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Nov. 27, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:58:16

2044 Freedomain Radio Sunday Call in Show, November 27, 2011

Rebuttals to spanking justifications, freedom versus environmentalism, the infection of evil in the modern world, the verbal abuse of the judge beating video, veterans finding peace, and the hell of male rape.

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	Hi everybody, it's DeFan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	It be the Sunday show on November the 27th, 2011, 2 p.m.
	By God, we're starting on time.
	It's almost like this isn't a show about chaos and anarchy.
	So one of the comments, issues, criticisms that I got back on the recent shows about spanking was The alternative to spanking is absolute permissiveness and never saying no to your child about anything.
	And that seems to me like a very odd perspective.
	But it makes sense in a way.
	If you look at... Aggression and permissiveness are really two sides of the same coin.
	We all know that bullies tend to be cowards when somebody has more power over them because they've created a hierarchy.
	The moment you bully someone below, you set up authority above you.
	That's the great chain of nastiness that occurs in these kinds of situations.
	But when you are using aggression, you're not reasoning.
	You're not reasoning with someone when you're using aggression, when you're hitting a child.
	You're not reasoning with the child, which is one of the reasons.
	It's theorized as to why it causes a reduction in IQ points.
	But also, importantly, when you acquiesce to someone, when you simply don't ever say no to someone, you're also not reasoning.
	So aggression and compliance are two sides of the same coin of avoiding aggression.
	And the reason that people avoid reasoning is because they weren't reasoned with in the past and it's an area of great pain and sorrow and tragedy and loss for them and they skirt around it.
	So if you sort of look at compliance, like over-compliant parenting and aggressive parenting as two ways of avoiding reasoning with your child, then it sort of makes sense as to why people would switch from one to the other.
	But I would also say that if you look at the avoidance of aggression with your children as the only alternative to giving them everything that they want, never saying no to anything, Then, of course, that's going to lead you to say, well, a little spanking is better than complete acquiescence to everything the child wants.
	But it's a false dichotomy.
	And I think that you invent this alternative so you can continue with the spanking.
	And again, it's not because people feel great about spanking.
	I don't think there are many parents out there who enjoy it.
	But it's because it helps you avoid the pain of having to deal with the fact that you were most likely spanked yourself.
	And that's not a pretty pleasant thing to look at.
	What you also hear a lot of when you bring up anti-spanking ideas is that people will say about spanking or, you know, they'll sort of say, well, you can use force on your children to prevent them from worse injuries and so on.
	So you say, well, if your child keeps reaching for the boiling pot of water on the stove, one smack is better than them getting burnt.
	I agree. One smack is better than them getting burnt.
	But that's like saying getting a toe shot off is better than getting a kneecap shot off.
	Why are there weapons in the first place?
	Why is there an option for aggression?
	I think it's really important to understand that if you accept aggression as part of the legitimate tools of your parenting, it will change how you parent.
	It will change how you parent as a human being fundamentally in foundation.
	It has massive effects.
	Like the moment you accept the legitimacy of a state within a society, you end up just going down this snowball from hell, cliff edge, drop to increased state power.
	Laws multiply. And the moment that you accept aggression as a parent, then you stop using other things because you've got this thing called aggression.
	Like if you have the ability to magically counterfeit, you stop working for a living.
	In other words, you join the Federal Reserve.
	So I think it's really, really important to understand that if you say, well, my child keeps reaching for the pot of boiling water, and so I'm going to smack him or her to stop that person from doing it, But the question is why?
	Why are they reaching for the pot of boiling water?
	And if the child is not able to be reasoned with yet, what are they doing in the kitchen when you're using a pot of boiling water?
	You have to shoo the child out.
	You have to put them in gates.
	You can put them someplace where they don't have access to this part of boiling water.
	That's sort of important. The second thing, of course, is to explain to the child.
	It's hot water. It's going to burn.
	It's going to be a big owie. You don't touch.
	You don't touch. And to do that beforehand.
	You don't try and discipline in the moment.
	You have to set up rules beforehand.
	And if you set up rules beforehand and you explain them to your children, in my experience, they're They may grumble a little bit, but they're fine with it.
	My daughter has never tried to play in a plug.
	She's never tried to grab anything from a stove.
	The worst she does is occasionally put her foot on the screen of the iPad, which we sort of have as a rule that you don't care less about the iPad, but I want a glass to break and injure her foot.
	So if you say to yourself as a parent, I am going to reject the idea, Of using aggression in my parenting, then you immediately have to come up with alternate solutions.
	You immediately have to come up with alternate solutions.
	I've never had to gate my child.
	Somebody says, isn't gating the same as imprisonment?
	No, of course gating isn't the same as imprisonment.
	That's like saying to a child, you can't leave the house when it's minus 20 outside if you're three and you're on your own, that that's the same as imprisonment.
	No, it's not. But I do think that I've never had to do it.
	First of all, when she was So short or so young that she couldn't reach the stovetop.
	And that wasn't really an issue.
	And of course, when she was in my arms, if I felt there was any danger in terms of cooking, I simply wouldn't cook using boiling water.
	I would cook in the oven, I would cook in the microwave, or we would eat cold food.
	Those are the choices that you just make as a parent.
	I mean, if you take smacking a child out of the equation, what it allows you to do is be really creative in other things.
	I've never had to get my child away from doing anything.
	We did put a barrier when she was very young in front of our fireplace, which is always a little warm because there's a pilot light going.
	But that's not exactly, you know, putting a little fence in front of a tiny section of the house is not the same as imprisoning a child.
	I think that would be pretty much a stretch.
	But if your child is around and grabby, then you just don't cook with boiling water that day.
	I mean, how hard is that? Just don't do it.
	Find some other way to get food into them that doesn't involve that.
	You can use a toaster oven that's further back.
	You can use just toast.
	You can give them cereal or porridge or whatever.
	There's tons of things that you can do that don't end up with you in that situation.
	So that's the challenge in terms of, well, what if they're running out into the street?
	Well, Have them play in the backyard, have them play in the basement, have them play in the house, put up fences, take them to a park, take them to a baseball diamond, take them to a play center, take them to Chuck E Cheese, take them to the library, take them lots of places they can go where they're not going to be out running on the street, assuming that they're too young. Now, of course, by the time they can run and break free and so on, you need to have gone over these rules and the reasons why.
	You know, my daughter, like most kids, didn't like the straps in her car seat.
	And so, for about half an hour, I sat down with toy cars, explained to her the bump, the fact that we might have to stop suddenly, that she could bump her head, this and that.
	And, you know, I'm not saying that she immediately is filled with the elimination of two-year-old concepts of cause and effect and delay of gratification, but she understands and she acquiesces.
	It's the same thing with brushing your teeth.
	You know, you have to sit down and explain in the child's language what and why, teeth brushing, why it needs to occur, and so on, right?
	I'll give you sort of a tiny example.
	My daughter didn't want to take her pajamas off this morning, and frankly, given how comfortable those full-body pajamas are, who would?
	But I had to explain to her, and I said, I need to take this off, and she said, I don't want to, right?
	And it's like, okay, I understand you don't want to.
	But you know how you sweat when you run around and all of that?
	Well, the sweat goes into your pajamas and then you sleep in your pajamas for a couple of days with that sweat and it can give you a rash that can make you itchy and uncomfortable and I really don't want that to happen.
	And it took two passes and she got it.
	She let me take her pajamas off.
	She changed into her day clothes and so on.
	I mean, you just have to be patient and you just have to say, I'm not going to the place of force because if you go to the place of force, you immediately Discredit and discount the value of patience and reasoning and so on.
	So just take it out of your toolbox.
	Take it out of your toolbox and you will find another way and a better way and that creativity will translate into better parenting, into a better relationship with your child, Into your child's capacity to internalize reasoning.
	This is why smacking tends to escalate.
	This is why hitting tends to escalate because it doesn't teach the child anything other than try and get away with stuff.
	It doesn't teach the child any reasons as to why things are happening.
	So no, you don't need to use this kind of force.
	I found it utterly unnecessary.
	But it also means that you really, really have to, for the first couple of years, you just have to devote yourself to your kids.
	I know there's an inflammatory thing to say, and I certainly don't mean to imply that there are short parents out there who, large sections of parents who avoid this, but you just have to be there.
	I mean, I gave up video games, I gave up reading, I gave up exercising in any predictable or regular way, I gave up You know, of writing books for the most part.
	I mean, you just have to give all this stuff up and you just have to be there with your kids.
	And I have found that at this point, if my daughter is running someplace that she shouldn't, all I have to say is, Isabella!
	And she stops. It's just a slight change in tone.
	You know, it's like you're driving a supertanker.
	If you want to turn, it's got to be just a delicate motion.
	You whip the wheel around and things just go all kinds of haywire.
	You just need... The very lightest touch.
	But for that lightest touch to work, you have to have credibility.
	You have to show your child, through your relationship with your child, the behavior that you want from that child.
	You instruct the child in language.
	You say, this is a boat.
	This is a tree. This is a hat.
	This is a house. This is an expression of bemused resignation.
	She's quite advanced. But you teach your child the words and then your child echoes the words back to you.
	In the exact same way, you teach your child how to treat people by how you treat that child.
	If you want your child to listen to you, you have to listen to your child first.
	If you want your child to respect you, you have to use words.
	You have to respect your child first.
	If you want your child not to use violence, you have to not use violence first.
	Everything you do is the template.
	Your child is the echo of your actions.
	And so everything that you want out of the child, you have to first put into the child through your actions.
	And people don't like the fact that children are in fact an accurate reflection of their parenting, but Nonetheless, it's a fact.
	Anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
	Thank you so much to everyone who's calling in.
	Let's get straight to the call of the brains of the outfit, and I will see you on YouTube soon.
	Ready to go?
	All right. Well, first caller we have on the line.
	First time caller in.
	Go ahead, Alex.
	Hi, can everybody hear me?
	Yes. The world is listening, my friend.
	How are you? First, I just wanted to say thanks for James for getting this all sorted out, and thanks to Stefan.
	Your podcasts have been really enriching, so I'm excited to be here and a little nervous, but thanks to you both.
	You're welcome. And yes, that is a very good point.
	Thank you so much for James. Every single time, every single week, it makes the show so much better.
	I really appreciate it. Well, I'll just get to the point, I guess.
	I was listening to your podcast on environmentalism, both 1, 2, and 3.
	And I recently got done listening to a podcast with Dr.
	Robert Nelson about religion and environmentalism.
	And I was hoping we could maybe talk about Environmentalism and morality.
	I'd love to, that's a great topic.
	I took note of the idea that environmentalists often can act in a Calvinistic way, sort of, humans are the cancer of the earth, we're not fit to manage the planet, and that maybe there was some pristine Garden of Eden before that the Native Americans lived in or something like this.
	And I'm currently working on a permaculture, local organic food kind of project, and we kind of have a different way of looking at human management.
	And if we look back at Native American tribes, and the one I'll be specific about is the Kalapuya Indians in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, where I'm from.
	They actually, their nature was not untouched by man, but rather they managed it very...
	With a lot of skill developed over many generations, and an easy example is that the land here is oak savanna, meaning that there's grass that's really good for big game, and there's a lot of oak trees and other undergrowth that yield a lot of good nuts and other edibles.
	And this kind of takes away the whole concept that Native Americans were primitive.
	They didn't have any control over their lives.
	They were just sort of letting life happen to them.
	And it kind of makes us think...
	I'm sorry. You mentioned a tree, and then you said this proves that.
