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March 18, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:10:49

2113 I Dreamt My Boyfriend Had a Gun - Freedomain Radio Call In Show March 18 2012

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, takes listener calls and questions about philosophy, ethics, economics, virtue, self-knowledge - and debates the question whether it is moral or not to have children. Also, how to overcome a lack of integrity at work.

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	Have we started? I guess we've started.
	Hi, everybody. It's the 18th of March, 2012.
	It is 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
	And this is...
	It's decaf philosophy.
	I'm attempting to come back with the java juice, and I've actually removed the IV, and I've not had...
	The soy latte enema that I normally have on Sunday mornings.
	And, you know, we all have to have our religion.
	And so, it's going to be interesting to see, A, whether I stay awake from the show, B, whether I'm at all coherent, and C, if I'm not coherent, whether you can tell that from any other Sunday show where I have coffee.
	So, let's see.
	Let's see. Somebody has asked me, what do I think of left libertarian organizations like the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, the Center for a Stateless Society, and the Molinari Institute.
	It's a fantastic name for a Bond villain or the nemesis of Sherlock Holmes.
	Carl Hess, Samuel Edward Konkin III, Gary Chartier, and Roderick Long.
	I like Roderick Long.
	As I've mentioned before, one of the best libertarian porn names you could imagine.
	And I've met him a couple of times.
	He's a smart guy. He's a very funny speaker.
	And I have the same reservations I have with all libertarian academics.
	See, I'm going to repeat a joke here because I'm not sure.
	I was on the radio this week, and I will share a joke with you.
	I don't often recycle my jokes, mostly just everything else.
	And I was asked about, you know, right-wing, left-wing, libertarianism, and so on.
	And I said, you know, communism, fascism, libertarianism, so many isms.
	The only ism that I like has a J at the beginning.
	Anyway. At the center of the state, the society of these left libertarian organizations, I'm completely fine with all of them.
	As long as they're working from first principles.
	As long as they're doing good philosophy, I think it's fantastic.
	If they're doing bad philosophy, then I think that's about the most damaging and dangerous thing that thinkers can do.
	The worst thing that any thinker can do is bad philosophy.
	The philosopher is like the navigator of society.
	Society goes where the philosopher says.
	Maybe not in the same generation, but certainly a generation or two from now.
	If the philosopher or the thinker who's claiming ethical judgments is not working from first principles, Then he or she is doing about the most damaging thing that a navigator can do.
	You know, if society wants to head north, they've got the compass by Sackwitz, and they say, go that way, and everybody ends up heading south, then we all end up dying in the ocean with albatrosses around her neck.
	And so, you know, I have no problem.
	If they're doing good philosophy, I think it's fantastic.
	If they are not doing good philosophy, I think it's extremely, extremely dangerous.
	It's the most dangerous thing that there is in the world, in my opinion.
	So, I haven't studied the thoughts of these people enough to know whether I think they're doing good or bad philosophy, but I wouldn't judge them for being left or right wing.
	I would only judge them on the quality of their reasoning and their consistency with the evidence, if that helps.
	Somebody says, I don't have any questions, but if Steph is willing to look at a mole on my leg...
	I think that's fine, but remember, moles like to burrow in darkness, so you might want to go underground on that one.
	Coffee. You think I should get a coffee?
	And maybe cut the mole joke?
	Yeah, I can see that.
	All right, do we have any callers?
	What do I think of antinatalism?
	No idea, but if you could tell me what that is, I'm sure I could conjure up an opinion like a genie on the spot and have him speak like Robin Williams, who has had a lot of coffee, I think, in doing those scenes.
	A lot of cocaine.
	Yeah. Sorry?
	I was going to say, antinatalism, real short, is, real briefly, is sort of, I don't know if you call it philosophy, but sort of the saying that it's immoral, or it's wrong, or it's aesthetically negative to have children.
	Aesthetically negative to have children?
	Of course, there's stuff which, I mean, I guess there's the left and the right, right?
	The left side would say it's because people in the first world use up too many resources and damage the planet and so on.
	And on the other hand, the sort of survivalist thing is society is going to, you know, shite at cannon speed and therefore we don't want to put your children in the way, something like that.
	I'm actually connecting the person that asked that question now, so you can ask for her.
	I think that people who can think, people who are philosophical, people who have self-knowledge, should be the ones breeding the most.
	Hello? Hello.
	All right, there we go. Avon calling.
	Yeah. So I had a heated debate in one of the YouTube comment sections on one of your videos.
	Um, and this is with an antinatalist, and, uh, yeah, basically it's not about the, um, using up resources issue.
	It's more along the lines of, um, you're creating a person who is bound to experience suffering and death, and so you're causing suffering and death by, um, procreating. But isn't the person making the argument causing suffering and death simply by continuing to exist?
	Why don't they just kill themselves?
	I asked that question and I said, well then that would be putting a burden upon other people that are around, that they would have to clean up the mess and deal with the pain of the loss of my, you know, my attention and so on.
	Wait, wait, so, but that, sorry, but logically, if the people around, let's call the antinatalist, the antinatalist Batman, right?
	So... If Batman, the antinatalist, believes that his suicide would cause other people suffering and loss and pain and grief, then clearly being in their lives makes them happier.
	Otherwise they wouldn't miss him at all, right?
	And so he's actually spreading joy and happiness by continuing to live because to absent himself from those relationships would cause other people significant loss and pain and grief, right?
	No, I guess the response on that would be not causing pain and suffering does not necessarily mean that you're causing happiness and joy as well.
	Well, no, no. Logically, if you're going to miss something, then you prefer it being there to not being there.
	In other words, it is a positive thing.
	Like, so, if somebody has a brain tumor, and they take all the brain tumor out, the person doesn't say, I really miss that brain tumor, right?
	I send it notes. I dream about it.
	I have wistful Hallmark card sunset images in my mind about dancing through the meadows with that tumor of mine, right?
	It's like, that tumor was going to kill me, and I'm really glad that it's gone.
	So, logically, if people are going to miss you, then you are a positive part of their life.
	You can't get away from that.
	That's just logical. Now, it may be that it's dysfunctional and it's EE and so on.
	I'm sorry? I don't think that he would have a problem with agreeing with that.
	That would be fine, having that perspective, saying, all right, well, yeah, maybe my staying around would be a benefit to somebody, and, okay, that's a reason for me staying around.
	But it doesn't justify having children, because Having children, you're basically creating a person that you know is going to experience pain and suffering and that is immoral.
	I mean, so what?
	I mean, so there's pain and suffering.
	The child can grow up and can choose to take his or her own life whenever they want, but there's much more pleasure in life than there is suffering.
	Otherwise, we'd all kill ourselves, right?
	Of course they're suffering. I mean, so what, right?
	I mean, that's like saying I'm never going to drive my car because it's going to be wear and tear on the car and then it's going to need repairs.
	Well, of course it is. I mean, of course it is.
	We're all going to get old and we're going to die.
	To say that, I mean, is it 1% of pain that makes it not worth living?
	Well, then...
	Well, I mean, that just doesn't make any sense, right?
	I mean, if the majority of it is pleasurable, and then the minority of it is painful, then the pleasure outweighs the pain, and that's good, right?
	Well, yeah, but theoretically, you could see the same thing about governments, that, you know, if it theoretically does secure things, and Yeah, sorry, you're cutting out quite a bit.
	You must be on a cell phone, so we'll have to move on to another caller.
	But look, the difference, of course, is that having a child does not violate the non-aggression principle.
	Government violates the non-aggression principle.
	It's really that simple. Because what this person is doing is submitting a kind of pragmatic calculus to a situation that does not violate Moral bans.
	It's not UPB incompliant to have children.
	And so, since it doesn't violate persons or property, it doesn't violate personhood or property rights, so it's not a moral thing.
	So then there's a pragmatic calculus about it.
	That's fine.
	But then you can't take that pragmatic calculus and then switch it over to another situation where there's a direct and egregious violation of the UPB and then say, well, then I'm just going to substitute the pragmatic calculation for the moral argument.
	It's sort of like saying, well, you know, OK, so people should make love because it's more pleasure than it is, you know, sadness or discomfort or sleepiness after whatever or whatever.
	And therefore, that's a pragmatic calculus.
	And therefore, a rapist is justified because he prefers raping to not raping, and that's a pragmatic calculus.
	No, no, no, no. Because the lovemaking doesn't violate the NAP, whereas rape certainly egregiously does.
	So you've got to be careful about people who are going to start off with a sort of moral, a pragmatic calculus argument, and then try and transpose that same pragmatic calculus argument to a situation where there's a gross moral violation.
	The two are not even close to the same.
	I guess I'm with you.
	The other one point I suppose that they would bring up is, okay, as you would say yourself, if God exists and He's created the world and the universe, then He's an immoral person because He's created all the suffering that exists in the world.
	Isn't that the same thing as for a parent?
	Well, I don't think that I would say that God would be morally responsible for suffering, but if God has the power to directly prevent evil and doesn't do it, right?
	Evil and suffering are not the same thing.
	Suffering is a result of evil, but it's not the only result.
	A thing that results in suffering.
	So I can stub my toe and nobody's violated the non-aggression principle or property rights.
	I've not been subject to any evil, but I'm suffering.
	And so I can't take anyone to jail.
	I can't put anyone in jail or report them to my DRO because I stubbed my toe.
	So suffering is not a moral standard.
	In the same way, you can be Andy Kaufman, right?
	The Man of the Moon. There's a comedian from the 80s, I think it was.
	He was in Taxi, and then he morphed into Jim Carrey in some movie.
	And he got lung cancer, although he'd never been a smoker.
	Okay, so the smoker gets lung cancer.
	He suffers at least as a cause.
	But this guy just got lung cancer, although he wasn't a smoker.
	or it was just bad luck.
	So there's a lot of suffering there, and that's not quite the same, of course, as somebody stabbing him in the chest.
	So with God, but if you could snap your fingers without any effort and cure someone of egregious illnesses or prevent all the evil in the world, then sure, that would be good.
	Sorry, but we don't have that power as individuals.
	We do have, of course, a lot of power To raise our children in a way that is going to make them as functional and happy as possible through the principles of morality and not aggressing against them and respecting the involuntary aspect of the relationship from their side and treating them the very best that we can out of all of our relationships.
	We have to treat our children the very best because they are in a relationship with us involuntarily and so in order to equate to even close to a voluntary relationship they have to be treated the very best.
	And so we can do all of that, and that's going to make them statistically and scientifically far more happy than unhappy.
	So there's a lot that we can do as far as that goes, but we don't have the power to end all suffering in the world.
	And the equation, right, so if this person is saying, well, God is considered evil because he doesn't prevent suffering, and he's saying that then non-existent would be the case, Then he would obviously view the most virtuous action that God ever did as being wiping out all of the human race except Noah and Bill Cosby through drowning everyone, including the children, in the great flood that Noah's Ark sailed away from to impale itself upon Mount Ararat.
	Mass genocide would then be the most virtuous action that God could take, or, failing that, the mass sterilization of all women so that they couldn't have children.
	And, of course, we would accept that that is an egregious violation of the non-aggression principle.
	It's a universal genocide.
	It's about as bad as you can conceivably get as far as moral actions go.
	So I wouldn't equate the two at all.
	Anyway, sorry, your connection is really bad, so I'm going to move on to the next caller, if you don't mind.
	That's fine. But if you want to talk to this guy, sorry, I would ask him a little bit more about his childhood than engage in this kind of abstract debate, because that's just trolley stuff.
	Anyway, go on. Oh, great.
	I will...
	You broke my stride.
	No, next up we have Kyle H. You broke my smolder.
	Yes. Kyle, how's it going?
	Well, it's going pretty well.
	I just wanted to listen to the call, but...
	I guess my question would be, I used to support Ron Paul and now that I've been listening to more of your videos, I've been not wanting to support him anymore because I don't feel that I could justify being an anarchist in supporting a system that thoroughly violates rights.
	Is my thinking becoming wrong or Or am I able to reconcile my beliefs by not supporting the system at all and, by extension, not supporting Ron Paul?
	Well, first and foremost, I would say that choosing to support Ron Paul is not a violation of the non-aggression principle or of property rights.
	So if you want to go and send Ron Paul 50 or 100 bucks or whatever, however much money, that's your voluntary choice to go and send him money if you want to go out and pound some lawn signs and march in a parade.
	It's not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	So I think it's really important to, you know, you don't put that in the same category as calling in airstrikes on a big pile of homeless people or anything.
