Aug. 12, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:15:54
2187 How to Deal with Verbal Abuse at Work - Freedomain Radio Sunday Call In Show, August 12, 2012
Astounding statistics on the decline of religiosity, how to respond to 'social contract' arguments, how to deal with verbal abuse at work, what is the best time to have a second child, how to market your small business, the immoral hell of intergenerational debt - and my heartfelt thanks to this philosophical community. Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the Internet - http://www.freedomainradio.com
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Sunday show, August the 12th, 2012.
So, saving Private Ryan.
Mitt Romnatron has selected Paul Ryan as the vice president.
Ooh, it's a cynical giant black hole of ethical inconsequentiality sucking the Ron Paul slash Rand Paul favoritrons into the Republican matrix.
So, let's just go over a couple of basic facts you may or may not be aware of about The Ryan.
And yes, he does look remarkably like a wind-up Republican Ken doll.
But that's neither here nor there.
Okay, so he's at this budget.
It's a combo of the 2011-2012 budget.
The roadmap to prosperity.
Oh, it's just so mad.
It's so insane.
Okay.
So, he says that he's got over six trillion dollars of cuts over the next 10 years.
Oh, but are they really cuts?
What do you think?
Yes?
No?
Maybe?
No.
There are no cuts.
It's not cuts from what the government spends today, but what President Obama wants to spend.
In other words, he's reducing the increase.
And this, in the psycho world of government, they call a cut.
Quite mad.
The spending would actually increase by about a trillion dollars over the decade.
Now, this is the radical, you know, the media.
Oh, lies, filthy lies, damned lies, government statistics, Satan, and then the media in ascending order of perfidy.
Okay, so this is called a radical slashing budget.
And his budget by 2015, if it would ever to occur, which it won't, but it would reduce government spending to 20% of GDP by 2015.
Well, Obama, you see, wants to cut it to 23%.
It is currently at 25%.
So you're looking at a three percentage point of GDP cut difference.
And how does this compare in the past?
Well, you see, when grabby hands, dewy-eyed, Bubba Magic, Bill Clinton left office, um, Government spending was 18%.
So after radical, savage, bitter, libertarian-style cuts, Ryan might be able to get it down to two points above where it was when Clinton left office.
Over 10 years, the president's, like Obama's plan, is going to add $11 trillion to the debt over 10 years.
But Congressman Ryan, you see, his plan will only add $8 trillion of debt over the next 10 years.
He is a big fan of increased military spending and, of course, this is something conservatives need to grapple with.
They won't, but they need to.
They need to grapple with the fact that you cannot balance the budget if you eliminate only non-military spending.
It can't be done.
So, he also wants to reduce the federal workforce by 15%.
Ryan's figure is 10%.
And they would do it by attrition.
And, I mean, that's just cowardly crap.
You want to fire the inefficient workers.
Attrition is just a way of avoiding any confrontation with the unions, which means the unions can call the shots, which means nothing's going to change.
Also, Ryan's budget has revenues for the government growing miraculously from $2.4 trillion to $4.6 trillion in 10 years just by cutting taxes.
I mean, that's the Laffer curve on steroids.
So, yeah, overall, it's going to lead to 10 more years of deficit spending.
Ryan's budget, it adds between $5 to $11 trillion to the national debt, spent a total of $40 trillion over the next 10 years, and Ryan's plan requires that the debt ceiling be raised.
And, oh, do you know when the budget is going to be balanced in Ryan's plan?
Because he's a radical, slashing, objectivist, Rand-style Conservative, his budget plans will balance the budget by 2040.
2040, 28 years from now.
That really is quite mad.
It increases the rate of spending over the next few years.
It slows the rate of spending increases, doesn't cut anything.
And what is his voting record?
Let's just run over this very briefly, because remember, he is an objectivist-style libertarian.
He voted yes to corporate welfare for big agriculture.
He voted yes for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, the Bend Over Taxpayers.
The bank have an unpowered, ungreased dildo for you.
He voted yes for a bloated defense bill.
Voted no to repeal NDAA indefinite detentions.
He voted yes to prohibit reductions in nuclear weapons as required by START treaty.
He voted no to limit military spending on the Afghanistan war.
He voted yes to override military sequestration.
Spending cuts negotiated in last year's Let's Raise the Debt Limit bill.
He voted yes on CISPA, the bill that attacks internet liberty in the First Amendment.
He voted yes on corporate welfare for the Keystone Pipeline, which also authorized the use of eminent domain to sieve private property for a private use.
He voted no to extend payroll tax cuts, so kind of a tax increase on the poor and middle class.
He voted yes to increase the debt ceiling.
He voted yes To a war, to the war in Libya.
He voted no to limit funding of NATO for use in Libya.
He voted no on removing armed forces from Libya.
He voted yes to extend the Patriot Act.
So please, please, I mean, do I even need to say it?
Don't be fooled.
Don't be deceived.
This is all smoke and mirrors, kabuki, drug, crip nonsense.
He's going to achieve nothing.
What they're trying to do is just sucker you in one more time.
Pretend that George W. never existed.
Pretend that Ron Paul never existed.
pretend that Rand Paul exists in the netherworld between compromise and idealism and just attempt to hoover you in.
Don't be fooled.
I mean, these men are all compulsive liars and misleaders and the media is only creating this artificial.
I mean, you know, the media is like the, you know, like the quote umpires in WWF, all the fake wrestling stuff.
I mean, they just pretend that everyone has these hatreds on just to stoke up the crowds.
It's all nonsense that It's inconsequential.
Please don't get suckered in.
Go out for a walk.
Play with your dog.
Enjoy your children.
Don't get suckered into this mad nonsense.
Just two other little things about Paul Ryan.
First of all, his connection with Ayn Rand is touted now, and this is considered to be a very, very important thing.
It's all mad nonsense, of course.
Ayn Rand was a committed, strong, passionate atheist, and Ryan is a Catholic.
And so, what that means either, one of two things has occurred.
He's either read, he's very passionate about Ayn Rand, he hands out her books to his staffers and so on, and what that means is that he's either overturned her arguments against the existence of a deity or deities, which I would love to hear, wouldn't it be fantastic?
That would be a great thing to change my mind on, or to accept new evidence and arguments on.
So he's either overturned Ayn Rand, which would make him You know, if he could prove the existence of a deity or at least rebut Ayn Rand's strong atheist arguments would make him one of the greatest philosophers in recent memory.
So he's either done that and kept it hidden to himself, which is why he can read Ayn Rand and manage to maintain his religiosity, or he's just cherry-picking.
He's just picking whatever he likes.
In other words, none of his values are a systematic whole, that he just cherry-picks whatever he likes.
And he's found that, as the Republicans have found lately, that The shrinking of government will get them votes.
They don't intend to do it.
They're just lying to you to get your vote.
Please, please, do not be the abused spouse who keeps going back for more.
And the second thing, of course, is that in Ryan's budget, he takes great aim at rich people who use corporate loopholes and tax loopholes to get away with not paying taxes.
And then he is the enthusiastic deep French Kisser and hugger of the man who chooses him for the V position, although that man has hidden hundreds of millions of dollars in offshore accounts to avoid taxes.
And I believe that he also put down a dressage horse as a business expense.
So then again, we have no principles, no principles of any kind running along here.
He's just another pretty boy sociopath who's out there to caress your balls while he pilferes your wallet.
Cross your legs.
Get out the pepper spray of reason and evidence and back away slowly.
Thank you so much.
Let's move on to the callers now.
I appreciate your time.
This is the Sunday call-in show.
Please feel free.
Sundays, 2 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time for the foreseeable future.
Just come by freedomainradio.com to check it out.
And now, we will move on to the callers.
Thank you so much for your time.
All right.
We're adding a phone caller.
And he'll be up.
A phone?
Wow.
You'll get cups and string, baby.
We're calling John.
We are going back in time.
Yeah.
This is John.
Hello?
Hello, John.
Yeah, okay.
Give me one second here.
Okay.
I got the live stream on.
Yeah, no rush.
Okay.
Take your time.
We're live.
What's up, man?
Oh, not much.
Well, my...
The reason I was calling in today with the politics are very...
You can kind of ask this question.
Normally, it's a...
Taking Steph's model that, you know, politics is virtually meaningless.
It's all just sort of shady guys behind closed doors.
But a buddy of mine decided to run for state representative as a libertarian this year.
And so I, you know, figured, hey, he's my buddy.
I'll help him out, you know, do some campaigns for him and stuff.
and by proxy I've also been passing out stuff for Gary Johnson and Hello?
Hello?
Thank you.
Excellent!
Looks like we're off to a rousing start.
Sorry, go ahead.
I can't tell you how many times I have literally heard something effective.
I would love to vote for Ron Paul or Gary Johnson, but Obama is an atheist Muslim antichrist who is going to be shot in the head soon and will be resurrected and implant a chip in our palm prints.
Wow.
All right.
Yeah, it's...
Do they have no problem with an atheist Muslim?
I mean, does that not seem like right up the front?
He's a tall, short guy with a bald Mohawk, right?
Yeah, exactly.
So, sorry, these are people who won't vote for Gary Johnson or Ron Paul, is that right?
Yeah, they tell me straight up that they like what Gary Johnson and Ron Paul have to say.
But, you know, because Obama is an atheist, Muslim, Antichrist, we can't have four more years of him, therefore we must vote for Mitt Romney.
And where do you think they're getting the, you know, he's the Antichrist, Muslim, whatever, right?
Where do you think they're picking that up?
Well, yeah, I live in the Bible, though.
So...
Right.
I'm sure...
You know, unfortunately, it is something, like I said, Seth, but...
I don't know how much time you get to spend in the southern U.S., but it is a fortunate thing that, you know, I mean, church is the big thing here, and a lot of churches are hardcore Republicans.
My home city of Jacksonville, you know, I make the joke in my home city of Jacksonville, it's not big oil or the mob that controls our city, it's big church.
Right.
And it's, yeah.
Not to mention, I think, you know, part of it is sort of the internet.
But it's just, you know, I've read books like Myth of the Rational Voter and other things like that.
I don't know.
It's sort of the sideshow of it all.
I'm not sure.
Well, my question is, what do you say when these topics come up?
Not that I think you should or shouldn't say anything.
I'm just sort of curious what you do say.
Uh...
Usually I go something to the effect of the lesser of two evils is still evil and the enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
Right, so you're not taking on the whole Antichrist.
Sorry, they believe he's going to be reincarnated?
Or resurrected?
Yeah, I'm sure you know the whole story about the Antichrist.
You'll get somehow fascinated and then sort of parallel to Jesus, he'll be resurrected in three days afterwards and Yeah, and I think in Revelations he is described as a Jagir Beanpole who's fairly good with Al Green songs.
So, I mean, it's very, very specific, and that's pretty neat.
Look, I mean, this is the product of government schools, right?
I mean, the fact that people have come to adulthood after 12 years of education in how to think, reason, and process evidence and can still Absorb and regurgitate these blood-soaked, apocalyptic, Ragnarok-style fairy tales is simply...
I mean, it speaks to the power of a number of things.
It speaks to the incapacity of government schools to train anybody in rationality.
I mean, that's the case.
Anybody I know who's learned anything about rationality...
Well, yeah, I was a product of government schools, although I had one in my...
Mine was sort of a...
I got a voucher, so...
I didn't get the regular K-12...
Yeah, no, I mean, all government schools taught me was how to swallow, regurgitate, and become so perpetually bored that all I did was sexually fantasize all day, which was basically that was my entire public school education.
When I was a senior in high school, I took a class called Theory of Knowledge, and that's the only class I've bothered to learn anything about life in high school.
Right.
So, yeah, so government schools ain't doing it.
The church, obviously, is not doing anything to combat this kind of irrationality.
In fact, the church is fostering it.
And it also teaches the power, I think – I mean, I never know in reality.
I never really know what people believe and what they are saying because that is necessary for their social circle.
Does this make any sense?
Like, it's really hard to know what people believe deep down, you know, or whether they just – well, okay, look, if I question these beliefs – Then no one in this town will talk to me.
If I oppose this, it's, you know.
But listen, be encouraged.
I mean, there's some pretty interesting things happening in the world of religiosity and atheism.
And let me just grab you a couple of stats.
Did you know, did you know, that atheism in the U.S. just over the past six years has gone up 500%?
I think I remember, I think it was a larger minority than Jews.
Yes, yes.
But let me give you a couple of stats.
I mean, I think it's worth mentioning.
Certainly, I mean, I've been doing this game for 30-odd years, and it has really, really quite changed.
So, the Irish have finally discovered REM and are losing their religion.
Ba-dum-bum!
Oh, there's a fine, fine old-song joke.
So, this is a study that...
I remember when, what was it, Nine Inch Nails, closer...