	Can you make that connection for me that they're not primitive because...
	Okay, I guess rather than us thinking that nature was untouched by man before settlers got here, it actually was touched by man in a very skilled way, and that the Native American populations were domesticating the countryside.
	And I think that stands in contrast to what most people would say was, you know, a promised land of Eden where nature was untouched because...
	Sorry, I don't think anyone has said that the natives, at least I've never heard it said that the natives didn't touch the land.
	Of course they did, right? I think...
	But I'm having trouble understanding what you mean when you say that it wasn't primitive.
	I mean, technologically and philosophically, I mean, it was incredibly primitive.
	I mean, they had, you know, virtually no...
	Well, no modern tools that we would really understand of it.
	And their worldview was incredibly superstitious, right?
	They believed that, you know, spirits lived in things and so on.
	I mean, it was very, I mean, it was really, really primitive.
	It was more primitive than the Egyptians as far as I mean.
	Again, this is my sort of understanding.
	I'm no expert on it. And again, you know, I'm sure that they lived in harmony in some ways with their environment.
	The one thing I remember is that people say, well, they used every part of the buffalo and that actually is To my knowledge, it's not true.
	It wasted a huge amount of stuff.
	But yeah, I don't think anyone's going to say that they didn't affect their environment.
	I think it's certainly true that they did.
	But I think we do have to categorize them as a primitive society, again, unless you have a different definition.
	And I think that that would be something I'd like to put forward, is that I think that our definition of them as primitive might be a little short-sighted, because We have to imagine that they didn't have books to convey knowledge,
	and that their civilizations lasted thousands of years comparatively to, you know, if we're going to take the American empire, which is relatively new and is already showing a lot of signs of collapse, both economic and environmental.
	These people of North America lived, you know, within their means for many, many generations.
	And they transmitted their knowledge through ritual and these superstitions.
	But this knowledge helped them know which trees were good to make into bow and arrow and how to manage the grasslands and how to follow game.
	I'm not saying that we need to go back to exactly how they did things, and I actually agree with you very much that if we've created a cityscape, that is our environment.
	But I was kind of hoping to put forward another form of environmentalism that doesn't look at humans as an evil cancer, but rather a very skilled species that can manipulate their environment in ways that can be very sustainable.
	And I guess my argument would be that while we have developed a lot of new technology that is really amazing, for instance, the laptops we're all using, we've also developed a lot of processes and ways of being that are very short-sighted compared to Native American cultures.
	And we like to think that, you know, our technology was what made us defeat them as settlers, but rather it was smallpox that, you know, wiped out 90% of their people.
	And I like to think that, you know, what if 90% of us got wiped out today?
	Would we have cell phones or laptops?
	And who on earth could possibly construct one?
	You know, who could fabricate all the pieces?
	And also, you know, get all of the materials needed out of the land.
	And I think that starting from a different way of looking at environmentalism and realizing that, yes, we can be stewards of the earth and affect our environment in ways that are more suitable to us, but maybe it's important to question the extent to which we're doing it and whether or not it's short-sighted or far-sighted.
	Well, sorry, let me just sort of interrupt for a second.
	I appreciate where you're coming from, and I think this is a very, very important topic, and I certainly do appreciate you bringing it up.
	But let me say this.
	It's important to understand that when we're talking about stewardship of resources, that by and large, and vastly for the most part, we are talking about the state.
	In the West.
	The state runs and controls the resources.
	The state runs and controls the human resources in that it indoctrinates the children and controls almost all of the economic actions to some degree or another of the adults.
	So the human capital is created, managed, and controlled in a sense by the state.
	The sort of fixed capital response to state edicts, I mean, if you want to look at something like the huge, it was an environmental catastrophe.
	Everyone talks about the housing crisis as an economic catastrophe, which of course it is.
	But I would also argue that the housing crisis in the US was a massive environmental catastrophe.
	how many resources were pulled out of the earth and transmogrified using massive amounts of energy and other resources, and then how many people went out and built stuff, how many roads were built, and so on, to the point where millions and millions of houses are unneeded and falling into disrepair and disuse.
	A massive, massive waste of resources that would never occur in the free market.
	And so I would really argue that there are two areas of – and it's a bit of a continuum at times – but there are two areas of economic conservation, of environmental conservation.
	Because economics is about doing things more efficiently, which means using fewer resources, less time, less energy, and so on.
	So economics and environmentalism are incredibly tied together.
	And wherever you have forces which interfere with economic efficiency, you have forces which interfere with environmental issues, environmental needs.
	And you can just think of these, you know, millions of ghost city houses and condos that are going up in China just to create the illusion of economic growth.
	I mean, it's a huge, massive, monstrous, disgusting, vile, hateful waste of resources.
	So in the area of voluntarism and the free market and so on, things tend towards efficiency, right?
	To the point where you can, you know, I wanted to start reading my daughter The Hobbit yesterday.
	And so normally I would have had to I've had to go to a bookstore and buy a copy, drive over, and the physical copy would have to be there.
	Or I'd have to go to the library, or maybe they'd be able to order them online, in which case it would have to be driven to my house.
	I mean, how crazy is that, right?
	On the other hand, for $11 and change, I downloaded it in about 30 seconds to my Iconia Acer 100 tablet and began reading it there.
	So that is the area where The use of energy and of resources tends to diminish because those are all involved in price.
	And the areas where the government is involved tends to waste and waste and waste.
	And just look at the public road system.
	I mean, talk about encouraging the dependence on fossil fuels.
	So in terms of our collective management of resources and so on, it's really important.
	You've got to separate these two areas of voluntarism and virtue.
	Like in the same way, if you're talking about childbirth, Or abortion, you have to differentiate between rape and consensual sex.
	You just have to. You have to differentiate between violence and voluntarism in all spheres of life.
	Failure to do so, I think, blends the two together much to the expense of both truth and virtue.
	Right. So that would actually bring me to the next point I would like to touch on.
	I, too, agree that government managing our resources in the way that we react with the environment is not, as you say, the government is initiating force against us and our resources.
	And I really liked your discussion about the problem of the commons and private property and private ownership as a way of managing Resources.
	But I've found that if we decide, okay, we don't want the government managing our environment or our resources, we're going to rely on the free market for efficiency and private ownership.
	I thought of an example that I might like to ask you about in a case of private ownership where I found that actually the problem wasn't really solved.
	There's a man that owns a lot of land privately, and he's a logger.
	And so he chops down his trees, but he reseeds and he replants in a rotational format that makes the forest still exist.
	But the problem there is that he only replants Douglas fir.
	And so the diversity of all the land surrounding a property that I'm affiliated with It loses a lot of diversity.
	And during the time of the clear-cutting, a lot of rainwater just rushes down through his property, taking a lot of topsoil with it, and ends up bursting through our creeks that are on our land.
	And what ends up happening is our watershed goes from being a year-round creek system to a four- or five-month creek system.
	And here I see that it's not really, you know, he thinks that he's doing a good job.
	He's keeping the forest going and he's keeping, he's still making profit from it.
	But I wonder if this is more of a case of personal consciousness about really understanding the processes there and not as much about private ownership.
	Well, sorry, I'm just trying to understand what the issue is.
	I mean, I understand it, and I'm sorry to hear about it, right, that you're getting excess runoff because the lack of biodiversity in this man's land is not keeping back the water, right?
	You're right. So he's damaging your property, right?
	So you would have legal recourse to that.
	He's flooding your property, right?
	More or less, yeah.
	And I'm not sure if...
	Well, that's an interesting point to wonder if I could have legal recourse to deal with that.
	Well, sorry. Yes, you would in a free society, right?
	Because I would assume that because you don't live in the Kalahari Desert, you would buy flood insurance, right?
	Well, it's not necessarily a flood.
	It's just not managed as well as you would like to, to have really sustainable and productive water catchment.
	Sorry, but however you want to talk about it, there's some negative impact on your property, right?
	Yeah, yeah. Right, so you would have insurance against that negative impact, whatever you would call it, flooding or lack of water, table management or whatever.
	You would have some insurance against it, right?
	And so it would be up to your insurance company to make sure that they were able to minimize their costs of paying out.
	So let's just say it's flood damage just because I don't know what the hell else you're talking about.
	Just my ignorance, right?
	So you buy flood insurance.
	So the first thing your flood insurance company wants to do is to make sure you don't get flooded because if you get flooded, they have to pay out a lot of money and they're going to lose a lot of money.
	So the first thing you have to do is they have to make sure Mm-hmm.
	is that all this water is going to run off and going to flood you and it's going to flood lots of other people.
	They're going to have to pay a lot of money, right?
	So they're going to have an issue because what they would do is in order to recover the money that they have to pay to you for flood damage, they would go and sue this guy who's flooding your land, right?
	And so when he wanted to go and build all of this land, he would need insurance to do his business or he'd need someone to enforce his contracts and to provide title or whatever it is, right?
	And so these people would say, okay, well, wait a sec.
	So you're going to plant these Douglas firs, which means all this water is going to run off.
	So let me call up the flood insurance company and they're going to say, holy crap, if you do that, we're going to have to sue this guy for 10 million bucks.
	And so they're going to phone you back and say, listen, we can't.
	We can't give you any insurance. We can't enforce any contracts because you're going to get sued and we don't want to get sued for $10 million, right?
	So you're on your own.
	Now, if he decides to just go ahead and do it on his own, then he himself gets sued without insurance for $10 million and he's not going to want that to happen.
	So he's going to have to find either another location or some way of eliminating or minimizing the water damage because in a free society, it's the market that deals with the problem.
	And everybody wants to make it as efficient as possible and everybody's really interested in preventing rather than solving problems after the fact.
	So that would be, again, that's just off the top of my head.
	I mean, that's just a guess as to how it would work.
	I think that part of, you know, I don't, I really appreciate your responses explaining the free market principles to me a little bit more.
	I'm not very well versed there.
	And I have another question that might, you know, help me clear up some of my ignorance.
	So something that I run into in my mind is, what if the insurance companies and this man living above us, and I find that this is not an uncommon thing that happens, simply don't have a very enlightened understanding of how systems should work to be the most efficient.
	And even if I perhaps show them data that proves One way or the other, they say, well, our men have checked this out, and actually, you don't have recourse here, because what you're saying doesn't fall in line with what our research shows.
	And I find that this is quite common, that people that are You know, in the permaculture field or in more diverse agriculture fields that would refuse to just use monocrop systems or clear-cut systems, their methods are often overlooked.
	So in a free market, would there be a way to, would efficiency just lead toward people who really have more in-depth knowledge, being able to enact their knowledge, or am I not really understanding?
	No, it's fear.
	It's fear. Look, I mean, it's fear, like rational, sensible fear.
	that would drive people to do this.
	So if it's objectively true that planting nothing but Douglas firs means that you're going to cause water damage to everyone around you, then people are going to say, well, I don't want to get the shit suit out of me, so I'm going to buy insurance.
	And the insurance company is going to say, I can't insure you if you're going to do what you're going to do because the likelihood is, the risk is, that I'm going to have to insure you for $5 million a year for a $10 million policy.
	And people are going to say, well, I can't do that, right?
	Because anyone who tries to pay too much in insurance is going to be uncompetitive in selling his Douglas firs relative to somebody who's going to plant far away from anyone else or where there's no water table issues or in a valley or, I don't know, I'm just making shit up, right?
	But they're going to be able to sell their Douglas firs that much cheaper because they're not going to have all of this risk insurance.
	But people... You know, people don't want to damage other people's property in a system where they are going to be responsible for that.
