it.
	And what does your dad think about this?
	He says, if it makes me happy, then it's a good thing.
	And I'm an adult and I make my own decisions.
	And since...
	He's talked to my boyfriend over Skype, actually.
	It's so funny just to think of the word boyfriend to a guy who's pushing 50.
	It's just a trick of the language that's kind of interesting, right?
	Anyway, go on. Yeah.
	He approves.
	My boyfriend, as long as he's good to me and he's always there for me, emotional support, it's not like his...
	You know, he's a busy person, but he makes the time for me, a lot of time for me.
	And it's not a relationship that I'm settling for in any way.
	It's just, it works for me.
	Yep. And Is he – I mean I guess he's – I don't know how to put this delicately.
	And look, if you don't want to talk about this, I mean this is very interesting to me because I think all aspects of human experience are just fascinating.
	So I really do appreciate you talking about this.
	One of the things that – I dated a woman who was older when I was a student and one of the things that was a challenge for us was just the different income levels, right?
	So she was – Making money hand over fist and I was living on student ramen and all that kind of stuff.
	Is that something that comes up in your relationship at all?
	Yeah, it's a huge difference, yeah.
	But, I don't know, it doesn't affect our relationship negatively, except in the sense that I'm not ready to move closer to him yet because I can't afford to just up and move across Canada and do that yet.
	And live on my own yet.
	I just can't do that yet.
	But other than that, it doesn't really get in the way.
	Do you guys see each other?
	Where do you see each other again?
	I was fascinated by the logistics of stuff, right?
	I mean, how does that work?
	Well, sometimes he flies here, sometimes I fly there.
	He goes on a lot of business trips for his work and also he's involved in a couple of Sort of geeky subjects.
	So he goes to conferences on those.
	And sometimes he'll stop in Toronto and see me during that trip.
	And actually last year I lived in his city for three months.
	So yeah, that was a bigger visit than we normally can have.
	And I would assume that you can't afford these trips, right?
	I mean, so he pays for those? No, I can't.
	No. So he sends you a plane ticket and puts you up in a hotel with him or whatever?
	Yeah, yeah. He assures me that it's worth it to him.
	And of course, I can't afford these things.
	But we love each other.
	And otherwise, we wouldn't be able to see each other.
	So yeah, he...
	He's okay with arranging it.
	And your twin, is it a girl or a boy?
	A girl, yeah. And what does she think of it?
	She met him at the same time I met him online.
	And I think she thought he was, first of all, really, really intelligent.
	And I think her opinion of him is good and she met him the last time he was here and so did my friend.
	Met him in person, I mean.
	And yeah, I think she has a good opinion of him.
	Right, right. And when you said earlier that you had worked through this stuff from your childhood, can you tell me what you had done to achieve that?
	Well, I've been in therapy and I just talked to her...
	Sorry, how long were you in therapy for or are you...?
	I was in therapy for, I believe, a few months with a sort of a specialist, but I didn't really like that one.
	So then I was in therapy with a sort of a general therapist sort of counselor for another few months.
	And that was what really helped me until the point where I felt like I didn't need to go there anymore.
	So I'm not in therapy anymore.
	Right. And what's...
	I shouldn't think that's a reasonable question to ask.
	No, I don't think it is. I was going to ask you sort of what was the content, but I think that's probably too personal to talk about it.
	So let me just figure out what the other question was.
	I'm trying to remember what I wanted to ask you.
	So you did a couple of months of therapy basically with a therapist that you felt was good.
	Yes. And what did your therapist think of this relationship?
	At the time, I hadn't told my family about it because I thought they would obviously react very negatively.
	Since then, I've obviously told my entire family And, you know, initially they were very against it, but now I think they've had to accept that he's been good to me and it works for me.
	And, you know, I know it was very hard for them, though, because it's very unconventional.
	But, yeah... Sorry, I forgot the question.
	No, that's fine. Do you think that, I mean, in terms of the age difference is obviously bigger than you've been alive, right?
	So it's about the same length as I've been into philosophy, manly coincidentally enough.
	The age difference...
	It's interesting to me because there is an accumulation, and I say this as, you know, somebody who to you probably seems as ancient as the Himalayas, but maybe not actually given your dating preferences or preference in this situation.
	But there's kind of an accumulation of life experiences that occurs over the years that to me is hard to replicate.
	You know, like when I'm talking to people who are younger, you know, perhaps yourself excluded, right?
	But with... But when I'm talking with people who are younger, I'm very aware that I'm talking with people who are younger, and I also feel that way when I'm talking to people who are older.
	If this theory is true, and it may be complete nonsense, but if this approach is true, then there must be some sort of mental age that you meet in the middle to have that kind of compatibility.
	What do you think the age is that your minds are meeting at?
	Is he young for his age?
	Are you old for your age?
	Are you sort of meeting in the middle? How does that work, do you think?
	I don't have as high of an IQ as he does, but I think I'm mature.
	Intellectually, I can grasp the things he talks about.
	The way we met was a philosophy discussion, actually.
	And we debated, you know, and he since learned that I was a very mature person, or that was his impression of me, even though at the time I was 18 when he met me.
	And he...
	He ended up after months of knowing me and now it's been years.
	His opinion is that I'm a mature person more so than some people he's known who are his age.
	That I just think about things carefully and I don't like I don't manipulate people.
	I don't throw a hissy bit.
	I don't do any of that stuff that he usually encounters, I suppose.
	And I've always been attracted to his maturity because I basically can't really stand people my own age.
	Not can't stand them, but couldn't stand to be Right, right, right. Well, I mean, I'm certainly not one to even remotely stand between two hearts destined to be in love.
	But, you know, the part of me, obviously, that, and I'm sure this is something that you've thought about, and I'm not telling you anything new, is that I guess he was like 44 when he first met you when you were 18?
	Yeah, I think that's right, yeah.
	Right. Now, I mean, of course, when a woman is 18, and I certainly think a woman is an appropriate term for an 18-year-old female, when a woman is 18, her brain is still developing.
	I mean, the brain doesn't really finish developing until about the age of 25.
	So you're That's sort of an annoying thing to say and whatever, but that's a sort of scientific fact.
	So I think that a man of 44 engaging in a relationship with a girl of 18 – a woman of 18, sorry – he's not letting the sort of – he's sort of going in before the brain has finished maturing.
	And that's just something that's one of the reasons why I think people find those age differences to be unsettling.
	And again, I'm sure you've thought about all of that stuff.
	Oh yeah, well he actually was very against having a relationship with me the first time I started telling him my feelings.
	He was, as you can imagine, he didn't want to feel like a creep.
	He hadn't ever had a relationship with someone with that much of an age difference before.
	So he was very reluctant to actually You know, he had to try and make sure that I understood that I was actually mature enough to understand what I was saying and that I was mature enough to make a decision like that.
	And I realized that when I was 18, I wasn't as mature as I am now and I'm still growing.
	But I think I clearly did make the decision knowing what sort of decision I was making because the relationship is still lasting and Well, look, I would say – and again, this is just going to be annoying, naggy, older guy stuff, so you can just discard it as you see fit.
	But this to me is not quite at the level of a relationship because a relationship is like you guys have fun times when you get together and there's passion and there's physicality and there's all that kind of good stuff.
	But it's bungee stuff.
	Like relationships are, you know, like night and day.
	Like you have to deal with each other when you have the flu.
	You have to deal with your mother-in-law getting sick.
	You have to deal with bills and you have to deal with mortgages and you have to deal with debt sometimes and you have to deal with all of that kind of stuff, right?
	Yeah, cool. Can I just – well, for a normal dating relationship, you don't necessarily have to deal with all that stuff.
	I just like – Well, after four years you do.
	At least you probably do, right?
	Because if you're not at that level after four years, then you're holding yourself out from the relationship, right?
	Because you kind of have to get in with all of the mucky-muck of life's problems at least within – when you're coming up for half a decade.
	So, again, I'm not criticizing what you have.
	I'm just sort of saying that it's not quite the same as a relationship where you're living with someone and dealing with, you know, the daily trials and tribulations and challenges that come up with living.