That came out.
I remember that being a me.
They wouldn't even play that song on the radio where I grew up.
Nine Inch Nails, I think I only know a song.
Bow down before the one you serve.
You're gonna get what you deserve.
That's them, right?
Oh, no.
Closer was the one that goes, I want to fuck you like an animal.
You get me closer to God.
Really?
And the important thing is to include what kind of animal, because that matters.
I believe some are more tender, and you would not want, say, a ferret.
going at you.
Anyway, okay, so let's, let me just get some of these stats.
So yeah, 11 million Irish Americans have left the Catholic Church recently, and let me just see.
So in America, the people who are, you know, out and out atheists have gone from 1% to 5%.
And that's quite interesting.
There's been a growth in sort of unaffiliated or non-denominational, like more on the agnostic and sort of humanist side.
Let me just get...
Sorry, I'm just having a little trouble finding 40 countries.
Religious survey.
Let me just get it here.
You know, a real host would be completely prepared.
But I was not expecting this.
But...
Yeah, religion may become extinct in nine nations.
And so, yeah, it's really cranking up.
The number of people who are atheists and secularists has gone from, I think, 6% or 7% to 12% or 13% just in the last six years.
And there is a worldwide loss in religiosity.
And I believe it all can be traced back to this show.
That's it.
There's no other influence in the world that is...
I'm just kidding, right?
I mean, there's, of course, lots of people who are working towards it.
And, I mean, this is good and bad, right?
I mean, this doesn't mean that people aren't going to replace religion with statism, of course, right?
I mean, the tendency is to swim from one pole to the other.
Well, that's the other thing, I guess, is that even though so many more atheists are coming out, it's that the vast majority of them are hardcore leftists.
Yes, yeah.
They just replace one G-word with another.
God and God.
Right.
You know, and I just wonder, you know, where do we get sort of the atheist, anarcho-capitalist types, you know, sort of where do you see our revolution coming from?
Well, as I said before, and I'll say again, our revolution comes from parenting.
Our revolution comes from not having an authority.
You know, I mean, I just put a video out yesterday with some studies about spanking and physical aggression against children.
You know, if you just order children around, and you don't reason with them, you don't listen to them, you don't let them mutually explore the world with you, Then they grow up with authority as arbitrary and authority as aggressive.
And authority punishes you for standards that authority itself is not subjected to.
Right?
I mean, in one of these surveys, a mother was hitting a child, somewhere between the ages of two and five, three and five.
Mother was hitting a child because the child had either kicked or hit.
And nobody knows.
It was just an audio recording.
It could even have been accidental.
The mother was hitting the child because the child was innocent.
This will teach you not to hit.
Whap, whap, whap.
This is so insane, the irony, the hypocrisy is just ridiculous, right?
But what this means is that people grow up that authority is arbitrary, authority is aggressive, authority bullies, authority dominates, authority does not reason, and authority is exempt from the rules that it inflicts upon its victims.
Well, that is a perfect template for religion and for statism.
Only authority can kill with impunity, as God does in the Old Testament.
Only authority can levy taxes and go into debt on your behalf.
You can't.
Only authority can print money.
Only authority can save souls.
You can't.
For you, it's immoral.
The state and religion is all just an effect of the family and early childhood experiences.
This is true philosophically.
It's true logically.
It's true empirically.
It's very close to being confirmed.
It's certainly all of the data that I've read.
It tends that way scientifically, so for me it's about as close to an absolute as you can get in these kinds of areas, and this is why I'm just constantly telling people.
Just got an email from a guy, actually no, he posted on the, you can see the post on the video, he said, wow, I'm not going to hit my kids anymore, thanks Steph.
That doesn't mean that he's going to teach them reason, but it means that there is a step in the right direction, so that's what it's all about.
You can't win the war of reason with people who can't think, and people who are too traumatized as children Don't have the capacity to overcome bias through reason and evidence.
At least very few of them do as adults.
I hope that makes some sense.
One final...
I appreciate it.
Keep up the good work.
Hopefully...
A buddy of mine is working with the Libertarian Party of Florida to see if you wanted to come down and speak.
Hopefully I'll get to see you then.
Yeah, give him a poke.
I'm always happy to talk with libertarians.
Alright, so let me just give you a couple of this data for those.
So a survey has found Ireland is second only to Vietnam and loss of religious sentiment.
In a survey of more than 50 countries, I've heard someplace it's only 40, but you can check that out, Ireland has experienced the second greatest drop in recent years in the percentage of the population that claims to be religious.
This survey, which measured changes since 2005, found that those in Ireland who consider themselves religious has fallen by 20%.
62% in 2011.
From 69% in 2005, that's really quite astounding.
So there's less than half of the Irish population consider themselves religious.
I mean, I spent lots of summers in Ireland.
My family is there.
I was born there.
And I'm telling you, that's...
I ain't the Ireland I grew up in, boy.
So...
And yeah, 57 countries were surveyed.
Only Vietnam experienced a greater drop of 23% over the same period.
And Ireland was a joint seventh among the most atheists of these 57 countries.
And they talked to a huge number of people, like 50,000 people in this.
So it was quite a significant amount of people.
So that is quite fascinating.
Ireland is alongside Australia, Iceland and Austria, a seventh of the ten most atheistic countries.
China is at the top with almost half of the population of atheists, followed by Japan at 31%, Czech Republic at 30%, France at 29%, South Korea and Germany at 15%, and the Netherlands at 14%.
The drop among those who consider themselves religious in other countries was 21% in France and Switzerland, 19% in South Africa, 17% in Iceland, 15% in Ecuador, 13%, a 13% drop in just a few years in the U.S., 12% in Canada, and 10% In Austria.
So of the country surveyed, 59% of their population think of themselves as religious, 23% think of themselves as not religious, and 13% think of themselves as convinced atheists.
And overall, overall, those claiming to be religious dropped by 9%, while atheism rose by 3% between 2005 and 2011.
The survey asked the same question in the 57 countries.
Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say that you are a religious person, not a religious person, or a convinced atheist?
Let me just...
Those claiming to be religious dropped by 9%, while atheism rose by 3% between 2005 and 2011.
Is it just a coincidence that I first started publishing in 2005?
Yes, it almost certainly is.
It certainly is.
So, I mean, that's...
That's an opportunity.
That's an opportunity.
And...
This does not mean that the world is heading to a better place.
It's not like the Chinese who are atheists are all great parents and reject socialism, communism and other forms of secular irrationality or democracy or you name it.
But what it means is that there is an opening.
Just because somebody is no longer buying a competitor's product, it doesn't mean he's going to turn around and buy yours.
But it does mean that you have some opportunity.
In any political campaign, you focus on the undecideds.
And so I'm very proud to have been part of bringing this about.
You know, 40 million downloads doesn't do any harm to these kinds of ideas and arguments.
So thank you for your call, and if we've got somebody else, I would like to hear from you.
Next up, we have Gerard.
Gerard.
Hello, hello.
Hello.
Hello, Steph.
Can you hear me?
I can.
Okay, good.
Hello from Paris, France.
Ah, hello.
And are you an atheist?
Well, yes, of course.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah, yeah.
Don't worry.
I believe in nothing.
I believe in nothing.
I think you just contradicted yourself.
Let's not nag you about philosophy now.
Oh, sorry, just before I forget, there's a new feed, everyone.
So go to freedomainradio.com forward slash podcast.aspx or just go to freedomainradio.com, go to podcast, make sure you check out the new feed.
We are on volume six because I just can't shut up.
Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
Yes, well, I have a lot of conversations with my friends here in Paris about my analysis of the things you talk about all the time.
And I quite honestly agree with you.
I could not agree more about the absence of the social contract, about the importance of freedom, of liberty, of the individual, and so on, of course.
But I have some very good friends with whom I have very similar ideas, with whom I agree a lot on many things about economy, philosophy and so on.
But I'm confronted with sort of a wall as soon as I talk about the social contract.
And as soon as I talk with them about how I haven't signed anything, I was born in this country, but all I want is maybe People to try and change some things.
They say, well, no, you can't because we are all born here.
And there is an implicit contract that, well, yes, of course, we didn't sign, but it's the product of a very long history of negotiation and decisions and individual decisions and collective decisions.
And so, if we want to change anything, we cannot break this contract.
All we can do is try and modify it with time.
And are most of your friends atheists?
Well, yeah.
Well, that's interesting because Christianity has a long and complex history.
And yet they seem to have been able to reject that.
Christianity is the foundation of Western ethics.
The older I get, the more I realize that's true, whether it's for atheists or not.
But how is it that they get to reject religion, which is not even an implicit but an explicit religion?
Well, I don't know.
I don't know.
We don't usually speak about religion at all, at all.
Well, no, and I wouldn't say that you would, because, you know, I mean, if you're all atheists, but if they say, well, you know, that which has developed and that which is old and that which is, you know, culturally relevant and that which has had great contributions and that which is, you know, in the area or in the land, why?
You know, but they have no problem rejecting that, which means that those arguments...
Are not universal, right?
It means that they're only applying those arguments to the social contract of the state, not to religion, right?
Yeah, yeah, that's it.
One of the hardest objections that I had is that, well, and it's about what you talk a lot and very often about this difference between the individual ethics, the ethics of the family of the individual, And the ethics of society as a whole.
And you often talk about this kind of switch that occurs.
Well, sorry, let me just be clear for those who are, you know, I don't want to assume that everyone's listened to all the private shows.
So the ethics of childhood is identical in many ways to the ethics of the state and to the ethics of religion.
The only reason that the state works is because of people's early childhood experiences, which are very similar.
But we have this other world called adult-to-adult relationships.
So if you understand that when people are talking about the state and the social contract, they are actually talking about the home, the family home, and their parents or their teachers or their priests or whatever other authority figures were in their life.
And, you know, you've probably heard the phrase, I don't know what it is in France, and thank you for not switching to French, you know, my house, my rules.
When you live under my roof, you do as I say, right?
Well, you don't get, you know, this is an imposition of power.
Now, the parents own the house and the child lives in it.
The government is perceived to own the country and you are born into it, in the same way that you're born into your parents' house.
The government has arbitrary and often aggressive or violent rules that it inflicts upon the children, which itself is excluded from.
And the government does not have to justify itself.
And the government comes out of prehistory.
The government has been around for a long time.
The government has grown out of all this.
But this is how children view their parents.
So when you're a child, your parents, they seem like they've been around forever.
They're like gods.
You can't really imagine them as children themselves and so on.
A lot of parents really kind of reject and resist that.
So the important thing to understand is that, you know, 100% Of philosophical problems are solved with three things.
One, definitions.
Two, let's talk about what we're really talking about.
And let's not bullshit into something else.
If people are talking about the social contract, almost certainly, unless they've gone through a hell of a lot of self-knowledge, they're talking about their early childhood experiences of authority within their parents' home.
Because it's such a ludicrous and ridiculous idea that a bunch of elected officials own everyone and therefore can order them around with virtual impunity.
It's such a ridiculous and insane idea that it can only seem sane because people have experienced it and absorbed it unconsciously for many years and it has to be early childhood stuff.
And the third, of course, is reason and evidence, right?
Once you've got the first two sorted away.
But so yeah, when people talk about the social contract, you can say, well, just to make sure we're not talking about something else, what was your experience?
Have you ever heard the phrase, like, why did you obey your parents?
And people have basically come down to, I'm the one who puts food on the table, I'm the one who goes out to work, I'm the one who pays the bills around here, so as long as you live under my You go by my rules.
My house, my rules.
It will come down to some flavor or some form of that.
And that's the only experience that can make the adult social – I mean, the government is the parents, the country is the house, and unfortunately, we remain forever children in this more than analogy but reality.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, it does.
Of course it does.
But that's not the argument that I heard the other night in the restaurant.
This friend said that there is a difference of scale.
Between what happens at the individual level and what happens at the social level.
And this difference of scale is the difference that when you're in a group, well, no one says that the government is the good solution and that it's efficient.
That's not the argument.
He says that when you're in a group, you need to organize some kind of collective self-defense.
And at this scale, obviously, he says, you need to design someone or something to take care of the group.
Or the group can defend itself as an individual would use his self-defense, his right to self-defense.
So what do you think?
Can you ask this person?
Well, there's a couple of things I would say to that.
The first thing I would do, you can just pretend to be your friend, right?
So...
Who do you think won in Iraq?
Well, NATO, of course.
NATO won in Iraq?
Excuse me, I'm not sure I get your...
Like in the recent, like when America invaded Iraq in 03, right?
America is in the process of withdrawing from Iraq.
Do you think that they have achieved their objectives and won a decisive victory in Iraq?
Because their goals were to turn it into a democracy, into a functioning market economy, to whatever, right?
No, no, of course not.
