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May 22, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:51:29

1916 Freedomain Radio Sunday Call in Show, 22 May 2011

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	Happy Rapture Day to you, my brothers and sisters!
	I suppose it's now 2pm.
	I think that the world was supposed to come to a crashing neobiblical end a little bit earlier on today.
	But I think it's worth pausing and...
	Mulling over or turning over in her mind what it means to believe in this kind of stuff.
	I'm not going to pretend that all Christians or even the majority of Christians believe this stuff, but there are lots of people out there who believe that Satan walks the earth, not to mention that Jews can rise from the dead, and that the world was created 6,000 years ago.
	Evolution is a hoax. And this kind of base superstition is really, really tough for the human race.
	Anybody with any scientific literacy well understands, well understands how much Christian cosmology or the superstitious cosmology of brain-addled desert Bedouin 5000 years ago has contributed to the retardation of scientific advancement and progress in the human race.
	And we don't see as clearly the degree to which religious ethics have stopped and buried and retarded the development of rational, secular ethics in the world.
	I'll give you some examples.
	A Christian cannot kill someone.
	A Christian cannot kill someone because the soul is immortal.
	The essence of the human being is the soul, and the soul is immortal, and therefore a Christian cannot kill.
	It can only release the soul from its earthly prison and send it off to a better place.
	Has that had any influence on the degree to which Christians are willing to engage in war?
	Well, yeah. I mean, for sure.
	No question. I mean, this is documented in the Middle Ages when the Christians were invading the Holy Land for the first of many, many, many, many times.
	The Crusaders would line up the Muslims, would demand a conversion to Jesus, and then would cut their throats so they wouldn't have a chance to relapse.
	For God and country is what people wage war for, two completely fictional entities.
	It is like going on a date with the three bears from Goldilocks.
	It is a complete exercise in monomaniacal insanity.
	And another Another way in which Christianity, or religion as a whole, has distorted and mutated and retarded the progress of ethics in the world is through the concepts of forgiveness and the concepts that there is good in the worst of us and bad in the best of us.
	The idea that there's good in the worst of us has, I believe, caused more human suffering than just about any other single belief In the history of human thought, the idea that there's good in the worst of us, that you may have somebody in your life who is violent,
	who is abusive, who is drunken, who is thieving, who is gambling away, but there's good in him somewhere and you just have to kind of reach through the mess and the muck and the mire and the dysfunction and the problems to reach the golden core of his soul within.
	This is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea.
	And it applies to no other material thing.
	You know, we don't look at the ashes of a burnt-out fire and say, well, if I reach in, there's still fire in there somewhere.
	You know, we don't pee into somebody's wine and then say, well, you should drink it because there's still good wine in there somewhere.
	We don't look at a gangrenous leg and say there's a healthy leg in there somewhere.
	We don't look at a diseased, cancerous lung that is failing and needs to be removed and say, no, there's an essence of a healthy platonic good lung in there somewhere.
	But when it comes to the human personality, when it comes to the effects of immorality and deception and destruction and abuse and evil in the human mind, we reach through the eye sockets into the twin glowing beams of God's Camaro headlights of virtue and we feel that we can touch and grasp A virtuous soul placed there by God that is incorruptible and indestructible.
	We just have to reach through the dysfunction, reach through the satanic wrappings to the virtuous mummy within.
	This is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea.
	Wickedly, wickedly, wickedly false.
	And fairly scientifically false as well.
	And how many people have stayed in abusive relationships because they believe that there's good in there somewhere and they just need to forgive and support and love until they connect like a live wire, like a lightning strike.
	They connect with that virtue.
	No. No, no, no, no, no.
	This is not how the world is.
	This is not how the human personality is.
	Abusers who have suffered themselves almost always from abusive children have different brains than non-abusers.
	You can see this in the brain scans.
	A child who is not fed enough protein or nutrition when he is young will have a stunted growth.
	Maybe only two-thirds the height that he could have been had he been fed adequately.
	When we see somebody who's stunted in that way, we say, well, that's just terrible that you didn't get what you needed as a child.
	But we don't imagine that if we feed them more food now, they're going to recover all of that lost height.
	We don't say, well... There is an invisible tall person walking around your short stature and I just need to find the right way to connect to you so that we can get you taller.
	We don't imagine anything like that.
	We don't imagine anything like that.
	So the idea that because God places a soul in a human being and that soul is a fragment or shard of God and that soul is perfect and virtuous and noble and good and indestructible Has caused so much immense human suffering throughout the ages.
	Because people then feel we need to just forgive and love our way into finding the virtue in people.
	It's a destructive and deadly pursuit for many people.
	Literally deadly pursuit for many people.
	The idea that there is evil in the best of us.
	You know, we've all heard this Taoistic or Jungian idea that there's the shadow and the evil.
	And yes, of course, everybody has impulses that are negative or destructive and so on.
	But to say that there's evil in the best of us It is to attack anyone who is proud of his or her own virtue as being blind to the evil within them.
	It is a way of tearing down anybody who attempts to rise above the general collapse and compromises of the common herd.
	It is a way of clawing down people.
	It's a grappling hook of guilt and self-irony that we shoot at anybody who attempts to rise up to drag them back down to our level.
	So anybody who is doing real good and is proud of it We can then attack by saying, well, remember, there's evil in you, just as there is good in me.
	And it's a way of evening and leveling things out so that we don't have to worry about rising, about climbing up, about mounting the fiery, sharp and bladed steps to a higher plane of goodness.
	These are just one of the many, many examples.
	So, you know, I almost wish there was such a thing as a rapture.
	To go rapture, to say that the word is astonishing, the word is unaccountable.
	Because... From a secular standpoint, rapture simply means genocide.
	It means a genocide. It means mass suicide or mass murder of the human race as we saw in the kindly Old Testament Yahweh who drowned everyone except Noah and Bill Cosby because some people were doing wrong and therefore babies and children and innocents all had to die.
	There is a death worship at the heart of religion which is inescapable because the happiest world is after death.
	The yearning is after death.
	Religion is like a plant and death is its sun.
	It grows towards it.
	It yearns towards it. It fights to achieve it.
	So the idea that the mass suicide or murder or evisceration of the human race is something called a rapture is a gleeful kind of self-mutilating sadism.
	That runs through religion and how could it not when we look forward to a vacation when we've been working hard and the ultimate vacation is heaven and life is a veil of tears ruled over by demons and devils designed to tempt you and trick you into an eternity of torment in hell.
	How could there not be a death worship in that kind of environment?
	People buy the lottery tickets hoping to get in, and if they get in, they do a dance!
	They do a jig! And heaven is the greatest lottery prize of all.
	There is a joy in death for the religious, just as there is a joy in lottery winnings for the lottery player, although it's far greater, because it's an eternity of perfect bliss, and we all know from those of us who followed lottery winners that this is not what happens with lottery winners.
	And we need to not view humanity through the lens of superstition and eternal souls and ghosts within the machine of the body.
	We need to look at humanity as secular, as material, as physical, as scientific, as empirical, as biological, as evolutionary.
	And only then, Can we begin to approach the problem of virtue from a rational and secular and productive and universal standpoint?
	Can't understand biology if you believe that God breeds life into the animals he makes from clay.
	That old cartoon, he's making the snakes.
	Hey, these ones are easy.
	Can't understand biology if you believe that God made things.
	You can't understand The universe, if you believe that God flicks the planets around like a small boy with his marbles, you cannot understand these things and you can't understand virtue.
	As long as you have the soul and the death worship and the immortality and the perfection within of the God-created essence of the human being, you can't understand virtue.
	You can't understand the mind.
	You can't understand the brain.
	You can't understand human nature.
	You can't understand relationships.
	If you're looking at it, Through the blinding, eviscerating fog of superstition.
	So, yeah, I kind of wish there was a rapture sometimes, so that these people could be beamed up, and hopefully away from the children who they tell about such things and do such immeasurable harm to, that they could be beamed up and leave the rest of us to pick through the wreckage of past delusion and build a clearer,
	saner, more rational, more productive, more sustainable world, free from these historical delusions of predation and death and the worship of that which is not Which is the same as patriotism.
	Worship of the government of the country.
	Worship of that which is not.
	So I hope that helps.
	Clarify things at least from a philosophical perspective.
	Thank you, everybody. We move on now with the Sunday show, Sundays, 2 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time, every week of the year.
	And you can go to fdrurl.com forward slash chat to join in, and I hope that you will be part of the conversation.
	Now we turn to the brains of the outfit, the listeners, the delightful, wonderful, perfect listeners.
	I'll talk to you soon. Those out in the video land.
	Hello? Hello.
	Hi, Seth. How are you doing?
	I'm very well. How are you doing?
	I'm a little tired.
	It's 3 in the morning here.
	I'm the one who mailed you living in Japan.
	Right, because you're big in Japan.
	Right. Exactly.
	If it's okay, I wanted to ask you a little bit, maybe some advice about how to be a little more philosophical with some of my students as a teacher here.
	Sure. Because I work, I guess I'll set it up, I'll kind of let you know kind of what my job entails and then kind of some areas where I'm kind of looking for some advice and then, you know, if you want to go from there, then we can do that.
	Basically, like, I work at a traditional kindergarten.
	It's mostly three to six-year-olds.
	They actually have three levels in kindergarten here.
	And then two days a week also, I actually just do kind of daycare with One to three-year-olds.
	And the majority of my students are about four to five years old.
	And I'm going into my third year this year of teaching at the same school.
	And I really love it.
	I really love the kids, and it's a really big challenge.
	And, you know, I don't think I can picture myself doing anything else.
	But one of the biggest problems I have, just in general, is kind of deciding when to kind of When to be authoritative, and when to kind of put my foot down and say, like, no, you can't do this, and when to kind of give them kind of some room to explore things on their own,
	and kind of when to try to just guide them along with it, or just to kind of, like, if they're having an issue, like some conflict or something, to kind of let them resolve themselves.
	That's kind of the biggest problem I'm having with teaching right now, is Yeah, those are great questions, and I've certainly struggled with that as a parent myself, which is, when do you say no, and when do you say, go for it?
	That's a very, very tough question.
	I obviously can't tell you what to do, but I can certainly give you my thoughts on it, and hopefully there'll be some help.
	Okay. First of all, it's important to understand that there are some things that children can figure out for themselves, and there are some things that they can't figure out for themselves.
	Obviously, that's obvious, but I think I just want to make sure it's clear in our minds as we talk about this.
	So, a child...
	My daughter is...
	She's in her 29th...
	She just started in her 29th month, so she's not quite two and a half yet.
	Okay. And...
	She can tell how high she can jump from, right?
	So she's up on some big step, or she's up on the couch.
	She can tell that she can jump from the seating part of the couch, but not from the arm, because the arm is too high.
