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Jan. 6, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:01:10

2294 The Freedomain Radio Sunday Philosophy Call in Show, January 6, 2013

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, answers listener questions on the weekly Sunday philosophy call in show. Topics include: Liberty Inspiration Award, 33 years old, Never Kissed a Girl, Leaving the Army and Spanking behind, Collectivism Versus UPB and Why Men Don't Want to Get Married.

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	Well, oh my goodness, it's the first show of the year.
	How's everyone doing this morning?
	I hope you're doing fantastically.
	It is the 6th of the 1st of the 13th.
	That must add up to some kind of demonic number that I am probably not aware of, but which some listeners I'm sure will make me aware of over time.
	So I hope you had a great break, a great Christmas, and a very happy new year.
	This is a good year.
	So far, this is a good year.
	Listen, thanks everyone.
	Who stepped up and, sorry to use that cliche, stepped up, like this is not an aerobics class, but thank you everyone for throwing your donations in, as I recently whined and begged about in the Why Men Don't Want to Get Married show.
	It's been very, very helpful.
	I wanted to mention something that was pretty good.
	I was quite excited.
	So there was a Liberty Inspiration Award.
	Which they got 540 odd letters.
	The way it worked was that you had to write in why.
	You can just sort of click on someone's name into why you thought they should be nominated as somebody who inspires you to awards.
	Liberty.
	And that was something I put out a couple of calls for it, and then I kind of forgot about it, as is my, ooh, something shiny over there kind of way.
	And it's really just wonderful.
	And I've actually printed all the letters.
	You can find them if you want.
	You can go to fdrurl.com forward slash lia.
	It's on the message board.
	And really, there's just a huge number of letters that came in.
	It's just wonderful.
	I'm going to read a few of them.
	You should read them.
	And the reason you should read them is because we are engaged in a very challenging and exciting endeavor here, which is bringing philosophy to the world as a whole.
	And it's really nice to know that you're not alone in listening to and being interested and, most importantly, bringing philosophy to bear.
	And that, I think, is really, really important.
	So, I'll just read a couple of the letters, in no particular order.
	So, somebody wrote, I nominate Stefan Molyneux, philosopher.
	Molyneux's Freedom Aid radio podcast inspire thousands of people daily.
	Just when you think you've got the freedom thing all sewn up, he challenges your ideas and pushes your mind to deeper places.
	He explains how the world works in many, many areas.
	Self-knowledge, sociology, theology, and economics, to name a few.
	Another one writes, I nominate Stefan Molyneux because he's a genius and tells it like it is.
	Stefan Molyneux would be my choice for this award.
	I am sure there are those who have worked very hard that I don't know about.
	I have to say, however, that Mr.
	Molyneux has inspired my intellectual side and caused me to rethink some of my previous ideologies, especially regarding statism and non-aggressive behavior.
	I want to nominate Stefan Molyneux for the Liberty Award because of his relentless efforts to populize the philosophy of liberty and for his unique approach to raising the lowest common denominator towards a moral, non-violent, free, interactive, and therefore happier society.
	His efforts flank the most noble of ideas for social harmony and his message and style reach through all age barriers, uniting, in ideology, people across the world.
	His message is one of hope and it is delivered in ways that are practical and effective.
	He has no equal in the complexity of issues he addresses.
	His knowledge and research are impeccable, and his charming sharing ability makes any drab subject a walk in a park, and fun in challenging ways.
	Even my wife listens to them.
	And did I mention humor?
	Well, that is one of the most rewarding treats that he brings to the theater of ideas.
	Creative, not regurgitated humor.
	The world needs to know this man, his intellectual stature, moral integrity, knight of virtue, leader by personal example and introspection, beacon of hope for frightened minds and souls, a shining light in the modern ideological dark age.
	Anyway um...
	It goes on.
	Obviously, um...
	I'm very proud of the responses.
	It's been a while.
	I mean, feedback sort of comes in in bits and bits over the time, but this was a real cluster of feedback, and it's great to know what impact philosophy and the work that we all do collectively here is going.
	And I believe that false modesty is just another form of hypocrisy, so I just wanted to tell you that I think it's the best show in the world.
	I think this is the greatest show in the world.
	I think this is the greatest show that's ever been.
	I don't know if it's the greatest show that will ever be, but that's my standard.
	I want to create the greatest, most life-changing, most powerful, most engaging, most enjoyable, most stimulating, most provocative show that the world has ever seen.
	I think, given the rather dark nature of the culture we're facing and the challenges ahead, it may in fact be the greatest show that will ever be.
	Now, that's my judgment.
	It is certainly not up to me to determine whether that's true or not, but I will tell you without a shadow or a shade of humility that that is and has been always my goal to create the greatest show possible and that means most deep, most insightful, most engaging, most enjoyable and that which is going to give you the greatest traction in bringing your life to a happier place no matter what the challenges, no matter what the obstacles.
	I'm glad that some people agree because it would be not great and not a good testament to rationality if I was the only one who thought it was such a great show.
	And I share this.
	Obviously, I've been a lot of the main driving force behind it, but I certainly share the greatness of the show with everybody who's called in, people who've stimulated on the message boards.
	I could go through a list, but I don't know if they want to be mentioned.
	But everybody who's written, everybody who's contributed, everyone who's donated.
	Everybody who shared themselves in shows like this Sunday show, like the listener conversations, it's wonderful.
	We are all part of the phantasmagorical brain fireworks soup skyrockets that is Free Domain Radio.
	So thank you everyone for your kind words, for your participation, for your support.
	We're going to do some great things this year, I will tell you.
	This first documentary, which we're still plugging away on, is numero uno.
	The next documentary is going to be The Bomb and the Brain, and the third documentary is going to be The Cure.
	How we achieve a free society.
	I imagine I'll get the second one done this year and the third one early next year.
	That's the plan and it is a non-stoppable plan.
	It is going to happen if I have to sell a kidney.
	If I don't have to sell a kidney, it will be thanks to you and your financial and other kinds of support and generosity.
	But that's the plan.
	That's what's going on.
	I have a multi-year plan for the show and so far things are going Quite well, I would say.
	The show is, to me, in the perfect place.
	But enough about my...
	Let's get to the brains of the app for the listeners and thanks to James for dragging his disease-ridden carcass out of bed this morning.
	He is not doing well physically and I am very grateful that he's able to do it because otherwise I'm just sitting here in the red room talking to myself.
	So sorry that you're sick James and thank you so much for sitting around for the show.
	I hope you're still awake and let's bring on the first caller.
	Thanks, Steph.
	I really appreciate it.
	I am feeling much better this morning, and hopefully this is on the upswing.
	So first today we have Jordan.
	Hello, can you hear me?
	I sure can, Jordan.
	How are you doing, my friend?
	Okay, just a quick note of warning.
	I tried to call in a few months ago on a call-in like this, and we had some trouble.
	So just to bear warning you on that, we might have some breakup on this phone.
	Tom, I got a dream for you to analyze.
	Hit me.
	You want to just dive right into it then?
	All right.
	Let's do it.
	Well, it starts out, I'm walking in this field out in the middle of nowhere, just flat farmland as far as the eye can see.
	Not a tree, a bush, just corn and soybeans.
	And this one building, which I'm walking towards, It's a gigantic building and it's the only thing I can see.
	Walking towards it, just minding my own business, when suddenly a bunch of rock giants burst up out of the ground all around me.
	Now, by rock giants, I assume you mean the Tolkien kind and not, you know, the reanimated zombie corpse of Freddie Mercury coming to grope your butt, right?
	Yeah.
	Have you seen the movie The Hobbit yet?
	I have.
	You know the scene when they're up in the mountains and they get caught in the battle between a bunch of rock giants?
	I do.
	They look exactly like that.
	In fact, I had this dream one night and then the next day I went and saw The Hobbit for the first time and it kind of freaked me out a little because...
	The giants in that movie look exactly like the ones in this dream.
	It took me out of the movie for a second, but that's what they look like.
	Are you saying that you had a dream that looked like The Hobbit before you saw The Hobbit?
	Yep.
	Wow.
	And it was real close or similar?
	Had you read The Hobbit recently?
	I have read The Hobbit, but it has been quite a while.
	In fact, I had completely forgotten there were rough giants in it.
	Right, right.
	Okay.
	Sorry, sorry, people are complaining about spoiler alerts.
	I'm sorry.
	It certainly was a surprise for me.
	They deviated from the book a little bit, but I was very surprised that the giant reanimated corpse of Freddie Mercury showed up in The Hobbit.
	I just wanted to tell you, sorry, that is a spoiler.
	And, you know, the we will rock you thing with throwing the rocks back and forth.
	I thought that was a little bit too much on the nose, but sorry, that was a bit of a spoiler, but go on.
	Okay, well, I won't give out of any more spoilers.
	That'll be the last one.
	Anyway, I'm scared to death of these giants.
	Don't talk about Robert Plant being one of the trolls in the thong.
	That really spoiled too much, but anyway, go ahead.
	Anyway, I'm scared to death of these giants all around me, and I start running as fast as I can toward the building that I was nonchalantly walking towards.
	The giants, they start to follow me toward the building, but They don't really seem to be paying me any attention.
	It's like we're going to the same place, but they really don't care if I'm there or not.
	So I finally get to the building.
	I run in, because it's really the only place to hide from the Giants.
	Like I said, it's flat farmland for as far as the eye can see.
	I get in there, and the whole building is one enormous room, big enough for the Giants themselves to even fit in.
	And almost all of it is covered by a gigantic swimming pool.
	The pool, however, has this, like, lip running along all of its sides.
	So what I do is I jump into the water and then hide under that lip with only my head slightly bobbing up above the water.
	The giants follow me into the building, still paying me no attention.
	They go to the opposite side of this enormous room and start digging in the floor into the ground underneath the building.
	They bring up a bunch of rocks and earth and mud and start molding smaller versions of themselves.
	These smaller giants, I guess, what would you call them?
	Golems or something?
	They're about twice the size of a normal human being and have these really Fierce looking faces, really frightening ones, while the bigger giants have no faces at all.
	They're just slabs of rock where the faces would be.
	And sorry, where were the smaller giants again?
	What?
	Sorry, where were the smaller giants again?
	They were being molded by the bigger giants.
	The bigger giants were pulling a bunch of rocks out of the earth from Underneath the floor of the building and they were molding the smaller giants, kind of like they were sculptors or something.
	Got it, okay.
	That's cool.
	The smaller ones, they don't seem to be alive, like the bigger ones are.
	They're just, you know, huge rock sculptures, essentially.
	Suddenly, another door to the outside flies open and a friend of mine comes running in, followed by even more of the larger rock giants.
	She's clearly terrified, I mean just frightened out of her mind, so I poke my head up from under the lip and motion for her to join me in the water.
