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March 20, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:57:24
1873 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show March 20 2011

Reaching out to the irrational, a naked dream, Libya, and the slow death of endless vengeance.

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All right. Well, hi, everybody.
It is the 20th of March 2011.
I hope you're doing very well. It's Devan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
And thank you for your patience as we work through the technical issues with our new Skype setup and new server and all those kinds of juicy things.
We will be working to continue to improve things to make it easier for you to listen.
But we now have a much easier call-in number and a much easier setup for those kinds of things.
So, if you'd like to chat, given that we've started a little bit late, I am all ears.
I'm going to do a show a little later today on Libya and some responses to my nuclear program.
But for now, let's go straight to the listeners.
And if you have questions or comments or issues, I'm more than happy to hear.
I think we're just waiting for him to call up.
Okay.
Open the pod, Bay Doors, Hal.
Thank you.
Okay, so... Open the pod bay doors.
Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Hey, man, Hal.
Okay. How's the sound?
Is it better now? It's fine. Okay.
So, basically, since the...
with the earthquakes and, like, when I see on Facebook or on Twitter or whatever, Pray for Japan, I get really annoyed.
And I'm kind of...
I'm ambivalent about it because...
Part of what my thought is, is like, if you're, you know, praying for Japan and thinking you're actually doing something, and you're not doing something else, like donating money or whatever, it's really, that's just stupid and ridiculous and annoying.
But at the same time, like, people in Japan seem to be Feeling comfort from the pray for Japan.
Like I've seen a lot of people in Japan, Japanese people, saying, thank you for thinking of us.
Thank you for your concern.
Thank you for having us in your thoughts.
I was just interested in hearing your thoughts on the whole praying for disasters, praying for Japan kind of thing.
Yeah, what you think about that?
I think that's a great question.
And I know what you mean.
When somebody says, you're in our thoughts, you're in our prayers, there is something that I think is a little bit nice about that.
So I think that there's two ways to look at the statements, you know, I'm praying for you.
The first is the one that I think you are legitimately annoyed by.
And that one is that...
God has punished you for some sort of misdeed and so now I'm praying for God to stop punishing you for your misdeeds or something like that.
Or God actively intervenes in human affairs and he's going to listen to me more than he's going to listen to you.
So I'm going to pray for God to not punish you or not do bad things or to do positive things.
That is insulting, of course, because it's like I'm on the in-club with God on the speed dial and you don't even have the number, so you have to have me intervene.
Of course, the thing that's also annoying about that...
If God can help, then of course, why didn't God just prevent the earthquake?
What did the Japanese do that was so bad?
The one thing I would agree with is hiding too much wasabi in various pieces of sushi that make bald white men cry.
That would be fairly high up on the list of, obviously, fairly secular sins that the Japanese would be guilty of.
So that is annoying.
It is annoying, for sure.
And it is the pretense of doing something, and it's very passive-aggressive.
And I'll pray for you is what people sometimes say when they can't defeat your arguments.
Like, so when religious people, I get this all the time, you know, like, well, you're an atheist who's going to burn in hell, but I'm praying for you.
It's like, okay, so that's just a passive way of saying, screw you, atheist, I can't answer your arguments, so I'm going to take this false moral high road.
So I think that is annoying.
I think that's legitimately annoying.
But there's another side to the phrase, I'll pray for you or I'm praying for you, which is basically to say that you're in my thoughts.
I care that bad things have happened to you.
I can't do a whole lot for whatever reason, but I can send you good wishes.
And, you know, I think that there are worse things in the world to hear than somebody sending you good wishes, if that makes any sense.
Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I think the point about the, if you're praying to God, then, like, is it the same God that let this happen?
Because it's pretty screwed up, otherwise, you know, if that's the case.
But I did miss the last point.
It just cut out a little bit.
Oh, just that people can give you good wishes and that's nice to hear.
It's like a get well card with a sort of supernatural bent.
Not the end of the world. Right, right.
So is there like...
I don't know.
When you see that kind of stuff, do you think about it in another way?
Like they're using the word pray, but they don't really mean that because pray doesn't work and what they're doing does seem to have some kind of effect.
I think that in the realm of religiosity there is a wide range of superstition.
There are people who are Insane, like genuinely mental.
You can see these, not to pick on India, but you see these sometimes, like these guys just sort of dancing up and down, jumping up and down, wild-eyed and matted-haired, and they're living in holes in the ground.
I mean, just people who've been so damaged by abuse and culture and superstition that their brains have just snapped like twigs under a car tire.
And those people, obviously, they may be in a psychotic state where they believe that their thoughts can affect reality and they may be genuinely insane, for want of a better phrase.
And those people, of course, are probably not very open to reason.
But there are much more secular people who, you know, they go to church, or they may not go to church that much.
Maybe they go to church a little bit, or maybe they go to church a lot, but they're pretty secular.
You know, they don't pray if their kid gets an infection.
They don't pray to God for healing.
They go see a doctor. And, you know, if their car gets a flat, they don't kneel down and pray for Jesus to kneel down and, you know, fix it.
So, I mean, they're very, very sort of secular, and they have a compartmentalized part of their mind which is more around social conformity and perhaps a respect for a certain kind of tradition or perhaps just not wanting to offend their parents.
Or something like that, where they just kind of go and they like the singing and, you know, maybe the priest has something useful to say in the sermon about jealousy or greed or avarice or anger or something like that.
Maybe there's some useful pseudo-philosophy or pseudo-self-knowledge that you can get out of that sort of stuff.
And I think that's, you know, There are worse things in the world.
I think that it's tragically limited by the projection into the supernatural, I mean that kind of self-knowledge.
But I think, remember that there's a wide range, and those people will all use the word prayer.
I think fundamentally, it is the privilege of the majority to be incredibly insensitive, right?
I mean, that's, I think, something really important to ponder.
It is the privilege of the majority to be incredibly insensitive.
So, given that there's, even in America, you know, 15% or more of non-believers in religion, and in Europe it's as high as 60 or 70% or more.
So, given that That there are so many non-believers in the world, not counting, of course, more than a few Chinese and more than a few Russians who grew up without religion, and of course more than a few Jews who are pretty secular and not religious.
So given that Christians, at least in the West, or certainly the United States, are in the majority, they can use the word prayer without feeling like it might be somewhat insensitive to the Beliefs, let's say, of those who aren't religious.
As an atheist, you can't really go up and reject prayer in public.
That is a very tough thing to do.
But as a Christian, you can go up and advocate prayer in public, and that's considered to be the norm.
So the majority doesn't have to be very sensitive to the feelings and perspectives and sensitivities of the minority.
And tragically, that does seem to be the case, pretty much.
So I think that's why the word prayer is used so often.
Right, right. Yeah, that kind of connects to something else related to this for me.
Like, when people say they're praying...
You know, for guidance or something, it's easy for me to just say, oh, you're just having an ecosystem conversation and you're talking to your parts or whatever, whatever language you want to use, you know?
It's like, yeah, that's something good to do.
And, like, I agree with, and I think you've said it before, that people that do that are actually probably a little bit more healthy than people who never have that kind of internal dialogue, even though there's kind of a Disconnection about what's really going on.
It does seem to be kind of a healthy approach to life.
But when they're doing it in regards to this...
Sorry. My point with that was that I have to change that word that they're saying.
I have to kind of associate it with a concept in my head where they don't have to do that.
Like, because I'm in the minority...
Because I'm in the minority, I have to be really clear, right?
If I'm saying...
If I want to express an idea, I can't say to them, I'm praying because they're going to associate that with God, so I have to be very clear.
I'm talking to another aspect of myself, another part of myself, in that kind of praying for guidance kind of thing.
But in this kind of...
In this situation where they're not talking to themselves when they're praying for Japan or praying for something external, I don't know.
Well, they certainly wouldn't put it that way for sure.
Well, they wouldn't put it that way.
They wouldn't say, I'm talking to an aspect of myself saying, I wish good things to Japan.
Because, I mean, that sounds kind of narcissistic, right?
Like, I'm talking to myself about good things that I want for other people.
It's like, well, why don't you just go do good things for other people, right?
Right. So do you think that's what they are doing?
They're just, like, praying for Japan is...
I'm trying to self-soothe about how painful it seems to be, but how helpless I am.
In reality, that's what's going on.
I think the important thing to remember about prayer is that although we see it in the present, it arose from the primitive prehistory of our species, right?
And the reason that we have technology and houses and cars and so on is because people wanted to control their environment.
They wanted to have an effect on their environment.
That's why we discovered fire and learned how to cook and wore clothing so that we could have some control.
Over our comfort levels and over our environment.
And that's where prayer comes from.
Now prayer, of course, the desire to have control over your environment significantly predates your actual ability to have control over your environment, right?
Right. So you want to be warm long before you figure out fire and clothing.
And that's why you figure out fire and clothing, is you want to be warm.
So there's a gap between wanting to control your environment and actually being able to control your environment, right?
Right, right, right. And that gap is very emotionally difficult, right?
I mean, we don't face a lot of that in the West.
I mean, we have some of it.
But we don't have a huge amount of that in the West.
We can do a lot to control our environment.
I mean, the last time that I was, like, really cold and couldn't do anything about it was, like, 25 years ago when I was working as a prospector and it was minus 60.
I mean, I was cold and couldn't do a whole lot about it.
But that's pretty rare.
You go inside, you turn the heat up, you put some socks on, you put on a sweater or something.
So, prayer, I think, arose from a desperate desire to have some control over an environmental issue.
And, of course, it has to do with being ill a lot, too, right?
Like, your kid gets sick, and up until, I think it was the late 19th century, if you took your kid, if you took anyone to a doctor, they were more likely to be harmed than helped by that doctor.
And so, if your kid got sick, and you'd have this desperate desire To have your kid not be sick, to have your kid be healthy.
And, of course, you can't, you know, when your kid gets sick, it's a little bit late just trying to figure out the germ theory of disease and develop antibiotics and all that.
