Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

April 3, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:53:52

1883 Freedomain Radio Sunday Call In Show 3 April 2011

Dealing with apathy, avoiding debates, living as if there is no audience, and can we have property rights in land?

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux on April the 3rd, 2011, just after 2pm, and I hope you're doing very well, and we do have some people on the line, and so I guess we'll turn the show over to them, because Lord knows my yappy yopin is filling up more than enough of your hard drive as it is, so James, if you want to just bring the first caller up, let's see if we can cut a few Gordian knots with the scintillating scimitar of philosophy.
	All right. Well, while we're waiting for the callers to assemble their vocal cords, we will talk about a couple of other things.
	I don't know exactly how this has occurred, but it seems to be occurring in the wonderful mayhem of internet technology, but I'm getting asked questions on Facebook.
	It's a new feature. I think people are aiming some questions my way, and one of them I thought was very interesting.
	It said, in your opinion, what's the single biggest thing we could do to end the national I think it's a very good question.
	And my response to that would be something like this.
	Or is, in fact, about to be something like this.
	The key word in that sentence is the one that is almost always taken for granted.
	And this is my tip when it comes to philosophical sleuthing.
	When you are looking at a question in philosophy or in economics or psychology or any of these sorts of things, when you're looking at these kinds of questions, the very important place to start is the place where you feel like you can gloss over the most.
	Like, that's just taken for granted.
	That's just an assumption. But always stop, because the places where we glide by, the places where we rocket over, the places where we scoot surreptitiously by, those are the places where we're the most subject to propaganda.
	So I would really strongly suggest it's very important to stop.
	And the word that I stopped on there was national.
	So people said, well, what's the biggest thing that you would suggest to solve for a national economic emergency?
	And I compliment the person who seems to be quoting from Atlas Shrugged, directing questions at John Galt.
	But it's the nation.
	The nation is the thing.
	The first thing I would do is question or point the finger of blame at the very concept of nations.
	The very concept of nations.
	Nations is...
	A ghastly, horrible concept.
	Nationhood, countries are ghastly, horrible concepts.
	Countries are artificial pockets of exploitive propaganda and rampant geographical theft.
	And it's not just the thieving and the propagandizing that I object to.
	It is the way in which the very existence of nations warps and corrupts and degrades human-to-human compassion around the world.
	They are different.
	They are from India.
	They are from Sri Lanka.
	They are from Singapore. They are from some other, other place.
	And the common humanity that we all share is...
	It's undermined and degraded.
	People say, well, where are you from?
	I always think of that as like, where are you coming from, man?
	Where's your gig in the brain?
	Where's your psyche at?
	It's launching place. But people say, where are you from?
	I'm from Canada.
	I'm from Canada. I'm Canadian.
	I was born in Ireland.
	I grew up in England. I lived for a little while in South Africa.
	I've done business in China.
	I visited Morocco.
	I did business with companies in America.
	All of this stuff is pure fiction.
	You know, where are you from?
	Earth. Little blue ball floating in space.
	So, where you have countries, you are inevitably going to have in-group and out-group thinking.
	We are better. They are worse.
	As I talked about, I think it was in podcast six or seven, The government invests in sports because it creates an artificial sense of geographical virtue, and what really are countries other than artificial senses of geographical virtue?
	The proximity of my mother's vagina to certain pieces of dirt is my perception of self-worth, and that is really not a valid place to build the foundation of a free and peaceful humanity in the future.
	Where you have this kind of us versus them, where you have this kind of differentiation, and also the ascribing of national characteristics, which I find to be pretty hideous.
	Oh, Canadians, as John Stewart referred to them, the peaceful cannibals up north.
	Oh, they're so polite, they're so nice, they're so this, they're so that.
	Well, I mean, that's all.
	Oh, people from the South are like this, or Indians are like that.
	I mean, just, it's very silly.
	It's very silly. And when you have this kind of stuff, you automatically have a susceptibility to trade barriers.
	Like, if a job is lost to an American, that is a net loss to America.
	What nonsense! What nonsense!
	I mean, think of all of the Millions and millions of farming jobs that have been lost to Americans over the past century when we went from, or America went from, about 90% involvement in farming to now 2-3% labor force involvement in farming.
	Millions and millions, tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of jobs lost on the farm.
	Some of it shipped overseas and some of it replaced by machines.
	Does anyone feel that that's a huge net negative?
	You want to solve unemployment tomorrow?
	Simply ban all farm machinery and we go back to doing it by hand.
	Everyone recognizes that would be nonsense.
	But there's this idea that if a job is taken from America and put in India, that's a bad thing.
	But that wouldn't exist without countries.
	That whole idea of protectionism, tariffs, trade barriers, preferential treatment to local companies, by America, by Union, all of these things only exist because there are countries.
	You couldn't conceive of trade wars without countries.
	Any more than you think of a trade war between one town and another town in the same county.
	Couldn't conceive of them. Economic disasters are caused by in-group, out-group thinking in countries.
	And that kind of stuff.
	Or think of people who come from other places in the world, right?
	So let's say somebody lives in Niagara Falls and wants to move to Buffalo and he's a doctor.
	Well, guess what? He can't practice.
	So he can move 3,000 miles to British Columbia and still practice, but he can't move 20 miles to Buffalo and still be able to practice.
	So the degree to which immigrants are kept out, the degree to which immigrant skills are underutilized, the degree to which we even use the word immigration rather than moving, all of this is driven by the very concept of countries, the very concept of nations, the very concept that a piece of dirt and a line on a fictitious map has some sort of moral quality,
	has some sort of collectivized value that people In Buffalo feel that they have more in common with people in Houston, Texas, than they do with people a few miles away over the border.
	I'm not saying they should feel they have more in common with anyone geographically, but there are some things in common, like shared experience of brutal winters and so on, that also has a way of, I think, shaping people's perceptions of the world.
	But this idea that there's some sort of us, and then there's some sort of them, and it's defined by historical lines.
	And historical lines are the edges of blood pools.
	This is really where countries end.
	One country ends and another begins, Where successful, brutal warlords in the past ended up running out of people to slaughter, or ended up running up against other warlords who slaughtered people just as well, if not better.
	That's what the edges of countries are.
	It's where blood met blood and washed up against itself.
	That's what the edge of a country is.
	It's even worse than the edge of a zoo or the edge of a farm.
	I mean, farmers don't wage war against other farmers usually.
	But countries are...
	You know what countries are?
	Countries are like the chalk outlines of a body that got shot.
	The outline of a body as it fell and lay on the pavement bleeding to death has an outline when the police come.
	And when cartographers come to map out countries, that's what they're mapping out.
	That's what they're mapping out, is the outline of a crime, of a genocide, of a murder, of an encapturing, of an enslavement.
	That's what countries are when you look at a map.
	They are the outlines of historical crimes from sociopathic murderers and warlords.
	And as long as we have countries, we're going to continue to have economic disasters because we're going to have...
	Once you capture and domesticate animals, they become very valuable.
	And that value drives the lust for political power, for control over the tax base of a population, for control over the minds of children through state and religious indoctrination.
	For controls over the productive value of productive citizens, which you can then take rather than the basic mechanism of power as you take from the productive.
	You keep some for yourself and you use the remainder to bribe people, to indoctrinate everyone about how valuable and virtuous you are.
	That's the basic nature of power, political, religious or other.
	Without countries you can't do that.
	Without countries, you can't have government.
	Without countries, you can't have taxes.
	Without countries, you can't have trade wars.
	You can't have tariffs.
	You can't have national debts without countries.
	Now the flag is something that at least in America, maybe in other countries too, is so often draped over, is draped over the coffin of a murdered man, a man murdered in war.
	Not over his victims, of course.
	They can't ever be seen. But over the man murdered in war, wearing a green costume, we drape a flag.
	But the flag is the wreath of humanity as a whole.
	Flags cover the coffins of humanity as a whole.
	Because as long as we're bound by these ridiculous blood borders, by these outlines of ancient crimes, we will not be able to see each other as human.
	We will not be able to see each other as brothers and sisters.
	We will not be able to see the common love and dream and desire for freedom that we all have.
	Because we all imagine that we're boxed up in these little crates of virtue draped With funeral flags of historical crimes.
	So, somebody says to me, what's the one thing that you would do to end the national economic emergency?
	I would take the word national out of our vocabulary, and then almost all emergencies, military, political, debt, counterfeit fiat currency, war, prison, enslavement, almost all of those would fall away as well.
	That's it for my opening speech.
	If anybody has any questions or comments, perhaps we can unbox the voices of those in the distance.
	I'd like to talk to you about apathy.
	You'd like to talk to me about apathy?
	Well, I'm glad you roused yourself to do that.
	What's your question? Well, I'm in a really good position with my life, business, opportunities, and I can't Find the motivation to work.
	I just keep distracting myself with video games or watching Netflix and I don't understand why I'm doing that.
	Same thing with, like I've lost a lot of weight, 70 pounds the last four months, but it's hit a brick wall where I'm just, I don't have the motivation to work out.
	Wait a second. You're telling me that...
	Oh, you said working out. I was going to say, like, you lost 70 pounds playing video games and Netflix?
	Because I would have thought quite the opposite might have occurred.
	But you're working out and eating well.
	Well, congratulations on that. That's a huge deal.
	Well done. Well, the reason I lost all the weight was just eating right.
	I started eating correctly. Right.
	Well, good for you. I mean, that's a huge deal.
	And, you know, that is something to be enormously, enormously proud of.
	So congratulations on that. But tell me a little bit more.
	You were saying that you're doing well or you have positive things going on in your business life and so on.
	I just want to make sure I understand all of that before we try and dig into apathy.
	Yes. Like, right now, I do vacation rentals.
	And I have to go through all the contracts, put together contracts.
	Put together the webpage and phases for the computer programmer.
	And I just can't...
	I'm just not sitting down and doing the work.
	And I don't know what else to say other than that.
	I don't know what the resistance is.
	When did this start?
	It's been going on for the last two months.
	And what happened two months ago?
	Well, when I started really working good, I had some friends, and all my friends left to go out of town to college or to start their business in their doctor practice.
	And I moved out to Florida, so I don't really know anybody out here, and maybe that's what caused it.
	It's just the loneliness set in.
	Yeah, no, I understand that.
	I mean, I remember when I went to go and work for a mining company, I was based out of Thunder Bay, and I spent, I don't know, six or eight months in Thunder Bay.
	And, you know, how the hell do you meet people?
	Especially if you work, I mean, I worked in a warehouse, panning gold and stuff like that with one other person.
	And, you know, where the hell do you meet people when you come to a new town?
	It got to the point where I got a membership at the gym at the university in Thunder Bay, as it's called, and I remember sitting in the sauna almost naked and chatting with another guy who I sort of enjoyed his company, and I said, hey, maybe we can grab a bite or a movie sometime.
	He absolutely looked at me eyes wide, and I realized, of course, that he thought I was...
	I was hitting on him, but of course the accent doesn't help that much.
	But no, it's tough to meet people when you come to a new town.
	I mean, you can, I guess, try and meet a woman and then try and get into...
	I'm just using you to get to your friends or something like that.
	But it's tough.
	It's tough. So I really do sympathize with that, with the challenges of coming to a new place and trying to meet people.
	Do you think it's just that I need to go out and meet new people?
	Yeah. I mean, you can, I mean, I'm not, obviously, this is stuff you can, you know, but I'll just sort of mention it.