Okay, so they lost.
Now, on one of the sides of the conflict in Iraq, you had a government with trillions of dollars of resources, right?
Yes.
On the other side, who did you have?
Who was fighting them?
Well, people with guns or very few resources.
Right.
And so, were they a government?
I don't know, yes.
No, they weren't.
They were insurgents, right?
Yeah.
Freedom fighters.
They were rebels.
They were, you know, whatever, right?
And so here, in this situation, you have the most powerful government that has ever been conceived of in the history of modern warfare, or any warfare for that matter.
You have a firepower disparity that can't even be calculated.
And you have a victory on the part of people who spontaneously self-organized their own defense against this.
So the idea that in order to have An effective defense, we need to have a government, means that, I mean, this person simply hasn't even thought about the lessons of modern warfare.
I mean, how many governments have tried to invade Afghanistan over the past thousand years, or two thousand years?
And yet, Afghanistan remains in the hands of its defenders, so to speak.
And so, the idea that somehow we can get the most effective...
I mean, you understand the military is just another government program, the idea...
The idea that we can have some sort of effective defense through the government that can't be achieved through the spontaneous self-organization of interested individuals, it just means that any kind of military history hasn't been looked at in any objective way.
Okay.
Okay, but yeah, all right.
But what about if we are a group or a family or, I don't know, 50 friends and someone comes to attack one of us?
What do we do?
Well, you pay your taxes because that's who's coming to attack you in your world, right?
Who's coming to attack you?
Who's going to come and take your property?
Well, the taxes, right?
Who is going to come and throw you in jail if you don't send your children to approved schools?
Often it's the government.
Who is going to lock you in a cage for years because you have a little bit of garden-grown vegetation in your pocket that the state happens to disapprove of?
Well, the government.
Who is going to sell off the future productivity, sweat, toil, and tears of your children to foreign bankers for the sake of a few shekels to bribe friends with in the here and now?
The state.
So the idea that we're going to give people the right to take from us whatever they want at will and to sell us all into debt slavery forever in order to protect us from potential criminals is like saying, well, I'm afraid of getting a hangnail, so I'm going to pull a hiker trapped in a canyon and saw my own arm off.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
So the answer is what?
It doesn't work.
We cannot do that because… Well, no, no.
The answer is that you can't just jump over the context of what you're talking about.
Not you, but your friend, right?
So I would say to your friend, are you concerned about the initiation of force against peaceful individuals?
And he would say, well, yes.
Well, how on earth do you solve that by creating a system that survives only through the initiation of force against peaceful individuals?
You cannot square that circle.
See, what happens is people pretend that the government is not violent.
That's why they create this social contract.
They pretend that the government is not coercion.
Now, they can only say the government will save you from coercion if they pretend that the government is not coercion.
Yeah, that's it.
That's the point.
They think that the government is not coercion.
They think that the government, like if we are 20 of us and we say to the three biggest ones, protect us, they think that the government is just a common decision.
Right, but this is what happens, right?
They say that the government has to have – yeah, I mean this is the standard rotating – the revolving door of the social contract argument.
So people will say it's voluntary because it's a contract.
And then you say, okay, well, if it's voluntary, then we don't need compulsive laws and we can allow for competition.
We don't need taxation and the government can't have a monopoly on services because it's voluntary, right?
Yeah.
Like, I mean, if I say to a woman, you can go out with me and it's totally voluntary, then she would say, okay, well, if it's totally voluntary, then I have the right to say no and I can date other people.
Is that correct?
And if I say no, you don't have the right to say no and you cannot date other people.
In other words, I'm going to initiate force and I'm going to claim a monopoly.
Then she will have the perfect and moral right to say to me, you scumbag, then it is not dating.
It's rape.
Right?
If it is voluntary...
Then it is not government.
If it is government, then it is involuntary.
And if it is a contract, it is voluntary.
If it is taxation, it is involuntary.
And this is just the standard rotation that people have.
If you object to the violence, they will tell you it's voluntary.
If you then say, here are the consequences of the social contract being voluntary, which is that I can choose to say no and the government cannot have a monopoly, then they will tell you that this is not true.
Yeah, okay.
And it only makes sense because of propaganda and the propaganda can only rest on early childhood experiences, in my opinion.
Okay.
Okay.
And listen, get your friend to call in.
I'd love that.
Tell him, look, if you want to own this bald idiot in Canada, you really should.
He promises he will not.
Yeah, listen, this goes out to hundreds of thousands of people.
You will get a chance to strike a real blow against a false doctrine that is being put forward.
I promise I will not cut.
If I get completely beaten up and humiliated in this debate, I will not cut it.
I will put it out there.
He can have a transcript.
He can have bragging rights that he took down the host of the biggest philosophy show in the world and showed him what's what.
I mean, tell him to come on.
Where is your Gallic pride?
Yeah, I don't think so.
He's very peaceful.
But he speaks very good English anyway.
So, yeah, why not?
No, peaceful or not, tell him I want to be corrected.
Look, the last thing that I want to have is incorrect ideas about violence and voluntarism because that really is the light and dark of ethics and the most important conversation in the world is about ethics.
So, please, I mean this in all sincerity.
If I have made some fundamental error for 30 years and I have misidentified violence and voluntarism, then He really, I beg him to come on and to tell me to set me straight.
All right.
I'll do that.
I'll talk to you.
Thank you.
Okay.
Have a good day.
Bye.
Thank you.
And I won't tell my story about France.
Love France.
Anyway.
Okay.
So I think we've got more call on deck.
Who we got up next?
You're welcome.
You're welcome in Paris anytime.
Oh, thank you.
Oh, man.
I'm going.
I've got to cut the short now.
I've got to go.
I've got to go.
Okay.
Bye.
But where's your passport?
Oh, yeah, right.
Right, right.
No, no.
I held that close.
Keep your friends close and your passport closer.
Indeed, indeed.
Next up we have save yourself.
Hey, Steph.
Hello.
Okay, I wrote this down.
I don't know how this is going to come across.
Basically, I realize my approval-seeking, giving machine is impaired from my childhood out of my fear of abandonment, and I don't know rational forms of seeking or giving approval.
Outside of that, when I recognize I'm just trying to seek approval and I realize that it's because of my fear of abandonment, I don't know what to do with that realization in the moment.
How would I communicate that to someone?
Like, oh, I didn't mean to actually give you approval, besides obviously saying it that way.
Right.
Yeah.
Thank you.
That's a very smart and sensible question.
Can you give me a more concrete example if anything comes to mind?
Yeah, sure.
This is the thing.
It's with basic things all the time.
I have one co-worker I work with.
I work at a restaurant.
She will make a mistake and then look to me for approval.
I don't want to give her approval.
At the same time, I don't want to be rude and just ignore her.
I don't really know what to say.
Does she look for approval or does she look more for forgiveness?
That's a good question.
I actually...
I didn't even know that there was a difference between the two, so I don't know.
Well, you can't really approve of a mistake.
Right.
But what you can do is you can say, but it's okay.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah, that's true.
And which do you think she's...
Okay, so what kind of mistake are we talking about?
Does she put the wrong order in?
Does she forget to bring food out until it's cold?
Does she not attend to the table?
It's basically everything.
It's so small.
She'll say sorry for things that it's not even unavoidable.
It's something completely like everyone does it.
I will walk by her, and she will not be in my way or anything, and she'll just say, I'm sorry.
If I were to count, she probably says it at least 10 or 12 times a day.
If I were to try to think, I can't really even think of any time she's really made a mistake or anything like that, that I would remember, like, oh yeah, I'm glad she apologized.
But it's kind of those kinds of little, little things all the time.
Okay, so they're not actually mistakes.
They are sort of just like an e-jerk apologetic thing.
Yeah, yeah.
That would probably be more accurate.
Right.
And where do you think that comes from in her, if we can hypothesize?
That's a very good question.
I really do strongly believe, of course, I don't know for sure, but I strongly believe that she just wants to feel okay and wants to know that it was okay what she just did.
That there's nothing wrong with anything that she did.
Because she'll look at me, and then if I don't say anything, it's almost like she won't know what to say until I say something.
And she's very talkative, and she'll just stop talking.
She won't say anything until I say something next.
Right.
And I would guess, I mean, she's not here, but I would guess that a lot of people's habits, if they've gone through any kind of significant aggression...
As children, a lot of people's habits are lion-taming.
In other words, if there was a conflict between myself and my parents, my parents would not admit that they were wrong, my parents would aggress against me, and therefore I'm the one who had to give way.
I'm the one who had to apologize.
I'm the one who had to make it right.
I'm just hypothesizing, but this could be the case.
To me, that would be the most likely case.
That also explains me, too.
Okay, go ahead.
I don't know if that, like, I really, I mean, I was writing down my question, and I kind of just got confused and wrote a bunch of things down, so, like, basically, I guess, like, that's what I was, like, trying to say, is that, like, that's sort of what I'm doing, too, and, like, I would be, like, if I said, like, okay, like, okay, you're sorry, you're right, that's okay, or whatever, like, I would then feel like, well, did I just, like, sacrifice myself?
Or did I just say something I didn't mean?
My fear is I don't want to have the power my dad had over me, over anybody, and I don't want to also give that power to anybody else.
Right.
Well, look, you have much more control over the first thing you said than over the second.
In other words, it is a lot easier, in my experience, to not exercise power over others than to avoid Experiencing the exercise of others' power over you.
Yeah.
Right, so it's easier for me to not yell at my daughter than it is for me to not feel anxious if someone yells at me.
Right, yeah.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
And now what my mind falls to is that if I just don't do anything, then I won't be yelling.
And this is where the black and white is that I don't know how else to communicate.
I know that I do, and that's sort of where I guess I'm just defaulting.
But it's really just awkward, and I guess I'm not used to it, so I don't know if I should practice that at work.
Because it could be really awkward, and I wouldn't want to...
You know what I mean?
I don't want to make that into something that's like that big.
And it's really small when you think about it, but like it's in my head, like it's just such a big deal.
It is.
No, there's nothing small, I think, in human interactions because there's so much that can be gleaned almost from the apostrophes of conversations, the pauses, the eye darts, whatever, right?
Yeah.
So, I mean, first of all, I really want to applaud you for what that's worth for your commitment to avoid exercising power over others.
Thank you.
I think that's incredibly great and foundational, and this, I believe, will serve you enormously well in your life.
I mean, I am very conscious of this with my own daughter.
Not that you're obviously a kid, but I tell her stories about when I was a boy so that she understands that I was I'm a child and I grew up.
I don't have any special authority because I'm bigger and I can make arguments and give reasons why.
I can claim experience but I have to explain it and so on.
And when I'm wrong, I make sure that she knows it, right?
So if she says something and I disagree with her and she turns out to be right, then we go back over it and I say, well, who was right?
I was daddy.
And who was wrong?
You were daddy, yes.
And sometimes the other way will go the other way.
And so I'm very clear for my relationship with her that She knows that I was just her size and so on, and that I don't have any authority because I'm bigger.
I have more experience.
I can further see the consequences of certain choices, but even that has to be a case that I can make now that she's three and a half.
I mean, all we do half the day is negotiate, which is a real delight, and she's really, really good at it.
So anyway, I really want to point out that this goal of not exercising power over others is fantastic.
And when you start to see how much preemptive lion taming goes on in the world, I think that it will break your heart.
I mean, it is heartbreaking once you really begin to see it because you see how many people have not been treated with dignity and respect and egalitarianism as children.
You can see the footprints to some degree of authority predators on the faces of humanity in so many places when you see this kind of stuff.
And, I mean, just by the by, I mean, as a thought exercise, imagine What would change in the world if children were all treated with peace and dignity and respect and so on?
What would change in the world?
Well, the price of managers would go down because there'd be more competition for managers, right?
I mean, this person, if they're this afraid of a tiny error that isn't really an error that they need to apologize, then it seems unlikely that they would have the authority of going head-to-head with any kind of manager.
And so the ruling classes, in a sense, need children to be maltreated in order to keep the price of what they do high.
And also it shapes the kind of leadership that works, right?
An aggressive kind of leadership, and I worked in a bunch of restaurants that seemed to be quite common, the Gordon Ramsay phenomenon, right?
An aggressive kind of leadership only works with traumatized people.
And if there were no traumatized people, these leaders would be tossed outside the next day because people would just be like, what are you doing?
This is insane.
You know, in the same way that, you know, a long time ago you could bring a Bushido blade to your place of work if you were in the military and you could have authority that way hundreds or thousands of years ago.
But now if you bring a Bushido blade to work, you are escorted off the premises as being insane.
And the same thing would happen in the future with sort of peaceful, with the offspring of peaceful parenting growing up.
The stuff just wouldn't work on them.
This bullying, this yelling, all this kind of stuff.