You can't do it, right? And so you have this desperate desire to do something, to do something, anything, to feel like you have some control over the environment.
And so people turn to prayer.
That's the origin of prayer.
I can't imagine it would be anything particularly different.
And so I think that this just comes from the prehistory of the species when people didn't have much control.
Now, so I can understand why people turn to it.
I really can. But the problem is that it creates a class of people who are generally heavily invested In there not being solutions to things, right?
I mean, the degree to which the Catholic Church has opposed science, and in particular, medicine.
I mean, the Catholic Church opposed anesthesia, for heaven's sakes, because it was an interference with God's plan.
At least I'm sure they did until they needed anesthesia, and then they found themselves a magical, funny-hatted exemption.
But... It does create a class of people who are dependent upon problems not being solved.
And this is why, of course, the Catholic Church is still opposed to basic things like birth control, because that is a problem being solved.
And nobody's a more fervent prayer to God than a woman who doesn't want to be pregnant who thinks she might be so.
So I think it's important to remember that although we see prayer in the present, it certainly didn't arise in the present, and it's hard to imagine that it would arise in the present.
It's just something that is, you know, we've sort of dragged behind us like an appendix that unfortunately is still affecting far too many people.
Right.
Right.
Huh.
Oh, yeah.
I think that's...
that's That's really helpful.
And sorry, the last thing I'll say, just to finish up, I mean, and a lot of religious people will understand this, right?
So if you say, well, wait a sec, do you think that your prayers are going to, you know, have God put his ghostly thumb down and squish out the problems of the Japanese nuclear plants?
And they're going to say, well, no, I'm basically just sending good wishes.
I'm basically just thinking good thoughts and so on.
And you say, okay, well, I mean, you recognize that doesn't change anything in the world.
They say, well, but the Japanese people seem to appreciate it.
And you say, well, okay, I guess that's true, but it doesn't actually help them in any material way.
It helps them in a psychological way, which is not to be discounted, I'm sure, entirely.
But I think most people will say that, that they're not, you know, because everybody who's religious recognizes that If you're asking God to solve a problem, then by definition God could have prevented the problem and didn't, and they just don't want to go down that path because that is a well-worn slippery slope to agnosticism at the very least, if not atheism, at the outright.
So yeah, there's a lot of dodging around this question if questioned by a skeptic.
All right, all right, all right.
The thought I just had in regards to my own reaction to it is something I think I need to just think about on my own, but something I just wanted to let you know because you might remember this.
My response to people saying prayer and how I want to interact with them after I see I'm praying for Japan is similar to how I used to go swimming with trolls on the board.
It feels like the same feeling.
So, yeah, I just think that's kind of funny.
If only interacting with trolls were as dignified as swimming.
Yeah, right.
It's more like a monkey poo throwing contest with sandwiches involved.
But yeah, I think you're right.
Sorry, go ahead. I was just saying, I was going to say that It was swimming.
I didn't specify water.
That's right. That's right.
It's a scuba gear from my rectum to my mouth.
Sorry, what were you going to say?
Well, I mean, I agree with you that there is something provocative to anybody who's rational and philosophical to somebody saying, I'm praying for the people in Japan.
Because, of course, there is the assumption that you are religious.
And that is a pretty rude assumption.
I mean, I just saw this scrolling underneath the Fox thing the other day.
I apologize, but Fox was on.
I just wanted to get a bit of news about Japan.
And I think some Jewish woman in Congress was complaining that the word Jesus Christ was used a lot in a Christian ceremony.
And, of course, they believe, I think, that he was a prophet, but certainly not the Son of God.
And so we're told to have all of this sensitivity, and sensitivity to the beliefs of others, and to some degree that does go the way of atheism, right, in that some of the more explicit religious stuff is taken out of some public ceremonies and so on,
but it is It shows a kind of parochial small-mindedness to go about trumpeting and blaring your religiosity without thinking perhaps for a moment that other people may not feel the same way, may not have the same beliefs.
Right. And so that's just one level.
I mean, there's many, many levels of which it's kind of annoying.
And the way to find that out is just to ask and say, okay, well, do you think that God is going to listen to your prayer and do something to intervene in Japan?
And that short-circuits a lot of people because it instantly brings up all of these problems with religiosity.
That God can intervene, that God does intervene, but God is so passive, right?
God is such a lazy bum.
God is so ethically neutral that he won't intervene unless a whole bunch of people nag him to, right?
I mean, that's really not...
You know, if it's right for God to intervene in Japan, then he should be way ahead of...
Well, first of all, he should prevent it, but let's say he's napping and he wakes up.
Then he shouldn't need a whole bunch of people to pray for him To do good things for Japan, because he's the best and most good and most powerful entity in the universe, and therefore he shouldn't need a whole bunch of people saying, God, come on, get off the couch, take out the garbage and fix Japan, come on! You know, he shouldn't really need that.
And so there is something annoying about people feeling that they need to get a big ethereal prayer stick and poke God in some sensitive spot so he'll finally, you know, put down the Xbox, roll off the couch and do some of his damn chores.
Right. And, I mean, even if for whatever reason it's right that praying to God after an event, you know, he needs the encouragement or something, let's say.
Well then, why aren't you encouraging before the event?
Like, why aren't you constantly praying for the whole world so that there's no earthquakes or tsunamis or whatever?
It's bullshit, but yeah.
Right. Now, but the only other thing that we should, I see, leave ourselves open to is that, and this would be fairly convincing evidence of something unusual, is that if anybody and everybody who was negatively affected by the Japanese quake turned out to be the member of the same Satanist cult, that would be pretty interesting.
Again, not holding my breath in any way, shape, or form, but that's something to keep an eye out for.
Right, right. Then clearly it would be divine punishment and so on.
Now, do you have, since you are interested, of course, very closely connected to Japan yourself, do you have suggestions of what people can do and where they can go to get the best aid to Japan?
Well, I mean, personally, I've Donated to the Red Cross, but I haven't found anything that useful, because from what I've gathered, actually, the Japanese government is kind of trying to stop too much foreign help, and I'm not sure why.
But, yeah, I don't have any...
Novel suggestions other than Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, whatever charity you think is a good one to go with.
If I was there, I would I think I'd probably want to go up there and volunteer personally, but if I'm not, I don't know.
All right. Well, thank you so much.
And of course, I think that our good wishes do go out to the people of Japan.
Not that we think it changes anything in particular.
If you want to donate, the Red Cross, I think, is a pretty good place.
To do it. And it is tragic.
I mean, of course, they're sitting on 20 plus years of economic stagnation.
And this, of course, I think the death toll is not insignificant.
And, of course, the financial toll is going into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
So it is a real challenge.
And, you know, certainly it is.
I was watching some of this stuff the other day just with huge sympathy and also huge admiration for the degree to which the Japanese people are pulling together and the degree to which, of course, there's no looting and there's, you know, spontaneous help organizations are being set up and people are helping each other enormously.
Exactly as, of course, anarchic theory would predict.
Not that I want to sort of turn it into a proof of anarchism.
I don't want to sort of exploit the Even at that distant level they don't exploit the tragedy, but there is a huge amount of spontaneous organization that is occurring that is not government directed, that is people helping each other, which is of course exactly what any rational theorist in this area would expect.
Yeah, and of course the Japanese government is doing everything in their power to try and make the pain and suffering last as long as possible by They printed a whole bunch of money right after this happened to stabilize the financial market.
They are talking about raising the taxes to help, you know, so that they can send more help is what they're saying, of course, but it's just bullshit.
And there's a lot of Japanese people calling for, like, the people affected by this are, you know, immune to all taxes for five years.
There's just... They would...
But, of course, the government won't hear anything about it, but...
That is not surprising, but frustrating.
Well, and then what will happen is you'll need a huge ministry to figure out who has and hasn't been affected by the crisis, which will cost a huge amount of money, and people will try and get in and, quote, cheat.
I mean, that's not going to happen, but I think it is tragic, I think, that WikiLeaks predicted some of these problems.
I think that there were falsified safety reports in the past.
with regards to these plants and I mean again this is not to say I mean what on earth do I know right I mean a tsunami and a massive earthquake I think that's a little bit beyond what some falsified safety reports or inspection reports would solve but it is yeah it is tragic and it is scary and I you know the one thing I do hope that people get out of this in the long run it's not likely to happen in the short run the one thing that I do hope that people get out of this is that these problems are not being solved by governments and people are taking care of each other.
I hope that we, just as a species, I hope that we can generate a little bit more love and trust for each other and a little bit less fear horizontally.
Because fear horizontally leads to allegiance vertically in the political hierarchy.
And it really is only when we learn to trust each other and expect the best from each other, and rationally so, in so many situations.
People do become, I think, very heroic and very positive in these kinds of crises.
And it is always the dream of any ethicist that the amount of cooperation And goodwill and positivity can continue outside of a crisis.
I think there's a 9-12 society in the U.S. that looks back to the amount of cooperation and help and goodwill and the sort of brotherhood, sisterhood stuff that was going on in the U.S. after 9-11 and try and find a way to recapture that.
I think that is an important feeling, not that we sort of want crises to make us do the right thing or to recognize our common humanity, but there is this I think that most people interested in bettering the human condition feel that if only we could maintain the amount of cooperation and positivity and peace that occurs during a tragedy or a disaster,
and even during a celebration when people are out in the streets Having a great time and not, you know, say, setting fire to police cars, but, you know, drinking and dancing and perhaps even making love in out-of-the-way places, that that is a kind of beautiful thing.
And it is a thought.
It's a pretty illusory thought at the moment, but it's nice to see that it's possible.
And, of course, we're working to create situations and circumstances where it can be more sustainable.
Yeah, yeah. Well, there's someone else in the room who has another question, and I'm feeling pretty...
So thanks for that.
That was very helpful to have your thoughts.
You're welcome. It's a great question.
Thanks. All right.