	But, I mean, you can, you know, start a philosophy group or join a philosophy group or a group on economics or you can, you know, photography group or, you know, anything that you're interested in, you can join and you can meet people that way.
	It's something to remember, you know, when you get older.
	I'm not saying that you sound like a fine, upstanding young fellow, but it's important to remember that, you know, when you get older, friendships are tricky because everybody already has their established group of friends, and coming into an established group of friends is tough.
	So if you don't meet people through work or you don't meet people through dating...
	It's tough. It's tough to meet people.
	And then you may have friends, and then maybe they get married and they have kids.
	And kids is like a slow atomic bomb on the atoll of your social life.
	So it can be really tough to maintain things, at least for a while, for a number of years after that.
	So, yeah, it is a tough thing, and I think that that's why God gave us a desire to fit naughty bits together with someone for our lives long, because that is the friendship, you know, your husband or wife, and that's the friendship that could really last your whole life, because other friendships are subject to, you know, as you said, people move away, people change, they may become less appealing, they may do things that we find not so great morally, because, you know, when you make your friends as a teenager, that's not your big standard, right?
	I mean, your big standard is...
	Are they cool enough for me to hang out with?
	Am I cool enough for them to hang out with?
	And do we like sort of somewhat similar things?
	But standards really change, and I think they improve when you get older.
	But I just wanted to sort of mention, that's one of the reasons why I really urge people to get, to focus on and try and get into a long-term, passionate, lifelong, hopefully, love relationship with someone.
	Because, I mean, that is the friend that you really need to go through life with.
	It's always sort of struck me when people say, like some single woman is having a kid.
	You see this all the time in movies and TV shows.
	Some single woman's having a kid.
	And all her friends say, don't worry, we'll be there for you.
	And I just, I mean, I can't help but laugh.
	It's tragic because it's just not going to happen.
	I mean, you know, your kid wakes up three times during the night.
	What are you going to do? Call your friend across town and say, can you come over again?
	It's just not going to happen. People say they're going to be there for you, but the reality is that you really need someone with you for your life because friendships can be A little unstable and subject to all kinds of variations.
	Anyway, I just sort of mentioned that, A, I really feel for you and I really understand.
	There's things that you can do, but it's a challenge, I think, that a lot of people face.
	Now, apathy though, that's interesting.
	So you have a job but you are distracted from your job and you're not doing that great a job because you find yourself...
	Is it apathy?
	Is it procrastination? Do you think that you might be depressed?
	I mean, what do you think is going on?
	What are you avoiding by distracting yourself with all these other things?
	There is depression.
	I don't know what I'm avoiding.
	I guess if I knew that then maybe I could figure it out.
	I don't know.
	Well, let me ask you this then.
	Is this a new situation for you to be without friends around?
	Or to be alone?
	No, it's not.
	I've been alone for a very long time.
	My parents really were abusive and they didn't really talk to me growing up.
	So I was already alone at home.
	You know, we moved around at school when we moved.
	I went to a different school and lost my friends there.
	And I've probably been dealing with depression since I was 15, and I'm about 29 now.
	I'll be 30 in a couple of days.
	Wow. Happy birthday.
	Happy birthday coming up.
	Okay, so you're going to be 30 in a couple of days?
	Yeah. That may be relevant, right?
	Maybe that's what you're avoiding.
	Because, I mean, 30 is a big marker, right?
	I mean, 20, frankly, who gives a shit, right?
	20, you're just out of your teens and your life is stretching way ahead of you like there's nothing over the horizon but more and more future, right?
	But when you're 30, you're, you know, hopefully a third of the way along, hopefully more than half.
	But by the time you're 30, if stuff is not there in your life, there's not this weird, hazy some day that you can cross your fingers and hope it's going to roll down the hill towards you.
	So let me just ask you that basic question.
	So you're going to be 30 in a couple of days, and how's your life relative to what you want, relative to your ideals, relative to your goals?
	How is your life as a whole?
	Not in a good place.
	Right. Right.
	Okay, so let's just go down the list, right?
	So if you can just do that sort by order of importance, because I'm talking to someone who's got some technical stuff.
	So sort by the column called Gotta Haves.
	What's missing from your life?
	What's the top three things that are missing from your life that are the most important?
	relationships with people successful business and financial stability I guess the two and three kind of go hand in hand.
	Yeah, no, I mean, you can be successful in business without having a lot of financial stability.
	Like, so if you're an entrepreneur, you may not have a lot of stability, but you may be really enjoying what you're doing.
	So, but I know what you mean.
	So you'd like financial stability, you'd like more business success, and you like relationships.
	And do you mean primarily friendship or romantic or both?
	Romantic and friends.
	If you had to choose, which would you choose?
	Romantic. Right, okay.
	I'm just trying to sort of figure that out, right?
	So, when was the last romantic relationship you were in, if any?
	Sorry? When was the last romantic relationship you were in?
	Probably eight years ago.
	It's been a long time.
	Eight years? Wow.
	All right. Does that seem like a long time to you?
	I mean, I'm kind of leading the question there, like, C-O-M-G, eight years?
	But that's a long time, right?
	Yeah, I put it off just because I didn't want to get romantically involved when I didn't have stability in my life.
	I didn't want to have a chance of having kids and then not being able to take care of the kids, so I just kind of put things off.
	I think that what you believe is true, but it doesn't seem true to me.
	Because you can have romantic relationships that don't lead to kids.
	You can have romantic relationships that are like flings or fun.
	You can have romantic relationships that you sort of say up front, listen, until I get stable, I don't really want to have kids and have that conversation up front.
	I don't think that it's true, fundamentally, that you'd spend eight years not dating because you were afraid of not being able to take care of kids, because there's lots of people who date in their 20s who don't, you know, go and have kids or whatever, right?
	Well, I was also really very religious until about a year ago when I started listening to the show.
	I just realized that there is no God.
	But I think that affected my decision-making.
	That loosens the old zipper a little bit, doesn't it?
	Well, and also, of course, there's a weird kind of cause and effect that can occur that when you have kids, or when you get married and you have kids, generally, your economic situation tends to improve.
	And I don't think anyone really knows all of the causes and effects behind that.
	But people who have kids tend to improve their career significantly, either because they're working harder or they're perceived as having more responsibility because they have that responsibility at home or they're more conscientious or whatever it is that goes on.
	But there's some alchemy about having kids that helps people make more money.
	And again, I'm not going to say I know anything about the cause and effect of that, but there does seem to be a pretty significant correlation.
	Lack of economic stability is not a reason to not have kids.
	I'm not saying go have kids when you have no money in the bank and no job.
	But there does seem to be an effect that when you have kids, people get a lot more serious.
	I mean, I certainly feel a lot more differently than I did.
	I feel a lot different than before I had a daughter.
	So things change.
	I just sort of want to point that out from a cause and effect standpoint.
	It may not be that clear cut.
	Okay, so do you want to focus on the romantic side of things, or do you want to focus on the work things, or do you want to focus on the friendship or the financial stability?
	What do you think would be the best one to take a swing at?
	The work thing.
	The work thing, okay.
	Is there something that you could ask me about it or...
	Well, so you have a lack of motivation to do well at your job at the moment, right?
	Yes. Well, that means, I think, that you don't really like your job, first and foremost, right?
	I'm not sure about that.
	I mean, I've always wanted my own business.
	I think I'm at a tipping point where if I get all this stuff done, then it starts moving forward.
	And I'm in this business with my parents as well.
	Sorry, the business that you're in right now is with your parents?
	Yes. They're financing much of it, some of the properties, and I'm overseeing the properties and managing.
	And you said that your parents were abusive, right?
	Yes. Are they not that way now?
	They're not as verbally abusive as before, and I do avoid calls with them.
	And physically abusive, you know, I'm already bigger than them, so that ended years ago.
	So they're less verbally abusive, but you're saying it still occurs?
	Yes. There are times when things are hectic, when, like, there's not enough bookings.
	No, I understand. And have you talked to them about your childhood experiences and your history and any issues that you have, or the issues that you do have, obviously, about how you were raised?
	I have, and they blow it off as me blaming them.
	Right. Okay.
	So it's not like you're just blaming us so you don't have to take responsibility for your own life, that kind of stuff?
	Yes. Right.
	Right. And when did you have those conversations with them?
	I think the last one I had was this past November.
	I don't really recall too much.
	I've had a few of them with my mother.
	And how do you experience that they've, if I can use the phrase, blown you off about some significant complaints you have about your history with them?
	How do I feel about it?
	Yeah. Unimportant or just sad, irrelevant.
	Right. Right.
	If I can... I mean, the word that popped into my mind when you were saying unimportant, sad, and irrelevant is apathetic.
	Like you feel apathetic.
	I mean, I don't want to put words into your mouth, but tell me if that fits at all.
	That looks like it goes hand in hand.
	I mean, they don't care about me, so I don't care about my life.
	Well, that's not the causal effect, right?
	There are millions of people, billions of people in the world who don't give a rat's ass about me, but I still care about my life, right?
	Well, it is, yeah.
	Look, I agree with you it is different, but I would say that it's not specific to parents.
	If you have people in your life who think that you are not worth very much, it's very hard to have self-esteem.
	Right? Yeah.
	If your parents, I mean, I don't know, but if your parents do think that you're unimportant, it's going to be very hard if you're involved in them, particularly in something as intricate and involved as a business.
	If your parents think that you're unimportant, it's going to be very hard for you to feel that you're important and worthy if you're around people, especially with this kind of history, who think that you're unimportant.
	Does that make any sense?
	Isn't that by me again?
	Well, let's say I'm dating a woman who thinks I'm ugly.
	Okay. Right, and she's constantly complaining that, you know, my head's too big, I'm too bald, or whatever, right?
	And she thinks I'm ugly. How easy is it going to be for me to feel attractive?
	Very difficult. Yeah, I would say kind of impossible.
	Kind of impossible, right?
	So if you have people in your life To whom your genuine needs and honest experience and preferences are not important, how easy is it going to be for you to feel that you're important?
	I'm not. So apathy, I believe, like 90% of the time, apathy is kind of like an infection from others.
	Did that make any sense?
	I'm intrigued. I don't know if I put it together yet.
	Look, it's just my theory, right?
	It's just idiot amateur error on the internet.
	But I genuinely believe that our identity, our sense of ourself, right?
	I've talked about something in the past called a mycosystem, which is like ourselves, that we don't just have one identity, we have a bunch of different selves.
	But I think it's much wider than that.
	I think that we actually have to use a ridiculous phrase, but I think it's helpful.
	It's called a we-co-system.
	It's we, right?
	So my identity is composed of, you know, a self or selves that I have, a number of different selves that I have.
	You know, a self-critical self, a self-praising self, a happy self, a self that gets down on myself, you know, a whole variety.
	And they come from my identity itself and also come from people that were around me when I was a kid.
	My parents, a priest or two, a teacher or two, those kinds of things.
	My siblings or my brother.
	And those are the identities that I have within myself.
	But I also have My wife's view of me.
	And her view of me has multiplicities as well, because she relates to my multiplicities.
	And my daughter has a view of me as well.
	And my friends have views of me as well.
	And so what I call my identity is a very complex interweaving of my identity, of other people's identities, and all the relationships that all these identities have with each other.
	And so if I have people around me who think that I'm worthless, who think that I'm unimportant, who think that I'm useless, who think that I'm crap, who think that I'm boring, who think that I'm unattractive, I'm not saying you've said all of this, but if I have people around like that, that is an invasion like a virus into my identity.