	So, there's still a place to go.
	Yes, of course. And I don't think that I'm...
	I realized that it would be different and that this is a sort of an easier, you know, I don't have to deal with any of like, maybe he has annoying quirks that I just never have encountered because I haven't been living with him, you know, 24-7.
	Although we have taken two weeks, three weeks trips together where we are in constant...
	But vacation, right?
	Yeah, that's true.
	It's hard to not get along.
	I mean, just sort of pointing out, I mean, just as someone who's now, you know, been married for, I guess, coming up for a decade and, you know, kids and illnesses and problems and all that kind of, I mean, I'm just saying that there's a level that still has to get to.
	Did your parents have any problems with, I guess, what would traditionally be called infidelity in their marriage?
	Yeah. I don't think they did in their original marriage.
	I'm not really clear on that.
	I think my mother did because she wanted to drink and so my father didn't approve of that and so she would drink with other men and that made him jealous.
	But I don't think she ever actually had a relationship with...
	yeah. Okay, so there was maybe some inappropriate flirting, but not necessarily sexuality, is that right?
	Yeah. But you don't know, right?
	And I'm not saying you should know, I'm just sort of curious.
	Yeah, I don't know. Right.
	Yeah, I mean the last thing – and I appreciate this.
	I really do appreciate you opening up your life like this.
	It certainly helps me put some things in perspective.
	But the other thing that I would mention of course is that you had a sort of unavailable dad to some degree or another at least according to what you said.
	And that certainly is a bit of a pattern that's been repeated to some degree in your relationship with this other fellow, right?
	Well, yeah, that's an interesting way to put it, except that he is sort of available basically all the time because he's always online and always accessible and I can always call him.
	And we talk for hours every day online.
	Maybe it's not the usual face-to-face communication, but actually I prefer writing because that's actually my strength.
	With speaking, I sort of stumble and lose my point and that sort of thing.
	But anyway, that's just the person.
	But I mean sort of available in a way of being able to commit to you as an individual, right?
	He's not unavailable when I actually...
	Yeah, but I don't need that, so for me it's really irrelevant.
	No, I'm sorry. Please understand.
	I'm not saying you should, or I'm not saying you should need it, or I'm not saying it should happen.
	I'm just saying there's a pattern here that I've noticed.
	It may be irrelevant, but it may not be entirely accidental, that this may be something that your comfort level is to have intimacy without an overwhelming kind of availability, or maybe it's just a possibility.
	I'm just sort of throwing it out there. Yeah, you're right.
	That could be possible.
	Eventually, though, I do want to make it so I live near him and then he would be available to me in a greater way.
	Well, maybe. Maybe not.
	Yeah, it makes sense.
	And again, I'm not obviously trying to compare you to a drug, but I've certainly heard that there's some kind of standards within the profession which is to say that you can't be continuing an affair while you're working on repairing a marriage, particularly if one person is not so keen on the affair, i.e.
	the wife here.
	That variable has to be taken out of the equation in order to work on the marriage.
	So if they go into marital counseling, that may be a condition of marital counseling.
	So it may or may not work out that he's going to become more available.
	Yeah, it's just, well, I just want to point out that it's not a condition of the counseling because they're trying to see if the wife wants to know if their relationship is worth it to her outside of the fact that he is having a relationship with me.
	She's sort of putting that aside and seeing if, because their marriage has been kind of Unhappy, I would say, in various ways for both of them.
	But listen, I've got to tell you, this is where, and again, I hate to be annoying, but this is where your youth shows up, that their marriage can exist outside of a four-year affair with you, that that's not intimately bound up.
	There's no way of looking at the marriage outside of including that.
	Well, obviously it affects her.
	But before I ever came along, there were problems.
	That's what I would like to say. Oh, no question.
	I'm certainly not saying you've caused the problems in the marriage.
	Obviously it's not helping if he's continuing an affair with you that she doesn't want to continue.
	That's obviously not helping their marriage.
	In fact, it's harming it. But I'm just saying there's no way to look at the marriage outside of the fact that you're involved as an affair.
	I just... Aren't you sort of discounting that an open relationship can work and that everyone can be happy with it?
	I certainly am.
	And I'll be completely honest about that.
	I don't believe that it can work.
	And it's certainly not working for the wife, right?
	She seems to change her mind on that because she seems sometimes perfectly happy with it, perfectly fine with it, and she says she's fine with it, but then she'll change her mind.
	This is one of the traits that he can't be close to her because she changes her mind so much.
	She's not really firm on what she says.
	He thinks that that is sort of an immature...
	Right, but all I'm saying is that, you know, it's not working for her at the moment, right?
	I mean, maybe she's okay with it sometimes and then she's not, but that's not uncommon, you know, if you're, you know, people who are not unhappy in a relationship, one of the challenges is that they don't just get completely unhappy, you know, from 100% happy to 100% unhappy.
	There's a transitional phase where it's like, you know, a plane losing fuel.
	It doesn't just go straight into the ground.
	It sort of goes up and down and catches an updraft and goes down again.
	So I think that's...
	That's pretty natural.
	It's not working for the kids because he can't talk to his kids about his relationship with you.
	You can't talk to the kids. You can't be part of their family.
	So there's a separation.
	He has to put up those mental walls to separate his relationship with you, with everyone else, which creates intimacy barriers with, I mean, things that you have to keep secret, particularly important things create intimacy barriers.
	Irrevocably. If you can't talk about stuff, you have to keep it secret.
	You have to constantly be aware that you can't talk about it.
	And of course, when he's online talking to you for hours a day, He is de facto not available to his family because he's talking to you, at least to his children, because he's talking to you and you're sort of a secret.
	So if they say, what are you doing? He has to not tell the truth to them, right?
	I mean, I'm not criticizing.
	I'm just pointing out that these are ways in which there are barriers to openness because of it.
	Well, actually, that's not...
	He works on the computer, and he talks to me while he's working, so he has to be on the computer anyway.
	It doesn't take him away from his family in any way.
	No, I've just pointed out that it does, because if one of his children IM him and say, what are you doing?
	He can't say, well, I'm chatting with so-and-so.
	Well, when his daughter does ask, he will tell her that he's talking either to me or to someone.
	But yeah, his other kids, that's true.
	But I don't think that's necessarily a barrier.
	Okay. You disagree.
	I've made the case. I'm not going to...
	Yeah, you disagree. You disagree, and that's...
	You know, we're not going to agree on that.
	I obviously think it's working for me.
	But... Yeah, I don't know if you think this will affect our debate in some way.
	I've been trying to understand where you think this could possibly affect, you know, where we're coming from intellectually.
	Well, look, if we can't agree on the tangibles, we won't ever be able to agree on the abstracts.
	That's sort of why I ask this kind of stuff.
	You're trying to tell either me or you're trying to decide, you know, what's personally best for a relationship between me and him or my boyfriend and his children where it's not a barrier because they're not at that point that they're close enough that they would even discuss that.
	They still have to get to the The parts where they're discussing something else.
	And I don't think, you know, for everyone else, there's a different point that you approach the subject of what is very significant to your life, you know, in that sort of romantic sense.
	Like, not everybody talks about those things, and some people wait, you know?
	Like my father, when he started dating after he was separated from my mother, he kept his relationships hidden for a while because, you know, you don't want to tell a child that, you know, That you're dating someone if that person's not going to stay in your life necessarily and you haven't figured that out yet.
	And so, you know, they'd wait a while, you know, to see if it's still lasting and if they think it's going to last.
	And at this point, he probably, you know, he would have told them because it has lasted.
	But that point is different for everybody.
	But he did tell his daughter and he was going to tell the others.
	But at this point, I really don't think it has an impact on the relationship.
	I don't think you can decide that, and you can disagree all you want.
	No, look, it's not a decision.
	I'm not deciding, and I certainly never said what was best or worst.
	All that I said is that if you have to keep an important secret from people in your life, that it's a barrier to intimacy.
	That's all I said. I mean, if we can't agree on that, then there's certainly no point talking about abstract ethics.
	Okay, I can agree it's a barrier.
	It's a barrier, fine.