	So I think that's really important to understand from that standpoint.
	I think that I mean, a lot of people who are libertarians and even some anarchists who are for or who support Ron Paul do so on the argument that it is through their opposition of the state that they are trying to get somebody into power who's going to shrink the state as much as possible.
	Is that sort of where you would be coming from?
	I would say yes, that would be where I'm coming from.
	But on the same token, it's using...
	Violence, thievery and You know, all-around murder in order to get my viewpoint across, and I don't want to promote that in any way, shape, or form, even if it is...
	Wait, sorry, sorry. Just help. I mean, maybe you're right.
	Maybe I'm missing something. So if you send 50 bucks to Ron Paul, and then he uses that to fund a television commercial that opposes U.S. foreign policy and calls for the end of the monopoly of the Federal Reserve or an audit of the Fed or something like that, how is that a gross violation and using murder and so on?
	Well, that's...
	I mean, that's great that he'd be reducing that stuff, but he would still be using power, and I don't support centralized power in any way, shape, or form.
	He would still be using violence through taxation in order to get some of his programs done.
	Well, but let me sort of play the devil's advocate position here.
	And say, look, if I... Sign a government edict to cut taxes by 50%.
	Isn't that a net reduction in the amount of force?
	Let's do another one. If I sign a government edict legalizing all hard drugs and marijuana, then how is that...
	I mean, I'm reducing the amount of violence that's going to be deployed in society.
	Mm-hmm. Yeah, I see your point there.
	Yeah. I guess I need to think about this a little bit more.
	I just don't feel that I can justify supporting a system that uses violence even if that violence is reduced.
	Any violence against other people, I don't agree with.
	I guess I'm taking the non-aggression principle to the extreme by saying I'm not for any violence against anybody ever, even if That person is reducing violence and making violence minimal.
	I want violence to be gone. So you would be opposed to self-defense, is that right?
	No. No, I'm not a pacifist.
	Okay, so if you then take an action to reduce the amount of violence in a given interaction, you know, if that's, I don't know, Firing a warning shot at someone who's coming at you with an axe, so they back off. I mean, that's a threat of violence, right?
	And so if you accept violence as a way of reducing immediate violence, I could certainly see how that argument would transpose itself to getting Ron Paul in to reduce the amount of violence that is in the system at the moment.
	I have a different take on violence and self-defense.
	I don't see self-defense as violence per se.
	I see violence as the person that's initiating a coercive act.
	The person that is defending themselves is not being violent.
	They are simply using force against a person that is trying to commit a violent act against them, trying to kill them, or trying to steal their money.
	Right. And I have no problem with this.
	It's a bit of a different definition that I would use.
	It's sort of like if someone steals my bike and then I go and steal it back, I'm technically stealing because I'm taking a person's You know, thing without their permission.
	It's just that I'm actually re-establishing the primary property rights, and I'm stealing it back, and therefore I'm not a thief.
	So, yeah, I mean, you could say stealing in the both sides, but you wouldn't use the word thief in both situations.
	Well, yeah, just like you wouldn't say justified violence.
	No, well, see, I would, because I would view if somebody's coming at me with a chainsaw and I shoot them in the leg, I'm definitely shooting that person in the leg.
	And that's a violent act, but it is not...
	I guess maybe it's closer to surgery or something.
	Like if somebody cuts me open and takes out my appendix when it's perfectly healthy, they're guilty of an assault.
	And if it's a surgeon when I've got appendicitis, he's saving my life, right?
	We wouldn't call both of them stabbing, right?
	No, no. That's why I try to go with a different definition.
	That's why I try to say the person that initiates a violent act is the person that is committing violence, and the person that is not – is defending themselves is not committing violence, but simply using force to dissolve a potentially violent situation.
	Right, but let's follow the bouncing ball of moral responsibility.
	So if you send Ron Paul 50 bucks, that's not a violent action, right?
	If Ron Paul argues for and He abolishes legislation that has created the prohibition on illegal drugs.
	He himself is not initiating a violent act, right?
	No, he's not. He's not shooting anyone, he's not stabbing anyone, he's not threatening anyone.
	He is simply signing a piece of paper that has the magical power to keep a bunch of guns in holsters rather than being pointed at innocent drug users, right?
	Right. So, tell me where in the system that you're talking about the violence shows up.
	Let's just take the repeal of the drug law situation.
	Good point. There is no violence.
	At least none that I can think of right now.
	I mean, unless the DEA, FDA, and the alphabet soup of federal in Congress overrules his edict.
	Well, but then he's not responsible for their violence, right?
	If they overrule him, like, so if he signs the legislation, then Congress votes the two-thirds to overthrow his legislation, repealing the drug war, then he's not responsible for it.
	But even the Congress, in a sense, I mean, it gets really fuzzy around here, so like around the ethics of it, because if you sign legislation knowing that you're increasing the use of violence, to me, that's like hiring a hitman.
	You're not doing the hit, but you're still responsible for the hit being done.
	So I think that you can, but as far as I know it, again, I'm not sure where he stands on abortion.
	I think he thinks it's a state's rights issue, but he is mostly for the repeal of government power, for the diminution of government power.
	Now, he may be overridden, of course, but that would be the responsibility of the people who override him, not his.
	Yeah, that's the thing that I try to reconcile.
	What would I rather see, the state being minimalized or seeing the government go to hell in a handbasket, so to speak?
	Because I believe that if anybody else gets elected, it's just going to go straight downhill.
	And I'm wondering, will people wake up to...
	To see that everything that has been done in their name has been destructive in the most obvious ways.
	And like you said in one of your videos before, if Ron Paul gets elected, the only thing that people will remember is that a libertarian was president when Things went bad or the state collapsed or anything like that.
	So I'm wondering, is it really worth it to get him elected in any significant way?
	Well, no. I mean, I certainly don't think so.
	I think it's not going to work.
	And I've made these arguments six million times, so I sort of won't go into them in any particular detail here.
	But no, it's not going to work because the violence in society comes not from the state, but from the family.
	That's where the statistics are.
	And so, if you want to reduce the amount of violence in the world, you have to reduce the amount of violence within families.
	There's just no other way that I know of, scientifically and statistically, to work it.
	That would be my suggestion.
	If you want to donate to a course that does good and so on, then I would suggest donating to a course that promotes peaceful parenting and anti-spanking.
	I think all of those things. Ron Paul has great arguments.
	Lots of people have great arguments.
	Lots of libertarians and everyone has great arguments.
	I think that's fantastic. The problem is, though, that until people are raised more peacefully, they're not going to be able to respond to great arguments because they don't think rationally.
	You know, all of their judgments are ex post facto.
	All of their quote reasoning is ex post facto scar tissue nonsense.
	And so if we have better and more rational arguments, Well, we need to promote peaceful parenting so that people will be even remotely receptive to those arguments.
	Otherwise, we're just wasting time.
	We're just shouting into the wind.
	We're speaking in a language called reason and evidence that people simply aren't able to process because they're too traumatized from their history.
	Whenever you're ready, we have Polly.
	Hello? Hi.
	Okay, so I had this dream and I typed it up and I can hit enter in the chat so you can read it.
	Okay, so my boyfriend and I were hiding in the woods from some bad guy.
	There was a big, big house under construction nearby and in the dream I knew that there were bullet marks all throughout the cement foundation.
	It sort of had a daylight basement so there was a lot of concrete.
	It seemed like I thought Of that in the dream because of the fear associated with fighting in and around that space.
	I don't know whose house it was though.
	Whoever was after my boyfriend and I wanted to hurt us, him, me, or kill us.
	We were huddled in the bushes like a thicket of salel.
	Salel? What's that? Shrubs that grow all over in the Pacific Northwest.
	Alright, okay. My boyfriend was making me stressed because he kept talking and I would tell him to be quiet so we wouldn't be found.
	It seemed like he wasn't taking the situation seriously.
	Then he sort of taunted me and wiggled the bushes trying to say something like, what, you don't want me to do this?
	And he would shake the bushes.
	I was really scared and I insisted on moving to a new location in the woods.
	We crawled and crouched through the undergrowth through a new spot.
	He still kept talking though and just generally didn't seem to be paying enough heed to the amount of danger we were in.
	Then we could see a big man, unusually huge, coming through towards us.
	It was like he was a giant, like we were little kid size and he was a huge adult, but we weren't little kid size.
	And then there he was above us and he looked down and saw us, only it was like he didn't see me, only my boyfriend.
	My boyfriend looked up at him and was sort of surprised or curious, but he didn't seem that scared, or at least as scared as I felt.
	The huge man then slammed his fist squarely into my boyfriend's face.
	It was like he had hit me.
	I had waves of nausea and disbelief.
	The big man then turned around and went back the way he came.
	My boyfriend was in extreme pain and I was sobbing and trying to comfort him as best I could.
	Then the dream sort of changed past that part and then we were trying to track this man down.
	My boyfriend wanted to kill him.
	He had a rifle and it was a lever action.
	I was reluctant to go along with this plan.
	I quote, knew the bad guys had machine guns and we probably wouldn't stand a chance if we engaged them.
	My boyfriend used the lever action to load a bullet in the chamber, I assume, and we were out in the open.
	It was sunny, and the house under construction was in the distance, with what I assumed were the bad guys swarming around.
	The sunlight was reflecting on the metal parts of the gun my boyfriend was holding, and I was afraid that it would draw attention to us.
	My boyfriend was trying to decide which man he was going to shoot at.
	I was full of apprehension.
	How do you know it's the right guy?
	What if you miss and it pisses them off, etc.?
	We put the gun up to aim, And I saw the big man, I assumed it was the big man, come around the corner of the house.
	I really did not want my boyfriend to pull the trigger since all these thoughts were in my head about violence not being the answer and no matter how mad you are, more violence never makes anything better.
	I think I tried to plead with my boyfriend not to shoot with all these reasons and then I woke up.
	Alright, when did the dream happen?
	Thursday night. Do you remember what happened Thursday day?
	Yeah, actually, the night that evening before I went to sleep, I had had a conversation with his mother.
	And his mother, she's the kind of person who has everything as far as material things.
	And I have a couple of friends that...
	Well, she can't stay with me when she visits because she's allergic to cats and I have cats.
	So last year I had asked her if they could use my boyfriend's mother's beach house and she grudgingly accepted or said that it was okay.
	And, of course, I assured her that I took full responsibility if anything happened and I would totally clean the place when they left.
	And then, so this year I wanted to ask her again, but I had this dread, like for a month I dreaded asking her.
	And so I put it off and put it off and finally I called her.
	To talk about one other thing and then ask her the question.
	And she was kind of reluctant.
	I said, I really want to ask you if my friends could use the house again.
	You were so kind to let them use it last year, and I really appreciate that.
	And so, of course, you know, this year they'd like to use it again, but I would always ask you first.
	And she said, darn right you will.
	And then she went on into how the heating bill was high.
	And I mean, this is somebody who has five houses and spends six months a year in Hawaii.
	So anyway, she grudgingly, grudgingly said they could use it.
	But I felt so horrible when she made that comment.
	Darn right you, Will. I felt just...
	I was kind of...
	I almost felt like just hanging up, it was such a horrible feeling, like she wanted me to grovel or something.
	I don't know. It was really awful.
	And my boyfriend has made lots of comments about how much he hates his mom.
	And I don't think I really ever understood what he meant until that conversation with his mom.
	And so I think the dream maybe has something to do with that.
	Right, right.
	And what about your boyfriend's dad?
	I'm sorry, can you hear me?
	What about your boyfriend's dad? His dad?
	Yeah. His parents are divorced and his dad is also not a very nice person or present in my boyfriend's life and he feels like neither one of them has ever really understood him.
	I mean we both have very dysfunctional parents.
	Right. Now, what's your boyfriend's relationship to that dysfunction, and what's your relationship to that dysfunction?
	In other words, how visible is it?
	How much does it inform your actions?
	How objective is it? How moral is it?
	All that kind of stuff. As far as, let me see if I get this straight, how does the dysfunction affect me with my parents or with his parents?
	No, what I mean is, are either of you in denial about the effects of the dysfunction or the moral nature of the dysfunction and so on?
	I don't feel like I am, but especially since discovering Free Domain Radio last September, and I haven't had contact with my own dad for over almost 20 years, But my boyfriend is just now starting to realize the dysfunction.
	He had an incident happen with his stepsister when they were teenagers, and for some reason it came up again.
	And so last, not this past Christmas, but the Christmas before, his dad just called him up and told him not to come over for Christmas because the stepdaughter, her issues were, I guess, more important.