	And if I continue to hang around people like that at some level, I have to agree with them.
	Does that make any sense? This is why we have to be so careful about the people we have in our lives.
	They always say, be very careful who you have sex with and wear a condom.
	When you have sex with someone, you're having sex with all the partners they had in the past.
	That's true, right? But I believe that it's our relationships that we have to guard even more fiercely than our penises and vaginas and all other kinds of goodies.
	Because the people who are around us, they become us.
	We internalize them.
	Their opinions of us become indistinguishable from our opinions of us.
	Does that make any sense? So if you have people in your life who think that you're not worth very much, And who are uninterested in your genuine experiences and all other kinds of things.
	I don't want to talk too much about it because you've just given a few hints, but you know what the answer is to all of this.
	Then those people are going to come into your head, they are going to take up residence, and they are going to start repeating themselves, and they're going to start, like...
	They're like an infection. I mean, everybody's an infection.
	It can be a good infection or a bad infection, right?
	But everybody that we have a relationship with takes up residence in our heads and starts talking to us.
	Everybody. There's no exceptions to that, I believe.
	And so you have to be really careful who you let in your head.
	How do I move the bad ones out?
	I mean, once I've separated the contacts, I just...
	Well, look, yeah, therapy I think is very important, and you can't fundamentally eliminate things.
	People are like herpes. You can control the outbreaks, but you can't eliminate them, at least in my opinion.
	But no, this is my opinion, right?
	So nobody can tell you what to do, and this is just my opinion.
	But if I were you, I would go back and talk to my parents some more.
	I know it's tough. I know it's scary.
	I know it's hard. But you're kind of in the dull zone.
	I think you need to find a way to break through with your parents.
	And if you can't break through with your parents, then you have other options.
	But I would get a hold of a therapist.
	I would talk to a therapist and I would say, this has been my experience from when I was a kid.
	This has been my experience of trying to talk to them as adults.
	I want to try and talk to them again, but I need some help.
	I need some support so that I could really do my very, very best to try and break through and have a more healthy and beneficial relationship with my parents and you know it's always my hope that that works if it doesn't you have other options which you're fully aware of of course which everybody's fully aware of that adult relationships are purely voluntary but you're kind of in a null zone because you had this talk with your parents and they kind of blew you off and you're still doing the same thing like that didn't happen well What that's telling yourself is,
	I can act on my values and if I don't get what I reasonably deserve, it doesn't matter.
	Well, that is going to make you apathetic because it's going to feel like, well, so what?
	What does it matter what I do?
	If I talk to my parents and they blow me off and then I just keep going on like nothing happened, well, of course you're going to feel apathetic, right?
	Yeah. That makes sense.
	So don't stay in the null zone.
	I mean, that's where people want us to go sometimes, but keep talking.
	Keep the conversation open.
	and keep talking about what's important to you with people.
	Because what's going to happen is we either drive our life consciously or life drives us unconsciously, which can be quite risky.
	Because what's going to happen if you can't solve this apathy?
	What's going to happen to your career, your job?
	What's going to happen? Yeah, so don't let that happen to you.
	If you're destined not to end up working with your parents, at least make that a choice.
	Don't turn that over to the Netflix server to solve for you, right?
	Right. Yeah.
	And I would suggest that until you solve this, it's going to be tough to get a romantic relationship going, I think.
	You're just not going to be available, I think, emotionally.
	I agree. So that's, you know, my major few scraps of idiot wisdom.
	That's all I really had to say.
	Is there anything else that you wanted to add to that?
	No, thank you. I mean, it gives me a lot to think about and look over.
	Yeah, and look, a 30 can be a lot of fun.
	Your 30s can be great.
	I had a ball in my 30s.
	I'm having even more of a ball in my 40s, but I had a great time in my 30s.
	It doesn't have to be a decade to dread.
	It can be a lot of fun, but it sounds like you've got a bit of talking to do with people in your life, I think, to really earn that kind of propulsion.
	Thank you for your time.
	Thanks very much, man. Great topic, great conversation.
	I really appreciate it. And Jimmy, Jimbo, James, O-Rama, Bart, do we have somebody else online?
	Oh, hi. Yeah, from England school.
	Yeah, no, I think I got that from the accent.
	What can I do for you, my friend? Well, I could have put on an accent, but it would have sounded weird, I think.
	Yeah, I messaged you before, but I think you got half the meaning of what I said.
	I wasn't going to call the show with that particular message.
	Okay, so what's on your mind?
	Oh, what's on my mind? Yeah, basically, I mean, I didn't hear the full conversation with the last caller, but It's sort of tied in with a destiny to do with parents and a few realizations about the way I was raised.
	I've been reading Atlas Shrugged and having a few realizations from that.
	It's pretty hard to sort of To process that and have, I think I'm still waiting to have that kind of emotional connection and realize a few things, but yeah, just in terms of that stuff really.
	I'm not sure what I can and can't say really in terms of what I've realized.
	Well, that's up to you. I'm happy to hear whatever's on your mind.
	Well, in terms of my parents' behavior towards me, it was very abusive, but different types of abuse in terms of neglect from one side and violence from another.
	I'm so sorry to hear that.
	I'm so sorry to hear that.
	Yeah, and it kind of...
	I mean, I've noticed quite a lot of effects from it and stuff.
	One thing, it's very hard to think about stuff because I was kind of made not to think, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, it does. Because one thing my dad hated was me questioning him.
	And talking. Yeah, he had an expression, if I say jump, you ask how high it is.
	He wouldn't be a military man by chance, would he?
	Well, funny enough, when he was younger, he did join the RAF, but he didn't stay for long.
	Yeah, no, I was just saying, like, my grandparents met and married because of war.
	They wouldn't have met.
	They were from different ends of the country, so they wouldn't have met anyway.
	And so my dad joined the RAF, I think, to kind of impress his mother or something.
	But I think my...
	I mean, I haven't spoken to my dad for nine years now.
	I mean, I was kind of a bit nervous in ringing up tonight because, I mean, you're kind of like this, seen as this, certainly amongst me and my friends, and I was introduced to your videos through my friends, but as this kind of, obviously, sort of all the Authority figure, so I was kind of really nervous and wondering my motives for calling and stuff.
	But I think that side...
	I think the subject is quite difficult.
	I think in terms of physically, I get that feeling like I'm going to get hit if I go against my dad or my family and stuff.
	But I think...
	One of the biggest realizations I had in terms of how they treated me, and in terms of evidence as well actually, you know, was that they wanted to destroy me, which sounds like really bold, like really like a big statement.
	It kind of sounds like when you say someone arresting you is kidnapping you kind of thing.
	No, listen, I understand what that means.
	I really do. And I'll just reinforce that, at least from my perspective, that thought and judgment and evaluation and all those kinds of things, that is called having an identity.
	That is called having a self.
	And I know when I was a kid, my mom would say, you know, I told you to do X or I told you to do Y or whatever.
	And sometimes these things would be contradictory or sometimes they wouldn't make sense or whatever.
	And I would always say the same thing.
	Well, but I thought you said this or I thought that.
	And she would always snap back, well, don't think, right?
	That would be her big statement, right?
	Right. And to me, when somebody says don't think, all I hear is don't be, don't exist, don't have an identity, don't have a soul, don't have a mind, don't have a brain, don't exist.
	And so if you were not allowed to question or criticize Then, to me, that is a very powerful assault upon identity, a very powerful assault, a very negative and destructive assault upon the very concept of being.
	Because if you're not allowed to think, if you're not allowed to question, if you're not allowed to oppose people in authority, then who are you?
	Who are you? I mean, what thoughts are in your head other than fear and compliance and resentment?
	Yeah, and I certainly think in terms of...
	Because, I mean, I could say, oh, well, I'm just saying that, or maybe I interpreted things different.
	But when I kind of had that realisation, I was kind of looking at experiences that I'd been through.
	I used to be on drugs and alcohol, and it was when I was on drugs and alcohol that my family wanted to engage with me the most.
	When I got off all that...
	Well, are you still there?
	Yeah, yeah. Yes, so when I sort of got off...
	Drugs and alcohol and did productive things with my life.
	Really kind of knew sort of exciting things.
	My mum wasn't really interested.
	My family weren't really interested.
	And so there was looking at that, so I thought, well, that's weird how they're showing an interest when I'm at this really bad level.
	There was like times where I kind of did feel quite down.
	And my mom would say things like, don't, don't, you know, so I'd say I'm feeling really, you know, I've just moved to Bristol.
	I feel, you know, this strange city from a small town.
	I feel really lonely and isolated and depressed.
	And she'd say things like, oh, don't say that.
	It's making me upset and that kind of thing.
	And also, I think the biggest realization was when my dad said to me, my life would have been easier if you hadn't been born, kind of thing.
	So that was kind of like...
	Yeah, yeah, oh no, he's...
	I could tell you stories about my dad, and he's just like, he's another person.
	It wasn't so much the physical stuff.
	That was more humiliating, kind of, but it was kind of, as opposed to...
	Oh yeah. I remember my mom's statements or rages.
	I remember the words like 40 years later.
	I remember the words. I remember the intonation.
	I remember where she was in the room when she would say the most destructive things that she would say about wishing we weren't there and wishing she'd never had kids and wishing that we didn't exist and all that.
	I mean, that stuff, it's like a brand right down into the very base of your brain because it tells you very, very clearly that you better not be too demanding, that you better not be too oppositional, that you better not cause too much trouble, right?
	Yeah. And so, you know, having this realization, it's like, right, okay, so they want to destroy me and stuff.
	I mean, I've already kind of cut off contact with my family, really.
	I don't speak with my brothers.
	I think that's unfortunate because I think my brothers were just as much victims as I was.
	But because I was the oldest, I was very much vilified.
	I was used as the scapegoat for my mum's neglectful...
	I mean, we're talking mouldy food in the cupboards, not feeding us properly, sending my brother to school with his pyjamas still on, you know, just...
	But I think I know why I was kind of vilified.
	I mean, I was thrown out of home at 14.
	My mom said she couldn't handle me.
	And I think the difference between me and my brothers was I questioned things.
	Both my parents had me very young.
	And I think when you have a kid, it kind of makes you have to face reality.
	You have to face reality in order for that child to survive.
	And that child's not had a choice and can't look after itself, you know.
	So you have to kind of face reality and face up to responsibility.
	And I think them doing that made them realize.
	And I'm not making excuses for my mom or my dad, but particularly my mom has.
	Look, I mean, reasons are not the same as excuses.
	I completely agree with you.
	Saying that smoking causes cancer is a reason.
	It's not an excuse for smoking.
	It doesn't mean that everyone who smokes is no longer responsible for their cancer.
	But reasons, causality is not an excuse.
	So I'm with you there.
	I think examining these kinds of things is very, very important.
	And yeah, they didn't sort of generate out of nowhere, but I think in terms of my mum's experience, I mean, that's quite horrific to think about because she's been through...
	And yeah, this isn't confirmed.
	I mean, There are some abuses I haven't got confirmation on just in terms of behavior and odd responses and stuff.
	Sorry, just don't go into detail about your mom because she's not part of this conversation, but I think we can all understand.
	Yeah, I want it to be as vague as possible.
	Yeah, I think that's fine.
	I think it's completely fair to say that, I mean, my mom certainly went through just things that I would have a tough time even imagining growing up in the war, and your mom went through things that were terrible.