	But I agree with that.
	I just don't think that that's relevant at this point.
	Okay. Well, so I'm going to – if it's all right with you, I'm going to move on to another caller because we do have a bunch of people queued up.
	I certainly – look, I really do appreciate your – honestly, I know this is not always the easiest thing to bring up a non-conventional relationship, but I really do appreciate the fact that you've talked about it so openly, and it certainly has given me a stronger sense of you as a person, which I always think is really important if you're going to get into debates as things are sort of deep and powerful as ethics and virtue and the right way to live, so to speak. So I really do appreciate that.
	Yeah, I guess I don't understand what this whole thing was about.
	You were learning more about me, but you're not going to address my question in the end, even after learning about me?
	I mean, I thought that was the point.
	Well, the point was for me to determine whether I wanted to continue at an abstract level.
	Well, at the moment, I don't know.
	At the moment, I sort of have to move on to another caller because we spent a lot of time.
	So let me sort of mull it over and I'll post something on the board or whatever with what I come up with.
	Okay, of course. All right.
	Well, thank you. Thank you so much.
	Okay. And, James, we had somebody, I think, in Europe who needs to get to bed, if I remember rightly.
	Yes, Mr. Emil. Yes, sir.
	Can you hear me? I can.
	All right. Yeah, I have basically two points I would bring up.
	First one, I wanted to thank you for all the work you have done.
	I think it's great stuff.
	Thank you. I think it improved my life quite a lot and the life of other people I know.
	I mean, I've been talking with other people about the ideas you bring up and stuff.
	For example, I've got a friend who I think due to your videos basically Decided not to join the army for 13 years.
	Oh, fantastic. Which I think is a pretty big achievement.
	That is a good day's work, I'll tell you.
	So please pass along to him my congratulations if that means anything to him.
	I will, certainly. And also on a more personal level, I think your book, Real-Time Relationships and other related things really helped me to improve my friendships and other relationships.
	Yeah, that was the first point, I guess.
	Second thing, a question.
	I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, to be honest.
	It's kind of a complex topic.
	I've had problems with things like procrastination and motivation all my life, basically.
	I kind of blame the school system, and I think you would agree that at least it has something to do with it.
	For obvious reasons, I guess.
	It wasn't really a problem back then because it's not really that difficult to go through school.
	But now that I'm studying, it's gotten more difficult because I have to do my homework now to succeed.
	And it's gotten really hard.
	Yeah, as I said, I'm not really sure where I'm going with this.
	I've tried therapy, because, well, that's what you say.
	It's not the reason why I tried therapy, but you convinced me that it might be worth a shot, I guess.
	Just to be clear because I hope nobody does anything because I say so.
	I've sort of tried to present the empirical evidence for the benefits of therapy that there's lots of evidence that it is the most efficacious way to build and achieve happiness.
	So I guess not just because I say so.
	I mean I've interviewed Chris Hoyce who had some pretty compelling data about the degree to which therapy improves people's lives.
	So I'm sort of trying to present the argument rather than an opinion.
	Yes, of course, and I agree.
	I have a friend who has gotten into therapy because of arguments that I basically got from you, so another good thing, and that really helped her to know herself and to deal with her childhood.
	Anyway, I tried it last year, but it didn't really work out.
	Had like six sessions, I guess.
	But I kind of had the feeling that she wasn't able to help me.
	It's like...
	Sorry, I'm going to need to, just because you're rambling quite a bit, I just want to make sure we get to the meat of the matter.
	What is it specifically that I can help you with?
	Or try to, at least.
	Well, if you would have any thoughts on the...
	On my problems, basically.
	I mean, I didn't say much about them, but...
	Do you mean in terms of procrastination?
	Yeah, right. Have you seen my video or podcast on procrastination by chance?
	Yes, I did. And did that fit your circumstances at all?
	I think you brought up some interesting points.
	I'm not really sure how much it applies to me because, well, I've kind of I've got a problem with thinking about all these reasons that might be behind it because I don't remember much of my childhood, for example.
	Which is not a good sign, right?
	You know that, right? Yeah, I agree, yes.
	And of your childhood that you can remember, was it good or bad?
	Well, it depends, I guess.
	My parents were definitely not as good as I would have liked them to be, I guess.
	I mean, they were pretty violent sometimes.
	It has gotten better over the years, but obviously I've grown up and can defend myself now, so I guess it's partly the reason.
	Were they violent with each other or towards you?
	Or both? Towards me, basically.
	I'm so sorry. How did the violence manifest itself?
	Well, when I was little, they hit me sometimes.
	I'm not sure how often, but it happened more often than once, definitely.
	And also things like screaming, I guess.
	And that was the discipline that you experienced?
	Is that right? Yeah, that's right.
	Discipline to want of a better phrase.
	Well, let me give you – I have a feeling that it's going to be a little bit like pulling tooth.
	So I'm going to give you a speech that hopefully will be of some use and then I'll have to move on to the next caller if that's all right.
	But I will tell you what I noticed from my daughter, that with my daughter, who is now just over two years old, there is no question, there is no issue, there is no problem with motivation.
	In fact, there is often, not just often, there is sometimes a problem with an excess of motivation, right?
	So she gets up in the morning, the first thing she does is she...
	You know, says what she's wearing and its color and what color binkies she's got.
	And then she sort of, you know, says that she wants this and she wants that.
	And then she wants to go downstairs and she wants to have her bottle and she wants to jump on the couch and she wants to run around.
	And, you know, we've got a little dance we do with a broom called the Victory Dance, which she wants to do.
	And then she wants to go up in my shoulders and touch everything that's high in the house.
	And then she wants to do... Like, there is no problem with motivation, right?
	With my daughter. In fact, sometimes her motivations can be occasionally just a little bit exhausting because it really is kind of nonstop.
	Even when she's lying in my arms, she's always moving to some degree or another, legs kicking or arms wandering around or whatever, right?
	And so she is just a nonstop blur of Martin with its hair on fire motion.
	And this to me is nothing remarkable or particular to my daughter.
	I think that is the case with children in general, that the last thing they ever need is motivation or enthusiasm.
	I think that is how we are born, is this eagerness, this eagerness for knowledge, this eagerness for knowledge.
	Growth for progress.
	She loves mastering new things.
	She's just starting to struggle with the alphabet now, and she's learned A, and she's starting to learn B, and we're trying to sort of teach her that kind of stuff.
	She's struggling to, like, I'll draw a star, she'll try and color it in, and she's trying to draw her own stars, which is kind of frustrating, because even I get it wrong sometimes.
	So she is hungry for mastering the next thing and learning the next thing and doing the next thing to the point where it almost feels like it's a boulder rolling downhill that you kind of got to slow down rather than something you have to get behind and push.
	And so I think when we have problems with motivation...
	That to me is a significant intervention into or against the natural push and thrust and flow of the eagerness that children have.
	We were at the mall the other day and she saw...
	A little girl, sort of her age.
	And she wanted to jump and do our victory dance.
	So she went up, grabbed the girl, took her head and said, come do the victory dance.
	Come jump.
	Come run around. And so then I sort of got down.
	We did that for a while.
	And then there was these ramps going up and down.
	There's a sort of central area in the mall.
	So I I kind of went down and did the airplane and we did flying through with my arms out, flying through the mall.
	And there were two or three kids who ended up following us around as we flew around and all that kind of stuff.
	And so she's very enthusiastic.
	I mean she's very socially confident.
	She can be a little bit – because she doesn't deal with shy kids a lot, she can be a little bit overwhelming I think to other kids.
	But I mean all I can do is ask her to be a bit more sensitive to that.
	I certainly don't want to restrain that enthusiasm.
	And so the heartbreaking thing, I think, is that when people like yourself – and this happens to me as well – people like myself, when we are – or yourself, when you're faced with inertia, when you're faced with paralysis, when you're faced with procrastination, to me that is – Not proof of, but it is a sign of something to explore in terms of what happened to your early enthusiasm.
	Because I think if parents are kind of depressed, if parents are kind of inert, if parents are kind of empty, then, you know, you've seen this cliche played out a million times in movies where there are kids, you know, like there's 16 kids running around and jumping on the furniture and all that sort of stuff.