	So that really hurt him and I think really made him realize kind of how, Like, this whole idea, like, families really love you.
	Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, the people who love you really love you, but there's no category that meshes perfectly with that called family, right?
	Okay, I'll step you what I think of the dream.
	Now, of course, you know, this is just an idiot amateur opinion on the internet, so, you know, you can take it as seriously as you like.
	But this is what I see in the dream, and you can tell me if it makes any sense.
	Okay, so you've got a big house under construction nearby.
	I'm going to guess that it wasn't about to be finished, but it was somewhat early in the construction?
	Correct. Okay, that's the beginning of self-knowledge, right?
	And if you started getting into philosophy and self-knowledge last September, then, you know, fantastic.
	Congratulations. I mean, a million-fold.
	But it's early days, right?
	Mm-hmm. Okay.
	Bullet marks all throughout the cement foundation.
	So, you tell me, what is the foundation of a house?
	If the house is a person, what is the foundation of a person?
	What is that a metaphor for? What is a person's personality built on or from?
	What stage of life? I mean, really early.
	Yeah. It's childhood, right?
	Yeah. The child is the father of the man, right?
	Or the woman. And so the childhood has bullet marks all throughout the cement foundation, right?
	Yeah, damage.
	And aggression.
	Violence, right? Right.
	Does that make sense? Absolutely.
	And there's fear associated with the fighting in and around that space, right?
	Mm-hmm. Now, Parents who've been harmful to children do not want their children to process or see that harm, usually, right?
	Yeah. So it's almost like because you can begin to see the bullets in the foundation, you're in danger, right?
	Mm-hmm. Does that make sense?
	Yeah. Now, you are further along the path of self-knowledge than your boyfriend, right?
	You said he's just starting?
	I think so. Well, I can only assume that you're right since you know him and you're starting yourself.
	So, for him it's kind of like a game, but for you it's very serious, right?
	Mm-hmm. And him not taking the danger seriously puts him in danger, right?
	Right. Now, you see a big man coming through towards us like he's a giant, like we were little kid size, right?
	Mm-hmm. So that's a very early memory because you're a child and this is a parent or caregiver, right?
	Right. And your boyfriend is treating it like a game and you know that it's serious.
	Now, when your boyfriend treats it like a game, what happens?
	He gets really injured.
	He gets really injured because it is very serious, right?
	Mm-hmm. And that I think is really, really important.
	He's taunting, he's immature, he's endangering, and he's putting you both in danger.
	But what I think, I was really, really struck in the dream, when the man looks down and doesn't see you, but only your boyfriend.
	Yeah. And I don't know if you've ever seen a red Lord of the Rings movie.
	I have seen. Yeah, so you know how like the Nazgul or the ghost, they can only see the other ones and nobody can see them?
	I don't remember that.
	Well, it's almost like the people who are the most dissociated can only see each other.
	Because you're actually present to the danger of the situation, he can't see you.
	He can only see and interact with the person who's equally dissociated from the danger.
	Does that make any sense? Wow.
	And that's fantastic because you become invisible to bad people when you gain self-knowledge.
	You pass out of their sphere of interaction.
	That is how we escape the dead, so to speak, right?
	Wow. That's cool.
	And one of the things that happens with bad people And yeah, I understand I'm just using that in a very sort of loose way, right?
	What happens with bad people is they will mistreat us, and what we are drawn into is the desire for or the dream for vengeance, right?
	Which is the second part of the dream.
	Yeah. Right, because the way to escape violence is to forego vengeance.
	Right. Because you're trying to comfort him.
	And what he could have learned from your comforting was how to avoid this kind of evil action of being punched by this mystery huge man, right?
	Because he could have said, well, how come he didn't punch you?
	It's like, well, he couldn't see me. Well, how come?
	Because I was scared. I was hiding.
	But you were taunting him.
	And you were pretending it was a game.
	And look, now you got punched full in the face.
	Yeah. Which can, you know, I mean, I remember reading...
	Marlon Brando punched a photographer in the face and I remember the photographer saying, I had to go back to the dentist like half a dozen times to try and get the teeth fixed and they never got it quite right and I was in constant pain.
	Like being punched in the face can be, like it can leave you permanently disabled and in pain.
	Yeah. And he could have learned something from you about how to avoid this.
	It's like you were shaking your butt, it was a big joke to you and I was telling you, look, We're in danger here.
	This is dangerous. Very dangerous.
	And he got a warning shot and he could have learned from you at that point, right?
	About how to avoid these kinds of situations.
	But instead, he wants to escalate, right?
	In other words, he's not taking any ownership himself about how he ended up getting punched.
	Which is that he wasn't listening to you.
	He wasn't Processing the dangerous reality of the situation and the dream that you were in, right?
	He takes zero responsibility.
	And when we take zero responsibility, we almost certainly will repeat whatever disaster we're not taking responsibility for, right?
	Right. Because he didn't listen to you the first time, and what happened?
	He got punched in the head and was in severe pain.
	And then, did he listen to you the second time when he wanted to escalate through vengeance?
	It didn't seem like it because then I woke up.
	Well, no, because in the dream, you're very uneasy about this course of action called let's go shoot these guys, right?
	Of course you are. What a crazy thing to do.
	Yeah. And he's not listening again, right?
	Mm-hmm. And...
	So, the mom was mean to you, right?
	And this is something that you really felt that meanness to you, right, his mom?
	Yes, yes. Right, so you're really feeling that danger.
	You're really feeling that disquiet, that unease.
	Now, if he grew up with it, the likelihood is that he's not going to feel it, right?
	Because you have to block it out to get through it.
	Yeah, I mean, I think that really struck me, and I actually told him, I said, I never quite really understood until just that conversation that you actually had to grow up with that.
	And she has such a subtle, manipulative way of making you feel really small.
	Sure. And so she did that over and over to him.
	Right, right.
	Which means that he's going to minimize and all that kind of stuff, right?
	And, you know, pretend to be tough and all that kind of stuff.
	But that is, you know, people desire vengeance in order to avoid the pain of loss.
	Right. Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, I think so.
	He's grappling with the issue of not ever maybe talking to his dad again.
	Even though they're not close, there's so much pressure from society that you don't cut your family off.
	They're your family. It doesn't matter what they do to you.
	You've got to keep in contact with them.
	It's very important to get out of abusive relationships that you choose.
	You know, like getting married to a guy who hits you or yells at you or puts you down all the time.
	Or even if you're just kind of dissatisfied with your marriage, it's really important to be self-actualized and to get out of relationships that are unfulfilling.
	Those relationships that you choose.
	Those relationships that you were involuntarily born into, though, you should never, ever, ever even think about getting out of abusive relationships that you didn't choose.
	Only those that you did choose.
	I mean, I understand. That's completely crazy, right?
	It's a complete backwards.
	To the way it should be.
	I mean, the relationships that you didn't choose should have a far higher standard for sustaining themselves than relationships you did choose.
	Because you have causality.
	You chose to get married to a guy who beats you.
	That's terrible. And he's wrong and he should not do that and he should be punished for it.
	But you chose to marry the guy.
	You did not pursue self-knowledge.
	A third of people who get divorced, a third of women who get divorced say that they knew it was the wrong guy when they were getting married.
	And they just chose to go ahead with it.
	And people have responsibility for that.
	They have responsibility for that.
	I have great sympathy for the difficult childhoods that lead them into that situation, but they're still responsible for that because they're adults.
	So, I mean, that's the reality of that.
	But, of course, children born into a family have zero choice, zero power, zero options, zero avoidability, and they have no choice, no say in the matter.
	And so the idea that we should, you know, that I've always heard that, you know, women or whatever, you should get out of abusive relationships no matter what, should far more apply to parents than it should ever apply to a husband or a wife.
	To say otherwise is simply ridiculous and a play of power on the part of the parents.
	So anyway, I just sort of wanted to point that out.
	Now I think that you're feeling a certain kind of danger, and that danger, I believe, is called moral objectivity.
	Moral objectivity is, I'm not going to be sentimental about these relationships, I'm simply going to look at the ethics of the relationship, right?
	Philosophy is anti-sentimental.
	And sentiment is anti-philosophy.
	Because sentiment says these things have value just because.
	Because you grew up with them. Because they're there.
	Because this was the god your parents had.
	Because this is the country you were born into.
	Because this is the race you have to be part of.
	Because it's an appeal to sentimentality is a kick to the teeth of rationality and empiricism and philosophy.
	And so philosophy is the mortal enemy of sentimentality.
	And sentimentality, as Jung noted, is most often just a superstructure or a reaction formation to brutality or a defense or a cover for brutality.
	And so I think that you're perceiving an objective danger.
	And the objectivity is simply to take away the sentimentality.
	To say, okay, well, if I was not taught about this God, would I believe in this God?
	Well, if these weren't my parents and they were just people that I met, would I like them or not?
	And that I think is very important because that is the truth.
	To take away the history, the sentimentality, all of the sort of programmed biological attachments and social reinforcements of these relationships, you just look at the virtue of the relationship.
	You just look at the actions of the person.
	Is this a person I can admire?
	Is this a person who is brave?
	Who is courageous? Who is noble?
	Who is true? Who is honest?
	Who is curious? Who is empathetic?
	And where they have shortcomings, are they willing to address them?
	Are they willing to admit them? Are they willing to provide restitution for the wrongs that they've done?
	The basics, the basics of love, relationship 101.
	And philosophy says, look, It doesn't matter the family that you were born into.
	It doesn't matter the country that you were born into.
	It doesn't matter the church that you were born into.
	It doesn't matter the class or the race or any of these things that you were born into.
	What is true? What is true?
	What is proven? What is empirical?
	And I think in the dream, you are processing a danger that is real, and the dream confirms that the danger is real, because it doesn't turn out to be a game of hide-and-seek, right?
	Because the dream could have easily had this big giant come up, pull off a mask, and have a clown nose underneath and go, booga booga booga, I found you, now it's your turn to catch me, right?
	In which case, the dream would be saying, look, your perspectives are a tad over the top, right?
	That you are unjustly alarmed at a friendly situation.
	But that's not what happened. The dream fully confirmed the danger that you were in.
	Ah, but the dream is telling you, again, my belief, my opinion, throw it away if it's not useful.
	My dream is telling you not that your boyfriend is not listening to you, but rather that you are not listening to your boyfriend.
	That's my belief. Your boyfriend in the dream, your dream boyfriend, your dream lover, is saying very clearly that I can't process this danger and what I'm going to do is I'm going to put myself and therefore you in more danger at the moment.
	And it seems like he's not listening to you but you're not listening to him because in the first part of the dream you were right and he was wrong and he turns out to be badly wounded.
	and then in the second part of the dream you're right and he is wrong and he's escalating but you're still with him doing this dangerous stuff.
	Does that make sense?
	And by with him I don't mean in the relationship.
	I mean whatever, right?
	I just mean you're walking with him to a gunfight for heaven's sakes.
	Right.
	And there's not much point having all of these alarm bells go off in your head if you're still walking by the guy who's pulling out a gun with a bunch of guys who got machine guns.
	Right. - That makes total sense.
	I mean, I have other sort of questions around the whole situation.
	I mean, this beach house is, they never use it.
	I mean, it's empty probably 99% of the year.
	And so there's part of me, because I get along fine with his mom when we've been around them.
	Sorry, you mean the real beach house?
	That's not the one, that's the dream, nothing to do with the dream, right?
	Right, right. I'm not friends with her.
	I don't call her every month or every week and see how she's doing.
	So there's part of me that's like, well, I dreaded making the call partly because I don't want to be seen as, oh, she only calls when she wants something.
	Even though when I borrow something or ask for something, I absolutely respect other people's property.
	I return it in better or as good of condition as when I got it.
	I mean, I feel like I'm offering something in return.
	In other words, you know, a full cleaning.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, Polly, but I mean, I don't judge it negatively.
	But isn't it the case that you didn't really call when you wanted something?
	I'm sorry? But isn't it the case that you did in fact only call when you wanted something?
	I don't judge that negatively. I'm just looking at the facts.
	Yes, that is. Yeah, I have not called her just to say hi or be friendly.
	So yeah, pretty much the only time I've called is to ask her if I could borrow the house.
	And that's because you don't particularly like her, right?
	I mean, you seem like a friendly person to me and we're having a pleasant chat.
	We don't even know each other. So you seem like a friendly person to me.
	So is that because you don't particularly like her?