	And so they're going to buy insurance because they're also not going to want to operate without insurance because that's really risky.
	To operate without insurance means that you could get wiped out if there's a heavy rain.
	And people just don't want to do that.
	They don't want to do that. So it's sort of fear of the consequences of doing harm to others.
	That makes this work.
	Now, of course, people in the government and people in corporations have very little fear of that.
	Very little fear of that because they're protected by these legal fictions called the immunity of the state or the immunity from personal liability called the corporation.
	And so in the current system, and of course people who want to bring suit against someone, We need to spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars at best to do it.
	And so there's a huge barrier to entry to using the legal system.
	And this is what people say, well, how are we going to run society without a legal system?
	I say, have you ever tried to use the damn legal system?
	Are you crazy? I mean, it's nuts.
	So it's just, it's fear of the consequences that keeps people from doing bad things.
	I mean, and hopefully some love of your fellow man and so on.
	But where love fails, fear rules.
	And so I think that's what would keep it going.
	And I hope I'm not taking up too much time, but I just had one more thought.
	Am I doing okay on time here?
	Yeah, yeah, go, go. I mean, I find this useful stuff, so please go ahead.
	Okay. My friend, Opie, he's actually in the chat room.
	He inspired me to come on and ask these questions, but he mentioned that there was a conversation that had taken place, the idea of running away to the forest kind of to escape the bully that is the state.
	And how that might not be such a good idea because the bully will still exist.
	You're kind of running in fear rather than standing up to the bully.
	And I haven't heard the discussion, but let's just say that that's a scenario.
	I'm kind of under the impression that if the state runs off of my taxes...
	And the corporations and lobbyists and everybody that stands to profit off of the state, if they're all kind of working together and living off of my input, both financial and, you know, if I vote for people, I give them credibility.
	If I go into the woods with a group of people and we start an intentional community where you're growing everything that you need, and we kind of take our manpower and our money out of that system, Is it not kind of starving it from below?
	And is that not a viable way to maybe stop a system that is run off of our finances and our acquiescence?
	Well, I appreciate where you're coming from.
	And yeah, I mean, I think that certainly it would be harder for the state to tax that.
	And as a result, the state would have to live with less taxation.
	But that doesn't mean that the state will stop.
	I mean, if you look at the government of the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages, I mean, they had a tenth of a percent of the resources that current governments have now, but that didn't mean that people were any more free.
	Do you see what I mean? Yeah.
	Right? So, I mean, just starving the government of resources is not going to make the government going to go away.
	Right? That's just not going to happen.
	Again, and the historical examples are...
	I mean, it's the almost perpetual majority of human history is a government with few resources that still hangs on to power at all costs.
	But the government doesn't run on your resources.
	This is my argument.
	I'm not going to say this is proven and true, but I'll just make a briefcase for it and let me know what you think.
	The government does not run on your resources.
	The government runs on the willingness of others to attack you for questioning the government.
	That's the only thing that the government fundamentally runs on.
	Let me say that again. The government runs on other people's willingness to attack you for questioning the government, for questioning the need for a government.
	That's what keeps the government running because obviously it's not just force because few people experience or relatively few people experience in the West direct government force.
	To begin with. And so it's not just force that makes that case.
	It's when you sit down with your friends and your family and you say, I don't like the use of violence in running society.
	And that if people support the state, they're supporting the use of violence against you for disagreeing.
	It is the emotional H-bomb that goes off when you sit down and have that conversation and point out the violence of a status system.
	And everyone attacks you and everyone puts you down and everyone makes fun of you and everyone mocks you and everyone calls you names and everyone will go to the brink.
	And it's seeing the ugliness of your own tribe turning against you because you question the violence of the rulers.
	That is what keeps the state running.
	Running away to the woods doesn't solve that problem at all.
	A moral stand is what does.
	Because I guess what I... So it seems like if I was wanting to go start local food production systems, the state would still run unless everyone decided that's the right course of action.
	I'm not going to belittle and ostracize people for questioning the state anymore.
	Well, no. Not everyone needs to do it.
	Waiting for a perfect consensus.
	But just enough people. It has to become a known thing.
	What has to happen is people have got to become ashamed of supporting violence.
	Right. People just have to become ashamed of it.
	It doesn't mean that, like, saying that we can't get rid of the KKK until nobody wants to be in the KKK means that, you know, it's sort of a circular argument, right?
	Right. But what you can say is that we don't want people to be proud of being in the KKK, right?
	Yeah. We don't want it to be openly...
	We've got to drive it underground.
	We've got to drive it underground.
	If we drive it underground, we have a chance.
	But when people view allegiance to the state as virtue, and they openly state it, and they're openly proud of it, and it costs them nothing!
	Statism costs people nothing.
	But if it starts to cost them...
	Relationships with virtuous people, there's a price to being a statist, right?
	So if you're a member of the KKK in Alabama in 1910, what is it costing you?
	Nothing. In fact, there's great social rewards to it.
	Free barbecues, free lynchings, right?
	Everybody is approving of it. How did that change?
	How did it change?
	Well, it changed because people said, this is a racist, violent, ugly, evil, nasty, brutish, Childish, dangerous organization.
	Now, people can listen to a lot of labels like that, and people don't give a shit if you apply labels to them unless it actually has some direct impact on them in some visceral way.
	Right. And so if you say to your brother, listen, racism is hideous, racism is wrong, you participating in the lynching of these poor black men and women and hanging them high from trees and setting fire to them and brutalizing and chasing and murdering them You being involved in this, you supporting this, you approving of this is not something I can overlook anymore.
	Right. You need to stop participating in this violence or I can't have you in my life.
	Right. So we've kind of established that there can still be a...
	There's certainly a virtuous act of staying within this realm...
	And standing up to the government and the state and saying, you know, I don't support this violence.
	But I was wondering, I find that even with people that practice, you know, this kind of virtue, I find one more bugaboo that might That leads me to say that perhaps even though we think we're acting morally, we might still be initiating force against our fellow man in a way.
	And what I mean to say by this is that since we're all using our laptops right now, you know, I'm a culprit, everyone's a culprit, and if we think of how these were manufactured and where the precious materials came from and the political and human cost to building these things,
	You know, the data for the United States right now, as far as preventable diseases and diseases that were quite uncommon before the Industrial Revolution, kind of stands as a testament to what kind of damage we're doing to our air, our water. And especially the lack of nutrition in our food that we eat, even if they are fruits and vegetables, the way that they're produced is really not very healthy.
	And so if we take our modern lifestyle, whether it's a laptop, the carrots that we're getting that are shipped from very far away, if we take all these things into consideration and we realize that we're all members of the same planet, Basically, we're all sharing the same water, the same air, the same soil.
	Am I not initiating force against my fellow human by participating in practices that will pollute that air and that water and give children cancer and give people, you know, food that gives people heart disease and cancer and cars that require lithium from Afghanistan?
	Is that not initiation of force?
	I don't see how.
	I'm certainly willing to look at it.
	I mean, certainly you are not directly initiating force, and you are not morally sanctioning the initiation of force.
	Because I find that I'm financially sanctioning, you know, this MacBook Pro I'm on.
	Which you're using to do what, right now?
	You know, talk about these things.
	To talk about truth, peace, reason, virtue, philosophy, all the good stuff, right?
	And so I personally think, yeah, it's a really good tool.
	But I wonder if people think, maybe I'll drive an electric car.
	And that was mentioned in one of the podcasts as a moral statement that an environmentalist might make.
	Which is not true and valid anyway.
	I mean, the amount of environmental predation and degradation that goes into making an electric car is worse even than a gasoline-powered car, particularly the batteries.
	I mean, it's monstrous. Anyway, go on.
	Yeah, and that's exactly my point, is it is really monstrous.
	And I think that if we're going to be acting with virtue and with morality, I on some level think that using that Prius or just participating in an urban lifestyle...
	What financially is telling the market, even though it's not a free market, it's telling those producers of those products, I support your product and I will support you mining it from the Horn of Africa or shipping it from China after it's been canned.
	And I think that is kind of an attack on our generations to come.
	No, no, but look, look, no, because you're looking at the, this is the concept of collective crime and collective guilt, right?
	So, you know, Apple apparently and reportedly uses Chinese companies to produce parts of its electronics, and those Chinese companies treat those people badly, and you want a MacBook, and therefore if you buy a MacBook, you're giving money to Apple to give to the Chinese companies who treat their workers badly, and so on.
	This is sort of the argument, right?
	Yeah.
	And if you had said to people in the South who were trying to end slavery, you cannot live in the South because everything that you buy in the South has some involvement with slave labor.
	Right?
	You cannot buy paper because the wood that was grown to make that paper was grown by slaves.
	So you can't buy paper and you can't write down any arguments against slavery because the pens and the ink and so on are all produced by slave labor.
	So you can't live in the South.
	You can't proselytize against slavery.
	You can't make the case against slavery.
	Would you make that argument to them to tell them to stay out of the public arena and not make any arguments against slavery because things that they're buying are integrated or involved with slave labor?
	I think an argument that I might make is that we need to transition to buying things...
	No, no, no, no. Sorry. Just deal with the theoretical example, if you don't mind, first.
	Would you go back in time and tell these people, stop writing anti-slavery tracks.
	Stop making the case against slavery.
	Because everything that you're buying and use is involved with slave labor.
	Well, sorry, can you repeat that one more time?
	I got a little mixed up there.
	What part? Well, I guess I would, the theoretical scenario that you're putting forth, I'm confused about what I'm answering, sorry.
	Would you go back in time and tell to the people who were arguing against slavery in the South in the 18th century or the early part of the 19th century, would you go back and tell them to stop doing what they're doing?
	Because the paper that they write on is made by slaves and because the pens that they're using and the newspapers are partly funded by slavery and slave owners own the means of production and communication and the railways lines that they took to go and deliver an anti-slavery speech were built by slaves.
	Would you tell them to stop and go live in the woods, not make any case against slavery because that would be to involve themselves in slavery?
	I see your point, and I think that I wouldn't tell them to stop, but that I might support them and say, well, you know, if we make slavery not an economically viable institution, then wouldn't that make it stop on its own?
	People won't enslave people if it's expensive, and they're not making any money out of it.
	Right. But in order to do that, you need to get the government to stop enforcing slavery, because slavery is perfectly viable if the government is going and catching your slaves.
	But you need to make some sort of moral case against slavery, no matter what, if you want to end it, right?
	It's not just an argument from economic efficiency.
	That never moves anyone, right?
	And if you're going to make an argument from economic efficiency, then you tend to support slavery because it's economically efficient to continue with the path and the institutions and the setup that's currently there, rather than get rid of all the slaves, which is economically devastating to a lot of people, and start to wait for the development of machinery that in the long run will produce more profits, but there's a big dip beforehand.
	So the argument from economic efficiency tends to be very conservative.
	It tends to keep things...
	In the grooves that they're already in.
	It tends to keep that train on its tracks because there's so much disruption and lots of people lose and lose permanently and some people gain down the road.
	So economic efficiency is a very conservative argument.
	The moral, like the true revolution is in morality.
	But I assume that you wouldn't say to the people arguing against slavery that they should not make those arguments because everything that they use has been built by slaves.
	Right. So under this line of reasoning, I guess I'd be curious.
	So if you go to a chain grocery store today and they have really cheap fruits and vegetables maybe shipped from Chile or the Midwest or something, those foods and vegetables are very economically cheap for people that are trying to save money.
	Or people who don't have money.