While we're just waiting for the next caller, we've got a call in the chat room.
So let me just ask about that.
Hey, Steph, would you say that aculturality would be the ultimate cultural state of a free society?
Would you agree that eventually what is now termed a Western culture will be the ultimate shape of a free society?
A capitalist atheist disregarding to ethnicity rather than proud of it is encouraged by many statists and semi-statist institutions, such as the UN and non-governmental organizations that talk about people's determination.
Where individual creativity is encouraged rather than any sort of formally ethnic categories.
A society where people don't go to eat Chinese, but...
And then it sort of runs out, I think.
And I am not a fan of culture.
I am not a fan of culture at all.
Culture, as people who've listened to the show for a while know, is philosophically defined as error or inconsequentiality, right?
I do think that expressions of human joy will take local form for some time, right?
So there'll be, you know, I don't know, Turkish dances and Greek dances and Icelandic dances.
And so I think those sort of things will continue.
But I don't think that people will believe in any significant way that it's better than some other dance or something like that.
I think that there will be some local styles of music, Chinese opera versus other kinds of opera.
And so I think those kinds of things will occur.
But I don't believe at all that there will be this kind of tribal loyalty to distinctly local customs and certainly to distinctly local ethics.
So if you want to look at The future of society, what I would suggest is you look at science, right?
So a scientist, or maybe even you can look more closely at mathematics.
If you look at an Indian mathematician and an English mathematician, even if they don't speak the same language, they can do a fair amount of work together just looking at numbers and equations.
And there is no Indian mathematics, there's no British mathematics, there's no Western mathematics or Eastern physics.
And so there may still be local preferences and customs.
There may be little local flourishes in how to write certain things.
But science is a universal language.
Science and mathematics, of course, in particular, is a universal language.
And there are some local customs, but they are primarily language-based in the scientific communities.
But science itself is universal, and it's accepted as universal.
And if it's not universal, well, it's damn well not science.
It's postmodernism.
So I would say that if you want to look at the future of human society, look at where science is at now and, you know, go a little bit further than that, and that's where you'll see.
So there will be no particular conception that ethics would be different in different locations.
There would be no particular belief or acceptance that ethics would be different from person to person.
And somebody who said, like in a free society in the future, anybody who says, we need a group of people with exclusive moral rights in order to make society secure and take care of the poor and protect the whatever, whatever.
It would be pretty much viewed as someone coming up and saying, at a physics conference, we need to elect a small number of people to be immune to gravity so that we can harvest clouds and produce better weather.
I mean, such a person would be viewed as either joking or crazy.
And if they persisted, then they would be viewed as crazy.
And so the idea that we would promote a small group of individuals To have opposing moral capabilities from everyone else, like the ability to initiate force rather than non-initiation of force.
I mean, it's completely accepted right now, of course, but the idea that we're going to promote this in the future or that this would be accepted in the future, it would just be viewed as crazy.
And children would completely understand that it was crazy.
I mean, if you go up to your average five-year-old and say, let's both concentrate and make Billy over there float into the air and be immune to gravity, she'll look at you like, what?
And the idea that we should both vote and make somebody else immune or have the opposite moral laws, then everyone else would be viewed as kind of ridiculous and silly and joking, and if the joke persisted, you know, crazy.
So that's, I think, the way to look at how things are going to go in the future.
Fortunately, we have some examples now, and we know how well it works.
Or medicine, of course. Medicine, right?
I mean, the same sort of thing. Actually, medicine's not perfect because there are some regional differences in susceptibility to ailments.
It's going to be closer to mathematics or physics.
All right. Do we have another caller?
We have another hour in the show.
Hello? Hello. Hi!
Oh, so I just want to put it out there that I'm like super nervous.
Excellent. I will try not to be super scary.
For once. Well, I had a dream about a week ago and I was wondering if you'd be willing to take a shot at the deeper meanings.
Is this, I think you emailed me one?
Yeah. Could you, I'm sorry, I don't have my email here, just handy, could you just whisper it to me in the chat room if you're there?
Sure.
All right.
Okay.
All right.
Do you mind if I read it just because your sound's a little...
No, please. Okay.
I will, of course, read it as a young and highly attractive woman.
So let me just get into character here and shift my man boobs around.
Okay. Sorry, just one sec.
I just have to wait for the chat room to go back up.
Oh, sorry. While I'm waiting for this, somebody did ask me last week whether or not Isabella had shown any more indications of UPB. And I just wanted to mention that she has, but pretty much only in the negative.
In other words, She has shown that she completely understands UPB, but only through omission.
So, for instance, if I've sort of been playing with her for an hour or so and then I need to change her diaper, and then I say, well, look, we've been doing what you want for the last hour.
Is it okay if we go and do what I need to do, which is to change her diaper?
She will immediately change the topic.
So she recognizes UPB in that she's steering away from it as madly as possible sometimes.
Yeah. And so that is very interesting.
And she's experimenting with lying at the moment, which I think is very cool and interesting and helpful.
I think I definitely want her to have that capacity.
And so she is definitely able to...
To recognize that absence or to recognize UPB in that kind of way.
So I just wanted to mention that she is, in a sense, you can see UPB in the same way that you can see how a body fell based on the chalk outline after the body's been taken away.
So I just want to sort of mention that.
I'm sorry, perhaps you can just read it while I'm trying to gather it here.
Sure. Okay.
Okay, so I had just come home to what looked like my parents' house from a challenging but rewarding day at work, and it had been a payday.
I was working for the same boss I have now, but my job was to walk around the city in the rain with my boss and some guy instead of babysitting, which I actually do in real life.
It was raining outside and I was enjoying walking around in the warm weather in the rain.
Then I was home in my old living room, which looked like my old living room, my parents' house.
I had to use the bathroom really bad since I had to go in real life.
Sorry, I'm trying to...
Okay, so I took all my clothes off from the waist down and just, like, dropped them on the living room floor.
And I started running up to my parents' bathroom, even though that was farther away than another bathroom on the way, because I preferred that bathroom.
I was worried, though, as I was running through the house half-naked that someone would come home and catch me.
But I got to the bathroom in time, even though it was, like, sort of like slow run, you know, when that happens, where, like, you can't move as quickly as you want to.
I got to the bathroom, I locked the door, started going to the bathroom, and then I heard my mom enter the house.
And then she was yelling like, hello, anyone home?
And I didn't answer because I was all the way upstairs and I didn't want to just yell.
Then I heard more yelling and I realized that I was witnessing an argument between her and I, but I wasn't like saying anything.
I was just overhearing myself and her arguing.
And I was yelling, you don't understand, I'm not yelling, I'm just upstairs.
And she said...
Don't yell at me, Em!
And then she was furious, so she started to run upstairs, like, towards me.
And I was, like, I was so scared in the street.
I remember it was just, like, the scariest dream I've had in a while.
And she was running towards the bathroom.
I double-checked to make sure the door was locked so she couldn't come in and get me.
And then I, like, was going—I was finished going to the bathroom, so I, like, squatted down in the corner to, like, hide and curl up on a ball.
And I was whimpering in my dream and I heard myself whimpering as I woke up because soon after this someone bumped me and I woke up.
So my mom came to the bathroom door and she looked in a window that was at the top of the door, which doesn't exist in real life.
And she just was peering into the window and she smiled real creepily as if to say, I know you're wrong.
I give you, like, she used to say that stuff in real life when I did something that saw with her.
So I just was whimpering and crying and terrified in the corner.
And then I started thinking, like, okay, where can I go to get out of this house because she's awful?
So I was going through my friends, my friends now.
I was like, okay, well, I could go to so-and-so's house.
Oh, but he's still with his parents.
Oh, I could go to his house. No, he's still with his parents.
So I felt really discouraged.
Thinking about getting out of that situation.
And that was the dream. I see.
I see. That's good.
Very interesting. Do you remember what was...
If you could just paste it into the chat room, that'd be great.
Do you remember what was happening the day before the stream?
Yeah, I wrote that down because I might ask that.
Okay, so the day before...
Well, I had work the day before.
With the same boss that was in the dream and I felt particularly sad leaving work that day because it was kind of a rushed leave leaving these two babies.
They're 11 months now and I just get sad leaving in general so the anxiety around the leaving made it worse so I remember feeling particularly sad about that and then I hung out with friends that night I was working through some more like leaving slash sadness, anxiety about, you know, leaving people I really care about.
It's sometimes difficult. With my boyfriend, I was working through that that day.
And then also someone else, a friend had decided, like she had just finished packing up her house.
That was really significant and I found out about that.
And then another friend that same day decided to move out of his house.
And then also I participated in a psych study at school that asked about my family's history with psychosis.
Those are the significant things I can remember.
All right, so quite a lot.
Yeah. All right.
So you're working for the same bus you have now.
Your job is to walk around the city in the rain with her and some man instead of taking care of her babies at work.
What does her babies at work mean?
Well, normally, in real life, I take care of her babies.
I don't walk around the city with her for, you know, so...
Okay, while she's at work.
Okay, it's raining outside. You're enjoying walking around in the warm weather and rain.
Then I was home in my old living room, which looked like my living room.
So there's a blend between the one you grew up in and the one you're living in right now?
No, that's unclear. It looked like my parents' living room.
Okay, got it. Okay. I had to use the bathroom really badly since I had to in real life.
You mean while you were sleeping? Yeah.
So I took off my clothes from the waist down in the living room and ran up to my parents' bathroom, which was not the closest bathroom even though I had to use the bathroom badly.
And you preferred their bathroom in real life.
Yeah. That's interesting.
Now, that to me, and just because we're toilet training Izzy at the moment, and you're probably aware of this, that's how babies, in a sense, are sort of quote, or toddlers, how they go to the bathroom, right? Is you take their pants off and their diaper off and you sit them on the toilet, right?
Yeah. So that, I think, is an indication of sort of a very early time in your life.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah. Alright.
I was worried as I ran up to the bathroom that someone would come home and catch me naked.