It would fundamentally change the way society works, the way leadership works, the way hierarchies work, the way Corporations and governments and churches and all that, it would completely change.
And this is one of the reasons why there's such resistance to treating children well, because the entire pyramid and structure in society is predicated, is built on the base of these foot-stamped young Anyway, I just want to point that out.
I think you'll see that quite a bit.
And so I'm so sorry, because if you asked a question, it has completely escaped me.
Was there something in particular that I could help you with, with regards to this interaction?
You talked about how to receive people's good opinion or give it.
Is that right?
Yeah, and it was just like, if I just don't want to exercise power, just the way you said, I just don't want to exercise power over people.
The thing is, I don't know that I'm doing it until I've already done it.
And so even, I guess that's another question for myself, but at that point, Even afterwards, I realized that, and I'm like, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean, or whatever you say, or from whatever I did.
I've been raised to not speak my feelings, not speak my thoughts even, not really have conversation, so I just don't know the language of, hey, I don't like that.
I know that's how simple it is, and that's what I want to do.
I'll give you an example.
Today, my manager called me a bitch, and I didn't like that at all, and I didn't say anything.
Ever since that happened, my whole day was like...
Wow.
But I realized why I didn't say anything in return.
Then I'm like, okay, so next time if this happens again, I hope it doesn't, but maybe it does, I will say I don't like that.
And from that to me, that whole thing is just awkward, but she's the one that's being awkward calling me a bitch.
It's not my fault if she calls me a bitch and then I say I don't like that if she feels awkward.
When I thought about this, I thought about that hot potato metaphor you used in another video.
It looked like she felt better and then I felt worse.
I guess that's where I'm coming from.
How do you speak your mind without I mean, I guess that's just a question for myself, but do you get where I'm going?
No, no, it's a great question.
First of all, I think recognizing what she felt better because you felt worse, right?
That's the win-lose of abuse, right?
That's the vampirism, right?
They get your blood and you get less blood.
Sorry to interrupt, but that's actually interesting because actually she really loves vampires and that's all she ever talks about.
Right, and vampires are very clear metaphors, right?
I mean, they live on other people's Precious fluids on their soul and their identities.
They have no reflection in the mirror, right?
They have no identity.
They can't see themselves.
To me, this is just sociopathy.
And yeah, just to give some feedback on that, because this is really interesting too.
She would say other things and they weren't personal to me, but she would just call me like, well, little boy, I guess that is personal.
But I wouldn't get offended by it, and I just ignored her.
And after I ignored her for like 20 seconds, she didn't say anything, and then she asked me how I was doing.
Like, she asked, like, she was like, I would say, I mean, if I could put my finger on it, I would say like, her true self came out.
But like, I just want to know like quick, fast ways without having to like, sort of fight someone's false self or like, I don't know, I guess it's sort of just another, like, I just want this tool to sort of use to express myself without like, engaging someone's false self, I guess.
Yeah, and look, I mean, I don't know of any ways to deal with bullies than humor.
I know it's weird, right?
Because you say, well, I don't like this.
Oh, is little bitch getting upset?
No, you're going to cry, right?
So if you assert rational needs in front of a bully, I've not found to me that that works particularly well.
Again, maybe I just don't do it the right way or whatever.
But what popped into my head, I said somebody at a restaurant calls me a bitch.
It's like, wait, I'm a female dog?
Well, dogs aren't allowed in the restaurant.
Woohoo!
Day off!
See, that's funny that you say that.
And that's actually what I was going to say.
I was going to say the whole female dog thing.
But then, like, I was a little offended by it.
And so, like, I wanted to, like, kind of get to the bottom of it.
But I guess I don't know if I'm just being unrealistic.
Because, I mean, at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter because she's just a co-worker.
And, I mean, we hardly work together.
And it doesn't, like you said, if you just joke about it, it's probably a lot quicker and a lot easier.
Because then I put the ball in my court.
Right, right, right, right.
I mean, yeah, I mean, there is something about, if you're not intimidated, well, I mean, or if you can get them to believe that you're not intimidated or whatever, then that can be incredibly helpful.
Because they, you know, if somebody attempts to exercise power over you and they don't, that's very negative for them.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, just make jokes.
Yeah, I mean, in the moment I found that to be quite effective.
It does tend to push people back.
It's startling to them.
And that can be helpful.
And what it does is it changes – if this was a pattern from your childhood, it changes that pattern.
Because when parents are aggressive, if you make a joke of it, they tend to become – like if you have parents who are on the dark side of parenting, it tends to make things escalate.
Whereas as an adult, that's – I mean, I've mentioned this before.
It's just the one that sort of pops into my head was many, many years ago when I worked on the trading floor – Of a stock exchange trading company.
My boss assigned me a computer program and would come in like every half an hour to demand to know whether it was done or not.
And, you know, he was a pretty intimidating guy.
And anyway, I just looked up at him and followed him to his office and said, okay, listen, man, I promise.
When I finish this program, you know, just so you don't wear out your shoes, if not, you're welcome.
When I finish this program, I will come straight to your office.
I will not pass go.
I will not go to the washroom.
I will not tie my shoes.
I promise you, I will come straight to your office and tell you.
And this way, you don't have to get leg cramps coming over here.
Plus, these interruptions make it slower and all that.
And so, sort of saying, there's a lot that's communicated in that.
And that can be helpful.
And we ended up with a fairly decent relationship.
But it is also a kindness...
To bullies, not that I'm saying you would just be emotive or whatever, but if you reject someone's bullying in a positive way, it frees them as well as freeing you.
That makes sense too because this was actually interesting because I realized because today's Sunday and she usually parties on Saturday nights, at least from what she says, and I said to myself very quickly, I was like, wow, because I open every Sunday morning now, I'm going to have to deal with this every Sunday morning.
And I'm like, so basically...
She's going to have a good night or doing whatever she voluntarily wants to do, come to work, and then she's going to be treating me the way she treats others, and then she's going to get this reaction from me, and then she's going to be confused and more hesitant, or if not, then also it was like that win-lose feeling, but now with the humor, it's like I definitely see what you're saying because now it kind of opens her up and me up in sort of more of a sheath-like manner for me, but I see where it's a win-win.
Yeah, so you know how you walk up to someone, you shake your hands up and down, right?
Well, imagine if someone walks up to shake your hand and you just start waving your hand back and forth, like from left to right.
What are they going to do?
They have to change what they're doing.
I mean, this doesn't mean that you have responsibility for how other people, you know, do whatever they do.
But if you change what you're doing, the other person has to change what they're doing.
I mean, if somebody walks up to shake your hand and you keep your hands clasped behind, what are they going to mime?
You know, they have to do something different than what they would have done if you'd stuck your hand out.
And if you break the cycle in yourself, then you break the cycle in others.
So, I mean, this is, you know, at least to me, was very advanced stuff, right?
So, there are people who are no longer in my life because they could not stop bullying.
They could not stop one-upping me.
And it is actually a very kind thing for me to do for them as well.
You know, it takes the drug away from the addict.
Maybe they'll go find it somewhere else, but that's, you know, less important.
But every time you let someone treat you badly, it does them, it obviously does you harm, it does them harm as well.
And taking myself out of the equation of negative relationships, which can't be reformed, it can't be changed, is, I mean, it's a strange way to look at it, but I really do believe that it is the most compassionate thing you can do to bullies, is to change The interaction, to shake it up, to get them to act in a different kind of way.
It frees them from the grooves in their own mind as well.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
I didn't think about it that way.
And again, I'm not saying, I don't believe in, obviously it may be true, I don't believe we act out of love for our abusers.
I think that's to twist the definition of love.
Since I really do know what love is with my wife and my daughter and some close friends, I really do know what love is.
So I'm not going to take the same word and apply it to people who are doing me harm.
But there is a kind of compassion in breaking the cycle in yourself because that disrupts the cycle in others.
It gives them an opportunity to act in a different kind of way.
Wow, yeah.
Thank you.
That's very revealing.
You're very welcome.
Okay, yeah, well that was all I have.
Thank you.
Yeah, and sorry, there's just one last thing, because you said that you wanted to seek other people's approval.
Yeah, yeah, and it's sort of when the situation like that happens, where she'll call me, like if she calls me a bitch, then it's like I fall into that sort of paradigm, and I'm like, okay, I have to seek for approval for everything.
Right.
And I just sort of realized.
But I think it's very important to be clear about what's happening here.
Right.
If some guy comes up to me in an alley, sticks a gun in my ribs, or I don't know, sticks a knife in my ribs, and then I push him over and run away, what am I seeking in that moment?
Survival.
Safety, yeah.
I'm seeking safety because the person has the power to do me harm, and I'm seeking safety.
And so it's not so much approval that you want from the person is safety from the person.
Does that make any sense?
That makes a lot of sense, yeah.
That saves me a lot of work, too, because I just thought it was like I was seeking approval.
But yeah, I definitely see that because I also see in other people, too, that work for the company that she kind of does those things to where they'll act in the same way where when she's there and she's in that mood or whatever, they'll react the same.
When they're about to do something, they'll stop and see if she's around the corner, and they'll be like, okay, she's not, and they'll just keep going.
Right, right, right.
Right.
And, you know, once we identify the truth about our interactions with people, I think that the course becomes much clearer.
Because if, like, you, I think, would be relatively happy if she simply stopped giving you nasty terms, right?
Like nasty words.
Yeah.
You don't want to marry her, be your best friend, or, you know, she's not going to be officiating at your wedding.
You would just, you know, let's just stop with the negative.
So what you want from that person is...
A security or safety from the harm that can inflict.
Now, a lot of people will say, well, you have to understand that she's acting out for this and, you know, it's not about you, it's about her and this and that and the other.
Maybe that works for some people and certainly people in the chatroom can let me know if it does.
I don't find that stuff too helpful.
You know, there was a question the other day that was floating around, which was, can we ever be cured of early trauma?
I don't think so.
I mean, I don't think so.
It's like saying, can we be cured of a twist fracture in our leg?
Well, no.
I mean, you can get physio, you can walk around again, you may even regain full mobility and so on, but you can never be somebody who wasn't, who didn't have that injury.
You may even end up stronger as a result of physio.
Physio might get you into exercise and, you know, whatever, right?
So it doesn't mean that you're debilitated or anything.
But I think that once you have learned the language of aggression, if you've learned it in your family, expecting you to unlearn it is unrealistic in the extreme because that's the way that your brain is patterned.
It's like if you spoke English for the first 20 years of your life, can you ever not speak English?
Can someone ever speak to you in English and you have no idea what they're saying?
Of course not.
Of course not.
So I think that this idea, to me, it just ends up being a trap that ends up blaming the victim to say, well, you should just manage your own responses and talk yourself out of whatever negative stuff people put into your life and so on.
I don't think that's realistic.
I don't think that accords with sort of the science of brain development as I understand it.
It's, you know, there's a picture that somebody posted on my Facebook page about an Iraqi veteran curled up in a fetal position because fireworks were on.
And there's not much point saying to that guy, look, these are just fireworks.
They're here for your entertainment.
You just get up, shake it off, you know, walk it off.
I mean, no, because he is undergoing a physiological response in his body that is far below the layer of his consciousness.
And so I think that the same thing occurs when we find ourselves, if we have experienced threats as children, when we find ourselves in threatening situations as adults, all of the Amygdala in fight or flight and all that all gets activated and I guess we can you know work to soothe ourselves and calm ourselves down and so on but it's there nonetheless and you can't prevent that from happening that's an autonomous nervous response that is laid in so early in childhood I mean obviously I think you can have a happy life you can be a great person you can have love you can have all of these wonderful things but I'm concerned about
the standard which says we can undo the impacts of formative brain development I don't think that's true I don't think that's true Anyway, please understand, I have no particular expertise.
I'm really speaking from my own experience and the experience of people that I've known.
This may turn out to be entirely false, but I am concerned about the ethic which says, just rise above it.
Don't let it bother you.
Recognize it's not about you, it's about the other person and so on.
I think that's like saying, okay, so you spoke nothing but English for the first 20 years, and now you're 25.
So, if somebody speaks to you in English, just don't understand them.
Well, no, that's, you know, the processing of language is autonomous by the time you become that proficient in it.
So, anyway, I just want to sort of mention that.
I wouldn't have that as a standard term.
But there's still things you can do to disrupt the pattern.
There's still things that you can do to make yourself feel better in those situations.
But I think that we don't want it to turn into self-attack if we're bothered by abusers, if we've had a history with abuse.
Yeah, for sure.
I totally agree, too.
Well, thank you.
Thank you very much for calling in.
Those are just, you know, excellent, fantastic questions as always.