	Right. Or don't even have money.
	Right. I mean, this has allowed fruits and vegetables into the hands of the poor that were formerly unavailable, right?
	Right. And in the long run, What these foods are proving to do is that they're actually making people very sick and not healthy.
	The reliance on high fructose corn syrup products that are cheap and affordable to those who could...
	Well, sorry, but now we're getting back to statism, right?
	I mean, that stuff's all driven by the sugar monopolies, by tariffs and subsidies and all of this sort of stuff.
	Right, right, right. Listen, we've got lots of other people on the line, so I'm going to have to move on, and I'm sorry to interrupt you.
	It's a great conversation. Thank you for your time.
	All right. I really do appreciate you calling in.
	It was a great topic and please feel free to call in again because you raised some just truly wonderful points and thank you so much.
	Take care. Thank you. All right.
	Sorry, James. Thanks for the reminder.
	Please to continue. Well, we have a question.
	I think you want to get to it from the chat from last week.
	I agree with your concept that in the realms of reality, that one?
	I believe so. I agree with your concept that in the realms of reality, there is no government.
	It is just an abstract idea projected onto reality by human beings, borders and colored maps.
	So with that concept in mind, how can you go further and explain private property rights?
	What do I mean by that? First, I agree with you on property rights and universal property rights, e.g.
	you own your own physical body.
	However, how would you explain property rights in connection to land ownership?
	Isn't that a sense? We did this last week.
	We absolutely did this last week, and I don't think last week's show was up.
	It was a pretty long one. It's taking a little bit of...
	A little bit of time to get finished, but I'm sorry I'm going to have to refer you.
	We just did this whole thing last week in the show.
	It's a great question. How do you go from personal property to land property and so on?
	But I don't want to repeat it for people who were here last week, so we'll have to move on to the next caller.
	Somebody says it was a month and a week ago.
	I thought we talked about it last week.
	But all right, five weeks ago.
	We may have talked about it then too.
	All right, speak up if you're waiting.
	Okay.
	Yes, hello? Hi.
	Hey Stefan, how are you doing?
	It's been a while since I've been on and I did at least want to pop back in and get more of your thoughts on several subjects.
	I was still kind of contemplating.
	All right. Shoot. All right.
	Well, first I just wanted to have one comment and then three questions after that.
	My comment is that how you opened up the broadcast is that you had a very nice way of how to explain to a child why they should do something rationally instead of beating them over the head with it, such as with the PJ example.
	And I've actually had to do the same thing.
	When teaching people how to go like camping, hiking, backpacking, but like the same reason with the clothes, but you know different reasons like you don't want food smells unique as animals will be attracted to and all that.
	I didn't have to beat them over the head with it, but they saw how rational it was and whatnot.
	So that same technique, even in a different context, does work with adults too, provided they're rational, which can be hard to find occasionally.
	Sorry, and I also mentioned as well, That this teaches her something important more than just obey me and take off your pajamas, which doesn't teach her anything but obedience.
	What this teaches her is that she sweats, that sweat can be smelly and unhygienic, that she doesn't want to sew.
	The next time I say, we need to take your clothes off because you've been sweaty, she'd be like, oh yeah, sweat it.
	So it solves problems in the future.
	It radiates outwards like a A beam of light, it dissipates into the future rather than just teaching her, obey me in this particular instance today when we're upstairs just doing this, which teaches her nothing other than obedience.
	It teaches her principles that she can then make her own decisions about taking off clothes in the future.
	Right, right. And same thing in other spheres as well.
	And especially when you aren't there to teach them to not give advice, that's when it's really important for them to really kind of rationally learn how to survive and preferably thrive.
	And a lot of what we're seeing with different abuses and all that, there was a video you made pointing out that footage of, I think his name was Judge William Adams, the guy who beat his daughter with the belt.
	I've actually had terrific success actually using that particular video as an illustration of larger systemic concepts with whatever you're talking about, the state or just other despotic entities, whatever they are, and saying like, look, it's basically they're beating you with the cane or the belt or whatever, and more precisely, here's how it works.
	So it's actually been a very valuable tool to teach people about the non-aggression principle and the initiation of violence and all that.
	So in that sense, that...
	I guess you could say some good can be taken from something that was actually truly...
	It looked almost like a snuff film, actually.
	It was hideous to watch.
	It was just hideous to watch, yeah.
	Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, you can look at photos from Abu Ghraib or other type of things.
	But yeah, it's kind of the gut-wrenching thing.
	But the good thing of it is you can use it as to, like, look.
	I mean, when we're talking about taxation being theft, I mean, this isn't just hyperbole.
	I mean, this is the act of violence against me, against you, against the guy down the street.
	Yeah, also around the question of love and automatic parental allegiance and virtue.
	Should this daughter love her father?
	I mean, that's another very powerful question, right?
	Is love earned or is love automatic from spilling seeds, right?
	Yeah, exactly. And I would have an extremely hard time even forgiving the guy.
	And also notice, too, even the stuff that was technically nonviolent, if you listen to some of the dialogue, he tells her, like, this is all your fault, placing the guilt on her.
	And so that was also kind of its own mind control aspect right there.
	Oh yeah, everyone's focusing on the beating, and the beating, at least according to my knowledge of the science, the beating is less destructive than the verbal abuse that both parents are inflicting upon the child.
	And I've heard very little talk about the verbal abuse that's in that video.
	It's all about the, oh, he's hitting her, and of course that's wretched and evil and wicked, but it's the verbal abuse that I bet is going to have much more effect on her when she's 40 than the physical assault.
	Oh, of course, of course.
	And also notice that as it goes on, you know, for anybody that watches the whole thing, you know, she starts, you know, it's kind of like the attitude of the victim when she says like, yes, sir, or when the mom talks for like, yes, madam, she's very quiet.
	And, you know, so you can kind of see where those effects are.
	And you can also notice that on a systemic level with the populist in general, whenever, you know, if you're driving down the street and you see a cop behind you, you know, do your hands get sweaty?
	Do you start looking at your speedometer, seeing whether you're speeding or not?
	Do you make sure that, you know, if you're doing anything that's exactly right, because you don't want to give them an excuse to, uh, infringe upon you.
	I mean, it's the same reactions at any scope, in any context.
	It's the same primary method that's going on there.
	Yeah, I mean, what you want in a free society, what you would have is the police would be like doctors, right?
	Like if you're sick, let's say you're staggering down the street and you're sick and you're nauseous and you see someone up ahead who's carrying a little doctor's bag with a white coat on, you feel an immense flooding of relief and happiness.
	And at the same time, if you're not sick and you see someone, a doctor, walking down the street, you don't see any fear.
	And that's what you want.
	From policing in a free society is you want them to be like doctors.
	Like if they're there and you need them, you're so happy.
	And if they're there and you don't need them, it's like, okay, they're there.
	So that's good, I guess, if somebody needs them.
	But you don't want to have that fear and anxiety and, oh, it's just wretched.
	And there was an article actually recently about cops in Chicago.
	This woman got beaten up because she tried to intervene and two guys beating up some other woman.
	She got beaten up really badly.
	And she went to go and talk to the cops and they, of course, took down her name and did nothing and did nothing and she kept calling them back.
	She ended up doing her own investigation, right?
	So she did her own investigation.
	She went to talk to the bar owner.
	She found these people. She found them on Facebook.
	She got their names. She got their addresses and she went back to the police.
	To say, here are these guys' names, here are their addresses, here's when they're home, go.
	They wouldn't go, of course not, because that doesn't make them any money.
	What makes the police money is asset forfeiture, is hitting their numbers, and of course the cops don't actually want to report violent crimes because that creates the perception that the city is violent, right?
	So they want to report that they have arrested all these drug dealers because that makes idiots feel safer.
	want to report violent crimes, so relying on police statistics is like relying on Coca-Cola's advertisements for its products and their relationship to your tooth enamel.
	I mean, it's all just nonsense.
	So anyway, I just sort of wanted to mention that, but go ahead.
	No, no, of course, of course.
	And the other kind of sad aspect of it is that their jobs, even if they were more of the minarchist patriotypes when they originally started their jobs, where they were supposed to function as peace officers, the problem is that they are acting as policy enforcement with collecting revenue, as you just mentioned.
	And one simple fun task for any of them to do If they don't think there are quotas or hidden quotas or whatever, just try not writing tickets for 30 days and see what happens to your job.
	Really, it's a fun experiment.
	You don't even need to believe me or for people listening, you don't need to believe me, Stefan, or anybody else that mentions this.
	It's a fun experiment. Take 30 days, don't write tickets if you're a cop, and see what happens to your job.
	The results will empirically prove it or not if the experiment is done over and over again.
	Yeah, sorry, going back to that video, the last aspect I wanted to bring up was notice also the mother's role.
	And as people focus on, again, the violent aspect of the dad beating the girl with the belt, well, notice also what the mother was doing.
	She was supporting the judge.
	She was doing a lot more of, you could say, more verbal-related stuff.
	And yeah, she did do some of the beatings and all, but it was interesting, especially at the very, very end when she was mentioning about, oh, go down on the sofa and do that.
	So she was very much not just acquiescing to everything he was doing.
	He was more just kind of like this blind-ranging animal, but she was methodically Thinking it through, thinking about the cause and stuff, it was almost, the mother's role was almost more insidious.
	Yeah, lie down and take it like a woman.
	The definition of femininity and maturity is to submit to beatings.
	What a mind frack is that, right?
	Well, yeah, of course. I mean, that was the more obvious thing that, of course, should not be ignored.
	But I was more pointing to, like, look at everything else she was doing.
	Don't look so much at the, like, the bell or that infamous phrase.
	But notice, like, when she was talking so much quieter, when she was out of the room, you could still hear her voice.
	She was still orchestrating a lot of the other stuff that was going on.
	Whereas the judge, the dad, he was just kind of crazy going off the cuff, whereas she was deliberately, methodically thinking it through and saying – and kind of crafting the narrative.
	So kind of like what the state does or any despotic entity when they craft the fake moral narrative with whatever it is they're trying to put.
	That was the mother – She definitely inflamed his – She handed him the moral justification for sure.
	I mean he was just angry and of course he was scared, right, because he's a judge and if his daughter is caught downloading illegal materials that looks bad on him.
	Because he's only concerned about appearance, not actually hitting his child.
	So yeah, he's got concerns about his job and so on.
	He could not have done it without her.
	And the question is, would he have done it without her orchestration?
	It probably wouldn't have been as long.
	He probably wouldn't have come back.
	I mean, there's no way to know for sure.
	But parental violence is a system, and both people hold equal responsibility.
	And in fact, you could say that the person who's more prone to verbal manipulation and less prone to physical rage is more responsible.
	Because she was colder.
	She wasn't in the grip of rage like he was.
	So you could argue that she's more morally responsible because she's not in the same fit of rage.
	Yeah, it's just...
	Well, yeah, and to draw an analogy, you could obviously, like, the judge was in the position of, like, what you see, like, the people who don't like police brutality.
	That's, like, the really simple, obvious stuff you see at kind of the street level.
	But then if you go to the more higher levels of state power...
	You notice the folks that are calmly, like the bureaucrats or politicians or whomever it is, calmly, methodically plotting.
	I'm literally, I mean, they a lot of times admit it too, but day in and day out, very like, okay, so we're going to raise property taxes or we're going to do this and all la-dee-da.
	It doesn't have that same visceral impact, but it's insidious nonetheless.
	And basically the mother was felt like...