	And, you know, there's a mom sort of leaning up against the doorframe, rubbing her Her temples because she's got a headache and she just can't take it anymore.
	It's too noisy and it's too busy and it's too loud.
	This is a challenge.
	So the unblemished, rocket-like enthusiasm of children goes smack into sometimes the emptiness or depression or enervation of parents.
	Children don't have the strength of wings to lift their parents, right?
	We get underneath them if they're inert and all of our busy enthusiasm and aerial abilities aren't enough to lift our parents.
	And so sometimes what happens is the weight of the parent's emptiness falls upon the enthusiasm of the child.
	And the child gets buried under these layers of depression and resentment and overwhelmedness and the enthusiasm and deep spiritual joy of the child almost rises as an affront to the emptiness and inertia of the parent and the parent almost can't help himself or herself sometimes to...
	To squelch and suppress and minimize and sometimes even directly attack and assault the enthusiasm of the child because it brings up a lot of pain for the parent, right?
	The happiness of a child brings up great pain for a brutalized and unhappy parent and that is a great danger.
	So over-enthusiastic children that provoke misery, anxiety, hostility, fear, often unconscious in parents.
	Well, We're either bullied into or assaulted into or we ourselves choose to minimize our own enthusiasms in order to protect our parents' sensibilities and this may be something that is occurring for you and has occurred for you and that's only of course introspection and hopefully work with a therapist can help figure that out but that would be my approach to that so I hope that that's helpful and please let me know if it's not we can talk further but I would like to move on to the next caller if that's alright.
	Yeah, right. Thanks, Dave.
	You're very welcome. I guess I'll listen to it later and then I'll see if it helps.
	Thanks. But next...
	Oh, let's not forget, we have in November, if you would like to, we still need some more registrants for it, the Liberty Cruise.
	For, I think, about 500 bones, you can join myself and Wes Bertrand.
	I think Brett Vernad is coming.
	Certainly, Christina and Izzy will be there if this all goes ahead.
	FDRURL.com forward slash cruise.
	It's going to be a cruise in the fun and the sun.
	And I think there's onboard karaoke, which is really the only reason that I'm going.
	But I hope that you will be able to join us.
	It should be just a wonderful week and I hope that you will at least look into it.
	And if you could sign up sooner rather than later, that would be fantastic because we do need a certain number of signer uppers in order to make it happen.
	So again, fdrurl.com forward slash cruise.
	Let's get some philosophical sun and sea and swim and snorkel and all those kinds of good sibilants that go on with a tropical holiday.
	I hope that you will check it out.
	Alright, do we have somebody else on the line?
	Oh, hello?
	Hello, can you hear me?
	Hi. Hi.
	I'm hoping that my baby doesn't wake up Tuesday because she's been sleeping this whole time.
	Okay, we'll keep it quiet. It's not so much about that because she's in her baby carrier.
	Just keep walking.
	Just keep walking.
	That's the trick for mine.
	My mother did the same thing as the example you just gave about the enthusiastic child.
	She was most abusive to me because I was her most enthusiastic child.
	She could hit me, beat me.
	I was still happy running around.
	Very enthusiastic and Loving of life in the world and I still am though I've carried her abuse over into my relationship as you talked about.
	I actually have taken a few steps since I started listening to you.
	Can you still hear me?
	Okay. I started listening to you maybe three months before I had my baby, three or four months, and my brother's been listening to you for a couple years, and he always told me if I listened to the CDs that he gave me that a tyranny of truth or tyranny of illusion,
	he said that I wouldn't be in the relationship that I was, so I never listened to them for like the two years that I had them because I really didn't want to listen to something that was going to Take me away from this little wonderful relationship I had, right? Right. And so I finally listened to it.
	A big thing I wanted to get before having my baby, I wanted to have my laptop with the iPod and be able to get all the information and have access to it, like, you know, to be able to have that, to be the best parent that I could be and really investigate everything I could.
	And on parenting, and you had some podcasts on parenting, and that's what attracted me first.
	And since then, I love everything, and now I am an atheist, and it took me a while to come to that because I had gone to massage school and really liked the airy-fairy relativistic world.
	Right, right. You know, like, I really loved all the girls and all the enthusiasm that I saw in that of Just the magical realm.
	But anyways, now I understand and appreciate reason and logic very much.
	And sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to mention that to me, I mean, I've done yoga, massage therapy, I've had shiatsu done, I've had cupping done, and I think that there is deep and powerful mysteries in the area where the base of the brain blends with the body.
	I think that there's I mean, I don't choose my dreams at night, but they can be amazingly instructive.
	So I think there is great room, and in fact, I think it's necessary to really enjoy the magic of being this amazing brain perched on this ancient body and the interactions between the two, between the body, the unconscious, and the brain, right?
	And I think that people who get massaged, it can release memories.
	The body can hold the memories in muscles.
	So I think that I just wanted to sort of reiterate that There is this perception, I'm not saying you're putting it forward, that logic is sort of Spock-like, that you become this brain in a tank, unfortunately attached to a messy biological thing, but I think that it's very much united.
	The conscious mind, the unconscious, and the body are a very powerful system, and you shouldn't live a life in any of them at the expense of the others, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, it does.
	Yeah. Yeah, I agree.
	They're all very, very much...
	Important centers to explore and to know the science on and the magic part of it.
	I mean, the magic that really is more on the scientific end that they really are.
	You know, science explores just amazing things that are not any less magical than made-up stuff that religions make up, you know, but mysterious.
	It's like there's a lot of mystery out there that we can really truly figure out, you know.
	Well, I started listening to you and I brought up the parenting stuff with my ex, who's now my ex, and I noticed that he was a major dictator with his son and I really wanted a son that wasn't mine.
	I really wanted to change things so that when Kaia came into the world, she had a healthy family and a healthy brother that was treated with respect so he would respect her, you know?
	Anyways, it really didn't work.
	It actually exacerbated the violence with my ex.
	And he became a lot more resentful.
	It took me down when I was pregnant, like pushed me down, yelled in my face, ripped my pajamas.
	I mean, it wasn't like hitting-punching type of abuse, but it was so traumatic.
	It's terrifying anyway. I'm so sorry.
	Particularly when you're in such a vulnerable state as being pregnant.
	I mean, it's completely terrifying.
	Yeah, and I really didn't, I didn't even know how I could leave.
	I just traded my old crappy Elantra that I'd taken around the country and it was all beat up.
	I traded that in for a brand new 09 Subaru that he had bought, so it was in his name.
	And he told me if I left, I couldn't take the car.
	And we lived in a beautiful little home, humble abode in Sugar House, which is the area where I live that's just an artsy community happening place.
	Like, everybody rides their bikes.
	Yeah, the phrase that just popped into my mind is living the dream.
	Unfortunately, it is a dream, right?
	So... Yeah, it was totally extreme and it's been a nightmare after she was born and he became so resentful of her, like of the attention I gave her and not respecting my motherly instincts,
	I guess, and would get just really upset and started actually, he started smoking pot, which was something he had quit before, right when we found out I was pregnant with her, he had quit smoking and smoking pot and he started Doing these things again, he started just practicing with his dad more and being gone more.
	And anything that I'd bring up about any logic, anything that I would, like when he would lie and I would point it out, like the logic, he would get so infuriated.
	Like violently infuriated he could not and it wasn't until I would react like so like when I would then cry or get emotional it's like he felt a lot better than when I was actually logical and and we didn't have any emotion but behind it because it was just logic you know like well clearly that was a lie and you know like I don't anyways I left him and It was kind of scary.
	He threatened to take 50-50 custody of her, and if I'm not feeling safe enough to be with him alone, there's no way in hell that I'm going to let my daughter be with him alone, you know?
	Right. In an environment where he's abusive to his son, and his son tried to hang his little brother.
	Sorry, I just want to make sure you said his son.
	Does that mean son by another woman?
	Yeah, yeah. His seven-year-old son has another brother who he's like, he's used to harm before.
	And it's the scariest thing to me is my daughter being alone with him.