	With nowhere else to go, she slips into the water and as stealthily as possible, she joins me from hiding from the giants.
	The giants that were following her joined the others, and they start making smaller giants of their own.
	As we're hiding, huddled under the lip together, one of the larger giants—and this is kind of freaky as far as I'm concerned—one of the larger giants rips a huge piece of its own head off, grinds it into powder, and sprinkles it like pixie dust over all the smaller giants, causing them to come to life.
	Yeah, one of the bigger ones rips off a big chunk of his own head, grinds it to dust, and then sprinkles it over the smaller ones.
	The smaller ones, now that they're alive, they take notice of us hiding under the lip.
	You know, the larger ones haven't paid us any attention up until now, and now suddenly the smaller ones, they see us, And they start screaming this really ear-splitting shriek, kind of like they're angry at us for something.
	With really nothing else to do, the two of us slip underneath the water, and that makes the smaller ones stop screaming, like they don't notice us anymore, like they can't even see us, you know what I mean?
	Every time we come up for air, though, the smaller ones stare intently at us and scream again.
	So this just freaks my friend just completely out of her wits, even to the point where she's now refusing to come up for air.
	She'd rather stay down under the water and not breathe and come up and face these smaller giants that she's scared of.
	So I have to come up for air for myself and for her, giving her air every time I resubmerge.
	Finally, this goes on for about a few minutes, and then finally the larger giants just get up and leave.
	You know, leaving us all alone with smaller ones.
	And that's it.
	That's when I woke up.
	Wow.
	Excuse my New Year's French.
	What a great fucking dream that is.
	Oh my god.
	Holy crap.
	I mean, you've got a rendering engine in your brain that would put like a multi-channel NVIDIA box to shame.
	Like, holy crap.
	That's some good CGI, man.
	I hope those guys are unionized because they're working overtime.
	Holy.
	Wow.
	Okay.
	Can I ask you a question?
	Yeah, go ahead.
	It amazes me too, because usually I'm not the kind of person who remembers his dreams, unless they're really vivid like this.
	I usually just forget about them all in a sense of life.
	Yeah, this sounds like, and I call them landmark dreams.
	You know, it's a dream where your unconscious has concentrated a huge amount of information and it's trying to get it all to you across because it needs you to change course or understand something big.
	I've had a number of landmark dreams in my life where it's just like you wake up just like, whoa, I am not the same person as when I lay down my head.
	And so I'm really glad that you brought it up.
	Okay.
	Let me just run through it real quick.
	Make sure I got it.
	I was just making notes as you were writing.
	So you're in a big field with corn and soybeans.
	There's a big giant building.
	Suddenly out of the ground spring these rock giants, which are kind of scary.
	So you run towards the big building.
	And they're sort of following you, but they're not really focusing on you.
	And inside, there's water.
	And sort of smaller giants or baby giants are being molded by the bigger giants.
	The smaller giants have faces.
	The bigger giants have no faces.
	The smaller ones are like big rock sculptures.
	They don't seem to be very alive, is that right?
	That's right.
	Alright, so then your friend comes in.
	She's scared.
	The big rock giants are coming in as well.
	And you say, come in the water.
	She does.
	And then one of the larger giants rips part of his own head off, grinds it to dust, sprinkles it over to the smaller ones.
	And they kind of animate.
	They come to life.
	And then they start screaming at you.
	You go underwater.
	And then every time you come up for air, the baby giants are screaming and staring at you.
	And the girl wants to stay underwater.
	And then you breathe for her.
	And then the larger giants get up and leave.
	And I guess you're kind of stuck in that situation, right?
	Uh-huh.
	That's about it.
	Yeah, that's about it.
	Okay, okay, okay.
	Let me ask you a question.
	So the baby giants have no faces, but then the big giant rips off part of its own head, sprinkles on it, and they kind of come to life.
	Does anything change?
	Do they lose their faces?
	No.
	The faces, they still have like this very etched, almost gargoyle-type face, like it's I don't even know how to describe it.
	It just looks really...
	...demonic, I guess you would say.
	Is it demonic before they get the head dust sprinkled on them?
	Yeah, they look demonic before they come to life.
	But, you know, after they get the dust sprinkled on them and they come to life, nothing really changes.
	The mouth just opens and they start screaming.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Alright, I'm just going to...
	Sorry, and is there anything that happened the day before you had the dream that was of any note?
	And how long ago was the dream?
	The dream was about a couple weeks ago.
	I've been meaning to call in and get your thoughts on it for quite some time, but either I couldn't make it in for the Sunday call-in show, or the queue was full, or there was no show, so it was a few weeks ago.
	Okay, and did anything happen the day before that you remember?
	I mean, now it's a bit hard to remember, but...
	No, I can't think of anything.
	Your relationship with your parents?
	Okay, I guess.
	I mean, I suppose it could be better, but it's not bad.
	And emotional availability of your parents?
	That's it.
	They're kind of emotionally distant.
	I mean, they can be available if they want to be, you know what I mean?
	But often, sometimes, you know, they can be somewhat distant.
	And you know why I'm asking that, right?
	I have a pretty good idea.
	Go ahead.
	You do the show.
	I'm going to do my nails.
	No, go ahead.
	Why am I asking that?
	Because childhood experiences tend to have a big influence on a lot of things.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Come on, that's FDR 101.
	In fact, that's just, you know, Psych 101.
	But why am I asking that, about emotional availability, about this dream?
	That I don't know.
	Dude, you have giants made of stone in your dream, right?
	And, okay.
	If they're made of stone, they're not very emotional.
	Is that what you're saying?
	Yeah, I mean, stone-hearted is a way that people talk about somebody who's emotionally cold, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And you have giants making babies.
	Okay.
	These are clearly parents, right?
	I hadn't seen it like that before, but yeah, that makes sense.
	Okay, so the smaller giants have faces, the bigger ones have no faces.
	Now, I would imagine, so the size of the giants, I would assume, is inversely proportional to your age that you're recalling here.
	In other words, when babies are very small, their parents are just colossal, right?
	And, of course, when kids get bigger, their parents shrink in stature, right?
	So when you have giants in your dream, the way that, this is just my interpretation, doesn't mean anything, it certainly doesn't mean that it's true, but my interpretation is the larger the people in my dream, the earlier experience that I'm having.
	Because we empirically do have experience of giants.
	We're just very young, right?
	Uh-huh.
	Now, a giant that has no face, to me, would be a giant whose, like, a parent whose facial expression doesn't change much, right?
	Because children, babies, they look for very animated faces, you know, whatever you're doing with your face, like, very animated, change expressions a lot.
	I used to play games with my daughter when she was very young about, you know, This is my angry face.
	This is my happy face.
	This is my scared face.
	This is my surprise face.
	Whoa!
	And she would laugh at that and she would try and mimic them back.
	What's your angry face?
	And we still do that game occasionally.
	So animated faces are very important.
	And I think studies show that babies really are drawn towards more animated faces.
	So I think like a big...
	A big giant stone face.
	Sorry, a big giant stone giant.
	Sorry, this is a terrible language.
	Let me reboot my language center.
	Uh-oh, it came up all Martian.
	So, it's got no face.
	It means to me that that would be a facial expression that doesn't change very much.
	And you say that you're followed by the rock giants, but they don't have much interest in you at the beginning of the dream?
	Well, they don't have much interest in me all through the dream.
	I mean, the bigger ones don't, but the smaller ones, once they come, the life shifts, interesting.
	Well, see, but that's a challenging thing to say, and I'll sort of tell you why.
	But at the beginning of the dream, you are scared of them, you run towards the big building.
	And this, to me again, you said it's a giant building, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, so that again indicates to me that you're talking about something very early in your life.
	Uh-huh.
	course, when you're a little kid, every building is a giant building, right?
	Uh-huh.
	You sound, I can hear massive, colossal, deep waves of skepticism in your voice.
	If you think I'm going in the wrong direction, we'll try some other path.
	You sound like, uh-huh, yeah.
	Swampland in Florida, you say, Mr.
	Molyneux.
	Let me mull that over for you while I wait in my idling car.
	How do you feel about the direction that we're heading in this stream?
	It makes some sense.
	I think I may have overstated the emotional unavailability of my parents because I see where you're going with it, but my parents, they're available just like, well, definitely they were when I was a baby or when I was a kid.
	I guess I wouldn't remember when I was a baby, but when I was a kid, they were very emotionally available for me.
	It's just that now that I'm an adult, they tend to be sometimes emotionally distant.
	You know what I mean?
	Uh-huh.
	So, yeah, I mean, like I said, I see where you're going and where you would get that from, but I don't know if it really applies to my relationship with my parents because, you know, by and large, they are very available.
	It's just every now and then, they can't be.
	Okay.
	Well, I think that's true for every human being on the planet, so it won't pick on your parents at all.
	Let me ask you this.
	Was there a priest in your life when you were younger?
	No, I did not grow up in a very religious household.
	My parents, they self-identified as Christians, but we certainly weren't a church-going family.
	In fact, religion was...
	I really can't think of any time they ever discussed it with me.
	Alright.
	Now, the other place that the building could be is a school.
	Okay.
	And the reason I'm saying that is that there are a lot, like...
	I mean, I'll tell you where I'm trying to build the core analysis of the dream on.
	It's the incredible image of the larger giant ripping part of its own head off, grinding it into dust, and sprinkling it over the smaller ones.
	Okay.
	That strikes me as an incredibly powerful metaphor for indoctrination.
	That definitely makes sense.
	Well, when I was in school when I was a kid, I can't say I really enjoyed it.
	I mean, no more than anybody else, I would say, but it was a I was a straight-A student all through school, and I did feel a lot of pressure from a lot of different people to succeed in school, so I don't know if that had anything to do with it.
	You had a lot of pressure to succeed?
	Mm-hmm.
	A lot of pressure from friends, family, teachers, well, everybody, really, to be a straight-A student.
	And the reason is, I mean, that could be the giants screaming at you.
	Because the big giants could be the teachers and the smaller giants could be the other students.
	Okay.
	Classmates.
	And I think, you know, I think the school thing makes a little bit more sense because you're going to a big building rather than you're at home.
	Does that make sense?
	Like, if you had this dream and you were at home, then it would be about your home, right?
	Right.
	But you're going to a big building?
	Is there anything about the big building that reminds you of anything like...
	The building I've never been in.
	I'm sorry?
	Yeah, it's a building I've never been in before, so I doubt it represents my home.
	Right, right, right.
	And the actual...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	It doesn't really remind me of any building I've ever been in before either.
	It's just...
	Just a gigantic building with a huge-ass swimming pool in the middle of it.
	Right.
	Alright, so you say that the bigger giants don't seem to have much interest in you, right?
	That's true.
	But I would not agree with that.
