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Jan. 13, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:33:08

2297 There Are Panthers in My Bed! The Freedomain Radio Sunday Philosophy Listener Call-In Show

0:00 The Recipe for a Great Marriage 12:10 Why Choose Peace over Violence? 49:20 I Pulled a Knife As a Child 1:36:58 There Are Panthers in My Bed

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	Okay, okay, let's go!
	It's the 13th of January, 2013.
	Hope you're doing very well.
	It's Stefan Molyneux from the Free Domain of Radios, and I wanted to just mention a couple of speeches I've got coming up.
	March 6th to 10th, I will be at the Global Escape Hatch in Belize, and you can go to freedomainradio.com forward slash Speeches.aspx.
	I'll just go to the homepage.
	There's a speeches tab.
	April 20th, I will be in New York City with, of course, a biohazard suit, given the prevalence of the flu virus there.
	And, of course, October, I'll be in Libertopia.
	A couple of other ones coming up.
	We're just finalizing details.
	But I hope that you will be able to come out to these things and adjust.
	It's actually quite...
	Quite lovely on Friday we dropped dear Izzy off with her best friends and the parents of course and Christina and I traveled back south we went down to the very lake shore and back in time because it was our 10th wedding anniversary and 10 years ago Friday we got married at a completely freezing yacht club in Mississauga of course and we went back To
	the same restaurant.
	And the place still looks fantastic.
	They've done a great job of keeping it up.
	And, you know, I love these milestones in life where you get to stop and, you know, stop the sort of general...
	My days generally feel like I'm fired out of a cannon.
	And then sort of I have to put my bed at a sort of 50 degree angle so that I hit it.
	Ricocheting off everything else that I'm doing.
	I slam into bed and jump up again the next morning.
	But there's these great times where you get to sort of pause and reflect and so on.
	And, boy, you know, with the right person, I just cannot recommend marriage highly enough.
	It is a wonderful institution with the right person.
	It is the greatest thing in the known universe.
	Not only do people who are married have a 30%, sorry, have three times less chance of dying in middle age.
	Always a good thing to pursue.
	But, you know, the tenderness, the closeness, the strength, the courage, the The security, the love, the passion, and the power of a goose-like pair bonding.
	At least one-like pair bonding.
	I'm trying to think of what else mates for life.
	But it is, in my experience at least, an unparalleled joy.
	And I'm incredibly grateful for the beauty of this woman in my life, of the two ladies in my life.
	I do feel extremely blessed, and I do feel extremely lucky.
	I mean, yes, I've worked for it, and I'm very glad that I met My wife-to-be, after I had gone through a couple of years of very intensive therapy, that made it, I think, not only manageable, but possible.
	I don't know if there's any particular secret.
	I mean, obviously, listening and making sure that you spend the time every day, as in the hurly-burly of life, it's easy to pass each other by waving, as if you're on two ships going in opposite directions in swift opposing currents, but To make sure that you take the time, even if it cuts into your sleep, to connect, to chat, to bring new information to your relationship, to new ideas, new thoughts, new reflections.
	To be open-hearted in your love is essential, and to not be afraid of conflict, but to embrace it as part of growth and connectedness in a relationship.
	As I've mentioned before on the show many, many years ago, I read someone who said, oh, you know, if you don't get married, you might date, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 people in your life, but if you get married, you'll date thousands because you're both constantly changing and growing, and there are new challenges, and you get to meet those new challenges with the security and depth of your existing connection, and that's great.
	That's wonderful.
	So, I just really wanted to mention, and be of utility to Be of utility to each other.
	I was just chatting about this with Christina the other night.
	I was exercising, and I put on a pair of shoes, which she'd actually picked up for me when we were dating.
	I couldn't go and get them for some reason, and she said, oh, you know, I'll nip down and grab them.
	And she did.
	She went down, she picked them up, and this is still early in our dating, so I gave her the money back for it and all that.
	I remember at that time being extremely confused, delighted, but extremely confused by that simple and obvious gesture.
	The idea, and this is not about women in general, just sort of my experience of them, but the idea that a woman who I was dating could be...
	Helpful to me.
	I mean, I tell you, I remember sitting there holding these shoes after she'd left going, what was that?
	How on earth?
	What?
	She'd actually just gone out of her way to help me out, to do me a favor, and I was agog.
	And I mean, that's pretty tragic all around.
	It's pretty tragic to think about being surprised in my Mid-30s, being surprised.
	I mean, I'd gone out with dozens of women before, and just to have a woman who would be helpful.
	I mean, I know this sounds all kinds...
	Oh, she just wanted to get some shoes.
	But it was really astounding.
	And I remember thinking, well, this is new, and this is nice.
	And that level of helpfulness and generosity is...
	I've learned a lot from them.
	I've certainly tried to reciprocate in every way that I can.
	But I just remember...
	Being of utility to someone is pretty foundational to a relationship.
	You know, there's that old phrase, the dry calculations of mutual utility.
	Well, sorry, but it's true.
	There's a lot in a lifelong marriage, particularly with children, that has to do with just getting stuff done.
	You know, doesn't it feel when you're a family man that just a list of things that need to get done is pretty much never-ending.
	The font gets smaller, the page gets bigger and longer.
	And your eyes get older.
	But just checking things off a list of things that need to be done is kind of important.
	Kind of important.
	I mean, my exciting day yesterday was basically just getting things checked off a list, you know, taking garbage to the local dump because we had more than our fine public servants will Pick up, cleaning some stuff up, doing some cooking.
	I mean, it's just a whole bunch of stuff that needs to get done when you're running a household and you have a family.
	And having somebody who is productive and helpful and useful in that arena is, you know, it's not the most romantic thing.
	And it's probably not something that Hallmark will be producing a card about anytime soon.
	I find you of extreme utility in getting through the to-do list.
	But it really is, you know, without that.
	I think a lot of marriages found her.
	They take on too much water.
	They capsize if both people aren't enthusiastic or at least energetic in getting through the to-do list because it doesn't end.
	So, of course, I'd just like to say to my wife how much I love her and 10 years is...
	I wish it were longer, but if it were longer, it would have dipped into my pre-therapy days, which probably would have made me a bit too much of a handful.
	But...
	It's a real honor and a privilege.
	I genuinely feel incredibly lucky every day to be with the people that I have in my life, to be with my wife, to be with my daughter.
	And that's my suggestion.
	Be of utility to each other.
	And that's at least necessary but not sufficient for love.
	Somebody's written, I cherish you, my darling, because you get shit done.
	You know, I... I hate to say it.
	No, but it's not.
	I mean, everybody gets stuff done, but in my experience beforehand, women were just kind of balky and, you know, they'd grumble about it and then they'd make you pay for it and all this kind of stuff.
	And that's just no good.
	Oh, yeah.
	Somebody's saying, I have that experience.
	People are shocked when you text and say, I'm on my way to your house.
	May I pick up something for you?
	Yeah.
	Is there anything I can do for you?
	Is there anything I can do to you?
	Do for you?
	Do at you.
	But I do think it is...
	I think it's really important.
	I read a book, my wife and I read a book together that was quite influential to me by Daniel Crittenden, which I've mentioned before.
	And she relates a story of a woman whose husband, she was heading back to the, they were going to play tennis and she was heading back to the changing house or whatever.
	And he's like, oh, I forgot my tennis racket.
	Could you grab it?
	And she turned around and says, well, get it yourself.
	And it's like, whoa.
	But that was actually kind of my experience as a woman prior to meeting my wife.
	And the author said, you know, that was just kind of rude.
	You know, we've become sort of balky and difficult and non-enthusiastic, non-participative and so on, she said, of women as a whole.
	Because, you know, if you tell a group of people for 50-odd years how...
	And I'm very glad that that message did not land squarely in my wife's enormous reservoir-like heart.
	But I sort of always felt before in relationships that if the woman did something for me, it was kind of grudging.
	And, you know, it counted in a way that Obligated me, whereas the stuff I did for her just didn't count.
	That was just stuff that had to be done to pay back the endless debt of patriarchy or something like that.
	Anyway, that's sort of my experience.
	I mean, I remember when I was living with a woman and I was working and she was looking for work and I would sort of ask her to do some housework and she'd say, well, we have to split the housework 50-50 and I said, well, But I'm paying all the bills.
	And she says, well, that doesn't count.
	I was like, really?
	Why doesn't that count?
	I mean, I'm working.
	I'm just working outside, though.
	Anyway.
	That kind of stuff.
	The division of labor within a marriage.
	It ebbs and flows.
	And it comes and it goes.
	And all that.
	So my wife worked while I was trying to sell books.
	And then I worked when she was setting up her practice and so on.
	So it...
	Just find somebody who's willing to help you out.
	I hate to put it that way, but that's a pretty good indicator of things that can be long-lasting.
	Life is a massive series of to-dos, and finding somebody who's going to help you out with that is really, really important.
	All right, let's move on to the brains of the outfit.
	Let's get on with the callers.
	Alright, good morning.
	The first caller today we have up is Nigel.
	Hello?
	Nigel, we are only making plans for you.
	How can I help you, my friend?
	How did I know you were going to make that reference?
	Because you know my demographic, something like that.
	Yeah, quite possibly.
	Well, I'd just like to maybe talk about the group I just started going to, this Libertarian group.
	Well, it started in 2008.
	I've been running for about four years.
	That's about 100 members spread out through Edmonton and Calgary.
	This last meeting I went to, January 10th, had about 20 people and it was really good.
	The group has evolved over the years from meetings at Boston Pizza to the public library meetings based downtown.
	The aim of the group is to talk about current situations and break out of the comfort zone and progress intellectually, which I think is great.
	We're looking to organize speaking events at University of Alberta and University of Calgary campuses.
	And I heard the name Ron Paul kind of being thrown around, but it would be definitely a treat to hear him speak.
	People that turned out was very diverse, from students to lawyers and economists.
	It was kind of neat to see.
	I had the pleasure of meeting Mary Lou.
	She was very nice to talk, very warm, welcoming.
	I heard about this finality enough through just Googling Libertarian Meetup groups.
	I guess, sort of an introduction myself.
	I'm just, I don't know, a college kid.
	I'm studying architecture and I heard about you When I was YouTubing the Introduction to Philosophy in 2008, I think it was, I took the red pill, so to speak, over the holidays, and it's never really been the same since.
	And I guess the hook for me was the argument for morality.
	I found the clarity offered from arguing morality incredibly enticing, although I've had to restrain myself when discussing anything to do with school, like ethics for land use, planning, politics, taxation, and all that stuff.