	We don't have a lot in common in family situations, but yeah, I don't...
	You have your boyfriend in common, right?
	That's quite a lot in common right there, right?
	Yeah, that's true.
	No, I mean, I think you're being a very nice person about it, but philosophy is no more about being nice than it is about being sentimental.
	I'm getting the sense, given how she treated you in this instance, and the fact that you dreaded calling her, and the fact that you don't call her socially, would that not be evidence that you don't like her very much?
	Yeah, I guess.
	I wouldn't go around telling people I don't like her, but I don't think that she's a particularly moral person.
	First of all, my boyfriend has told me stories about him getting beaten up by his dad, and she's in the other room, and he's screaming, no more, no more, and she was nowhere.
	What kind of mother could let her kid be beaten, and he's screaming, no more, and she just doesn't care?
	I can't even imagine that.
	Well, and that's assuming that the mother didn't tell the father whatever prompted the beating, right?
	Yeah. That's terrible.
	That's unbelievably awful.
	And the fact that the man, it's the proximity to the house in the dream and in the real world, you know, that is, and it's a big giant man who hits him in the face, right?
	That's similar to a beating, right?
	Right. So I guess my question is, is it bad of me to call and ask to borrow something from somebody I don't particularly like, even though I'm going to offer an exchange, like a cleaning?
	No, it's not about the house and it's not about the cleaning, in my opinion.
	Because the dream doesn't have anything about the house and the cleaning.
	It doesn't even have the mom in it, right?
	Right. It's not about whether you ask the mom for something or not.
	It's that I think that you and your boyfriend need to get on the same page about his relationships.
	Right. And the good thing is he is in counseling now, talking about some of these issues with his mom and his dad, with a therapist.
	And we've actually been in some group...
	Couples counseling also addressing these issues.
	Right. Right.
	Yeah. And so I think that if you had, I mean, if you dread calling someone, that's because you're, you know, that has significant negative thoughts about it.
	And I think those were somewhat confirmed.
	And so you coming in from the outside are going to have a kind of objectivity that somebody raised in that family just generally doesn't have.
	This is why we need a community to have truth.
	Truth is not a solitary go to the Walden Pond and sit staring in the Water kind of thing.
	That's not how you get to the truth.
	Because we're blinded to so much by the situations that we grew up in that we need a community to get to the truth.
	We need somebody's outside eye to get to the truth.
	And so you can be that outside eye for him.
	And if I were you, it's not about your boyfriend's mom.
	It's about you and your boyfriend.
	And it's about sit down and Tell him everything that you experienced, you know, without jumping to conclusions, without saying, this means this about your mom or anything.
	But, you know, I had this fear and then I was on the phone with your mom and I had this experience and I had this experience and then I thought of you and being beaten and your mom not doing anything about it or possibly even provoking it.
	That would be my suggestion.
	Sit down and really have as frank and open a conversation about your experience of this phone call in the aftermath as you can.
	And then, of course, you can bring up the dream and say, I think some really heavy stuff is cooking in my brain that's really important.
	And recognize that it may take a while to have that conversation because it's a big thing for somebody to look at.
	Actually, I wrote the dream down at 5.30 in the morning because I had so much adrenaline when I woke up that I couldn't go back to sleep, so I wrote the dream down, and I also thought, oh my gosh, I want Stefan to analyze this dream, and so that's the other reason I wanted to write it down.
	But I actually, my boyfriend read the dream.
	I wrote it down, and I told him about it, and I let him read it.
	And so we have had a pretty good discussion about it.
	He gets pretty upset around his mom, even talking about her, so that can be a little bit difficult, but he's willing to talk about it in therapy also.
	Fantastic. Fantastic.
	And so, yeah, so, you know, if...
	Would you say that, I mean, obviously, if he got beaten and stuff, there's going to be a lot of anger and humiliation and pain.
	How close do you think he is to being in touch with that, or is he in touch with that?
	No, he does know that he has a lot of rage around his parents.
	And it's affected our relationship, which is another reason that we've both been in counseling.
	But, I mean, I think he's pretty...
	He's pretty open to looking at himself and figuring this all out, which is really good for me.
	Yeah, that's great. That's great.
	And so I think your dream may be warning you that if he gets in touch with the real anger about how he was treated as a child, that his desire may be for vengeance, to rail against his parents and so on.
	And that's a phase that's, you know, I think, Lord knows, I understand it.
	I really do. But, you know, true freedom is past vengeance.
	If you have vengeance against people who've wronged you, you know, they're still kind of controlling you, right?
	And it's a great emotion to work through, but people want to act it out, and then they just get enmeshed again.
	So anyway, I really want to keep moving, and I'm sorry that we can't spend more time on it, but I really, really want to thank you for bringing the dream up.
	It's a very intimate and obviously personal thing to bring up, and I really, really appreciate your openness and honesty in this call.
	Well, thank you so much for taking my call, and I'll sign off.
	My pleasure, and if you do get a chance, drop me a line.
	Let me know how it's going. Okay, thanks, Stefan.
	All right, take care. Bye-bye.
	Next up, we have Ali.
	Ali Oxenfree, how are you, my friend?
	Great, how are you doing? How are you hearing me?
	Ooh, that is a cell phone, if I've ever heard one.
	No, it's actually my laptop mic.
	Oh, that's better. Okay, sorry, go ahead.
	You're right. So my question for you today was, I was talking to my mom, I was having a little political dialogue, and we were talking about tobacco companies and the fact that, you know, the government's forcing them for the longest time to advertise against themselves,
	you know, putting, like, pictures of, you know, like, you know, And what do you think?
	Well, it's tough for me because I feel like if they hadn't been doing that, if tobacco companies were allowed to skew data and research, that most people today would be completely ignorant.
	Well, not completely, but for the most part, the majority of people wouldn't know that tobacco is really bad for you.
	So I'm thinking, you know, it's whether it's better to violate the rights of tobacco companies and do it or to respect their rights and hope for the best.
	Well, I would be happy if the US stopped subsidizing tobacco.
	I think that would be great.
	So, for instance, tobacco subsidies in the US, it was like over a billion dollars over the past sort of 15, 17 years.
	1.1 billion dollars.
	I think if the government would stop subsidizing tobacco farmers, I think that would be a fine thing.
	Because imagine, people whose wife died of lung cancer from smoking cigarettes is now forced to pay for the subsidization of the growing of tobacco.
	So I think that would be great.
	Now, as far as advertising goes, it certainly is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	To force someone to advertise against his or her own product.
	That is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	If you sell a pack of cigarettes and you don't have a picture of a diseased lung on it, that is not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	If you sell a pack of cigarettes with the printed claim on it that it is really good for your heart and your lungs, then that is fraud and that would be punished accordingly, like any false claim.
	Any false claim. If you sell, I don't know, fish oil and say, this is really, really good for your pimples if you rub it in.
	I don't know if it is. I assume it's not.
	And then you're making false claims and you would be subject to complaints from people in the marketplace who had bought your product based upon its stated claims and found that those stated claims were false.
	So I would much rather let...
	Let the free market deal with this.
	Anybody who made false claims would be subject to sanctions for those false claims, for fraud claims, and also would be putting the legitimacy of their business at risk and would probably be toasting their business completely.
	And not have the government involved because, of course, the government subsidies simply stimulate more tobacco than would otherwise be provided.
	And the other thing, too, of course, is that the government has become so addicted to taxes on alcohol and tobacco.
	People say, well, how come pot is illegal and alcohol and tobacco aren't?
	Well, the simple and basic reason is that the government gets a lot of revenue from the latter and not from the former.
	In a free society, it would not be illegal to avoid putting horrible images on your product, but there would be sanctions, economic and perhaps even further sanctions, against making false claims for your product, because that is, of course, fraud.
	Does that help at all?
	The tobacco companies have a long history of skewing information in their favor and they pay research groups to search for specific information that helps their cause or makes it appear that their products aren't harmful.
	So how do you regulate that?
	You have to understand that the reason that tobacco companies do that It's because tobacco executives will never lose a penny if that's false, because they hide behind the status shield called a corporation.
	A corporation is a legal fiction invented by the state To give a get out of jail free card to all the rich bastards on the planet.
	That's a very important thing to remember.
	A corporation has nothing whatsoever to do with a free market.
	A corporation is a reward given to the rich in return for political favoritism and for corporate taxation.
	And so... If tobacco executives lied, and they're in a free market society, first of all, in a free market society, there'd be almost no smokers, because smoking is directly correlated to child abuse.
	And the more people are abused as children, the more likely they are to end up as smokers.
	We're only going to get a free society when children are almost never abused, and therefore there'd be almost no cigarettes in that free society, the same way there'd be almost no drug abuse.
	No alcoholism and so on.
	Almost no promiscuity and STDs.
	This is all the unholy flowers that come out of the bloody soil of child abuse.
	But let's say that it was the same as it is now, but no corporatism.
	Well, then if you made a million dollars as an executive during a time where you put out false claims that got people killed, then You would be sued without the legal shield of the corporation.
	And that means that people would take your house, they would take your car, they would take your savings, they would take the money you'd put aside for your children's education, and they would quite possibly take your liberty by banning you from interacting economically with society until you paid restitution.
	I'm pretty sure the tobacco executives unshielded by the legal bullshit called the corporation, the get-out-of-jail-free card that is for the very richest members of society that is not available to any of the poor people, that those people would think damn twice about lying to people about products that killed them if they were personally liable for those things, which they're not now because of this ridiculous, horrible, evil legal shield called the corporation.
	So I think it would be quite different.
	Does that make any sense? Right, yeah, I understand.
	And I have another question for you.
	How will companies in a stateless society, how will companies be held accountable for their products and services, for the safety of their products and services by the public?
	Because in your previous talks, you talked about social ostracism.
	My mom gave me a pretty compelling statement saying that the majority of people are completely apathetic about the safety of the products that they use.
	They just don't care.
	Or they assume that people higher up than them will be taking care of them.
	So how do you think that social ostracism can be used When the majority of people are completely apathetic.
	Well, but let's go back a little bit, right?
	So your mom says that people are apathetic about the safety of the products.
	But the reason for that is because they assume the government is taking care of it, right?
	So let's look at a bang.
	I draw my bank before and I'm sure I'll bang again.
	Let's look at psychotropic drugs, right?
	So these drugs, at least according to the experts I've talked to and the research that I've done, are dangerous and destructive and are prescribed massively to children.
	And people give these drugs to their kids because they say, well, the FDA has approved them, the government has approved them, the doctor has prescribed them, the doctor is regulated, the doctor has an association, the doctor is licensed, the pharmacist is licensed, so wouldn't you know everything's just fine?
	And so the government has given a false sense of security.
	For the safety of these terrible drugs.
	And so they're apathetic because they assume it's taken care of.
	Like the same reason that people don't give much of a shit about the stability of their banks anymore because of federal deposit insurance, which ensures people's deposits up to a fixed amount of money and so on.
	And so people are, we can't get rid of that because people are apathetic about the safety of their banks or the safety of drugs or the safety of whatever, whatever, the cars.
	Because the government's regulating it, so they assume that it's taken care of, so they're indifferent.
	In a free society, there would not be that assumption, that it's all just magically taken care of, which of course it's not.
	And so, you know, what I would ask your mom or what I would ask you is, what would you like for a company to do to ensure that you're Cold medicine was safe.
	What would you want the company to do?
	And you can ask this a real question because you will be deciding that in a free society.
	Well, I mean, you talked about it before.
	You talked about companies keeping each other in check.
	They actually have an incentive to...
	To run ad campaigns against other companies pointing out their flaws, pointing out what they did that this company doesn't do.
	They would buy up a bunch of the cold...
	The ABC company would buy up XYZ company's hoard of pills and run them through every conceivable test to find out whatever there was that was bad in it.
	And if they found anything bad, they would advertise that like crazy.
	They would all check on each other, because they would just blow somebody out of the water.
	If it turned out there was some bad crap, you know, if they had cold medicine with some addictive qualities that was damaging, then they would advertise that and say, hey, do you know what we found in this company's stuff?
	You wouldn't believe it, X, Y, and Z, right?
	Or, you know, you would find some trusted third party and say, you know, if they've got the seal of approval, then I know it's safe or whatever.
	And that's different from the government, right?
	Because in the government, if the FDA approves a drug that proves problematic, nobody in the FDA loses their jobs.
	Nobody in the government loses their jobs if they fail to protect the consumer, but that's very different from people who are running a private company who will lose their investment, their careers, their jobs, and possibly their liberties if they do stuff that's wrong.