	I think that there's indications in the dream that they do.
	So, for instance, they follow you to the building, right?
	Uh-huh.
	And they only start doing what they're doing.
	Sorry, the baby giants that were being made, were they being made by the giants who followed you into the building, or were they being made by giants who were already in the building?
	They were made by the giants that followed me and my friend, him.
	Okay, okay.
	So when you go into the building, the giants follow you in, right?
	Yeah.
	And so the giants are interested in you because they're following you in and then they make these baby giants and then they sprinkle the head dust on the baby giants and then the baby giant starts screaming at you and you hide under the water, right?
	And then when the girl no longer comes up anymore, the large giants get up and leave.
	So their purpose is to do something to you in that building.
	So the idea that they're not Taking any interest in you, I don't think it's supported by what happens in the dream.
	Okay.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, I hadn't noticed that before.
	It's only after my friend refuses to come up for her own air and is really risking her own life to stay down in the water that the big giants leave.
	And so now you're both trapped in the water, right?
	Uh-huh.
	Because if she's not going to come up, you have to stay to give her air, right?
	Uh-huh.
	So you are as trapped as she is, in a way, because of your caring for her and your inability to do anything about the smaller screaming giants, right?
	Yep, that's correct.
	So you're trapped in a pool in a building by children created by these giants who are, in a sense, guarding you.
	Now, they're not actually threatening you.
	But they're screaming at you, right?
	Yep.
	Which would seem to me to indicate that some of the slavery that you may have experienced may be more verbal or language-based in nature than physically violent, right?
	And that would tie into the...
	Propaganda is verbal abuse, right?
	And screaming at people is verbal abuse.
	And so...
	What you're being surrounded by is nobody's hitting you, right?
	Nobody's raining down the ceiling on your head.
	Nobody's releasing shocks into the water or anything.
	A dream can do anything, right?
	So the fact is, the only thing that you're trapped by is language, so to speak.
	It's stuff coming out of people's mouth, right?
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	All they're doing is just They're staring at the two of us very intently and screaming their heads off, so they're not trying to hurt us in any way.
	I mean, other than terrifying us, which is obviously what they're trying to do.
	And they are objectively scary, right?
	I mean, they've got these demonic gargoyle faces, they're screaming at you, they're staring at you, they're made of rock, which means you can't fight them, so, you know, that's all pretty scary.
	Now, who's the girl in the dream, in real life, just roughly?
	She is a friend of mine I met just a short time ago.
	She's a bartender at a sports bar that I like to go to.
	So yeah, she certainly wasn't a friend of mine back in my school days.
	So yeah, just a recent friend.
	And is she in a relationship, like a romantic relationship?
	Yes, she is.
	In fact, I had Thought about asking her out on a date when I first met her, but yeah, she's married, so that ain't gonna happen.
	And how's her marriage, Gina?
	Pretty good, as far as I know.
	I mean, I'm not really close with her husband or anything.
	I mean, I just...
	I basically...
	I just know her as the bartender at the bar I like to go to.
	That's how we're friends, you know what I mean?
	So...
	I guess casual acquaintances or maybe a little bit more than that would be the best way to describe our relationship.
	And why do you like to go to the bar?
	Well, they have good food.
	I get to watch football, baseball, and the women who work there tend to be very attractive.
	So that's the main reason why I like to go there.
	And are you married?
	No, sorry, of course you're not married.
	You were asking a girl that.
	How long have you been single?
	I've never had a girlfriend.
	I've always been single.
	And how old are you?
	33.
	And why do you think you've never had a girlfriend?
	Well, I do have a pretty big fear of communicating with the opposite sex when it comes to romantic relationships.
	So it's really gotten in the way of having a girlfriend.
	I mean, even when I was...
	Even when I was like 11 years old, I had a lot of trouble talking to girls, and I never really grew out of that.
	So, that's why I've never had a girlfriend.
	Alright.
	Why do you think you have trouble talking to girls?
	That I do not know.
	I have spent years in therapy trying to figure it out, and we're just banging our heads against the wall.
	We have no clue why I have so much trouble.
	Uh, huh.
	Uh-huh, uh-huh.
	You're not going to like my thoughts on it, but I'm not here to be liked.
	So, you are 33 years old, which means your parents have known you for over three decades, and for more than two decades, you've had grave difficulty talking to women, right?
	To the point where you haven't even had a girlfriend.
	Yep.
	Do you want to get married and have kids, or one of the two?
	No.
	I would love to be married with kids.
	I'd love to have any relationship with a woman, to tell you the truth.
	I would love that for you as well.
	I would love that for you as well.
	So I'm going to be annoying as a bug in your eyeball trying to get that for you.
	All right?
	So strap yourself in.
	You ready?
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	What have your parents done to help you achieve the thing that you want the most that you have not achieved at all?
	Well, they've gone to therapy with me.
	They've tried to set me up numerous times.
	They do their best to encourage me to talk to the women I want to talk to, so I guess that's really about all I can think they could do.
	So, I mean, they really have been supportive in the issue.
	Alright, so they've gone to therapy with you, and it's my understanding that the therapist has not found any connection.
	Now, do you have a...
	I'm going to sort of ask the questions of intimacy, right?
	I just mean sort of connection, right?
	Because I think that's kind of important.
	Do you think that your difficulty speaking to women comes from insecurity?
	Like you saying, well, I don't have much to offer or the woman's going to say no or I'm not really a catch or anything like that.
	Yeah, that's about the only thing me and my therapist have come up with over the course of my therapy was these feelings of insecurity.
	But I really don't know how much stock I put into that because...
	I mean, like I said, I was having these same troubles back when I first hit puberty, so Unless these feelings of insecurity were just instinctively in my genes or something, I really don't see how they came into being.
	Alright.
	But no, I can't tell you, I do have feelings of insecurity.
	Sorry, could you repeat that?
	I do have feelings of insecurity around women.
	Like, a lot of times when I try and Work up the courage to ask, well now, what you just said, you know, I don't have much to offer.
	You know, she'll say, no, those thoughts do race through my head quite a bit.
	I just don't know where they come from.
	Well, now they kind of come from the fact that you're like 20 years late in the game, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, what you're facing is a huge challenge because you've now missed, like, 20 years of chatting with women, which means you're competing with guys who have 20 years more experience than you, and if you try that in any field, that's going to be pretty tough, right?
	Yep, that it is.
	So now, and what happened with you as a teenager, you know, as parents, it's important to prepare your children for puberty.
	Right?
	Because puberty is a time, you know, sexual awakening and all that.
	It's kind of, in a sense, too late to start preparing kids for puberty at puberty because the hormones are throwing the whole system into overdrive and so on, right?
	Like you prepare for the race before the race.
	You prepare for the test before the test.
	You're not like, oh shit, I have a test.
	I better start studying.
	It's like, no, no, too late, right?
	Uh-huh.
	I will also tell you that my experience of you in this conversation is that you have a skepticism and an emotional distance in your voice that is hard to overcome.
	Like for everything I say, you're like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.
	I don't know if you can hear it in my voice, I'm trying to sort of mimic it, but it's very uninviting.
	Uh-huh.
	There you go again.
	Let me just check in the chat room and see if it's just me.
	Is anybody else having that experience as well?
	I'm sorry?
	I understand what you're saying.
	Yeah, it does make a lot of sense.
	A lot of people have pointed that out to me before that, you know, I tend to be a good listener but not a very good talker.
	Well, I don't think that the two are...
	I mean, you can't be a good talker if you're not a good listener and you can't be a good listener if you're not a good talker, right?
	Okay.
	See, you're just doing it again.
	Can you hear it?
	You're like, okay.
	Like I'm saying something completely insane or imposing something on you or getting it wrong or anything.
	Say that again.
	You were cutting out.
	The okay is like, okay.
	Like I'm saying something really crazy, really out of left field, and you're trying to process this bizarre place that I'm coming from.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	It definitely sounds like what I'm doing.
	Why do you think you're doing that?
	I really have no idea.
	Because you see, it's a very distant thing, right?
	It's a very distancing thing to other people.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	I'm very enthusiastic about the dream, and I'm very interested in the dream, and I'm also very enthusiastic and interested in helping you maybe see some blocks that you have with the opposite sex.
	But it feels like I'm kind of scrabbling against a brick wall.
	Well, I don't know what to say.
	I mean, I'm enthusiastic about the dream, too.
	Maybe it's just not coming across in my voice, but I don't know.
	If I had to put my finger on it, I'd probably say it goes back to those feelings of insecurity you brought up.
	You know what I mean?
	Like that you don't have much to bring to the table, that you're not a catch kind of thing?
	Yeah, that...
	Maybe that's why I seem so distant.
	If I think I don't really have that much to bring to the table, then I just don't bring anything to the table to begin with.
	You know what I mean?
	But see, dude, if you didn't think you could bring anything to the table, you wouldn't be calling in.
	That's true.
	I'm trying to break through it.
	No, no, and I appreciate that.
	And I'm certainly not being critical, at least I hope.
	I hope I'm not saying, and that's bad.
	I'm just giving you my sort of honest experience, which again doesn't mean it's objectively true.
	I'm just giving you my experience that I feel like I have to climb a very steep and slippery hill to try and connect.
	Yeah, well, you're not coming off as critical at all.
	Oh, good.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	How deep is the pain and fear and the loneliness of where you are in life?
	Oh, it's quite deep.
	It's quite deep.
	I wouldn't even know how to describe it.
	I mean, like you said, it's been over two decades that I've gone with this problem.
	Yeah, dealing with something like this for two decades, that'll cause the pain to go pretty deep.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, it's a significant agony.
	You know, we almost expire for lack of love.
	You know, like babies die, even if they're fed, even if they're kept at a comfortable temperature, even if all their physical needs are met.
	If they're not held, if they're not cuddled, if they're not played with, sometimes they just die.
	That's true.
	Yeah, I know you've talked about that before on quite a few podcasts.
	Yeah.
	I mean, have you kissed a girl?
	Did you say that again?
	You were cutting out again.
	Have you kissed a girl?
	No.
	Right.
	And a simple act of sort of cuddling up with someone, having her head on your shoulder while you watch a movie, this is something you must be...
	No, I haven't had that yet.
	You must be dying for that.
	Yes, I am.
	Yes, I am.
	I'm so sorry.
	I'm like, I'm so sorry.
	I'm so sorry.
	This is, um...
	You know, assuming that you're not currently calling from a leper colony, it's not right and it's not fair that this should be so absent from your life, and I'm really sorry for that.
	Well, thank you for that.
	Um...
	Hello?
	Yes, go ahead.
	Okay, you were cutting out again there.
	I said we were probably going to have problems.
	Yeah, I definitely do want that stuff and the pain does go pretty deep.
	I can imagine.