	And the media plays, sorry, the media plays the role to the state that the mother played to the father here, right?
	Yes. That they create the moral narrative and they attack the transgressors and Anybody who questions or opposes the arbitrary and brutal use of violence will be attacked.
	The media plays the verbal abuser and the state plays the physical abuser and I think that's another reason why people found this to be, they had so much, it had so much resonance for people.
	Right, and that's why I was kind of trying to use this horrible event as a teaching aid to show folks that the specific example is a personal one, obviously.
	It's two parents and their child.
	But on a larger systemic level, you could also apply in the same way, and that's what I was trying to do with that.
	On to my attempt to try and keep these brief.
	I recently finished your book, Practical Anarchy, and I must say, it really did clear up some of the questions.
	As well as, admittedly, my reservations about the nature of post-state power structure relationships or the lack thereof, as the case may be.
	My first question is, what do you think would be the best role or way that veterans can do to bring about the state and society, especially in terms of how they can bring about DROs for protection services or security services?
	That's a great question.
	What are your thoughts? Well, there was a video I made a while back.
	I believe it was part of a series I was doing.
	It was called Suggestions for Resisting Tyranny, and it was something about veterans as firearm instructors or something like that.
	But basically, I was saying that, look, veterans consider what their...
	I mean, again, this is like a business plan, if you will, a very super simple one.
	But there is a demand for people to learn how to protect themselves For obvious reasons.
	But the problem is that a lot of people don't know how.
	For example, you can waltz down to any dojo, basically, and a lot of people don't even know how to throw a punch correctly.
	And there's different ways of doing it correctly, but the point is a lot of folks don't even know one way of doing it.
	So I think that veterans, considering their occupation or why they are veterans in the first place, Considering everything they had to do in the services, and a lot of them do feel guilty about it, and in some cases, rightly so, but one of the ways they can try and make the world a better place, genuinely, and in some kind of proxy way, perform some level of restitution, is to, for the future and for other people, at least people here, teach them how to deter aggression when it's necessary.
	So I was basically saying, like, look, I mean, whether it's the hand-to-hand stuff, or whether it's firearms, or whatever version it takes, Also, it helps the veterans out, too, because a lot of them, even when they aren't afflicted with mental issues, which happens a lot, or presuming that they aren't amputated and stuff like that, and of course that they're alive, because a lot of them get killed off, so soldiers don't even live long enough to become veterans, or at least not that long, provided that they're still able-bodied, pretty much.
	They can go around and actually go and teach people for profit On how to protect themselves.
	And one of the proofs of this is look at all the different, I guess you could say private schools, but the different, you know, like tactics schools or firearms schools that have been popping all over the place.
	And you can just do an internet search for anybody who's curious about this.
	But those guys are turning a good profit.
	I was kind of surprised.
	Even with the ongoing Second Depression, I could say, you could interpret it as.
	I mean, they're doing quite well, and more so.
	So if a veteran doesn't want to go around in some office job that he's overqualified for making coffee and photocopies, he could make use of his previous experience and at least tend to do some good by trying to teach people how to...
	Protect themselves. But the reason I really want to bring that first question up with you is that I was trying to connect that aspect that I was already familiar with, with the DROs you mentioned in Practical Anarchy, especially the ones that would provide security services, especially against state aggression.
	So I just wanted to know, I guess what I'm saying is, how could veterans go about forming their own DRO? Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
	I think DROs are pretty much a long way Down the road.
	But I will say that...
	And look, talk to Adam Kokesh.
	Look up Adam Kokesh. Adam versus the man.
	K-O-K-E-S-H. He's the guy.
	He's the go-to guy. My experience in the military is related to rolling dice as a paladin in a basement drinking RC Cola and eating greasy pizza at the age of 15.
	And Unreal Tournament.
	But I will say this, that if I were a veteran, I would be...
	I would be enormously pissed at the...
	Genocidal word jockeys who continually paint the military as heroic, noble service, sacrifice, saving lives, freeing countries, freeing others, defending the oppressed.
	The greasy wheel of the propaganda shoot is what delivers people into the endless great white chomping shark jaws of the military-industrial complex.
	I would be pretty damn pissed off.
	At people who praised the military, at people who had lauded the military, at all of the propaganda in the media and in the family and in the church and this and that and the other.
	And it's pretty simple, right?
	I mean, the South is known for two things, religiosity and delivery of youth to the military.
	And those two things seem to me pretty incompatible.
	I mean, the biggest anti-war movement, if Christianity is to have integrity, the biggest anti-war movement should come.
	From the Christians, right?
	Thou shalt not kill. Pretty damn simple.
	Pretty damn basic. And thou shalt serve no other but me, saith the Lord.
	And I think if you have a commanding officer who can order you to do just about everything, that is serving something other than God and Jesus.
	And I don't see a lot of that coming out of that, and I'd be pretty pissed off at that as well.
	So... Yeah, it takes a lot of propaganda, so that would be something that I would focus on.
	Sorry, go ahead. Oh, no, no, it's just that, yes, I mean, the righteous indignation, and Kokesh has a specific example, although there are many others and folks that I've talked to, where that is a pretty typical attitude.
	But I was thinking more, again, more into the future, more kind of just applying the stuff you had in your book about the role of veterans because, I mean, you actually had certain portions of the book where you actually specifically mentioned not just about DROs in general, whether it's the insurance or, you know, certain types of insurance, but about ones that would provide security protective services, basically kind of like an anarcho-police type thing, if people want to think about it that way.
	And there are certain veterans that I've talked to who are very well aware of stuff like this, but they're concerned more with the nuts and bolts.
	I mean, is it really up to them to kind of form the nuts and bolts of how to make this happen, or what would you suggest?
	Well, I mean, the key thing is to gain business experience.
	I mean, I would say that to anybody who's interested in changing the world.
	Gain business experience in whatever sphere you can with as much authority as you can.
	It certainly wasn't the plan, but I feel very lucky and fortunate to have had all of the business experience that I've had, sort of 15 years as a customer-facing entrepreneur.
	Just go get business experience.
	DROs are fundamentally a business.
	The violence is incidental, but fundamentally they're a business.
	And the army is the opposite of a business.
	And so if you want to begin to be able to provide valuable services to people if you've come out of the military, you need to cast aside the military mindset and you need to go into voluntary, gotta get people's attention, People can say no and you have to make a thousand calls sometimes to make one sale.
	And I can tell you this from experience because very few people who listen to this show donate.
	I have to have About 100 listeners to get one or two donators at best.
	And so there's a lot more rejection than acceptance.
	There's a lot more indifference than engagement.
	And there's a lot more no's than yes's, which is really quite the opposite of what happens in the military world where you just make things happen.
	So I would say, you know, just get business experience.
	Become an entrepreneur. And that's the best way, I think, to shake off the military mindset and, of course, lay the foundations for the possible provision of defense or protection services in the future.
	Okay, cool, cool. Then I'll just relay that and forward into this podcast and stuff like that.
	Okay, second question is...
	Sorry, let me just see if...
	Sorry, just to be aware of time.
	James, do we have other people on the line?
	Yeah, we do. We have several people on the line.
	Okay, I'm so sorry. You'll have to call back in with the other questions.
	I do apologize for that.
	These are great questions, but I want to make sure that the people waiting on the line get a chance to talk.
	No problem. We'll do that perhaps next week.
	Thank you so much. No problem.
	Thank you for having me on. You're welcome.
	I guess I'm up next as far as I have read.
	That is a great guess.
	So this is Robert again.
	We've had a couple of talks.
	Both of them have been theoretical talks about property rights and intellectual property.
	This time I thought I would...
	...personality or personal experience type situation rather than being abstract.
	So, a significant time back, I had a relationship with a friend's sister who, she was basically my best friend for a very, very long period of time.
	And are you hearing that?
	You still there? Yeah, sorry, am I hearing it?
	Yeah, go ahead. Okay, so...
	We had a really good friendship, good relationship, a lot of positives coming from it and basically I was going through a period in time where I was not finding any opportunities of relationships with people of the opposite sex and so I was quite frustrated with the whole situation and I decided that I was going to go ahead and hang out where opportunities existed which were with people of the same sex.
	Not because of any specific physical attraction, but because I was horny.
	Sorry, I just want to make sure I'm following that.
	So you were having a relationship with a friend's sister, but it wasn't particularly satisfying, and so you thought you would seek out same-sex sexual relationships, is that right?
	No, my friendship with her was very much just a platonic friendship.
	It wasn't about trying to find any myths from that.
	She and I were friends, just friends.
	I was not finding that I was meeting women in an amorous type relationship, so I decided that I would go to diverse bars.
	They're gay bars. Yeah.
	Or bi bars, is that? Bi, more so.
	Right. So anyway, at one of these excursions, I ended up running into a sexual predator who I was extraordinarily intoxicated by sort of voluntary consumption of alcohol, I guess. Needless to say...
	We ended up going back to his place and he raped me.
	Oh, I'm so sorry. So, later on, I came back and she and I were discussing the issue and she was asking if I had used a condom.
	If you had used a condom.
	Sorry, you mean if the predator had used a condom.
	And I... Didn't really know because I was drunk, and I assumed not.
	And so the discussion basically boiled down to her chastising me for not having been using protection.
	And she was an amazing friend prior to that, but the harshness of her tone and the interaction was just Far worse than anything I could remember from the other situation.
	It destroyed me in a lot of ways.
	I was just devastated. Sorry, it destroyed you or destroyed the friendship?
	Oh, it destroyed the friendship. I mean, I was really devastated at the time.
	I didn't have anything to do with her and talk with her after that time, after that conversation.
	And I have since been reintroduced to her, and she's, you know, just gotten married and stuff.
	Anyway, it was a fairly cordial interaction and whatever, and I don't even think that she recalls the circumstances at which our friendship ended.
	And... And sorry, just to put my own mind at ease, I assume that you got tested for STDs and you were fine.
	Oh yeah. Okay, good.
	Well, I'm very glad for that, though.
	I mean, that's, you know, like taking one piece of shit icing off the evil sandwich you were forced to eat, so I'm so sorry about that as a whole.
	That's just wretched. Yeah, it was bad.
	But, you know, one thing about being so drunk that you really can't hardly remember anything, it's, you know, you can kind of move on from it as if it were kind of like a bad dream in certain respects.
	But that being said...
	Sorry, did you think of pressing charges and so on to protect other people from this predator?
	At the time, I was young and stupid and I didn't even think of it.
	I mean, I thought, you know, well, it must have been voluntary kind of thing because I was drunk.
	And that's basically what she was suggesting, is that it was voluntary because I was drunk.
	You know, I chose to go into that situation and drink that amount of alcohol.
	Has she never heard of feminists and rape?
	Anyway, go on. So anyway, at this time, I'm...
	Able to interact with her on a cordial level and I'm not sure if I should approach the topic and if I should discuss it with her and explain how hurt I was.
	Rekindle that whole angst and frustration on myself or bring that into her life if I should just let her go and do her thing and move on.
	Okay, this is a great question.
	Let me just ask you a couple of background questions because this is always the tip of the iceberg question and I don't want to deal with the effect rather than the cause.
	What do you think it was in your life that led you into this or led...
	What led you to be more susceptible to being in this kind of terrible situation?
	I understand. I'm not blaming you for it at all.
	We're looking at the cause and effect, right?
	What do you think led you down that road?
	Well, I'm a rather effeminate-looking and stylistically person, and so the social pressures that I received All right, so what led you, do you think, to have people in your life who said you should explore being gay because you kind of look gay?