	And so it's an entirely different environment.
	Lots of people will be checking on the quality of everything.
	And there won't be this false sense of security that occurs.
	And the other thing too, of course, is that there's absolutely nothing wrong with a risk that is freely and knowingly chosen.
	There is nothing wrong with a risk that is freely and knowingly chosen.
	Hey, skiing is dangerous.
	Just ask Sonny Bono in the poll.
	Skiing is dangerous.
	Horse riding is dangerous.
	Just ask Christopher Reeve. And, well, I guess you can't ask either of those people, but they're very dangerous.
	But it's freely chosen.
	And if people want to, if they're dying from some horrible illness and they want to do some experimental cure and they're fully apprised of the risks, great.
	Of course, they don't have the choice to do that for the most part now, at least not in their country of origin because it's illegal.
	But, you know, if death is coming and you want to try to roll from the horse even though you don't know where you're going to land, then I think that's a fine thing to do and people should be free to do that if they want it.
	They know the risks. So, So yeah, those would be my answers, and I guarantee you it would be a whole lot safer than it is right now.
	That makes sense. Yeah, we said 40% of the addictive and destructive drugs that are consumed in America come from perfectly legal sources.
	So how's that working out?
	Yeah, that makes sense. And I've got one last question for you, Stefan.
	Sure. One other thing we talked about is national defense in a stateless society, specifically border patrol.
	Who would pay for the border patrol in America if there was no government to do it?
	What do you mean by border patrol?
	Well, I mean, there's constantly people coming in, especially drug cartels, running guns, drugs through the border.
	And people are dying as a result of it.
	And how do you create a defensive army in a stateless society?
	Okay. I'm afraid I must say that you are rather green and you're in your salad days of stateless thinking, which is fine, but of course there are only people running drugs because drugs are illegal, right?
	So in a stateless society, Drugs are not going to be illegal because there's no centralized authority that enforces these laws for the benefit of some at the expense of many.
	You understand that it is the cigarette and alcohol companies that do a lot of funding for the anti-drug war because they don't want the competition of drugs that in many ways are safer.
	Marijuana is far safer than alcohol for people because it's a mellower and not something that turns bad drunks even better.
	So, yeah, these things aren't going to be illegal.
	You know, if I live in a state of society and someone wants to come and live in a state of society, fuck, great.
	Have them come. I don't care. What do I care?
	I got my house. I got my job.
	I got my friends. I got my family.
	I don't care if somebody goes and buys my house who comes from Mexico.
	I don't care. Great.
	Fantastic. Go for it. I don't care.
	As far as national defense goes...
	I've had good criticism.
	I think very good criticism about some of my earlier ideas about, you know, just get a couple of nukes and you're set.
	Because what people have said is that if you have nukes as a deterrent, it means that you must be prepared to use them.
	And then if you go nuke some other country, you'll be killing a lot of innocent children.
	And that is a very, very good argument.
	And I actually have changed my ideas about that based upon that very good argument.
	I would personally not fund Nukes because of the indiscriminate nature of that.
	You know, there are many other options.
	Assassination of a warlike foreign leader is something that could be conceived of in a future society.
	Or, you know, other things that could be done to minimize the possibility of invasion.
	I also don't think that there'd be much point invading A free society because there would be no tax structure to take over.
	When you go to invade, like if you go and take over a farm, it's because you want to You want to get all the crops, right?
	You don't go and invade and take over a stretch of completely wild wood and swampland because you've got to do a huge amount of work just to turn it civilized.
	And if you want to take over a free society, you don't know who's armed, you don't know what weapons they've got, you don't know what booby traps there are, there's no sort of you-don't-shoot-my-leaders-I-don't-shoot-your-leaders kind of pact as there is at the moment between leaders of countries.
	And there's no tax structure to take over, so it's a huge mess and it's sort of pointless.
	To go in. And I think we can see this, I mean, just in terms of Iraq, that you have these insurgents who have effectively defeated, you know, the biggest, largest, most powerful army the world has ever seen, though they've been, you know, very lightly armed and very ill-equipped and ill-trained and so on.
	And so I don't think it'll be a big deal.
	I think I'm sort of backing off the new thing.
	I think that argument has been really, really good and is very compelling.
	And so I would be open to, you know, six million ideas that entrepreneurs would have about how to repel invasion, should invasion ever be threatened.
	And I would just look upon the array of options put forward and choose one.
	And I would hope that there would be one that would be more morally acceptable.
	For defense than nukes, which I think does have the problem of unjustly incinerating the innocent.
	And so, yeah, so that would be my response, if that makes any sense.
	It kind of surprises me that you'd be an advocate, you know, in the past even, of using nukes.
	Well, sorry, but empirically they've worked, right?
	Empirically they've worked. And that's why I was advocating them.
	And nobody gets invaded who's a nuclear power.
	You may have proxy wars like Argentina or Korea or Vietnam or whatever, but you don't have direct conflict.
	So it works. I would just, you know, and if that was the only option that did work, I would fund it.
	But I would hope that there would be other options that would work because of the innocence problem.
	Right. So you said entrepreneurs would find a way, you know, the free market would find a way to, quote-unquote, repel invasion.
	Who would sponsor that?
	Who would fund that? I mean, I, for one, in a stateless society, I'm not generous enough to give my money to, you know, defend this country.
	Just, you know, just for an example, I mean, if there was a company that said, you know, we'll take $2 from every person and not all of you will be, doesn't it?
	Right. Well, then you would have to be comfortable with that being publicly known, right?
	I don't know if I follow that.
	What do you mean? Well, I mean, I understand the free rider problem.
	I mean, obviously the free rider problem is not solved by the state because they need to turn politicians and their dependents and the public sector unions into free riders.
	But what I would do, let's say that there was a need for national defense, then what I would do is if I were a national defense guy, is with the permission of my clients, I would publish their name on a website or have it pingable in some secret database by authorized other companies,
	right? And what would happen is then, you know, if you want to go for a job or you want to go for credit or you want to go to a mortgage, then part of that process may be, hey, I wonder if you're paying for national defense and it's secured, it's encrypted and whatever.
	I mean, however you keep that anonymous or not completely anonymous, but there would be some sort of code and there would be a pooled database of all the defense agencies that would ping back and say, yes, this guy is funding for national defense.
	Now, if there was, um, uh, if it was generally A positive thing in society to pay your two bucks for national defense, and if you didn't, you were considered a cheap-ass freeloader, then there would be social pressure to do that.
	It would be impossible to remain completely anonymous unless you chose to do so in that situation.
	And then if lots of people wanted that, then employers might not hire you if you didn't contribute to national defense.
	That would be a perfectly free choice to do that, right?
	Some credit card companies would say, listen, we give discounts to people.
	Who contribute to national defense, and we don't sign contracts with people who don't.
	And it would simply be enforced that way, because it would be very hard.
	You couldn't hide that you didn't, because you wouldn't have your name in some secret-ass database of people who are contributing to national defense, and you would probably face some negative repercussions.
	Now, if it was a very serious and big issue for you, then you would be willing to accept those negative repercussions, but I think most people, it would be like tipping a waiter.
	You just kind of do it, even if you're never coming back to that tent.
	Does that make any sense?
	That's really interesting.
	I really appreciate that. My mom has the funniest look on her face right now.
	Well, first of all, if she's listening, hi.
	I think it's completely fantastic.
	I just think it's completely delightful that you guys are having conversations about this.
	I mean, you definitely get Cool Mom of the Year Award.
	I know it's early in the year.
	It's only March. But I think you've got it.
	You've taken it without a doubt.
	And if I had some kind of Cool Mom of the Year Award statuette, I would definitely send it over.
	But I think it's just completely fantastic that you're having these conversations with your son.
	And I must admit, more than a smidgen of envy.
	So I think that's great.
	Good for you. Thanks, Evan.
	That was great. You're welcome.
	You're welcome. See, doesn't she even sound cool?
	I bet you she's a motorcycle jacket, glasses, like big, big Ray-Bans.
	Yeah, tattoos. Tattoos, motorbikes.
	Yeah, yeah. Let's go with the anarchist stereotype.
	No, no, no. You're arguing. You'll get there.
	But I think that's great.
	Good for you. Congratulations. Thanks a lot.
	All right. Take care. Take care.
	I'm sorry, we had a cool mom contest going up.
	A cool mom. Oh, mom.
	Mom's the word. That's M-U-M. That means she's coming from the rainier side of the pond.
	All right. Sorry. Next we have?
	Next we have James Cox.
	Hey, Stefan. How are you doing?
	I'm very well. How are you doing?
	I'm doing good. Long time to talk.
	How are you? I'm doing fine.
	You know we met in New Hampshire briefly, right?
	Oh yeah, I remember, but it was like a real catch, catch again, fly by.
	Yeah, it was like a photograph.
	I wanted to stick around.
	Well, I did stick around.
	I listened to the show, but then I had to go do something else.
	I tried to find you to have a chat, but I came to your roast, which was fun.
	Anyway, I hung out with Larkin for a little bit and had some fun with him.
	I wish you could have been part of the conversation.
	It was myself, James Babb, and...
	George Donnelly, and it was pretty good.
	We had a pretty good conversation.
	Some of it's on video.
	It's on YouTube somewhere.
	Okay. Let's look here.
	I want to talk to you about the first call you had about the Ron Paul and Steph's like saying, oh no, not the Ron Paul thing again, please.
	I can't wait till November, man.
	I really can't. I really can't.
	Spare the raft, please!
	Spare the raft! It's so close. All I've got is another, what, seven months to go, six months to go, and it's like, woohoo!
	Probably not even that long. But, yeah, I mean, it's the last lap of the marathon, and, you know, good for Ron Paul to keep it interesting, but go ahead.
	All right, so, do you agree that all ill roads are built on good intentions?
	No, I don't agree with that.
	I think that some people pretend to have good intentions, but I think that some people, you know, like, I mean, so somebody who's a con man is going to pretend to have good intentions while he has bad intentions.
	He's just going to pretend to have good intentions.
	Okay. Here's my thought, basically, being an anarchist and rejecting authority, because, you know, Ron Paul is an authority figure.
	You'd agree with that, right?
	Ron Paul is an authority figure?
	Yeah, I could see that. Okay, so you agree with that.
	Okay, so my point of view on this is, meaning well doesn't give Ron Paul the right to march into my house and tell me how to live.
	Just because he means good doesn't give him the right to control my life.
	Yeah, but wouldn't Ron Paul argue that he is exactly in agreement with you, and he's doing everything he can in his power to stop the government from doing just that?
	No, because he's stealing money, not just from me, but other people.
	It's like me asking you, if you had a friend that hung out on robbing people, even though your friend didn't take part in robbing people, hurting people, but your friend willingly took the money, would you still want to be associated?
	Would you still want to have that person as a friend?
	No. I rest my case.
	Well, and of course the reality is that Ron Paul's constituents and Ron Paul is only...
	The argument seems to be very clear that Ron Paul's constituents vote him into power so that they can get all their hands on the money that he sends their way.
	Now he says, well, the money is already earmarked.
	It's going to be spent anyway. But if you want people to sacrifice, you have to lead by example.
	You have to lead by examples.
	The problem I have with libertarian academics and people who just say, well, other people should subject themselves to the free market.
	Ron Paul is asking people to make massive, massive sacrifices.
	He's asking people to give up guaranteed pensions.
	He's going to ask people to lose their entire careers as he privatizes, as he cuts government spending and so on.
	He needs to make that clear in his own district first, to ask his own constituents to make those sacrifices first before telling everyone else.
	There's no point sending all this money back to your own constituents and then saying everyone else needs to tighten their belt.
	And that would sort of be my argument.
	But I think, you know, he's obviously a way better politician than I could ever dream of being.
	And so he hasn't taken that course.
	And I think that means he knows that he's not going to get elected unless he sends money back to his constituents.
	That's what he's being elected for.
	And he's got, you know, as much, if not more, pork barrel projects going on in his own district as anyone else, just like, what is it, a couple of billion bucks that the Tea Party has all sent back to their own districts after lobbying hard to get that money.
	It's, you know, I feel sympathy for that.
	That's the way the system is set up.
	But demanding general sacrifice while excluding your own supporters from that need is about as ridiculous as free market economists saying, we need more free market, but don't you dare touch my tenure.
	But don't you own yourself, right?
	You own yourself, right? Yes.