	And who do you, I mean other than the therapist, who do you talk to about the pain?
	Well, I talk to my parents about it.
	Like I said, they try and support me as much as they can.
	But that's about it.
	My parents and my therapist.
	I tried to talk to a friend of mine back in my college days about it, but that really wouldn't know.
	Right.
	And how often do you talk to your parents about it?
	About once every two weeks.
	I was going once every week.
	Couldn't afford that anymore, so I had to cut it back once every two weeks.
	Sorry, that's your therapist?
	Yeah.
	And how often do you talk to your parents about it?
	Oh, probably once a week.
	What has happened to the women that your parents have set you up with?
	I just haven't been interested in any of them.
	As desperate as I am for a woman, if I'm not interested in her, there's not really much I can do.
	You know what I mean?
	If I don't find her physically appealing, if I don't find her mentally appealing, What am I supposed to do?
	do just go out with somebody I'm not interested in.
	All right.
	So, okay, now we've got a crack in the defense.
	All right?
	So this is good.
	I'm just asking questions until I get an inconsistency.
	Right?
	So would you say that your parents know you very well?
	Fairly well, yeah.
	What do you mean by fairly well?
	This is another one of your non-answers that can't be worked with, right?
	I don't know what that means.
	Okay, so I'm just curious.
	So how well do you think your parents know you?
	Oh, this might be another non-answer, but probably as well as any parent can know their kid.
	I mean, there's things all parents don't know about their kid.
	No, that's fine.
	I got it.
	So your parents have as great a knowledge as any parent can have About their son, right?
	I'd say that's fair, yeah.
	Okay.
	What is not consistent with their setups with you?
	Well, they're setting me up with women I end up not being interested in for whatever reason, even though they really should know what I'm interested in.
	All right.
	So, do you see here we finally have a piece of empirical evidence that is breaking through the half-brain dust of propaganda that you've been spinning, right?
	Okay.
	How many dates have your parents set you up on?
	Oh, quite a few, I think, here.
	Just roughly.
	I mean, you don't have to have an exact number.
	Down to at least three decimal places.
	Well, more than a dozen.
	Okay, more than a dozen.
	Okay, so let's say 15, 20?
	Yeah, probably around 14, 15.
	Okay, 14 or 15.
	And not one of these women has been appealing to you emotionally, physically, intellectually, spiritually?
	Well, most of them have been appealing to me physically, but...
	Well, most of them have been appealing to me physically, But almost all of them have been not appealing to me mentally or emotionally or spiritually in one way or another.
	Okay, so this is another non-answer.
	So you say most of them have been unappealing to you.
	So what you're saying is that a few of them have been appealing to you both physically and mentally, physically, emotionally.
	Sorry, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
	Okay, no, I misspoke there.
	Most of them have been physically appealing, but I haven't met one yet that has been emotionally appealing.
	Okay.
	So, your parents do not seem to have a single solitary clue that the women that they're setting you up with are completely incompatible, right?
	So, I mean, if they were a little bit compatible, you'd probably give it a try for at least a couple of days, right?
	And see how it shaped out?
	Mm-hmm.
	Yes or no?
	Sorry, I'm not sure what that sound is.
	Sorry, I was coughing.
	Yeah, if they were at least a bit appealing to me, I would at least give it a few days.
	Okay, so your parents keep serving up to you, these women, who are completely unappealing to you.
	Uh-huh.
	And you say that they know you as well as any parent knows their child.
	Come on.
	Are you going to actually work with me here or are you going to keep spinning this nonsense?
	I don't want to waste my time.
	Well, they're not completely unappealing to me.
	I did say that most of them are at least physically appealing to me.
	Yes, okay.
	I understand that they know that a penis likes a boob, or a butt, or whatever it is.
	We understand that.
	What I'm asking you, because I've got lots of callers in the queue, and I'm starting to get a little annoyed with you.
	Which doesn't mean anything.
	I'm just honestly telling you that this is annoying to me.
	Because I feel like every time we take a step forward, you pull the rug out from under the conversation.
	Do you understand?
	Like, just at a logical level, try and distance yourself from the conversation.
	I know that's tricky.
	If you say to me, my parents know me as well as any parent knows their child, and they continually encourage me to go out with women who are completely incompatible with me.
	And they know that what I want most in this life is to find a woman and settle down with her, who I have at least the capacity to love.
	And they keep serving to a starving child meals he simply cannot eat, that he is allergic to.
	And you say that your parents are supportive, and you say that your parents know you as well as any parent can know their child.
	Does this seem logically consistent to you?
	No, it doesn't.
	Okay.
	Can we accept that one of these can't be true?
	They contradict each other.
	Yes, they do.
	And you understand that if your parents keep giving you women that you can't date, it's a kind of torture.
	I don't mean that they're consciously plotting to torture you, but it's tortuous to you, right?
	If you're starving to death, and the only thing that you're highly allergic to is peanut butter, And you say, Steph, I'm starving here.
	I'm faint.
	My teeth are falling out.
	My eyeballs are turning brittle.
	I'm so hungry.
	And I say, oh, here's a peanut butter sandwich.
	And you say, oh, man, I told you.
	I'm allergic to peanuts.
	I say, oh, okay, sorry.
	Here's some peanut brittle.
	You say, dude, I am allergic to peanuts and I'm starving.
	Help me.
	And I say, oh, here's a Reese's peanut butter cup.
	Would you then go and say, Steph was incredibly supportive in helping me get my food?
	No, I can't say I would be.
	Steph knows what I could eat as well as any human being can ever know what anyone else eats.
	No.
	Okay.
	So do you see the gap here?
	Yes, I do.
	All right.
	Tell me what you think.
	Oh, well, I see where you're coming from, and I'm not trying to pull the rug out from under the conversation or anything.
	No, no, no.
	This is not where I'm coming from.
	Okay.
	This is not my opinion.
	These are contradictory facts that you have provided to me.
	This is not where I'm coming from, like, I like vanilla ice cream and jazz.
	This is not where I'm coming from.
	These are facts that you have provided to me.
	You could say, I can see how these facts are contradictory.
	You can't say, I can see where you're coming from.
	I'm just trying to be really precise here, because you're trying to turn this into my opinion, which is another way of distancing yourself from the contradiction.
	Okay, well, I'll try not to distance myself.
	But...
	If...
	How do I say it?
	Um...
	They are contradictory facts I've given you, but, you know, which one would be contradictory?
	Which one is the one I would have to give up is the question I'm asking myself.
	That you don't have to ask yourself.
	Sorry, that you don't have to ask yourself.
	Okay.
	Because, look, you understand, this is why intimacy has no appeal to you fundamentally.
	I'm telling you this.
	Because leading questions don't seem to help that much, so I'll be very blunt.
	If you think that the very best intimacy that is capable and possible after 33 years of in-depth knowledge, exposure, conversations, co-therapy and everything, if you think that the very best intimacy that is possible in human relationships is for people to continually Provide the opposite of what you desperately desperately need and want then what the hell good would intimacy be?
	What the hell good would love be?
	It's not insecurity.
	It's that if you think that your relationship with your parents and how they quote help give you what you need or support you in pursuing what you need And their knowledge of your preferences.
	If you think that that is the best intimacy capable in human relationships, why on earth would you want it?
	Fundamentally.
	Have you said to your parents, I did not like that woman you set me up with?
	Yeah.
	Have they asked why?
	Yeah.
	Have they changed the next, like is it 15 women who are completely different but you still don't like?
	Yeah, they have changed who they've set me up with.
	They haven't just been giving me the same kind of woman over and over again.
	But, I don't know.
	Maybe my standards are too high.
	Maybe it's just that I find one little nitpicky thing about them and then, oh well, I don't like her.
	Well, do your parents know that your standards are too high?
	Let's say that's true.
	That still doesn't solve the problem of being known by someone.
	If I know that your standards are too high, like let's say I'm trying to set you up and I know that your standards are crazy high, then I'm going to stop setting you up with women who I know are not going to meet your impossible standards, right?
	Like if you say, I'm starving to death, Steph, but I'm only going to eat caviar, I'm not going to bring you Pringles, Rolos, and a baked Alaska, because I know that you're only going to eat caviar.
	So, having high standards does not solve the problem that your parents are still serving up food you can't eat when you're starving to death.
	Well, I don't know.
	I mean, I know they care because they are trying.
	In the end, you know, like I said, it's not like they're just trying the same thing over and over again.
	So...
	Okay, well, listen, obviously, I'm going to move on to the next caller, and I don't mean to sound harsh or anything like that.
	I think that what you need to do is listen to this conversation again.
	And it's not surprising to me that this is a hard thing to break through.
	Obviously, this is 33 years and so on, right?
	So, you know, the dream is trying to tell you something.
	And I think I'm certainly even more clear now about what the dream is trying to tell you.
	This doesn't mean that I know for sure.
	I'm just telling you that in my own mind, I am very clear on what the dream is trying to tell you.
	And I'm also very clear that this is going to be a very, very hard thing for you to listen to.
	And so my suggestion is to just have a listen to this conversation again.
	And you might even want to note down the things that I'm pointing out.
	That are contradictory in what it is that you are providing.
	And listen to your own voice and see is it inviting or not.
	And listen to how hard I'm working and how hard you're working to diffuse whatever it is that I'm doing.
	Or I could say how hard your parents are working to do that.
	But anyway, I would say have a listen to this conversation.
	I am incredibly thrilled that you called in.
	I am very happy that you called in.
	And I will tell you that I really, really Found the conversation to be stimulating.
	Just say that again.
	You broke up again.
	Oh, I just said I really do.
	I found the conversation very stimulating and I'm very pleased that you called in.
	Okay.
	Well, thank you.
	I'm pleased that I called in.
	But if you've got to get to the next caller, I'll let you go.
	All right.
	Well, thanks, man.
	And I appreciate the dream as well.
	Thank you.
	Next up today, we have Nate.
	Hello, can you hear me okay?
	Is the volume good?
	I can.
	Thank you for your patience.
	Sorry for that long call.
	I am all ears, my friend.
	No worries.
	I totally understand.
	It's interesting to listen to as well, and I would just like to say, yeah, I can understand that guy, and I have sympathy for what he's going through.
	That must be incredibly difficult.
	Agreed.
	I guess I don't really have a question per se, more like comments about...
	Kind of like how you've helped me in my journey personally, and more specifically in job-related.
	I recently put in my conscientious objector package for the Air Force, right?
	And with this process, it's very technical, and it's not really well-publicized, and a lot of people don't know about it.
	But what is the most, I shouldn't say puzzling, Well, the experience for me so far has been that once I express these ideas and questions about, you know, what are we doing, you know, the morality of war, how essentially you just, you know, paid killers, right?