	And so she's good at making those decisions because she has jumped.
	She knows, you know, what the limits of her physical capacities are.
	She knows what gravity is, at least in the concrete sense.
	And she knows what she can and can't do.
	So I'm pretty comfortable. Sometimes I get a bit uneasy, but I'm pretty comfortable when it is an extension of an already known thing.
	Okay. And then I think it's a good idea to let children continue to explore that.
	Now, she doesn't know what's going to happen if she sticks a fork into an electrical socket, right?
	Right. And there's no reason she would know that ahead of time, right?
	Because she hasn't stuck a bunch of other things in there and found that, like, so it's not...
	It's not a progression, but this is a different thing where she can't reasonably or rationally predict the outcome of what's going to happen.
	So for Isabella, where she's had experience before, I grit my teeth and I trust her judgment, and her judgment is very good.
	She has only once hurt herself jumping, and that's because she was trying to avoid something.
	So she's got great judgment with that.
	I let her explore that. So where she can't conceivably know the consequences of her actions and those consequences are negative, then I don't let her do that.
	So that's sort of my suggestion about which way to go.
	I think if the consequences aren't hugely negative, it's better to err on the side of liberty.
	Because what I want is for Isabella to be able to know when it's safe to jump and when it's not.
	And this, of course, is the great challenge of parenting, and of course what you're doing is a kind of parenting, certainly caregiving.
	I want her to know when it's safe and when it's not.
	Now, if I'm intervening and keeping her safe ahead of time, all she will know is when I, her dad, thinks it's safe or not.
	Not when she thinks it's safe or not.
	And so the goal, of course, is for her to internalize These standards of safety or danger and making some mistakes along the way, but that's my suggestion.
	I don't want her to internalize my judgment when her judgment is possible.
	Where her judgment is not possible because it's a non-empirically learnable situation, then I have to substitute my judgment with explanations as much as possible, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, that does make sense.
	I guess one example might be we have this slide area where It's kind of built with, like, I'm trying to think how to describe it.
	It's kind of got all these kind of wood planks that kind of go up the side as it curves upward.
	And a lot of times the kids will start to climb up it.
	I'll let them go one or two.
	They're the younger kids. They're about two years old.
	I'll let them go up one or two by themselves.
	But when they try to climb all the way to the top, that's when I'll step in and say, no, no, no, you can't climb that high.
	If you fall down, you can get really hurt.
	So is that kind of what you're talking about?
	Like letting them gauge Kind of letting them figure out, like, you know, how far they can go, but once they push it past a certain limit, kind of stepping in and saying, like, this is too dangerous.
	Is that kind of what you mean? Yeah, without a doubt, you know, if they climb to the top, so, like, if my daughter jumps and it's six inches too high, what's going to happen?
	Well, you know, she might hurt her knee a little bit, she might hurt her foot a little bit, but it's not too serious, right?
	Right. And that's okay.
	I think that's useful because I want her to be a self-sustaining entity.
	I don't want her to think, well, I can do anything I want until daddy says no.
	Okay. Right?
	Because that's not good.
	That means that when I'm not around, she just will do anything and then hurt herself maybe, or she'll do nothing because I'm not there to tell her what to do.
	So I think you're right.
	Now, yesterday, we were all at the park.
	And Isabella, she sees the kids and she wants to do, of course, what the older kids are doing.
	And one of the older kids was hanging from the monkey bars.
	And we have a little play set at home which she uses as well.
	So she wanted to hang. Now she couldn't climb up.
	She got a little frustrated because she's too little to climb up.
	Although I am teaching her with lines on the wall that she's getting bigger every day, right?
	She's growing like an inch a month at the moment.
	It's crazy. And so I'm telling her, she keeps getting bigger.
	She's going to get bigger. And then when she gets bigger, she'll be able to do it.
	Because I don't want her to feel like she's just a kid and everyone else is bigger and stronger.
	Because I remember feeling that as a kid sometimes.
	I think in particular because I was the youngest kid around.
	That everyone was just bigger and stronger than me.
	And it was just kind of rant.
	Like nobody sat down and said, well, you know, your brother was smaller than you and you may end up bigger than him and all this and that, right?
	It was just... You know, I was just smaller, and that just felt kind of...
	So I wanted to understand that she's smaller now, but she's going to get bigger, right?
	So I keep telling her that I was a little boy and all of that.
	So yeah, I think where it's possible for them to sort of, in a sense, survive bad judgment, then we should give them that opportunity.
	But yes, so when she was hanging, I let her hang, and we would count to see how high she could go.
	She actually hung there for 10 seconds.
	I mean, I think that's incredible.
	Yeah. And now, she wanted to drop down to the ground, but it was too high, even onto sand.
	It was just too high. And so I had to explain to her that given it was, you know, more than her entire height to hang and drop down to the ground, I couldn't let her do it because it was too dangerous.
	Because she probably would hurt herself in some way that would be not pleasant.
	So, yeah, I think you obviously have to intervene where the consequences of any misjudgment is going to be too severe, but where the consequences of misjudgment is not too severe, I think that's not the end of the world.
	And I'll sort of give you an example.
	So, and it's because it's not specific to kids, right?
	So if you see some blind guy, you assume he's blind, right, walking along the street with his headphones on and he's about to walk into traffic, You don't sit there and say, well, he'll learn his lesson, right?
	You'll say, you'll stop him because the consequences of his mistake are too severe, right?
	Whereas if, I don't know, some guy is listening to music and he, I don't know, just bumps his head on a glass door that he forgot the check was open, I mean, assuming he's not really hurt, I mean, that could be kind of funny, right, in a sort of little way.
	So it's the same principle with everyone, and so it's not specific to kids.
	So that would be my first thing.
	I'll try and keep the second one shorter, and I'm sorry for going over so much, but it's a complicated topic, at least it is to me, because I'm trying to do it rather than just talk about it.
	As far as conflict goes, that's interesting.
	That's an interesting question.
	Conflict is really difficult with kids because It requires two people, right?
	So if my daughter's trying to figure out whether she can jump down or not from the couch, that's her judgment and a fixed constant called physics, right?
	But if she's trying to negotiate with another child, then there's her level of maturity and capacity to negotiate.
	And there's the other child's maturity and capacity to negotiate.
	So she's no longer dealing with a fixed environment.
	She's now dealing with a variable environment, which is her own impulses and maturity and the other kids' impulses and maturity.
	And I am quite keen on not intervening.
	I sort of do a little coaching, but not intervening.
	So of course, my daughter, like everyone her age, believes that everything is hers, right?
	So if she's sitting on a swing and then she goes away from the swing for like 20 minutes and then some other kid goes on the swing, naturally he is now sitting on Isabella's swing and she wants him to get off.
	That's entirely natural.
	That's egocentric. That's, you know, natural and healthy and all of that.
	And so, yeah, of course, I'm not going to let her go over and push the kid off the swing.
	She's never done that, but I wouldn't let her do it anyway.
	But I need to tell her, you know, that's not our swing.
	That's, you know, it's everybody's swing.
	It's not in our house.
	It's not in our backyard. And of course, if she sees someone's, like a fun playset in someone's backyard, we say, you see this fence?
	This means we can't go there because it's not ours.
	We could ask if they were here, but blah, blah, blah.
	So I think a little verbal coaching is okay.
	But we were, I took her to, she's really into trains.
	So I took her to go and look for a train set in a little town near here where there's a train storm.
	And outside, there was a boy, I think he may have been three and a half or four, and yeah, I found him a little annoying.
	You know, I try not to feel that way about kids, but occasionally it happens, right?
	Because he sort of jumped up to Isabella and said, I'm taller than you.
	And then he jumped to his own little sister, like, I'm taller than you.
	And it's just like, dude, come on, you're just older.
	I mean, give me a break, right? I mean, what are you taking pride in the fact that you were born sooner?
	That's ridiculous. And anyway, so Isabella was okay with him, but then he sort of started dancing around her, and I started moving towards him because I was just a bit concerned.
	And then he didn't exactly step on her foot, but he kind of like stepped forward with his heel down, and his toe went on top of hers.
	And I was going to say something, but I also thought, okay, well, what's Isabella going to do?
	And she said, don't.
	And then she turned to me and she said, the boy stepped on my foot.
	And his mom said, you know, don't step on her foot.
	And I said, are you okay?
	And she said, yes, I'm fine.
	And she turned to the boy and said, don't step on Isabella's foot.
	I said, that's so cool.
	She is so cool.
	I don't know how much therapy, probably years more I need to be that unconsciously assertive.
	That's beautiful. But she was able to tell the boy don't.
	Now, of course, if the boy had then made a game and tried to step on her foot, then I would have intervened because...
	She would not be dealing with a fixed or negotiable interaction.
	So what I want is for Isabella to clearly express her needs and preferences.
	She can't control whether the other child or adult is going to respect her preferences.
	So I'm not going to intervene until she expresses her preferences.
	If she expresses her preferences and the other child respects those preferences, good.
	Then I, you know, I don't need to.
	We'll talk about it afterwards because we talk about everything afterwards, but I won't intervene at that time.
	Now, if she expresses her preferences and the other child does not respect those preferences, then I will intervene because then she's dealing with a situation that she can't manage or control.
	So that's my particular approach, if that makes sense.
	Okay, do you mind if I kind of walk you through an example of what I go through typically and kind of like what I do and you can kind of let me know if that works or if I... Should tweak it, kind of?
	I probably can't let you know if it works, because you've got experience in this as well, but I can certainly share some thoughts.
	Okay, well, so, like, you know, typically with, like, the two- to three-year-olds, I always, first of all, I always kind of have trouble, and I was going to ask you, too, like, how much you can kind of reason with kids from when explaining something to them, because, like, basically a lot of the teachers around me, they just kind of, they'll just blurt out, it's dangerous, don't do it, or just stop it, that's bad.
	Like, but whenever I tell them to not do something, I always try to explain to them why.
	So, like, when two kids begin fighting, like, I'll just, obviously they're angry, I'll just say, you know, like, last year I had two kids.
	One of them, his name was Lei, and the other kid's name was Takuma.
	And they were fighting, and I would say to Lei, I would say, when Takuma hits you, it hurts, right?
	And you cry. And he said, yeah.
	And I said, well, when you hit Takuma...
	And I said, Takuma, when they hit you, it hurts and it makes you cry.
	He said, yeah. And I said, well, do you think it's a good thing to hit each other then?
	And they said, well, no. And I said, okay, well, let's stop.
	And so that's kind of like one of the things that, that's kind of how I try to handle fighting.
	Like if they're just kind of like squabbling over a toy, I kind of let them see if they'll work it out.
	And then kind of like what you said, like if it's clearly just escalating and they're going to start grabbing for each other, then I'll step in.