	Okay, so when one understands that he owns himself, he owes no allegiance to any supposed master and needs no legislative permission to be free, correct? Well, I mean, needs no legislative permission to be free.
	Well, unfortunately, in a state, you kind of need that, because if they decide you're not free, they can make you not free very quickly, right?
	I understand that, but isn't it contradictory?
	I mean, here we have a guy that's on a pedestal preaching freedom and, you know, saying this down the other, but on the other hand, he's a legislator.
	Legislators legislate laws.
	Laws are man-made, and they're put in place to control people.
	Well, but his argument, I don't know.
	I'm guessing. I obviously can't speak for Ron Paul.
	I can barely even speak for myself sometimes.
	But I'm sure Ron Paul or his supporters would say that the man who holds up a piece of wood and blocks the knife that's coming at you, that's being thrown by some circus performer, is doing you a service.
	And that his goal is to block the legislation that is making you less free and hopefully roll back or repeal it if at all possible.
	I still just seem to think that voting for the lesser of evil is still evil.
	And, you know, he's part of a criminal gang that, you know, uses coercion, as you know, to steal money from people to do what they want.
	And what's to say that, you know, even if Ron Paul did get the country back to, as most people say, if only we could get back to how the founding fathers had it.
	And they don't do their history.
	They don't understand that Washington, during the Whiskey Rebellion, went and used force against the people in Pennsylvania for taxes.
	Thinking about this, once he's gone, once he's done his four or eight years, the power is going to end up back in the hands of somebody else.
	Only to do evil, right?
	Yeah, look, I mean, I just look at things empirically, James, as you know, and I say, okay, so this man claims that he can reduce the size of government and cut spending.
	So I say, okay, well, where does he have the most authority?
	Well, he has the most authority in his own district.
	Has he been able to reduce the size of government and cut spending in his own district?
	No, it's gone up. It's like, okay, that's all I need to know.
	You know, the idea that there's going to be some magical difference once he becomes president is, you know, it's ridiculous.
	If somebody says to me they can lift 50 pounds, I give them a five pound weight and see if they can lift it.
	If they can't lift that, I don't care about the 50 pounds because I know it's bullshit.
	If the guy can't even lift the 50 pounds of cutting government in his own district, then there's no reason to believe that he can do it at the huge monster federal government level.
	I mean, it's a ridiculous thing to even imagine to believe.
	But there lies the word, right?
	Authority. There is no authority but yourself.
	And when people start to believe that, when people start to reject the state instead of promoting it by saying, yeah, encourage your friends to vote for Ron Paul and do this and do that, get the system going, knowing that what happened last time was that I know people that were going to vote for Ron Paul and when he never got the nomination, the majority of those people went and voted for this asshole that's in power now.
	Right, right. Yeah, look, I mean, I'm not anti-state.
	Statelessness is the same as godlessness.
	It doesn't mean that you're anti-god, because you can't be anti-things that don't exist.
	You can't be anti-state. State doesn't exist.
	And I just, I cannot spend my life being consumed against, railing against something that A, doesn't exist, that B, is a complete fantasy in people's heads, and C, which I can't control through reason and evidence because most people are statistically immune to reason and evidence.
	So I'm simply not going to bang my head against a foggy wall that falls over a cliff for the rest of my life.
	I'm going to live as if there's no government as best I can and prove that it works that way.
	And that's why I can't follow politics.
	Occasionally, if I'm watching The Daily Show, they'll have some bit on politics.
	It's funny. But I just can't follow it any more than I can go through the tortured anti-intellectual meanderings of medieval Catholic scholastics.
	I mean, if you don't believe the paradigm, you can't care about the details.
	I'm with you there. I can't watch it either.
	You know, people start talking to me about politics and politicians and, you know, Rick Santorum's done this and Newt Gingrich is doing that.
	I don't want to get involved in the conversation.
	I just, you know, I get up and walk away because, yeah, it's right what you're saying.
	It is a superstition that people are believing in, just like religion is.
	You know, government is the new religion.
	And I think that...
	Well, it's like if you're genuinely a non-believer in superstitions, then somebody wants to draw you into a conversation about which apostles' teaching should we focus on.
	It's like, I'm sorry, I mean, I don't even know where to begin with my lack of interest in any of that stuff.
	Yeah, I don't.
	It infuriates me when I, you know, start...
	Hearing what these people that claim to have authority over us are saying and what laws they're going to pass when they get into power and what they're going to do.
	And, you know, I just don't want to have no part of that conversation.
	And I think going to that and saying, I think you're on the right track most definitely with talking about, you know, teaching about nonviolence Teaching our children about, you know, nonviolence, not hitting children, not obeying.
	And I think that the other thing that we should be looking at is getting people to refuse.
	Refuse the system.
	Because if we get enough people to refuse, and then when I mean refusal, I mean full refusal, like don't pay taxes, you know, practice agorism with one another instead of You know, using Federal Reserve currency, trade with one another, trade your services for something.
	I think only when we go down that path and ignore it, if we get enough people to wake up and fully understand that there is no authority but yourself, if no one obeys, nobody rules, then we'll start to see some change, some real change. Yeah, I mean, I certainly don't have any opposition to that.
	I don't think you'll ever get enough people to do that because too many people are still enmeshed and require the system in order to function because of various laws, licenses, and regulations that have been put in place.
	You know, if you want to be a doctor and that's your dream, then there's the hoops you've got to jump through.
	You just can't go and start operating on people in your shed.
	But I think for some people, I think it's a great Great solution.
	If you can legally find ways to barter and trade, I think that's fine.
	I don't think it's particularly how things are going to change.
	We need to climb a hill.
	Unfortunately, we have a culture at the moment that, through churches, schools and many parents, breaks the legs of children.
	And so we say, well, how are we going to get up this hill?
	Well, the first thing we have to do is stop breaking the legs of children.
	And then we can start to think about how we might climb the hill.
	But right now, given how many people come out of childhood so messed up, and given how nine-tenths of parents are still hitting their children, and the public school is wretched for children, and superstition of religion is still terrifying children, you know, saying where could we go when all our legs are broken doesn't mean anything.
	All we've got to say is, okay, first thing we've got to do, let's stop breaking the legs of our kids.
	Let's stop breaking their minds.
	With superstition, violence, bullying, and fear.
	And then, you know, we can go wherever we want.
	But right now, we're not even in a position to start drawing on a map.
	I just think that the authority thing, if we can get the message across that there is no authority but yourself, that to reject anybody that claims to have authority over you, And that could be parents and the government school system and everything like that.
	It has everything to do with the way that society is today.
	And I think that coming the up-and-coming economic collapse, I think that more people will have to start to take control of their own lives and not...
	Rely on others and the system and supermarkets to that matter of fact because I think things are going to get a lot worse than what they already are before they get any better.
	I think that's probably some truth in that.
	I'm sorry, we've got two more callers, so we're going to move on.
	I just wanted to mention that words like authority can be tricky because there are people who have authority over me.
	My wife, my daughter, and my dentist, and my tailor.
	I don't have a tailor, but if I was stylish, I would have a tailor who would have authority over me.
	And those people have authority.
	It doesn't matter about authority or left or right or libertarian or fascistic or communistic or agoristic.
	All that matters is, is there a gun in the room or not?
	Is there violence or not?
	I am not anti-state.
	I am anti-violence.
	And if you're anti-violence and not anti-state, then you look at where the most violence is occurring that people have the most control over, and that's in parenting.
	So if we can move on to the next caller, thank you so much for calling it.
	It was great to hear from you again. All right, thanks.
	Next up, we have Sergio.
	Hey, Steph. How are you doing?
	Not so good.
	I've got some personal issues that I want to bring up in relation to integrity.
	Shoot. I've got some pretty big issues with integrity.
	It's just been a mess for quite some time.
	Basically, I'm constantly late for delivering projects.
	And I do all these things to try and make up for it, like spending more time to make the project better or whatever, but at the end of the day it's just...
	It feels like a lot of my time is spent just judging myself for having a lack of integrity and at the same time cleaning up, cleaning up, and not really ever...
	It feels like I'm in debt, basically, with my integrity.
	And I just don't know what it's going to take for me to...
	How I can think about it in a different way that's going to get me to have a higher standard of integrity.
	And I was wondering if I could have some of your advice.
	Sure, I can try and help.
	What's the biggest issue with you in terms of integrity at the moment?
	Work and timing.
	It's always about, I'll do something, like people can rely on me to get things done, but there's no, like it'll get done when I say it gets done, not when they actually want it done by, not when I promised.
	Alright, so let's just talk about work and commitment.
	So let me ask you this.
	When you were a child...
	This is my four-word sentence that opens up all these things.
	So when you were a child, when you were asked for a commitment, what was the environment like?
	It... In school, I'll give you school first because I think it's the closest.
	I would say I was going to do something, but I never really had to try that hard.
	I could study at the last minute and still do pretty well.
	Sorry, that's a deadline, not a commitment.
	So you have a deadline called an exam and you say you didn't need to study that much for it because you were really good at it and so on, right?
	Okay, I remember just at the beginning of every semester, every term, I would say, this semester I'm going to study really hard and I'd feel very proud of myself and I wouldn't keep that promise to myself at all.
	Okay, so why would you want to study really hard?
	Things like that. To be good.
	To get good grades.
	And why did you want to get good grades?
	So that I could be smart, basically.
	It was just the idea that I wanted to really be smart.
	And why did you think that getting good grades would mean that you were smart?
	It was like a measurement of it.
	This would be like in primary school.
	So... Yeah.
	Alright, so the thing is, if you get all A's, then you're smart, right?
	Yeah, exactly. And why did you want to be thought of as smart, or why did you want to think of yourself as smart?
	I had been praised for being smart when I was young.
	Not a huge amount, but sometimes by my mom, and also by the teachers at school.
	And I really liked that feeling.
	Right. And do you remember what else you were praised for as a child?
	Being creative and being cute when I was really young.
	Right. Okay, so when you were home, your parents or parents would require a commitment from you, right?
	At times? Yes, sometimes.
	So typically chores and that kind of thing.
	Right, okay. And in what way was this commitment?
	What was this commitment transaction?
	How did it look? What was it like?
	Typically, we had a housekeeper.
	And so I actually was able to...
	Well, essentially, I was able to get away with not doing things.
	Okay, sorry. You're not even committing to this conversation as yet.
	Okay, I can see the problem.
	I'm asking you...
	When your mother would get a commitment from you, how would that interaction look like?
	What would it be like? Okay.
	She would say, Sergio, please clean your room.
	And I'd say, yeah, yeah, sure.
	And I'd be absentmindedly.
	I'd be focused on something else at the time.
	And I wouldn't really be engaged in the commitment.
	But I'd be like, yeah, sure, I'll get it done.
	Okay, but why would you say yes?
	Why would you say yes to that? It just seemed like it was...
	I was like, yeah, sure, I could do that.
	But when it came time to doing it...
	Repeating it doesn't give me any more insight.
	I said yes. Why did you say yes?
	Well, I just said yes. That doesn't actually add anything to my knowledge pile.
	So back up the dump truck of openness and dump it on me.
	So why would you say yes in the moment?
	I could tell that it would be unreasonable for me not to.
	It seemed like a reasonable request.
	Okay, so did you do it because it was reasonable or because it was easier in the moment?
	I think probably because it was, I think it was just, yeah, it was reasonable, sorry, it was easier in the moment.
	And also, actually, I think it was also just because I felt like it wasn't like, I think partially part of it was like, yeah, sure, I'll get you off my back.
	I think that was another aspect of it.
	Right. Now, you know, as a parent, you know, Isabella, of course, like all children, likes to take out and play with her toys.
	She doesn't like to put them back, right?
	And so her radical solution, I know she's unique in this, is for her to say, Daddy, you do it.
	You put them back.
	I don't want to. And it's like, I don't want to either.
	So what are we going to do? Right?
	Because you understand To not do what is reasonable in a relationship is unempathetic.
	Yeah, I can say that.
	Right, so if you don't tidy up your room, someone else has to.
	If you don't put the dishes away, if you don't clean up your own toys, somebody else has to.
	Yeah, and look, that is something that I got, even from a fairly young age.
	But I didn't...
	It was kind of like I... It wasn't really an issue for me that some of these things weren't getting done in terms of cutting out my room or whatever.
	But it was very important for other people that they get done.
	But it wasn't important to you, right?
	No, no, not at all. Now, your room is kind of a special case, right?
	Like, kids, probably since we started putting stuff in caves, have used the same argument, which is, it's my room, it's my space, why do you care if it's messy?