	But that's not quite the same as a cause, right?
	Because there are people who go through terrible things who...
	Become more humane as a result, right?
	So it's like the old story about twins of an alcoholic dad, right?
	And one twin says, well, my dad was a drinker, and that's why I'm a drinker.
	And the other twin says, well, my dad was a drinker, that's why I never touch alcohol.
	So, right, there are causes, but they're not a direct line to effects, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, I mean, we still have a choice.
	Granted, we've got a lot of...
	Well, we, you know, sorry, just to make the argument a bit more nuanced, I don't think we always have a choice.
	I think that, you know, free will seems to be something that's like a muscle you exercise, and if you don't exercise it for long enough, then it's like you don't have it.
	So the problem is, of course, that when we reach the age of reason, sort of 7, 8, 9, 10, or 11, or whatever, our parents, I mean, your parents sound younger, but our parents are often in their mid-30s or whatever, and Then we didn't know them when they were younger and had more choices.
	And we look at them now, if they're dysfunctional, then they kind of seem like robots.
	Like they just react and they don't think and they don't evaluate and they can't seem to make better choices.
	And we say, well, gosh, that's the way they are.
	But probably, I would argue that there was a time when they were younger, but they had more choices and more capacity for change.
	And the fact that we see them later on, there can be a bit of an illusion about how much choice they did have.
	Could you explain that a bit?
	Well, okay, so let's say that my dad, I think he smoked pipes.
	And he used to smoke a long pipe because he said his joke was that my doctor told me to stay away from tobacco, so he smoked a very long pipe.
	Ha ha ha, you're a funny guy. So let's say my dad was a heavy pipe smoker.
	Well, if he's a heavy pipe smoker, he's not likely to be a marathon runner, right?
	Because, you know, whatever, he's got smoke all over his place.
	Body. Now, when he was first starting to be a pipe smoker when he was 20, he had a choice about whether to either start smoking pipes or just after he'd started to stop.
	Now, by the time I knew him when he was in his 40s, you know, he'd been smoking pipes.
	And I'm making most of this up.
	I know he smoked a pipe, but I don't know to what extent or what degree, but he'd been smoking pipes for like 20 years.
	And so he was probably addicted and that had become really ingrained behavior.
	So I'd say, well, he's a pipe smoker.
	He has to smoke pipes. And therefore he can't run a marathon.
	But that's because he'd now been smoking for 20 years.
	Whereas back in the day, when he was 18 or 19 or 20 and first started smoking pipes, he had a lot more choice.
	But now he'd been smoking pipes for 20 years, he has a lot less choice.
	But I want to always remember that there was more choice when he was younger.
	Yeah, and I think it would be very hard.
	I think that's where my mum would say things, in terms of my experience of her, she would say things to me like, you're making me have a nervous breakdown and stuff by me questioning her.
	So I think she'd gotten to a level where she denied so much or just didn't even want to think about her Her life, maybe, that to face up to raising me would mean or to face up to any abuses.
	I mean, because she made the choice to get with my dad and, you know.
	Yeah, and stay. Like, I'll give you just a tiny example, right?
	I got an email from a woman the other day who was saying that she has a kid who's about 18 months and she realized she got so angry at him that she was yelling at him and about to shake him because he was not doing something that she wanted.
	And she wrote to me and she was like, oh, my God.
	You know, I started listening to your philosophical parenting series and I was just horrified at what I was doing.
	You know, do you have any advice?
	And, you know, I mean, what do I know, right?
	But I just said, you know, go see a therapist.
	Figure out what in your history is making you this angry.
	For heaven's sakes, don't ever touch your child in anger and don't raise your voice.
	Somehow people think that raising your voice is so much better than hitting, but I don't think that it is.
	And yeah, I mean, last I'd heard she was going to therapy.
	She was making great strides forward.
	She had not aggressed against her child since.
	And Right, so every parent has this thing where they first hit their child, or they first yell at their child, or they first see that fear in their child's eyes.
	I think every parent then has a crossroad.
	They have a choice. Now, if they choose the dark path, right, if they choose the dark side, and they just keep hitting and yelling, then they get all these justifications for it, and their choice diminishes over time.
	But I believe that, except for genuinely insane parents, which of course very, very few, Parents, yeah, they hit their kid, there's a moment of horror.
	No matter how jaded or cynical or corrupt they are, there's a moment of horror.
	I know my mom had it. There's this moment of, oh my god, what have I just done?
	And that's the choice.
	That's where the choice shows up.
	And we don't remember that because we were probably too young when it happened, but there is a real moment of choice, and everything that happens after that is, I genuinely believe, the result of what happens in that moment almost always.
	And I think in terms of how that's affected me now, it's kind of made me sort of realize, okay, so they wanted that because I get very stressed about stuff and I get two modes of thinking, either to Be self-destructive internally or externally.
	And I kind of know where that comes from now, so it's kind of like Trying to recapture that kind of will to want to be happy, to do something, to be productive, because, you know, you do something productive, but then this kind of voice of self comes in, you're like, oh, I'm doing this kind of thing.
	And it's kind of thinking, did I have it?
	What is that? And I think, you know, looking at kids and stuff, and you see that curiosity that they have.
	So it's there. It's inherent within us, I would imagine.
	It's just a guess. Yeah, but look, I mean, I think the reality is, like, I'm no doctor, no psychologist, but you might want to check out the video series called The Bomb and the Brain that I did.
	It's fdrurl.com forward slash bb.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I've seen that, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, so there are brain changes that occur as a result of abuse that can't be undone.
	I mean, you can fix them.
	The brain retains a lot of plasticity throughout age.
	But you can't be a person who was never abused.
	That's not ever going to happen.
	So when you see kids who are sort of happy and healthy and positive, and I see this every day with my daughter, I can't ever go back and have that.
	I can't ever be that person.
	I can't ever be the person who didn't go through many, many years of terrible abuse.
	I just can't. Particularly, you know, if you're an adult and it happens, like you're unjustly imprisoned or a prisoner of war or something, I mean, that's rough enough, but at least your brain is formed.
	At least you have an adult's brain and you have an adult's capacity to understand things.
	But the damage that is done to children during the time of brain formation, and that can occur before the child is even born, This is permanent.
	It's permanent and it's developmental.
	And that doesn't mean that it's unhealable, but it means that even if you heal it, you can break your arm and then you can even end up stronger than before your arm was broken if you do the rehab and all of that.
	But you can never be somebody who never broke his arm.
	Oh, hey, sorry. Are we back?
	Hi. Yeah, sorry.
	I think I got booted from the call, but I'm back.
	Oh, okay. Yeah, I think what you're saying makes sense and certainly I think in terms of how I learn things I get very frustrated and I think I had a lot of problems in school because a lot of it was kind of like you're the problem as opposed to looking at what the source of the problem was and I think that I could I could go into a long history of what my school was like,
	but that's another story.
	But I think in terms of how it's affected me now, I think there's a part of me that still very much looks for Right.
	Well, you're used to, right?
	So my argument would be that you're used to managing danger and aggression, that that's what you grew up with, that that was the only sense of control and power that you had, was to manage, to deal with, with control, to control aggression, to manage aggression.
	And so It's sort of like a man who's been walking against a strong wind for a long time.
	When the wind stops, he falls down, right?
	And so there may be a part of you that is so used to managing aggression that if it ain't there, you've got to make it, right?
	You've got to invent it. If you're not used to managing stress and difficulty, that may have something to do with the drug use and the alcohol use and so on.
	I'm so used to managing chaos.
	I'm so used to managing dysfunction that if it's not around me, I need to go generate it because that's all I know.
	And that's the greatest tragedy is this kind of addiction that we have to managing this kind of stress.
	It's really hard to let go of that.
	And I think in terms of the stuff I'm learning now, particularly about stuff that you've mentioned and I've mentioned that I mention with my friends in terms of the government and schools because it all ties in.
	So when I'm talking to someone else who may have a different opinion from me and I've not heard the arguments, I'm not very good with arguing or disagreements and that shits will come back and all my thoughts will kind of And it's very frustrating.
	And then you kick yourself for saying, oh, I should have done that better, or later I should have done this.
	Yeah, later, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, look, I mean, I've said this before, and I'll say it again.
	Listen, my friend, I think it's very, very important that if you're dealing with this kind of history and you're working through this, do not put on the caped crusader of philosophical Superman right now, because you've got enough of your own shit to deal with and to calm down and to soothe before you go out talking to people about red pill and blue pill.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah. You know, like you're flying in a plane and they lose pressure, the oxygen masks come down.
	It's like you put it over your own face before you put it on other people's, right?
	Yeah, so don't go out and be a Caped Crusader, man.
	I mean, it's not time.
	It's not time. Because you're just going to replace one set of stressors for another.
	And I would really love the idea of you living kind of stress-free for at least a couple of years.
	And that would be my very strong suggestion.
	Yeah, I'll...
	Yeah, I don't know what else to say.
	How am I doing for an asshole authority figure?
	Am I doing okay? I didn't say asshole.
	I know, but that's part of you, right?
	Because that's what you're used to.
	But no, I think it's really like, take care of yourself.
	Take care of yourself, right? I mean, if you're working on healing a broken arm, don't go out and throw a cricket ball around, right?
	See, I'm localizing my metaphors here.
	But I mean, you need to get yourself straight.
	You need to get yourself calm. You need to get yourself right.
	The long haul of changing the world is a really difficult thing to do, and you can really only start it from a position of relative calm and security.
	I would get the love of your life into your life, get your career straightened, get your finances sorted, get yourself calm, get yourself peaceful, get yourself into a good place, and then see if you want to.
	Just because you have the truth doesn't mean that you're obligated to go and help people, because the vast majority of people don't want the truth, and they will piss all over you for trying to get it.
	I think you got my message the other day about an experience.
	I won't mention it, but, yeah, sort of trying to pick a time and a place to speak to someone when you see something going on and getting a certain reaction.
	It's difficult. It's difficult.
	Yeah, I mean, look, if you see someone being hurt or abused, I mean, I think it's good if you can.
	But, yeah, I mean, not obligated.
	I mean, I get letters from people who, like, you know, they're subscribing for $10 a month.
	And they say, listen, I'm broke.
	I can't do it. And I'm like, yeah, of course.
	I mean, geez, ditch the philosophy podcast and buy food, for heaven's sakes.
	Don't put yourself in any kind of risk to keep a podcast going.
	I mean, the podcast will survive.
	But yeah, everybody needs to take care of themselves, first and foremost.
	Because change is going to come not from you debating with people, not from you arguing with people, not from you winning arguments with people.
	My friend, the change is going to come from you having a happy, wonderful life.
	The change is going to come from you raising children with peace and with kindness and with virtue and with generosity.
	Peace is going to come from you falling in love with the right woman and her falling in love with you for all the right reasons and having a wonderful and supportive and happy life.
	That is where change is going to come, organically, from within the family, from within your life, from within your heart.
	It is not going to come because you browbeat somebody down with logic and evidence.
	There's times, and I love a good debate, there's times where I think it's great.
	But I don't make the mistake of thinking that I'm obligated to do it or that it's going to do a damn thing other than maybe get a few people interested at some point.
	And remember, of course, it's my job and it's other people's hobby, right?
	So, you know, that's an important thing to remember.
	You know, just because I can do okay at karaoke doesn't mean I'm going to open at Massey Hall.