	And the reaction I've gotten from people besides my one really good friend has been, No one wants to talk about that subject, right?
	Until it becomes official, until I go to the interviews and we go through the whole rounds, which that hasn't started yet.
	Most people avoid talking about this sort of thing.
	It makes them emotionally uncomfortable, and also because they haven't I haven't heard any of these ideas before that you talk about and some other people that I listen to as well.
	But I want to thank you that is directly because of the podcast I listened to that first back in January of last year when I first started listening to FDR raised doubts in my mind about what exactly I was doing, right?
	I guess I really just want to thank you for that because it's really helped me through a lot of stuff.
	Before I did the CEO thing, I went through a personal development.
	I've been going through therapy for almost a year now, working on my relationship with my children.
	Unfortunately, I'll be getting divorced as a result of all this, which is for the better, not for the children, but for myself.
	And just kind of expressing my thank you for all that you've done and everything.
	And I just want to tell you that.
	Wow.
	Well, that's a lot.
	You know, I am currently actually on my knees bowing to you.
	I'm going to do this physically because saying it is not even close enough.
	Look, the courage that you're showing with the conscientious objective root is something that blows my mind.
	I mean, I think I have to have a few clangy nuts hanging between my legs sometimes to do what I'm doing, but what I'm doing is nothing compared to what you're doing.
	What I'm doing is nothing compared to what you're doing.
	I mean that genuinely.
	That's not false praise.
	That is a force of nature.
	The conscientious objective route is extremely challenging.
	It is confrontational.
	It is hard to explain to others.
	It goes against the immense propaganda Around the military in our culture in all cultures in all cultures and I I Just I can't tell you just how much I admire that and how difficult I can imagine that process is so holy crap All praise hallelujahs I release the philosophy angels to beat their wings around your head and give you good dreams so Good for you man,
	and I'm sorry to hear about your marriage.
	Was it specific to Leaving the military or other things?
	That was part of it.
	This happened back, the decision I decided to, before I went through, I had called it back then.
	It was like, I think May was the first time I had participated in a call-in show.
	And I had already been having these thoughts, ideas.
	I just wanted to talk about it some more.
	And what I first started with was go back to basics.
	And before I could do something as monumental as what I'm doing now, I first had to start with knowledge and knowledge.
	That I received from you and reading up and thinking, like truly thinking and keeping a journal, I really had to start with my own family, first myself, and then my own immediate family with the contradictions in my life that I was allowing to continue.
	And so it started with becoming a better parent and stopping to hit my children.
	And that has worked out beautifully.
	I mean, my relationship with them is I can't even explain how great it is and how...
	No, you can!
	You can!
	Come on, sell the anti-spanking a little bit because you don't want your kids to grow up and become conscientious objectives to you as an adult when they become adults.
	So yes, feel free to put a little selling juice into the anti-spanking thing.
	The feeling that when everybody is happy...
	When everyone has a voice and everyone is just good.
	It's just the thing where you see your kids and you give them a hug.
	It's unbelievably powerful.
	The point where when my kids are sad or unhappy and they're crying, my first reaction is to feel what they're feeling and cry with them.
	Rather than anything else, is to feel what they feel and put myself in their shoes to empathize directly with what they may be feeling or thinking or what they express to me.
	And that is so powerful that it has increased our relationships.
	I mean, they're still kind of young, so I don't think they quite get the magnitude.
	But what they do get is understand that, you know, when they're with me, it's totally different than any other relationship they have, including the one with their mother, right?
	And it's just good.
	It's good.
	By good, I mean amazing.
	The most amazing experience I've ever experienced in my life.
	Spanking is very harsh for empathy, right?
	Because empathy is putting yourself, obviously, in your child's emotional hammock.
	And spanking is the exact opposite.
	Spanking trains you to be anti-empathetic.
	Not unempathetic, anti-empathetic.
	Because you are specifically acting in a way that is extremely diametrically the opposite of what your child wants you to do.
	Which means you have to completely blow their preferences out of your mind.
	In fact, you have to use their preferences as the basis for spanking.
	Because spanking is the one thing that no child ever wants done.
	And if you do it, you are training yourself to be anti-empathetic.
	To use your child's preferences against your child.
	To use your child's nervous system against your child.
	To use your child's desire for peace and non-pain against your child.
	That is training you to be cruel.
	That is training you to be harsh.
	That is training you to be the opposite of empathetic and loving.
	And every time you do that, it just takes you that one notch or one rung lower down in that ladder towards hell.
	So I really appreciate you not doing that.
	And of course, you know, what the hell do I care?
	I mean, what do you care about what I think?
	But I just, I really want to point out that you have reversed that training that unfortunately, of course, is the essence of military training as well, right?
	Military is all about enacting things that other people desperately don't want enacted, right?
	So, but anyway, go ahead.
	100% yes.
	I mean, I think about that.
	And this went even deeper than that, back to my origins when I was a child, right?
	I was physically punished as well.
	And once I come to the realization that I was just manifesting the same stuff that was done to me as a child upon my own children, once that concept came to my head, it was as clear as day.
	You wake up and the sun's just shining so brilliantly.
	There's no doubt where that was coming from.
	But then the positive thing was that I could change all that.
	I didn't have to let that continue.
	I could make my own choices and make it better for them.
	Yeah, so it just went down.
	I started with my kids and did that.
	And then I started talking about these things with my wife.
	And then she just like...
	In her defense, I think I came about the wrong way.
	It was almost like a diarrhea of truth.
	I don't know if that makes sense, where it just kind of came out.
	And in that regard, I think I failed.
	I mean, wake up.
	I know it's been three days, but I'm not finished.
	Yeah, that's exactly what it was.
	But...
	Even after that, the unwillingness to talk about anything in regards to that was really what put the nail in the coffin and just kind of made it so, if I can't even talk about these things without getting verbally abused by you, there's really no point in even trying to maintain a pretense of relationship.
	It would just continue to do more harm between her and I and even more so to the children.
	I'm very sorry about that.
	I'm very sorry.
	You made those choices.
	That's something I learned as well, that by accepting responsibility, like, I wish I would have known what I do now back when I was 18.
	That would have made my life a lot easier.
	But I was trapped in the things that I was taught and raised, and I really didn't hear it.
	It wasn't really a voice of reason to say, uh...
	It kind of slapped me in the face.
	It doesn't have to be this way.
	Metaphorically.
	Yes, exactly.
	Without wanting to get all competitive, you probably wasted a whole lot less time than I did.
	That's the only consolation I can offer you.
	Thank you for that.
	Listen, obviously you are breaking the cycle of abuse.
	About nine different levels of intergalactic magnificence.
	So, I mean, militarily, familiarly, parentally, and so on.
	So, geez, I wish we knew whatever secret sauce, whatever alien probe put stuff in your ear that we could just replicate that for other people and give them that level of commitment to truth and virtue.
	But of course, it's an individual choice thing.
	And I just obviously want to applaud you for your choice.
	And what happens with the CO stuff now?
	I mean, you said that you're just starting the process.
	Oh, no.
	I've turned in my official package.
	I think it's 11 or 12 pages long.
	It starts with you've got to state your belief, what your belief is, and how that relates to your objection to participation in war.
	Then once you put that in, something that might be helpful in case any other listeners or anyone that hears this might be thinking about the same thing.
	If you're in the United States military, you can go to the Center for Conscience.
	It's called the Center for Conscience in War.
	You can just Google that and it'll come up.
	And they've existed around since World War II when the CEO thing really started springing up.
	And they've been around for that long.
	So they've got over 70 years experience, 80 years experience of dealing with sort of stuff.
	And they have helped me by far the most.
	So if anyone else needs a resource like that or kind of hesitant because...
	My peers, leadership around me, they had no idea about this process or what was specifically entailed.
	And so I just kind of networked out and I found this.
	So that was intensely helpful for me.
	But from this point, go ahead, please.
	Yeah.
	I thought they were going to...
	Yeah, absolutely.
	So from here on out, then I go do an interview with a chaplain, interview with a psychiatrist, and then they'll do like an investigation all to ensure that my claim is true.
	Then it'll be up to...
	Decisions from the upper echelon of the military to decide whether I'll be granted that status or not.
	Right.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	That's quite...
	I mean, it's kind of weird to be vaguely thankful for this, but it is kind of weird that that's even an option in the military.
	You know, that's pretty new.
	As you say, it's really since the Second World War.
	I mean, you know, in sort of the German army in the First World War, you conscientious objector, you just get a bullet in your head kind of thing, right?
	So, that's...
	That's kind of weird that that's what we have to be grateful for, that there's a way out that can salvage your honor, which is not a pine box.
	That's kind of good.
	Yes.
	I just want to share one quick story.
	I was trying to...
	I don't know what I was trying to...
	I was in the middle of making these changes and I went to a briefing before we started my shift and I watched this guy get blown up by a bomb and...
	Sorry, where did you see it happen?
	This is at my work.
	It was like a little briefing before I actually went to do my job, right?
	And saw that and the piece of his body fly up in the air and I felt like just such intense sadness and tears come into my eye.
	And all around me people were laughing and making jokes and slapping each other on the back.
	And I had never felt more alone in what I've been doing at Until that point.
	Oh, so this would say, quote, and everyone got blown up?
	Yes, yeah.
	Especially, quote, big quotes.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, once I felt that, I just knew, like, there's no way I could do this, even try and pretend, like, and there was any sort of semblance of good, because my conscience and my brain, my moral center, if you will, is telling me, get the hell out of there.
	Right.
	So you were, I mean, basically this guy got blown up and everybody's like, woohoo, high fives and all that kind of stuff, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, I understand why I think that.
	When we were talking about the military training, it's basically the dehumanization of human beings, right?
	That's why you need this sort of training because it's not natural for us to want to kill each other.
	Yeah, I'll just leave it at that.
	But yeah, and that's just kind of when I realized.
	And then once I realized that, and I already started making the family moves and everything, and then I knew it was that time that, hey, I've done all this already.
	Let's just take this another step and move forward.
	But overall, it's been positive.
	I mean, I've lost most people that I kept in contact with, but except for one really good friend.
	People call us the Liberty Brothers because we're always talking about things...
	That are related to that and spreading ideas of nonviolent parenting, you know, opposition to the war on drugs, what that really means.
	My favorite thing when I talk about people with, especially people in the military, about spanking their children or hitting their children, I say, so this, I always bring this out first off.
	So if you have a disagreement with your spouse and she disagrees with you, do you smack her across the face to get her to comply with your behavior or comply with what you want?
	And they're like, no, of course not.
	I was like, okay, then why, oh why, oh why do you do that to your children?
	Yeah, your wife at least chose to be there.
	Your kids didn't choose to be there at all.
	Yes.
	And I go through that whole route.
	This is really just an echo of what I've heard you say.