	But that's kind of typically how I handle those situations.
	So like if it's a fight over a toy, one of the kids is playing with the toys, and one of the other kids comes up and tries to take the toy away, I always wait to see how the kid responds.
	If he just kind of says, stop, or no, it's mine, and the other kid who wants the toy gets really upset, I won't tell the kid you should give it to him, but usually kind of how I'll approach that is I'll say, well, Well, he wants to play with it, too.
	Will you lend it to him?
	And if he says, no, I don't want to, I'll say, okay, well, then that's fine.
	Why don't you go ahead and play with it a little bit longer, but when you're done, go ahead and give it to him.
	Since you're done with it, just go ahead and let him play with it then.
	And that's kind of how I approach those kind of things with the younger kids.
	And, I mean, more or less, it's not perfect, but it seems to work pretty well, at least in most cases.
	How does that work in terms of repetition?
	I mean, do you have to keep doing it over and over?
	I mean, obviously you do to some degree because they're very young, but how does it work in terms of the next time?
	Well, I found that as far as kind of the fighting, some of the kids, they never stop fighting.
	No matter how many times I explain it to them, they just...
	I mean, that's why I wonder, is it that I'm not communicating to them?
	Of course, I have to do it in Japanese, too, so sometimes it's really difficult for me to communicate, so I have to communicate to them.
	Sometimes I wonder, is it my communication that's not clear?
	Am I not explaining that to them well enough?
	No, no, look, sorry to interrupt, but I mean, of course, the possibility that I would go to, which is obviously not proof, is that they're either seeing, hitting, or they're being hit at home.
	Oh yeah, without a doubt.
	I look at the way that their parents interact with them, and I have no doubt that they get it from home, of course.
	Yeah, look, philosophy or reasonableness and so on, I don't believe that it can overcome trauma without the aid of significant amounts of self-knowledge and maybe some therapy and so on, right?
	So some of the kids will listen and they will empathize and they will understand because they have more peaceful home lives and other kids will not be able to listen to To reason because they have seen irrationality so aggressively enacted in their own homes, right? Children learn empirically first, and whatever they learn empirically, it's almost impossible to contradict that through mere language.
	So the first thing I would suggest is don't assume that it's just your lack of communication.
	That is the issue. So that would be...
	I agree with you about the sharing.
	If one kid has a toy, I assume that's homesteaded.
	I'm going to put the lock in.
	He's now homesteaded that toy and that toy is now his.
	And he can relinquish it to another child or he can trade it to another child.
	But I think it's important to teach property rights, particularly in a daycare.
	And I did work in a daycare when I was younger.
	You want to teach property rights. Yeah, he's got the toy.
	You can ask him for it. But if he says no, then you have to wait until he's done.
	Because otherwise, you become the welfare state of forcible redistribution of toys, right?
	I don't think that's a good thing.
	And it makes the kids kind of anxious because then if they have a toy, they're just waiting for it to be taken away by someone.
	It also teaches them to hide toys and to go and play off on their own where no one else can see them.
	And there are lots of negative consequences to just moving toys.
	So I agree with you as far as that goes.
	I think I agree with you as far as the hitting goes in the moment.
	But you might want to think about taking it a step further and saying, not, when he hits you, you feel bad, which, you know, they know, and I think that's a good first step.
	The second step that I would suggest is, how did you feel when you wanted to hit him?
	Ah, okay, yeah.
	Right? Because the important thing is not for them to say, well, hitting someone else feels bad.
	For them, therefore I don't.
	That's kind of like an argument from consequences or utilitarianism.
	What I would suggest is, and what I'm trying to teach Isabella, it's actually quite successful, is angry and frustrated.
	Right? So Isabella now, when she gets angry, she says, she'll thump her legs and she'll say, my boo is angry.
	And when she was trying to stack something up to reach a light switch, to turn the light switch on in the study, and she couldn't do it.
	I was trying to help her, and she didn't want me to help her, of course, because she wants to do it by herself, because she's got this fierce pride, which I just adore.
	And I'm frustrated, and she threw herself on the couch, and she was frustrated.
	I think that's fantastic.
	She's identifying her own emotions.
	She knows what's causing them.
	And she acts out that much less, right?
	So, you know, what did you feel right before you wanted to hit him?
	I felt angry.
	I felt hurt.
	I felt sad. Whatever it is, get them to connect with their own feelings because if children can't slow down and know what they feel before they act, then they will be driven by their emotions and you'll end up Firefighting consequences all the time, rather than giving them the tools to know what comes before the hitting so that they cannot hit, but rather say, I'm angry.
	Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
	Yeah. And then, I guess to kind of take the whole, like, fighting one step farther, I'm still kind of stuck about the best way to approach...
	Like, the aftereffects of a fight, right?
	So, of course, like, all the teachers around me, and, like, the thing I really don't like about, like, Japanese kindergartens is, like, they just basically...
	I mean, it's very robotic.
	I mean, it's like, you hit him, tell him you're sorry.
	Okay, tell him it's okay. Okay, good, shake hands.
	Okay, you're friends now. Okay, go play.
	Like, that's literally how most teachers approach, like, the aftereffects of a fight.
	So, like, what I always try to do is, like...
	You know, like if one of the kids, you know, like in my class or something is crying because somebody hit them, then I'll call the other kid over and I'll say, look, I'm not angry or anything, but, you know, she's crying and I just want to find out what happened.
	Can you tell me what happened?
	And I just kind of get the story.
	And then from that point, that's kind of where I get stuck because, like, because he'll say, yeah, I hit her.
	And I say, okay, well, what happened that What made you want to hit her?
	And why were you angry, you know, towards her?
	And then he'll tell me, and so I try to, you know, find out all that, but then I kind of get stuck, like I said, about, like, the apology.
	So I won't tell him, tell her you're sorry.
	I won't say, you know, okay, apologize.
	Like, what I try to say, I guess the best way I've approached it, at least that I think, is, you know, I'll say, well, um, She's very upset.
	Do you feel bad for hitting her?
	And she says, well, yeah. I said, well, what do you think you should do then?
	And I just leave it at that.
	Sometimes they just kind of ignore me and walk off, in which case I don't pursue it.
	I don't pull him back and say, no, you should apologize.
	I don't tell him what he should do.
	I let them figure it out on their own.
	Do you feel that's kind of the best way to approach that as well?
	Yeah, that's a tough call.
	Yeah. We're currently, sorry I don't mean to make it all about me, but we're currently teaching Isabella please and thank you.
	Okay. And so I'm sort of explaining it, right?
	So, you know, please is you would like me to do something.
	If you don't say please, it feels like you're just telling me to do something and you don't like it when I tell you.
	Like we're trying to give her, and she's doing pretty well with it, please and thank you.
	But there is a certain amount that it's just a ritual to begin with before she really understands it.
	Now, please and thank you isn't, of course, nearly as emotionally charged as an apology.
	But the problem with apologies is that if they're not heartfelt, then you're teaching children that there are these magic words you can say to get out of trouble that have no emotional content.
	Exactly. I say the words, I'm sorry, and okay, maybe they want me to stick my lower lip out and shuffle my feet and look down to make it more believable, but you just turn them into fakers, right?
	And that's not, of course, what apologies should be.
	So I'm very much of the opinion that...
	If the child knows that something is not allowed, then yes.
	I think sorry is necessary once it's explained.
	So Isabella knows that she can't throw things.
	She can throw ping pong balls and socks.
	That's all she can throw.
	And she knows that, and we've gone over that for months.
	And she still is occasionally throwing things.
	So if she throws something and hurts me, then I'll say, Isabella...
	You know that you're not supposed to throw things.
	You just threw something and you hurt me.
	That's not very nice.
	And now, nine times out of ten, she will say, I'm sorry, Dad, and give me a kiss, and I'll give her a kiss back, and we'll just give a big hug and go on with our play.
	And sometimes she won't.
	And at that point, I don't want to force an apology out of her, so to speak, or I don't want her to just say it like it's a ritual.
	But what I find interesting is that the one time out of ten where she doesn't apologize, Nine times out of ten, within half an hour, she'll come up and give me a big hug and say, I'm sorry, daddy.
	Because she's taken the time to process it.
	And if I had asked her to apologize or made her apologize, she wouldn't have had the chance to process it on her own.
	And so I think it's worthwhile, you know, explain it and see what happens without forcing the apology.
	But I certainly don't believe in the apology as an empty ritual to get back to playing with your toys.
	I think that teaches... The surface of things.
	You know, it's like teaching, you know, nine times nine is 81.
	Like it's just a series of sounds without any content.
	So I think it's worth seeing because you really want kids to internalize that apology, not just follow it like a ritual.
	So I would say that...
	Yeah, I'm sorry. I know I'm contradicting myself, but I'm sort of, because I was saying I think it's important to get the apology, but I'm sort of revising that to say that it's worth seeing what happens if you don't, because I found that most times it will happen anyway.
	Right, and I totally agree with that, because I can see, like, you can observe the emotionless of them apologizing constantly like that.
	It just becomes this, okay, the teacher's mad at me because we fought, so I say this and you say this and let's go play.
	Like, it's just kind of like this You know, they got pissed at me, so now I just gotta get out of it kind of thing.
	Yeah, and the most important thing with apologies is not for the children to apologize to each other, but for the adults to apologize to the children and the adults to apologize to each other, right?
	I mean, this is such a constant thing in all human societies that we so often just fail to remember that if we want children to apologize to each other, then we need to apologize Exactly.
	And we need to apologize to other adults and so on.
	We need to model the behavior that we want the children to pursue.
	So, yeah, I mean, I will very often say, sorry, I mean, I must say at least a dozen times to Isabella, sorry.
	Like, I'm sorry you have to go to bed.
	I know you want to stay up. I'm really, really, I am.
	I'm genuinely sorry that she has to go to bed because I'd like to stay up and play, but she needs to get her sleep.
	You know, I'm sorry that the quiche that we made is not exactly what you want to eat, but that's what we've made, and, you know, we have to, you know, occasionally we're going to have to eat stuff that isn't exactly number one on our list, but I'm sorry you don't like it, but you still have to, you know, if you want to eat, then that's what you have to eat.
	So there are things that I will say sorry, or if I bump her by accident, oh, I'm so sorry, or whatever, right?
	So I think that's really, really important.
	So then they understand that sorry is not an act of humiliation, but an act of, you know, genuinely recognizing that somebody else's interests are being negatively affected, whether you can do anything about it or not is another matter.
	I think that's important.
	So if you apologize to kids for upsets that you may be causing them, however justly that may be, I think that will help them.
	That's the way that you do it, in my opinion.
	Okay, that's a relief to hear, because actually I will do that when I'm in the middle of my lesson and I'm trying to ask the kids a question, like, what's your name?