	It's okay to keep those things as a hobby, but the most important thing is to not let philosophy be...
	Don't use philosophy as a way of re-experiencing stress and tension from when you were a kid.
	That's not what philosophy is for.
	Philosophy is to bring you happiness and peace and serenity and security in your life.
	And if you find that you take pleasure and happiness and can do it in a relatively stress-free way to help the world, fantastic.
	But that is completely optional.
	And that comes long after, in my opinion, in my very strong opinion, that comes long after you have your life right, that your heart is open, that your life is filled with love and butterflies and bees and birds and all that kind of stuff.
	Then you'll be showing people what happiness and virtue looks like rather than telling them And most people in this world learn only by seeing, not by hearing.
	Yeah, that's great.
	So I've got a lot of food for thought there, and apologies.
	And listen, I hate to cut you short, but I want to make sure if you have anything else, let's deal with that, because I want to make sure we have a couple other callers.
	No, I just want to say quickly, apologies to the American listeners if they didn't understand my accent.
	No, it's pretty good.
	It's not like you're calling from Glasgow or something, in which case we just have to slow you down and play it backwards so that people can hear it more comprehensively.
	No, that's great, Steph.
	I appreciate that.
	Thanks so much, Mandy. Great, great topics.
	I'm so sorry to hear about your history, of course.
	I hope that you'll talk to a therapist if and when you can.
	And congratulations on this journey that you're on.
	It is so incredibly heartwarming for me.
	I mean, not that you shouldn't live your life to be heartwarming to me, but it is anyway.
	It's incredibly heartwarming to me that people are so interested and finding such value in self-knowledge.
	And people bring up family stuff a lot here, and some people like that.
	Some people don't. But the reality is that family is our first experience of philosophy.
	Family is our first experience of philosophy, and it is the most powerful experience of philosophy that most of us will ever have.
	So when you're upset and your mother says, I don't want you to talk about this because it's making me upset, well, that's a philosophical argument.
	That is a moral argument.
	That is an argument from universals.
	That is subject to UPB, a universally preferable behavior.
	That is subject to an evaluation of its ethical content because that is a moral statement.
	We don't have to analyze it now, but I'm just saying that most of what we hear from parents, certainly most of what we hear from teachers and from priests when it comes to morality, It's all ethical.
	It's all a moral argument. We are entirely surrounded by moral, ethical, and philosophical arguments when we're growing up.
	So the fact that people bring up family stuff and all that, I think that's perfectly appropriate to a show about philosophy because that's where we hear our first philosophy.
	So when your dad says, when I say jump, you say how high, that is a philosophical argument about the relationship.
	between the powerless and the powerful that is a philosophical argument about the relationship between might makes right versus universal virtue that is a philosophical argument about authority that is a philosophical argument about morality and its place and its applicability that is a moral argument about thought as offensive to power that is a philosophical argument And the fact that it sticks with you is because of that philosophical content.
	The stuff that really lasts with us, the stuff that really sticks with us is the stuff with deep moral content and it needs to be evaluated.
	So I'm very happy when people talk about these kinds of topics because it is the most powerful and primordial form of philosophy that we all experience is that which we get when we're very young.
	So thanks again very much.
	If we wanted to move on to another caller, James, we have some time, I do believe.
	Yeah, I've had an issue with grandiosity for some time, not as a Permanent way of thinking, but whenever I'm feeling a bit low or whenever there's some distraction, I sometimes use it as a distraction from when I feel low or not good enough in some way.
	In those moments, I just go into this sort of fantasy world where I see all these designs and impressive things and that kind of thing.
	I looked up what narcissism was two years ago, and since then I've been kind of paranoid about this habit.
	So now you need to look up paranoia, narcissism, and grandiosity.
	Good! We're getting quite a collection going here.
	Quite a grab bag.
	You know, pretty much you'll just open up the DSM-4, I guess soon to be DSM-5, and just say, yep, that's pretty much me.
	But sorry, go on. Seriously, reading about personality disorders, Every time I read anything, I think I have it, but that's usually not the case.
	If I see a thing that I've done once or twice in terms of behavior, I assume that it's a full-on tendency.
	But in any case, I'm wondering what I can do to basically lessen the use of grandiosity, but still take advantage of some of the cool designs and stuff that I see in that mental state.
	Right, so how can I be ambitious without being grandiose?
	Is that right? Oh yeah, that's it.
	Now, first of all, I would question the wisdom of calling a guy who's trying to run the biggest and most powerful philosophy conversation the world has ever seen to ask for advice on grandiosity.
	I just, you know, so take everything that I'm going to say with a huge grain of salt.
	It's like they're calling me up to ask me about, you know, should I part my hair on the left or the right?
	It's like, dude, I'm so past that question.
	But, um... But no, I mean, and, you know, just the usual caveats that we're just using all of these words in strictly amateur ways.
	There's no, of course, professional diagnosis going on here.
	But grandiosity, I think, is a really, really fascinating question or issue because...
	There are states of mind that are elevated and positive, but are threatening to other people because of that very elevation and positivity, right?
	And so I wonder the degree to which ambition, which I think people recognize as a good thing in and of itself, like, I mean, as long as it's not like cold-blooded, ruthless, win-lose, stab your opponent kind of, right?
	So I think ambition is generally considered a good thing.
	But I wonder, I always wonder if the negative aspects of ambition, which obviously are termed, you know, grandiosity or whatever, if they're not invented by people who are threatened by somebody else's ambition, does that sort of make any sense?
	That definitely does.
	One thing that I've noticed is that there are two kinds of grandiosity that I feel.
	And they both have this sort of fantasizing aspect to them.
	One of the, when I'm, say, running in the gym or whatever, And I just feel amazing and happy.
	It's kind of like any barriers to my emotionality drop away.
	And I just see my emotions taking all these beautiful shapes in my head.
	But the other form involves pumping myself up when I'm not feeling that good.
	And it's a second form that tends to...
	There's always some implied audience there that I really wish wasn't there.
	This wasn't so much of a big thing for me until a couple of years ago when I thought of this as a habit to sort of minimize over time.
	But then I read The Fountainhead and I was like, oh, here's permission.
	Here's permission to dream big.
	I basically wanted to overdrive with this.
	I experienced a lot of ups and downs as a result.
	I'm just wondering what your thoughts are with a more healthy approach to all of that.
	Yeah, let me start with a useless metaphor, and hopefully that will help frame.
	So I sort of view self-esteem like a ball floating on the water, like a ball that has some air in it, obviously, right?
	And so self-esteem to me is like, and there are waves in life, right?
	So your ball, on still, like on a swimming pool, the ball is going to float, pretty much, right?
	But if you put the ball in the ocean, right, there's going to be times where it gets swamped by a wave, and it's going to be underwater, but it's going to bounce back up, you know, to the surface, right?
	And so that to me is self-esteem.
	It doesn't mean that you're never underwater.
	It just means that you have a kind of buoyancy.
	And, you know, I have my stresses and trials and tribulations in my life and I sort of feel down or frightened or anxious or whatever.
	And then, you know, but I sort of write myself.
	The wave passes and I sort of pop up and, you know, all of that basking in the sunshine again.
	And that, to me, is sort of similar to self-esteem.
	People think that you can sort of float above the waves.
	I think that's nonsense. I don't think that's reasonable or rational, right?
	That you can be all zen and not be bothered by anything.
	I think that's crazy. I mean, that just means you're not living.
	You're not engaged in life.
	You're just not in the water.
	And so, yeah, you're in the water.
	There are waves, and some waves are of other people's making, and some waves are accidental, and some of your own.
	But there are waves anytime you try and do anything, right?
	What's that famous line, I think, from...
	Particularly if you try and do anything important or virtuous in the world, right?
	That pisses off a lot of bad people.
	And I take great comfort in Winston Churchill's statement, you have enemies.
	Good! That means you have stood up for something sometime in your life.
	And so I sort of view self-esteem that way.
	Now, on the other hand, if you take a ball and think of taking a balloon and holding it underwater, you know, what happens when you let it go?
	It comes up with a big rush.
	With a big rush, right?
	It's not stable. Now, of course, it will stabilize.
	So that's not the best metaphor from that standpoint.
	But it is something that if something is artificially down or something is held down, then...
	So you think of kids who come from really restrictive households and then they go to college and they live in a frat house or they live on campus or whatever, right?
	Well, they go nuts, right?
	Because they've been held underwater so long that they don't have a stable relationship to the surface.
	They just go bursting through and go up into the sky without restraint.
	I mean, everybody was always surprised.
	When I went to college, I spent a year and a half working as a gold panner and prospector up north.
	I was damn ready to get my learn on.
	So I went to college and I was doing essays within the first week or two of going there and people wanted to go out drinking and I'm like, hey, I'll come out and have a drink or two and I sure love to dance but I'm not going to get drunk because I'm here to learn and I'm paying a lot of money to be here and I don't have any parents paying for things.
	So, you think of people who have, you know, or this happens in the gay community, right?
	Somebody who's been really closeted, you know, they go down to the gay district and it's like, holy crap, who let the demon of infinite sexuality out, right?
	And so, to me, grandiosity is like that balloon bursting through the surface because it's been held down.
	It's not stable yet, and it does go too high, and it does make its own waves, so to speak.
	I mean, does that matter for...
	I know that doesn't answer anything, but does it give us sort of a framework for thinking about it?
	It does. I guess what I'm really...
	Okay, there's this...
	There's something about it that still makes me feel like it's possibly a dangerous habit to go and strengthen it, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, it is. And let me give you sort of the way that I train grandiosity.
	And I have to watch it.
	I know that I have very big ambitions.
	I don't want to be a good parent.
	I want to be the best parent.
	Not best to other people.
	I just want to be the very best parent that I can be.
	And I want to be a great husband.
	And I want to be a great communicator in the realm of philosophy.
	And so, I mean, I have very high ambitions.
	But I'll tell you how you deal with grandiosity, in my opinion.
	You privatize it. What I mean by that is, do you know how government workers, they can do all this shit and they never face any consequences for their actions, right?
	So if some government program doesn't work, nobody has to pay, right, personally?
	So they can say any kind of shit that they want.
	And, you know, like the failed war on drugs.
	People, you know, in the government, they can say, well, I'm for the war on drugs.
	Well, so what? You know, it's like you don't pay personally.
	And where people do pay personally, they tend to change their mind, right?
	So Harry Brown reported once that there was this...
	U.S. government official, I think a politician, who was very much for three strikes and you're out and zero tolerance for drug abuse and so on, and then his own kid got caught with heroin or with cocaine or something, and suddenly he's all making calls to the DA's office to get him into rehab.
	But that's just so predictable, right?
	Where the consequences don't accrue to the individual, they can just posture, and they can make all of these empty words and empty promises and empty phases, you know?
	Because, you know, I mean, George Bush doesn't go and invade Iraq or Afghanistan, so he can say whatever the hell he wants.
	He can go speak from a megaphone and sound all kinds of tough.
	It doesn't accrue to him personally.
	The bill, the trillion dollar bill doesn't get sent to his house, right?
	So, When I look at my own emotions, what I always try to do is to give them consequences.
	So if you say to yourself, I don't know, give me a grandiose dream that you have.
	Build a city with a unique design style.
	Sorry, build a what? Build a city.
	Okay, so build a city with a unique design style.
	Fantastic. Okay, so I say to myself, if those fantasies keep coming back, you say, okay, well, what are the consequences to this fantasy?
	Am I going to do it?