	I would rather be with this abusive person than leave him and have her be with him.
	So I was actually going to like really, really leave, like leave the country or like go live in a different state.
	I was thinking of maybe Keene where A friend had pointed me in the direction of, but I also thought Hawaii was a lot less depressing if I have to leave my home.
	I can see that. Of the two, having gone too keen when it's not so warm, I hear that it's not so nice, so Hawaii might be a little bit more balmy.
	And look, I tell you, I mean, I live with a baby in a cold climate and sometimes it's like being on a space station with really vivid 3D on the windows because she doesn't want to go out because it's like minus 15.
	And, you know, if she doesn't want to go to the mall or the library or the play center or Chuck E. Cheese, I mean, you really are stuck at home.
	And so, yeah, I'm hungry to get outside.
	I'm starting to feel like Gollum at the base of the mountain sometimes here.
	So, yeah, warm would be good.
	I just sort of wanted to mention that.
	Yeah totally. It just doesn't have maybe quite the community that I would be looking for.
	I think more of the maybe new age kind of people there.
	Like I looked up meetup groups for like I think philosophy or atheist meetup groups and I can't remember specifically the group type that I looked up but I didn't see anything like that in Kauai, where I was looking to go.
	But anyhow, I learned about non-violent communication by Wes Bertrand.
	He's my brother's friend and I talked to him and I started to learn.
	I started listening to it.
	I went to Colorado, had an incident with my family.
	After I left her dad, I went to Colorado to kind of make up my mind as to where I was going to go while staying with my aunt and uncle for a little bit.
	And we got into a political debate.
	My uncle thought that me sneaking into hotels when I was younger to go swimming in their pools was like stealing, and he was really happy that I wasn't that kind of person anymore.
	And I mentioned that it's really interesting that you were so concerned with me being a thief just sneaking into a hotel swimming pool when you pay taxes, they're involved in the government corruption and theft that goes on there.
	Are you there? Hello?
	Sorry, go ahead. Sorry, I just muted because I was sitting down.
	I didn't want the creaks to distract you, but sorry, go ahead.
	I don't mean even a chair, I just mean of my ancient bones, but sorry, go ahead.
	Well, I made some more discovery about family and the corruption of family when I was with my really sweet aunt and uncle that I've always loved over the years.
	They started yelling and screaming at me because I kept bringing them back to the same logic, the gun in the room, that if you don't pay your taxes, it's going to be a gun to your head.
	I just kept using logic and they asked me more about how a society would operate without the government.
	And I said, well, I don't know because I haven't read the books, but there's a lot of books.
	Les has written a book. And I just was kind of pointing them in the direction if they were really curious where they could go to find out that information.
	And they really just wanted to yell.
	And when I'd asked them to stop and they didn't, I actually asked them to let me out of the car.
	And I would never think I would do that with family.
	So after leaving in a kind of abusive relationship to then being with my aunt and uncle, I was so frustrated, like, where do I go?
	I felt completely, like, as far as people that, you know, think more like, Like, logically and voluntarily.
	But anyways, after learning, I learned to talk to Wes that day and told him about that and he mentioned nonviolent communication and that you can actually look at what needs of theirs weren't being met like for security and that they're really concerned.
	If the government is really this corrupt thing, then it takes all their security, needs for security away, you know, if they were to realize that, you know, and see it for what it is.
	And so anyways, I started to see that there's, okay, there's a different way to operate and think, and it actually seems completely revolutionary, like, oh, Oh my god, where was this non-violent communication like a few weeks ago before I left my ex and would I have needed to, you know? If I had have known this.
	And I actually came back home and decided to stay in Utah rather than leave because I could possibly work it out with my ex rather than seeing him as the enemy imagery.
	I could understand his feelings and needs and be peaceful with him in that way, you know?
	And I listened to it but I wasn't able to fully empathize and follow through with it because I guess there's too many things that still...
	I would ask him for help with Kaya financially and he believes that I should go put her in daycare and that he shouldn't pay me anything and that if I want him to help that I should just send Kaya to be with him.
	You know? Right. And I suggested Maybe trying to co-parent where we meet up and I try and do some internet business and he can watch her while I'm there.
	But that never works because then he goes and smokes and leaves her unattended and also will play in the band until 4 in the morning so he's not really capable of having enough energy for her.
	Right. Eventually, like, I'll ask him to set dates with me.
	Anyways, it's just really still been really violent and I wasn't, I just listened to your thing about NBC and how sometimes it may seem, if something seems almost like so magically, like, It's just going to fix everything, that it might need to be thought out a little bit more?
	Well, yeah, look, I mean, I appreciate the aspects of nonviolent communication, and I certainly think that communication should be as peaceful as possible, you know, certainly to start with.
	I think there are some limitations, and I'm sure that people who are into it would agree.
	First of all, if somebody's on drugs, you can't reason with them because they're on drugs.
	So their brain chemistry is altered, their reasoning centers are altered, their capacity to process the consequences of choices are altered.
	As far as I understand it, you can't do counseling with people on drugs.
	You can't counsel an alcoholic while the alcoholic is still drinking.
	The person has to stop using the mind-altering substances in order to enter into any kind of improvement in their communication.
	So if he's exhausted, if he's smoking dope and so on, I don't see how nonviolent communication is going to be effective.
	So that would be sort of my first...
	I'm no expert, obviously.
	It takes a lot to become an expert on nonviolent communication.
	But all I've seen are anecdotes.
	And that's not to say that's all there is.
	But I've not heard of any big studies, and certainly people who are more into it than I am have not talked about the big studies about the long-term positive effects.
	So people who get involved in this stuff.
	Does their divorce rate lower significantly?
	Is their marital improvement happier over the long run?
	Because in the short run, you can surprise people into changing by being different yourself.
	So if you've had a longstanding conflict with someone and you change what you're doing, they have no choice but to adapt in the moment to what you're doing.
	And I think Rosenberg himself talks about this, that he was trying to deal with some tribes in Nigeria who kept killing each other.
	And he got them to admit that they had needs that weren't being met and he reports that they'd said, well, if we'd known how to talk like this before, we wouldn't have to kill each other.
	And he worked with them for quite some time and then he left and they fell right back to killing each other again.
	And I think then he changed his mind to believe that it's more of a multi-generational thing.
	In other words, there's no magic source in human relationships.
	There's no magic dust that makes a broken leg whole.
	And so you can get short-term changes in the way people deal with you By not being aggressive, right?
	Of course. I mean, I think that's fair and I think, you know, if I call up my hosting provider, I've had some issues with them and I call them up and I'm just yelling at them and read, not that I would ever do that, but if I was, I would be much less likely to get a positive response than if I'm sort of firm but positive and so on.
	So that kind of stuff, to try and get people on your side and enroll people into what it is you want to do, I think that stuff is all great, but there are limits.
	You can't, you know, the bomb in the brain stuff that I, if you want to check it out, fdrurl forward slash bib, it's some of the most important stuff I've ever done.
	I wish it would get more views, but I understand that it's very much swimming against the stream of what people prefer.
	I'm not saying you, but what people prefer in this world, which is the belief that there are some easy solutions.
	You know, with all due respect to Wes, if he believes that nonviolent communication can create anarchists out of statists over the long run, fantastic.
	What I want to see is for him to get a statist in to his show and use the techniques.
	I'd rather see them in action so that I can learn that way.
	You know, I'd rather see somebody who claims that they have these amazing abilities.
	I want to see them in action and I want to see them work over the long term.
	In other words, I want that person to stay a statist for two years.
	Those to me are the kind of tests because what I talk about in relationships is not nonviolent communication in that sense.
	All I talk about is not figure out the needs of others and figure out how the conversation can meet their unmet needs and so on.
	I think that's fine for a therapist to do.
	I don't think it's that appropriate in a personal relationship.
	The only thing that I focus on when I talk about relationships and how best is honesty, is personal honesty.
	Not trying to figure out what other people really need and how it can be provided.
	That to me is more salesmanship or more therapy.
	What I think is really important is personal honesty.
	Without jumping to conclusions that are unwarranted, right?