	I mean, that's kind of a weird thing to say to someone, right?
	Yeah. But, you know, it just seemed like so many people were on the bandwagon that we need to embrace this alternate lifestyle and, you know, try to support anyone who we think, you know, it was, you know, definitely...
	No, let me explain this to you.
	Sorry, let me try and sort of tell you where I'm...
	What do you think led you to choose Bad Friends?
	Oh, um...
	What led me to choose bad friends?
	Let me put it to you in an even more explicit way.
	What was it in your childhood, do you think, that may have had an influence on you choosing bad friends?
	Well, fairly early on I found that making friends was easier if I had something to give them.
	And my dad, being a candy broker, had tons of candy around so I would bribe people.
	Why was it that you felt so deficient in what you could offer friends or what friends could offer you that it needed to be you plus candy to make a friend?
	Oh, you know, negative.
	I would say a quote from my father would be, you have your head up your ass 99.9% of the time, things like that.
	Oh, man, I'm so sorry.
	What a terrible thing to say to a child.
	You know, and I just – it reminds me of it because a bunch of people have emailed me since I've taken up the spanking bandwagon, so to speak, and said, ah, you know, I deserve to get spanked.
	I was a horrible little shit.
	I was a little snot.
	I was a disrespectful little jerk and blah, blah, blah, right?
	And it's just like you can hear their parents' words coming right out of them, being inhabited by these mad ghosts and they don't even know it.
	And I'm not saying that you're in that category, but – It struck me, and I don't want to reach too far here, right?
	But your father talks about something being inserted up your ass, and you end up being anally raped.
	Yeah, that's fun. Wow, never really noticed that one.
	You seem to be very present when it comes to noticing these coincidences.
	Well, and the penis, of course, the tip of the penis is called the head, right?
	Oh, yeah. You're giving head, you're getting head, right?
	And head up your ass is a very violent phrase to use against a child and to have the metaphorical head of a penis inserted there.
	I mean, it's just...
	Again, I don't want to reach too far, but I don't think these kinds of things are all coincidences.
	I think there's a kind of programming that occurs for us through verbal abuse as children that we really have to fight to overcome as adults.
	I just wanted to mention that.
	Yeah. Well, it's definitely a...
	An angle that I had not really thought about, but I guess my question more so is to, you know, do I broach this topic with a person who has moved on in their life and has really no thought of what had happened in that way?
	Has she done any work on herself that you know of since blaming you for being raped?
	I don't know her well enough to say that she has or she hasn't.
	I know that for a while...
	What does your gut tell you? What does your instinct tell you?
	Probably not. Well, I can tell you one indication that she had done work would be that the onus wouldn't be upon you to make this decision.
	In other words, the onus is upon you because she's not mentioning anything about your past, right?
	There's no way that you forget that somebody told you that they were raped.
	There's no way. And there's no way that you forget your response to it.
	That just doesn't happen. Unless she's had some massive brain injury, right, in which case you're just starting all over from scratch.
	It doesn't happen. So the fact is that she is not bringing up What you told her, I mean, if she had care, compassion, and concern for you, one of the first words out of her mouth the moment that it was appropriate and you had some privacy would be, listen, how are you doing since this awful incident that happened?
	I mean, how's that been? And the second thing would be, I really thought about this since, and I'm like, oh my god, I actually blamed you for not using a condom when you were raped.
	I actually put the onus upon you.
	And as a woman, I should know better than anyone that you don't put the onus upon.
	I mean that's like the woman asked to be raped because she was in a short dress.
	You asked to be raped because you were drunk.
	I mean that's bullshit and women should know that better than anybody.
	So that would be the second indication that she'd done any kind of self-work.
	So if she's in a place where she's continuing to ignore what you told her and her response, I would not.
	I would not. I can't tell you what to do.
	I would not let myself be exposed and vulnerable to that person at all because I would assume that would simply be a repetition.
	of early trauma and what would happen is she would deny, she would minimize, she would obscure, she would fog and you would end up feeling like you were four again and that I would not do to myself.
	You know one of the things that happens when we come from particularly verbal abusive histories is we tend to take the onus On the success of a relationship, 100% on our side, it's very hard for us to sit there and say, I wonder what the other person is going to do.
	I wonder what the other person is going to do.
	I wonder how the other person is going to work to win back my trust.
	And if that other person is not willing to work to earn back my trust, which is an act of self-esteem and self-worth, if that other person is not willing to work to regain my trust, then they've told me everything I need to know.
	You have to let other people inform your decisions.
	You have to let other people inform your decisions.
	Right, so you said, I would have a hard time...
	No, no, sorry.
	No, no, sorry, it's another caller.
	Never mind. Right, but you need to let other people woo you into wanting to approach them.
	It is not a decision that 100% rests upon you.
	Let the other person... Draw that out of you.
	And this is like love. This is like respect, forgiveness, and so on.
	Let the other person's actions draw it out of you.
	Be patient and say, well, here's how the other person is acting.
	How does that make me feel?
	But you, I suspect, like me, like a lot of other people who've been through these kinds of histories, tend to say, it's all my responsibility.
	It's all my choice. It's all what I do that determines this relationship.
	No, no.
	Step back from that wheel and see where the other person drives it.
	Yeah.
	Well, I don't think that we really interact enough to have that come up in the near future.
	No, no. See, that would be her choice, right?
	Things don't just come up.
	People make choices about what they bring up and what they avoid, right?
	So, being that it could be something that is too difficult for her to address because of her immaturity or whatever, then I should acknowledge that not for something to be as well as...
	That is a whole lot of forgiveness in that sentence, my friend.
	That is a whole lot of forgiveness, and I would argue too much pseudo-understanding.
	But just argue, right? It's not that it's too difficult for her, right?
	Because something can be too difficult for someone and they can say, listen, you bringing up this topic is way too difficult for me and I know that that's selfish.
	I know that's making that about me but I cannot give you good advice here because I was raped or my mother was raped or whatever.
	They would then say, this is too much for me.
	I'm not able to give you good advice or good feedback here.
	I'm so sorry.
	I know this puts you in a hard place but I can really understand where you're coming from.
	It's too raw for me.
	I'm still working through it and I really can't help you.
	I mean you'd be like, it wouldn't be great but you would understand that.
	So something can be too hard for someone and they can be open and honest about it being too hard for them, right?
	Yeah.
	I guess the tough time I'm having with it is the idea of – I don't feel that I have any closure on it.
	In fact, I've written a short story about the whole situation and tweaked it and modified it and rewritten it and rewritten it again and again.
	It's one of those moments in time that just changes who you are and how you think.
	No, it doesn't change who you are.
	It changes what your relationship with the woman is.
	But you have a choice about whether it changes who you are.
	Yeah, it's true. Well,
	I considered it to be worse than the actual act.
	Yeah, I mean, I'm certainly not going to try and prioritize what you experienced because you experienced it, not me.
	But it is a truly heinous thing to do.
	It is a truly abysmal, wretched, awful, nasty, gruesome thing to do.
	But that is her gruesomeness, that is not your gruesomeness, and that is not the gruesomeness of the world as a whole.
	Do not let her gruesomeness infect and color your view of the world as a whole.
	If somebody chooses to blind themselves with a fork, that doesn't mean you have to stick a fork in your own eye, right?
	Right. And so, it did not fundamentally, unless you wanted it to, or unless you acquiesced to it at some level, it does not change who you are for people to treat you badly.
	Because your relationship is to virtue.
	Your relationship is to truth.
	Your relationship is to philosophy, I hope.
	Your relationship is to self-knowledge and integrity.
	Your relationship is not defined by what other people do to themselves.
	Fundamentally, she did this to herself.
	Not to you. Fundamentally, she did this to herself.
	Now, she wants it to be done to you so that she feels relief.
	This is all unconscious. This is all just my guesswork, but this is what I believe happens.
	When people do us wrong, they desperately want us to internalize that label so that they weren't abusive.
	They were just accurate.
	Right? So if somebody says to me, Steph, you're a piece of shit.
	And if I say to myself, my God, I am a piece of shit.
	Oh my God, I am a terrible human being.
	Then they're vindicated. They're not abusive.
	They're just correct. Like saying, Steph, you're bald.
	Right? But if I reject the label, Of course, which I do.
	If I would reject that label, then they're no longer correct.
	They're merely abusive, and that's why people are so desperate for you to internalize their abuse, so that they're accurate and right and speaking truth.
	But if you reject the unjust and abusive labels, then they're just revealed as petty, nasty, vindictive verbal abusers, and that's not something that they want, which is exactly why this woman is not bringing any of this stuff up with you, which she damn well should.
	If you've done someone wrong, you owe it to them to bring it up and make it better.
	Well, I guess then the advice pretty straightforward is don't bring it up unless she brings it up.
	Yeah, I mean, that certainly would be my advice.
	And also, when you're around this person, to monitor very closely how you feel, how you experience being in her presence.
	That's very important. That's very important.
	I genuinely suggest that we don't make decisions based on abstract principles when it comes to relationships.
	I mean, it certainly can be useful to help inform us, but what we first need to do It's to experience our own inner experience of being around that person.
	Do we feel good? Do we feel happy?
	Do we feel guided? Do we feel spaced out?
	Do we feel disassociated?
	Do we feel distracted? Do we feel irritable?
	How is your experience of being in the presence of that person?
	That's the most informative thing that you can get.
	Remember, the unconscious is 9,000 times faster and deeper than the conscious mind.
	And your unconscious will tell you just about everything you need to know about that person and the relationship.
	And we always try and detach our unconscious and have our merely cognitive faculty attempt to run things.
	And that doesn't work. That's like saying that in order to speak a sentence, I have to look every word up in the dictionary and read out every definition.
	Immediately and almost inevitably, nobody's going to want to talk to me.
	I'm never going to get anything out. Language is a fluid construct composed largely of the unconscious and that's what actually communicates and the same thing is true of relationships.
	They are fluid and powerful and largely reside in the unconscious.
	And if we listen to our unconscious, I don't think we can go wrong with self-knowledge and self-criticism in our relationships.
	So I guess now as far as like my own lifestyle now, I've since been married, divorced. I've since been married, divorced.
	I'm looking to find another relationship but I'm putting the issue on my physical appearance and, you know, Fuck physical appearance.
	Fuck looks. Fuck them.
	And I don't mean that in a sexual way.
	No, fuck them. Look, everyone gets old and ugly.
	And do you think that my daughter cares if I'm handsome or not?
	She cares if I come to her in the night when she's crying.
	She cares if I'm compassionate and tender and encouraging.
	My daughter cares about virtue.
	Does my wife care whether I have six-pack abs?
	No. The fact that I have only five and a half, she doesn't mind at all.
	But if you're going to get sucked into looks, then you are immediately going to attract shallow, empty people who will be manipulated.
	That is just natural and inevitable.
	Because we're programmed, we like looks, and there's nothing wrong with it and so on.
	You simply can't go on looks.
	And if you allow yourself to become insecure based upon your looks, then you're surrendering your power to tragic and omnipresent marketing, which I don't think you really want.
	Yeah, but it does help with the lonely thing.
	Oh, you ever want to feel loneliness, my friend?
	You get into a relationship based on looks.
	you will never feel lonelier than that in your entire life that is true loneliness right To be in proximity with that intimacy is true loneliness because then you can't even be intimate with yourself, so to speak.
	I don't mean that again in a sexual way, right?
	Right. But no, the first relationship you need to have is with yourself, and that's why we're spending so much time on this.