Well, not quite naked, right? Just from the waist down?
I'm sorry, what? You're not fully naked.
You're just naked from the waist down in the dream, right?
Yeah. And if it were my dream, next I'd be giving a libertarian presentation with no pants on that I hadn't prepared for.
Anyway, so let's see.
I ran up to the bathroom. I went into the bathroom, locked the door, sat down, and heard my mom come home.
She yelled, hello. I didn't answer because I was all the way upstairs and didn't want to yell.
Then I heard more yelling.
Yeah, you know what just popped into my head?
And tell me if this makes any sense.
In families where there are tempers, I find that it's almost like if you're at opposite ends of the house and you have to yell at each other, it's almost like you end up angry even though you don't start off that way just because you're yelling.
Does that make any sense? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, that happens a lot.
Right. People say, well, why are you yelling at me?
It's like, well, I'm not yelling at you.
You're just far away, right?
I was talking to someone a while back about his family being mad at him because he had headphones on and they were trying to get his attention.
He was sort of outside and he had headphones on.
And by the time they got his attention, everybody was furious.
And it's like, but I couldn't hear you.
I had headphones on, you know. But it's sort of like it escalates.
Like people think you're ignoring them when you're just far away or you just have headphones on or whatever, right?
Yeah. All right.
So, you heard more yelling and realized I was hearing an argument between her and I. That I can't quite understand.
So you realize you're hearing an argument between your mother and yourself, but you're not there, right?
Yeah. So, help me understand that.
Well, okay, so I was sitting there and I was like, I'm going to yell because I don't want to get her angry, right?
But then all of a sudden, like, my voice is yelling.
It wasn't coming from me.
It was like I was in the bathroom and it was as if there was a copy of me standing outside the door yelling to her and she was answering that copy of me.
So, like, the argument happened even though I deliberately decided not to yell.
Alright, and then you yell.
You don't understand. I'm not yelling at you.
I'm just upstairs. No, that was actually...
That was the argument that I heard.
Oh, interesting. Okay.
So it's like you have a sort of twin who's downstairs talking to your mom.
Yeah. So furious, she starts to run upstairs.
I was panicked. She was running towards the bathroom.
I double-checked to make sure the door to the bathroom was locked, squatted down to the corner of the room to hide.
I mean, it's a bathroom.
You can't hide, right? Yeah.
I just, like, went away from the door.
Right. And I mean, it's an exquisitely vulnerable position, right?
You've got no pants, no underwear, no shoes, no socks.
And yeah, I mean, it's a very vulnerable position, right?
Yeah. Well, tell me what do you think it's about?
Let's have you do the show.
Well, the first thing that came to my mind after I woke up was that it was like A lot of times dreams are pretty cryptic.
This one was really familiar.
I was never chased around my house naked, but we were hit on the butt a lot.
And the humiliation of that was really similar to the humiliation in the dream.
And that fear was the exact same.
The moment you realize that they're angry at you and they're going to do something about it, it was exactly the same.
It's just, like, you're pushing it because you're angry at them, but then, like, you push it so far that they just blow up, and then you know, like, you're gonna get hit, and, like, the fear, like, when I heard her yelling in the dream was the exact same as, like, crap, she just got so angry she's gonna come, like, attack me.
Right. Right.
Now, something that's quite different here, though, in the dream, which is that you establish A boundary in the dream.
The locked door? Right.
Yeah. And that changes your mom's behavior in the dream, right?
Yeah. Go on.
Ugh. You got it, right?
Yeah, I think so.
When, yeah, like when I locked the door, I guess almost two years ago, when I said like, hey, stop, like, leave me alone.
Stop talking to me for a bit.
I want to be on my own.
And that was finally enforceable through the police and just running away and having enough life experience to get a job.
Well, at first my dad yelled over email, and then they got really nice.
Recently I got an email from my dad, which I didn't read before the dream, but it was super nice to the point that I started missing the good parts of him.
It's been mostly, like, surface-level sweet emails since the defu.
Right. But the attitude hasn't changed.
Like, I'm still the one who's doing something wrong.
They're waiting for me to come back.
Stuff like this. Right, right, right.
So, when you have this barrier, right, you lock this door, your mom is, she changes her tactics, right, so she's no longer physically aggressive or hitting you, but she is, it seems to me, she takes a standpoint of moral superiority, right?
Yeah. Like a, I forgive you.
Yeah. In other words, it goes from aggressive to passive-aggressive, if that makes any sense.
Yeah. That actually all happened when I was, like, after she would get angry and either, like, hate me or just, when I was older, just guilt me to no end.
After that whole initial, like, frontal attack...
I would cry for a long time and then she would come back and she would be like, when I was older, she would be like, it's okay, just say you're sorry, I forgive you, I still love you.
That was really, really common.
Right. Okay, so I think the dream is, at least your unconscious, is sort of saying something like, you have boundaries now that you didn't have in the past, and the boundaries have changed your mother's strategy or behavior, if that makes any sense. Yeah, yeah.
But the challenge is, of course, if you have the sort of history of abusive relationships from your parents, the challenge is we don't want a change of strategy, right?
We don't want strategies anymore.
I don't want to switch from being hit to being manipulated.
That is not progress.
At least I would argue that that's not particularly progress.
What I want is an honest examination of wrongs that were done in the past, an honest acceptance of responsibility on the part of the parents, an honest commitment to change, and hopefully some therapy for the parents and some way of figuring out how all of these terrible things came to pass and so on.
A non-defensive, non-aggressive, non-manipulative, non-moralizing approach to trying to solve the problems within the family.
And that is, I mean, it's rare.
It certainly has happened. And at least according to people who've talked to me or who've talked on the message board, it has happened.
But tragically, it's very rare.
And certainly, I think your dream does not seem to indicate that it's imminent.
And of course, dreams aren't oracles, right?
But at least that's where I think the dream is at the moment, if that makes any sense.
I think that's where your dream is saying things are at the moment.
Whether that's true or not, who knows, right?
Because that's something that you have to sort of process yourself.
But I think the dream is saying that the boundaries that you've set up are changing strategies but not fundamentals.
I'm just having trouble understanding that the dream is saying...
I heard the dream is saying that changing strategies is not fundamental.
No, sorry, is that if your parents change their strategies, that's not the same as changing their fundamental approach?
Yeah, I totally get that, yeah.
And you said that you got an email from your dad before the dream, right?
Let me just check to see.
I don't think I read it before the dream, but it came like...
Well, whether you read it or not is...
Yeah, it came like two days before or something.
Right, so an interesting thing to examine would be the degree to which your dream accurately predicted the contents of your father's email.
Right. Yeah.
And probably was more important than the other things you were talking about.
Yeah, I think it was very accurate.
Right. And so, yeah, so I think that having people approach you in a sort of, quote, nicer way But without accepting any responsibility for misdeeds or problematic behavior or abusive behavior in the past is not the kind of progress that we all kind of want from these kinds of situations,
right? Right.
Oh, wow, yeah. That's amazing because when I got his email, there was even a glimpse for the first time ever that was like, oh, maybe.
You know, and oh my god, now I get it.
Go on. Sorry, go on.
Oh, like, maybe...
Maybe they might get it.
Like, there was a little hope that came up that I hadn't felt in a while.
But it didn't happen. Yeah, I would say, and again, you know, this is your family, your situation, and certainly, I mean, no one can tell anyone else what to do in these kinds of situations, but I would say that when people get it, and look, you've listened to this show before, so you know when I've had conversations with people who get it, or even when I get something in the middle of a solo cast, There is a very strong emotional current when someone gets it.
You can't miss it, so to speak, right?
Yeah. It's not something you have to sort of search around for?
Yeah. You know, it's sort of like a fast-forwarded sunrise.
It's not like blink and you miss it or let's see that one more time and look at the details.
It's not like, you know, those pictures you used to get on menus when you were kids, like spot the differences between these two pictures and you have to kind of really look and, you know, one buckle is filled in and one buckle is not filled in and all that sort of stuff.
Right, right. It's not that detailed, at least I don't think it's not that detailed or that complicated.
It tends to be something that's just like, wow, okay, sunrise, you know?
And that doesn't mean everything's solved, but it means that there is room for progress.
There is momentum.
There is a potential that's really there.
And it's almost like you can't miss that sort of stuff, I think.
Yeah, yeah. Well, that makes total sense.
So I hope that, and is there anything else?
I mean, dreams, you could go on and on.
I just want to sort of make sure that we get to where I think the dream was pointing you.
Yeah, that was clear. Fantastic, fantastic.
I did wonder if you had a thought on the very last part of the thought about going to my friend's house, but I realized like they were with their parents as well.
You mean in the dream you were younger and your friends were with their parents as well?
No, I was thinking of my friends now.
Like, can I go to current friend number one's house?
No, he's with his parents.
I don't want to be in that situation either.
I couldn't think of a friend that was not with their foo.
Or with a healthy family, right?
Yeah. Right.
I don't know. I'm just trying to mull it over.
Most of my friends are not in healthy families or they just eat foods, you know?
Right, right. Well, I think that the dream would be pointing you back to a susceptibility to this kind of manipulation that would have been part of your life after the physical abuse had stopped, but before you had more adult options.
Right, right. So, yeah, I think the dream is saying that that's where your susceptibility to this may be coming from, to that particular time in your life.
Right. Cool. Thanks.
All right. Well, thank you very much.
A very, very interesting dream.
Thank you. Here's hoping that one day you get the email that they get it.
And so, you know, sometimes it's hard to keep up hope, but it certainly has happened in other families.
So let's keep whatever fingers we can crossed.
All right. I think we have time for another caller, if we have anybody.
I haven't seen anything. I've just been keeping half an eye on the chat room.
I haven't seen anything in the chat room, but I am more than happy to hear from other callers.
Somebody has asked, what do you find is the best way to segue from a policy-based debate to a morality-based debate?