	Just close the door, right?
	And the moms or the dads say, no, it needs to be tidied up, it needs to be cleaned or whatever, right?
	Mm-hmm. And the kids will say, yeah, okay, I can understand in a common area.
	I'm not going to leave my roller skates on the stairs because people can trip.
	But this is my room. What does it matter if my bed's not made?
	I don't want to make it. I don't care to make it.
	I'm just going to make it messy again when I go to bed.
	So I don't want it.
	So my question is, if it wasn't important to you, but it was important to your mom, Why didn't or couldn't you have that conversation about these differences of opinion?
	In other words, why did you appease with no intention or little intention of follow-through, which is certainly not solving the problem, right?
	It's just postponing the problem a little bit.
	Because then she's going to get frustrated that your room isn't getting cleaned, that she's going to end up nagging you, you're going to end up resentful.
	And instead of discussing these different value systems, which is not good and evil, right?
	These are just aesthetic preferences.
	Some people are okay with mess, and moms are not.
	To get, you know, really stereotypical about it.
	Teenage boys don't care about the mess, and moms really do, right?
	Well, it's pretty much at the point where I can actually only remember back to my mom already being frustrated.
	So it was like this thing, Sergio, you're being inconsiderate.
	Sergio, what do you think?
	You're like a king and where are your servants?
	Things like that. Sorry, you're breaking up a little bit.
	I just want to point out that puts the moral responsibility on you completely, right?
	And another way, I would argue a better way for a parent to approach that, is to say, well, you said you would clean up your room, you haven't cleaned up your room, so let's talk about this.
	Because what that means is that you don't want to clean up your room.
	You know, if your favorite band was in town and your mom reminded you you needed to get ready for the concert and you'd forgotten, you'd jump up and do it, right?
	And so, what it would mean, if I was a parent, and I'm sure I will have these conversations, I know I've already had some of them, and Isabella makes a commitment and doesn't follow through in it, what it means is that she did not want to talk in the moment about our differences of values.
	That she did not agree with the commitment she was making, but she did not want to or feel comfortable in the moment expressing her disagreement with me about these values.
	Does that make sense? She appeased me rather than talk openly about a difference of values.
	Yes. The important conversation is about the difference of values.
	I'm so sorry to interrupt. Please go ahead.
	Oh no, that's it.
	That is actually the exact pattern that I see that's carried through.
	It's an appeasement.
	Even with clients I feel like it's an appeasement.
	In fact, with everything, I feel like it's an appeasement of someone else's standard.
	So my question is, why couldn't you have an honest conversation with your mom about your differences in values?
	And I understand, I'm not blaming you, I'm not blaming your mom, I'm just asking that question.
	Why would you choose appeasement, which harms the relationship, rather than honesty, which helps the relationship, right?
	I think it was just not a language.
	It just wasn't a way that we communicated.
	That's not how we would have had a conversation about it.
	I would have said some reason why I think I shouldn't do it or shouldn't do it right now.
	I'd come up with some kind of rationalization or reason.
	We're just not a counter-argument.
	And I felt free to do that, but in terms of that other style of communication that you just outlined before, we didn't do that.
	Yeah, like saying, Mom, it seems really important to you that my room be clean, but it doesn't feel important to me.
	And I respect our relationship too much to just appease you, to just do what...
	You say rather than do something that I think is good or reasonable or useful or helpful.
	If I just obey you, I become empty.
	I'm not actually in the relationship anymore.
	I'm just like a vacuum that you push around to clean the rug, so to speak.
	I'm not saying that you're treating me like that.
	I'm just saying that if I were to obey you when I disagreed with you, that would not be good for our relationship.
	And I want, you know, I want quality relationships.
	I mean, me as staff, that's all I want from people is quality relationships.
	And, you know, clearly appeasement and avoidance and procrastination and frustration and resentment, these do not add up to quality relationships in the long run.
	And so, yeah, I mean, you know, if my wife wants me to do something and I don't agree with it, I won't do it because she wants me to do it.
	And I would certainly hope she would never do it, and I don't think she ever has, even if I wanted her to in the moment.
	She won't do it just because.
	And Isabella won't do things because I tell her to.
	And I don't want her to do things because I tell her to.
	I want her to do things because she kind of understands.
	And that is a long process sometimes, and it takes time and so on.
	But that's because I'm fanatical about building the quality of the relationship.
	And now, of course, the first couple of years is the foundation for all of that.
	And if you appease people, you do so out of a lack of concern for the relationship.
	And again, I'm not blaming you, understand?
	I'm just saying that if that habit is there, and if on your mom's side...
	It was completely non-thinking, yeah.
	Yeah, yeah. And on your mom's side, if you want people to obey you who disagree with you, then you are also...
	relationship.
	Right?
	Because, I mean, if you think about the power, I mean, you know, this is a show also about politics, but if you think about that paradigm, I want you to obey me even if you don't agree with me.
	That is the essence of statism, right?
	Hmm.
	And that's why it seems to us because so many of us grow up in that, you know, don't do as I say, don't do as I do, do as I say.
	No backtalk, just do it, you know?
	Because, you know, parents get tired, or they get exasperated, or maybe they're just mean, I don't know.
	And they just, you know, just do it.
	And I can understand that impulse as a parent, of course, of course, you know?
	I mean, trying to get my daughter out the door is like trying to herd a cloud, you know, with a tennis racket.
	I mean, it can be quite maddening sometimes.
	You know, I have to remember, she's three, right?
	You don't know. Come back. Come back.
	Don't play with the butterflies. Come get your shoes on.
	No, it's not time for a cookie.
	Come get your other shoe on. I mean, you really have to keep her focused because she sadly has got the attention span of her father, so I can't really blame her for that.
	But yeah, the just do it thing, that is to philosophy as my philosophy is to running shoes.
	In other words, completely useless and counterproductive.
	Because the important thing is if you have a difference of opinion, In how things should be done in a household, in a business, in a relationship of any kind, and you care about the long-term health of that relationship, then you need to talk about the differences of opinion because that is how consensus is truly built.
	So I can roll the other person in why they should do it, why it would actually be something that, hey, like actually appeal to them as a better person or just a person who can get, how can I put it, Yeah, get them on board, not just say, come on, do this thing that you don't want to do.
	So, I mean, one of the things that I've played out of my head a couple of times, because I had the same conflicts, of course, with my mom when I was a teenager, was, you know, I generally suspected that my mom would be in a bad mood and would pick on my messy room to feel better, to level up or whatever. Or...
	If people were coming over and my room was messy and those people would see my messy room, that they would then judge my mother negatively and she didn't want that.
	Yeah, I guess that one.
	And if that is the motive for me cleaning my room, that my mother is afraid of social disapproval, that is not a good motive for cleaning a room.
	Because if your mom were to come to say to you and say, look, I don't care about your messy room, but Aunt Cecily is coming over and she's very judgmental, and if she sees your messy room, I'm never going to hear the end of it.
	You may have a conversation and say, you know, Mom, you may be a bit too dependent upon the negative opinions of other people, right?
	Before you wonder about why somebody thinks negatively, the first important thing is to ask, why do you even care about it, right?
	But there could be a very productive conversation, which is, why do you want my room to be clean?
	I mean, what a fascinating conversation to have with a parent.
	What is your motive for wanting my room to be clean?
	Well, you know, when my room wasn't clean, my parents would get mad at me, so it provokes anxiety in me when your room is messy.
	Well, that's not a good reason.
	Right? That's just the turtles all the way down.
	Why are you mad at me for my room being dirty?
	Because your parents were mad at you for your room being dirty.
	That doesn't answer anything right now.
	Well, maybe it's a social approval thing.
	Maybe it's a genuine concern that, you know, under all those messy clothes, you've got, you know, three slices of pizza and a blow-up doll.
	I don't know, right?
	I mean, or whatever, right?
	So there may be legitimate hygiene reasons.
	There may be whatever, right?
	But what an amazingly productive conversation to have about differences of opinion about how things should be done.
	I think, from memory, one of the clearest things about it for me was that every time it came up as something I was being asked to do, it seemed like it was being asked in a way that was assuming that I wouldn't have done it anyway.
	And I remember that really bugging me.
	It was the assumption that I wasn't the kind of person who would do it.
	Oh, so if I don't tell you to tidy up your room, you will never do it?
	Yes, that, yeah, as if it, yeah, it felt very much, it felt kind of patronizing and also just, yeah, it made me, it was kind of like a slight moral, just a slight moral criticism every time as well.
	Right, and the challenge then for the parent is not to say, well, if you don't do it, if I don't tell you to do it, you'll never do it.
	The challenge for the parent is to say, okay, how have I parented that these values have not been internalized by my son?
	And if a value has not been internalized by someone else, Nagging them about it, sure as shit is never going to internalize it for them, right?
	Because you're setting yourself up as the external source of motivation.
	That's a really abstract way of putting it.
	Does that make any sense? I think I know exactly what you mean.
	I get things done if there's someone breathing down my back.
	Yeah, you become inert, but people have to push you.
	And then people push you around saying, well, why don't you ever walk for yourself?
	It's like... You're pushing me around, right?
	I mean, you know, I'm never going to develop those skills.
	You keep pushing me around. You know, and this is the challenge that, I mean, as a parent, I have to say to myself, why is my daughter not putting her own toys away?
	Why have I not? I don't know.
	Again, I know she's only three, but this is where this stuff has to happen.
	So why is Isabella not putting her toys away?
	And my job as a parent is to find that out.
	And to help you understand that, you know, so she says, well, I don't want to put them away because it's not fun.
	It's like I fully understand that it's not fun for you to put them away.
	Do you think it's fun for me to put them away?
	And there's a pause, right? Because she knows.
	She knows immediately when she's being backed into a UBB corner.
	And she's like a cornered rat.
	I have to, you know, put on one of those oven mitts that you train Dalmatians with and German shepherds and police dogs, right?
	Because she knows exactly where things are going to go.
	Because if it's not fun for me and it's not fun for her, but she had the fun of playing with the toys, right?
	So you had the fun of playing with the toys, right?
	And I'll stack up some things saying this is all the positive fun.
	And so it's plus three to play with the toys and it's minus one.
	To put them away. You're still plus two.
	Whereas I didn't get the plus three of playing with the toys because I was cooking, but I now get the minus one, so you end up with plus three and I end up with minus one.
	Is that fair? No.
	Right, so it's just explaining to her and helping her to understand about that kind of...
	So she's still up ahead if she plays with the toys and puts them away, but if I put them away, she's ahead and I'm behind.
	And just sort of helping her to understand that, you know, that can't be sustainable.
	Said, well, how would you like it if I only did things that were fun for me and difficult for you?
	Right? And then she'll talk about, well, we went to the computer store yesterday and I didn't like that.
	You're absolutely right. You know, we'll talk about that.
	What a great conversation to have, right?
	Yeah. I've had a few interactions like that with my mom, but not in relation to this.
	It was a different thing.
	Just me thinking about how she would feel about something.
	But it wasn't really that common.
	Until you know why she's asking you to clean her room, then in a sense you're just doing it to make her feel better, which is just another way of doing it because she wants you to.
	And it also encourages people to pout if you don't do what they want, so that you'll do it to make them feel better.
	But no additional knowledge.
	Doing it because the empathy at the level of, well, my mom will be upset if I don't do it, is no different from, I'll do it because she's telling me to.
	It's still not on a shared value scale, and it's still without the understanding of why she's asking you to clean your room.
	I had no relation to the actual grand picture of why this was important at that time.
	To me, it wasn't at all, and I didn't see any reason for her why it was either.
	In hindsight, I can now, easily, but that's not where I was back then.
	Sorry, somebody just mentioned, could putting the toys away be made into a game, that it was fun?
	Well, yes, it certainly could be, and we've done that.
	I've certainly done that from time to time.
	But I don't want the requirement to be that she does something because it's fun, because there are times when we have to do stuff that isn't fun.
	And again, I know she's only three, so it's a very, very small proportion of her day.
	But I don't want that it's my job to make something fun for her in order to do it.
	Because again, I don't think that gives her any sense of proportionality and balance in relationships.
	Again, I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do, and I've certainly done it from time to time.
	But I don't want that to be the onus upon me to make it fun for her in order for her to do it.
	I agree with that. I find that it's kind of a liability in that I find right now that I pretty much have to make things fun before I'll get going on them.
	I know lots of other people around me who get things done regardless of whether it's fun or not.
	They just get it done. Yeah, and there's ways to make it.