	You need to have a positive and accepting and happy relationship with yourself.
	Then you are capable of being in a relationship.
	But if you attempt to overstep that or sidestep that, you will end up in a sexually charged void of endless falling that prevents you from being close even to yourself and certainly prevents you from ever being close to anyone else.
	Well, I would... I would say that it seems pretty apparent that I need to work on that.
	I think so. And I really want to, just before we move on, again, I want to just express a massive fire hose of sympathy.
	Okay, maybe not the best metaphor.
	I really want to express a deep well of sympathy for you, both for the head-up-your-ass comment, as you say, repeated so often by your dad.
	And that is just a terrible, terrible, wretched, awful, horrible thing to say to a child.
	I think that this is the kind of programming that occurs in the unconscious.
	And I think that it does not...
	It's not uninvolved in where things end up in terms of the tragedies and the crime and the rape that you experienced.
	And I just really want to express sympathy for that and for the way that your friend handled it and to say that you deserve better friends.
	You deserve better parents and you deserve a better life now.
	And all you have to do is put the abuses and the crimes back into the little slots called the heartlessness of those who perpetrate it and stop accepting anything for yourself and stop over-forgiving people who've done you wrong and have not apologized or given sufficient restitution.
	And I think you'll be well on your way.
	Thank you. All right, well, before I go, one last harping on you.
	Harp away. I've asked you to watch a movie and provided you links to it.
	Thrive? What's that?
	Was that Thrive? No, it was Harrison Bergeron.
	Yes, you've sent me the link.
	I have it on the list. I have not yet.
	I'm so sorry about that. I've spent all week doing this, getting all the research together for this mental health video.
	Oh, by the way, when it comes to the mental health video, I would really change the title.
	Two? The...
	The mental illness racket.
	Oh, okay. Because you're talking about the racket of mental illness and there are some areas of mental illness where there have been real understandings, especially in some of the comments that I've seen on the video,
	that one of them specifically is a Brain scans showing people who have had schizophrenia that it can be shown, well, these people have schizophrenia.
	Look at the brain here, and you can see it, and so on.
	Well, sure, but I mean, that is something, at least according to my research, that is something that is shown after these people have been on meds for years, and of course you're going to see that changed brain.
	Well, sure, sure.
	I don't know the specific reference to that, but maybe put in a little segment on that then to highlight that because that was one of the points that was definitely made.
	All right.
	Well, listen, I'm so sorry.
	We do have to move on because we only have a little bit of time left.
	We've got a bunch of other callers, but thank you so much for the honesty of your story, and I appreciate that.
	You're welcome.
	We have two other callers.
	Go ahead. Hello, Steph.
	Hi. This is Cody.
	I'm the one who emailed last night with the subject SSRI escalation in regards to the video.
	Yeah, so let's hear your story.
	I think it's very, very important and thank you for bringing it up.
	Definitely, definitely.
	What had happened, real brief overview, 2003, around January, I had been laid off of a job that I'd been there for a long time, put way too much of my self-confidence in that job, false self, so forth.
	So throughout 2003, then, okay, I feel depressed.
	What's going on? Never really had done a lot of research or thought into it.
	And my mother had said, oh, why don't you try Effexor?
	It worked for me. Effexor being...
	Sorry, your mother said that? Yes.
	Yes. And Effexor being an SSNRI. So it's selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor.
	So it deals on two different of the...
	The different things in your mind.
	Sorry, I'm a little nervous.
	But no, I did go on that, and he had started me at lower dose.
	It was actually through a state behavioral health services, which I'm sure didn't help.
	This was before I knew any of the things I know now.
	And then proceeded to move up quickly, eventually to 220 milligrams.
	And how hard was it to get this?
	Not hard at all. I walked in and it was prescribed the first time I went in there immediately.
	I asked for it. He didn't give it to me because my mother said, oh, this is what worked for me.
	I go in, prescribe just easily.
	Of course, I find out after the fact it's one of the worst, but we'll get to that in just a moment.
	And sorry, you went through this checklist.
	The guy said, do you experience this?
	Do you experience this? And it's like, bingo, bingo, bongo.
	Here's your drugs.
	Not even that hard. It's like, I'm feeling depression.
	My mother said this is the drug that will help.
	I don't remember all the specifics because it was about six years ago, but it wasn't hard at all.
	I've had experience later on, and I won't get into it, with Adderall, which I don't take anymore.
	I just go over the talking points online and they prescribe it on a whim.
	No real investigation at all.
	So throughout the summer, I started not losing touch with reality just yet, but a lot more easygoing than probably should.
	Sorry, but just so you started taking this stuff, and according to the research that I've done, it takes a couple of weeks for this stuff to kick in.
	Was that your experience as well, that it took a while?
	Yes. Within about a week, I started feeling kind of...
	Every now and then waves of somewhat euphoria, not like ecstasy, but it was noticeable.
	And part of me was worried, like, am I going to lose myself?
	That was a huge thing that I had some anxiety about because I didn't want to lose who I am and the lovely feelings I get.
	But it was a trade-off I thought was worth it at the time.
	And so, yes, I agree.
	It does take a couple weeks for it to build up into the system or for me to actually notice some changes.
	But it's not like a painkiller where it's drastic.
	It's really kind of subtle.
	And, of course, you know one of the reasons that that seems like it makes sense is that depression often remits in that time frame anyway without any kind of intervention, right?
	Yeah. It's like I say, here's a medicine for a cold, and in four or five days, you'll feel so much better.
	It's like, well, yeah, because that's what happens with a cold anyway.
	Anyway, go on. I agree.
	I agree. So throughout that summer, I was still getting unemployment and then had found a small part-time job, but really was too afraid, thought it was just so hard to find a new job that I was kind of running for myself, and it was a bit of a downward spiral.
	But to get to the point of the escalation, what I wanted to bring up was then later in 2003, Around September, October, I was then slowly starting to lose touch with reality, where I was fine.
	What was that experience like?
	Have you ever heard of something called schizotypal disorder?
	Is that sort of an extreme depersonalization?
	I'm not sure if that's, let me describe to you and see if that would be where patterns were starting to become a really big thing.
	I was starting to get obsessed with patterns.
	I was getting obsessed with that I wanted to go completely on instinct, like scarily so, you know, not like going wherever that all the little things meant Everything and really getting into irrationality.
	I'm just trying to sort of see if I can...
	When I was a kid, when I lived in England, from about the age of...
	Seven or eight to eight or nine, I was obsessed with counting the exhausts in cars because some had one, some had two, some had four, and occasionally you'd find one that had six.
	So every time a car went past, I had to look and see the exhaust.
	Now, I understand psychologically it's because I had a lot of stuff I needed to vent and get out of my system, so I was fascinated by exhausts.
	But that's not the same thing as what you're talking about, because that's not about having strange ideas about patterns and instincts and so on, right?
	Correct. Yeah, it was more...
	I mean, later on, it was where I would be so obsessed with the numbers of things.
	I don't know if you've heard of numerology.
	I didn't know much about that, but that's what I was doing.
	Like, if someone's name was something, I would go off of the letter of the alphabet and get it down to certain numbers, and I would put a meaning to numbers, like nine was...
	Evil and bad, and eight was perfect for affinity.
	But before the psychotic break, there were times when I was having faith in having some type of plan where I would leave my car doors unlocked, where I would just do things that were really ridiculous, opening myself up to all sorts of threats, having your car stolen. But in my mind, oh no, it's okay, because I'm on this Path of Righteousness.
	And where the pinnacle was, I ended up going to a concert in D.C. at a place called the 930 Club.
	And I remember standing in the center of the club, staring straight up at the ceiling and then holding my neck where I was cutting off my blood supply.
	And all of this, I wasn't consciously thinking on purpose.
	This was what I was going to do, just what I was doing.
	And I remember taking out my wallet and all of my possessions and my shirt and was just...
	I ended up blacking out, and I was just in my jeans, and they took me outside of the club.
	They probably thought I was high on some type of crazy drug, which affects her, just an antidepressant, and ended up sitting on the corner.
	I took off my pants and sitting naked in an Indian-style position, staring up at the sky, which I understand.
	It sort of reminds me, I think Michael Hutchins died from erotic auto-asphyxiation, that he was attempting to cut off his air supply at the same time as having orgasm.
	And I guess that seems like a good idea if you're on these meds.
	And it sort of reminded me of you sort of choking yourself, though I know it wasn't erotic for you.
	Correct. So people from, I guess, the local hospital ended up taking me in.
	When they asked me, what do you want?
	What do you want? I said Effexor, and they again asked and asked what had happened.
	My body had overheated so much where I was screaming for ice.
	Maybe there was some type of serotonin overload.
	But I told them only Effexor, and finally they just ended up writing, I found out after the fact, ecstasy on the list, but I didn't take any ecstasy.
	So it's probably a good thing they did that, or I probably could have gotten locked up.
	But after that point, My mind was just gone.
	It was my own different world for a few months.
	And at that point, you know how...
	And you were still taking these drugs, right?
	No. Then the insane bastard went from 220 milligrams to zero.
	Oh, so he basically catch a cold turkey because you basically had a psychotic break of some kind, right?
	Yes, and now with the therapist who I talk to now, they said that is so absolutely wrong.
	I can't remember what the term is, when a doctor does something, negligence, that that's negligence.
	So he had taken me off directly and then tried to put me on lithium.
	At that point, I was getting into...
	Is it because he said now you've escalated to bipolar?
	Exactly. Exactly.
	He says, now you're bipolar, you need to go on this med.
	I didn't want to take it. He then wanted to put me on antipsychotics, and then I had at least gotten in my mind while I was psychotic, not violent, because I wasn't raised violent, but I definitely wasn't myself.
	But self-harm was a potential if you're choking yourself, right?
	Yes, and there was a time, and it's kind of scary, before I wrecked my car.
	When I was driving my car and I wanted to almost close my eyes because I had faith that I was on this right path, just following instinct.
	This is like you having a Luke Skywalker moment, you know, close your eyes.
	I mean, we shouldn't laugh because it's very dangerous, but I mean, that is the level of fantasy that you were in, right?
	Yes. Yes. Yes, it was.
	Now, some of the scariest stuff that still brings back I've got tears, but I'm getting better with therapy.
	I told you this at Porkfest before you went on the Adam vs.
	the Man show that all the people I loved and trusted the most helped me the least.
	Whatever safety net I thought I had with family and friends Nope, nope, I'm now called manic.
	There's a word for me now.
	And if I start talking weird, oh, manic, we don't want to talk there.
	Right, and then all of your passions become symptoms of insanity.
	Exactly. I'm really into philosophy.
	Oh, that's because you have a monomania and you're socially avoidant and you want to, oh, I'm really into anarchism.
	Oh, that's because, right? Whatever you get into, whatever you become enthusiastic about now becomes a symptom of a significant problem.
	And everyone then becomes alarmed by your enthusiasm, right?
	Yep. Man. It was way before I got into the ideas that we talk about and the philosophy, but still just anything I got excited about.
	Oh, you're mania, you're manic.
	And no one was helping.
	And even my father put me in an impossible situation because go a few months ahead, I'd wrecked my car in a bad accident, but I didn't have a car.
	I didn't have a job and living in his house.
	And it got to a point where he was like, well, you need to get into therapy.
	And if you don't, I'm going to kick you out.
	Saying this to someone who is still pretty much insane and doesn't have anything.
	But dude, and I'm so sorry about that, but how do you feel about your mom?
	With saying, let's get going on this stuff.