	So if somebody does something that makes you angry, you say, you did this and I got angry.
	And I don't know why exactly. It could be me, it could be you, but let's talk about it.
	So that to me is really the essence of philosophy in relationships.
	The first virtue is always honesty.
	Because if honesty is not present, no other virtues are possible.
	If you're lying to yourself, if you're letting other people lie to you, if you're lying to other people...
	No virtue is possible in the relationship because there is no relationship without the truth.
	So that's sort of my very brief nonviolent communication versus real-time relationships comparison.
	Don't jump out of your own skin in my opinion to try and figure out what other people need.
	Just be honest and direct about what your emotions and your experience are.
	And let the other person, of course, as much as possible, be honest and direct about their emotions and experience.
	But those, I think, are the big differences that I see, if that makes any sense or is even useful.
	Yeah, like if he's worthwhile, I guess, as far as if he really is concerned at all about being, I guess, Not angry or violent or fair-minded or something or concerning, I guess, virtuous or moral or anything like that.
	I guess he would pursue that on his own.
	And the idea of nonviolent communication is to maybe help give him more of a push or opportunity to see himself better, like his own needs that he may be disconnected from, which may be why he doesn't pursue Truth or virtue or any of that, you know? But look, if he's in a place where, and I'm just going about what you've told me, right?
	So correct me if I'm wrong, but if he's in a place, my friend, where he feels that smoking pot is an appropriate thing to do while being the parent in charge of a baby, then I don't think that the issue is whether you are into nonviolent communication or not.
	Does that sort of make any sense?
	Yeah, I mean, it's his own trauma living out or something like it.
	Well, you know, it could be, I mean, who wants to psychologize even third party, right?
	And this is something for, obviously, for you to figure out, though, obviously, there's a huge amount of scientific evidence to show that compulsive drug use is related to early child abuse and unprocessed early child abuse and so on.
	But the reality is, of course, that you can't be smoking pot while you're in charge of a baby.
	I mean, you just, you can't be. You can't be doing that.
	You can't be doing that. That is not responsible any more than you can drink I don't know.
	Like I just won't do that kind of stuff because who knows, right?
	Babies – you need quick reaction times with babies because they're always doing stuff.
	And if it even slows you down a little bit, that's not good.
	So obviously I hugely commend you for your desire to keep your precious, beautiful, wonderful, perfect daughter safe from irresponsibility and potential physicality or violence or aggression or any of those kinds of things.
	I think that's fantastic.
	I personally, this is just my opinion, so you can take it for whatever it's worth.
	I don't think that nonviolent communication would have been a magic pixie dust to turn around your now ex-husband's approach to this, right?
	So if he was physically aggressive to a pregnant woman, physically aggressive to anyone, but physically aggressive and frightening a pregnant woman… That is some deep, dark shit, my sister.
	That is some deep, dark stuff.
	And there's no magic pixie dust that can turn that kind of night into even a morning time, you know, to deal with that level of entitlement and violence.
	And look, I mean, it could be possible that somebody finds themselves doing that.
	Like you get into a fight and your husband finds himself, you said, ripping your pajamas or physically aggressing against you.
	And then what you do is you say, oh my god.
	Like you see yourself and you say, oh my god, what am I doing?
	And you're so horrified by what you're doing that you will stop at nothing to get help.
	You will stop at nothing to get help.
	And yet if you're like, I'm okay with that.
	You made me do it.
	It's perfectly valid. I'm going to smoke up again.
	Well, that's not something that you can fix.
	Yeah, that's more of what it is.
	It's more of the blaming it because I want him to change or whatever things like I was pointing out that he lied or whatever it was that makes them angry.
	It's never that he needs to get his own seek-after help for himself, which was what I needed to be able to stay in that relationship was for both of us to have therapy.
	And we started seeing a counselor, not the same as a therapist, But that was helping a little bit, although he didn't find it useful to continue funds in that direction.
	He had other priorities.
	And so now I'm just looking for one for me.
	And basically what I've been trying to figure out is like, okay, do NVC and stay in Salt Lake City or Basically, give up the one last thing I haven't given up yet, which is the hometown I live in.
	Salt Lake City is so gorgeous and beautiful and I've already given up everything else and mourned heavily over it and now I'm just wondering like if there's any chance that he might try and like he seems like he's not trying to get custody now because she's a baby and he can't really do anything with her as a baby.
	He's not interested in having me involved anyways.
	The chance that he might threaten down the road to to get the law involved or the courts and even if they said that he had to take her every other weekend I would leave the country and I would have to become a felon in that case because I'm responsible for her and I'm not going to send her off to somebody like that.
	Even if the law is like these people are putting guns to my head to force me to give my daughter up to the least likely person to be any good candidate for a babysitter, you know?
	Right. Look, the first thing I want to say, and look, nobody obviously can tell you what to do in this kind of situation, but I just want to reach out as much as I can and just tell you that I'm so, so sorry.
	That at a time when you should really be enjoying with calm and peace and serenity and a supportive, loving, attentive husband, you should be really basking in the joy of early motherhood and the trials and the tribulations and the challenges and the sleeplessness and all that kind of stuff.
	I'm so sorry that this is even coming up, that this is a kind of issue for you, that you have to think along these lines.
	I absolutely applaud you for keeping your child safe.
	That is obviously the most essential thing.
	But, oh my God, I mean, what a Terrible, terrible situation to have to be in.
	Particularly, you know, new moms need, you know, a Spartan army of support because it is such a draining and intense period to be...
	Is your baby relatively young?
	Yeah, she's nine months, almost nine months.
	Okay, so you're coming out of that a little bit.
	I mean, at least for us, I mean, the first six, seven months are just a complete blur of like we were just one big pile of flesh.
	It felt like, you know, just one big goo with like six arms and six legs.
	So I wish – I really wish that you had had that kind of peace as much as possible.
	But new moms in particular, they need so much support from everyone around them because those first six months, nine months, I mean they're just so intense and so draining and so exciting and so amazing.
	I just wanted to point out that I really wish you'd had that and not had to start thinking along these lines.
	I just really wanted to point that out because we sometimes, in the blur of stress management, we can forget just how tough things are.
	Thank you so much.
	I really could have benefited by knowing this Earlier on, though I'm really happy I have her, I really see importance now.
	People doing their self-work before, and I think I knew that in a way, being a pretty intelligent young person, and it made sense to do the self-work before having kids,
	but I definitely want my own childhood trauma to get the best Of me as far as who I chose as my partner and eventually had a child with and it's definitely part of the process of being a mother to reinvigorate that protector and then to see like even more so the harm that my mom did and make me understand really the impact of it.
	Like I could never imagine her feeling inconvenience to me Like, for me to be inconvenienced with her in any way or her energy.
	And as tired as I am, sometimes, like when I don't, you know, get sleep, she nurses a lot through the night still.
	And I'll, like, I give every bit, like, I just, I get every bit of enthusiasm that I can possibly conjure up to just being excited with her over life because she's so excited, you know?
	And just to think about my mom, it definitely brings a new life on that, you know?
	And that she didn't do that for me.
	And she very much was very abusive.
	And so anyways, my priority right now is finding a therapist besides figuring out my living where I want to be.
	Right, right. Look, I mean, I got to just share with you that what you're saying is just moving me enormously.
	I mean, your obvious love for and dedication to your daughter, I'm just picturing you sort of walking around with this bundle of tender, sleeping joy on your chest.
	I just wanted to tell you what a beautiful thing it is to hear and to picture, the depth of Beauty and ferocity in terms of protection and keeping her safe and keeping her nurtured and the degree to which you are confronting and overcoming your own prior traumas and the stance that you're taking to keep her environment secure and safe and nurturing and loving.
	I got a tear in my eye.
	It is just a beautiful, beautiful thing to hear.
	I don't want to make this about me or my show, but the fact that even to a small degree, what this show is doing, if it's moved you in that direction even one degree, you have a mighty, mighty heart.
	And I think that your daughter is incredibly lucky to have you as a mom.
	And I just wanted to tell you just what a beautiful thing it is that you're talking about here and what you're doing.