	Right? And if it keeps coming back to me, I'm just going to do it.
	I'm going to start that design.
	I'm going to pull out my Lego or my AutoCAD.
	I don't know what the hell you people use to design stuff.
	But I'm going to pull this stuff out.
	I'm going to start doing it. And maybe I'll write a book about my idea of the perfect city.
	And I'll get involved in the Venus Project.
	Whatever, right? But write a book, start a movement, get it going, make it happen, because then your dreams have consequences, which means they get privatized, which means that they have to put up or shut up.
	And I found no better way to deal with my own grandiosity than to give it consequences, to make it sweat, to make it work.
	That's actually, I'm really responding to that.
	So you're basically saying, no grandiosity unless you're going to do something about it.
	You know, it's like, well, no, I mean, you're still going to have the grandiosity, but it's like, put up or shut up.
	Like, you know, you have this friend, like, you go to karaoke or whatever, and he's like, oh, you suck as a singer.
	I'm a way better singer than you are.
	I could, like, I could do Josh Groban and Freddie Mercury and Sting and Pavarotti and Enrico Caruso all rolled into one.
	And if you keep saying this and keep saying this, at some point, it's like, okay, here's the fucking microphone, right?
	You know? Like, show me, right?
	Like, I think, I don't know if you ever watch, like, American Idol or those kinds of things, but if you ever do, part of you, because I love to sing and I love to perform, right?
	And part of me is like, give me that mic, right?
	But, you know, I've recorded myself.
	I know how I sound.
	You know, I do it.
	If someone thinks they're really, you know, oh, those guys suck, it's like, well, go cut an album.
	It doesn't cost much at all to do it.
	Go get a karaoke machine and sing into it.
	It's gonna cost you like 500 bucks start to finish.
	And then give the album to your friends and see if they'll like to play it in their car. - To an extent, I've like had maybe, I spent maybe a couple of hours over the last two years doing something to that effect.
	So I really could do more in that aspect with like drawing it and mapping out the designs.
	- Yeah, do it.
	Do it.
	There's no cure for fantasy like reality.
	There is no cure for fantasy like reality, right?
	So I was like, oh, you know, I think I've got really important things to say to the world, and that keeps recurring to me.
	And before I podcasted, before I had Free Domain Radio long, long ago, in my car, I'd practice speeches.
	Because I was like, you know, like long before I ever had any place to talk about or to any venue, I was practicing speeches off and on for years when I was commuting.
	So I didn't just start Free Domain Radio like, hey, I open my mouth and all the words come out.
	I mean, I've been practicing this shit for years.
	I was writing. I was in there with no outlet, right?
	I was writing. I was practicing speeches.
	I was doing all this kind of stuff.
	I mean, this doesn't just pop out of nowhere.
	And so I always sort of felt that I had this stuff to offer.
	I had this value to offer.
	And so then, you know, when it's like, okay, so I think I may have enough money to at least start to do this, well, do it.
	You know, you thought for years you could do it, so do it.
	And that's great. And that has really cured me of grandiosity, is realizing what a challenge it really is, and that I, you know, some of my ambitions have been true.
	I have been very pleased with the way it's worked out.
	Some of them I have still yet to realize.
	I still want to give a complete, you know, fist pumping, Klingon brain, forehead vein pumping, a bond burner of a speech, but I think that will come over time.
	So, you know, I've still got a ways to go, but, you know, there's nothing that cures ambition or grandiosity like putting the spinning wheels on the road and seeing how fast it goes.
	Is there anything that you've managed to do to avoid the whole sort of Peter Keating, imagining an audience all the time phenomena?
	Well, again, you're talking to a guy on a Sunday show about how to avoid thinking you have an audience.
	But yeah, no, look, that is a very, very big problem.
	And I don't think it should be cured completely.
	I think it would be insane to cure it completely.
	Because we do have an audience, right?
	So if you're on a first date with someone, you have an audience.
	And it seems unlikely to me that you're going to act exactly the same way as you are after you've had a relationship for 10 years.
	When you go for a job interview, you have an audience and you're going to behave differently than otherwise.
	And if you're singing in the shower versus singing on a stage in front of 10,000 people, you have an audience.
	I don't imagine that Mick Jagger puffs out his lips and struts all around his shower if he's singing in the shower.
	No, but we don't want to see him rubbing himself down with Irish soap and singing on a stage, right?
	So there is an audience, and there are times where an audience is important.
	So I don't think it's good to get rid of completely.
	I think that would be unhealthy and a rejection of a sort of important social reality, if that makes any sense.
	Sure, I can see that.
	So that's one. But at the other extreme is, you know, we feel that we're playing to an invisible gallery all the time.
	And, you know, of course, Ayn Rand did this with great effect.
	But you can go all the way back to Oscar Wilde's stories, where he's talking about a woman who's hysteric, who's, you know, continually doing these scenes of gross, inept tragedy as if she's playing to some invisible audience and trying to get an Oscar.
	I've mentioned this before, a long time ago, but a book that I would recommend for this, which really helped me with this, is a book called The Magus, M-A-G-U-S, by John Fowles.
	He's the guy who wrote The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Maggot and some other books.
	I'm not a big fan of his other books, but this is a guy who is going through this problem of feeling that everything in his life is being evaluated and he's getting good and bad points for good and bad behavior.
	And you see this, of course, with people who are playing tennis, right?
	Any game. Or playing tennis.
	I'm a tennis player, right?
	So, you know, you hit a good shot and you feel like good.
	And you see people, I don't do this as much anymore, but you see people who hit a bad shot and they're like, oh, damn it, you suck.
	Or something like that. Well, that's an external judge in their head who's like saying good points for good or bad behavior.
	But the other thing is, too, is that you can't be indifferent to making a good or bad shot.
	I mean, that's insane as well, right?
	I'm so Zen that I'm just at one with hitting the ball and I don't care if it goes and kills a pigeon or lands perfectly.
	I mean, of course we care. I mean, you can't play a sport and not care about excellence.
	You can't be a pianist and not care about hitting the wrong key.
	Like, if you've ever seen Phil Collins at Live Aid, he's doing Against All Odds.
	I mean, he butchers, he messes up the intro.
	And you can see him go, God, what an idiot.
	And then he starts all over again, right?
	And Sting was, when I saw him last, he had...
	His lyrics were on a music stand in front of him because he recently has been forgetting lyrics because, you know, he's, I don't know, getting up there or whatever, right?
	But you can't be indifferent to that kind of stuff.
	You just can't. And so I think pretending that there's no audience, pretending that the outcome doesn't matter is not healthy.
	What we want to have is a more healthy and positive relationship with that.
	But you can't have a preference without simultaneous disappointment.
	You can't want to ask someone out and then simultaneously not care whether they say yes or no.
	That's just not rational.
	Desire is the, you know, the stairway to desire has within it, innately, the trapdoor of disappointment, right?
	So that is just natural.
	I don't think you can get rid of, and I mean, understand that Howard Rourke is insane, and John Galt is insane, and they're not meant to be human beings.
	I mean, Ayn Rand would be the first one to say that, right?
	They have no families.
	I mean, can you imagine John Galt going for dinner with his mom and in-laws?
	I mean, it would be a different kind of person.
	Not at all. There's a reason why there's no families, right?
	Ayn Rand is the ultimate Dfue novelist, right?
	All of her heroes have no families whatsoever, and that's an important reality.
	I think I've tried to compare myself to, not compare myself, but to try and aim for that as a standard, so where I fell short, and then felt, yeah, not good enough.
	And Ayn Rand herself! Ayn Rand herself!
	Fell woefully short of that.
	I mean, her reactions to the popular reception of or to the critical reception of Atlas Shrugged was to never write another damn piece of fiction for as long as she lived.
	Yeah. Right?
	And she refused to go to parties where some of her most vocal critics were.
	And look, I can understand that. I don't blame her for anything like that.
	But she sure as hell wasn't indifferent to what happened.
	And she was, you know, she didn't live up to her own standards of truth with regard to lying to everyone about her affair with Brandon.
	She didn't live up to her own standards of integrity.
	She didn't live up to her own standards of virtue for attacking that which was real in others when he rejected her.
	So, I mean, I try not to look at fictional characters.
	I try to look at real people for my standards.
	Because fictional characters are very easy to make up, right?
	They're very easy. You know, if I was really interested in fictional characters, I would assume that almost all cops are noble heroes and pursuers of justice and forgivers of the innocent and almost never make any mistakes.
	Because those are all the fictional characters we see on television.
	When you see movies about the military, how heroic generally are the military men portrayed?
	And if they're not heroic, it's usually the fault of someone else, like their civilian commanders who put them in Vietnam or whatever.
	But it's really important to stay.
	Fiction is so incredibly easy to manipulate.
	Fiction is not flesh and blood.
	Fiction is not reality.
	Fiction is fantasy. And there's nothing wrong with it.
	I think fiction is great. But for heaven's sakes, don't imbibe the gaseous emptiness of invented characters and think that there's anything human in there for you to emulate.
	If you want to look at the best that people can do, and if you're a fan of Ayn Rand, you know, go read Ayn Rand and the World She Made by the woman who recently put out a biography, or Ayn Rand and the American Goddess of the Market.
	I think it was Ayn Rand and the American Right.
	Go read... A sense of life, or I think there was a video of hers, a documentary made of hers, go read Barbara Brandon's book about her or Nathaniel Brandon's recollections.
	I mean, she was a powerful woman.
	She was a lion of reason.
	She was very passionate, but she did not come close in many ways.
	In some ways she did, but in many ways she did not come close to achieving her own ideals.
	And that's not the end of the world. It's just that she didn't seem to ever admit it.
	That's the biggest failure.
	It's not the failure to reach your own ideals, but to admit when you don't, right?
	That's the biggest failure. And so this is not to slag Ayn Rand, who remains a very powerful heroine for me, but don't try and crawl into a book.
	They're two-dimensional, they're flat, and they have very papery aftertastes, and you get cuts.
	So don't crawl into a book and think that you can emulate anything that's real or living.
	Life is much more ambivalent and complicated than the books are.
	And the books are great to have as an ideal, like I should care less what other people think.
	But you can't escape it.
	You shouldn't try to escape it completely.
	I think that would be psychotic.
	But you can try and work to minimize the degree to which our lives are run by the opinions of others.
	You know, the first thing that I try to do when I come across somebody's opinion to me is not evaluate their opinion of me, but to evaluate their opinion of themselves, to evaluate their behavior, right?
	So if a virtuous man calls me a monster, that is very serious to me.
	But if somebody calls me a monster, or I don't know, whatever people call me, if somebody calls me something bad, the first thing I do is look at that person's life.
	How they're doing, how successful are they, what right do they have?
	So if a fat person calls me fat, and I'm much thinner than the fat person, I don't think that it has anything to do with me, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, definitely. I've been applying that approach with criticism for a while now.
	Yeah, look at the person.
	Don't look at the words. The words are used to distract you from the person.
	The words are used so that you look at the wound in yourself rather than not even the knife that's in the other person's hand but the person themselves, right?
	So someone comes rushing at you and they're trying to activate your fight-or-flight response so that you don't Coherently and empirically evaluate the situation.
	They're trying to activate your fight or flight so that you don't stop and reason about things, right?
	So when somebody insults you, they're trying to make you feel so bad that they activate your fight or flight and you can't look at things rationally.
	And then they have control over you because they've just shut down your neofrontal cortex, they've tickled up your amygdala, and they're in control of you.