Yeah, and I just want to say thank you so much too for all your help because I've been seeing a counselor and stuff and it really is great to have a counselor and to be able to call you and just because that right there like I could have spent, I have the next day off, I could have spent all day writing and I don't know like how far along I would have come to that.
It's just very, very easy and very simple just, you know, to be able to, you know, when you need it to be able to talk to someone like this.
Thank you.
Oh, I appreciate that and congratulations on the therapy too.
That's great.
Alright, next.
Next up we have Richard.
Richard.
Hello?
Hello.
Hi.
Hi.
I want to say thank you.
I spoke with you a while back when my son was in prison.
She still is.
And the advice you gave me was great to ask him the questions.
So there's that.
It's great advice, I think, for anyone to ask what their three worst and best experiences are, etc.
I had a question that you may have covered in a podcast, but I unfortunately have not.
At this point, please feel free to ask again, because there's so much out there.
I haven't got through 10,000 of them yet.
And it has to do with, because I have a daughter who is nine months old, and we want to have more kids eventually.
And I'm wondering, you personally, what you think about when is the right time as far as for the kid.
Okay, you, for instance, are you going to have more kids?
No, I'm a man, so...
Not really possible for me unless there's something possibly I could do with a...
What are you going to do?
Keep it in a box?
That's the line from The Life of Brian.
Look, as far as...
Okay, how many people do you know who get along well with their siblings?
Well, most.
Okay, good.
And what's the age difference of the siblings that you know who get along with, if there's any pattern, the best?
Two to three years, usually.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, so if that's your experience and that's the range, that would seem to me to be a pretty decent area.
I mean, this is all obviously very subjective and so on, but I think if the kids are too close together, it's pretty exhausting for the parents.
And I think if the kids are too far apart, then they're just not going to be close enough in age to enjoy the same things.
If that makes any sense.
I think somewhere in there may be the sweet spot, but it's obviously a very personal decision for everyone.
What I was wrestling with though is just the idea of respecting the kids' preferences and for them to be able to understand it.
It takes resources away from us.
Do they want a kid?
How can they know if they want to have a little brother or a little sister?
Yeah, I mean, that's a tough question because I actually have a call I haven't released yet with some parents where I was sort of working through this and, you know, they have another kid and they were saying, well, you know, the older kid doesn't really like it.
And it's like, well, what's the case for having a sibling if you're a kid?
You know, what's the case?
Well, down the road, you'll be able to play together.
It's like, well, yeah, you've got a newborn.
That's going to be like three years or more.
I think kids really start to sort of play side, instead of just side by side, they play with each other around sort of three and a half to four and a half years old.
So he's not, hey, son, you're two, but in four years, you'll be able to play with it, right?
You know what I mean?
Like it doesn't really, that's not much that's going to be that compelling.
So it is, it's tough, you know, for kids.
For the elder siblings, I don't know how to sell that, so to speak, to them.
There'll be more love in the house.
It's like, well, you know, mommy and daddy will be more tired.
We will have less time for you.
They'll be yelling, screaming, you know, and all that.
And so it is a hard case to make for...
The sibling, as to why another sibling would be great.
I didn't come up with an answer to that.
I've thought about it intimately since.
I don't have a good answer as to how you would make that case.
But I do think that as a whole, if you sort of look at the big picture, it's tough to make the case with an 18-month-old why you need to brush their teeth.
But you still have to brush your teeth, right?
Or why they need to get their shots.
well, I mean, I think the shots are valid, then you gotta get the shots, right?
So it's tough to make those cases, but you are responsible for the life experience And, you know, I think if siblings, you know, the siblings who are close, I think, are a great benefit to each other's lives.
It is what survives family.
What survives his family when the parents are dead and gone are the siblings.
And that is a continuity throughout their whole life that if the sibling relationship is good, I think can be just a wonderful and most amazingly beneficial addition to I mean, it's nice to know people who knew you when you were a kid, you know, through your whole life.
And, you know, lots of milestones to celebrate together and lots of people to help you raise your kids together and there's lots of great stuff that goes on with a positive and beneficial sibling relationship that you can't sell to a two-year-old, you know.
Well, when you get married, you know, you have your own children and blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
So, I think it is, it's a tough case to make when they're very young, but Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the case can be made that you know what's better for the sibling, sorry, for your child as a whole.
And obviously, I mean, I think having a sibling in your life is kind of a good thing if the sibling, if it's a good relationship.
Yeah.
As of, you know, there's pluses and minuses.
But that's sort of my thoughts on it, not that there's anything conclusive I think that anyone can say about that.
Yeah, and she's definitely seen examples of her cousins playing together, where she has two brothers and sisters and all this, and she just loves it.
So I don't see where, moving forward, she would not want that.
I feel like she's kind of missing out.
There'll be lots of times when she doesn't want it, probably, when the newborn is there, and it may not be that easy to explain, but sometimes as a parent you just have to grit your teeth and know that it will make sense to your kids in time, because they're young and all that.
All right.
Okay.
That's just all I was thinking about.
I'm very concerned about respecting my child's preferences.
No, and I mean, good for you, man.
I mean, fantastic.
You know, I want to be reincarnated as your second kid.
That's my plan.
No, listen, I mean, that's fantastic.
You know, the sensitivity that you're bringing to this question is beautiful.
It's wonderful.
I am moved.
Not quite beyond words, because I've still got to run a show, but I'm very moved, and I really wanted to Congratulate you.
Give infinite props and respect and honor to you as a parent for being so sensitive to the preferences of your kid.
Man, that's gold, baby.
Gold!
So, and, you know, be sure to outbreed the status.
So I wouldn't stop at two.
Maybe a baker's dozen.
That would be the point.
And the reward I get is she gets around family and everyone's complimenting on how she's the happiest baby that they've ever seen.
And next, hopefully, they'll ask, and how did you?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
In fact, someone posted a cartoon on Facebook about people criticizing, oh, you shouldn't sleep with the kid, and you shouldn't do this, and you shouldn't do that.
All these, you know, the more evolved ways of parenting, as opposed to a violent way of parenting.
And then, in the last one, they're asking, well, how's your baby so happy?
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, I'm...
I'm sort of a fan of co-sleeping if you can manage it.
I mean, that seems to me...
I mean, I sort of go back 50,000 years.
I mean, that's a pretty important thing.
I mean, I think the babies are kind of designed to sleep most comfortably with their parents.
And if you can manage it, if you don't have some jujitsu baby who does these kinds of ninja flips, then I think that seems to be a positive.
And so, yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty good place to start.
How did we evolve and what are we used to and all that kind of stuff.
Right, right.
Right, and I try to do paleo as much as possible with that because they were used to being held all the time.
That's just the way we develop.
That's right, and that's why I don't shower.
I mean, 50,000 years ago.
Oh, wait, there were waterfalls.
All right, well, I guess I better go and stop weeping above my own armpits now.
Well, thanks very much, and congratulations again.
And this just all sounds too wonderful for words, so good for you, man.
Thanks for all your help.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Next we have Ross.
Ross, if you could just flip on a bit of a falsetto.
We'd like to get more women on the show.
And it's either you or me.
And so, go for it.
Ross, are you there?
Oh, well, Steph.
Sounds like Michael Phelan with a groin injury.
Beautiful.
Alright, well, first I want to say thanks for taking my call.
I've always had a good time whenever I called in here, so I appreciate it, and I like how you've handled some of the calls today.
They've been relevant to some stuff that I've been experiencing.
So I guess I have a multi-parter, if that's okay.
Alright, sneak.
Yeah, sneaking one in there.
I guess I'll ask...
I'll ask this one first, which is, I'm trying to get a tutoring business going, like where I tutor people High school age or younger and whatever, and then tutor students at the local university and anthropology and sociology and maybe help some of the foreign students with English and just kind of help people work on their papers.
I'm not going to write papers for people, but I'd like to help them.
I was just wondering if you had any advice as far as getting that going, how...
How I could market myself better and sort of introduce myself to people and also how to overcome this problem which this is a problem that I know you have dealt with which is where people would love to have your help and they want your help and they'll talk to you all day about it but then when it comes to the part where They would actually have to make any sort of transaction financially.
They don't want your help anymore or they don't want to actually do that.
They're just trying to get that help for free.
So I guess that would be my first question.
How are you marketing yourself now?
Right now, it's mostly been word of mouth.
I am working on some flyers and stuff like that to put up.
And I talked to a lot of people when I was a substitute teacher and got some people like that.
And I do tutor people sometimes online.
But yeah, that's pretty much all I really have going on right now.
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you're heading in the right direction.
So the flyers and so on, I think, can be...
You can also, if you wanted to spend some money, you can very geographically target Google AdWords and other kinds of online, very specific to your town or wherever it is that you are.
And that can be useful, because of course the good thing is that you only pay when they click, at least that's how it was when I was doing it.
So I think online advertising that is very geographically specific can be very helpful.
And the other thing too is that you may want to go You know, just talk to a college and say, look, I mean, this is the service that I'm offering.
I think it's win-win.
I mean, if, you know, because I know a lot of colleges, they get people who come in from high school who can't spell, don't know grammar, you know, just come out of the brain mash of, you know, probably even better than I do, the level of education that's going on in this area.
But, and talk to the colleges and say, listen, if you end up with students who get better grades, that's good for you.
If I end up with students who will pay me, even better for me.
And, you You can have a look.
There may be bulletin boards.
You can post some stuff in or whatever.
When you're starting out, you know the term lost leader.
I'm a big believer in lost leader.
Hell, my whole podcast series is a lost leader.
But I'm very much around if you want to differentiate yourself, you have to offer something cheap or free.
So it might be first lesson free, first lesson half price or whatever it is kind of thing.
And that will get...
I mean, the key thing, I think, to building a business is simply get people to consume your product.
And from there, if your product is good enough, then they should pay for it, right?
I mean, free samples, taste tests, you know, get the stuff for all the time.
You can't go down to a park without somebody offering you some Ben& Jerry's in a cup or something.
And so I think lost leaders are very important in establishing a business.
People, if they don't know you, they will discount your price, just naturally, right?
I mean, if you've ever ordered stuff online, you know, here's a computer by Dell.
Here's a computer by Dell with three L's.
Which one do you feel is going to be more reliable?
Well, it's the company that you know and so on.
I mean, advertising as a whole has huge amounts of loss leaders in it, right?
So, you know, if you're some sports drink and you hire Kobe Bryant for God knows how much, enough to make a philosopher groin his teeth at how much celebrities get paid to market sugar and carb drinks.
But the reason that people get celebrity endorsements for start-out products is they're saying, look, we've just sunk a whole bunch of money into this, so we're going to be around for the long haul, so don't think of us as a fly-by-night company, you know, spend a lot of money, get a big, you know, and movies do this all the time, right?
I mean, The more money a movie can spend on promoting itself, the more money usually has been spent on the movie and so on.
Also, if they hire a big star, then you know you're not going to get cheesy production values because they spent a lot of money, so you know you're going to get a certain kind of quality.
So, I mean, I think loss leaders are pretty important in the software business.
The first software program I sold was $5,000, and the last one was 850,000 plus plus plus.
So it takes a while to get up into the larger figures and the way to do that I think best is to offer some sort of incentive to start consuming the product.
And of course then you get more contacts even if that person ends up not buying it.
He may say, oh I had this tutor who seemed good, I couldn't do it at the time or whatever.
Just get your product in front of people and you get to practice providing the best quality service and so I'm a big one for first session free kind of thing.
Now, the question about, you know, people are interested until they have to pay.
Well, I mean, the standard economic argument is they're not then that interested because they're not willing to pay.
You know, every day or two, I mean, sometimes a couple of times a day, I get emails or PayPal.
Somebody will donate something through PayPal.
Yeah.
I hate to say it.
Because, you know, I don't want to sound ungrateful for any donation, but there does seem to be a kind of disparity for me.
Somebody says, oh man, I've burned through all of your, you know, I've burned through half of your podcasts and it's changed my life.
You know, I used to be fundamentalist, now I'm atheist, I used to be a statist, and now I no longer donate to political campaigns.
I've freed up my time, my relationships are way better, I'm more in love with my wife, my relationship with my kids are better.
Here's eight dollars.
And that to me is just like, oh...
I never know what to say.
I don't know what to say.
I used to refund that stuff.
I did.
I used to refund it.
I'd say, man, look, I mean, if this is only worth eight bucks for you, you need the eight bucks more than I do.
Because, you know, after PayPal, it's like $6.50.
But then people would get really upset.
What do you mean you're refunding?
You know, he says, pay whatever you want.
Actually, it doesn't.
It says 50 cents per podcast is requested.
So...
What I do, and this is just anybody who's even vaguely interested, I just have to assume that they were not raised with a strong sense of reciprocity.
If the podcasts have changed your life, then maybe I could be worth more than a happy meal.