	Thank you so much, Beth.
	I really appreciate it.
	You appreciating that and seeing that and, you know, because it can be, it's definitely been really hard and I've definitely, like, at times just thought myself even thinking, oh, I could have done NBC and stayed with them and had my life still, but, like, I'm so happy now, though, just to think that she'll never have to see somebody, like, harm her mom because that's how women should be treated, you know?
	No, exactly. And however stressful it may be to get out of a relationship with a guy who is obviously not ready to be a father, to put it as nicely as we can, the stress levels of staying inside something like that is worse.
	I mean it's the best of a bad situation and I'm sorry that the situation is so bad.
	I'm incredibly...
	I hate to say proud of you because that sounds sort of condescending but I'm incredibly proud of the stand that you're taking with regards and I can really hear the love that you have for your daughter and she is lucky to be nestled against the wonderful hut that she's nestled against.
	I just really, really wanted to share that because we don't give enough praise I think to particularly new moms who are wrestling with this kind of stuff, particularly moms in your kind of situation which is so hard.
	Yeah, I feel it. Thanks.
	Thank you, Steph. Now, if you move, get just one or two bits of practical advice for whatever they're worth.
	If you move, I think it's really important that you make sure that wherever you're going has some kind of support area or group that you can be with.
	My experience of parenting, I'm not going to speak for my wife, but certainly my experience of parenting has been we're doing it without friends or family.
	That's just the way that philosophy shaves you down to the bare bones of truth and integrity.
	So we're doing it without extended family.
	We're doing it without... We're doing it without friends.
	And it's hard.
	And we have the privilege that we're both home.
	My wife works, but she's home for a good chunk of the day.
	And even then, it can be pretty intense.
	So wherever you're going, just make sure that ahead of time, ahead of time, please...
	Look into chat rooms.
	Talk to people. Call people around.
	If you move to Keene, there'll be lots of contacts.
	Wherever you look to go, find some place where when you get there, you have someone so that you're not just alone with your daughter because I think that can be tough.
	I think that could be really tough.
	So I think it's really, really important to try and develop as strong a support network ahead of time so that you have some place to slot yourself in, some place where you can go and hang with other moms or dads if they stay at home.
	Some place where you can have your wonderful daughter play with other kids.
	I think that's really, really important.
	I just want to sort of put that out there.
	Yeah, that's actually put one question in the chat room to ask people if they knew of any intentional type communities that involve atheists and voluntarists.
	That definitely seems ideal, something that's safe nurturing, but also on the very, very affordable side, you know, like I knew of co-ops and stuff in Seattle.
	I couched in one for a couple weeks when I was traveling before, but I don't know of a family community like that, and so more of people that have more of the family atmosphere.
	I know of a lot that just have kind of a young vibe, but I'm definitely going to put that out there and try and find it.
	If people know of that kind of stuff, if they can post those resources on the board, I think that would be great.
	So, yeah, I mean, look, I mean, I sort of wish there was some magic god brain that I could access that would give me some sort of sense of to tell you what to do.
	And obviously, such a thing does not exist.
	And what I really wanted to do with this was to listen to, to sympathize, and to certainly recognize and respect what you're doing to keep your daughter safe.
	Also to try and steer you away from the magical thinking of, if only I'd arranged my words differently, with a slightly different intention, things would have been magically reversed.
	I don't believe that that is the case.
	I think that human personality is extremely, extremely inert.
	It does change if you really get behind and push it, but it's like a massive boulder.
	Its tendency is to just stay wherever the hell it is, and it takes a lot, a lot of work, as you, of course, are figuring out, right?
	It takes a lot of work to move it around, and, you know, we understand that if somebody in our life is 400 pounds, and we say, you know, you kind of need to lose some weight, and the doctor says you kind of need to lose some weight, and here are your triglycerides, and here's your cholesterol, and here's your heart murmur, and Here's an x-ray of your knee cartilage buckling in and if they say, no, there's nothing wrong with me.
	You're fat and you weigh like 100 pounds or whatever, that this person is not going to lose weight.
	Now, if somebody says, you know, God, I can't even climb up the stairs.
	Every time I reach down to tie my shoes, I have to part my gut like Moses with the Red Sea and I can't even see my toes.
	I kick a soccer ball and my knees twinge.
	At some point, somebody is going to say, I really need to lose weight.
	Now, even if they say, I'm sick of this, I really need to lose weight, the vast majority of people do not lose weight and keep it off successfully.
	And so when you're dealing with dysfunction, I always find it's useful because the brain is very immaterial.
	It's very amorphous and people can mislead you about their intentions or they can mess with your head and so on.
	I like to translate the brain into something kind of physical and tangible.
	So if I have a dysfunctional person in my life, I sort of say, okay, well, if this person was 400 pounds and I pointed out that they were 400 pounds and really needed to lose some weight, if they denied that there was a problem, Then for me to hang out hoping they're going to lose weight is insane.
	It's understandable because we all have hope.
	And so we all want people to lose weight because it's a lot easier if people in our life become healthier and saner and more philosophical and wiser and all of that kind of good stuff.
	But if somebody in my life is really overweight and not only...
	Doesn't think that they're overweight but thinks that I'm overweight.
	Well, I'm not going to think that that person is going to change.
	Now, even if they get that they're overweight and are really committed to change, the odds of them changing in a sustainable, meaningful way are very small.
	I mean, this is true of just people who lose weight.
	80% of them gain it back within a year.
	And as somebody who recently lost 25 pounds, I guess, a year and a half or two years ago, it's, you know, something you have to keep maintaining.
	So... I don't think that the brain is any more malleable than the belly, so to speak, right?
	I don't think that brain cells are any more open to linguistic manipulation than fat cells, so to speak, right?
	I don't think that there's a nonviolent communication approach or even like an RTR approach.
	I don't guarantee that relationships will improve at all.
	I guarantee that if you're telling the truth, it's sort of a tautology.
	I guarantee that if you're telling the truth in a relationship, you will be telling the truth in the relationship and you will genuinely see what telling the truth in the relationship does for or to the relationship.
	So that's all I promise is honesty.
	I don't promise any effects whatsoever.
	I don't promise that the other person is going to react in a different way or a better way or a worse way.
	I simply say the only responsibility that you have is to be as honest as you know how in your relationships and to give people feedback on your genuine experience of them in the moment, which is sort of what I was doing earlier when you were sort of moving me to tears.
	And so when it comes to your ex or to your aunt or to your uncle or whatever, the brain is a very fixed organ.
	It is the organ that is the most fixed from birth to death.
	Our bones get brittle, our muscles atrophy, our skin sags, our hair gets brittle or flies away.
	But the brain, assuming no physical injury or deterioration like Alzheimer's, the personality for most people is pretty much identical at 85 as it was to At the age of five.
	This is the science that I've read and it seems to be very consistent.
	So people do gain weight and they do lose weight.
	But as far as personality changes go, if somebody genuinely recognizes that there's a problem, and if they do not project that problem or blame it on others but rather accept responsibility for it themselves, and if they then take practical and tangible and objective and empirical actions to change that, that.
	Not, well, I'm just going to work at it, I'm going to do a bit of journaling, I'm going to whatever, but goes to therapy and reads up and does the exercise books and, you know, like John Bradshaw has some self-help exercise books and Nathaniel Brandon, like actually does those and shows you, not like, hey, mommy, I did my homework, but shares with you the results and genuinely I did my homework, but shares with you the results and genuinely digs in to try and change, well, yes, then the personality, the potential can But that is the other person.
	You can point it out. You can encourage them.
	You can be there for them. But nobody can climb the mountain but us.
	You can't get pushed up the mountain.
	You can't get catapulted up the mountain.
	The mountain can't be dragged down to your level or other people's level.
	There is nobody. Who can climb the mountain but ourselves?
	And that is true for your ex-husband and it's true for you.
	I don't need to tell you that because you're climbing the mountain.
	Good way up, it sounds like.
	So I just wanted to give you that.
	Don't take the ownership for What happened in terms of if I'd said something different, things could have gone in a much different way.
	I mean, you did try therapy, which is, you know, good for you.