	And people just kind of sit there like, what do I do?
	What do I say to this?
	And I don't do that to hurt their feelings or to create a controversy.
	I do that so they start thinking and they start using their brain and plant that seed and you never know when it's going to sprout.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	But anyway, that's all I wanted to say.
	Let me just say one thing then, because Lord knows I can never have a listener have the last word.
	Ah!
	It's a curse.
	Or maybe a blessing.
	I don't know.
	It's your show.
	Yeah.
	Listen...
	You know, like in all seriousness, it's a completely horrifying story.
	The man basically being liquidated by high explosives with his gizzards and innards thrown up into the air like a hellish sneeze from Satan himself.
	And then everybody, you know, cheering and whoop, we got him, you know, the kind of thing.
	And this is the kind of thing that, of course, occurs in war.
	I mean, this is war, fundamentally.
	I mean, you had Luftwaffe pilots giggling while they strafed the French people fleeing the cities, blowing up nunneries, and I mean, this is what happens in war.
	This is an unavoidable, not even consequence or aspect of war, but this is war.
	This is war, where that which is inherently most repellent to human beings, most human beings, you know, sociopaths accepted, most human beings is the taking of another person's life, As I said before, a spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.
	It goes into somebody else that kills you too in some ways.
	And this is the environment that people are praising with their little fucking yellow ribbon support the troop bullshit.
	Oh yeah.
	You know, if you want to support somebody who has cancer, you support them getting well.
	Which means you support them getting out of hospital.
	Which means you support them not being...
	Productively poisoned by chemo, radiation therapy.
	Supporting a cancer patient means ending the goddamn cancer.
	The only way to support the troops is to work as hard as you can to end the war or end their participation in it.
	That is the only thing that support the troops actually means.
	That is the only thing that support the troops actually means.
	Everything else is, I support them having their souls ritually scrubbed sand, blasted away through repeated exposure to brutality, inhumanity, and just plain old-fashioned evil.
	The people who say that they support the troops without moving heaven and earth, particularly if they know someone, to either end the war or end their participation in it, are...
	Little Eichmanns, as the phrase goes, are cheering on a bloodlust that they love but are too cowardly to participate in.
	It is, in a very real sense, a greater evil than the war itself because it is the evil that makes the war possible and makes...
	The troops so confused.
	Because what they experience is the dying of their self.
	What they experience is the end of their integrity.
	What they experience is the death of their humanity.
	What they experience is the crucifixion of their very soul.
	And for this self-murder, for this self-slaughter, they are termed heroes.
	And how fucking confusing is that?
	And these are the terms that we shower down on people who are 17 and 18 and 19 years old.
	And have no real capacity to process the immense evils that their culture is like a boa constrictor strangling their very windpipes and their larynx to speak with.
	So the idea that there's something around supporting the troops when this is what we're turning them into, giggling, putrefied zombies of destruction, Who laugh at the explosive slaughter of a fellow human being?
	Well, I just wish that all those who supported the troops could be moved to one particular area of the country and then all the veterans came back to live next door to them.
	Because they are coming back.
	All the wars end eventually.
	All the empires end eventually.
	England was in India for, what, 100, 150 years?
	It all ends eventually and the people come home.
	And all of these people that you have supported in the eradication of their identities with, in the dehumanization and giggling lust for blood that you have fermented and generated and fed within them, oh, they're coming back, my friends.
	They're going to come back and they're going to walk your streets.
	And they do not leave their bodies behind.
	They do not leave the corpses they have created behind.
	No, no, they bring them back, you see.
	They bring them back and they drag them.
	Like a man tied with a hundred barrels full of blood, they drag them down the street, and the blood spills on the street, and it swamps up the legs of your children, and these people will be in your neighborhood, and these people who are perhaps unrecoverable and certainly will remain so if their barrel-dragging bloodthirstiness is continued to be labeled heroism and courage and virtue.
	Well, they will be there.
	And they will probably be drinking.
	And they will certainly be driving dangerously.
	Vets have a 75% more likelihood of being killed in a car crash.
	And they may crash into one of your children, which I think is absolutely tragic, because the children are still innocent in all of this, always.
	And they may have a gun spree.
	And they may be dangerous in various other ways.
	In England, the highest single population of anyone in prison is veterans.
	So they will be committing crimes.
	So these zombies that you praise the creation of will be returning to you, will be returning to your neighborhoods, will be returning to the orbits of your children.
	And I don't know that fundamentally, deep down in what's left of their souls, I don't imagine that there's anyone that they hate more than the people who praised them and enabled the evil that they became.
	And the vengeance that they take will, like all unconscious vengeances, be very subtle, be very inescapable, and will be unspeakably brutal.
	So, if you don't care about the troops to the point where you'll continue to praise the machine that is turning them into a liquid ghostly evil, then at least have a care for the children who will have to grow up in a world who is populated by these millions of Of angry, hungry ghosts who will be returning from these distant shores.
	And he will have to live with the children that they drunkenly beat and the children that they abuse because the abuse within these homes of veterans is far higher than the average.
	And they will have to go to school with the children of these beasts.
	So at least have a care for the environment you are creating when you praise the war because the war is overseas.
	Out of sight is out of mind.
	But it never stays that way.
	It comes home.
	So perhaps you would like to rethink some of your praise of the conditions that produce these horrors.
	That's just the last thing that I wanted to say about that.
	Thank you very much.
	I appreciate your time and all your thoughts as well.
	And I look forward to being a part of this in the future.
	All right.
	Thanks, man.
	Big wet kiss to your kids for me.
	All right.
	Definitely.
	Thanks.
	All right.
	Next up today, we have Itay.
	Thank you.
	Or Itay, sorry.
	Hello?
	Hello, Itay.
	Itay, are you there?
	Alright, I'll see what's going on with him.
	I keep telling the minds, don't call in.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yes, so sorry.
	Can you hear me?
	Oh, there you are.
	Hello.
	Ah, sorry.
	You're up?
	Yes, thank you.
	Do you hear me okay?
	Yes, go ahead.
	Okay, I had a question regarding UPB. Yes.
	The first question regarding UPB relates to the applicability of UPB to morality.
	I think you provide a very good and coherent proof for the existence of UPB. But I'm missing the link of how do we apply it to morality.
	Since we use morality in order to organize society or a group of individuals, why can't people look at UPBs that are preferable by a group rather than by each individual?
	I feel instinctively that this is wrong, but I'm missing the proof.
	I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand the question.
	Could you just repeat the bit about individuals and the groups?
	I didn't quite follow.
	Okay.
	I think the question is, could people say that the UPBs that we are looking to use in order to organize society should be preferable by the group rather than by individuals?
	Like a behavior that is preferable by the group rather than by each individual.
	I agree and disagree.
	It depends on how you look at it.
	The important thing always to analogize, if you get confused, analogize UPB to the scientific method because the scientific method is a subset of UPB. So, clearly, if a theory is valid, a scientific theory is valid and accepted, sorry, if it's valid, if it's true, then it doesn't matter how many scientists accept or reject that theory.
	It's still true or false, right?
	Sure.
	So, from that standpoint, whether a lot of people or not a lot of people accept UPB, Is immaterial as to its validity, right?
	No, this is correct.
	But my question refers to whether, you know, there were some theories, and I realize that these are controversial, that put forward ideas of group selection to explain altruistic behaviors demonstrated by some species or the working class of ants So,
	could people say that the behavior should be preferable or not preferable based on some group criterion rather than by individual criterion?
	Well, can you give me an example?
	For example, again, somebody may come and say that a behavior is Unless people would behave in a certain way, the species as a whole, the humankind, would suffer.
	If people would not try to make sex with anyone they see, the species would die out.
	So I do realize this is ridiculous, but I'm missing the proof.
	Well, of course, a group cannot have preferences because preferences is a characteristic of the individual, right?
	Okay.
	So, a group cannot prefer things any more than a group can eat a meal.
	Eating a meal is an action for an individual.
	A group can share a meal, but the group cannot collectively eat the same Big Mac, right?
	So from that standpoint, it's not logically productive to focus on what a group might prefer.
	What I think is true, and an important part of what you're saying, if I understand it correctly, is something like this.
	So if I have a true theory about some important scientific thing, and no other scientist accepts my theory, Then what does that really mean?
	So a truth that is rejected by all that won is kind of fundamentally a truth that doesn't, quote, exist in society.
	So certainly the more people who accept UPB, the better off we'll all be.
	And if only, you know, three people in the world accept UPB, then UPB has no particular functional aspect in society.
	Like, it doesn't do anything in society.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yes, it does.
	But perhaps I did not explain my question well enough.
	Can I try again?
	Please.
	Okay, so...
	I understand that UPB, or preferable behavior, is a behavior of an individual.
	This is clear for me.
	But when we now want to apply UPB in order to define morality, morality is not just per each individual.
	It is used, at least today, in order to organize the society, which is a group of individuals.
	So in that context, Can the society or somebody come and say that the preferable or unpreferable behavior should be something that is serving the group and not each individual?
	All right.
	I'm not sure what you mean by serving the group.
	Because the group is composed of individuals who have often disparate goals, right?
	Yes.
	So, what does serving the group mean?
	Can you give me an example of something that would serve a group?
	Unless some behavior is executed by each individual, the group may not have enough food or may die off because the group may not have enough food or may die off because of
	If there is not If there are too many people then the group would have not enough food to feed them all or if there are too little people because they do not breed and then the group would like to encourage the individuals to exhibit some preferable behavior.
	You mean like have children or not have children?
	For example.
	Now, how could it...
	I'm just trying to think how a universal application of the non-aggression principle and a respect for property rights has been shown to be as...
	I mean, I think within this conversation, without having to go through reams of historical proof, we can say that non-aggression principle and a respect for property rights is about as optimal a set of economic allocations as you can possibly get.
	I mean, that's praxeological in nature.
	You can't get more efficient economic allocations than non-aggression and property rights.
	And so I can't imagine where an application of UPB would lead to a suboptimal economic allocation or resource use situation.
	Therefore, I can't imagine how the group as a whole could be served any better way than UPB at the individual interaction level.
	Does that make sense?
	Yes.
	Yes, but for example, let's say that, as you always say, we don't put it well in captivity.
	So somebody claimed that anybody should try to have sex with any woman, regardless of the fact whether she likes it or not.
	So somebody can say that this type of behavior would It'd be preferable in order for the group to reproduce.
	Now, again, although it's clear for me that this is absurd, the problem is that I'm looking for a proof and not the gas filling.
	Well, but the proof is in, I'm sorry, maybe I'm misunderstanding it, the proof is in the book.
	I mean, the book goes specifically into the issue of rape and shows how rape can never be universally preferable behavior.
	So if somebody advocates rape for some, you know, let's rape so that we have enough children, I mean, UPB disproves the validity of rape.