	So, hello?
	Yes, I'm sorry.
	I'm glad that you have the group.
	If you wanted to put out a URL or something like that, that'd be great, but there's no question yet.
	I mean, which is fine.
	It wasn't much for me to respond to, which I certainly appreciate that it's been helpful.
	Okay, so the question, the main topic that was brought up was the origin of violence in society.
	And the first thing that was brought up was the war on drugs, which I think is a good thing to discuss, but another topic that was brought up that nobody really talked about was child abuse.
	I was wondering if maybe you could give your thoughts on that.
	Sorry, did you just cut out for that?
	Did you say the war on drugs and also child abuse?
	Yeah, so just the origins of violence in society.
	Yeah, I mean, I guess the first question is, what is violence?
	Because everyone thinks they already know stuff because they kind of know a vague definition of the word.
	But the first question to ask is, what is violence?
	What purpose does it serve?
	And I mean, I think, obviously, it's the manifestation of a win-lose situation.
	You know, taking out whatever kinky S&M stuff that people want to do with people holding bat wings, pouring hot wax on their nipples or whatever the hell's going on in these creepy dungeons.
	Let's just say that violence is the manifestation of a win-lose paradigm, right?
	I mean, I take your wallet, you get to keep your spleen.
	So why would somebody be drawn to a win-lose paradigm?
	I mean, it's not innate to our nature.
	And clearly, clearly, clearly, a win-lose paradigm is parasitical.
	People have to have stuff for you to take.
	So it is not a primary but a parasitical form of interaction which requires its opposite, which is why violence cannot philosophically work on so many levels.
	There's UPP and all of that, but violence cannot be universalized because people have to have stuff to take.
	And to have stuff, you have to produce it.
	You can shake a sword at a field, but it ain't going to cough up a piece of bread for you, right?
	You can yell at a tree, but that doesn't mean that all the high fruit is going to fall down into your mouth.
	So people have to produce stuff, and then other people can take it.
	So that's sort of the first thing.
	The second thing about violence is that it is clearly far less productive than cooperation and trade.
	I mean, I think that's...
	I mean, that at least we can understand, that if we look at the reduction of violence and the growth in trade that has occurred over the past few hundred years, it's irrefutably clear to degrees that stagger,
	truly stagger the imagination, the degree to which trade, private property, the free market is, I mean, it's so far greater than violence in terms of Resource production that it is, to all intents and purposes, infinitely greater.
	Like our standard of living is hundreds if not thousands of times better than it was just a few hundred years ago.
	And so violence is parasitical, violence is contradictory, and violence is incredibly unproductive.
	So if you were rational, And you were just saying, well, they're like amoral and rational, as if those two could be the same, but let's just pretend they can.
	So if you were amoral and rational, and you were just looking out and saying, well, I could be violent, or I could be peaceful, there's no possible way that you could logically argue that violence would be the best way to go.
	I mean, violence has all sorts of problems.
	Violence will get you, well, it's highly risky, right?
	I mean, if you go in to buy a latte, What's your risk?
	It might be too hot.
	The ceiling might collapse on you.
	The barista might have a flu.
	But it's not very risky to go in and buy a latte.
	But to go hold some guy up, he might have a gun.
	He might be a ninja.
	He might have five friends in the alley.
	He might have psychic mind meld powers to cause your head to explode.
	Alice scanners, right?
	So violence is risky.
	Violence is parasitical, and violence invites repercussion both in the short run and in the long run.
	I think it was Thomas Sowell was writing about how black culture is really sort of a Welsh and northern English culture, which is very bragging, quite violent, shocking rates of illegitimacy and all that.
	In his description of this culture, And this is true of the South.
	I think Ann Coulter talks about this as well.
	So in the South, they're talking about some guy from this culture.
	Someone takes offense at him.
	He'll literally run through the forest for like 100 miles to go kill the guy.
	That's how crazy and violent they are.
	And that's because someone offended him, right?
	So if you're in a violent culture, it's very stressful.
	Your life is very short.
	Your resources get squandered.
	You can't have love.
	You can't have security.
	Oh, he's got to sleep with one eye open.
	I mean, it's a wretched, wretched way To live.
	So there's no rational way that somebody would look and say, well, I think I'll flip a coin, whether I'm going to be, you know, peaceful and productive or violent and parasitical.
	And so given that it's a hugely irrational choice to be violent, it can't be that it's just the way people are.
	Some people are just born completely irrational.
	Sorry, I definitely agree with you there, but I think...
	Going more to the origin, what the question was brought up at the meeting was child abuse and this idea of philosophical parenting.
	Could you elaborate a bit more on that?
	Sorry, I am.
	I'm just taking the long way home.
	Before we say the origins of violence in society, what we have to understand is that we're really talking about The origins of parasitical, irrational, win-lose interactions, right?
	Now, once we understand that these parasitical, aggressive, win-lose interactions are not innate to human nature, if they were innate to human nature, we could never have capitalism, right?
	I mean, people say, ooh, I have private property rights, great, I'm just going to go buy a knife and go stab people.
	I mean, that's not what people do, right?
	I mean, the moment that they started, I guess maybe a little bit in China, but the moment they started giving private property rights to people in India and China, they didn't just start going out and, you know, grabbing butt cutters to slash each other's cheeks open.
	They went and started trading and accumulating wealth and doing all that stuff which has resulted in 600-700 million people getting out of poverty over the past 10 or 15 years.
	So it's not innate to human nature.
	So if it's not innate to human nature and it's irrational, then clearly it must be taught.
	It must be.
	In the same way that speaking Urdu or speaking English or speaking Dutch is not innate.
	We have a language capacity, but the kind of language we speak is something that's taught.
	I think we can all understand that.
	And we have, obviously, the potential for aggression.
	We have the potential for violence.
	We have the potential for win-lose interactions.
	But the manifestation, the actualization of that potential is something that is taught.
	And so, who could teach a child, and this has to be very early, who can teach a child about violence?
	Sorry, I'm using the term instead of the definition.
	Who can teach the child aggressive, parasitical, win-lose interactions?
	Well, it has to be the parents.
	It has to be.
	Because we know it happens very early because the effects tend to be very physiological.
	It tends to alter the brain.
	It tends to alter the neurochemistry.
	It tends to alter the nervous system.
	It tends to alter the genetics.
	The genes are switched on and off depending upon one's exposure to violence.
	So the way that I think is useful and true and practical to look at it is that Violence is a language.
	It's, you know, let's say English is violence and French is peace.
	So if you grow up speaking French, we would all understand that you grow up speaking French because your parents spoke French to you.
	I mean, that would not be controversial.
	In fact, to say anything else would be ridiculous.
	You'd be going into some past lives Well, your parents did speak English to you, but obviously you were Louis XVII in a past life, so you speak only French.
	That would not be credible.
	And so if we simply look at peacefulness, at cooperation, at win-win negotiations as a language, and we look at violence as another language, then clearly we understand that this is taught by parents, or taught by the culture, or taught by the church, or taught by the teachers, or taught by whoever Or the daycare workers, whoever is dealing with the children at a very early age.
	That's the language that we teach them.
	And if you want to change...
	Let's say you wanted to stamp out English.
	Let's say you were in Quebec.
	You wanted to stamp out English, then obviously you'd have sort of punishments for people who spoke English in public, right?
	In the same way that we throw people in jail who are violent in their adult life.
	But if you wanted to really stamp out English, you would simply try to convince the parents not to teach English to their children.
	That's all that would happen.
	Right?
	And so if we want to get rid of violence, we simply have to attempt as best we can to convince parents not to teach violence to their children.
	Violence arises out of a form of panic.
	It's a form of panic which says, I desperately need something, I desperately want something, and I do not have any value to exchange.
	I do not have any value to exchange.
	And I desperately want something, I do not have any value to exchange for it, therefore I'm just going to take it.
	Right?
	I mean, I need bread, I'm starving to death, I don't have any money, and I don't think anyone is ever going to give me bread.
	And I need to live, so I'm just going to take it.
	And it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
	So because you take the route of taking things, you don't have value, you don't have things to trade, you don't have resources to exchange with other people.
	So it arises out of a desperation, it arises out of an insecurity, it arises out of an avoidance of an elemental panic which manifests itself as entitlement, right?
	It's the belief that you just deserve things because you breathe or whatever.
	And that level of insecurity and that lack of value that the person feels in order to...
	You have to feel a massive lack of value in order to end up in the place where you're just going to take something.
	Like a rapist has to feel massively unattractive and he can't get his needs met any other way through violence.
	Well, what produces that kind of insecurity?
	What produces that kind of anxiety, that kind of panic and that feeling of worthlessness?
	Well...
	This is all just languages that are taught.
	We are language-based lifeforms.
	We talk ourselves into and out of things all the time.
	We justify things after the fact all the time.
	And without justifications, it's very hard for people to get things done.
	And if you meet bad people and you talk to them about why they do what they do, they will give you very often eloquent...
	Justifications about it.
	You see these in YouTube comments all the time.
	Human nature is just violent and panties who pretend otherwise are just setting themselves up to get taken from and that they deserve to.
	They deserve to get taken from.
	If you're not strong and aggressive and defending what you want and getting what you want in this life, people are just going to walk all over you because that's the way society is and anyone who pretends otherwise is just a pussy who deserves to get taken from.
	People will tell you, see, that's a story.
	That's a story.
	And so the language that children absorb, the behaviors that they absorb, the interactions that they absorb, is oftentimes who they will become and what they will justify when they get...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Are you there?
	Oh, sorry, that wasn't me.
	Somebody just joined the chat, so...
	Of course we would look at the early interactions.
	For the people who are older, the people who have unfortunately already gone through all of this stuff, it's really, really hard to reverse it, right?
	Nobody has figured out how to make criminals in any reliable sense.
	To not be criminals.
	Nobody has figured out how to cure psychopathy or sociopathy or pedophilia or whatever it is.
	So once the human mind is broken to a sufficiently disastrous degree, it seems, at least according to the knowledge that I have as an obviously rank amateur, but it seems incurable.
	You know, it's like amputation.
	You cannot grow back an arm, right?
	You can heal a cut.
	You can regrow hair, but you cannot grow back an arm.
	And if the conscience is destroyed or doesn't develop as a child, if empathy is destroyed or doesn't develop as a child, it's an amputation.
	It can't, to my knowledge, regrow later on, which is why I'm talking about a multi-generational change.
	I hope that helps.
	Sorry, just a quick question to add on to that.