	And some of the kids are talking and stuff.
	I'll tell them to be quiet, but I'll say, you know, I'm sorry, but could you be quiet kind of thing.
	Like, I know you guys want to talk, or...
	Like, you know, if they want to run around and play with toys, you know, I'll say, like, I'm sorry, you know, but you guys got to come over here.
	Well, we can play with those toys later kind of thing.
	Like, you know, as opposed to mostly just saying, like, you know, stop it.
	You're bad. Knock it off. Come over here.
	Right. As if they owe you.
	Yeah. As if they owe you some sort of obedience.
	Well, kids don't owe you any obedience.
	It's something you have to earn. Right.
	Exactly. And a lot of these teachers get so frustrated because these kids just won't listen.
	And it's like... I think part of it's been through listening to your philosophy with how to interact with children.
	I've really learned to approach, with my lessons and stuff, if they're not listening or they're trying to play with toys or they're running around during the lesson, it's not because they're bad, it's because I'm not interesting enough.
	I have to be the most entertaining thing in that room, and then I don't even have to work to get them to follow me because they'll want to follow me.
	That's how I try to approach my lessons.
	Now, once I've had that attitude, if I start to notice they're getting a little rowdy and they're not focused, then I'll just switch it up and start acting crazy and get them to follow me.
	Then I lead them back into the activity and they have more fun with it.
	There's really no yelling or anything like that.
	It's working pretty well for me overall.
	Yeah, look, and the other thing, too, is that, you know, adults will often complain that children don't listen to them.
	My question is always, well, how much of your day do you spend listening to your children?
	Yeah, exactly. Like, really listening to what they have to say, really listening to your children, to their thoughts, to their experience.
	And, of course, at daycare, I mean, I know, it's really, really hard to do, but...
	It's essential. I mean, if you want children to listen to you, the first thing you need to do is listen to children.
	If you want children to respect you, the first thing you need to do is listen to children.
	If you want children to apologize, first thing you need to do is own up and apologize to them.
	And we focus on other people's behavior without understanding that, particularly with the case of kids, it's almost always a reflection of the deficiencies in our own behavior.
	And so, and look, I mean, it can be work sometimes when Isabella is telling me the same story for the 20th time that day and is stumbling over her words again.
	Yes, it can be easy to space out.
	Yes, it can be easy to want to finish the story for her and so on.
	But it's really, really important to listen to children.
	And then I have found that they listen right back.
	So, yeah, I mean, that would be my suggestion.
	And it's hard. You know, children are there to be shuffled around and fed and bathed and moved and maybe even played with.
	But the sort of sitting down quietly and talking and listening is, I think, really, really important.
	And it's something that is not often done, certainly not as often as I think it should be.
	Yeah, it's amazing that you kind of mentioned that simple rule of, like, you know, the simple rule, if you want respect, show it.
	And, like, you know, these teachers, they'll get so frustrated that, ah, these kids just don't listen to me, and they're all over the place.
	And then when they, you know, when the kid, like, asks the teacher a question, they're like, hold on, I'm doing this.
	You know, and it's like, you just complained, like, ten seconds ago how the kids never listened to you, and then the kids came to you with something, and you just blew them off.
	Or, you know, they'll ask the kid, like, Do you mind?
	Can I have this? Is that okay?
	And the kid says no, and they take it anyway.
	It doesn't make any sense to me.
	Or, you know, somebody just pointed to, somebody just wrote in the chat room, and when I say somebody, I just don't know whether the person wants name or not.
	So the caller may want to try not leading the kids as much, and let the kids direct the lessons.
	Find out what the kids are interested in with the material you present.
	You know the material. Let them discover it on their own intellectual So yeah, that can be the case as well, to provide choices and options.
	To the kids, I think, could be really helpful and really important.
	And so that would be, yeah, I would say, well, you know, if you guys are talking amongst yourselves, you're not interested in what I'm saying.
	You know, not in an offended way, right?
	But you're not interested, right?
	So, you know, and this can be tough.
	This can be tough. So one of my sort of pet peeves as a parent is Isabella used to be really good at listening to stories, right?
	She's got her storybooks and I read them to her.
	But now, I'm sort of reading, and, you know, within a few minutes of starting the story, she'll just start turning the pages.
	And so, I mean, I almost feel kind of offended, you know?
	It's like, wow, I'm sorry. My voice is not enough for you.
	I mean, I do have some people who listen to me on the internet.
	I know I'm not completely boring, right?
	But, yeah, so trying to figure out what she's saying when she's not listening or when she wants something else.
	And, I mean, what she's saying, I think, is that she's too old for these stories.
	Yeah. And that she also would rather learn to read than have me read to her.
	So that's what we generally will move to do.
	So I think that kind of stuff can be really helpful.
	Yeah, actually, I have found that to be very helpful.
	Because sometimes they'll say, okay, we're going to do this game, or let's do this song.
	And they're like, oh, no, I don't want to do that.
	That's boring. I say, okay, that's fine.
	Then what game do you want to do?
	And I show them all the things I have in my bag.
	I say, do you want to do this game?
	Do you want to do this? And they say, oh, I want to do that game.
	So I say, okay, that's fine. I mean, it's your guys' class.
	It's It doesn't matter to me.
	Like, I have fun if you guys have fun.
	Yeah, look, I mean, the fundamental thing is that, and I've mentioned this years ago, but I just want to repeat it, the authority is utility.
	Authority is value to the person who's subjugated to it, so to speak, right?
	So, you know, I submit to the authority of my dentist because she keeps my teeth healthy, right?
	So she has authority over me because I gain value out of that authority.
	Authority is utility.
	She's useful to me in keeping my teeth clean, and therefore she has authority.
	Same thing with my doctor. My doctor says you need to lose 15 pounds, I'll lose 30.
	Because he has value to me.
	So he gets his authority because of his utility to me.
	And the question I always ask of people who are in charge of kids, whether they're parents or teachers or caregivers of any kind, is how are the kids better off with you having authority over them?
	In other words, if they could choose to have your authority or have no authority, would they choose to have your authority?
	And that's just really important.
	You have to think of selling yourself to kids the way that you set up a shop in the mall to try and sell something to people.
	You make it valuable for them to come into your store.
	You have a sale. You have unique stuff.
	You have friendly stuff.
	You have great food or whatever it is.
	You have toys that their kids can play with and so on.
	Right, so we go to a restaurant near here that has, they have, it's cool, they have holes in the walls and the ceiling, and they have a little treasure chest that kids can root through and take one toy each go, and they have, you know, really kid-friendly stuff, and they have lots of crayons, and they give out lollipops, which we don't let her eat, but, you know, she likes to play with them.
	And so we go there not because we're ordered to, but because they have value to us, and therefore, in a sense, they have authority over where we eat.
	They dictate where we eat, but only because they have real value to us as a kid, as a family with a little kid.
	So that's just something.
	How is it that my kids, the kids I'm taking care of, how are they better off with me today than if I hadn't been there, if somebody else had been there?
	And I think that's the way that you can really gain the most, quote, authority over kids.
	Okay. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
	Do you mind? I know I've been talking for a while.
	Do you mind if I ask you one more quick question, just kind of how to respond to some of their behavior, like personally?
	Let me just see if there's another caller, because I want to make sure we get to enough people.
	So...
	Sorry, James, do we have another caller?
	We have another caller.
	Listen, call in again next week.
	For people who may not be interested in this stuff, I don't want to have them switch off the show before we get to other stuff, but I think it's a great topic.
	I could talk about it all day, but let's call in next week if you still want to, and I hope you will, and we'll deal with it then.
	Okay. Thanks, man.
	Great questions. Thank you very much.
	You're very welcome. And listen, your kids are incredibly lucky to have you.
	I hope that you get that.
	I hope that you respect and recognize that in yourself.
	They are incredibly lucky and their lives will not be the same because you've been in there.
	And I hope that you take huge, huge pride in that.
	Well, I hope to change their lives.
	That's the teacher I hope to be.
	So, thank you. You're welcome.
	Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
	And the future thanks to you as well, I hope.
	All right. James, we'd like to pipe up the next person.
	Yeah, we have Tom with a question about...
	Well, I'll let him introduce the question.
	All right. Hello, Tommy boy.
	Go ahead. Hi, Steph.
	Pleasure to speak with you.
	Nice to speak with you, too.
	I was watching YouTube the other day, and there was a video of the non-aggressive principle.
	And it was your video, but it was uploaded by somebody else.
	I'm sure that's not the only time this has happened, but my comment on it was, why steal Stefan's work?
	That seems like a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	I got into a rather heated argument in the comments section with another commenter who said it wasn't because you still had your video and you hadn't lost anything.
	My argument was that if his Hijack version of your videos, I've got many hits, then YouTube would pay them, which that money should be yours.
	So just your thoughts on that.
	Yeah, I can certainly talk about it.
	If you don't mind opening up your kimono for a moment, why do you think it was important for you?
	I'm not saying it's not important, I just want to make sure I understand, like you said, you got into a heated debate.
	Why do you think you got into a heated debate about it?
	Because I consider it a form of theft.
	If somebody's going to represent somebody else's work as their own.
	No, I'm sorry.
	I don't think he represented it as his own.
	Okay. The reason I'm saying that is because...
	It has my logo and the ThinkTwice Productions logo at the beginning.
	Because I think it was the sunset of the state one, and the very nice gentleman over at Think Twice Productions did the video for it, and so the logos were still there.
	If he'd cut the logos off and put his own logo and said, I made this, I think that would be a little bit different.
	But he was not passing the work off as his own, because the two logos of, I guess, me, the writer and narrator, and the Think Twice Productions as the video people, they were still there.
	So I don't think he was promoting it as his own work.
	Okay. That makes sense.
	So if he had, then it would have been an aggressive act.
	I'm not sure about that.
	I'm not sure about that.
	Certainly, if you take somebody's work and say, this is my own work, that's plagiarism.
	And I think that's not great.
	I don't think it's illegal.
	So if you plagiarize someone in In school, you may get kicked out of school, you may get a failing grade, you may be kicked out of the course, but you don't go to jail, right?
	Sure. So, I think that it's wrong, but I don't think it's evil.
	I don't think I feel comfortable saying to someone, you've ripped me off and And therefore you should go to jail.
	Now, I can sort of understand circumstances where that may be more tempting, right?
	So let's say that I write a book and somebody takes it, presents it as their own and makes a million dollars.
	Then I might say, well, wait a second here.
	This is my book and you've just slapped your own name on it and you've made a million dollars.
	And so, but...
	I would take that up with the publisher, myself.
	I wouldn't take that up with the individual because the individual is obviously not an honorable person and not an honest person, so I don't try to get into conflicts or negotiate with people who are obviously immoral.