	Yeah, I still have a lot of hate.
	And rage about her because she wasn't even there at the time.
	She had left my dad a year or two earlier, but she was using hearsay and convinced that same doctor to have police come and pick me up and have a psychiatric review, which my dad still, he was upset at himself because he's not really...
	I mean, that could have put you away for a while, right?
	Yeah, I beat it because even though I was psychologically gone, I still had logic.
	Right. You were lucky to beat it.
	Logic don't help sometimes in those situations.
	Yeah, the last woman had said, you know, you seem manic, but you are logic and not a threat to yourself.
	But yeah, that scared the crap out of me.
	And I know you have other callers, so just to kind of wrap it up, what had happened then, I still was way out there, and my dad wasn't helping.
	I ended up, did get another car through help from family, but I met a young girl in 17 at a local show, because I was really into going to local shows, and out of the kindness of strangers, because that's who helped the most at that time, she allowed me to stay at her house with her mother and sleep on their floor,
	get me a job at Burger King to slowly bring I'm so thankful that people like you are putting out this information because it's just about ruined my life.
	I totally get that.
	You should owe yourself a massive, huge, sky-spanning flag of congratulations for pulling yourself out of that slippery slope.
	I mean, holy crap. What an incredible thing to...
	I mean, talk about...
	It's like you sweet-talked your soul back from the devil.
	Yeah. You got your signed in blood on the contract that it's going down the Homer Simpson fire hole in the kitchen, and you pulled it back.
	What an incredible feat. How amazingly well done.
	Thank you. It's hard for me to take compliments.
	Thank you. It wasn't easy. Unfortunately, I first used a double-edged sword of opiates, which didn't help.
	And for three years and ended up in a heroin addiction.
	Never touched needles, but if you use opiates, regular like painkillers, if you do it long enough, you end up to heroin because it's cheaper and easier to get.
	And then beat that three and a half years ago.
	Found my wife, found philosophy, quit cigarettes a year and a half ago, and now have a wonderful wife and a wonderful life, and I rebuild everything.
	Well, we've just got a whole bunch of, I don't know if you can see in the chat room, a whole bunch of wonderful statements about what you did, including caller for president.
	Now, as an anarchist, I'm not sure if that's praise or not, but I think that that's something to be happy about.
	And, I mean, holy crap, what a terrifying incident.
	And... I don't know.
	Recommending meds to your kids without doing any research or without doing follow-up.
	I mean, where were the people in your life when you were going through all of this?
	Why were they not asking? Why were they not checking out?
	Why don't the people do the research?
	I don't know. It just seems to me that this is a very important thing to do.
	It is. And congratulations on getting back out.
	And I'm so sorry. That you had to rely on the kindness of strangers, as is so often the case.
	Either the strangers you pay through therapy or the strangers who come into your life who have some glimmer of possibly ancient or future wisdom in their soul.
	That's a great thing, and I'm very, very glad that you got snatched back.
	And I can certainly hear from your passion and coherence that you have not only just kept your mind, but your heart and soul as well.
	And that is something to be very proud of.
	I really appreciate it.
	And just keep up the great work now.
	Keep donating because what we're all doing here is so, so important.
	I can't help but agree.
	And, you know, again, this is all just amateur hour here.
	But my understanding is that if you are on these drugs and you want to get off them, you need to get rehabbed.
	You need to get detoxed.
	You can't just quit cold turkey.
	I think that's supposedly quite dangerous.
	Again, you know, check with a good doctor.
	I'm a doctor and check with better resources than I have, which is just, again, amateur hour, but this is highly addictive stuff.
	Highly addictive and throws many things off, so get help and do it slow if you're going to do it.
	Yes. Do it as slow as possible.
	Slow as possible. All right.
	Well, thank you so much. I think we have time for one more caller, and thank you so much for your patience.
	I am so sorry that you've had to wait for so long, but please go ahead.
	Yes. Hi, Steph. I have two questions for you.
	One about anarchy and one about God.
	I'll try to be quick. Alright, let's do some easy short topics.
	Go for it. Okay, easy one.
	For anarchy, I'm actually a huge staunch anarcho-capitalist advocate.
	However, to be devil's advocate, I was reading your book about practical anarchy, about why we would not get invaded because there's no tax structure and because another reason is You don't know what the people in the country have as far as weapons are concerned.
	But how do you explain that with the example of the Native Americans being invaded that way?
	Well, first of all, Native Americans were not anarcho-capitalists.
	I mean, anarcho-capitalism is a summit of philosophical understanding, and these people were way, way pre-Socratic.
	I mean, they were pre-Druidic.
	They were post-Stone Age.
	And so they did not have the technology.
	Technology arises from freedom.
	Now, of course, I'm going to get a million emails of people saying, well, what about all the technology developed by NASA and the internet and blah, blah, blah.
	Yeah, okay. But that stuff all remained uncommercialized until freedom came along.
	I mean, that's sort of important.
	There was no space juice until Tang was commercialized and there was no internet that meant anything to anyone outside of the Department of Defense until it was commercialized.
	Technology comes from freedom, and you can measure a culture's freedom level by its level of technological advancement, because people love to solve problems, and they love to please others, and they love to trade.
	That's a natural thing. I think you misunderstood me, because I'm not saying they're anarcho-capitalists, but they didn't have a tax structure, and we didn't know what weapons they had.
	It's kind of what I was getting at. No, no, but what I mean is that an anarcho-capitalist society will be light years ahead of a statist society.
	Oh, okay, I see, I see, okay.
	Light years ahead. And so, yeah, look, because I get this correction a lot too, or people think it's a correction, say that won't invade to get a tax structure, invade to get resources and so on, right?
	Sure. But you can only invade, I mean, you can only invade a country, it's much more efficient to invade a country where people have been legally disarmed, right?
	Yes, absolutely, I agree.
	And there would be no legal disarmament in an anarcho-capitalist society, or if there were, it would be stopped pretty damn quick if there was any remote threat of invasion happening, right?
	Yeah, I mean, so why doesn't the US invade North Korea?
	Because North Korea has about 8 million standard artillery shells pointed at all the American troops along the border.
	And why is it that they don't want these countries to get nukes?
	Because you can't do anything about a nuclear power.
	So, there'll be light years ahead.
	I mean, to give one ridiculous example, right, and this is not at all a perfect example, but what do you think the budget is of the insertions in Iraq compared to the budget of the US military?
	Oh, it's miniscule in comparison.
	Yeah, it's like a billionth of a billionth of 1%, right?
	Absolutely. And they kind of won, right?
	Yes, yeah, they're winning and they've won before against the Russians, so yeah, absolutely.
	And not only have they won in terms of repelling the invaders, but they've actually destroyed the social hierarchies of the systems whose country they never invaded.
	Oh, that's very true. I didn't even consider that.
	Yeah, communism fell.
	The existing system is without a doubt.
	It's going to fall in Europe and it's going to fall in North America.
	It will be a very great change.
	And this is exactly what they planned.
	And I'm not saying that's a free market, but that's a lot closer to a free market army than the U.S. military is, right?
	Right, totally. It is.
	Okay, and one last question on the God issue.
	I'll make this quick. I'm kind of a Christian right now.
	I consider myself to be, but I'm kind of creeping into that realm of agnosticism.
	And I had just one question.
	People say they don't believe in God like atheists or whatever because there's no evidence or they don't have enough evidence or whatever.
	However, I've been starting to ask the question of, well, what would you consider a valid example of what evidence is?
	What is an example of what you would consider to be a valid evidence?
	And they're having a hard time answering that, so I would hope that you had a better answer than they did on what actual evidence would be considered to be.
	Well, I mean, it's direct evidence, not hearsay, right?
	Sure. I mean, that would be direct evidence of a deity.
	And what that would be is, you know, a big giant face filling the sky, whispering down into everyone's ears in the language that they were familiar with, the ultimate truths of physics and chemistry and biology and so on, right? That, to me, would be a pretty cool...
	I mean, I'd even settle for a website that was, you know, God.com that had posted...
	The answers to all of the questions of the universe and the cure for cancer and AIDS and all that kind of stuff.
	I think that would be pretty impressive.
	Now, that may be evidence of alien races rather than...
	But it would be evidence of omniscience, of omnipotence, you know, direct, measurable, reproducible, interviewable scientific evidence would be the way that I would go.
	But I would argue that then that would be evidence merely of an alien being that was really powerful, right?
	Yeah, that's like a super dude.
	That's not what people usually mean by God.
	Absolutely, absolutely. It could be an alien, or if they heard voices in their head, they're schizophrenic, or if they predicted certain events from happening.
	No, no, no. Sorry, voices in your head means that you're listening to Free Domain Radio, and that is hopefully the opposite of schizophrenic.
	But anyway, go on. No, absolutely.
	So, yeah, that's what I was wondering, because like you said, it could be an alien, or if you're hearing voices, that's a schizophrenic, or if you predicted events accurately, that's just coincidence.
	I was just kind of wondering, okay, what would a valid example be?
	So, I don't know. Or it could be, you know, if time travel is invented and they go back to, you know, the Middle East about 2,000 odd years ago, and they can, you know, film and bring back evidence, empirical evidence of You know, that the sequence of the stories told in the Bible is true or they go back even further and they see,
	you know, a man being put together by a big old dude out of clay and then his rib being peeled out and being turned into a woman and that woman wandering around naked and then a talking snake convincing her to eat an apple and feed it to the man at which point they put on fig leaves and are driven out with a flaming sword To be cursed with work and childbirth, that would be something that would give a huge amount of credibility to the biblical story, and that would be something that would be pretty cool as well.
	Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Steph.
	I won't take any more of your time.
	Those are great answers, and I'm still a huge fan, and thank you for doing what you do.
	Thank you so much. Great questions.
	And I would also recommend, I did a three-part debate on agnosticism on Free Talk Live.
	You can find that on YouTube and in the channel.
	And I would also recommend, highly recommend, if I may dare so, I dare do so in my own book called Against the Gods, which is an examination of agnosticism, wherein I make, I think, a pretty compelling case that God is the unconscious, and that's why it's so compelling.
	And so I hope that you'll check those out, and I really welcome questions on religion.
	I think it is a very, very important topic to discuss, and I appreciate your frankness and curiosity about those matters.
	Absolutely. I'll check those out.
	Thank you so much. All right.
	Well, thank you, everybody.
	And I really do appreciate, as always, these great, great calls.
	I think that I am incredibly lucky and blessed, if I may use the phrase, to have what I consider the smartest listeners in the known universe.
	And I would imagine the unknown universe as well.
	But thank you so much, and please just be late in the month, and I would certainly appreciate it if you could see your way clear.
	If you haven't donated yet, naughtiness ensues.
	If you have not...
	Donate it yet. You can go to freedomainradio.com forward slash donate and give me the awesome sauce with whipping on top of a donation, a subscription, anything that you can would be hugely helpful.
	I think that we can be very pleased with the success of the show.
	I think that we can really be proud.
	And this is everyone who's involved in the conversation at whatever level you are.
	We can be enormously proud of a kind of renaissance in philosophy, I think, that is going along, which is really a community-based involvement and can't work without you.
	So whatever you can do to support the spread of philosophy, I would be hugely...
	Appreciative of. I think the future will be appreciative of.
	And I guarantee you 12 Dreams with L. McPherson, if that is your bag, if you donate.
	And just in order to make sure that they do in fact arrive, I will be there wearing a bearskin rug.
	So whether you want that or not, it's up to you.
	But thank you so much for all of your time and attention.

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