	What do you say to a parent who believes that it is necessary for the child to experience pain or to spank them just so that they don't grow up not knowing that?
	It's been kind of a very touchy topic for me to kind of talk to my friends about and stuff like that because, I mean, parenting isn't usually something that's brought up in conversations and critique, but I kind of feel it should be.
	What is your take on that?
	Well, so this is something that you will hear spankers do all the time, is that you will say spanking produces these objective biological scientific results.
	Lowered IQ, increased aggression, increased susceptibility to various ailments and illnesses, and lack of concentration, all these various things.
	And the spankers will say, yes, well, you see, but that's abuse.
	That's when you really, really hit your children.
	We're just talking about a little swat on the behind.
	So they'll minimize it.
	And that's complete bullshit.
	And it's a very cowardly thing to do, but I can understand it, right?
	I mean, if you've got a really bad conscience about hitting a helpless, defenseless child...
	Then I can understand how you're going to need to make up this mealy-mouthed bullshit in order to live with yourself, but it's better not to.
	Because the whole point of spanking is you have to frighten the child.
	I mean, you are looking to behavior modification, right?
	Because people always say, well, your child's running into the street or whatever.
	So a little swat on the behind is what people say, but it has nothing to do with spanking.
	Spanking has to be sufficiently terrifying to the child that it's going to alter behavior.
	A little swat on the behind is playful.
	And so what they say is, well, I need spanking because I need to modify my child's behavior so that they will never run into the street or touch the hot stove.
	Well, that has to be sufficiently terrifying or a sufficiently negative experience to the child that the child is going to fundamentally alter behavior.
	But then when you point out that what you're doing is absolutely terrifying your child to the point where they're going to fundamentally change their behavior, they say, well, no, no, no, it's just a little swat.
	It's like, well, then that's not spanking.
	Say, I need this tool, which is going to allow me to really fundamentally change my child's behavior, but it has to be completely innocuous.
	Well, which is it?
	If it's completely innocuous, it ain't going to change behavior.
	If it's going to change behavior, it ain't innocuous.
	But the idea that children need to experience, what, being hit by a caregiver?
	I mean...
	Well, you know, diphtheria is a pretty intense experience, and so we should inject our children with diphtheria so they have the experience of diphtheria.
	I mean, you know, they may lose teeth as an adult, so what we need to do is hold them down and pull out their teeth with pliers so that they have the experience and are prepared for what it means to lose the teeth as an adult.
	They might accidentally catch their hand in a vice when they are doing woodwork as an adult and therefore we need to put their hand in a vice.
	I mean, come on.
	This is ridiculous.
	We do not arbitrarily expose helpless children to negative experiences to prepare them for negative experiences as an adult.
	He might have to have his appendix out when he's older, so I'm just going to cut into his side so he knows.
	Come on.
	I mean, the grain of truth, which is always what's so annoying about people, not you, but people who misrepresent positions in such an irrational way, is that I certainly think it is true that children need to experience failure, right?
	I mean, the idea you sort of madly praise them for everything they do, which is understandable because, I mean, I'm obviously madly enthusiastic, but there is, of course, the danger that you raise children who believe that, you know...
	Every little thing they do is magic, magic, magic!
	I think that's not a particularly reasonable way to prepare them for what's in life, right?
	So there's studies that have come out recently.
	I mean, they're medium scientific-y kind of stuff, not, you know, sort of massive, but let me just...
	about narcissism in college students.
	Let me just get the study up here.
	And this has come from the idea that...
	This has come from the idea that they're just praised for everything they do in these contests where nobody can lose and all of this stuff.
	But narcissism is completely epidemic in college students and it really is quite shocking.
	So like an annual survey of college students has revealed just a shocking level of students who define themselves as gifted and ambitious and so on, right?
	And those who also say that they have a strong desire to achieve has also risen, even when their past grade performance does not reflect this self-assessment.
	So this is an American freshman survey been around since 1966.
	Hey, just like me, has found that in the past four decades, students' opinions of themselves have soared, even though test scores have gone down.
	Researchers have also found a disconnect between the...
	Oh, hey.
	Pop-ups.
	I don't want your pop-ups.
	Sort of annoying.
	I'm going to close this.
	Ah, there we go.
	No, that's...
	Sorry, just one sec.
	Let me just...
	No, no problem.
	I found that they're...
	They say that they are much more likely to rate their writing abilities as fantastic...
	And often their reading and writing abilities, they're actually far below their 1960s counterparts, right?
	So in 1960s, people were actually reading and writing much better, but they rated themselves lower, and now people are reading and writing much worse, but they're rating themselves much better.
	A 2006 study found that many young adults were prone to have ambition, inflation, in other words, their real lives did not match their expectations.
	Since the 1960s and 1970s, when those expectations started to grow, there's been an increase in anxiety and depression, says the researcher.
	There, of course, are going to be a lot of people who don't reach their goals.
	Narcissism in college students has risen 30% since 1979.
	And I'll put the link to the article in the chat window, and I'll put it in the notes to the podcast.
	But there is, I think, a lack of A lack of feedback for kids, right?
	So, I mean, one of the things that has struck me, this is in The Demise of Guys by Dr.
	Philip Zimbardo.
	He points out that...
	So, of course, the average young man plays, like he's exposed to or consumes 44 hours of computer and TV, of screen time.
	44 hours of screen time every week.
	44 hours of screen time every single week.
	Can you guess, I'll throw this open to the chat window as well, can you guess how much time per week that child spends in conversation with his father?
	I would say 4 hours?
	Just a guess?
	30 minutes.
	30 minutes, wow.
	And this, of course, is on average, right?
	I mean, this is on average, and I assume that this is a father in the home, or at least this is the end, so what about the kids whose dads are gone, right?
	Fatherless kids or whatever, right?
	So you understand, I mean, 44 hours of media consumption, 30 minutes of conversation with a father.
	13 hours of Of video games, 30 minutes of conversation with a father per week.
	And then we wonder why young men are going so off the rails.
	I mean, I really recommend reading The Demise of Guys.
	It's really quite chilling just how bad it is for boys and young men out there.
	It's horrendous.
	And for the exposure of the lie as to how, quote, badly girls were doing and how much school had to change to fix the problems of girls, you might want to read Christina Hoff Summer's Who Stole Feminism.
	But that's horrendous, right?
	And then we wonder why children have concentration problems, why children, young men in particular, have socialization problems.
	Well, they're consuming vast amounts of Completely unrealistic, hyper-stimulation, non-interaction through video games, right?
	You don't chat with people in video games, really.
	I mean, other than to say, take your rocket launcher to the high mountain or whatever.
	I need a medic, right?
	And so they lose conversational skills, they lose interaction abilities, and they don't get realistic feedback on what it is that they're doing.
	It's kind of important, right?
	So, you know, when my daughter was first banging randomly on a xylophone, I thought it was cool.
	Like, hey!
	And she said, that's cool.
	I'm glad that you're doing that.
	Now that she's four, and she's banging randomly on the xylophone, and she says, do you think that's pretty music?
	I say, gosh, no.
	No.
	You know, I'm glad you can hit them and all that, but no.
	And it's sort of, you know, so I'm teaching her Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and all that, and saying, well, that's pretty.
	You know, this banging randomly.
	And she says, well, I think it's pretty for me, right?
	She wants, you know...
	And I say, okay, well, let me sing you a song.
	Is that a nice song?
	She says, no.
	I said, well, there's random notes, right?
	Whereas I think, twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.
	That's pretty, right?
	Because it's, you know, it's actually a melody.
	And so, whereas if the parents are just jumping up and clapping because everything they do, the kid does his magic, of course, you can end up with an unrealistic...
	To me, at least, this kind of vanity develops in isolation.
	It develops in isolation from feedback.
	You may think you're a great singer.
	Record yourself and play it back.
	Go get someone to record you at karaoke and listen to it back.
	It's a very humbling experience.
	We all sound fine in the shower.
	But ask people for their honest assessment.
	You think you're a great writer?
	Well, try and submit some articles.
	But there's a huge lack of feedback for young people these days and that renders them under-socialized.
	Learning how to interact with people in a productive way, learning how to distinguish people who are good from people who are bad, right?
	Learning how to distinguish people who are praising you because they really like what you're doing as opposed to people who are praising you because they're insecure themselves or they're manipulating you or whatever.
	I mean, you go on and on.
	Learning how to navigate society.
	I mean, it was tough enough when there was only one culture.
	Now, there's dozens of cultures that you have to work with in your life.
	It's really a complicated situation.
	And children are growing up vastly under-socialized.
	As I mentioned before, The way we grew up was there were supposed to be four adults per child on average, right?
	Because you grew up in these extended families and so on.
	In an agricultural society, you'd be out with your parents all day.
	They'd be teaching you stuff, talking with you about stuff, and showing you stuff and all that.
	You'd have some playtime with other kids, but most of your time would be spent with adults and extended family and so on.
	And now, that's not the case at all.
	Family, extended families have atomized to a large degree, and we put kids in these ridiculous schools where there are, you know, 20 or 30 children per adult.
	And then we leave them to be socialized, of course, not by adults who are teaching them the ways of society and how to grow up, but we leave them in the tender care of their peers, who, of course, always skew towards the...
	Most dangerous and least stable and most cruel among them.
	It's really the lowest common denominator in schools.
	We leave them to the tender care of their sociopath-dominated peers or to the tender care of the media that wants to extract money from them and their parents through appealing to their most immature fantasies.
	And we end up with this terrible situation where in England, the 10th most requested present for Christmas was a father.
	And we end up, of course, with celebrity culture.
	Because...
	Like I was reading about how I think Lance Armstrong is going to confess to his...
	I was chatting with a guy who's really in...
	When I was in Libertopia, I was chatting with a guy who's really into the biking world, and he says...
	That, you know, this Lance Armstrong thing is true.
	And he's being sued, because papers said that he doped and he sued them for libel, and now if he's going to admit to it, they're just going to...
	And now he's been found guilty of it.
	They're suing him back for half a million.
	Someone else is thinking of getting seven and a half million back from him because they paid him a bonus as their representative when he won the Tour de France.
	And now I think all seven of them have been stripped from him for all this doping scandals and so on.
	And...
	This is, you know, where we've ended up, that this guy's worth $100 million.
	Lance Armstrong is worth an estimated $100 million.
	Why?
	Because he can move pedals around really fast.
	I mean, this is madness.
	You know, philosophers scrabble hand to mouth.
	And we have as heroes guys who have been found to be Using unholy chemicals and swapping in and out blood like self-administering vampires to move pedals around really fast and these are our heroes.