	I think that publishers would have a problem with that because they don't want to be known as people who put out books that are plagiarized because that's going to harm their reputation in the marketplace.
	And it's also going to mean that authors aren't going to want to go and deal with them if they stand behind – if they didn't know and they do the right thing and so on.
	They take the money back from this guy and they give it to me and with apologies or we find some way to split it.
	Because the reality is if someone takes my book and finds some great publisher and I wouldn't – that million dollars wouldn't even be there if that person hadn't done it.
	So I'm not sure – I'm not saying I should get the whole million dollars.
	But maybe we'd work out some split 70-30 or whatever and rightful attribution and so on.
	So I don't think that – if there's a million dollars on the table that wouldn't have been there if this guy didn't do what he did, then I'm not saying that I should get it all because that's to say I did everything which I didn't.
	But I think – So I would take that up with the publisher and I think that would be the case in a free society that if you pass someone else's work off as your own and profit from it in particular, then that's not so great.
	Now, if you take someone else's work and you don't pretend it's yours and you profit off it, then I think that it's equitable to send some money to the person whose work, right?
	So if he uploaded my video and he makes a million dollars out of Google AdWords because my videos are just that good, or I guess my Think Twice Productions videos are that good, Then I think it would be an honorable and decent thing to send me some portion of that income.
	I personally wouldn't chase someone down for that because I'm happy to have the exposure.
	So the only way he's going to make a million dollars in revenue is if, I don't know, 50 million people see The video, and if 50 million people see the video, then they've seen Free Domain Radio, the logo, and I did ask him to put my website in the comments, because after you sent me the email, and I think he did.
	So they've got my website, lots of people have seen it, and that's free advertising.
	So I think that's great.
	I have no problem with that.
	So I don't think it's the same as stealing.
	The other thing, too, is that when you put something out on YouTube, You're doing so with the explicit knowledge that it can be redistributed at will.
	You know that ahead of time.
	You know that ahead of time. Anyone can download anything and reproduce it and futz with it and do whatever they want.
	And I'm actually happy when people do that, right?
	So I just uploaded a video, I think a very good video, that someone put together with a speech I did about Remembrance Day in 2008.
	He put music to it and images, and I think it's a beautiful piece.
	It gave me goosebumps. And, you know, I've heard all this stuff before.
	So I'm very glad that he remashed it.
	He obviously didn't present it as his own work, other than the remashing mix-up with his own work, or the mixing with his own work.
	I think it's great. I very often will take remixes that people have done of my work and post it on my channel.
	So I think that's great. I mean, you put stuff out in the public domain.
	To me, it's sort of like saying, okay, I've left a fridge out front of my house for three days, and then someone took it.
	Well, there's kind of an unwritten rule that if something's out front of your house, anyone can take it if it's down by the curb.
	Sure. But you can say, well, wait a sec, that's mine and you stole it and I'm going to shoot you.
	I mean, that would be a very tough thing to sustain, I think, in any rational discussion.
	So once you put things out on YouTube, you know that they're...
	In the public domain that they're reproducible and that people can sort of do whatever they want with them.
	Now, if I were to say...
	At the beginning of the video, don't download this, don't reproduce this, don't mix it up, don't mash it, and blah, blah, blah, then I think you'd have a stronger case.
	But I've never said anything like that.
	And of course, I give away all my books for free.
	And if he's been to my website, which I assume he has, he knows that I give away all the podcasts for free.
	So he knows that I'm not a possessive guy about my intellectual property.
	So I didn't think it was the same as stealing.
	But anyway, enough about my thoughts.
	Tell me what you think. No, that's good.
	I understand that in the individual case it's not a huge deal.
	I was just seeking some philosophical clarity about, you know, morality of that sort of thing.
	But yeah, you've cleared it up and thank you very much for your thoughts.
	You're very welcome. And, you know, I'm better off with him having done it because there's more people who have seen my logo and my work, so I'm pleased with it.
	But, you know, I certainly do understand, you know, people who spend years making a movie and tens of millions of dollars and then people just, you know, download it in three minutes and watch it without paying anything.
	I can understand how they can be upset by that, and I think that there should be ways of making that work.
	And I think that there could be ways of making that work.
	So I think that movie makers should find ways to have the movies, you know, you watch them and you pay what you think it's worth afterwards.
	And that would be my way of suggesting how things should be done.
	I think consuming and tipping is going to be a pretty, which is, of course, my business model, if you can call it a business model.
	Consumption followed by tipping, I think, is a very effective way to get things done, particularly if you're in the field of education.
	There's nothing that is going to drive quality more than not getting paid up front, but optionally being paid afterwards.
	Imagine how nice cab drivers would be, and imagine how clean their cars would be, and imagine how efficient and courteous they'd be if you just paid them whatever you felt the ride was worth after they dropped you off at home.
	And I'm not saying everything should be the same as my business model because there's lots of differences, right?
	But I think that there is something in the economy that is underappreciated, and there's some books that have been written about it recently, which is freemium, right, where stuff is free and then you sort of pay for premium access.
	And I think a lot of stuff should be, you consume it and you pay what you think it's worth afterwards.
	I think that should really be the case.
	You don't think that too many people would take advantage of that, so...
	Well, some people would take advantage of it, for sure.
	I mean, I've been a waiter, and some people will not leave a tip.
	But most people will.
	And the way that you do it, of course, is you try to make it public, right?
	So you put a cash box in on the way out of the theater, and everybody who shuffles out feels everybody else's eyes on them.
	And if they see the ten people ahead of them put five or ten bucks into the box, then they're going to feel, unless they really didn't like the film, they're going to feel pretty crappy about walking out.
	And not doing it.
	And, you know, people also don't underestimate the sex drive of these things as well, right?
	So movies in particular, right?
	So movies in particular...
	What do guys want to do?
	Well, they want to impress their dates.
	Or maybe women want to impress their dates.
	I don't know. So, you know, you take some woman that you like to go see a film and it's a pay what you like afterwards kind of thing.
	And you laugh through the film and you enjoy the film and you get up and you say, what a great film.
	And then you walk out without paying.
	What's your date going to think? I mean, people don't understand the degree to which, you know, just sex drives will create virtuous behavior.
	I mean... You know, there's so many ways of these things being enforced, so to speak, without, you know, cops and jails and threats and lawyers and suing.
	And there's so many ways to enforce things or that things are enforced.
	And this is one of the ways in which it happens in restaurants as well.
	I would for sure, when I was a waiter, I absolutely noticed that when a couple came in and you could tell it was a first date or an early date, you'd get a better tip from whoever was paying if you were a good waiter.
	Because they didn't want to sit there and say, well, that was a $50 meal.
	It was great. The waiter asked me several times whether anything could be improved.
	And I said, no, the food is great.
	The service is great. Everything's great.
	And then leave a $2 tip.
	If your date sees that, they're going to be like, I don't know if I want to get with a cheapskate like that.
	There's lots of different ways that these things can be enforced.
	I just sort of want to point it out that that kind of creativity is not going to occur under the current system, but I think could occur under a freer system.
	Very good. All right.
	Thanks. And thank you. I really appreciate the email, and I appreciate you bringing that to my attention.
	Awesome. Thank you for your clarifications of that.
	I appreciate that. And thank you for looking out for the self-interest of my videos.
	All right. Do we have questions from the audience?
	From the chat remote, do we have any other one?
	Any other one with the person calling in for the me head?
	We do have another caller.
	I'll bring her on right now. Hello?
	Hello. Hello Steph, it's Maya, the Eastern European with a weird accent.
	Hello Maya, how are you?
	All good, all good. I have a question about UPB and actually it's about my inability to defend it and I believe one reason is that I'm still in the field of having the gut feeling for it to be okay but I'm not totally convinced so I kind of You know,
	I kind of see that it's real, but I don't understand all the arguments for it.
	So when I am in a discussion about it, I cannot defend anything.
	I don't have any experience in those debates, and I see that part of it is just having a lot of experience in those.
	So my question is, if there is such a thing as UPB, Is there a thing which I call URS, or universally recognized stupidity?
	So is there such a thing like a reverse from the UPB? Ah, so what is the opposite of UPB? Is that what you mean?
	Yeah, and is there something which you can call a universally recognized stupidity?
	I think if it's universally recognized, it's probably more...
	If something is false and universally recognized, then it's either universally recognized as false, in which case, you know, it's just rejected.
	Like if someone says the world is banana-shaped, there's going to be very few people, I guess, except for maybe three rhesus monkeys, who are going to agree with that statement.
	So, if something is universally recognized and believed to be true when it is in fact false...
	You could say that's stupidity, but it may be sort of closer to something like corruption or something like that.
	And so the opposite of UBB, that's a great question.
	Well, I think the opposite of UBB would have to be something that is, I think, akin to what you say, which is that something is universally believed to be true, but is in fact false.
	I think that is...
	I think that would be the closest, but I also think that would be a very hard thing, because I can't think of anything that's universally believed to be true that is in fact false.
	So, yeah, but I think that would be the closest thing to the opposite.
	Because, you know, in terms of UPB making inroads of progress into the world or into society, you know, what is the opposition that occurs to UPB? I actually just did a podcast on this, so I won't go into it in much detail.
	I think that people have a very sensitive relationship to authority, to being told what to do, to being told what to believe, to being told what to accept, to being told what is right and wrong, because these things are so often used by destructive or abusive authorities to get compliance out of kids or young adults or whatever.
	So people are very sensitive. To moralists who come up and say, you need to do this, and you can't do that, and this is right, and this is wrong, and you should feel guilty about this, and you should want this.
	And I think people feel very bullied by that.
	And I think that when UPB comes along, they feel, because it's occurred so many times before, that ethics have been used to control them, to manage them.
	That, okay, so here's some new asshole coming along with some ethical theory that's going to snare me into obedience, and it's going to turn out to be false and exploitive.
	I think people have a lot of caution, and I think rightly so.
	They have a lot of caution about ethical theories, a lot of hostility towards ethical theories, because it's been so often used to control people.
	In fact, I think that's why ethics were invented, was to control people, not to find the truth.
	So those are my thoughts on it.
	And look, I mean, the fact that UPB is a bitch and a half, To defend?
	Yeah, it's horrible.
	It's horrible. I mean, I feel half the time like I'm in some jujitsu competition while being randomly tasered.
	I kind of know how to do it, but my muscles are jerking and my nerves are shot.
	Because it's hard. I'm going against as much propaganda in myself as I am in other people.
	Well, one thing that I was... That I was trying to point out in that conversation was that it's really stupid to defend opinion that is not really yours.
	You know, when people, if an opinion is imposed on them, and they don't own it, but they defend it, and they will go very far to defend it.