That would be my particular thought.
The tens of thousands of hours that I put into philosophy and this show and all of that, if it really has changed your life.
So if you're no longer going to church, you're saving a thousand bucks a year.
If you're no longer donating to political campaigns, you're saving...
Thousands of bucks a year, maybe, or hundreds of hours or tens of hours or whatever, and if your relationships have improved, then you're spending much less time fighting.
Put all that together, you're saving thousands and thousands of dollars and having a much higher quality life.
You know, maybe shave a little bit more than eight bucks off that pile and send it to me.
Anyway, I don't want to sound ungrateful, but there is this disparity between what people say about the value of the podcast and what they're actually willing to type into a PayPal window or whatever.
And so...
There is this disparity.
I don't want to make this about me and my show, but there is this disparity that occurs.
I think the only way to do it from your perspective is if you're not going to do the last leader, you have to bring the financial conversation up first.
Because if somebody thinks you're giving away encyclopedias for free, they'll chat with you all day.
But the moment you say they're $1,600, you'll find out if they're actually interested or not.
If they're going to be an exchange available.
I've chatted with parents before, you know, chatted with them for 45 minutes about how they would love for me, you know, they'd love to have a tutor for their kid, and then, you know, they don't, but they don't care about having a tutor for their kid enough to pay me a paltry amount of money that they're going to be giving me.
But they'll talk all day about how bad they want me to do it.
Right.
No, there's just two other things.
Yeah, no, of course.
So, you know, people will talk a lot, right?
People will talk a lot about the good that they want to do.
But then if you ask them to actually do it, then you're usually in a different conversation.
Two other things I mentioned before we move on to the next caller.
The first is that find people who've got successful tutoring businesses, take them to lunch.
Pick their brains.
Ask them for 10 minutes on the call, on the phone or whatever.
I mean, I've done shows here where I try to help people get their own podcast started and so on.
But you want to try and find people who've got success and ask them.
Most people are very happy to share their success.
Most people who are wise in the ways of business know that competition is good for them.
It's not like, well, I'm not going to teach you how to become a successful tutor because then you'll take half my...
No.
You'll be advertising the value of tutoring and people don't just take the first tutor, they'll Google, they'll look for other tutors or whatever, right?
So it will raise the value of the business as a whole.
When I started out in software, our field was very small.
Every new competitor who came in, it was like, yay, fantastic!
That means that they've done the market research, they know the market is bigger for more than one company, they're going to be out there advertising.
People aren't going to spend that kind of coin without doing their market research.
Basically, now it's made the best man win or made the best software package win.
The more competitors who came into the marketplace, the happier I was, certainly, as an entrepreneur.
Take them to lunch and find people.
The other thing you may want to do, of course, is you may want to work for another tutoring company for a couple of months.
Obviously, not with the intention of poaching clients, but You know, you can learn a lot about a business from being in a successful business.
And then, you know, you can stay there for as long as you feel you need to absorb whatever works in the business and then go do whatever they're doing.
I think, I mean, Brett Venat from School Sucks, from the School Sucks podcast, runs a successful tutoring business.
I'm sure that he would give you a few smidgens of time to help you to understand how he did it.
But try not to reinvent the wheel.
I made that mistake too often in business.
Look online.
Are there books?
Are there online courses?
Has somebody written a book on Lulu about how to start a successful tutoring company?
I mean, do research.
A lot of us independent types feel that reinventing the wheel is a good thing.
I'm not saying it has no value, but I think that there's probably a lot of expertise out there that you can get access to, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
Thanks, man.
All right.
Oh yeah, you can call in at School Sucks Live.
Oh, cool.
You're talking about School Sucks Podcast?
Yeah, I'll go check it out.
Thanks a lot.
I didn't realize he had a tutoring business, so I'll look into that.
I thought it was a tutoring business.
In other words, he put up old-style British houses, but it actually is tutoring, so I don't want to mention that.
It's important to get these things straightened out.
All right.
Do we have...
I know.
Sorry.
I was actually biting back that joke for about 20 minutes.
I was just biting back that joke for about 20 minutes and it just got out.
And I apologize for the low quality of the jokes.
But I feel, you know, like if you have a dumb joke inside you, for me, it's just like, you know, it's like builds up to a good fart.
It may be unpleasant for everyone else, but you feel a lot better.
So I just tooted something savage and sorry.
Alright.
It just smells best to you.
Yeah, I know.
It doesn't even smell good to me.
But up next we have...
Hello.
Hi.
So my topic for today is discussions that you have with people who are statists or argumentative about the position of anarcho-capitalism or voluntarism.
I guess do we say voluntarism or voluntarism?
You know, I don't know.
I was told rather sharply many years ago that it's voluntarism, but I think voluntarism is a better word.
Or I just generally prefer philosopher.
Philosophy.
I think that's a better term.
Anyway, but go ahead.
Yeah, voluntarism is fine with me.
I found that when I'm discussing these things with friends and people online and so on, that certain words and certain concepts are really Misinterpreted or have stigma associated with them that cause a clash.
Obviously the word anarchy has certain mixed connotations and I know you really like to use it because, well, it means what it means, not what the society has abused it to mean.
And you'd like to draw that disparity up and discuss it, but sometimes that just stops the conversation.
And so I found that recently when I said that we're still basically slaves, that slavery, the term slavery specifically, just drives people up the wall.
And so I'm wondering if using enslaved Can be a way to mitigate that.
Obviously, we're not really endangered servants, but we are enslaved.
It just may not be, quote, slavery according to what people's common parlance view of slavery is.
Yeah, I mean, on the story of your enslavement, I get, you know, a comment every day or two basically, oh yeah, I'm so enslaved, I have a car, a 60-inch TV, Internet...
You know, whatever.
And that's right.
I mean, of course, people's concepts of slavery, you know, Ben-Hur and Hot Sun and Cat O' Nine Tails and whatever, right?
And so when they look at the modern world, they say, well, this is not slavery.
And of course, in terms of the appearance of things, they're completely and totally right.
I mean, I would not want to live at any other time in human history.
This is my absolute best preferred, most yummy, scrumptious, delicious, covered in caramel and nuts kind of time to be alive.
Maybe at some point in the future, I mean, I think at some point in the future there will be a much better society, a much more sustainable society, a much more peaceful society, but, you know, this beats being a 20-year-old in 1914.
You know, this beats being a 20-year-old in...
1939 in England or 1942 or 41 in America.
This beats the quarter of the European population dying in the Black Death.
This beats the Roman Empire where the average life expectancy is 21.
It beats being a caveman and dying from a tooth infection.
So, this is the best time and that is sort of an important thing to understand when you're talking with people that in a sense it seems like you're complaining about a society that is full of some pretty immense riches and toys and treasures and so on and I accept that and I think it's this is the best time and that is sort of an important thing to understand when
The problem, right, the problem of that is I think that we could say in sort of the case that I would make is to say to someone, okay, well, if I were to slap a quarter million dollar debt on you, would you feel more free or less free?
Yeah.
They would say less free, of course, right?
And I said, at some point, I would slap a big enough debt on you that you would feel that you would be working for me.
And there would be a kind of enslavement in that.
And it's a different kind of slavery to say, I'm going to slap a debt on you, but you can choose your occupation to pay it off.
That is a more free situation than I'm going to force you to pick cotton, right?
Whip you.
Right.
But fundamentally, they're more similar in many ways than they are different.
And then say, well, you recognize that the average American baby or Canadian baby or Greek baby is born hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt under the existing system.
Now, that clearly is not the same as being free.
And that is the result of early generations wanting stuff and not wanting to pay for it.
And that's facilitated by the state and the printing presses of central banks and all this kind of nonsense, right?
And it's also facilitated by the fact that because we get to choose our own occupations, we're that much more productive.
Like you can't put a slave in a quarter million dollars of debt because the slave's productivity is so low that you just couldn't borrow that much off of that, right?
Right.
But if the slave gets to choose his or her own occupation and has some relative economic freedom then the slave becomes so productive or the person becomes so productive that you can go much further into debt than if they were just a slave, right?
Like a direct, you go into the fields kind of slave.
And so excessive debt is definitely a form of control, of subjugation, of exploitation And the fact that you get to work for yourself but pay other people off does not make you free.
It's certainly more pleasant than being forced to go and work in the fields in the hot sun with no sunscreen and beaten up or whatever, right?
It certainly is more pleasant.
But the fact that it's more pleasant means that you can get even more in debt because you're that much more productive.
So, you know, the one thing that is, you know, if you want to step out of the realm of the moral argument, which I do from time to time, and it's fine, of course, right?
There's no perfect way to serve these balls back over the tennis court.
But when people say, well...
You know, what about the poor or, you know, the healthcare, and people get sick, and it's like, well, this is all nice, this is all well and good, but you know that they're all in debt.
Well, no, yeah, we can solve these, but people think, if people forget about the debt, then the impetus from a practical standpoint to change the existing system is much less.
You know, it's like, why should I stop going to college?
Well, because you're mounting up more and more student debt.
That's why you should stop going to college.
College is a lot of fun.
I loved college.
Well, I'm in graduate school more so than undergrad.
But if people forget that the systems are all running into catastrophic debt, then it seems sustainable.
Because there's no mathematical endpoint to the existing system.
And so that to me is a great rejoiner, right?
So like I used this when I was debriding Professor Cefatoli in Brazil.
Yeah, but they're all, you know, yeah, there are countries that have less imperialism and more socialism, but they're still in debt.
You know, dangerously, catastrophically, destructively, and it is fun to, I mean, I don't think there's anyone who's got half a brain who would say that indebting the unborn is morally valid, right?
You cannot have any kind of reasonable, just, or moral system that piles hundreds of thousands of dollars, let alone one thin dime, of debt on the tender, bald skulls of newborns.
And so they have to say that that's wrong.
And if they're not willing to say that indebting the unborn is wrong, then I'm just not going to have a conversation with them.
I mean, you could sort of prove it through UPB, but I mean, if somebody doesn't have any kind of moral instinct, then you're trying to play catch with a blind man.
I mean, anything he catches is going to be accidental, and more likely you're just going to brain him, right?
So if someone says, yes, it is wrong to indebt the unborn, Okay, great.
Great.
Okay, so something has to be wrong with the system that universally ends up indebting the unborn.
Right?
In Europe, in North America, in South America, everywhere, right?
All the countries are in debt.
So, you can say, well, what is the problem?
Why are all these countries experiencing the same phenomenon?
Well, then you're into an interesting conversation, I think.
But at least you've gotten over the hump of...
What's wrong with the current system?
There's nothing particularly, oh, okay, it could be tweaked, it could be improved, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, no, no, no.
If it indebts the unborn to the tunes of hundreds of thousands of dollars, it is a fundamentally immoral system.
And if you can figure out why, it keeps indebting, right?
You can get into that with sort of public choice theory and all that kind of stuff.
Then you're, I think, into a useful conversation.
But if there's no problem, you don't go to the doctor.
Does that make any sense?
Well, I guess the words that...
I'm just trying to get down to the word choices that we use in You seem to like the confrontation and are willing to walk away from a debate or a discussion right away when you see a lack of intellectual honesty.
Or morality.
Whereas I tend to be kind of like a pit bull and just latch my teeth on and jerk like crazy.
And look, I mean, certainly in public debates, you know, I have long debates with people I disagree with.
So I have no problem with the pit bull approach.
For me, of course, you know, if I get a show of it, so much the better.
But in my private life, I mean, time is just incredibly short.
I mean, I just, you know, I long for the days back when I could sort of write books.
My time is just incredibly short.
And competition with quality time with friends and family, and I'm not saying this is not the case with you, but for me, you know, the competition is, or I could be playing with my daughter and my wife, or I could be going out for dinner with friends that I love and hold dear, or I could, you know, go with some, borrow some friends' kids and we could go to the Butterfly Conservatory or a farm or down to the lake or whatever.
And so for me, it's like, or I could be doing X, Y, and Z is the competition that people are up against if I'm sort of not doing a show, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
Alright, and then another one that I seem to run into on a regular basis, in addition to the standard knee-jerk response to bad words that have been tainted.
The other thing I run into is that people, this is kind of like the social contract thing that some people had been talking about earlier on this call.
Today, you were talking with the guy, and by the way, Tom Woods has a great argument against the social contract thing, and I would really encourage the first caller to take a look at that.
Just do a search on YouTube for Tom Woods, and it's his most recent video.
That being said, you'll deal with people who will say things like, well, government is our best Our best way of examining how to deal with social problems and we've come to that conclusion after a period of, you know, a large amount of, you know, exploring and testing and variety.
And my response to that is, well, no, it's actually, it's a...
It's not logically determined by people acting rationally.
It was a system that wasn't even challenged or examined by society.