	Don't surrender that control.
	Yeah. Oh, I hate that feeling, too.
	So, yeah, you fight back.
	You fight back and you say, okay, well, who is talking trash about me?
	What's their life like? How are they doing?
	How are they doing? How's their love life?
	How's their family life? Do they even know what the words mean?
	Yeah, I mean, and why?
	Why are they bothering to insult me?
	I mean, this is very important stuff.
	You need to stay, you need to hang on to your neofrontal cortex, you know, with two hands if you have to, right?
	With gritted teeth, you need to, you know, put a lasso on it with a flotation device so that it doesn't get dragged down by the undercurrents of history.
	You need to hang on to your rational evaluation, and it can be really a tough to do, because we all have that emotional reaction, that sinking feeling that, oh my God, right?
	But then you've got to shake that off, to some degree at least, and say, okay, well, what's really going on here?
	What's really happening here?
	You know, is the smoker calling me unhealthy?
	Well, that clearly has nothing to do with me.
	Well, like, look, Steph, none of this was the answer I expected, so thank you very much.
	That's a big relief.
	Yeah, well listen, if it was the answer you expected, there'd be no point calling in, right?
	So yeah, and be gentle with yourself and recognize that we are all trained to be fearful of the opinions of others, right?
	You understand, this is how we are fundamentally kept in line as tax livestock, is that we're terrified of the opinion of others.
	No one can walk down school with people laughing behind their back and not feel terrible.
	The cliques, the viciousness, the infighting, the bullying, the ostracism, the attacks, the rejections, now the cyberbullying, all of the stuff we're trained to do.
	We're trained to do it.
	We're trained to do it in school.
	We're trained to do it in church.
	We're trained often, not always, but we're trained to do it in families.
	It's collective punishment that causes us, so if everyone gets punished, then the brothers and sisters all turn on each other when someone does something wrong.
	We're all trained for this, and we're put in these ridiculous situations where we're age segregated in school, not ability segregated, which is the only thing that makes any kind of sense, or not segregated at all, but allowed to learn at our own pace, hopefully with our own families in the future.
	But we're all attacked.
	We're all attacked horizontally all the time.
	And all of these attacks are continually provoked and are continually encouraged, often in very subtle ways, by people in power.
	Right? So public humiliation, this is something that teachers certainly used to do when I was a kid.
	And they would invite other kids in very subtle ways to laugh at you and to attack you and to ostracize you.
	You know, people say, well, teachers are against bullying.
	Oh, my God. I mean, let's not even get into that topic because it's too big.
	No, they don't do anything about it.
	Well, no, they encourage it.
	They encourage it. You try criticizing a teacher on rational grounds.
	He will make fun of you and invite the other students to laugh at you.
	That's almost inevitable. And so everyone else knows that, right?
	You know, bring up that taxation is forced when you're in grade 8.
	Bring up that the teacher's salary is paid for through violence.
	See how they're going to do. See how they're going to react to you.
	Are they going to just roll their eyes at you and say, I don't know where you're getting this kind of crazy shit from.
	Maybe you should read a little less stuff on the internet and a little bit more in your textbooks.
	Ha ha ha! Everyone laughs at you, right?
	Or they just pretend that this is all nonsense that you're bringing up, or they roll their eyes, or they sigh, or they portray that you're the one with some sort of weird problem, and they're just trying to get on with the lesson, or they imply that you're wasting everyone's time, and that this isn't going to be on the test, so maybe we should get back to what everyone else wants, so that they pit you against everyone else, and that everyone else is going to somehow suffer or pay in some way, because they'll be less prepared for the exam.
	I mean, I'm just off the top of my head.
	I just remember hearing all those kinds of things, definitely, in school.
	One thing I've gotten though, just thinking over everything, is how absurd it is to think of designing any piece of architecture and taking it outside of my head if I'm not going to show it to anyone.
	If I don't care what anyone thinks, then why build it?
	Why even design it?
	Why make it? So, of course...
	Well, no, you can do it for practice.
	No, you can do it for practice.
	I mean, there are videos, and again, sorry to sound like a queen geek, but there are videos on the internet of a queen doing sound checks before their shows.
	And I think it's kind of cool because it's kind of cool to hear Freddie do his scales and Brian play his guitar and all that.
	It's kind of cool to hear this kind of stuff.
	If you're a real fan, it's ridiculous that I do it, but I think I've spent about 15 minutes listening to these over the course of my life.
	But they're not, they weren't for anyone to hear.
	They just warm up and practice and scales and so on.
	And I will sometimes, and sometimes more than sometimes, do practice podcasts, which I never release or release just to a few people to say, well, what do you think?
	So I think that's, and I've written books that I'm never going to publish, and so I think that's all perfectly fine for practice.
	But with the goal of getting better at something...
	Yeah, but it's with the goal of getting good at something so that you can show, right?
	So the reason that the tennis player practices for four hours a day, nobody comes to watch the practice, or very few people do, but so that he can get good enough that people will come to watch him, right?
	So it still has an end called an audience.
	But yeah, so I just wanted to point out that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with being afraid of other people and afraid of their opinions and desirous of being in their good books, because we're all trained for that.
	And it's unfortunate that we're trained that way, but that's what we all inherit, almost all of us anyway.
	And it seems to cut across class lines and political lines.
	It's just a constant. It certainly happens in private school.
	I mean, I was accused of dishonoring the name of the school, by which implication everybody else was dishonored and they were all going to turn on me.
	I mean, this is when I was six years old, for Christ's sake.
	This is all stuff that we're raised with and is inculcated within us.
	So, you know, hope for sakes, don't feel bad.
	It's like feeling bad for being able to speak English.
	Well, that's just the language you were taught.
	And this language of being fearful of others and desirous of their good, of the security and safety of the herd.
	I mean, that's a story as old as mankind.
	So you're not wrestling with any defect.
	You know, hopefully we're going to have an improvement, but you're not wrestling with any innate defect yourself.
	This is common to all of us.
	Even those of us who have, you know, hopefully a greater sense of integrity and philosophy and desire to change things, I still struggle with it.
	And so, yeah, it's hard.
	It's hard. So I hope that you'll be gentle with yourself about that.
	That's sort of really all I'd say.
	Yeah, well, thank you for that.
	I definitely appreciate that. Yeah, thanks, Steph.
	You're very welcome, man. Great, great question, and I really appreciate you bringing that up.
	And I think we have time for one more.
	Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimbo, James, E.J. Alright, we're going to give this guy another shot.
	Oh, Mr. Echo. I think it's somebody else.
	Hello? Hello?
	Hi, how's it going?
	Good, good, good.
	Should I skip the phoning preamble?
	Yeah, skip the phoning preamble.
	I'll just assume that you like the cut of my jib.
	So let's go on with the question. - Okay, so I'm cutting out a little bit.
	Let me just make sure I understand what you're saying.
	You're cutting out quite a bit. I just want to make sure I understand what you're saying.
	So you have a question about the ethics or universal value of people who are landlords earning 30 or 40 houses relative to people who homestead those houses, like who would just sort of move in and improve them or put furniture in or whatever.
	Is that right? Right, right.
	No, I think that's a great question, and I do get this.
	Sorry to interrupt. I'd give you more time, but it's a little harder to hear you.
	So let me just give an answer, at least my answer, and then you can tell me if it makes any sense.
	I'm sorry we can't have more of a back and forth, but you're cutting out a bit.
	So let's take the example of a landlord who owns 30 or 40 houses.
	Well, I think we can reasonably assume that those 34 houses only exist because the landlord was willing to buy them.
	So what I mean by that is people build houses because someone's going to buy them, because nobody's going to build a house that no one's going to buy unless he's living in the woods doing it for himself and building his own house.
	So people who build houses build houses so that people will buy them.
	them.
	Now, most builders, and I know this from my own experience of buying a house, most builders want to get paid long before the house goes up, right?
	So I think we bought our house 18 months, I think, before it was even up, and then it took a little while before we were ready to move into it.
	And because they have to pay their people, and they don't want to wait for a couple of years to get paid.
	So a landlord is someone who has enough money that he's going to pay for 30 or 40 houses to be built, and those 30 or 40 houses really only exist because the landlord is going to pay for them, we can assume, right?
	Because if individuals were going to buy them, then they would sell to an individual.
	Or they exist cheaper because the landlord is buying them in bulk, right?
	So it's easier to sell 40 houses to one person than it is to sell 40 houses to 40 families, right?
	Because for obvious reasons I don't have to talk about, right?
	So the houses are either cheaper than they would have been otherwise, or they only exist because the landlord has bought them.
	And so the landlord, of course, has taken his prior productivity, assuming he's not a thief or a government agency.
	Sorry, but I repeat myself.
	But he's going to take his prior value, his prior economic value, in the form of capital, and invest it in these houses, which eliminates his...
	Value in other areas. So he's not putting it in the stock market.
	He's not buying gold.
	He's not renting porn.
	He's not doing whatever you can do.
	That's a lot of porn, I guess. But he's not doing other stuff with his money.
	And so the houses are either much cheaper or they only exist because of this landlord.
	So other people can't come in and homestead them because if they only exist because the landlord bought them, then they're stealing.
	And if they're much cheaper because the landlord bought them, then they should pay fair market value, which is cheaper than if they paid for it themselves, we would assume.
	Right? So the landlord is bringing value to the equation, and the landlord is bringing efficiency to the equation.
	And the same thing is true of land, of course.
	The same thing is true of farms, right?
	So if someone goes and, like if I have, I don't know, a million dollars, and I go and buy some land, I'm buying that land with the intention of doing something with it at some point.
	Or, you know, maybe I just want to preserve the tree frogs on it or something.
	But even that's of value to me.
	And so whatever value is there, whether it's a farm or the tree frogs or houses or a playpen, a play park or whatever, that value is only there because I have diverted my capital away from all other possible uses in order to buy the land.
	And so that's there, and it wouldn't be there otherwise.
	So if anyone takes it, they're taking what wouldn't have been there otherwise, and therefore that to me is wrong.
	And I'm sorry if that didn't come close to answering your question, but that's my first sort of thought about what you're talking about.
	Sure, good. I think everything you said applies perfectly to man-backed goods.
	The problem I'm having with her is when it comes to land, because land is something that is not a fair effect of labor.
	You have to justify your being able to occupy it, whether it's a house or a hut.
	Sorry, let me make sure I understand this.
	So you're saying a house is built, but land is not built.
	Land is just there. Is that right?
	Yeah, we have some moral justification.
	No, but hang on.
	Sorry, sorry. Just one second. What about fish in the ocean?
	Nobody builds those fish, right?
	But somebody has to catch them and bring them to land.
	Otherwise, how much are you going to pay me for a shark out in the middle of the Atlantic?
	Well, not much because, you know, you don't know where it is.
	You can't do anything with it. So, the fact that something is made and doesn't pre-exist, it doesn't seem to me to alter anything about property rights.
	The difference is, can something of value be extracted from whatever it is?
	So, for instance, if I catch a fish, then you can eat the fish or you can put it in your aquarium or you can mount it on a wall or do whatever, right?
	And so the fact that I didn't make the fish, but instead have put labor in to make it something of value, in other words, it's accessible, is good, right?
	So I may not have made the land, but if I plant crops and crops get grown on the land, which you can eat, it's exactly the same to me as investing the labor to grow the crops that you can eat is exactly the same as investing the labor to catch the fish so that you can eat it.