	Rape can never be universally preferable behavior, and therefore it can't be moral.
	So, I don't know, you could say that...
	Because of the too many in the room?
	Algorithm?
	Yeah, because rape can't be UPB because for rape to occur, one person has to really not want it.
	So it can't be universalized.
	So to say that rape is universally preferable behavior is to say that which is universally preferable and universally not preferable is universally preferable.
	It can't be.
	It just can't be.
	Could we change the language instead of using rape to say that the behavior which is preferable is That if you can, you should try to rape, but if you are being raped, you should try to resist, or something like that.
	Do not call it rape, but call it that the strong...
	Well, but see, no, no, come on.
	I've got to call this UPB 101, right?
	So you can't say...
	Then you're just making up different rules for people, right?
	So, okay, the man should try to rape, but the woman should try to resist being raped.
	Well, then it's not universal.
	Then rape is no longer a universally preferable behavior because one person is fighting like hell against it.
	So that doesn't work.
	Okay.
	And I think what you're trying to do is you're trying to say, is there a collective goal that can override UPP at the individual level?
	Yes, this is my question.
	No.
	No, because there's no such thing as a collective goal.
	A goal is an aspect or preference of the individual.
	There's no such thing as the common good.
	There's no such thing as a collective pregnancy.
	There's no such thing as a common goal.
	There's no such thing as a social end.
	These are all just nonsense that is invented to get people to follow rulers who always claim to represent the universal truth, the common good, the social contract, the will of Jesus, the will of Allah, whatever it is, right?
	And so this stuff is all nonsense and doesn't exist.
	It has no epistemological or metaphysical.
	And because it has no metaphysical or epistemological reality, it can't have any ethical significance.
	It's like saying, what are the rights of ghosts?
	Well, since ghosts don't exist, they don't have any rights.
	And since the social good doesn't exist, it has no moral weight.
	It has no calculation in any kind of morality.
	It's like saying in an engineering class, okay, I know I'm building this huge bridge out of balsa wood and styrofoam that's supposed to carry locomotives and trains and all this, right?
	But don't worry, because I'm going to have ghost giants hold the bridge up.
	Well, people would say, what are you talking about?
	There's no such thing as ghost giants.
	It can't factor into your...
	Engineering calculations.
	And since there's no such thing as a common good, collective good, social good, whatever it is, it cannot factor into any calculations of ethics.
	So there's no way that ghosts can override the properties of that which exists.
	And in the same way, there's no way that a collective good can override universally preferable behavior, which is a characteristic of individuals and can never be a characteristic of a group any more than you can say, what is the hair color of a ghost?
	Okay.
	That's your point.
	Thank you.
	You're very welcome.
	I'm glad to have helped.
	All right.
	I think we've got time for one more.
	Next up, we have another James.
	Uh-huh.
	Clone James, are you healthy?
	Go ahead.
	I'm feeling great.
	I wanted to thank you, Stefan, for the recent video that you had put out on YouTube, Why Men Don't Want to Get Married.
	You shed quite a bit of light on something I think needs to be lit up in our current society, and we're seeing this idea of dehumanization of men Oh, throughout history, but now it's taken a modern context through state intervention.
	The state becomes the daddy, and I really wanted to thank you for that.
	Yeah, you're welcome.
	I mean, it's just a couple of thoughts.
	I won't go into them all because I want to focus on you.
	But one thought that's occurred to me that I may do another show on is this idea that, do you know, the sisters are doing it for themselves.
	A woman is strong and independent and so on.
	And I mean, I have no particular problem with that.
	I don't think that strong and independent just seems to me like a...
	A synonym for lonely and bitter.
	But, I mean, let's say that, you know, there's a cliche of, you know, sisters are doing it for themselves.
	I can open my own door, thank you very much.
	I can pay for my own dinner, thank you very much.
	It's like, well, if women are doing it for themselves so much, then why do they...
	Why do they always have their hands in our pockets?
	You know, the people who have stable families, right?
	I'm talking about, like, the single moms and all this kind of stuff.
	Like, why do they constantly need all of this government money if they're doing it for themselves?
	Isn't the exact opposite of doing it for yourself?
	Anyway, Daniel Crittenden pointed this out in a book that I mentioned recently, where she's just saying, well, you know, instead of having a husband, you have an estate.
	And that's not exactly something you can cuddle up to at night.
	So the idea that there is no independence in parenthood.
	There is no independence in parenthood.
	Parenthood is an interdependent phenomenon.
	It's because you're pregnant, you have breastfeeding, you have birth, you have recovery, and this requires huge amounts of resources.
	You have the education of your children.
	You have someone who has to take care of your children if you end up going to work.
	Getting rid of the husband and denigrating men as a whole, which is common, though not universal in our society, It does not change the equation of resources that are needed.
	So this idea that there are all these strong, independent women, I would actually argue that there are fewer now than there were before the revolution because now they're dependent on the state, which can't last.
	I mean, the handouts simply can't last.
	And it cannot be more satisfying to get a check than have a husband who's helping you raise your kids.
	So anyway, I just want to point that out.
	I think it's exacerbating the problem.
	Problem of the state and yet bringing its eventual decline at an ever-increasing rate because as we've seen over and over again we have so many young men who are simply hanging up the phone and never bothering to answer back.
	They're leaving society.
	They're taking their resources either out-of-state hands altogether by minimizing their production or they are removing themselves through expatriation which we're going to see an increasing amount of over time.
	I mean, if you take a look at what's been going on in France here recently with the proposed increase in taxes Depardieu, a famous actor over there, all of a sudden Russia is vying for Depardieu to come over and live in Russia.
	And they'll say, oh, well, we'll hardly take anything from you as compared to France.
	But, I mean, we're seeing, with the removal of the labor force of men voluntarily from society, I think 85% of college grads are going to go back and live with their parents.
	And, you know, young men are playing an average of 13 to 14 hours of video games every week.
	That's like two full work days.
	Yeah.
	And immersing themselves in other kinds of media and wanting to backpack around Europe and go pick grape in Queensland, Australia, and pick grapes.
	I mean, and this stuff's all fun.
	And frankly, to be honest, given the statistics, it's a whole lot more fun than getting married, right?
	I read a study the other day.
	Of course, not only are 40 to 50% of marriages ending in divorce, but they did a study that said that...
	Men and women who are widowed later in life, 10% of them report being enormously happier after the death of their spouse.
	Relieved and happy and feeling great.
	By which we can surmise that at least 10% of the marriages that stay together are pretty miserable fucking affairs.
	If you're happy that someone's dead, that's a pretty miserable situation to be in.
	A 50% chance of losing a marriage off a Average of about 65% chance that the woman is the one who initiates it, with the most common reason being dissatisfaction, as vague as that is.
	And a further 10% chance that even if you stay married, you're so miserable that you're happy when they're dead.
	Right, right.
	So I think this movement toward men going galt is probably the Best way to destroy the state, because it's literally going to end up kicking the legs out from under the economic viability of the government.
	It's going to kick it out altogether.
	The whole entitlement system is going to crash as a result.
	A population decline is going to occur, and considering it's all a Ponzi scheme anyway, the inverted triangle won't hold up the system.
	Well, of course, but, I mean, one of the things that the tax farmers will do is they will attempt to bring in productive livestock from overseas.
	This is the traditional thing that happens, right, which is that they'll simply open the gates to immigration, and they will charge people to come in, right, so that they get money that way.
	And given the increases in wealth that are occurring in China, and to some degree Russia, and certainly India, that's one possibility.
	It might prop it up for another generation or so, but...
	People's desire to participate in the workforce is collapsing.
	Depending on what estimates you read, there are between 80 million and 100 million Americans of working age who don't have a job.
	There are a lot of underground messages being spoken between guys who Really do understand exactly what's going on and how it relates to statism.
	And a lot of them are beginning to turn their eyes toward UPB and first principles.
	Well, let me just say one other thing too, which I certainly thought about when I was younger.
	I think that Oh God, how many years ago?
	24, 23 years ago when we were roommates.
	We lived in the same room in a frat house.
	We weren't part of the frat, but that's where we were.
	He's a very interesting guy.
	Very smart guy.
	He's got like two PhDs now and flies all over the world doing ultra cool stuff.
	He taught me that people who can't solve basic math equations can solve incredibly complex math equations if they're put in Situations where sort of optimal social sharing, like who pays what part of a bill and who should get the next slice of pie.
	I mean, people have a very instinctual grasp of economic mathematics that far outstrips their conscious mathematical ability.
	And this central plan is, of course, ignore this, not to their peril, but to the peril of the future.
	And so I think, I personally think that young people I mean, a lot of doom porn comes out of libertarian circles, but not all of it is false.
	I'm actually working on a presentation about it right now.
	And I think what they say to themselves is something like this.
	Okay, so I can go to school and emerge $20,000, $30,000 in debt to a really uncertain job market.
	Maybe I can struggle to overcome all that.
	I can live hand-to-mouth and eating my own toenails for five or ten years to pay off my debt, and then I can go buy a house, and who knows if that house value is going to increase...
	And over all of this uncertain and dangerous economic landscape, not counting the possibility of marriage, divorce, alimony, child support, and all that mess, is rolling the great, gaping, giant, squid-like maw of the baby boomers' retirement and all the resources that they're going to need and the debt, which is going to have to be either repaid or some hyperinflated out or some massive contraction, social spasm, and who knows what's going to happen.
	When that all occurs to my career, right?
	Maybe my career will evaporate.
	Maybe I'll be in some government agency that will close or I'll be in some private agency that sells to that government agency that will close.
	Or maybe if I go and join some defense contractor, the wars end or, you know, that gets cut.
	So the massive amount of uncertainty combined with the certainty of immense economic dislocations in the not-too-distant future, I think that people don't understand and people may not even be conscious of it.
	It's all around, though.
	Nobody can miss the fact that everything to do with the state just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.
	Nobody can miss it.
	I've been with the help of some kind listeners gathering statistics on this for a couple of weeks because I really want to make this presentation.
	If you don't know the stats, you probably only know them deep down in your mathematical genius social calculation part of your brain.
	But I think all of that really combines for young people To kind of say, meh, and particularly young men, I don't know.
	I don't think I'm going to roll these dice.
	You know, I've got great virtual worlds to play in.
	I have instantaneous, endless porn on demand.
	I have great travel opportunities.
	I have lots of cool things that I can do.
	You know, I live in a pretty comfortable house with my parents.
	And I just, you know, oh, it's a failure to launch.
	It's like, no, it's not a failure to launch, dammit.
	There's no place to land.
	So why get in the rocket?
	So I think that's an important thing that's going to have a huge effect on the next generation routine.
	I think so as well.