	I do the garbage, which involves the diaper pail, and that's not fun, but I'll put on some music and some headphones or whatever, and I can sort of make it more fun.
	I remember this sort of division when I first came to Canada, and I stayed with my mom and my brother at my uncle's place in Whitby.
	And my brother would go into the basement and do his homework.
	He would just go into the basement and do his homework.
	And I so disliked my homework.
	There was this game where you pulled things out of shark jaws without trying to get them to close.
	A little plastic shark. I can't even remember what it was called now.
	I'm sure somebody knows in the chat room.
	And I would do my homework like, okay, I'll do two math problems and then, I mean, this is back when I did my homework.
	I gave up pretty quickly after that.
	But, you know, I'll play this game and then I'll do two math problems and then I'll play this game.
	And I just, I couldn't go into the basement and just do it.
	And I really admire my brother for doing that.
	He had a lot of discipline that way.
	And so I sort of remember, you know, I need to make fun for myself and so on.
	That didn't actually solve the problem in the long run because it doesn't, it's sort of self-manipulative.
	It's not actually getting to a...
	If you actually have a shared value, then conflicts become almost non-existent.
	So I'm naturally not a tidy person.
	My wife is naturally a tidy person.
	We fall entirely upon the most stereotypical gender lines that you could imagine in this area.
	But I'm very sensitive to the fact that every mess that I create is more work for other people.
	Mm-hmm. Yeah, because when the place is neat, if you lose something, you can find it in like 20 seconds, right?
	If the place is a mess, you can spend an hour or two sometimes.
	Yeah, it's just better on every level.
	Yeah, it's more aesthetically pleasing.
	It's better for your mental space.
	It is better to find things.
	You just don't feel like you're drowning in crap.
	And so I have...
	I don't think she's become more comfortable with chaos, but I have become much more respectful of the value of tidiness and order.
	And so, you know, if I'm cooking, I will clean up after myself.
	And so, you know, I don't sort of proudly present a meal with like six smoking saucepans stacked up on every square inch of counter space for someone else to fix up later, right?
	I mean, you have to clean up as you go and to make sure that as I go through the house with Isabella that we clean up as we play.
	And I've really become, like, I get it.
	It makes sense to do a little bit as you go along rather than, you know, spend Saturday morning cleaning everything up after you spent most of the week trying to find stuff.
	So I really have gotten to those shared values because I don't feel like I'm obeying some irrational thing like, well, if people drop by and the place is a mess, I will feel like I'm not a good housekeeper, like my wife said that.
	Then I would feel like I'm obeying irrationality or obeying a kind of shallowness.
	She doesn't say that, right? But if that was her perspective and I obeyed it, I would do so disrespectfully.
	But I respect her arguments and her perspective on the importance of neatness and its help for us as a family as a whole.
	So for you, is it about that time when you're actually making the commitment to make sure that there is that shared value at that time rather than just later working to do whatever your mouth said you're going to do?
	Does that make sense? Being extra careful with that?
	The shared commitment is the most important thing.
	It doesn't have to be right in the moment if, for whatever reason, there's no time in the moment.
	You know, like if your boss forgets something and it really demands that you work all weekend to do it, maybe there's no time at that moment, but then you can work on it later.
	So it doesn't have to be, whoa, stop everyone!
	Stop everything we're doing! We have to come to a consensus on values, us eight people.
	But it does have to be something that you're committed to in the long run because obedience is foundationally erosive.
	It erodes the foundations of relationships.
	Obedience and appeasement are so disrespectful to the relationship that it weakens it at its core.
	I find that even applies to commitments I make to myself.
	It feels just like that.
	It feels like it's one part of me is making orders for all the other parts to...
	I feel like they have to do it, otherwise there's going to be this consequence of guilt and shame and all this other stuff.
	And if I don't impose those penalties on myself, then I just get away with it and nothing gets done.
	It's just this big, dramatic and pointless, ultimately, cycle that doesn't actually result in getting the integrity in the same way that I guess in my experience, the only time I've ever had a sense of integrity that I could rely on was whenever I got inspired as myself as a better person.
	That things just get done.
	But it's...
	I don't generate that.
	Do you know what I'm talking about?
	Oh, I really do. And I really do.
	I really empathize. A long time ago, I talked about this in a podcast.
	And I called it the statism of the self.
	You know, that we've got this judge who's going to reward or punish us based on good and bad behavior.
	And I talked about a book that actually really, really affected me in this.
	The only book The only really good book I think that John Fowles ever wrote called The Magus, M-A-G-U-S. He's the guy who wrote The French Lieutenant's Woman.
	It's probably his most famous book and not a very good film, but The French Lieutenant's Hoa.
	But the statism of the self is the idea that we have good and bad behavior.
	We don't particularly believe in it, but we pursue good behavior in order to gain reward, and we avoid bad behavior in order to avoid punishment.
	And the punishment is internalized.
	You know, and people get into...
	I mean, to me, bulimia is just a wild exaggeration of this kind of cycle.
	Oh, I've been really good. Now I can have a chocolate cake.
	Oh, I've been really bad. Now I have to throw it up.
	That's my punishment. And...
	And so, I'm...
	I don't think that that's ever being free.
	Or having authenticity or...
	No. Excuse me.
	Or... Oh, I don't know what's the right word.
	It's not being moral.
	It's basically an internalized petty version of heaven and hell.
	You know, I will get this done because otherwise I'm going to get mad at myself.
	I'm not going to avoid that chocolate.
	I'm not going to eat that chocolate bar because then I'm going to say I'm going to call myself fat.
	I mean, it's better than, you know, it's better than, quote, doing bad things, but it is a long way from philosophy.
	So how do you think of, like, okay, because I gather that you have a fairly strong sense of integrity, like when you put your word to something, it'll get done in the way that you said it would pretty much.
	Well, my integrity is I will do it or I will say I won't.
	The worst lack of integrity is not somebody who fails to do something, but somebody who says they're going to do it and then doesn't do it.
	Because they've actually then prevented you from finding another solution.
	Okay, I do tell people when I'm not going to be able to do it.
	Yeah, so there was a guy a couple of years ago who said, oh, don't worry, I'm going to fix up your website.
	And so I didn't look into getting somebody else to do it.
	And then he spent a month not getting back to me and not postponing stuff.
	And I actually lost a month.
	He wasn't neutral. It wasn't like he didn't provide what he wanted.
	It's like the guy who says, I'll come pick you up to drive you to the airport.
	And so you don't call the cab.
	And then he doesn't get you.
	It's too late to call the cab. You missed your flight.
	I mean, it's actually cost you something for that person to make their commitment and not follow through.
	I remember listening to that podcast, and I got a lot out of it.
	And I have been looking for it ever since.
	But yeah, I remember that one.
	Because... Actually, I've got to say, I was the guy who, shortly after that, contacted you in regards to designs of the site and just different directions it could go in.
	We had a discussion about that, but then I don't know what came of that.
	I was glad that I didn't make any commitment at that time, but I still felt like...
	The difference is you and I didn't make a commitment about that next step, so we didn't actually lack integrity, I think, in that conversation.
	My motive is I try to act with integrity so that I can mentally lord it over people who don't.
	So that I can feel superior and criticize them without repercussions.
	So I've evolved beyond fear, petty punishment to petty vanity.
	I hope at some point you get to fear philosophy, but right now it's just mental masturbation, one-upmanship.
	Does that make any sense?
	And it actually can be quite satisfying.
	Yeah. Okay, look, I've actually done that before, and I didn't feel, nah, that's not really what I want to be doing.
	Yeah, like, I don't actually want to be a good parent, but I've spent so much time criticizing other parents that I'm forced to be a good parent.
	That's my only motivation, and I do it so I can continue to criticize other parents, not because I actually enjoy being a good parent.
	So that's really being trapped by integrity, rather than enjoying integrity, but it really is.
	And I completely painted myself into a corner, of course.
	Okay. Alright.
	Is there anything else that I can help you with?
	So, okay, just one more thing.
	If you could say, what's the most powerful or effective thing that you do when you're running on willpower and it's not working anymore, how do you Get in touch with that sense of integrity and get things done.
	What's your experience with that?
	Well, you can't really do it after the fact, right?
	Integrity is something that you can't really build after the fact.
	So what I do is I look back and say, when did my lack of integrity begin that I'm now experiencing?
	You have to go back to the start, right?
	And the start can be the first conversation, it can be the last conversation you have with that person or yourself, or it can be when you were five or four or ten or whatever, right?
	So if I have made a commitment to someone, And then I don't follow through on that.
	Oh, I just thought of one that I completely didn't follow through on and I will do that this week.
	But if I've made a commitment to someone and I haven't followed through on it, I can attack myself, of course, but I mean, that doesn't really, obviously, that doesn't help me gain integrity.
	It doesn't prevent the problem next time.
	What I do is I go back and say, okay, why, oh, why did I end up in this position?
	Let's go back through the causality.
	Was I really into it when I committed to it?
	And if not, then that was the problem.
	Like I made a commitment prior to being really into something.
	Was I really into it at the time and then I became more into something else and didn't communicate my lowered priority to the other person?
	What do you do when that happens?
	Because isn't it just a matter of, well, who cares how I feel, get it done?
	Or is it a matter of, you know, just saying to the person, hey, for no other reason than I just don't feel like it, I'm not getting this done.
	Well, no, but you see, you don't communicate conclusions, you communicate intentions.
	So you call up the person and you say, Listen, I may be being a total jerk here.
	I'm completely open to that possibility.
	But I'm much more interested in doing this than finishing your thing.
	And I want to have a conversation with that.
	Because I understand that's going to be inconvenient to you.
	I don't want your puppy chasing after a ball.
	Let's have a conversation about it.
	And maybe in that conversation, we'll figure out what's going on to the person.
	Because you see, a lack of integrity is kind of isolating.
	It's very isolating.
	And that's why you end up managing yourself rather than having relationships.
	Does that make any sense?
	Absolutely. You end up talking with yourself, talking yourself in and out of things rather than having a conversation with whoever you've got that commitment with.
	Sure. Alright, look, thank you for that stuff.
	That really helped me out.
	Yeah, definitely. All right.
	I feel good and dismissed, and I think that means that we come to the end.
	And look, let me know how it goes.
	I think those are all useful things, and I hope that you don't think that I'm some sort of master ninja of integrity.
	I certainly do my best, but I drop the ball probably as much, if not more, as other people.
	I just always try to get back to the basics about that stuff, and I found that to be really helpful.
	All right. All right, quick check in the chat room about the Decaf Philosophy Show this afternoon.
	I don't think I screeched like a Girl Guide Banshee even once.
	How was that for you?
	Okay, good. Is that a plus or a star?
	But yeah, thank you everybody.
	Thank you, of course, to all of the callers.
	I just love you guys so, so much.
	I think that you guys just bring up, and can I say gals?
	No, it sounds bad even to me.
	The men and the ladies of magnificent philosophy back and forth.
	It is just a genuine and enormous pleasure to have the privilege of chatting with you about these very important topics every single week.
	What an amazing gig.
	I really, really appreciate that.
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	I think that's the last thing we talked about.
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	And there's some Gold Plus boards for people who donate if you want to discuss stuff out of the general all-seeing sore on eye of the Google web crawlers.
	That would be great. And...
	Can I get an interview with Penn Jillette?
	Isn't he the guy who doesn't talk?
	What would I say about him?
	That's Teller. Oh, is that Teller?
	That's the other one? Okay. I don't know.
	I guess I could try and get something with Penn Jillette.
	And say I've really enjoyed his shaves over the years and writing with him.
	And he should really be scattered around a pharmacy somewhere.
	Alright, that's some fine content.
	I think maybe we'll have coffee next week for the joke content.
	Thank you everybody so much.
	Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week and I will talk to you soon.
	Can I get you for just a second?
	Yes. Do you have any idea or any comments or thoughts about what the next barbecue will look like?
	Oh yeah, actually not yet but it's on the list of things to do this week so I'm working on it.
	Okay, and I also sent out an email about that for something maybe more local here.
	Oh, yeah, Denver one, right? Yeah, if you could get back to me on that.
	I was thinking, you know, it kind of depends on when you would have it because I wouldn't want it to be too, too close.
	But if you have yours in late summer, then maybe I'll do something else.
	But yeah, that's the idea.
	We will work it out.
	Cool. And again, thanks as always, James.
	It's hugely, hugely helpful what you're doing, and I really appreciate it.
	Alright. Well, I'll talk to you later.

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