It's a holdover from tribal obedience to the alpha male that modern man needs just as much as we need to keep dairy away from meat anymore.
I mean, a cheeseburger, wow!
We don't actually have to keep them separate.
So, you know, the alpha male, he had special privileges that no other male had.
He could rape, steal, murder.
Nobody would question it, except for someone else that wanted to replace him as the alpha male.
And our society has the same view of government that we once had of this alpha male.
They're special.
They can kidnap, but it's called arrest.
They can steal, but it's called taxes.
They can murder, but it's called offending our interests or war.
So this double standard, you know, we can obviously see it.
It's immoral, illogical, and unnecessary.
And their response to that...
But see, but see, sorry, if I can just say, sorry, no, tell me about the responses before I jump in, sorry.
Well, the response to that is typically, well, that's, you know, show me how that's historically valid.
I believe that, you know, society's developed through a series of people coming through, you know, coming together voluntarily and blah, blah, blah.
Right.
And I just...
You know, there's a great, there's a, sorry, there was a great quote that was in a book I read recently I got from Laissez-Faire Books.
I strongly recommend their club, their mother book club.
And in it, the guy was talking about school boards.
You know, the people say, well, if you want to change your school, get involved in the school board.
Go and run for governor of the school or whatever, right?
Go be a teacher or go whatever, right?
Yeah, I get that.
And he was saying, well, you know, what nonsense?
What nonsense?
Let's say there's some grocery store.
That doesn't have the stuff you like or has poor quality stuff or the stuff is, you know, always three minutes from its due date.
Are you supposed to spend the next 20 years of your life trying to reform the management practices and getting into the organization and spending countless thousands of hours attempting to reform the business practices of that grocery store?
Well, of course not.
You just say, hey, that grocery store is not for me.
I'm going to go to the one across the street.
Done.
As they used to say, done and dusted.
Done.
Yep.
So this idea that, you know, if you want to change the system, you've got to go in and change, like, no, forget that.
Or what we should do then is we should say, okay, well, if a woman wants to get divorced, then, you know, she has to spend, you know, 10 or 15 years in court trying to get that to happen, right?
Or whatever, right?
So, but that's not how we run any kind of rational...
Any kind of rational system, but you're falling into a bit of a trap.
Maybe it's not a trap for you, but I think it's a trap.
The trap is that you have to get someone to agree with you that the state is not the result of a rational and consistent experimentation with alternatives.
Now, logically, of course, it's not, because the state specifically disallows alternatives.
You cannot introduce an alternative currency to pay your taxes with.
You cannot not fund public schools.
You cannot sign out of old-age pensions.
You cannot, at least here in Canada, avoid the healthcare system.
You can't.
And so the idea that this is some rational experimentation among...
It's like, well, if the other opportunities or experiments are banned, you can't...
Anyway.
But the reality is, this is back to the against me argument.
So if somebody was making this argument with me, I'd say, okay, well...
You believe that it's a rational blah blah blah and I believe that it's far from this, so are we free to disagree?
Somebody has to say yes, of course, right?
It's like, okay, then you should send your money to the entity you call the state and I should not because I disagree with you.
Now, we don't have to agree.
That's the beauty of a free society, right?
In a state of society, you got to get a majority of people to agree with you about something to even have a chance of changing it.
And therefore, needing to change other people's minds is really, really important.
You got to, as you say, you got to dig in like a pit bull.
You got to hang on there.
You got to change people's minds.
But the beauty of advocating for a free society is, hey, you think the welfare state's great?
Fantastic.
I don't have to argue you out of that.
I just have to be free to follow my conscience if I disagree.
And if you're not going to grant me that freedom to disagree with you, I'm not going to pretend to have a debate with you.
But if you remember that somebody can have a full-on belief in the efficacy of the police...
They can have a full-on belief in the efficacy of the court system and the prison system and government control of currency and borders and whatever, taxes, tariffs, controls, whatever.
They can fully believe all of that stuff.
As long as you're free to disagree with that person, that's fine.
But in the status paradigm, you have to change other people's minds or you're doomed.
But in a free society, people can believe whatever they want.
Now, it's my belief, like, so for instance, if somebody's really, I believe that drugs should be illegal.
Fantastic.
Am I allowed to disagree with you?
And act on it?
Well, if no, then, okay, I'm not going to pretend to have a debate with you if you want me thrown in jail for disagreeing with you.
But if I am allowed to disagree with you, then clearly I have to be allowed to smoke whatever weeds I want to answer my own conscience, or at least not pay for the pursuit and caging and incarceration of people.
Who pursue activities I don't find morally objectionable?
And it's my belief, of course, that as I talk about in Practical Anarchy, the free book available at freedomradio.com forward slash free, look, if somebody wants the drug war, like let's say a quarter of the population doesn't want the drug war, well then they get to opt out, and then the bill goes to the other people.
And of those, a certain number of people will break away because the bill gets higher, which means the higher bill goes higher.
And then the last guy gets a bill for $100 billion.
Suddenly, I'm sure he can find his way through to tolerance of other people smoking drugs if they don't get to socialize the cost of their own particular moral hang-ups.
So, yeah, I would just really focus on the fact that you don't need people to agree with you if you're advocating for a free society.
You just need to have the right to disagree with them, which they're willing to acknowledge.
Yeah, the against me argument is definitely like a moral one, but I'm...
I like to come at it from multiple different ways, and I can make that argument fairly clear and concisely, but then I also really like to do the logical thing like, which is more likely to achieve the optimal result?
Having one person throw darts at the dart board.
Having a committee select a person to throw a dart at the dart board or having everyone that wants to throw a dart at the dart board have a chance to throw the dart at the dart board.
Whoever gets the closest shot or the shot that we like the best ends up being the person that we give our money to.
It's basically explaining the free market thing.
When it comes to addressing problems like How do we build the roads?
Which one's more likely to achieve the optimal result?
The one where you're competing to see who can cooperate best with other people?
Or a system where you have only one provider?
Obviously, the competition wins out and that one works really well.
Well, sorry, but the problem with that, I mean, as I'm sure you're aware, is that… You don't want to have like 65 roads, highways going down the same… No, no, I don't care about that.
I mean, the market will decide all of that.
But the problem with that is that there is no such thing as the general social advantage.
There's only advantage for specific individuals.
And so, like right now, I think it's in Quebec, they're investigating all of the mafia ties to construction companies who get preferential treatments from the government, right?
For those people, they make a fortune.
Oh, sure.
Sure.
But when we're dealing with this type of discussion, you have the ability to basically say there are...
Moral actors and immoral actors.
And the ones that are the moral actors are the ones that are not choosing to take advantage of theft.
And the immoral actors are the ones that are willing to take advantage of theft.
And so...
Right.
Sorry, but the moral and immoral actors that need to be identified in a debate are not outside the debate.
Oh, I know.
I agree.
No, but the moral and immoral...
This is the against me argument.
The moral and immoral actors in a debate, first we need to define in the debate who's the moral and the immoral person.
And this is why if somebody advocates you being thrown in jail for disagreeing with him, then he is an immoral actor.
And so this is why for me philosophy is always about the personal.
It always starts with the personal.
It always starts with what's right in front of you, the person you're sitting across from, the person you're having a debate with.
That's the moral nature you need to determine.
Not some abstract group of people in the future who might benefit from a more free society.
That's all very abstract, right?
It's the ethics, right?
This is why, you know, they just put out a video and an article which was also published in Ernie Hancock's journal.
Does spanking violate the NAP? Mostly there's something we can look in the mirror and decide.
Does spanking violate the non-aggression principle?
And, you know, in this particular conversation with me across from the table, who are the moral actors in this conversation?
And again, you can do it any way you want, right?
I'm just telling you my particular, what I think is the most important.
Philosophy has to be made real for people.
It has to not be abstract.
It has to be something concrete that is definable in the here and now.
Because as long as you're dealing with abstractions, in my belief, you don't prick anyone's conscience.
Right, but if somebody is going to stare across the table at you and say, yes, you should be thrown in jail for disagreeing with me, you either find out if they have a conscience, which is kind of, there's no point discussing ethics with people who have no conscience.
It's like discussing diets with dead people.
I mean, you know, it doesn't work.
But, so either they, right, like, so the other day, a couple of weeks ago, this Jehovah's Witness called in, and, you know, he was not willing to have, he didn't have any moral problems with With God killing the unborn or children.
And so then, you know, this is a person with no conscience, with no moral barometer or steerage of any kind.
So you can't have a conversation with that.
No.
In that case, he didn't have any problems with it.
Right, but I would say that he could make a very simple claim that destroys your...
that's immoral.
It's just a different morality.
The claim is basically that that which exists on Earth and in the material and in the existence of our lifetimes and stuff that happens in this reality that we know is living No,
and I fully understand that argument, but if I were to say the Holocaust was a virtuous action, because in another universe it might have been morally the best thing ever, well, obviously that would be a hugely problematic statement, right?
Right, but they could actually agree with that too.
Right, but what I'm saying is that anybody who's willing to take an unbelievably evil situation and say that it's, I have no moral problems with it because in another dimension it might be considered virtuous, is somebody without a conscience.
I mean, if there's no slowdown or no, in my opinion, right, I don't have a brain scan or anything, right, but...
But I can't have a debate with somebody who doesn't have a conscience.
I'm not going to extend the courtesy of ethics without somebody who has a conscience.
And so this is why if you bring philosophy into the immediate, into the here and now, it's very difficult for people.
It's very painful for people.
I understand that.
I really do.
But it's the only way that philosophy can be acted on.
And if you can't act on it, then it's not going to do anything.
In particular, to change your behavior.
You know, how are roads going to be done in a free society?
It's a great question.
I love the question.
Don't get me wrong.
I think that these abstracts are a lot of fun to talk about.
And they really are.
And it's great.
But it's, you know, it's like doing a crossword.
It's great fun, but it's not a particularly moral situation.
The moral situation is what you can change and affect in the here and now.
Philosophy is...
You know what?
It's like...
Ouija board.
I've never had, but when I was younger in the 70s, Ouija boards were kind of big.
So Ouija boards, like, you push the letters, you spell things out or whatever, right?
So this is, to me, philosophy for a lot of people is like Ouija board, right?
But philosophy in the way that I think about it is you end up with the devil standing, a demon standing on the Ouija board that you have to deal with.
That's a little different from this really sort of subtle and abstract pushing around with the letters thing.
It is something tangible in the here and now.
That has to be processed, acted on, and decided.
And that's my particular...
It's not always, right?
Sometimes I'll have very pleasant abstract discussions and so on.
But I do think it is about that which is actionable.
And the first moral judgment that needs to be passed is about the people in the conversation.
Not about the provision of roads 100 years from now.
Anyway, that's my particular perspective.
I'm not saying you would agree with it or anything, but I hope that at least I made my points clear.
Just one quick opinion from you on what I said earlier before I go.
Did you like that association between the alpha male and special privilege and government and special privilege?
I mean, that we've...
Yeah, I think it's useful.
I would not say that that's the source of government.
I think that was the pre-source of government.
I think that what happened was, the problem with the alpha male thing is that alpha males get old.
And they then get overturned by the younger and fitter members of the tribe, right?
So some alpha male is, you know...
Well, no, but the reason that they live on is that they...
They invent ethics and they invent religion so that they can get an infinite, stronger party to back them up.
And therefore, striking against the elder of the tribe, even though you can take him out physically, striking against the elder of the tribe becomes Immoral, even though they gained power according to their strength, you now cannot overturn them according to your strength.
So I think that's more the foundation of a larger hierarchy.
But anyway, that's sort of my particular perspective on things.
Well, I guess that was my point, though, is that we had this alpha male thing, and then the alpha male, in order to maintain his power over his tribe, created a concept of God and used that to create fear of the unknown and then created religion.
To maintain his power over those people and then religion evolved into what we now have as government.
I think the first governments were actually religion.
Yeah, I mean, strong people will beat you up to control you, but weak people will put a curse on you.
They'll voodoo you, they'll curse you with hell or whatever bad crops, infertility.
They'll put a curse on you because they cannot physically dominate you and therefore they have to use language and ethics and philosophy and all of the low caste resentment stuff that Nietzsche talks about.
They have to spin webs of words to control you and to me that's the foundation of propagandist governments and I think that's actually fairly traceable.
And then you end up with the self-selecting situation, right?
I've talked about this in a speech I gave in Vancouver, which should be available in a day or two.
But you end up with a...
So why do we know philosophers?
Some philosophers and not other philosophers.
You know, why does everyone know Thomas Jefferson and almost nobody knows the Sandra Spooner?
Why does everyone know Socrates and, you know, some of the...
Not Murray Rothbard or whatever.
Well, it's because, of course...