	I cannot stress the idea of self-education enough, however, because that's really the only way that things are going to end up being able to be rebuilt once.
	I hate to be one of those doom and gloom guys, but I really think it's all just going to Fall down like a great big house of cards.
	And it's going to be up to these guys getting back out in the world and rebuilding from scratch.
	But they're going to have to do it from the idea of first principles and UPB. And I think the self-education aspects need to be pushed as much as possible.
	Yeah, I mean look, if people understand, and this is what the documentary that's coming out is all about, if people understand What has gone so wrong and why?
	Then they can fix it.
	But if it's just like, well, things turn to shit.
	I mean, that's why people are so depressed, right?
	That's why I think it's fundamentally why one in four women run into depressants and suicide among the young is at an all-time high.
	I mean, I think it's just because there's this sense that things turn to shit and nobody knows why.
	I mean, it's really depressing.
	It's a really depressing idea and it's a paralyzing idea.
	Like some virus strikes you down, you never know where or how or why.
	I mean, that changes your life.
	That changes who you are as a human being.
	That changes your window of planning.
	That changes your capacity to defer gratification and to plan for the long run.
	I mean, American savings rates, because of the low interest rates, which are necessarily low, otherwise the interest rates rose to some natural level.
	The government is spending over a trillion dollars a year just on interest on the debt.
	So, this all changes who you are.
	The fact that our system is unsustainable, and no one is really talking about it much, and no one is certainly talking about any kind of moral analysis or moral dealings with the situation.
	And the fact that the great lie of the Republican commitment to the free market, the fact that that has all evaporated is...
	You know, the Ron Paul campaign is done, and nothing can be done with the existing system.
	And that, you know, people, I guess, had some hope that the Republicans were going to restore small governments, and yes, we'll take some of the Jesus stuff, but just give us less government stuff.
	I mean, you know, well, you got all the Jesus stuff, and you didn't get the less government stuff.
	It's pretty bad when they consider a financial cut actually simply a reduction in the...
	Not a reduction.
	A slowdown in the rate of growth is considered a cut.
	And they just signed this fiscal cliff bill, which is basically taking a huge Huge, giant, social-spanning, planet-spanning catapult, loading it up with the unfertilized eggs of unborn future generations and firing it into the surface of the sun, basically, economically speaking, where there is, I think under Reagan, Reagan said that his biggest mistake was signing a bill which had $2 in spending cuts for every dollar in tax increases.
	Of course, the spending cuts never materialized.
	The tax increases all did.
	I think under Bush, the younger, he signed a bill where there was $3 In spending cuts for every dollar that was in tax increases, the spending cuts never showed up.
	And now, with this last bill, the fiscal cliff bill at the end of, I guess, early this year, 2013, the Republicans actually signed a bill with 41 times as many tax increases as tax cuts.
	And of course, the tax cuts will never materialize and the tax increases always well.
	And that's where the Republicans are.
	And the Republicans have no one to blame but themselves.
	No one to blame but themselves, because the Republicans abandoned principles.
	The Republicans abandoned principles with the welfare state, they abandoned principles with Social Security, and it's because, I mean, you could say it's no one's fault but themselves, but it's simply because they refused to make the case, the moral case, for the inhumanity and exploitation of social programs, right?
	So, John Stossel actually sat down, I think it was John Stossel, sat down with a bunch of retirees.
	Oh yeah, he's got a great book out called No We Can't.
	And John Stossel sat down with a bunch of Social Security retirees and went through the math and said, look, here's why you're getting three or four times more out of the system than you ever paid in.
	And so this bill is going to go to your kids.
	Is that fair?
	And they said, well, no.
	And they then did agree, after a certain amount of education, they did agree that they should have a reduction in benefits because the money isn't there.
	The money's been blown and they're taking far more out than they ever put in.
	Now, the Republicans have not made that case.
	And they had not made that case because the media, which as far as I understand it, is the sector of society that attracts the most sociopaths, right?
	Particularly the verbal abusers.
	The media would simply, you know, you're starving granny and, you know, all that emotional bullshit.
	Because, of course, everyone in society has to deal with the brain-dead remnants of the public tool system, this mindless horde of fools who rush back and forth between the latest emotional Pavlovian stimulus buttons pushed to manipulate them.
	But the Republicans did not make the principled case, did not call for sacrifice, and have coddled the entitled far beyond the point of rationality.
	And so there is no solution within the political system, and I think people are waking up to that now, and because they haven't come over to philosophy, there still is a very dangerous void where depression, self-absorption, nihilism, and a withdrawal from the world can occur, and is occurring.
	And that's something, of course, that we need to To help avoid.
	I agree.
	I work every day with people across the world in an attempt to spread the idea of first principles.
	So far, I've gotten a lot of positive feedback.
	Most of these guys, they've been burned by everything else in their In their society, they have nowhere else to turn.
	Some of them have drugged themselves back up from the depths of depression.
	And a lot of them are still somewhat broken after everything that's happened to them.
	Now, they have a hard enough time looking into the mirror and admitting their own faults or their own complicity in some of the problems that they face.
	But at the very least, the first principles allow them to stand up on their own two feet where nobody has allowed them to do that before without constantly denigrating them over the idea of their own disposability to society.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I don't think they're not particularly taught that an individual can make a big difference.
	Or if they are taught that an individual can make a big difference, it's like about mosquito nets to Africa.
	And of course, there's nothing wrong.
	It's a great thing to contribute to mosquito nets to Africa.
	That's great.
	But in terms of actually changing the course of their own society, I think they're kept semi-consciously, purposefully disempowered.
	When there's a disaster and you don't feel capable of doing anything about it, then you get depressed and you get into escapism.
	I mean, why wouldn't you, right?
	I mean, that's why we give morphine to people who are dying.
	Right, right.
	I think the key in this case is to get To get them off the morphine, they've got to interact with others.
	And this is exactly what I try to tell them to do.
	Here's the message.
	Here's the idea.
	Look in the mirror and assess whether or not you're willing to take the pain of sort of rebuilding yourself from the ground up and then spread that idea to your local communities.
	A lot of these people are so used to seeing everything from a top-down approach with politics, they lose sight of the idea that there's a moral philosophy that can be adhered to, that if applied laterally,
	meaning from themselves directly to their family, their friends, their neighbors, their children, that A lot of this can change over the course of 20 or 30 years.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, but I mean nobody takes sailing lessons on the Titanic after it hits the iceberg and certainly nobody takes sailing lessons in the middle of a hurricane because that's all about long-term rewards and you're in a very short-term time frame.
	Get to a lifeboat, don't drown in the storm.
	And I think that what's happened is statism has made people's Capacity to defer gratification smaller and smaller.
	And to save the world, we need to have a longer and longer term deferral of gratification.
	I mean, this is what I get a lot of comments from this.
	I say, look, it is a multi-generational process to get a free society.
	And people are like, well, that sucks.
	I want it now.
	It's like, well, yeah, of course you want it now.
	Of course we want it now.
	But, you know, like Donnie R. said, you go to war with the army you have, not with the army you might wish to have at some point in the future, and we deal with the world the way that it is.
	That's true, and I still find at the end of the day, you know, I brush my teeth before I go to bed, still find at the end of the day that the greatest gratification is the fact that I've been able to put some kind of light in people's lives with The ideas that we're putting out there.
	Yeah, look, the question is, have I helped reduce the violence in the world today?
	That's all it's about.
	In a measurable way, have I helped reduce the violence that is in the world today?
	Now, if you've been pounding lawn signs for your favorite political candidate, no, you haven't.
	If you're donating money to some think tank or some website or whatever, no you haven't.
	If you have convinced someone that the army is not a good place to go, yes you have.
	If you have convinced someone that the army is not a good place to stay, yes you have.
	If you have convinced someone to not Hit his or her children, to not use aggression in personal relationships, to get out of an abusive relationship.
	Well, yes, you have actually, measurably, empirically, in reality, reduced the amount of violence in the world today.
	Dare I say, if you donate time or money or energy to a website that is specifically and consciously dedicated and has always been dedicated to that, well, Then you have certainly contributed to that because if you've shared the truth about spanking or the philosophical parenting podcasts or whatever it is that you find useful for helping people to awaken, would they change their minds as a result of that?
	Then yes, the efforts that you put in today have helped to reduce the violence in the world in a very measurable way.
	And if we were a strict empiricist, which we always should be, then we would not defer.
	So people say, well, I want that free society.
	I don't want to wait.
	It's multigenerational for the world as a whole.
	That doesn't mean it's multi-generational for you in your life if you commit to only spending time with people who are against violence, people who don't yell and bully and hit their children or others around them, who don't praise the slaughter of the innocents overseas and seize who don't praise the slaughter of the innocents overseas and seize upon the very ghostly assets of the unborn to stuff their already overstuffed mouths The boomer generation is the richest generation that's ever lived, and they still want all the money from the unborn.
	If that vampiric greed is something that you praise, well, I'm sorry, I don't break bread with you.
	I will talk with you.
	I will attempt to change your mind.
	I will attempt to bring you to reason.
	But I am aware enough of the virus of proximity that either you get enlightened or I go dark.
	There is no in-between in those kinds of polarized situations.
	So you can have a free society yourself.
	You just can't have it as a whole, as a culture, as a society in general.
	But you can have it for yourself.
	I don't have aggressive people in my life.
	I don't have violent people in my life.
	I don't have spankers in my life.
	I don't have statists in my life.
	Of course not.
	Of course not.
	So you can have the society of the future now.
	You just have to accept that it is empiricism that you're unconscious.
	It is the empiricism of your actions that registers on your conscience and nothing else.
	Your words are nothing to your conscience.
	Your listening to podcasts or reading books is nothing to your conscience.
	Your actions and what is measurable in the world, in your life, is what your conscience will measure.
	And you will never have peace with your conscience if you live in words and do not have deeds to bring to the altar of your internal universally preferable behavior machine we call the conscience.
	If you don't have facts to bring to it, it will never give you peace because philosophy is empirical.
	Thank you, Stefan.
	You're very welcome.
	I think that that was a pretty good speech.
	We should probably end the show on that note.
	Thank you everyone so much for calling us.
	Thank you for James, assuming that you are still with us, still in the land of the living.
	I'm sorry if we didn't get to you this week.
	If you have a yearning burning, I'm still happy to try and entertain some listener conversations during the week.
	Usually late at night is best.
	So, if you would like to ping me, host at freedomaderadio.com.
	I'm sure we can set something up.
	Thanks again.
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	We are working on getting bitcoins back.
	I had some hiccups that were not bitcoins fault at all, but left me a little burned.
	So I will try and sort that out this month.
	And I guess in a week or two we've got a pretty exciting announcement, which I will get to.
	Thanks everyone so much.
	Have a wonderful, wonderful week.
	Welcome to 2013.

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