	And pretty people who are really good at imitating things, you know, actors.
	These are our heroes.
	But this is the general hollowing out of the society.
	What kind of depth do we have?
	I mean, if you watch a TV show, you have more exposure To the main characters of that TV show, I mean, watch more than one episode a week, you have more exposure to those characters than you do to your own father in terms of interaction.
	I mean, this is a hollowed out, empty, vacuous, vapid culture for the most part.
	Last thing I'll say, sorry about all these speeches, but the thought boulders are rolling down the mountain.
	I must catch and dodge them or they strike me down.
	You know, I just posted lots of things that go on on the message board, which I think interesting, and go in on the, right, lots of nicky-nicky, well, you should be focusing more on genes rather than on learned behavior through parents, or somebody posted, how is UPB not a complete ripoff of Kent's categorical imperative, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And this is all navel-gaving information.
	I would say narcissistic nonsense.
	I mean, okay, it's fine to ask these questions and let's have a debate about these things.
	That's fine.
	But I just posted a show called Have You Acted Courageously Today?
	Which is about a guy who has stopped spanking his children, is working at getting out of the military, and has completely reformed his life along the non-aggression principle.
	So go post that around places.
	Get people interested in philosophy.
	Get them to change how they're acting in their life.
	Get them to respect children and the non-aggression principle.
	And let's leave the debates about the degree to which there's an overlap between UPB and Kent's categorical imperative until we've got, let's say, a reduction in the parents who enthusiastically approve of spanking from, say, 75% down to 70%.
	Because there was a study done recently that I think 74% of women and 62% of men say that there are times when children need a damn good spanking.
	Holy crap.
	Holy crap.
	These are probably the same people, if they're pulled over by a policeman, are very much, oh yes, officer, I'm so sorry.
	I really didn't mean to.
	I'm very sorry.
	I will absolutely not do it again, right?
	Because remember, they're all kinds of courageous, right?
	Because hitting children is the way that they choose to exercise their moral courage and their leadership in society.
	Ah, these brave paragons of virtue, these brave paladins of peace and consistency.
	Well, I can't tell you just how much contempt I have for that perspective.
	And imagine, imagine what would happen if 75% of husbands say that there are times when wives need to be thoroughly hit.
	They need a damn good beating.
	Imagine what would happen in society if 75% of husbands said that.
	About 75% of women can say that, and it barely passes with a whisper.
	Because remember, women have been taught forever that they're only victims.
	Only victims.
	Women are only victims of the patriarchy.
	Women have no role to play in the cycle of violence.
	The enthusiastic Greater percentage of women who think that beating their kids, spanking their kids, hitting their children is a damn good thing to do?
	Well, see, women are victims, right?
	And victims can never victimize.
	We know all of that, right?
	Just ask the Palestinians.
	So, anyway, the culture needs a little reforming, and I would suggest that we focus on the important stuff.
	Sorry about that, but let us continue.
	Alright, so thanks for answering the question.
	Do you mind if I move on to the next caller?
	Oh, that's fine.
	Thanks.
	Thank you.
	Next up today, we have John.
	Hey, Steph.
	Hello.
	I wanted to talk about a conversation I had with my dad.
	I guess the last caller was a good segue into it.
	So I've just been exploring a lot of my childhood on FDR lately and I just wanted to get your thoughts on when children are being aggressive and violent.
	So as a kid I turned out pretty bad.
	Just in the conversation I had with my dad, we talked about a lot of it, but when I was four years old, I held my grandma at knife point.
	And just all the time, I was getting in trouble a lot.
	Other parents were getting mad.
	Just the way that I would behave around other kids and there were a few times when I bit other kids and in the conversation with my dad he sort of asked me why I did that specifically like holding the knife, holding my grandma at knife point.
	And I just had no answer for that.
	I don't know why I would be doing that.
	Do you really not know?
	Well, I know what you would say, but I guess I still have some doubts about that.
	No, no, no.
	Don't tell me what I might say.
	I'm genuinely curious.
	Sometimes I say, oh yes, you do know, but I genuinely am curious.
	do you not know why you were so aggressive as a child?
	I'm not trying to get a right or wrong answer at all.
	I mean, it's an open-ended question.
	I guess I don't know why it was more so than the other kids or just...
	Which other kids?
	People in general.
	Other kids at school or friends I would have.
	You don't know why you might have been more aggressive than other children who weren't in your family?
	Right, yeah.
	Okay.
	And why do you think that it might have been different for you Well, I guess my experience would have been different, either the way I interpreted it or just the way my parents behaved.
	Well, were you disciplined and punished, and if so, how, when you were a child?
	Yeah, I was spanked.
	Sorry, that sounded like the beginning of the sentence.
	I don't want to interrupt.
	Yeah, I don't have...
	It just kind of blew me away that...
	Even at, like, three and four years old that I was that violent, I guess.
	Like, I remember the spanking.
	Sorry, you know, I asked you about your environment and you're returning back to yourself.
	So I'm going to just ask you to stay on your environment for a sec.
	I mean, I accept that you were violent.
	Yeah, I was spanked.
	You understand that in particular environments, it is not at all unusual for children to be very violent.
	It's not at all.
	I'm not equating these two, but just so you understand, right, so in Romania under Ceausescu, abortion was illegal and they ended up, I think, with over 100,000 kids in these Romanian orphanages where there were like 50 to 1 kids to caregiver ratios and they were basically given bottles of milk and formula and whatever to drink and they were stuck in front of the Lion King or whatever it is that was playing all day and they were almost never played with or cuddled with.
	And when this all came to light, a bunch of European families decided to adopt them and they found it Almost without exception, virtually impossible to socialize the kids, right?
	They just had grown up in such isolation.
	They weren't beaten, as far as I know, but they were just kind of ignored.
	And so, you know, couples would adopt a kid and they'd find, you know, this three-year-old boy throwing the family cat out of a window, you know, from the apartment building.
	The little girl would be screaming, they'd pick up the little girl, and the little girl would end up screaming even more and biting them, and they'd have to build safe rooms in the house where they would put the kid who was having a tantrum into the room so that he would not physically destroy whatever and whoever.
	There were the parents who adopted these kids who ended up having to lock the children into their rooms at night because they would wake up with them.
	Standing over them with hammers and stuff.
	Again, I'm not putting you in this category.
	I'm just saying that under particular environments and circumstances, children do grow up very violent.
	I don't think that there was anything genetically wrong with this cluster of children who had these incredible behavior problems.
	These problems can be very easily, though not morally necessarily, they can be very easily reproduced in baby monkeys.
	All you have to do is Separate the monkey from the mother and the monkey grows up very aggressive.
	If you replace the mother with a fur doll with make-believe boobs and feed the monkey that way and isolate it from its peers, then it would grow up very aggressive and social and its reproductive chances of success are very low and so on.
	So it's very easy to create these aggressive offsprings in all of the ape families and I'm sure in other Other mammals and other creatures as well.
	So that's sort of what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the environment.
	So just so that puts it in perspective, the level of aggression that you showed is not unusual relative to particular environments.
	And that's why I'm sort of asking about the environment.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah.
	I guess there was a point when I was about one years old where my mom went through a depression.
	I don't know.
	Like where they just don't pay much attention to the baby.
	I don't know if that would have had anything to do with it.
	And I don't know anything for sure about that.
	But like when I was two and a half, I went to daycare.
	I don't know.
	But you're saying that that would be what caused the violent outbursts?
	Oh, no.
	Listen, you understand.
	I don't have any capacity to tell you what caused this.
	I don't.
	I mean, I'm not a psychologist.
	I don't have any capacity or ability to diagnose in any way, shape, or form.
	I'm simply pointing out that violence among children is...
	Easily reproducible with particular environmental, right?
	So neglect or abuse, of course, are the two big ones.
	what do you know about your parents' childhoods?
	My mom didn't have a very good one.
	Um...
	Her dad was kind of...
	Well, he was in the army and then wasn't at home very much.
	Then my grandma, her mom, I don't know, she was just really bad.
	I don't know if you're looking for specifics, but not a very good mom from what I know.
	And what were some specifics?
	I'm sorry, I can't have dead air on the show.
	Is it that you don't know what the specifics are or you can't remember them or what?
	I guess I just don't know too much of the specifics without thinking.
	Okay, well then it seems to me that you don't know much about your environment so my suggestion would be to Obviously try to find out more about the environment that was around when you were a baby.
	That's why I wanted to talk about the conversation with my dad because that's what I tried to do and that just didn't end up going anywhere.
	The way he What sort of interpreted my behavior back then was that they didn't do anything wrong and he'd come home from work and I would just be going nuts or something.
	He just had to spank as a last resort and that I was just crazier than other kids and just unmanageable.
	Right.
	So, he said that he and your mother did nothing wrong at all.
	Zero percent.
	He said he wouldn't say he did anything wrong, and that he wouldn't say he was a perfect parent, but that he wouldn't say he had done anything wrong.
	No, no.
	By definition, if you didn't do anything wrong, you're a perfect parent, right?
	If I'm taking a math test and I don't get any answers wrong, what's my score?
	100%, right?
	So he obviously does consider himself to be a perfect parent, right?
	And he also considers your mother to be a perfect parent too, right?
	Yeah, he likes to tell me about how much she loves me and would just do everything for me.
	Oh, wow.
	Okay, so did she then get help for her depression?
	She's been seeing a therapist on and off for forever.
	I don't know.
	She's on antidepressants.
	No, but I mean, when you were, you said, do you know if she was getting help for her depression when you were an infant?
	I know they saw a couple's therapist.
	I don't know.
	Yeah, but that would not be for parenting issues, right?
	Okay, so maybe, but probably not.
	Do you know how many parenting books your parents read, or how many parenting classes your parents attended?
	Um, we went to, like, a group family thing when I was about six, but nothing prior to...
	No, no, no, sorry.
	Sorry, that's not what I'm talking about, because that's after the problems have manifested, right?
	No, nothing in early childhood.
	Right, so your parents...
	I think you just talked about your mom, but I think we can probably assume that your dad did not have the best childhood in the world, let's say.
	And so if you don't want to do...
	To your children what was done to you as a child.
	It doesn't mean 100%, but if there are things that need to be changed or things that you want to improve from how you were parented, then you need to do some studying, right?
	Clearly, right?
	I mean, if you want to do something different, right?
	If you want to learn a language different than the language you were taught, then, or even if it's similar, you want to learn Middle English or something, right?
	Then you have to go and study that, right?