Well, I think you can ask the blunt question.
And the blunt question is, do you want this policy to achieve a particular end, or do you think it comes from a place of moral idealism?
I think that's a really important question because a lot of people will want policies that they believe will achieve a good end.
So for instance, to say somebody says, I think that the minimum wage should be raised so that poor people have more money.
Well, gosh, who wouldn't want to have poor people having more money?
I think that would be great. I mean, as long as it's real money and not fake money.
And so if somebody says, well, I think the minimum wage should be raised because I want poor people to have more money, they say, okay, well, is it because you just want poor people to have more money, or is it that you think that there's some moral ideal that raising the minimum wage conforms to?
So that would be my particular approach to it.
And if they say, well, I just want to achieve a particular end, then say, okay, then it doesn't have anything to do with morality in particular.
It's just you want a particular end, and so let's just make sure that we're not talking about ethics.
And if they say, well, no, it's good to help the poor, it's virtuous, and so on, then you can ask them to define ethics.
What virtue is and then I think you can get a positive contribution going.
Of course, I mean the number of people who can correctly or usefully talk about virtue or ethics or morality or so on in any kind of consistent way Very, very few people in the world can do that.
And so what will generally happen is people will respond in a pretty tense way because they want to achieve something good in the world, but they don't know what virtue is.
They don't know what philosophy really says in a useful way about goodness and correctness and wisdom and achieving the right things in the right way and so on.
And so it's like people really, really want to get across a chasm, you know, like Eiffel Knievel at the age of five in his stroller saying, gee, this stroller really needs a jetpack so we can get across the Grand Canyon.
And so people are looking across this canyon to the good life, to a virtuous life, to a happy life, to a peaceful life, to a good world, a moral world.
They're looking across this deep canyon to a moral world.
And everybody wants to flap their arms and fly over, and everybody wants to will themselves over, and everybody wants to imagine that if they get a big enough catapult, they can get over.
What nobody wants to do, or what very few people want to do, as I think being the exceptions of this trend or this rule, what very few people want to do Is to knuckle down, turn away from the canyon,
turn away from the chasm, turn away from the vision of this better world, and sit down in the shade with a drafting board, with some equations, with some slide rules, with some t-squares, and actually start to build a bridge across this chasm called the bad now and the better future.
And the reason that people don't want to do that, the reason that we all want to stand on the edge of this canyon looking at this cloud castle on the far side of a beautiful world, of a free and happy and moral and prosperous world, the reason that we don't want to turn away and go to the dismal little shed of philosophy and start actually building,
start actually researching, start actually experimenting, start actually designing a bridge that will someday cross This canyon is because when we turn away from this canyon, we turn away with the knowledge that we are not going to get there.
We turn away from this canyon with the deep and abiding and sorrowful understanding that it is not us who is going to cross this bridge to this better world.
And it may not be our children who are going to cross this bridge when it is eventually built to a better world.
And that is a very sorrowful realization to come to, that we can see this better world, that we want so much to live in this better world.
But when we turn away to actually start building the bridges, there aren't even mines yet that can produce the metals that we need for this bridge.
A lot of the engineering is barely invented to build the bridge to this better world.
The physics is only partially understood.
And when we turn away from regarding this heaven that we want to cross into and live without going through the unpleasant necessity of dying in the religious sense, We are turning away from it and looking at the materials that we have, which is three pieces of bubble gum and one stick of balsa wood, and going, okay, it's going to take a long time to design, it's going to take even longer to gather the materials, and it's going to take even longer to build.
And we will not be crossing that bridge.
We may not even see it start to go up.
We may not even see the materials gathered that are needed to build this bridge to this beautiful world that we all want to get to.
And that is, I think, a great sorrow that we all need to face in our own hearts.
Thank you.
That we are so far from being able to get across this canyon that the journey of a thousand miles that will start with a single step of us turning away from regarding it and trying to build a bridge of words and intentions and imagination and actually start to get our hands dirty doing the work To do the research, to build the plans that help us know what materials to gather and help future generations know how to start building it.
That is a very painful thing to accept.
It's a very painful thing to realize.
It's what keeps people lodged in politics and religiosity and other things that they fantasize is going to give them a free world.
There is going to be no free world in our lifetime.
It is a multi-generational process.
And it's very, very painful.
It's very, very painful to turn away from the world that we can see but we can't get to and to start building the bridge that can actually get the species across the chasm.
So I think that's why. And I hope that that makes some sense.
It is the greatest heartbreak, really, of my life, is to recognize that I'm not going to live to see it, although I know almost exactly how it's going to look.
I'm still not going to live to see it.
And I doubt my daughter will, but at some point...
People will live there. People will get across that bridge and people will live there.
And they'll look back and hopefully they'll toss a few grains of good thoughts and gratitude back at those of us at the lonely and isolated and fractious beginnings of things.
And thank us for what we were able to begin to build.
Izzy's story of the week.
She is mastering certain concepts, I think, with great alacrity.
And the one was, I think the Greek word for fart is pretz.
And I did unfortunately let a slow riptide bubble loose the other day, and she turned around and she said, Dada made a pritz.
And then there was a fairly significant pause, and she wrinkled her nose and said, It no smell pretty.
Yes, that is quite accurate, and Dada is not farting flowers.
That is very true. Somebody's asked, what do you believe will be the economic consequences of the earthquake in Japan regarding radiation, cleanup, Japan having to ditch a lot of dollars, etc.? I don't know.
I'm certainly not an expert in much, but I will tell you what my opinions are.
Certainly nobody can know for sure.
Let me put on my magic hat of anarchic prognostication and see what we can come up with.
I predict, and I don't know that this is a truly wild prediction, but I predict that this disaster It will be used by Japan and other governments around the world to extend and expand their powers over the population, over businesses.
It will be used to print more money, which will go to the friends of the Japanese government first and foremost.
It will be used to raise taxes in order to pay for a cleanup that is going to be almost entirely done by the private sector anyway.
It is going to be used to extend regulatory power over more and more Japanese industry and what that means is that they want more bribes and more campaign donations, right?
So as soon as you start to regulate or increase regulations on an industry or threaten that, all that happens is that industry will then begin bribing politicians through campaign donations.
In order to ameliorate or avoid the worst excesses of the regulations, I also predict that the regulations are going to end up affecting small companies who did not cause the problem rather than large companies who did.
That is always the case with this kind of stuff.
Large companies have enough power and enough economic clout and enough political clout as a result of donations and And cycling industry executives in and out of the regulatory agencies, they have enough power to make sure that whatever regulations go into place eliminate competition or at least minimize competition from smaller and more nimble companies.
When regulatory requirements are raised, the cost of complying with those regulations goes up, of course.
And it goes up proportionately larger for small businesses than it does for large businesses.
So if you need two lawyers to make sure you're compliant with something, if you're a small company, that's a significant problem.
And if you're a large company, it's not.
So all of this is going to occur.
So it's going to further fuel the corporatist, semi-fascistic Feather bedding between the state and large corporations.
It's going to increase taxes.
It's going to increase government control over the economy.
And this is my particular prediction.
And so the Japanese, of course, is the third largest economy in the world after the United States and Free Domain Radio.
And so it's going to survive and it's going to continue to struggle.
I mean, the businesses will still continue to produce despite the enormous amount of regulatory pylons that's going to come down the pipe.
And so they will continue to struggle, and they will continue to innovate, and they will continue to attempt to grow.
Despite the increasing burdens being placed on their shoulders, they will stagger up the hill of profitability even more.
And that's my prediction about how things are going to work.
And we have time for one more.
Oh, do you see this as the kickoff for the global collapse?
I don't know.
I don't know.
What I thought about Libya?
Well, I mean, Libya is depressingly simple.
The United States likes stable dictatorships.
It does not like unstable dictatorships where the dictatorial nature of the government is in full view.
Then it has to pretend that it dislikes the dictator and it has to pretend to attack the dictator.
And then it will not change anything fundamental.
So it's just a posture.
It's a show. It's like the cop who is in bed with the mafia and being bribed by the mafia.
If the mafia caused too much trouble, he has to go and arrest a few low-level mafia goons to say that he's fighting crime.
It's all too tragic.
And of course, who is attacking Libya?
It's the United States, it's England, and it's France.
At least those are the ones who kicked it off.
And all three of the leadership politicians in those countries are facing declining poll numbers.
And whenever you're facing declining poll numbers, what you want to do is go and blow some people up, because that gets everyone to rally behind you.
And I believe it has much more to do with that than anything else.
Of course, if America was really interested in helping a repressed minority fight off a kind of totalitarian noose around their necks, why wouldn't they have talked much about the Palestinians over the past, say, 60 odd years?
Well, because it doesn't fit into the political paradigm.
I don't know.
I'm still mulling over this global economic collapse thing.
I certainly understand that there's going to be more shocks and problems, but I also do believe that the tax farmers aren't dumb.
I don't know.
When push comes to shove, they're going to start trying to cut frontline services, hoping to get people to get so upset that they're willing to submit to more taxation, but that's not going to work forever.
They're just going to ditch the dependent class, and they're going to provide more liberties back.
To the entrepreneurial classes.
Because, I mean, they're not idiots.
They know which way their bread is buttered and they're not going to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
So they've bought political votes in order to maintain their power by providing benefits to special interest groups.
But if the entire system is threatened because there is too much control over the entrepreneurs, they'll simply loosen the shackles on the entrepreneurs.
And they will ditch the dependent classes.
And so I don't think there's going to be an economic collapse to that degree, to the degree that, say, you saw in the Weimar Republic, or maybe even, I don't think it's going to be as bad as the Soviet Union.
Yeah, I mean, of course, there's another example.
Libya also is another example of just what a non-issue the Constitution is, right?
I mean, the president just voted to go shoot $100 million worth of missiles into Libya.
I mean, that's a declaration of war, if ever I saw one, and Congress has had virtually nothing to do with it.