	Oh, yeah. Almost like putting themselves out of the equation and just defending this opinion that is not even theirs, like defending somebody else or something else or the state or something.
	I mean, you see that. You see that.
	And I think this is something really, like, universally stupid thing to do.
	Wait, wait, wait, wait.
	Look, you could be right about the stupid thing, but let me just ask you a few questions, right?
	Because I think if you say stupid, Then you're just dismissing it rather than be curious about it.
	Look, you may be right.
	I might be stupid for bringing this up.
	But I don't think that calling something stupid gives you much insight into it.
	Because that's to say that people are stupid.
	I don't think they are. I don't think they are.
	Look, the purpose of human beings is not to discover truth.
	The purpose of human beings is not to be virtuous.
	The purpose of human beings is not to be philosophical.
	The purpose of human beings...
	Is one thing and one thing only.
	To survive and reproduce.
	To survive and reproduce.
	And people who followed the truth against the tribe got killed.
	We are weird throwbacks.
	We are weird evolutionary little sub-branches that should not have made it into the modern world.
	I mean, there's a gay gene for reasons I don't think anybody really knows.
	And the truth gene is something that is...
	It pops up every now and then.
	It's a mutation, and I believe in history, like 999 times out of a thousand, it just got people killed.
	I remember reading a book called Montailloux, and it was about a village in France in the, I don't know, 14th or 15th century, and it was exquisitely detailed, the way that they lived and what people said and so on.
	And it was fascinating to me to read this book and to realize that there were atheists or, you know, secularists or people who were skeptical of religion, even in the 14th or 15th or whenever, 16th centuries, in the Middle Ages when it took place.
	Because one guy was saying, he said, God didn't make the world.
	The world came into being through screwing and eating, you know, just whatever.
	He was just sort of making a joke, but he was just saying the world is material.
	It's not created by some sort of spirit.
	And, of course, the village was...
	Because it was part of the Inquisition.
	And so when the Inquisition came down in this French village, I'm sure the guy who said that the world was not created by God didn't really do so well.
	He probably didn't do so well.
	And so the other thing that's true as well is that it takes usually a fair amount of physical maturity, like just growing up.
	To be able to really think for yourself.
	And most people in history began reproducing around the age of 13 or 14, which is not known for its advanced philosophical rigor at that age.
	It's known for its, you know, pitching a tent and thinking about TNA all the time or whatever the equivalent is for women.
	And so there's just not, you know, it is a really rare thing for people to be interested in the truth against their immediate self-interest.
	And that's really what philosophy really is.
	Because if You know, if the truth is not against your immediate self-interest, like 2 plus 2 is 4, you don't really need philosophy for it.
	You need philosophy for the truth that's gonna screw you some way, somehow.
	So, human beings are not...
	Everybody will say that they're into the truth, and they're like evidence, and they want to think for themselves, and we all say that we admire the independent thinker.
	You know, this is one of the things that happens in society.
	Everyone says, think for yourself.
	But the reason that people say, think for yourself, is so that the people who do think for themselves will kindly identify themselves so that they can be killed.
	That's really why there's such a strong ethic of speak up about your own thoughts.
	Think for yourself, be a radical, be an iconoclast, go against the tribe.
	That's just propaganda put out so that people who do think for themselves will step forward out of the line so they can be cut down.
	Identify yourself! That's all of this nonsense.
	It's about. And the internet, of course, has changed that to a large degree.
	But I don't think people are stupid.
	I don't think people are stupid.
	I think that they are just going with what they've been evolved and what they've adapted to do in a situation of near universal superstition-based absolutism human ownership.
	Is the cow stupid for not making a break for it and running for the fence?
	No, because the fence is electrified.
	And he can see three bodies out there, and history is full of independent thinkers who went through significant social or legal or ecclesiastical trials.
	So they just, well, why would I want?
	Why would I want that? I'm just going to sit here and mouth the platitudes and watch TV and go play hockey, have sex with my wife, and try and raise my kids and work at my job and pretend that I'm part of some culture that means something, because if I don't, there's lots of evidence of what happens in To people who actually do take the bait and proudly admit that they think for themselves.
	But I would just say that I recognize, I mean, I would like to be part of the change.
	And just today I was listening to your interview with, I think it was with Dr.
	Schwartz, I think so.
	Where he was mentioning how the society was different when we were in polytheistic and monotheistic.
	Even the ways the brain and the personalities were viewed were dependent on these beliefs in the society.
	And there is a stream in biology which is actually arguing the same thing.
	When we were believing Darwinian theory, which we still do, where it's the dog-eat-dog world and all of that, all of our...
	All of our societies, everything was made around it.
	Even when you think of the big companies, they were made in this way, to kill the competition.
	But actually, more and more experiments are showing that the way for species to survive is to help the weaker ones.
	It's not to kill the weak ones.
	No, it's to help each other, to help the parts of the society.
	So I would kind of like to be the part of the change, the part of the new ways of seeing things and being an individual thinker.
	I agree with you.
	Look, just because there is practical wisdom in conforming with the common delusions of the herd, Doesn't mean that we should accept those as true.
	So you are bitten by the bug called philosophy, and you are willing to sacrifice short-term self-interest, short-term comforts for the sake of building a better world.
	Well, that is, I think, the definition of heroic.
	It's the definition of heroic.
	It is. You are a superhero.
	And the progress of the world...
	No, seriously. You know, get a cape and some tights on.
	Don't leave me out here alone with this silly costume.
	No, this is heroic.
	Yeah, I was just thinking of a silly costume.
	Yeah, yeah, I know. I know, and I apologize for that.
	Red and yellow somehow. Red and yellow in my head.
	That's right. That's why I needed to lose the 30 pounds, because I was muffin-topping my superman costume.
	But look, it's heroic.
	George Bernard Shaw said, reasonable men...
	Adapt to their circumstances.
	Unreasonable men and women expect their circumstances to adapt to them.
	Therefore, all progress is the result of unreasonable men.
	Now, I don't quite agree with that.
	I think what happens is reasonable people, quote, reasonable people, adapt to Like, adapt their ideals to their circumstances, whereas unreasonable people expect circumstances to adapt to rational ideals.
	Therefore, all progress, particularly in the moral realm, is the result of, quote, unreasonable people.
	And, yeah, that is heroic.
	That is, you know, we stand on a high mountain built from the bodies, many of whom suffered enormously.
	Of independent, free, rational minds who stood against the prejudices of the common herd and stood immovable and often inviolate and often terrified in the face of near-universal prejudice and stood alone in a way that we who have the internet can't really imagine.
	But the reason we have the world that we have today, which is so beautiful and so amazing and so productive and so powerful and so entertaining in so many ways, the reason that we have the vestigial freedoms that we have now, the freedom to have this conversation, the freedom to share these thoughts,
	the technology to have this conversation and share these thoughts is the result of a mountain of largely forgotten, always attacked and sometimes murdered heroes Who stood up against common prejudice.
	It's a crazy thing to do.
	It's a crazy thing to do.
	I don't want to do it. In so many ways.
	I never have. I liked my private life.
	I liked not being known.
	I did not...
	And there's lots of things I don't like about what I'm doing and have problems with it sometimes.
	But you can't fundamentally resist that which is true.
	And I believe...
	And this is troublesome because I don't believe in self-sacrifice but I think that if you are gifted with the ability to see the truth and the capacity to talk about it in any kind of way that helps other people then I think once you are aware of this capacity within yourself if you do not pursue it if you do not exercise it then I think Your cowardice,
	for want of a better phrase, will become evident to you and your life will decline thereby.
	This is why so many people avoid the truth, because once you know the truth, a truth is simple as the non-aggression principle.
	It doesn't have to be as complicated as UPB. But once you know the truth, then you have an obligation.
	You have an obligation.
	And you don't have to pursue that obligation any more than a surgeon has to give a Heimlich maneuver or a tracheotomy to somebody choking to death.
	But if you can save somebody choking to death in a restaurant and you don't, then you will live with that knowledge about yourself for the rest of your life, which is why a lot of people don't want to learn the skills called truth, called philosophy, called reasoning, called empiricism, called evidence, or even science.
	Because once you know the truth and you back down from helping the world that so desperately needs it, you then know that about yourself and will know that about yourself for the rest of your life.
	So I can see many, many reasons why it's advantageous.
	Yeah, and you see people struggling to stay.
	I mean, even for me, sometimes it's different to stay on the same level of intensity of determination to defend what I believe in.
	Sometimes it's very difficult to stay on that intensity, so you're just kind of like, okay, I'm going to rest a bit, but it doesn't...
	I mean, if you rest for too long, then you go back to the...
	To the unreal life, let's call it like that.
	But you can't go back, right?
	In a little intense state.
	I mean, you can't go back, that's the problem, right?
	You can't, you can't, right?
	No, you can't.
	I mean, I was just thinking about this the other day.
	I was outside and I saw a sign for orange juice, a big billboard for orange juice.
	And I thought, well, I can't look at that and not know what it means because I can read English.
	I can't look at the words orange juice because I'm teaching Isabella to read and so this is why it's on my mind.
	I can't look at two words called orange juice and think that they mean something else or pretend that I don't know what they mean.
	So once you learn a language and you look at the letters, you know what they mean.
	But you can't undo that.
	You can't not know. I mean, if it had been written in Arabic, I wouldn't know what the hell it was.
	You know, even if there was a picture of orange juice in a glass.
	I don't know. Does it mean bubbles?
	Does it mean orange the color?
	Does it mean this is really great glass?
	I mean, whatever, right?
	But you can't...
	You can't go back and everyone gets that this is a one-way catapult with no return ticket, right?
	And for many people it looks like this is a catapult that goes off the edge of the world where you fall forever.
	And people don't want to because they know.
	They know it's a one-way ticket. They know that once you go through the fur coats in that cupboard, once you go through Once you go over that wall, once you get catapulted over, there is no coming back.
	You may be able to peer through, you may be able to come back for a few minutes, but coming back is like swimming down into the ocean.
	You can go down, but then you have to come back up because you can't live down there anymore.
	So, yeah, everybody gets.
	This is why people fight so hard against philosophy, because there's so much that reveals if you either accept or reject it.
	True, true. I'll just add, I think it was Oscar Wilde who said...
	Be yourself. Everybody else is taken.
	Right, right, right.
	That's fantastic. Okay.
	Thank you. Great question.
	Thank you very much. You're very welcome.
	Thank you for all the work. Thank you, and thank you for listening, and thank you for your support.
	Thanks, thanks. Bye-bye.
	Thank you. That's a great quote from our good friend, Nietzsche, who wrote, The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.
	If you try it, you will be lonely often and sometimes frightened, but no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
	I have a couple of questions queued up from earlier.
	Queue away. Alright, we have Eric asking...
	Any suggestions for good children's books for ages two to four?