	You have to go and learn about it.
	You have to figure out how things are going to change.
	And so it's very easy to say, you know, as a parent, well, I would do anything for you and I love you so much.
	That's easy to say.
	But I'm an empiricist, right?
	So if people say, like, so, you know, conversations that I had was, okay, so did you want me to be raised the way that you were raised?
	Well, no, I wanted things to change.
	Okay, well, how then did you work to make those changes?
	What did you learn?
	What books did you consult?
	What experts did you consult?
	What training did you take in order to do things that were different?
	Yeah.
	And if there, like, this is before you become a parent.
	Becoming a parent is truly the most awesome responsibility, the most fundamental responsibility that a human being can take on.
	It's something that needs to be prepared for.
	I mean, dear God in heaven, nobody just jumps into a car with an examiner next to him to get his license and just goes and drives, right?
	Without ever having set foot in a car before.
	You study that, right?
	You learn, you practice, you, right?
	Nobody just shows up for a math test never having cracked a book.
	I guess people do, but they certainly don't say, I was a perfect student, and they certainly don't expect to pass, right?
	Right.
	So, if your father was a perfect parent, then either he was raised perfectly, and he was just reproducing that, which is very unlikely, I would say, given what happened, Or he was an imperfect parent because of how he was raised and then he became a better parent before he became a parent because he did lots of studying and went to therapy and whatever was necessary
	to improve his parenting skills, right?
	I guess they don't think that they did anything wrong though.
	Oh no, I know.
	I got that.
	I got that.
	And then, so then who is responding?
	If your parents didn't do anything wrong...
	But you were a bad kid, then clearly it must be genetic, right?
	Yeah, that's their argument.
	Okay, but if it's genetic, then you don't goddamn well hit the child.
	Right?
	Right.
	Like, let's say that you had some form of mental handicap, right?
	Or let's say that you had dyslexia or something like that.
	There's no conceivable way in which any expert would say the way that you deal with dyslexic children is through hitting them.
	You can get your mentally handicapped child to be smarter by hitting them.
	So if it was genetic, if they were perfect parents, then everything that was negative about you had to be genetic.
	And you don't hit genetics, so therefore, by definition, they cannot have been perfect parents.
	Right?
	But then they switch back and say, well, no, it was your choice to be violent and do bad things.
	At three?
	Really?
	Well, my dad, yeah, I sort of thought I was a little crazy, but my dad didn't.
	Like he, he thinks a three-year-old is responsible.
	Ah, okay, okay, good, good.
	Okay, so a three-year-old is responsible for his use of aggression, right?
	Right.
	A hundred percent?
	At least eight percent.
	At least what?
	At least a certain percent, I guess.
	Yeah, he would say.
	Well, no, you see, because if he's a perfect parent, then all the negatives have to be 100% the child's fault, you see?
	Because if it was only 90% your fault, then he would have contributed 10% to that and therefore couldn't be a perfect parent, right?
	I guess he wouldn't say that he was responsible for any of it.
	Yes, okay, so then it's all your...
	So you as a three-year-old are 100% responsible for the use of violence, right?
	Right.
	Okay.
	Now, your choices don't arise anywhere from your environment, right?
	So the fact that your father is hitting you and considers that morally good and necessary and virtuous and the very best possible thing that can be done, the very definition of virtue, because he's a perfect parent, you remember, the very definition of virtue is to use violence to get To achieve results, right?
	That's the very best, most morally perfect, good thing that can be done is to use violence to achieve your results, the desired results, right?
	Even though there have been books around for 50 years talking about how bad spanking is and how necessary it is to negotiate with your children and how...
	And reason with them and providing endless alternatives to the use of violence.
	What you absorbed as a child was the lesson that violence in the goal of achieving ends, violence is morally as good as you can conceivably get.
	get.
	It is morally perfect.
	I don't know if it was...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I don't know if they would say it was perfect, just maybe more necessary?
	No, no, no, no.
	They're perfect parents.
	And if it's necessary, and it's the very best thing you can do, then it's perfect.
	Right?
	But let me tell you what I am experiencing.
	Right?
	So that we get a little bit out of the abstract realm.
	I think, just based upon my experience of you talking about your family in this conversation, I feel quite a sense of outrage and frustration.
	And I can't imagine that as a child, I can't imagine the amount of frustration and outrage that you would have experienced, but it must have been pretty considerable.
	I mean, for an adult man to say to a three-year-old that you are making bad choices completely independent of your environment and you shouldn't use violence to achieve your goals, so I'm going to hit you to achieve my goal of having you not hit people to achieve your goals.
	And I'm morally perfect and everything that goes wrong is your fault.
	But it's not genetic.
	It's your choice.
	That is an incredibly frustrating, in fact, enraging situation to be in.
	Because it's non… you can't negotiate.
	There's no humility on the part of the parents.
	There's no self-doubt on the part of the parents, and therefore there's no capacity to improve.
	You're just blamed for everything and you're always wrong and they're always perfect, right?
	All right.
	And so you obviously can't change anything because there's nothing – you can't change anything in your environment.
	No matter how outrageous it is, you can't change anything in your environment Because your parents are perfect and everything is your three-year-old time.
	100% fault, right?
	And so even though it is the environment that is producing this dysfunction, even though it is the choices of your parents, most likely, that is producing this dysfunction, your parents are very clearly telling you, we are not going to change.
	There's nothing you can change in your environment.
	This is going to continue forever.
	And your failure...
	Sorry.
	This is going to continue forever.
	You cannot change it.
	We are always going to blame you for the behavior which our actions are most likely creating.
	and we're not even going to entertain the possibility that we may have done anything incorrectly correctly.
	I mean, that's horrendous.
	I'm a pretty good parent and there's things that There's things that I apologize for.
	And I've never raised my voice at my daughter.
	I've never hit her.
	I've never threatened her.
	I've never...
	I haven't punished her.
	I mean, I put her in her crib once or twice for about 10 minutes.
	And I've apologized for that too because I think that was incorrect.
	But the idea that you have a child who's pulling a knife on someone And it's 100% the child's fault that there's no adult in the environment that is contributing anything to that entire situation.
	I mean, it's wrong.
	It's wrong at every level.
	It's wrong empirically, it's wrong scientifically, it's wrong morally.
	Being unjustly blamed for the results of your parents' actions is so elementally unjust and frustrating to children.
	that I can certainly understand where you would have the perspectives that you had as a child.
	I guess my dad would say, well, yeah, things weren't perfect, but can't we just move on from that and...
	Okay, why don't you roleplay your dad?
	How's that?
	Okay.
	Okay, so things weren't perfect, right?
	Okay, well, tell me what wasn't perfect.
	The whole family situation.
	Okay, what specifically?
	Your mom and I weren't very happy.
	I had to work a lot, and when I came home, the home environment wasn't very good.
	I wasn't happy.
	Your mom wasn't happy.
	You weren't the most well-behaved kid.
	Things weren't perfect.
	Okay, and what about hitting me?
	I guess that may not have been perfect either, but at the time, that was what I decided to that was what I decided to do, given what was going on.
	When you say it may not have been perfect, what do you mean?
	May not have been perfect is not exactly saying it was wrong, right?
	Everyone has their own parenting styles.
	There's no absolute answer on it.
	So it wasn't wrong?
	No, I don't think so.
	Okay.
	You know that scientifically it's wrong.
	I mean, it's bad.
	Bad for children, right?
	It causes aggression, which is one of the things you complained about me as a child.
	It reduces intelligence, which of course doesn't help me to make better decisions, and so on.
	So, I mean, I just wanted to point out that scientifically you're wrong, and certainly by the time you were a parent, This was well known.
	I mean, many countries across the world have banned it.
	The American Medical Association and the American Society of Pediatrics have both come out against spanking and so on.
	I just want to point out that it was the wrong thing to do.
	You may say, well, I didn't know at the time, but not knowing is not a valid excuse if you weren't in pursuit of the knowledge.
	But what's interesting to me, Dad, is that you say...
	My environment...
	Sorry, the family environment had a negative impact upon me, right?
	Is that fair to say?
	Like you said, we were unhappy and I guess you were fighting to the point where you went to marriage counseling and you were gone a lot and mom was depressed and then you spanked me and hit me and so on, right?
	So, you said about your own choices...
	That you said, well, I was working a lot and the family life wasn't the best and wasn't getting along with your mom and you were a difficult kid and all that, right?
	So, your choices were conditioned by the environment, right?
	That's what you're telling me.
	Right.
	Weren't my choices as a child much more conditioned by the environment?
	say when I was three?
	I mean, if they conditioned your choices, wouldn't they much more condition my choices as a three-year-old?
	Yeah, sure.
	Because if you're off the hook because of environmental factors, to some degree, aren't I much more off the hook for environmental factors?
	Well, but you were the one that was misbehaving and being violent.
	I only responded to that with violence.
	I don't know that.
	And you don't know that either.
	There's no way that you can reliably say to me, Dad, that I initiated violence out of nowhere.
	Did I start when I was one?
	When I was two?
	You don't know what happened with Mom?
	When you were gone, you said you were gone at work a lot.
	You don't know if she ever hit me or yelled at me or ignored me to the point where I could only get her attention through aggression.
	You can't possibly know the cause and effect that you're claiming.
	Well, but with the knife thing for sure, we can say that you were initiating the violence.
	No, we don't know that.
	How do we know that?
	I mean, had I been spanked before then?
	No.
	What?
	I had never been spanked before the age of four?
	Not that I remember.
	I don't know if that's true or not.
	So just to break out of the roleplay for a sec, is that true?
	That's what he would say that he doesn't remember.
	I don't know.
	Okay, so you don't remember.
	Okay, so let's say you don't remember, and you certainly don't know whether mom spanked me or not, right?
	Because, I mean, you certainly can't say that for sure, because you were gone a lot, right?
	You don't know whether grandma ever spanked, right?
	So when you say to me that I'd never been spanked before that, you're saying something that's just not true.
	And if we're going to have a conversation about this stuff, Dad, I need you to actually commit to saying stuff that is true, not stuff that is just made up in the moment to make you feel better.
	Or to escape some sort of criticism.
	Right?
	I need you to commit to telling stuff that is true.
	Or at least not saying stuff that you can't know, as if it's true.
	Right?
	From what I know, I've told you the truth.
	But let's say that I didn't make mistakes.
	Is that the end of the world?
	I mean, can't we move on from that?
	Well, I don't know, Dad.
	What happened when I made mistakes as a child?
	Was that the standard that you had?