	It's still mixing of value of labor to produce something that is of value to others.
	And if it's tree frogs that you want to go and see, well, I built the land and enclosed the tree frogs so you go and see them.
	That's obvious. It doesn't have to be something that you consume.
	It can be something you just look at.
	But I think that's, does that help at all?
	I'm sorry, my question is, I have actually several questions in this area, of course, going back to the blogging environment, so we don't have too much time, which is unfortunate.
	But the problem is, let's take the state as an example.
	We're, let's say the government of Canada to have legitimately bought old land in Canada.
	Oh, wait, wait, wait, okay, okay, hang on, hang on.
	Let's just say, up is down, black and white, and motor is good.
	Where do we go from here, right? No, no, no.
	Let's say the balsa load can hold up an airplane.
	We're having to build this bridge. No, no, no.
	We can't start from there, right?
	Okay, okay. Let's say my mother rents a house from someone and pays her rent.
	I am born in a house, and my mother passed my own house, and the mother comes to collect rent for me.
	And I would use the documents that I could possibly Okay, sorry, sorry.
	Let me go back.
	I'm sorry, you're cutting out quite a bit.
	So let me just go back to your mom.
	Because the important thing when you're looking at renting is not what your mom is paying, but what your mom is saving.
	So if you rent a house for $1,500 a month that costs $300,000, What your mom is paying is not the important part of the equation.
	That's not what makes it renting.
	Because you can have a mortgage for $1,500 a month and you're paying the same amount to someone.
	But the difference is not what you're paying.
	The difference is what you're saving.
	That's the difference between renting and ownership.
	So the difference is that your mom doesn't have to put up $100,000 to buy the house.
	That's the difference.
	Or she also doesn't have to go into a 20-year mortgage, but she can have a year's lease or a six-month lease, so she has much more options to get out of it.
	She doesn't have to put up a collateral.
	She doesn't have to put up a quarter century of time.
	She has much more flexibility.
	So it's not what your mom is paying.
	It's what she's saving, which is the capital for the down payment and the flexibility to not get involved in a multi-decade contract.
	It's what she's saving that makes the difference, and that's why you don't have property rights for it.
	The underlying... What do you think about this idea of homesteading as a dynamic process?
	I mean, if you buy land, you own it forever?
	Because if the original homesteading principle developed on farmland, it's very clear that you couldn't own land forever if you stopped having a relationship with the land person.
	Right. So the idea is that if you enclose a piece of land and then you don't use it for 20 years, do you still get to use it?
	Well, I think that the free market takes care of that, fundamentally.
	And I don't think we need any moral rules about it.
	I think we just need economic reality.
	So let's say, let's just take a silly example.
	So let's say that they open up half of Central Park for buying, and you can bone buy it.
	And let's say that I go put a million dollars down to get half an acre in Central Park.
	It probably would be more than that, but let's just say, right?
	Okay. How much do you think it's going to be going for?
	Quite a lot, of course. A hell of a lot more than what I paid for it, right?
	Because when I paid for it, there was a lot of other land available because it just opened up half a Central Park.
	And so if I have a piece of property and I leave it unused, there's really only one of two possibilities.
	Either nobody wants it, Because maybe I bought, I don't know, a piece of horizontal sheer rock on the side of some mountain in the middle of nowhere.
	Or I bought a square inch somewhere in Antarctica that nobody wants.
	In which case, me not using it is irrelevant because nobody's going to use it.
	And of course, I'm never even going to buy it.
	Nobody does that sort of stuff. But let's just say.
	So then it doesn't matter. But the second thing is, let's say I buy some land that has value and I don't do anything with it.
	Well, it has value, which means that people are going to want it, which means they're going to bid for it, which means that at some point I or my kids are going to sell it, because it's just worth so much.
	People sell stuff that's worth a lot.
	Think of this.
	Think of jewelry that comes from a mother, and she has two sons.
	She dies and she leaves all of her jewelry to her sons.
	She has no daughters. Well, what are her sons going to do with it?
	Well, they may keep a couple of pieces of it for sentimental reasons, but for the most part, they're going to sell it, right?
	Because they don't want it.
	They're boys, right? They don't want her necklaces and her earrings and all that, right?
	So that would be my answer, that the free market, through bidding up the value of unused but potential land, is going to continually move it away from unproductive hands into productive hands.
	Because productive hands can bid more for it than unproductive hands.
	And eventually, almost always, and it's usually sooner rather than later, you know, rational self-interest or greed, to use another phrase, will take that over.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, it makes some sense.
	I suppose I am working back.
	I have a pragmatic reason to not like landlords that own like 34.
	I mean, I own real estate.
	I think I'm truly in a bubble.
	I'm not in real estate. I'm not even so rich at all.
	I'm with you on everything except for real estate.
	Like, my grandparents in Iran, they owned a lot of houses, and they went for a generation, and they left Iran, and they went house to house, and so I owned it, and they said, wow, I raise my family here, and I'm a military now.
	And in a way, I do totally sympathize with them, because relationships with land come in a dynamic and can't be bothersome.
	You can't buy or sell relationships.
	I see it in a very fundamental way, that if you are actively using the land yourself, that courts shouldn't No, no, no, that's not true.
	Sorry to interrupt you, but you're cutting out quite a bit.
	That can't be valid.
	That can't be valid because, you know, when I go to do a speech, sometimes I'll rent a car.
	And I'm the one who's actively using that car, but I damn well have to give it back.
	And why do I have to give it back?
	Well, the rental cost of a car is usually more than the car payments, but the reason I can't give it back is because I haven't had to drop down $10,000 and get involved in a four-year purchase plan for a car.
	So the fact that I'm the one actively using the car doesn't mean that I own it in perpetuity, because it's simply a matter of justice.
	It's simply a matter of fairness.
	The reason that renters don't get to keep the house is because they didn't have to tie up significant amounts of money as a down payment, and they didn't have to pay off the house over 20 years, and they didn't have to worry about variations in interest rates.
	They didn't have to maintain it.
	They didn't have to invest in it.
	Nobody who rents a house is going to fix the roof.
	Somebody else is going to fix it.
	They've saved so much money by renting rather than buying.
	I say this because I grew up in rented apartments my whole life.
	I didn't own any property until I was in my late 30s.
	And so it's simply unfair.
	When you rent, if your toilet gets stuck, you call the landlord and he comes and does it for you.
	There's no such person in the house.
	You've got to pay for it yourself. So a renter, even though he or she is using it, they haven't had to tie up capital, they haven't had to get involved in long contracts, and they've had other people handle the maintenance.
	I'm not going to change the oil on the car I'm renting for a week, but I'm going to change it on my own car.
	So, it's not fair to people who own to extend the same privileges to people who rent, because there's so much savings and so much less involvement, so much less stickiness in renting, that it would just be unfair to all the buyers to give the same rights to the renters.
	Yeah, and I agree with you.
	I had a point where I had to make a decision between renting and owning, and I sold my question once in renting, because there's a lot of advantages What I'm talking about is like a more basic principle, and I think land is an exception.
	I think land is very different than a tar or a thing, because the moral reason that we get private property at all comes from this idea of homesteading, which is like the essence of it.
	So I know the practicality, but the essential moral principle of being able to offer on any material is homesteading, and I'm just wondering if there's a I don't see homesteading as different for land than it is for anything else.
	So when somebody sends me a donation, I've homesteaded that money.
	That money is now mine, and what have they gotten?
	Well, stress trials, tribulations, and problems, because that's what philosophy delivers.
	Oh, right, and happiness.
	When I eat a banana, I've homesteaded it.
	I now own it, and nobody's going to want it back in any way, shape, or form.
	And so there's no fundamental difference in land as there is in anything else whatsoever.
	When I air, when I breathe air in, I've homesteaded it.
	So, you know, when I rent a car, I have temporary homesteading, right?
	And, you know, for a variety of reasons we've talked about already.
	There's no fundamental difference between land and anything else in the world.
	Land is just stuff, and money is just stuff, and it represents stuff, and a lamp and a bed, they're all just stuff.
	And so there's no reason, like UPB is a thing, right?
	UPB is a universal way of evaluating things.
	Ah, so sorry about that.
	You can't differentiate between a lamp and a piece of land.
	Where would you differentiate it from?
	There's a wooden lamp in my bedroom.
	We can say, I can own the wooden lamp.
	Well, where did the wooden lamp come from?
	It came from a tree, and the tree was grown on someone's land.
	Everything does come back to the land in many ways.
	Everything does come back to the sea in many ways.
	And so I don't think how you can own the effects of land and then differentiate those from land itself.
	So my argument would be that you can't separate land from that.
	Now, there are tons of historical examples where temporary ownership or serfdom is entirely unjust and immoral.
	So you've got slaves who are actually working the land.
	People who are banned from owning it, and women who were banned from owning things, and serfs who were banned from perpetual ownership of their land.
	And all of that's immoral, but that's all statism and crap like that.
	But I think in a free market, you can't just draw a line down and say, well, land is one kind of property and everything else is another kind of property.
	I mean, everything does come from the land at one time or another.
	And nobody really cares about land, fundamentally.
	They only care about the productive things that land can do, whether that's just touristy consumption or building a house or planting trees and getting lamps for philosophers' beds or whatever.
	Nobody cares about land.
	It's only the products. Like, nobody cares about fish in the ocean.
	They care about fish on the shore or fish in an aquarium or whatever, right?
	And so I wouldn't say that there's any fundamental difference between land and everything else.
	I think we've got to have the same rule for everything.
	Well, it's just beautiful because islands off the coast, they're just beautiful and they just have a set of inherent value.
	It's something that just simply doesn't value.
	I'm so sorry. Listen, let's try it again next week, just to finish this up.
	A, we're out of time, and B, you're just cutting out to the point where I can't really hear what you're saying, so I'm afraid that technology has kindly given me the last word, which is not to say that I'm right.
	This is just my argument, and I'm glad to have the chance to put it forward, and I'm certainly happy to be corrected, but I will have to stop here.
	I mean, due respect for the people's exhausted ears or whatever, but...
	Listen, it's a great question.
	We'll try it again next week and see if the technology works any better.
	I'd really like to continue this because it's a big question, and I certainly don't claim to have any monopoly on an answer, but yeah, let's give it another shot next week, okay?
	If you can call back in, that would be great.
	And thanks everyone so much.
	It was a good week.
	It was a good week for me here.
	It's been a great month for Freedom Aid Radio.
	Lots of outreach. Lots of great interviews.
	Thanks so much to Karen for coming on the show.
	It was really great. To Woody for coming on the show and talking about the death of the It's a liberty dollar.
	It was really enjoyable. And have yourselves an absolutely wonderful week.
	freedominradio.com forward slash donate.
	If you'd like to help out, we should be switching over to the new website.
	And if you'd like to have a look, just shoot me a line and I can give you a link.
	And thanks, everybody.
	Thanks, of course, James every single week.
	James steps up magnificently and does a great job of hosting it.
	It may look smooth on the surface, but there's a lot of pedaling under the water.
	And thank you so much to Phil and Bill and everyone else who rhymes with Still, who's been helping out on the website.
	No more than helping out doing the website.
	I'm just coming in occasionally to mention certain things.
	It's really looking great.
	I really appreciate everyone's time and help and effort on that.
	And have yourselves a great, great, great week.
	We should be, I think, back to regular technical setup next week.
	So thanks, everyone. Have a great week.

▲