So, it only goes to show, again, that this is no longer any kind of limited republic.
I refer to it as a democracy, and people say to me, no, no, no, it's a republic, because it's bound by a constitution.
And, well, come on.
Come on. Yeah, and of course the Libyans are saying that children have been hit and the Americans are saying, well, we don't have any records of children being hit.
I mean, all of that's complete nonsense.
I mean, the war, the aggression, right?
The missiles going into Libya are...
They're a mere effect of the true aggression.
The true aggression is against American taxpayers, right?
Because it is the American taxpayers who are threatened with jail if they don't turf over their money.
And so the war, everything which costs money in military terms overseas, is primarily directed at the American taxpayers.
And everything that gets destroyed and every person who gets killed overseas is a mere effect of the initial aggression against the American taxpayers.
And this is what's so funny, is you see these images of these bright lights going up into the sky, these rockets, these missiles going up into the sky, very, very far away, and you think, gosh, that's very remote.
And it's like, no, no, no, no. That all comes because you have to file your taxes or go to jail, right?
Everything that lights up in the sky is a laser that was on your forehead.
And that's, again, you're not going to see any of that in the mainstream media, but that is the basic economic reality of what is occurring.
Somebody wrote, 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles launched on Libya by UN forces.
Those missiles are about 570 million apiece.
Sorry, 570,000 apiece.
Insane. Yeah, it is.
It is for sure. But you have to, I mean, Gaddafi, of course, is an evil troll of, you know, of Mordorian dimensions.
But you have to at least recognize the degree to which he understands U.S. military.
So, for instance, he's not fired back on any of the U.S. planes.
I don't know if he's got the weaponry to do it, but if he did, it would be insane to do so, because he's not interested in destroying the U.S. economy in the way that some of the other Arab nationalists or Arab insurgents are.
So he's not firing back on the U.S., which is, of course, quite wise.
And what he's doing, though, is he said, I'm giving a million weapons to my citizens.
Now, I don't know whether he's got them.
I doubt it. But what he is basically saying is if you invade, you're going to face exactly the same kind of insurgency that you do in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
So he understands that U.S. troops on the ground is the only way he's going to be ousted.
It's not going to happen from missiles.
You don't get regime change through missiles.
So it's only troops on the ground and he also knows the US simply cannot get dragged into another endless insurgent ground war and that's why he says he's handing out all of these weapons to his people and this again is a very good example of how anarchism would work in terms of national defense because the most powerful military in the world isn't going to go into a country where the people are well armed which is why in a free society if there is even any threat of war in a free society over the long run which I don't think there is That's a lack of control or regulation over the arms that people can have would be more than enough deterrent for even a vastly more powerful military to come in.
So I just sort of wanted to mention that.
Um, hello? Hello.
How's it going? What's your question, man?
Uh, sorry, what was that?
What's your question? Crap, uh...
The quality is really low.
It's hard to hear you. Yeah, sorry about that.
It'll be better in the final release.
Alright. I just wanted to talk to you about my problem with procrastination.
I listened to a lot of your podcasts on it and I realized that I'm just...
I'm really pissed off at my mom.
Yeah. You said that people who are socially paralyzed are usually really angry.
I think I made it better because back in seventh grade, I was forced to skip up a grade, and I really didn't want to.
It was very hard for me to make new friends and everything.
People didn't like me.
It was terror, basically.
I just wanted to know, how do I get out of this?
Because, like, I'm really angry all the time, and I just...
I'm just tired of being like this.
Well, tell me what like this looks like.
Well, basically, I sit in my room all day, I listen to your podcast, and I play Xbox, and that's about it.
That's all I do. And what would you like to do?
I don't know.
I want to get a job.
I want to get out of here. I want to go to college.
I mean, I guess that's looking too far ahead.
I'm not sure what I want to do there.
Well, if you could snap your fingers and have whatever kind of life you wanted, what would you do?
I honestly don't know.
I...
I guess the CEO of a company, yeah, I'm not sure.
Well, that's something. So you would like some sort of financial success and some sort of authority or I guess the power of the business world, is that right?
What was that?
You'd like some money and some power in the business world, is that right?
Not that I...
I think, I just...
I honestly don't know.
Let me ask you another question.
Do you remember, when you were a little kid, if you had any dreams about what you wanted to be when you grew up?
There were several different occupations.
I wanted to be an author, or a writer, or an architect, an artist, because I was pretty good at drawing.
Sorry, you wanted to be an author, an architect, and an artist.
So basically you went to the big book of alphabet careers and you stopped at A. Because there's some B's too.
Baker, internet buffoon, which is sort of my job.
Sorry, go on. Oh, did we lose you?
Are you still there? Oh, hello.
Sorry, I had the stream playing at the same time.
I was listening to you on Skype. Oh, no problem.
Okay, so you had some good ambitions and some...
High ambitions, right?
You didn't say, like, I want to be a waiter, because, you know, that's further along in the alphabet.
So you wanted to be, since you couldn't be an aardvark, you wanted to be an author and so on, right?
So obviously you're intelligent and you're ambitious and you want to do some important things with your life.
At least that's how you started when you were a kid, right?
Yeah. And so what happened?
Well, I was getting You know, I was doing well in school up until the seventh grade, which is when I got skipped up.
After that, I was just so angry that everything just went downhill.
I started getting F's in class.
I came home depressed every day.
I didn't want to do anything after that.
Now listen, I want to tell you about me, because remember, it's all about me.
But no, just because I think I understand, when I was in England, I was in private school, boarding school for some time, and however brutal it may have been physically and emotionally, academically it was quite good.
And when I came to Canada, I was in Whitby for a couple of months, and I went to school there.
I was in grade 8. Then when I came to Toronto, I was put back in grade 6.
Ugh, I had two grades back.
And I tried to sort of get out of it, but, you know, what am I going to do at the age of 11, right?
So I think I sort of understand.
I wasn't sort of put forward, but I was put backwards, and that was pretty brutal to do a lot of that material again.
And I thought for a while that I was angry at the school, and that wasn't the case for me.
Yeah, for me either. I'm pretty sure I was just mad at my mom and all my teachers.
Right. Right. So what was your mom doing when you were getting Fs and you were coming home depressed every day?
Well, I remember the first time I showed her my report card.
She was pissed off.
She was yelling at me.
My brother was in the car. And my brother was like, well, maybe he just doesn't know the material, Mom.
And she said, no, that's not it.
He's just pissed off that I made him do this.
And now he's procrastinating.
He's not doing his work.
Right, right. So she felt that it was a form of passive aggression on your part?
Yes. And what happened from there in that conversation?
Well, I mean, she was saying all the time about it, but nothing really happened.
I just were yelling every time I brought home a bad report card.
Right, right.
Thank you.
And then? Well, all the way up until my senior year of high school, I was still getting bad grades, but senior year I dropped out because around then I started listening to your podcast and it helped me realize why I was angry and why I procrastinated and everything.
Pretty much, I had this big conversation with my mom that year, and I told her how I felt, how I was depressed all the time, how I had thoughts of suicide before, and she was crying.
I remember she said, and I told her I was upset because of the way she treated me, and how she got angry, and how she yelled, and she said, Jacob, I promise I'll change if you promise to get good grades,
or something like that. I remember saying, okay, and going back to my room and thinking, I thought if she truly loved me, she would change because she wanted me to be happy, not because she wanted me to get good grades, if that makes sense. I don't think that she should change because she wants you to be happy.
I don't think that's a fair expectation for somebody else.
I could be wrong. I mean, I'm just giving you my initial opinion.
For what it's worth. I don't think that anyone should change to make you happy.
I think that people should change because it's the right thing to do.
Yeah. Right?
Mm-hmm. Right?
So, you were miserable and you were failing.
In school, which is not to say failing in life.
God help us if that's the case, right?
But you were miserable and unhappy and I didn't handle it the best way as a parent in any way, shape or form.
I yelled at you. Obviously you were yelling at depressed people.
I mean there's no sane person in the world who will tell you that yelling at a depressed person is the way to solve their problems, right?
And imagine, I mean, if your mom's down about something and you yell at her, how would she react?
Don't you dare yell at me, right?
She wouldn't be happy. She wouldn't be happy, right?
So she knows that this is not how you motivate people.
But, you know, let's give her the benefit of the doubt and say, okay, well, that's the very best that she could think of at the moment or at the time.
But later you say, okay, well, That wasn't the best thing to do.
That wasn't the right... That wasn't good parenting, to yell at my depressed kid when he's not fitting in at school, right?
And so people, I think, should...
Should attempt to do better or to change because, not just because what they did didn't work, not just because it made somebody unhappy because, you know, there's things that I do that make people unhappy but I strongly believe that they're the right things to do and I can't gauge what I do based upon whether it makes people unhappy or happy because that's not what philosophy is.
It's not a popularity contest.
So she shouldn't change because it didn't work.
Because that's to say that there was no way to know that it wasn't going to work at the time, and of course it was.
She knew exactly that it wasn't going to work at the time, because if you tried doing it to her, she would have been really upset, right?
So it's like, okay, I missed the boat.
I didn't step up when I needed to as a parent and take care of my kid at the time, and it's had some negative impacts.
I mean, you've talked about suicidality.
I mean, that's pretty catastrophic.
I mean, that definitely is not where you want to be as a parent, where your kid is so depressed and listless that...
That suicidality is coming into his head.
I want to reach out as best as I can and just tell you I'm so sorry.
I'm so, so sorry that you face this amount of stress and this amount of negativity and this amount of dysfunction that your life, in a sense, turned into a kind of ash in your heart or in your hands.
I really, really want to tell you how sorry I am.
Thank you. That you've experienced that, that you've had those thoughts, that you've experienced that, and obviously, obviously, if those thoughts ever come back in a strong, I mean, call a hotline, get the professional help that you need.
And, of course, I think therapy is great for just about anyone who wants to achieve anything significant or remarkable or even non-dysfunctional in their lives.