	I don't actually.
	I mean, we have a couple of Sesame Street books.
	We've got a couple of Cat in the Hat books, a couple of fairy tales.
	I haven't found anything that I particularly like.
	I mean, the fairy tales are pretty gruesome in some ways, and I've always found the cat and the Dresden-Sue stuff kind of druggy, addled, and creepy, but it's just my own particular thing.
	Though AC seems to like them.
	So, no, I'm afraid I don't have anything, but if people do, then that would be...
	If people do, please let me know and I'll share them with the audience.
	All right, and I don't think you've had too much experience with this, certainly not as bad, but the question comes from a guest.
	If two siblings or more vary differently in terms of success and talents, how do you keep them from being in competition with each other?
	Yeah, I'm not sure I'm a big expert on healthy or functional sibling relationships, but if you're happy as a human being, then competition doesn't mean that much to you.
	I think that's really important.
	It's really, really important to understand that.
	If you're happy, then competition doesn't mean that much to you.
	Because... You're already happy.
	And that's really the goal. Once you're happy, you're there, right?
	And so I believe that all striving for competition, and by that I do not mean striving for excellence, but striving for competition.
	Excellence is relative to an ideal.
	Competition is relative to others.
	And so I think that all competition results from unhappiness.
	All competition results from A second-handedness, a social metaphysics, as Ayn Rand used to say, a feeling that I have value if I'm doing better than someone else.
	As Gora Padale said, it is not enough for me to succeed.
	My friends also must fail.
	And that, of course, is problematic.
	I think that a happy, self-actualized person does not need or want to measure themselves against others.
	We can't ever not measure ourselves against others.
	I think that's an impossible ideal that, you know, Howard Rourke and John Galt aside is not sensible to pursue.
	And I think Ayn Rand would agree with that as well.
	But I think the fundamental competition comes from a dissatisfaction with the self and a desire for domination over someone else, to beat them, to win.
	And so my question for siblings involved in that kind of dysfunction would be to say, well, where did this come from?
	Where did we first learn about competition as a form of interaction?
	Competition is not a form of interaction.
	Competition is a win-lose form of domination.
	One person wins and one or more people lose.
	And so I would look into the family history and say, okay, well, How was my value defined within my family?
	Was it defined by my thoughts, my feelings, my person, my sense of humor, my empathy, my warmth, my courage, my whatever?
	Or was it defined by my grades, my victories, whether I mastered this piano piece or not?
	Was it measured with competition?
	And that's the fundamental, I think, pain that needs to be revisited to undo that kind of dysfunction, is you need to find a way to go back and have value.
	Have value for who you are as a human being, not the achievements that you put out.
	And I think that's the essence of what I would look at, is look at the family history and say, where did this sense of competition come from?
	And I think that would be your answer, though.
	That may take some time. Somebody put a good quote in.
	Sorry, just one sec before you go on.
	idea opposed to the one in fashion, as it would for a city man to dress coolly on a sweltering day or for a young society woman to attend a smart affair in one of last year's gowns.
	The man who possesses this moral courage is blessed beyond kings, but he must pay the fearful price of ridicule or contempt.
	Yeah, I think that's from Henry Hazlitt, and I think it goes a little bit more beyond ridicule and contempt in most of history, but.
	But anyway, sorry, come on. No problem.
	There's one, yeah, that's a good quote.
	There's one question, and I think you've talked about this from time to time, but asking directly, what don't you like about what you're currently doing?
	I mean, that's a big question.
	I think I would like to mull it over.
	I mean, it's sometimes scary, you know, in terms of, am I going to get any donations today or this week?
	And if time goes by without donations, there can be some anxiety around that.
	And there is some discomfort, of course, about opposing a lot of the popular things that Even in the subculture called libertarianism, people strongly believe.
	I don't like talking particularly about my skepticism of political advocacy or the Ron Paul candidacy.
	I don't particularly like talking about My opposition to drugs, because that causes problems.
	I don't particularly like talking about criticisms of other movements, such as the Zeitgeist and so on, because obviously I share a lot of their criticisms, but their solutions to me don't make sense and seem quite uninformed by economics.
	I don't like, you know, some of the criticism that comes my way that is, you know, vicious or unjust or hurtful.
	That could be unpleasant, although that's, I think, diminishing over time.
	It can be hard.
	It can be hard.
	Of course, the other thing that is quite true is that I think that it's hard to see.
	Once you give up on politics and you give up on other ways of averting the disasters to come, and once you accept that it truly is a multi-generational process, then you have to accept, I think logically, that Things are going to get worse before they get better.
	That's a hard thing to accept and I think one of the reasons people peddle so madly on the bicycle with no chain called politics is that they don't want to look at if it's not going to be politics then we're talking about a multi-generational change to do with parenting and personal relationships and the commitment to non-violence in one's personal environment and So I think people don't want to look at that and that can be a hard thing to look at.
	That can be a hard thing to look at and a painful thing to look at.
	So, yeah, I think those are some of the things that I have difficulty doing.
	I also feel a little bit, sometimes, video-wise, like a one-hit wonder.
	You know, they come out with a couple of videos that did really well.
	And, of course, the majority of my videos barely hit 6,000 views, and a couple have.
	Now, I mean, I just put out one that I was very, very pleased with called The Status Family, And everyone's like, oh, I hope this goes viral.
	I know it won't go viral because it's about personal relationships and it's about the family, which means it won't go viral because the stuff that goes viral is about politics and abstract things that people can't do anything about.
	People are drawn to knowledge that they cannot act on.
	It's just another way of unlinking their brains from action.
	It's another way to keep philosophy at a distance is to only be attracted to things that you cannot change.
	Like the Federal Reserve or who did 9-11 or who shot JFK. These are all things that you can't figure out and can't change and so people are very much drawn to them because then it gives them the illusion of doing something.
	But of course the reality is that most people suffer abuse not from the state but if they're going to suffer abuse they suffer abuse not from the state but from their personal relationships of one kind or another.
	And that's just a sort of empirical fact.
	I mean So people, I think, don't want to just look at that basic stuff.
	You know, they either want to not hit the gas, or they want to hit the gas with their car safely off the ground so the wheels just whine and turn in space, but actually hitting the gas with the wheels on the ground, which is philosophy in the sphere that you can actually have an effect in, which is your personal relationships or your relationships at work or where you have some capacity to effect change, well, that's why people don't want things.
	They want to keep philosophy as an abstract hobby, and I can completely understand that.
	I did that for many years as well.
	But it doesn't work to change the world.
	It certainly doesn't work to save the South.
	So those are the things that I had some trouble with.
	Thanks, and it certainly makes sense.
	They don't sound like...
	Wow. The thought comes to mind that they don't sound like small issues.
	They sound like things that you have to deal with by the choices you've made by where you are.
	Like, these aren't things you can necessarily resolve.
	They're intractable in that way.
	Does that make sense? Yeah, it does.
	And, I mean, I really, really wish that somebody else had tackled these issues in the past.
	I really, really wish that people had talked about Voluntarism within the family.
	I really wish that people had talked about that we judge people not by blood relationships, but by their commitment to virtue.
	I wish that this had been really talked about before.
	I really don't like being one of the people who's pushing the envelope as far as this goes.
	But, you know, the reality is it hasn't been talked about much for 10,000 years, and I have an ability to bring this basic truth to light.
	And so it's...
	Yeah, I wish it had been someone else, but it hadn't been, and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for someone else to do it.
	And so, yeah, that is a difficult part of what I do, for sure.
	Yeah, yeah, someone just said in the chat, blood is thicker than freedom.
	Look, I think that we should give people a break based on longevity of personal history with them.
	I mean, certainly... If a friend of 20 years offends me, I'm not going to just dump the relationship.
	If somebody I've just met at a party offends me, I'm not likely to pursue a relationship.
	So I think accumulated history with someone does give reason for investing more than in a stranger.
	I think blood matters, so to speak, or family matters.
	But it's still not a substitute for a real and consistent virtue.
	Yeah, if somebody wants to call in, please.
	Yep, I'm just working on getting them in.
	Don't forget to come to the Porcupine Freedom Festival.
	There's actually going to be a roast of me, which people seem to be quite keen because they probably have entire thesauruses of ball jokes that they've just been waiting to inflict on someone.
	So if you go to P-O-R-C-F-E-S-T.com, you can go to the Porcupine Freedom Festival.
	It is June 20th to 26th at Rogers Campground and Motel in beautiful Lancaster, New Hampshire.
	It is a blast.
	Of the conferences I've gone to, it's my favorite, just because it's so outdoorsy and there's such a sense of freedom.
	The other stuff that's in hotels and all of that, it's kind of nice, but it still feels kind of urban, and I'm kind of an outdoorsy guy, at least ever since I was working as a gold panner in my late teens, so...
	Yeah, go to Porkfest.
	I'm also going to be speaking in New York at Liberty Fest 2, September the 10th, 2011.
	I will be at libertopia.org.
	You can check them out in San Diego in October.
	I will be emceeing, so you will get more stuff than anything human beings should want over a three-day weekend.
	and a couple of other things that are going on that I'll post on the message board.
	Somebody posted a great objection, which I hadn't thought of, to when I was interviewed on Resistance Radio, They said, it is a violation of the non-aggression principle to use nukes against a potential invader because you will be harming people who are not initiating force against you, the tax slaves.
	And I think that's a really, really great question.
	And... I think I agree with it to some degree, and I think I'll have to rethink that position.
	Now, there's a caveat here, though, which is, of course, the children are not responsible, and that's something that would need to be figured out.
	But first of all, it is around prevention, right?
	I mean, it is around prevention of war.
	Nukes don't get used because they are so devastating.
	So it would not be with the intent of actually using them, but rather with the threat of mutually assured destruction.
	So that would be one answer.
	The second answer is that I think it would be unjust now to use a weapon of mass destruction against an invading army because statism is the dominant ideology to the point where it's not even the dominant ideology, it is just what is.
	But by the time a truly stateless society comes around in 100 or 200 or 300 years, then people will have been exposed to far greater, more rational or even vaguely rational and consistent ideas.
	And therefore people who still are statists will no longer be the default position.
	And people will have more of a moral responsibility once they've been exposed to alternate ideas.
	They have a moral responsibility that they don't have beforehand.
	So to be somebody who accepted slavery in ancient Athens, as Aristotle did, would not be crazy.
	I don't think it's great, but it's certainly not crazy.
	Whereas if you're a philosopher now who advocates slavery, that's a whole different kind of thing, because there's evidence and arguments and so on that have accumulated over time that hopefully will set sane people straight on that issue.
	So by the time there is a stateless society in the world, First of all, I don't think there'll be war as a whole because society will advance to the point where children will be raised peacefully enough that you won't need a state or a state will be recognized for what it is.