	Ah, it's not the end of the world.
	Let's just move on.
	No need to dwell on it.
	No need for punishment.
	No need for confessions.
	No need for moral ownership.
	Let's just pretend nothing happened and move on.
	Is that what happened to me when I was 3 or 4 or 5 or 10 or 15?
	Yeah, we moved on.
	No, I got punished severely.
	Yeah, but after that, we moved on.
	Yes, but we're moving on now before there's even any admission of anything.
	Right, so back when I was a kid, if there was something negative, then I would get spanked or punished in some other way.
	And now I'm bringing up something negative, and before there's even any admission of fault or responsibility, you're saying, let's move on.
	But it's not what you did when I was a kid.
	We dwelt on it until I was punished.
	In other words, when I did something wrong as a kid, we dwelt on it until you were satisfied.
	We dwelt on it until you were satisfied.
	So, in this instance, this is my whole childhood, Dad.
	We need to dwell on this because, you know, you say that you and Mom would do anything for me.
	Well, this is what I'm asking you to do.
	I'm asking you to stay with me in this conversation for as long as it takes until I feel satisfied that I understand my history.
	Right?
	You and mom will do anything for me and you love me so much.
	I appreciate that.
	I'll take that at face value.
	What I need you to do is stay in this conversation with me until I'm satisfied that I understand what happened.
	Because if you say that you were perfect parents and I was just a bad child making bad decisions, that is harmful to me.
	That is rescuing your own conscience at the expense of my future.
	Do you understand what it does to me?
	When you say, you and mom are perfect parents who love me so much, would do anything for me, and that anything that was negative was entirely the result of my independent choice, you realize that puts the entire blame for family dysfunction on me.
	Do you understand that that's, if that's not true, you understand that's incredibly harmful, right?
	Let's just pretend for a moment it's not true.
	Do you get that that's really unjust and very harmful to me?
	I'm not even totally sure what he would say at this point.
	Okay, well, so that's, you know, that's a possibility.
	I mean, there's a possible way of going through the conversation.
	I mean, I don't know, obviously, what you should say to your dad and so on, right?
	But the reason he doesn't want to say that, right, the reason he didn't want, do you know why he couldn't answer that one in your recreation?
	Well, then he's holding us to totally separate standards, which I guess doesn't work, and he can't say that he cares about me, but then that he's a perfect parent and that he'd do anything for me, but then not...
	Not talk about my childhood, I guess, if that's going to hurt me.
	Once someone says, I will do anything for you, I love you, then if you say, well, I need to talk about my childhood, and this conversation might take days, might take weeks, might take months, might take years, I need to talk about my childhood until I understand it, until I reach some level of satisfaction with regards to the conversation.
	Well, the person has already said, well, I will do anything for you.
	In which case, they will do that, right?
	And so the reason that that was a stalling block for him was that if he only said, I would do anything for you or your mother would do anything for you, if he only said that as a manipulation, then that's pretty grievous, right?
	That's pretty bad.
	To say you'll do anything for someone because you love them so much, and then when they ask you to do something that's uncomfortable for you, you won't do it, then clearly you didn't mean that you would do anything for them.
	You only said it to manipulate them, which means that you're using love as a tool of manipulation.
	That's really not good, particularly with children who are so attached to and dependent upon their parents, right?
	Yeah, I guess...
	That conversation just...
	And...
	Pinning them down like that, so to speak, I guess that's just really scary for me because...
	I mean, then they say, well, we've done so much for you.
	Like, even if they have done bad things, I mean, they took me on vacations, they...
	You know, all the stuff that parents do, they...
	They did do a lot of good things, they would say.
	Yeah, but that's, I mean, yes, of course, but that's not what's being talked about at the moment.
	Right, so to analogize, right, so, I mean, we all understand that if a man hits his wife and she gets upset about this and wants to talk with him peacefully and reasonably about being hit and he says, well, no, but don't you remember last anniversary I bought you a diamond necklace?
	What would she say?
	That's not what we're talking about.
	Yeah, and for God's sake, don't insult me by thinking you can buy me.
	Or that, for God's sake, don't tell me that you gave me gifts so that I wouldn't complain about being hit, because that takes away all the benefits of the gifts.
	So if you gave me stuff because you wanted to make me happy and this and that, fantastic.
	If you gave me stuff so that I could never criticize you, then it was never about me or my happiness.
	Don't tarnish the memory of your generosity by using it to try and evade just criticism or questions.
	That turns the whole thing into shit.
	If the diamond necklace was to buy my fucking silence, I don't want it.
	That's sort of how I felt over Christmas.
	I told them I didn't want anything, but then they got me all these gifts.
	Right, because they weren't listening to you, and they weren't saying, why don't you want to listen to me?
	Well, they asked and I said, I feel like you're trying to buy me off since I've started talking about these things with you.
	How's your violence these days?
	I don't...
	I don't get myself into violent situations really stupidly, but that sort of adrenaline rush you get, I think it's more profound for me.
	Like, I do have violent fantasies.
	You know, I've been arrested a few times.
	Like, it's something, it's a part of me I'm just sort of now exploring, but I do kind of want to be violent against people sometimes.
	Not like innocent people, but just like when I imagine someone that's using violence against me, I sort of just get this surge of adrenaline and...
	Yeah, and it's itchy hands, right?
	Or something like that.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	And I'm very sorry about that.
	Look, I get that that's not what you want in your life.
	That's not what you want in your heart.
	That's not what you want in yourself, right?
	Right.
	Because the idea of that being unleashed against someone you really care about or someone you love or your kids in the future or whatever, I mean, it's like having a devil in a cage in your heart, right?
	Yeah.
	And I'm very sorry for that.
	I'm incredibly sorry for that.
	That was not your doing.
	It was implanted in you.
	Like there's aliens in the movie that lay eggs in your chest or something like that.
	And I'm really sorry for that.
	That's a terrible thing to have to manage.
	But I really want to say what an admirable thing it is that you're doing.
	I really want to be clear about that.
	The exploring of this, the self-knowledge that you're in pursuit, obviously As usual, I will say that I hope that you will go see a therapist who's experienced with anger issues and who understands the biological, environmental nature of how these things are brought to be.
	But I think, you know, this is just my thoughts.
	I obviously don't know.
	I'm just going to tell you what my thoughts are at the moment.
	Earlier I was talking about violence.
	I guess this is the show, right?
	But violence, I think, fundamentally arises out of frustration.
	And the reason that you would end up holding a life to someone is you cannot get them to listen to you or give you any existence in any other way.
	You know, if everything is explained away and you're blamed for everything and everything, of course, is your fault and everyone else is perfect, Then you are invisible to people.
	You're being used by them.
	You're being blamed for their actions.
	And when you have a knife and you're holding that knife to someone, it's almost like you become real to them.
	It's almost like you come from dust to person.
	I'm sort of thinking about like the really old Star Trek that used to shimmer into existence when they do this teleportation thing or the transporter thing.
	So, violence Makes you real to people.
	And so tragically does violence against you.
	I don't think there's anything worse for a child than immateriality.
	And I think we know this quite well because children will act in abusive and destructive ways just to gain attention from their parents.
	And we understand this biologically, right?
	If a parent was truly indifferent to a child, then the parent would just wander off and the child would starve to death.
	So negative attention is better than no attention.
	And if there's no way that you can get listened to or get anyone to focus on you or get anyone to pay you any fundamental attention at all other than by using violence then by God that's what you're likely going to do.
	Just see me.
	And if the only way you can become real to people or getting attention from people Is to hold a knife to them.
	Well, I can certainly see how that's what you would do.
	If people...
	If you don't know how to get attention from people without being destructive, then you will be destructive.
	Because no attention is worse than negative attention.
	And if you're around people whose defensiveness and dissociation It makes it feel like you're living in a dead house of empty ghosts who just drift and wail and strike and rattle their chains and whisper old songs and pass through walls and regard old portraits and read blank pages as if they're books.
	If you live in a house of emptiness, if you live in a house of ghosts, But you desperately need contact, that you desperately need touch, that you desperately need attention.
	Well, if the only way the ghost will ever pay attention to you is if you cause discomfort to them, then you will do that, I think.
	You will do that, I think.
	Because the only alternative is to become a ghost yourself.
	Either they become real, or I disappear.
	And if violence is the only way to make them become real, even for a short period of time, If the only contact I can get is striking, I will take that over the cold nothingness of a ghost passing through my skin.
	And I am so sorry, if that's an accurate description of your environment, that that was your environment.
	That's not how it should have been.
	It should have been the opposite.
	And children need to be listened to.
	Children need to be real.
	Children are brought into existence from an egg and a tadpole.
	And if children are not listened to, they can leave reality.
	You know, out-of-body experiences or whatever, you know, this is obviously not physically true, but psychologically I think they can leave reality.
	And if they're in an environment, why do these Romanian orphanage kids become so?
	Because when they were violent, if they were just cooing contentedly or chatting to themselves, then they would be paid no attention.
	But if they started beating their head against the crib or throwing toys at another child, then they would get some attention and they would be rescued from immateriality.
	They would be rescued from dissolving into the ether of Like a drink thrown out of an airplane getting blown into atomic vapor.
	Identity for a child is like an hourglass, you know, with the sand inside it.
	You turn it over.
	Our existence, our identity as children drains away.
	It needs to be supported.
	It needs to be It needs to be listened to to become whole.
	We are a fog that needs to coalesce into something solid.
	We are a gas that needs to be hugged into a person.
	We are a ghost that needs to be kept alive until we become real.
	We are Pinocchio, a toy that wants to be a real boy.
	My daughter talks to me all day long She has stories.
	She has thoughts.
	She has comments.
	She has questions.
	She has insights.
	She has stories.
	And if I didn't listen to her, she would fade into the wallpaper.
	She would fail to achieve the materiality of identity.
	Parenting is summoning ghosts and turning them into people.
	And if you don't do that, they don't come to be.
	And then They become angry ghosts.
	Ghosts that don't scare you don't get your attention.
	So I am very sorry about that.
	And it's not how it should have been.
	And I hope that I've been listening fairly well in this conversation.
	How's it been for you?
	Good.
	This helps me.
	Well, do you mind if we move to another caller?
	We've had some real patients on the line.
	Thanks.
	Okay.
	Thank you very much.
	And I hope it works out.
	Drop me a line.
	Let me know how it goes if you can.
	And again, I hope that you will grab some therapy.
	Can we go with Jez?
	Yes.
	Yes, she's up there.
	Jessica.
	I'll just go with Jessica.