So, look, I just want to not gloss over that because it's a very powerful word, suicidality, and I don't want to pretend I didn't hear it and I don't want to pretend that It's not incredibly significant.
So I just wanted to pause at that little grave and, you know, put a couple of flowers on it, for want of a better phrase, and to say, just to tell you, you know, person to person how incredibly sorry I am that you faced that kind of extremity that is a very, very difficult and chilling thing to go through, and I'm so sorry that you did.
Yeah, thank you.
I'm starting to get some now.
When I was a kid, she yelled and she didn't spank me often, but every now and then she spanked me.
And I think, and this is just a theory, I haven't thought about it enough, I think I was only getting good grades in school because I remember when I brought home that report card that she was really happy when she saw the A's.
And my older brother, he always got bad grades in school.
And I always felt like proud of myself for doing better than him.
Well, I'll tell you something that occurred for me.
Again, I don't want to make this about me, but it popped into my head, and I think it might be...
No, I appreciate it.
I think it might be something useful for you, right?
Because I'm no therapist, no psychologist, so I can talk about myself until the cows come home, and hopefully it'll be of use to you.
When I was a kid, I was really into painting and drawing, and I did a lot of it.
And I even remember I dragged an entire door home once because I wanted to paint a landscape on it.
And I actually did quite a bit of a landscape on it, and I had a chalkboard, and I had...
I did lots of drawing, and I did portraits even up into my 20s and so on.
But I remember when I was a kid, I had drawn something nice, something I think pretty good on the easel.
I think like most people who get into drawing or painting, you have something in your head that you want to draw or paint, and what you come out with on the page is just horrible.
I remember I wanted to paint a rosy-cheeked child going down It's snow on a sled and I wanted the cheeks to be so red that you could almost tell the temperature of the air and I remember when I was like six or seven I was at boarding school and I painted with these you know big thick paints and it was just like this big black circle with a sled under like it was just look terrible right compared to what was going on in my head it was such a huge gap and When I was home,
I would draw and try and do chalks and I did sort of some watercolors and I did some graphite work and so on.
And I remember once my mom got so mad that I had, I think, gotten some chalk on some...
I can't remember. It was the curtains or something.
I guess I had walked over to open the curtains.
I had chalk on my hands. My mom got so mad and beat me up and all that kind of stuff.
And I remember afterwards sitting on my bed And I was sort of back against my pillow.
I think I was six or seven. And my knees were up and I was hugging my knees and I was shaking and crying because it was painful.
And I was looking at my easel and there was a picture of a tree's and mountains and there was a nice soft moon up in the top right hand corner some little stars and I thought the perspective was pretty good on the trees and you could see some ripples in the water and the moonlight was sort of reflected in their squiggly lines that you make when you're a kid on the water and I thought it was a nice little picture and I said to myself I said you know this is the last picture I'm ever going to make And I'm so mad at my mom and I'm so mad at my circumstances.
I'm so mad at my dad.
I'm so mad at everyone that I'm on strike.
And if this easel is never cleaned, what people in the future are going to do is they're going to look at this easel and they're going to say, well, there was a great talent that never came to fruition.
And I think part of me thought that the world was going to look at this great talent that didn't come to fruition.
And look at my mom and say, what did you do to break this talent?
What did you do? And they would be like spotlights on her and people would get mad at her because I was no longer going to be an artist.
And people would see what had been lost from the world and the potential and they'd get mad.
And, of course, none of that ever would have happened even if I had stopped.
And, of course, within a couple of days I was painting again because I liked it and, you know, I sort of got that surrendering it for the sake of a beating wasn't the right thing to do.
So when your mom said that, well, he's just mad at me and that's why he's getting bad grades, I wonder if there may not have been more than a grain or two of truth in what she was saying.
Sir, could you say that again?
I wonder if there might not be a grain of truth in what she was saying, that because you were so mad at your school, at your environment, and look, I get that it's not about skipping a grade.
I mean, lots of people do that and they don't end up in that state, so it's probably a lot more than that.
But what if You are punishing authority figures in your life by underachievement.
What if? I don't know, but what if?
Yeah, I think that's true.
Just the smallest thing I'll think, what will my mom think if I can do this?
And as gross as it is, like taking a shower, I'll be like, she probably wants me to take a shower.
Let's not do that today. And it wasn't even conscious before, but until I heard one of your podcasts and you talked about it.
And yeah, it's that bad.
And I get it.
I mean, I think I get it.
I mean, as much as I can get it over the freaking phone, I always want to see people's faces, right?
But I think I really get it.
I get the degree to which resentment and a feeling of being bullied and controlled and ignored And also, I think if your mom took a great deal of pride in your achievements, then if you're mad at your mom, taking away those achievements is a way to get back at her, right? Yeah, that's true.
But tell me why that is insane in the long run.
I mean, I get it. I get it.
But you tell me how that is so gonna fucking not work in the long run.
Well, I'm screwing myself over when I do that.
Well, she wins, right?
You think you're winning in these little victories, right?
And look, I'm not saying that she wants your life to be a failure.
I'm not saying anything like that. But in this mental battle that you've got going on, you certainly don't come out the winner, right?
Yeah, that's true.
But tell me more.
Tell me more. Tell me everything it's going to cost you of your life if you continue this way.
My happiness. I mean, it sounds really simple.
No, it's pretty complex.
Happiness is a very complex thing, but go on.
Yeah, everything.
My ambitions, my goals, that's redundant, but yeah, just all that.
I've thrown all that away.
Right. Go on. I'm guessing you're in your 20s, right?
Late teens or in your 20s?
I'm 18. You're 18.
Okay. Tell me what this looks like at 40.
Tell me how your life looks like without change when you're 40.
I don't know. I don't want to...
When I'm 40, it'll look like I'm listening to your podcast, so hopefully you're still alive.
I'm not that old. I'm still playing Xbox.
Yeah, like with the other two guys who are mad at their mom who are still on Xbox in 20 years, right?
But go on. I'm not sure.
And what about when you're 50?
Yeah, it's the same thing.
Okay, what about when you're 70 and you're looking back on your life and your mom is long dead?
I screwed myself over and she's dead now.
It doesn't matter. Right.
Don't do that, man. I know it's tempting.
I know it's tempting. But it is, in my opinion, and this is a very strong opinion, it doesn't make it true, but it's a strong opinion, my friend.
You cannot relinquish control of your life to the people who've hurt you the most.
Because that means that it will never stop.
You can't live grade fucking seven over and over and over again for the next 60 years until they drop you in a damp wet coffin marked here's lies grade seven.
It never, ever ended.
You can't relinquish your life to people who've hurt you, to people who've made you angry.
Thank you.
I mean, you can, obviously.
It's physically possible.
But, of course, and I'm not telling you anything you don't know, so I don't want to insult your obvious intelligence.
But the only person who fundamentally suffers in the long run is you.
And the victory that you achieve is not even close to a victory.
It's a dead, complete, and total loss.
And to cut your own legs off because people have yelled at you to run means that you never get to run.
Yeah, that is pretty ridiculous.
But understandable. Again, I'm not saying you're crazy.
It's understandable if you're that angry.
It's understandable if you feel that disrespected, if you feel that unsupported.
I understand it.
I really do. So I don't want you to think like, oh, what I'm doing is crazy and that makes no sense.
It makes sense.
It makes sense.
But it's like if somebody keeps yelling at you to play piano and then you say, oh, fine, I'm going to cut my own hands off.
It's like, okay, so you don't get to tie your shoes.
And maybe if you're not getting yelled at, you really would like to play piano.
Maybe you would really enjoy the challenges and risks of ambition.
And But it feels almost like, feels to me almost like, that you have a black smoky-eyed devil called vengeance sitting where your heart should be, where your passion should be,
where your ambition should be, where your I want to spread my wings and take flight should be called vengeance and that vengeance I sort of get an image of you down a well And vengeance is sitting on a manhole cover on top of the well and won't let you out.
And yeah, I'm saying, blow that sucker off.
Vengeance, and I have had times in my life where I have felt very strong desires for vengeance.
I have a temper at times.
And I have been unjustly treated in my life, and I have had great desires for vengeance.
But vengeance cuts off your future because vengeance is all about history.
Vengeance is all about the past.
Vengeance is all about things dead and gone, dried up and bottled in time that can't ever be changed.
Right? Nothing that you achieve in terms of vengeance is going to make your teenage life any better because it's all done and gone, right?
It's not going to change anything.
Yeah, that's true.
But what it will do, what vengeance will do, is not only will it not change anything in the past, it will mean that the future becomes a photocopy of the same day in the past over and over and over again.
Yeah, I don't want that.
I think it's been a year since I dropped out.
It's just one giant, it's not a blur, but it just seems like each day is indistinguishable from the next.
And you're still living at home, right?
Yeah, yeah. Right, right.
Right, and so I'll tell you what, you know, because I mean, I've given you some Fruity metaphors, which, you know, so what, right?
Maybe they're helpful, maybe they're not.
But I'll tell you what I would suggest from a practical standpoint, okay?
I think that you have to look forward in your life.
I know that it's important to deal with the past, and I'm not saying forget about the past, but if the vengeance theory is correct, then it's not going to achieve what you want.
Right. Because you're not punishing your mom fundamentally.
I mean, maybe you are, but fundamentally, you're the one who's suffering, right?
Yeah. Unfortunately, your mom is, at least to some degree, participating in this, in that she's not willing to do change at any cost, right?
It's conditional, like if your grades get better or whatever, right?
Sorry, what was that? Well, your mom is to some degree participating in this because she's not saying, like, change.
We have to change this no matter what.
Your life is not starting the way it should.
You're not pursuing and achieving things the way that you should or the way that I want you to.
And so whatever we need to do as a family to remove this roadblock, if I have to go into therapy, if I have to I don't know, go take Prozac through my ears.
I'm going to do to make sure that no matter what happens, your roadblock is removed for the future, right?