	I don't think that long-term couples should ever break up without therapy.
	So, I just wanted to mention, to give you some release in that.
	You can't change others, is sort of what I'm saying, but I guess I needed to say it in a very long-winded way.
	Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely a relief to hear that again.
	I mean, in that regard, it's not me who's going to be keeping Kaia from her dad.
	It's me exercising the protection that I need to, and if she wants to get on board, you know?
	With her or be involved in the healthiest way he can be, you know, then that is his decision.
	I often wonder, like, you know, I was thinking before, well, if I do the NBC and then she can see her dad and have, like, it would be me making that possible or not possible for her to have her dad in her life.
	And as concerned as I am for her to not have the dad, the father figure, I know logically it's better to not have it than to have something that could be, you know, potentially hazardous for her.
	Like, if he does take her alone and something happens for her, like, with the more kind of negligent parenting style, I guess, that he has that I, you know, like...
	He let his son go and play with our child molesting neighbors, like our neighbor that was a child molester.
	And that's just one example of the neglect in something that we were fighting over before I had, or right around the time I had her.
	Right. I know that she's not going to be, he has a judgment of things that isn't quite, it's more relativistic, like, oh, that person went through their life lesson they needed to learn, and he doesn't even know if the guy actually learned anything from molesting his daughters, and he doesn't even know that he learned, oh, that was a really bad thing, you know?
	Yeah, certainly in my experience, the people who are generally, not always, but the people who are most into relativism are the ones who feel the most need for forgiveness.
	But anyway, listen, I want to just address one last issue before I go.
	If you want to send me an email, I do have some listeners in Hawaii who I'm sure would be happy to chat with you about what it's like there.
	So just shoot me an email. I'd be happy to put you in touch with them.
	And thank you so much for sharing.
	And listen, I wish you the very best.
	And again, just your daughter is very lucky.
	And congratulations on what you're doing to keep her safe.
	Thank you so much, sir.
	You're very welcome. So somebody has – just before we end up here, and I'm sorry for those callers who didn't get a chance to call in.
	Sorry for those people.
	We've had some server issues.
	We have a new server. Please feel free to donate at freedomainradio.com forward slash donate if you'd like to help out with the copies – sorry, with the cost of the new server.
	And thank you so much to Bill and to James and to Phil who are – Doing technical wizardry that, to me, is like the flashes of lightning on a hill overhead as I hide in the grass of now growing technical incompetence and obsolescence.
	I used to be quite the wizard myself, but it is a long time since I picked up that particular spellbook.
	So thank you, everybody, so much for the work that you're doing to help get this server up and running to deal with the kind of traffic that it needs to handle.
	Holy crap! I mean, we...
	We're doing over 200 gigabytes of downloads a day, a day.
	And that is really quite astounding.
	We've probably hit six or seven terabytes of podcast downloads a month.
	That has nothing to do with all of the video sites that we're on.
	We're hitting four million video views.
	So it's really quite amazing.
	And thank you, everybody, all the participants and the supporters and the donators, whether it's time or money that you're providing in terms of helping to promote the show.
	Thank you, everybody, so much.
	Thank you to the people who have allowed me to pester them with interview questions.
	That's been wonderful as well.
	So let me just end up by addressing something that somebody brought up in the chat room.
	A wonderful listener put together a video called – let me just – I really should know this.
	But let me just double check on the title of the video.
	And he put together, I think, a wonderful video image.
	It's called A Short Story in Stop Motion from Free Domain Radio.
	And in it, it's some snippets from the podcast I did some time ago where I talk about how it can be very helpful to think about the impression that you're leaving on the world.
	When you die, it can help you to organize the way in which you make decisions about the present.
	And people are saying, and I think it's maybe more coming from objectivists, which I completely understand, where they're saying, well, look, thinking about how other people view you is a second-hander thing.
	You should live your life with integrity and so on and, in a sense, not care what other people think.
	I mean, I agree with that to some degree, that the first thing which informs our decisions should be principles.
	But, you know, principles, they don't help us a huge amount in life.
	Like, I don't often get tempted to steal a car and say, ah, property rights, they're really, really important.
	You know, that's not the kind of stuff that I really face in my life.
	Or, you know, oh, I'd really like to strangle this homeless guy.
	Oh, damn, UPB says that murder is wrong.
	So, this is not really things that I face.
	And so... When it comes to the aesthetics rather than the ethics of how I live my life, when it comes to the aesthetics, there is some importance in that.
	So there are so many ways that you can deliver A philosophical message, right?
	You can say nothing and write on a chalkboard with a video camera slowly and painfully.
	You can put on an Irish shamrock suit and dance a jig ferociously while screaming out your philosophical arguments at the top of your lungs.
	I'm sure that we could continue with this but you understand that there's an almost infinite number of ways in which you can present that which is valuable to the world.
	You can make your medicine taste like crap or you can try and add a little bit of sugar.
	So there's lots of ways that don't have anything particularly to do with ethics but have something to do with efficacy.
	And this comes out of my sales history, my sales background, and I believe that sales is a noble and positive profession.
	And so, yeah, I think it does matter.
	It does matter what impression you leave.
	You can be right and an asshole.
	And I certainly have been accused of being not only an asshole, but not right, which is certainly valid and I guess always possible.
	It does matter how you present yourself.
	It does matter what words you choose.
	It does matter whether you're open and honest.
	It does matter whether you're engaging.
	It does matter whether people are interested in and care about what you do.
	And the interesting thing is that a lot of people who've criticized that, and there have been some criticisms on the video, which I understand and I accept to some degree, but those people are there Because it's a beautifully made video, right?
	So the presentation is important.
	If it were just typed out on a webpage, it probably wouldn't garner quite as many views.
	So the way in which...
	I mean, I presented arguments similar to my big videos, the story of your enslavement or the Matrix video or Money is You or The Sunset of the State or those kinds of stuff.
	I presented those arguments, but...
	They didn't leave much impression in people's minds because they were sort of buried or scattered around.
	But those have probably contributed close to a million views to my website.
	Sorry, to the YouTube videos.
	And so the fact is that the presentation does matter.
	The fact that it's engaging and interesting and enjoyable to consume a philosophical argument in that kind of format does matter.
	And so I think it is important to have some concern about the way in which...
	We're perceived in the world.
	And that certainly doesn't mean that we must be a slave to other people's approval.
	Because the first thing is principles.
	But once you've solved the issue of principles, the question is, okay, so now what?
	And then for me, of course, I think if you have the ability and desire, then it's important to engage people in the search for truth and virtue and integrity.
	And how you present, in a false way, but how you present is not unimportant to that regard.
	So I think that it is important.
	And of course, if you're into philosophy and you want to make the world a better place, then it does matter.
	Whether people think about you when you're dead.
	Because, you know, I mean, people think about Socrates when, you know, 2500 years after he died.
	That means something.
	Now, it doesn't mean something good.
	When people think about Genghis Khan or they think about Hitler.
	And so it doesn't mean that it's necessarily good.
	But if you are, you know, it's like if you have a great product and nobody buys it, is it a great product?
	Well, it's really hard to say because there's no empirical evidence.
	If you have a great philosophy but nobody wants to listen to you, is it a great philosophy?
	Well, it's kind of hard to say.
	So I think that it's, you know, if a tree falls in the wood and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?
	Sort of an esoteric argument.
	So I think that it is the job, if you're calling and chosen and want to do it, it's the job of a philosopher or philosophically minded person to engage the world and challenge the world to do better, challenge the world to improve and to shun evil and to embrace virtue.
	And yeah, it does matter.
	It does matter, I think. And if you are going to gauge the success of what you're doing by its degree of acceptance, which I think anybody who's interested in communication needs to at least keep half an eye on, then I think it is important how you… And one of the ways of measuring is the degree to which people are listening.
	And I am an empiricist, and I am a peaceful market, free market kind of guy, which means that the customer is king, and yes, that is important to me.
	So I hope that that makes some kind of sense.
	And sorry for going over.
	I really appreciate people's patience, and thank you everybody for such a great show, and thank you as always to the listeners for calling in.

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