	Yeah, it's just Jessica.
	Okay.
	How are you doing?
	Good.
	I had a dream a few weeks ago, and I talked about it with my boyfriend, and it still kind of felt like I didn't really understand it.
	And I've listened to a couple of your dream analysis, and I was wondering if you would be interested in hearing this one.
	I would love to hear it.
	Tell me all about it.
	Okay.
	I wrote it down.
	I had it about a week before Christmas, so I'm going to read it.
	Is that okay?
	It is fine, actually, if you could put it in the chat window that I won't need to take notes.
	I don't know how to do that.
	You can just whisper it.
	Oh, okay.
	Don't worry about it.
	Then just read it.
	I'll take some notes.
	Okay, I'm sorry.
	No problem.
	To begin with, in the dream, I was alone.
	I was alone, haunting a decrepit home that never seemed lit well enough.
	There was the sense of dust, but I didn't see any.
	The rooms felt barren and sparse, as though we're only the skeleton of a house.
	I have the sense of wandering between rooms and two small kitchens with over 70s appliances that still seem dull and colorless, to a too long living room where the few pieces of furniture are not put in their place.
	A tall china hutch is crooked in the middle of the room, empty.
	There is no couch or chairs to sit on.
	The walls are dingy and dark.
	There are no pictures or paintings, with only a small clip of them hanging in an awkward place.
	The only thing of value here are random items that used to belong to family members.
	There are some beautiful lamps of my mom's, but they are not plugged in.
	There are some terracotta faces, but they are my mom's as well.
	Scattered in strange places, but on the top of the hodge, there are some photos of family members.
	There was a small beautiful book my grandmother wrote, another object that I cannot recall, but I know we're there.
	I am trapped in this graveyard of a home.
	Not by any real tangible force or object, just a sense that I cannot leave.
	In my mind, I cannot leave because there's something wrong with me.
	I am bad.
	I am a problem to others.
	I am crazy.
	Maybe criminally so, but in the way an invalid might be.
	I deserve to be here and I don't try to leave.
	Then in the dream, I am in a bedroom, in a bed that must be mine since I am alone here, but it doesn't feel like mine.
	Everything feels strange as though the house were a stranger.
	I am fully dressed and not sleepy.
	I do not want to be in the bed.
	The edges of the bed are not visible to me through the dark.
	They are further obscured by the mass of peline bodies that sleep on and around the bed.
	They are a family of black panthers, larger than I would expect them to be, and not shiny and regal like they appear in pictures.
	These are mangy, gloriously terrifying, and well-muscled, but their fur is coarse, their moths are rough, and uneven crags of teeth that snarl and gnash even as they doze away.
	From the pile of them, there's one large one who seemed to be in charge, especially of me.
	I felt she was responsible for me, like she was supposed to prevent Han from coming to me, but she was horrifying.
	She would growl and snarl at me like a feral wolf, and if I moved, she would grab my hand or arm and her teeth with almost enough force to hurt me.
	So I was immobilized.
	Yet though I was frightened of her, I felt close to her as though we cared about each other.
	This was the closest thing to affection in the dream I would ever know.
	I remained in the bed.
	Then the dream switched back to the rest of the house again with no segue.
	At this point I started seeing copies of myself.
	The first one appeared in the doorway between the living room and kitchen.
	It wasn't sudden or startling, just blurred into her being there without any acknowledgement from me.
	She wandered around the house like me, seeming shameless, but I had the sense that she had some intention.
	We noticed another copy of me outside the window.
	She acknowledged us, even seemed to give us some polite gesture, a wave, or vague smile.
	Outwardly, they both seemed benign, but they seemed sinister and threatening to me.
	I glanced out of the corner of my eye to the one on my left who was looking out the window at the other copy.
	Oblivious that I was looking at her, her eyes were narrowed to half-open slips, and her gaze was introspective and plodding.
	She was wearing makeup, but me and the other copy were not.
	Both of the copies were scary, and I didn't trust them.
	I am sure they felt the same way about me.
	We all continued to wander the house without acknowledging each other.
	I stepped out on the front door of the porch following another cat.
	This one was about the size of a large bobcat or medium-sized dog.
	It had gray and black spots and thick shaggy fur.
	Around its eyes had starling white tufts of fur.
	At that moment, I felt like it was my only companion.
	It would walk before me and look back at me as though conjuring me to follow.
	It seemed kind and crying, wanting of my attention, so I bent to pick it up.
	She was too large and heavy, though, and immediately started growling and scratching to get away from me.
	I struggled to set her on the porch table so as not to drop her and hurt her.
	As I put her down, I noticed someone walking up to the house.
	And through the dream, this keeps shifting from one person to two or three people that talk to each other.
	And I have trouble telling when they were singular and when they were plural.
	But in my mind, they're the same, so I'll describe them every day.
	Also, when I woke up, I recognized the face that they all had, that they looked like my mother's.
	But in the dream, they were strangers to me.
	So, for some reason, they had to be there to deal with me or watch me.
	They were from another dimension which seemed normal to me, as though it was normal that there was another world that I could not be a part of.
	In fact, their dimension felt like it was the real or main one, and where this house was, where I was, was just a sub-dimension, and I was a lower species of human that the real people had to have pity on and be charitable towards.
	These people were sent here like caseworkers for work.
	They made me go back inside the house and started moving around all my stuff.
	The lamps were lit now, as if they'd always been, with bright lights, but the caseworkers started changing all my lights to horrible yellow ones, saying that crazy people were sensitive to bright lights.
	They moved the disarrayed furniture to be even more disarrayed.
	There were books that were important to me that they scoffed at and said for garbage.
	They began to throw them away.
	They started pulling out all of my important items and packing them away to take.
	They were supposed to be there to help me, but they were only there because they had to be and needed to take whatever they wanted from me and no one would really know or care.
	So they took my things for their own use or to sell.
	I couldn't stop them from taking things, so I tried to just keep the important ones.
	I remember a terrible little blue book that was about Jesus' grandfather, which was important to me, but they scoffed at it.
	It was weird Jewish literature and threw away.
	But in my head, my grandmother had written it, and I grieved the loss.
	There were a few shelves of southwestern decorations like my mother had when I was very young when she lived on the Navajo reservation.
	There were two I chose and told them they better not dare touch them.
	At some point, though, I noticed they were missing and I knew they had taken it.
	And I snapped.
	I started screaming and cursing and threatening them.
	At this point, it coalesces to one person more often than not.
	The other copies of me were pretty much non-existent.
	There were vague presences, sitting around the kitchen table, talking and eating my food, ignoring everything.
	I can kind of see one of them leaning back in the chair, apathetically, not noticing anything, as I cried and raped at the lady.
	She had taken the bases and I wanted them back.
	We circled the table and pursuing her, she seemed to just step back away from me over and over and dismiss my upset as irrelevant.
	She refused to give it back.
	She was going to sell it.
	My helplessness and vulnerability made me even more furious and I screamed that I would destroy her things.
	I would destroy her purse so she couldn't get back to her dimension and would be trapped here like me.
	She didn't believe me and spotted me.
	I told her I would destroy her car where she had packed all of my things she had stolen.
	She didn't believe me.
	So I punched her in the face as hard as I could.
	I grabbed her hair and I lit it on fire and shoved her to the ground.
	She started yelling and crying at me, trying to put her hair out.
	I grabbed chunks of it and cut that off and then lit it on fire again.
	I dragged her outside to the car, which was packed to the roof full of my stuff.
	I showed her the huge car crusher, which was poised beneath and above her car that I would use to smash it if she didn't give me the bases back.
	She was back to being calm and dismissive again and started making excuses, telling me that it was packed too far into the car, out of too much stuff, that it would be too much work to get it out.
	I told her I didn't care and I turned the crusher on.
	Now she started rushing the full boxes out, exasperated, and within a few seconds procured the vase and handed it to me.
	I took the vase and then I climbed into the car in the spot she had just cleared and laid there waiting to be crushed.
	My rage had disappeared and there was just a gravity well, a sadness and apathy.
	I couldn't bear to go back in that abandoned house.
	I couldn't stand the cats.
	I couldn't bear to lose everything that had been taken from me.
	I couldn't stand having copies of me and I couldn't stand being alone.
	So I laid there waiting at the metal creek and snapped around me.
	I slowly let myself be crushed again.
	That's the dream.
	Well, thank you for sharing.
	That is quite a dream.
	That is quite a dream.
	How did you feel when you woke up?
	Actually, I don't remember when I woke up.
	I have a dissociative disorder and severe PTSD. So I guess I woke up in a flashback.
	And my boyfriend got me calm enough to have me write down the dream, which I remember the dream, but apparently whatever state I was in when I woke up, I remembered the dream as well.
	But even after I woke up from the flashback, I woke up just feeling like crying or like despair.
	Right.
	And if you don't mind me asking, you certainly don't have to share anything you're not comfortable with, what is your PTSD related to?
	In my early teenage years, a guy started treating me pretty bad until I ran away.
	So did you say he started treating you pretty badly?
	It was...
	He started...
	I feel like it's not listening to me.
	I'm afraid I'm going to offend someone.
	If you don't want to share, it helps a little, but it's certainly not essential.
	We can talk about the dream either way.
	Okay.
	He started raping me and taking me for periods of time and then returning me to my home for a few years.
	Gosh, I hope that you don't imagine that this would be offensive to anyone with regards to you.
	I mean, what is unbelievably immoral, vicious, evil, and offensive is the fact that you were attacked in this way.
	I mean, there's nothing for you to be ashamed about here.
	I'm nothing but sympathy for such a horrendous series of events.
	So I'm just massive sympathies.
	I hope that you don't feel that this stains you in any way, shape, or form.
	I mean, you were obviously a victim.
	You were young.
	And what happened to you was unbelievably evil.
	But it doesn't reflect on you.
	I just did a podcast because somebody was saying, like, if I talk about my childhood trauma, people think worse of me.
	Well, you know, way to recreate the trauma, way to side with the abusers.
	I mean, this is pure victimhood.
	It doesn't stain you in any way.
	And the heroism accrues to you for surviving.
	And obviously surviving with a very vivid imagination, which is a good thing to rescue from such a horror.
	So I just wanted to express my sympathy and hope that you never feel that there's any shame on you for these events.
	Yeah, I guess I just, I feel like I hurt people when I talk about it.
	and the process and progress.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's true.
	If you don't mind me being an annoying correcto guy, people may get upset about what you're saying, but you telling the truth about your experience to people in an appropriate context, I mean, that's You know, this is an important, obviously an important part of where you came from as a human being.