So she's not doing that.
So to some degree she's participating to some degree in this cycle.
So I don't think it's reasonable to wait for change to come from your mom.
Yeah. So, this is what I would suggest.
First of all, you need to fucking panic.
Right? You need to panic.
As you say, the last year is a blur, and I think you understand that without change, your life is going to dry up and blow away, right?
Yeah. I don't want that for you.
You don't want that for you.
Because you can pull this shit off when you're 18, but you can't when you're 38, and you can't when you're 68, right?
You can't. Yeah. And so I would suggest, you didn't finish high school, right?
Right. Okay, you need to finish high school.
I'm just gonna, I'm gonna lay it out for you, and then you can tell me that I'm an annoying and bossy idiot, and maybe I am, but I'm gonna tell you.
I value your opinion.
Okay, you need to finish high school.
I don't know whether you have to go back, God help you.
Although I guess now, you know what's interesting is that if you finish high school now, you're finishing it in the age that you would have been if you hadn't skipped ahead of grade, right?
That's true.
So it's like, okay, fine.
You put me ahead a year, I'll stay back a year.
But fine, only make it one year.
That was my original mentality, yeah.
I'm sorry? Yeah, that's what I was trying to do the first year, just get held back.
Yeah, yeah. So there's your victory.
You know, you got taken a year, now you've gotten a year back, and so you're on equal playing field, and you can go ahead with your life.
So yeah, you can get a GED, or as Chris Rock calls it, a good enough diploma.
So you can get a GED, but you need to finish high school.
And it's not because I think there's anything hugely useful in the last year of high school.
I don't think there is hugely useful stuff in the last year of high school, but it is, unfortunately, based on the system that we have, it's just a minimum requirement for doing anything.
Whether you want to go to college or not, you need to finish high school, in my opinion.
Because otherwise, how are you going to get into the army?
I'm just kidding. Pick up the phone.
I know it's Sunday, but get the number after we talk of your local high school or wherever.
I don't know how the hell you finish high school, but call them and say, listen, I need to finish high school.
Maybe you have to go back. Maybe you can do it while you're working or maybe you can do it at night or whatever, but you need to finish high school.
Because no matter what you want to do in your life, that's going to be something you don't want to have to keep answering questions for the next 10 years about why you didn't finish high school.
Look, I'm not asking you to agree with me.
I'm just asking you if you get what I'm saying, right?
Yeah, I do agree with you.
Okay. You need to find ways to begin to let go of the anger.
And look, it's a bullshit thing for me to say.
It's just about so many things I say are complete bullshit.
But... But you need to find some way, because the anger is eating you, right?
You know, there's this actress, Sharon Stone.
You don't know her because you're young.
But she may still be alive when you're 42.
I don't know. But there's this actress, Sharon Stone, who said about fame, you think it's feeding you, but it's eating you.
There's this thing about anger, right?
You think it's feeding you, but it's eating you.
Because anger is healthy, I think, and appropriate in a sort of fight-or-flight situation.
But when it becomes chronic, it's like chronic stress or chronic anger or chronic sadness, which I guess is a kind of depression.
When things become fixed, it's because our thinking has become circular.
It's because we go from A to B to A to B to A to B to A to B, and we don't break out of that circle.
And that's why the days all seem the same and that's why distraction like Xbox is so tempting because we can't break out of our own cycle of thinking.
We brood over past wrongs.
We think about things we could have done differently or things that other people could have done differently or ways in which we should have handled things differently or, you know, we go round and round and round and we can't find any escape from that circular thinking and so what we do is we just try and jump ourselves out of it by distracting ourselves with video games or drugs or sex or drinking or Any kind of sensation, mountain climbing, I don't know what, right?
Shopping. We try to just break ourselves out of this cycle because we can't do it on our own.
You know, it's like...
Here's a metaphor you won't know because it's about records, right?
So records, you know, the little...
They go round and round and then they get stuck, right?
And then it's like the only way that we can change it is to drag the needle, to get some sense of sensation or difference, and then it just goes back to being stuck again.
And I don't think that's, you know, that is obviously not where you want to be in the future.
So, you know, I always talk about therapy and I would strongly recommend it.
I don't know if you're in high school or even if you've taken it remotely, you might have access to some counseling resources.
I hugely and strongly suggest that.
If you can't get a hold of any of that kind of thing, talk about it with friends that you trust.
Talk about it with anybody who's reasonably trustworthy, who's willing to talk about self-knowledge and growth in this kind of way.
There's works that you can do.
John Bradshaw has some self-help books.
Nathaniel Brandon has some self-help books, which are sentence completion exercises or ways that you can figure out What's going on deep down in the dark recesses of your smoky heart?
And I would really strongly suggest you can get those from the library and maybe photocopy some of them.
It's real cheap and it is a way for you to begin to really figure out what's going on for you, why you're stuck.
Get an outline of the boulder that's in front of your future that you can't get around and you can't burrow through.
So I would, you know, really strongly suggest that it is time to panic.
And I think panic can be a very healthy emotion.
I think that it's very necessary.
I think that you need to cut back on your video game playing because, as you know, it can eat up the hours with not much to show for it.
And don't get me wrong, I like a good video game, but not at the expense of getting done what you need to get done to have a good life, right?
Yeah. You want to have an education, at least some form of it.
You want to have a job so that you can ask a girl out and show her a good time and all that kind of stuff.
You want to start... You know, walking tall as a young man with his eye on the future and a way to build a life where you can get the things that you want, whether you want to be an architect or an author or an ad man or, I don't know, I'm running out of A's, I don't know, an astronaut, I don't know that many careers, right?
But I want to really strongly encourage you that You're going to need to just do a little bit of willpower here.
I mean, I think that you need to do the inner work because you can't just will yourself through life.
You need to do the inner work to figure out what happened, why you're stuck, why you keep going round and round, and what vengeance is helping you avoid, right?
One of the tempting things about vengeance is it keeps you focused on the past, which keeps you from being afraid of the future.
But I think it's okay to be nervous about the future.
In fact, I think it's important to be nervous about the future because when we're nervous, we tend to double check, triple check everything.
Like I want my pilot to be nervous before he takes off because I want him to triple check everything.
And so when we're trying to figure out what we want to do with our lives, I think it's good to be nervous.
So to focus on the future and to be nervous about it, to be scared of it, to be alarmed about it, I think is good because it means you're going to really be careful.
And double check and triple check what it is that you're doing.
But I think as far as just getting started goes, I think that it's important enough to make the call to get the process of getting your education complete out of the way.
You know, if it pleases your mom, it pleases your mom.
You know, I mean, it pleases your mom.
But the important thing to focus on is not whether it pleases or bugs your mom, but what it's going to do for your life and your future and what it is that you want to achieve in the world.
To base such fundamental life decisions as education and career on whether your mom likes it or not, you know, you know, you know that that is not going to achieve anything.
And unfortunately, it gives your mom way too much power for an 18-year-old young man to have, right?
I mean, just imagine, just picture this.
I'll just give you one last image before we close off, right?
But just picture this, right? Let's say a year from now, you're on a date or whatever, right?
The woman you think she's great, you know, she's really great.
And then after 20 minutes you realize you've just spent the last 20 minutes complaining about how overbearing your mom was and is and how she controls your life and every decision you make is based upon whether your mom's gonna like it or not and you hope that she's not gonna like it because that's really satisfying and you're talking about all this kind of stuff and then you look up, you know, how's the woman gonna look?
If she's even still there, right?
Don't be that guy, right?
Don't be that guy who's complaining about his mom when he's 30.
Yeah, I don't want him to honor him.
Yeah, because I mean, that's going to be like the woman's going to be reaching under the table for the eject button for herself.
And you don't want that mess on the ceiling.
Well, thank you, Steph, for talking with me.
Yeah.
Listen, I hope it works out.
I would, you know, get some therapy under your belt, and if you can't, get some self-knowledge under your belt.
I think that it shows pretty well on your mom that she was at least willing to admit fault if you'd get better grades.
I mean, at least there's room in the conversation for Fault being admitted.
That's not so bad. You know, I've heard a lot worse on this show.
And so, you know, when you get some of this knowledge under your belt, I think it may be worth reopening.
In fact, I'd strongly suggest reopening the conversation with your mom and try and figure it out.
And ask your mom about procrastination.
Ask your mom about what she has achieved or not achieved in her life and how she feels about it.
You may learn a lot about yourself by asking your parents about themselves.
Not asking them about you and what they did to you and what they did about you, but just asking them about themselves.
Again, I've mentioned this before, but I had a seven-hour conversation with my dad where he talked about his life independent of me and why he did what he did and the choices that he made, and it was a little chilling how little I showed up in that.
But I learned a lot about myself just by listening to my dad talk about himself.
Not himself as a parent in relation to me, but just himself as a human being independent of me.
And it gave me a lot of relief.
And so you can ask your mom about her own, you know, procrastination or her own ambitions or her own frustrations.
You can learn a lot about yourself and it can be quite a relief to know that your parents came into their relationship with you with their own baggage and that it really wasn't all about you.
And there were a lot of times they were just bouncing off stuff in their own past.
I think there's a lot of independence and freedom in that.
It makes it less personal, if that makes any sense.
I think I just heard you're angry, sure.
But okay, it's just, I'll leave it there.
But I just wanted to sort of mention that as a possibility in the future.
So, listen, thanks everyone so much as always for, I mean, just amazing honesty and openness and just great, great comments and questions.
I just, I feel so...
Stimulated by this listenership that I consider it just such an enormous honor to be able to have people talk to me about really what they're thinking and feeling.
And I'm obviously happy that what I say has some use from time to time.
And thank you, everybody, for making all of this, all of this possible, this truly amazing philosophical conversation.
freedomainradio.com forward slash donate, just to put in my last humble begging as monkey philosopher dancing for food, request for donations.
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Have yourselves a truly wonderful week, and we will continue to try and work on show quality issues.
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