When you end up with that kind of hierarchy, you end up with the people who have the most resources, control over the most resources, the status and the top of the religious pile.
They choose the philosophers that get broadcasted.
They pick out of the heap of thinkers, they pick those who are of the most value to the realm, to the ruling classes.
And this is a phenomenon that has not changed at all from ancient Greece to now.
The internet has changed it to some degree.
I mean, obviously, I would not have gotten...
Tenured position at Harvard or anything like that.
Of course not.
So the internet has changed that by no longer having an intermediary, no longer needing a middleman, no longer needing the approval of the king to get a book published or to get contact with people in the world.
There's no gatekeepers.
I think this is a book that Jeffrey Tucker is coming out next week.
And that has changed things enormously.
And this is why I say I don't want to live in any other time.
This is the most incredible time.
Because you and I can have this conversation with no intermediaries.
We finally, FINALLY have a free market of ideas.
We finally have a free market of ideas and it took the internet to achieve it.
A true free market of ideas is when you are neither bribed nor barred from public discourse according to your value to the ruling classes.
That's all it comes down to.
We have a free market for the first time in human history of ideas.
No gatekeepers.
No people get to say, well, this book can be published.
Oh, this book can't be published.
Oh, this guy really fits well into this faculty.
Well, this person really, really doesn't, and so on.
And the lack of this gatekeeper, this direct potential communication, drives quality, I think, in a way that, I mean, I think this is the best.
It's not just the biggest.
I think it's the best philosophical conversation in history.
Certainly, it's the one that the market has chosen.
In terms of its size and scope and power to people.
And so I think that this lack of selection for those who are useful to those in power, which isn't just like, well, there are all these philosophers, we're just going to make this one famous, but it even selects who goes into philosophy and who doesn't.
And that is something that has just been blown apart by the internet.
I mean, if everybody had to have a PhD in computer science, In order to run a software company, we would have approximately 1% of the gadgets we have now.
There'd be no PC, there'd be no Windows, there'd be no iPhone, there'd be no iPad, there'd be no Android, there'd be no Linux, all this kind of stuff, right?
And so the free market in intellectual content in the digital realm includes philosophy.
I mean, if everybody needed 10 million dollars to make a computer game, well, there'd be no Minecraft.
There'd be like all the other stuff.
There'd be no Flash games, all this kind of stuff.
Bits and bytes are obviously a form of communication, communicates information.
And the liberation of information from the gatekeepers, the possibility of the spiderweb tentacles and netting of direct communication over the whole world for the first time in history is what has driven this show.
And the users, of course, people like you with these amazing, fantastic questions.
I love these Sunday calls.
These conversations are fantastic to me.
And that is because we finally have the chance to connect without intermediaries.
Or without approval.
You know, we don't always have to be whispering in church.
Or without approval.
There were times where, obviously, there was suppressed speech that was so oppressive that, you know, you'd have to sneak off and hide in a warehouse somewhere and have your church meeting about Jesus during a certain period of time.
And then, after that, if you wanted to be a Protestant, then, ooh, we had to do the same kind of thing.
And, you know, after time, then if you wanted to be an advocate for, you know, an abolitionist, then you had to sneak off and hide.
And now that we've got the internet, we don't necessarily have to sneak off and hide, although with modern government systems and programs in place, now they're You know, the potential is that we may revert back to having to sneak off and hide.
But fortunately, technology will be able to beat that in providing anonymous methods of exchange.
We currently have, like Bitcoin, allows anonymous transactions.
So, I mean, we can certainly look into, you know, at this point in time in our lives, we're actually coming to the point where technology will force Well, I think that will certainly come.
So, I mean, this allows us to bypass licensing, right?
I mean, I was thinking about this in terms of the Paul Ryan.
Let's do the Ryan sandwich.
It's the Ryan sandwich beginning and end of the show.
The most important thing to know about Paul Ryan is that Dick Cheney says, I worship the ground Paul Ryan walks on.
And since the ground that Dick Cheney walks on is filled with the damned souls and endless flames of perdition, that is truly a boost from the devil himself.
They're talking about controlling healthcare costs and so on, right?
And all they're talking about is basically cutting spending.
And what you need to do to control healthcare costs is to remove licensing.
Licensing is a form of monopolization that is enforced by the state.
To remove licensing is essential because what has to happen is people who can't judge the quality of an idea can only judge the letters at the end of someone's name.
Oh, this guy's got a PhD from Harvard.
He must be really great at whatever he's doing, right?
And that's because people can't judge quality.
You know, the great thing with the internet is...
People can judge the quality of this conversation, the conversation between you and I, and, you know, if they have half a brain, they won't care what letters.
In fact, they'll be more suspicious of more letters rather than not.
But they can't talk about licensing.
The foundation of state power is propaganda, and propaganda requires licensing because Licensing is you hold off on people's productive abilities, you raise their debt, you increase their time commitment, and then afterwards you restrict what they can do and say.
And it artificially raises costs because people say, well, I had to wait 8 years or 10 years to become a doctor.
I had to go through all of this crap.
I had to go through, you know, the 36-hour weeks and all of that.
And so now I've got to make me some money, right?
So this drives up the cost.
And once people have deferred their income and earnings to that degree...
And then they come out the other side into licensing, well, then you've got them, right?
But the question of licensing never comes up in reducing state power.
How are we going to control healthcare costs?
How about letting midwives do their thing?
How about giving prescription powers to non-doctors?
But this doesn't, right?
It's got to have this monopoly.
And this monopoly is rent-seeking.
This monopoly creates in the intellectual realm, in the realm of physical production, in the realm of healthcare, in the realm of academics.
It all is the same kind of deal.
You get people to defer their income, to postpone their adolescence forever until you can only become a professor when you're in your mid-30s or late-30s or whatever.
And then people are going to really toe the line because they've got so much sunk cost there that they're not going to do anything which is going to risk them actually becoming a professor which means they have to toe the line.
Licensing is an incredibly powerful soft form of censorship that I think is really important to understand and which is why the internet is such an amazing medium because I could never have completed high school.
As, you know, all the people who teach philosophy teach philosophers who don't have degrees, for the most part, right?
A few of them did.
But the amazing thing is it really only comes down to the quality of the product.
Nobody says, well, I'm not going to buy an iPhone because Steve Jobs, rest in peace, didn't have a PhD in computer science.
They just say, hey, is this iPhone cool?
Does it do what I want?
Is it neat?
Is it interesting?
Is it feature-rich?
Is it fast?
They only care about the quality of the thing itself, not the credentials of the people behind it.
And that is such an unbelievable revolution in the mind.
This accelerates human progress to such a staggering degree, and it splits the world.
I think it splits the world into two groups.
And one of the groups is those who are still addicted to and wedded to credentials and licensing and this and that and the other in terms of how they judge something.
And the other is, is the iPhone fast?
Not, does Steve Jobs have a PhD in computer science?
I can't buy this product.
I don't want to buy Windows 8 because Steve Ballmer doesn't have a, I don't know, a PhD in computer science.
Computer software business administration or whatever.
Well, you see, Brad Pitt is offered to work on my film for $12, but he is not a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, so I'm not going to do that or whatever, right?
And this is not to say that training and so on doesn't mean anything and so on, right?
But I think in the disciplines which are only deceptively hard, and philosophy and ethics and I think are in those disciplines which are deceptively hard.
In other words, they're not really, sorry, they're not very hard.
They're just tied into a whole bunch of knots to hide a whole bunch of corruption and justification for the ill virtues of those in power.
But having this kind of direct communication is astounding.
And the degree to which people have embraced what it is that we're doing here, have broadcast and amplified it.
Is amazing and I mean I'm incredibly grateful for the receptivity and openness of people who are on this journey despite some of the rough patches and bumpy sections that we've had in interactions with the world as a whole which are to come and to past and so on.
I think that people's belief and excitement and commitment about what we're doing here is astounding.
I mean this community, I mean my personal community of friends and family is My bedrock.
But the community as a whole, everybody who listens to this, everybody who talks about this, everybody who's excited about this, even or perhaps even especially the people who fight it.
It's important.
It's powerful.
And people's support and steadfastness in the quality of this conversation is why I'm able to hold on to my optimism.
I just had a conversation with Bob Murphy, where he was saying that without his religiosity, without his faith, he would fall into cynicism and despair.
Without the quality of this listenership, I would feel the same way.
So thank you, everybody, for keeping my belief in the world on an incredibly sunny and upward climb towards the truly astonishing vistas from which we can, like Jesus at the top of the mountain, but without the satanic guy by our side, where we can see the future and where we are We're going to take the world because it is through philosophy that we will find our way over these mountains.
It is the only GPS in the fogs of the future.
So thanks everybody so much.
I'm sorry, of course, that we went a little bit over, but great, great conversation.
Thank you everybody for your support.
I mean, I really felt this, you know, when I was doing this traveling and all of these great speeches.
It's just, it's been a real pleasure to meet everyone who's so supportive of this conversation in my travels.
It means so much to me.
I don't think I can even express it without getting quite emotional about just what everything means to me in terms of how passionate people are about this conversation and what we're doing.
It really does mean the world to me.
It means the world to me that people are inviting me out to speak.
It means the world to me that people are coming up and continually telling me about how much philosophy has done for them, how much improved their relationships, how they've given up on aggression with their children, how they've given up on I can't tell you how much that means to me.
It makes everything just incredible for me.
It literally makes me feel like I am a winged pegasus arcing my way over the world with rainbow lasers lighting up the fire in people's hearts.
And it only comes back stronger and lights the fire in my heart even more strongly and even more deeply.
And I just want to tell you how much it means to me that everybody is so...
Amazingly invested.
And I also want to tell you just how much it means to me when I, you know, people who've met through this conversation, who've met through philosophy, who've put these principles into practice.
I mean, people are getting married.
They're having great relationships.
They're having kids.
I mean, obviously, the way that they're choosing to parent has a lot to do with what they've heard in this conversation.
So, you know, people who've thrown money and poo at this show, I thank you all.
I thank you all and I just really want to open my heart to everyone and just tell you how much it means to me to be part of this, to have this kind of feedback, to have this kind of effect.
To open your hearts and to trust someone that, you know, most of you have never met, that you don't really know much about me, maybe if you haven't listened to many podcasts, but to open your hearts, to open your minds to the arguments and the evidence that is put forward.
I just, I admire people in this conversation so much.
And I know I say it a lot, but I just really wanted to.
Put this out.
How much I admire the people who are taking on these immense burdens of changing their relationships.
These immense burdens of demanding openness, honesty and quality in their relationships.
The courage that it takes to change the world.
This is a vastly accelerated progress and process.
This should have been taking generations.
Instead it's taking years.
It is a very dizzying and accelerated process because of the technology that we have available to us.
It is Moving faster than the speed of light as far as social change goes.
And I just wanted to tell you all.
I mean, I love you guys all.
I really do.
I just...
What was so different when I was a child, what was so missing for me when I was a child was a moral community where people were willing to take a stand and take risks.
You know, when I was a kid...
I saw all these movies about, you know, there are bad guys and there are good guys and there is, you know, stand up and fight the bad guys and this is what I was taught.
Even things about war and, you know, you stand up, these guys are really bad and we got to stand up and be the good guys and so on.
And yet no one in my life when I was a child did anything like that, intervened to help me when I was struggling with child abuse or anything like that.
Three different continents and half a dozen different schools and extended families and priests didn't do it, teachers didn't do it.
There was this hollowness and this moral torpor and inactivity at the center of the world that I grew up in.
That was a black hole that was actually even in my heart.
It had passed into me and it had become my heart where I think I felt, I know I felt, significant despair at the empty-headed moral posturing of mankind where the virtues were always talked about but the moment you asked anyone to act on those virtues they would back away in horror.
All the hollow men, wrote T.S. Eliot, and I think that was something that I experienced as well.
And that, I mean, my family, my friends have done a huge amount with that, but this community as well.
I mean, just to be honest about the effect this community has on me, this has taken away the black hole in my heart that came from my history because I see people.
Struggling and striving and achieving such incredibly powerful, brave, courageous, noble actions to see the gears of philosophy click into the cogs of people's hearts and minds and see, you know, like you're not just seeing people pedaling a bike where the chain's just dangling loosely and whipping all around, but it's actually on the cogs and motion is happening.
People are changing, relationships are improving, confrontations are happening, honesty is erupting.
And If I hadn't seen that, if I hadn't had the incredible opportunity to see that, and of course I see more than anyone else in this conversation because so much of the communication comes through me, to see that has eased my heart and opened my heart in a way that I really can't describe,
but I just want to thank everyone so much for the honesty and courage that you're displaying, and to thank you for restoring my belief In what people are capable of and what philosophy is capable of.
Because without you, I'm just a guy yelling into space.