	And so I don't think that there will be that kind of war.
	Also, of course, who knows what weapons or retaliatory possibilities are going to be available or what kind of defensive strategies are going to be available.
	I mean, there's just no way to imagine.
	It's like trying to imagine what weapons will be available now in the late 18th century.
	It's just not really going to happen.
	And so, yeah, who knows?
	But I do think that people who are still part of a statist mindset when there's examples like a truly free society and all of the arguments that have been around for a long time and been accepted by more and more people, then people do have a moral responsibility who then sign up for the military in a statist society.
	So that I think is different than now.
	So yeah, I'm not saying you just go and nuke some civilian city.
	That wouldn't be the case.
	But, of course, nuclear weapons won't be at all valuable or viable by the time a state of society comes about in a couple hundred years.
	So that's just sort of an example.
	And the example is that you simply don't need a lot of money to defend your country.
	Hello? Hello?
	Hello? Can you listen to me?
	Sure. Hey, how are you doing, Steph?
	I'm well, how are you? Fine, thank you.
	I was thinking about a couple of questions that I wanted to mention, just kind of short.
	The first of them, I have a very good friend of mine, and she's having...
	Her family, and she's having some emotional difficulties at the moment, and she recognized that she needs to work on some issues about her family and everything.
	So she has tried to find professional help, going to a couple of psychologists, and both of them kind of really sucked.
	So, well, she's kind of skeptical now about, you know, Finding someone who's really going to connect with her, trying to work these things out.
	So I couldn't come up with any good advice.
	So what would you do in a situation like this?
	I'm sorry, I may have missed the question if you could just repeat that.
	I do apologize. No, that's okay.
	The thing is that she's having some emotional problems and she wants to work them out with professional help, psychologists.
	So she went to a couple of them and they both really sucked.
	So she's kind of skeptical now about finding someone who might be able to connect with her so she can work those things out.
	So I didn't know what advice would I be able to give because my first thought was you should try going to a psychologist or something like that but then that really failed so I don't know What would you do next?
	Well, that's a tough call.
	And some people do get good relationships with psychologists or maybe even psychiatrists and so on.
	And they can get that right kind of connection and get a positive interaction going.
	And for other people, it can take a little bit of time to find the right connection.
	It's obviously a very, very important relationship.
	It's a very vulnerable relationship.
	I would suggest that it's worth giving it a little bit more of a try.
	I really do.
	I really think that if you find the right therapist, it can be just so amazingly advantageous to helping people with personal issues that I just strongly suggested.
	I certainly didn't find the therapist that I wanted to work with It wasn't my first shot.
	But I think it's worth trying and to recognize that therapists have their own values and their own particular approaches that may not mesh with where this woman is or how she wants to work.
	And maybe there's questions that she could figure out to ask a therapist over the phone before she goes in for a full session to hopefully save her.
	Like, do you have experience with the kind of issues that I want to work with and all of that kind of stuff that hopefully will make things move faster.
	But I think it's, you know, my advice for what it's worth would be to continue to keep trying to work it out.
	Okay. Good.
	Thanks. Another question that I was kind of, well, I recently realized that, and I kind of I saw it coming, but I wasn't sure about it, that a lot of, I don't know, libertarian movements around the world are very linked or involved with religious groups.
	And, well, that was kind of a bummer, right?
	But, you know, then you start to see that maybe you, I don't know, trying to get some...
	Funding for an event about, I don't know, Austrian economics or whatever.
	You might actually need to get involved with a lot of these groups that are highly religious, some of them.
	Another thing, I saw that you are having interviews and a good relationship with Jeffrey Tucker, let's say.
	So how do you come to terms with the fact that his religion and Catholicism or Christianity is very involved in these libertarian movements?
	And a side question that has a little bit to do with it, like, for example, Hans Roman Hopp, I recently was reading that actually some of them might have a little racist views, I don't know for sure, but that's what I'm maybe suspecting, and that, of course, would be not so very nice.
	I wouldn't like to have more to do with any races than I would with homophobic or something like that.
	How do you come to terms with those different aspects of their approach to ethics?
	Right. Well, I think there's a couple of great questions there, and I don't know the degree to which Jeffrey Tucker or other people I've chatted to are religious.
	Of course, I've talked to people who are psychologists who I'm sure, if I were to ask them, would be statists.
	But we're talking about psychology, not the state.
	So if I go to my hairdresser or my barber, I guess, then she gives me the number two buzz.
	I don't particularly care whether she's religious or not.
	I just want a good haircut, right?
	When I'm talking to people about particular topics, my interest or my concern is their expertise in those topics.
	And they certainly don't have to agree with me, as people know from my interviews.
	There's lots of things that people have said that I disagree with.
	But my goal in those interviews is to present ideas to the audience.
	It's not to have a debate.
	With the person.
	Now, if I am going to have a debate with somebody, as I've had with, I guess, Jan Helfelt and Michael Batnarek and a bunch of other people, then yeah, we do that ahead of time and we know what the issues are.
	We know what the debate is going to be.
	I don't think it's fair to jump somebody with a debate, particularly with a debate about a very unusual area.
	So if I've got some, I don't know, a The psychologist on the show, when I start jumping into him about anarchism and use the against me argument, that's like an ambush.
	It's not like an ambush. That is an ambush.
	Because I haven't told them about it ahead of time.
	I'm just sort of jumping them in the show.
	I don't think that's a reasonable thing to do.
	I think if a psychologist, let's say, I don't know, I contact some psychologist.
	He goes to my website and he says, oh, you're an anarchist.
	I'd love to debate anarchism.
	Right? We're like, great, let's do that.
	Right? Then we can go and he can prepare and we can read each other's material and I can prepare and we can have a good debate about it.
	But, yeah, so I mean, I like Jeffrey Tucker as a person and I've enjoyed my conversations with him.
	If he ever wants to debate the existence of God, I think that would be an enjoyable topic and I would certainly be happy to do that.
	And so, yeah, but when I'm talking to him about particular issues, then I'm talking to him about particular issues rather than Yeah, well, I get that.
	For example, if you need funding for an event, and you know that some people, let's say, the high positions within that group, which is probably the one that could give you funding, they have some Let's just assume racist views.
	Would you, I mean, what would you do then?
	Because I... Well, yeah, I mean, I don't think I would take funding from that.
	Yeah. Yeah, I don't think I would.
	I mean, I don't know. I mean, I guess if I were starving to death, but I don't think that's, you know, a particularly reasonable place to start.
	Right. Well, thank you very much, Steph.
	Have a great evening. You are very welcome.
	You are very welcome. Alright, I think, unless we have just a very quick one, we are at the done!
	Quickie, quickie time! I'm not even going to make a joke about that.
	It's quickie time, and by the time I'm finished, we're done.
	I don't have a mic, somebody says, but I'm curious if Steph thinks improvements in German-Austrian parenting versus parenting of the US and the UK might have come from the amount of time Germans have to spend criticizing their parents and grandparents for the Holocaust or two world wars.
	If that is the case, how would we Anglos come to accept parental criticism without a generation being so blatantly evil as 1930s German?
	Look, I'm no expert on this.
	I'm just going to speak from my own personal experience, but I'm not going to pretend that this is any kind of universal argument that I've studied.
	But I will say this, that I had German cousins who came to stay with me when I was a kid in England, and they were not allowed to play war.
	And they were not allowed to touch guns, and they were not allowed to have airplanes that had weapons on them as toys.
	There was an extremely strong anti-martial aspect to the parenting that they received, which is really quite fascinating when you think about it, that everyone, at least that I knew from that culture as a kid, everyone got that it had a lot to do with the parenting.
	It had a lot to do with how the kids In Germany had been raised throughout history and up until the Second World War.
	And so there was a very instinctual thing that we need to start raising our kids differently.
	And the anti-war element in German parenting and the recognition that if you scream at parents, sorry, if parents scream at children, those children will be much more likely to obey someone like Hitler if someone like Hitler screams at them.
	So I think that you can look at The history of Germany since the Second World War as the attempt to reform through parenting and this is one of the reasons why England is still getting involved in wars and Germany isn't because England was very proud of the Second World War and taught martial values to their children and I know that for sure because it was all over the place when I was growing up in England.
	So I was born of course just 21 years after the war ended.
	And in America we're still teaching martial Virtues and values to kids, and therefore we're involved in wars.
	Canada does it less so, and Canada is involved in fewer wars.
	And they've also found that in the Scandinavian countries where they've banned hitting children, they can't get enough people to sign up to be soldiers.
	You understand that the state needs children to be hit, otherwise it can't get enough enforcers to keep the general population down and profitable.
	So the state is heavily invested in the continued harm towards children because, well, for reasons that I've just stated.
	So I would absolutely say that that is an important aspect.
	I think that, yeah, I think there was some significant criticism of parents and the parents' generation that went on.
	I think we are going to have to have, obviously, not the same level of vituperation towards the older generation.
	But yeah, look, I mean, we're left with a huge national debt with a pretty polluted planet.
	With a terrible school system that kids resent being in.
	With a legacy of war and in the UK and the US. So Empire, of course, the US more recent.
	So yeah, there's some criticisms about the world that has been inherited by the young.
	And I think those criticisms are healthy.
	And I think those criticisms are necessary, however unpleasant they may be for older people.
	So yeah, I think it's...
	I think it's important to remember the degree to which we hope that things don't have to get as bad as they did in Europe in the 1930s and the 1940s for there to be a revolution or at least an evolution in child raising.
	So I hope that helps.
	Yeah, I just want to add to that, you know, I had similar experiences with a lot of militarism when I was growing up, you know, 10 years after you were a kid, you know, in the United States.
	A lot of, you know, and it's still even now, you know, a lot of soldier worship, not as strong as used to be, but, you know, it's quite a lot of it in certain parts of the country.
	And also there's someone in Germany, from Germany, in the chat the other night who was kind of complaining about how it's hard to sort of get traction with arguments about the state, especially about arguments about militarism, because it's just not really part of the culture anymore.
	Right, right. It's good to hear.
	Well, thanks. Thanks, everybody.
	It's a great chat. Great callers, as always.
	I mean, you guys just blow my mind every week.
	It's an absolute highlight of my week to get to spend some time with some great thinkers and great questioners.
	And I really do appreciate people's feedback.
	And to the guy who works in the Japanese daycare, please feel free to call back if we didn't.
	I know we didn't finish this stuff off, so I hope that you'll call back.
	And thank you everybody so much for all of your support, all of your kindness, all of your generosity, all of your interest.
	And however you support the show, donations or sharing information or talking to people about philosophy as a whole, it's all hugely, hugely appreciated by me.
	And I think by the majority, I hope, of people you may introduce these ideas to.
	So thank you again so much for that.

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