	And you really can't be close to anyone and hide that sort of thing.
	And so I hope it's, you know.
	Anyway, okay, so I just wanted to get some sense of that.
	It's funny.
	Go ahead.
	It might feel a literal, like too literal is an interpretation, but I felt like the copies of me were pretty much like that.
	Well, probably the dissociation.
	At least that's what I saw when I had a dream.
	That's when I remember the dream.
	Right, right.
	Are you alive in the first part of the dream?
	I wasn't quite clear on that.
	There seemed to be indications that you were, and then there seemed to be indications that you weren't.
	Is this a kind of hell?
	Is this a kind of pre-life or after-life?
	Is this another non-physical dimension?
	I got that sense, but I wasn't totally clear.
	I don't think so.
	I think I was alive, but it was just like life was of hurt and hurt.
	Right, right.
	And the reason I'm saying is that I'm trapped in this graveyard of a home.
	And there seems to be an element of death there.
	I was also struck when you said, first of all, I mean, freaking great use of language.
	I mean, holy crap.
	I mean, just fantastic stuff, particularly in your description of the panthers.
	I thought that was just...
	Really.
	Uneven cracks of teeth, you said.
	I mean, that's just fantastic.
	I mean, so I just wanted to compliment you on the creativity of that.
	It was a delicious use of language.
	But you say there's 70s appliances and so on and a lamp of your mom that is not plugged in.
	I'm going to focus on that not plugged in part and just see if that...
	Because not plugged in also seems like a metaphor for dissociation.
	So...
	But just for those who don't know the word, right, and you're obviously more of an expert on it than I am, but how would you describe the word or the content of the word dissociation to other people who may not be familiar with it?
	I think the best description I ever heard was that it was the normally integrated functions of memory, identity, consciousness become separated.
	Okay, okay, fair enough.
	So, not plugged in.
	When bad things happen to children, and I mean, obviously, completely horrendous things happen to you, when bad things happen to children, my sort of first question is, well, where are the parents?
	Where are the parents?
	So, where were your parents?
	My parents were getting divorced and it's actually very strange because for the first 10 years of my life, my family was a strict Mormon family, very scholarly.
	We didn't have a TV in the house.
	We read books and we wrote and we did things like that.
	My parents were pretty And then when they got divorced, my dad pretty much disappeared.
	He moved to Panama and we interacted with him hardly at all again until I was an adult.
	And my mom dropped out of the church and went back to college.
	And kind of went through this stage where she never wanted to have kids.
	The only reason she had kids was because our father made her have kids.
	There's three of us.
	I'm the oldest.
	I have a younger brother and sister.
	And she would tell us, you know, like, oh, you know, when we grow up, don't have kids, it's the worst thing that'll ever happen to you.
	And then, like, she would just...
	She would not be there.
	She would be at school or work or at her boyfriend's house or she would go do art things for the weekend.
	We were pretty much on our own after the divorce.
	And of course if your dad vanished from your life, which I think is frankly despicable, but if your dad vanished from your life then this would have lent you I would imagine this may have led you to be a little more susceptible to attentions from older men.
	No.
	Well, it happened.
	The stuff where he took me, it was never friendly.
	The first time I met him, he braids me.
	And then we continued to do so for several years.
	Okay, so there wasn't a lot of grooming going on.
	No, it wasn't like a relationship or a friendship.
	He wasn't a lot older than me.
	He was about 10 years old.
	And I would imagine that you didn't...
	Oh, sorry, let me not guess.
	Did you tell your mother about what happened?
	No, no.
	Right before the divorce had happened, my friend's dad had molested me.
	And it turns out he did that to a lot of girls in the neighborhood.
	And the military police had investigated him and found out that I had been around the family and came.
	And when my mom found out what happened, there was this It wouldn't have happened if you didn't deserve it or it wouldn't have happened if it was my fault or that she was angry at the situation.
	So I felt like if she found out what happened, it would be worse if she would hold it against me.
	Wow, so your mother actually said that you were to blame for being molested.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, I don't remember the specific conversation.
	But that's what you got out of it, right?
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	That's unspeakable.
	That's unspeakable.
	Today is a show of outrage.
	Today is a show of outrage.
	I'm incredibly sorry for that.
	Of course.
	Of course.
	I mean, everything to the opposite should have occurred.
	So...
	And of course, anyway, let's not get into any of that, I'm sure.
	Anyway, so when you say the mom is not plugged in, you know, plugged in is this double meaning, and the unconscious, I think, often plays with words in a very serious way.
	So not plugged in, you say your mom didn't want to be a mom, that she basically wished that you guys didn't exist.
	I mean, that's a really sinister thing to hear as a child, right?
	I wish that you didn't exist.
	Yeah, and it would sting when I would hear it, but it was always in my mind that I was overreacting, or that I should just be logical about it, and maybe she didn't want to have kids, and that was just the fact of life, not to take it personally.
	But this is why, obviously, as you mentioned, you have these different selves in the dream, right?
	So you have a self that's shocked and appalled, and then you have a self that tries to reason you out of that, so you're already kind of split in that way, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, so it starts pretty early.
	Yeah, so the mom not plugged in, I think, is important.
	And when you talk about being trapped in this graveyard of a home, of course, if your mom was gone a lot, as you say, she's doing art stuff, she's with her boyfriend and so on, then there is that kind of Lord of the Flies situation.
	And now tell me a little bit about the Panthers.
	I think that's...
	I mean, that's obviously quite important.
	Were there cats around?
	Do you remember having any strong associations with cats, particularly if you're younger?
	Because to a little kid, every cat looks like a panther, right?
	Well, the only pets that my mom ever had were cats.
	And I also...
	I had a few cats when I was around the time the stuff with Chris was happening.
	And he actually killed them.
	He skinned them.
	The rapist did?
	Yeah.
	Well, I'm shocked and appalled.
	I mean, there should be no reason why, of course, I'd be shocked.
	I mean, if a man can rape a child, then what can he not do, right?
	right?
	I mean, but that's pretty, obviously pretty terrifying and pretty horrifying.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	And of course, when you say that in the dream, the panthers are giving you something close to affection, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, that's one thing that pets can do.
	I mean, I think animals are incredibly sensitive.
	I mean, particularly, obviously, dogs and cats.
	We're sensitive to our emotions, and if we're hurt, they will often try and comfort us and be more affectionate to us.
	So in a sense, they're kind of like, if the parents are not present, they're kind of like stand-ins for parents kind of thing.
	So it's not too shocking to me that the Panthers are trying to keep you from going outside.
	Because when you go outside, you die, right?
	Later in the dream.
	I don't die.
	People come and chase me back inside.
	Oh, sorry.
	I thought at the end you died in the car being crushed.
	Oh, yeah.
	But I did that to myself.
	I thought you meant when I went out on the porch the first time.
	No, no.
	I mean, you kind of did that to yourself, but if the cats had been able to keep you in the house, that wouldn't have happened, right?
	Right.
	Okay, so...
	Your mother...
	You said your mother coming up to the house and it seemed like it was one person but also more than one person and so on, right?
	And then there are all these caseworkers moving around with all your stuff.
	This sort of indicates to me that this is kind of like an afterlife or a pre-life or a non-life kind of thing.
	Because they're pulling out, as you say, all your important items and packing them away.
	Well, that's kind of what you do when somebody's died, right?
	Hmm.
	Well, they felt like they were my memories.
	The items were pieces of my history or my life that they were taking home.
	So, there's a woman, you punch her in the face, you lit her hair on fire, then you try to take her hair out of her head and then you light it on fire again and so on.
	Was that a caseworker or was that your mother or some combination of the two?
	It was the caseworker or like the cumulative caseworkers, but she looked like my mother, but in the dream I didn't recognize her as my mother.
	The one, two, or three caseworkers, however many they were at a time, they all looked exactly the same.
	They all looked like my mother.
	Right.
	Right, so obviously the dissociation then on the part of your mother would be there as well.
	And so that's why there'd be more than one of your mother, just as there is more than one of you.
	The fragmentation, the splitting, right, I think is the more technical term for it.
	But it struck me, I don't know if you were listening to the earlier caller where I was talking about the fear of immateriality for children if they're not paid attention to, if they're not visible to other people, then they can lash out just to get attention and feel like they're not dissolving into dust.
	And I think that at the dream...
	That kind of happens because you said, and it really struck me, you said my upset was immaterial, was irrelevant.
	Sorry, was the word, was irrelevant.
	And as a result of that...
	Yeah, so you kept saying, look, I don't want you to do this, I don't want you to do this, but your upset was irrelevant.
	And so as a result, what was the only way that you could become visible or what was the only way you could get people's attention?
	Or this woman's attention?
	Exactly.
	I mashed out of that.
	Violence, right?
	When I remember, it's almost like I'm ashamed of it.
	I'm not a violent person.
	I wouldn't do that in real life, but in the dream, it seemed like the rage just overtook me, and that's what I did.
	Right, right.
	I don't know, but that part really bothers me.
	To say it out loud bothers me.
	Right.
	Right.
	And then you, well, first of all, look, violence in the unconscious, violence in the dream is not immoral.
	In fact, I would say it's self-knowledge.
	It's good, right?
	It's the action of violence, not the thoughts of violence, that are immoral.
	And in fact, I would argue that if the thoughts of violence are not dealt with, the action of violence becomes more likely, right?
	I don't mean for you, right?
	But I'm just talking in general.
	If people deal with their own feelings of violence and they deal with their own feelings of aggression and they integrate them and they, you know, heal whatever circumstances gave rise to such extremities of fantasies, then they're not going to enact it in life.
	At least I think that's the general thesis of self-knowledge, right?
	If you integrate these aspects of yourself, then they won't act out.
	They won't take over kind of thing.
	So to me...
	Internal thoughts or dreams about violence are a road to health.
	They are not, right?
	Because, you know, in the Christian world, I'm sure it's true in the Mormon world as well, the thought is the deed, right?
	I mean, if you think about infidelity, it's the same as being unfaithful, right?
	If you look at another woman in lust, blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
	So the thought is the crime, but the opposite is true in reality.
	That if you actually deal with and process the thoughts of violence, then the violence will not be acted out.
	Does that make any sense?
	Well it does kind of make sense because I know like in the past most of my dreams have just been like trauma related and I've had a lot of problems with nightmares and things like that but now I'd say in the last year or two my life stabilized a lot more and I found that the dreams have shifted.
	They're less about This is the second dream that I can remember having in the last year that I did something violent in the dream.
	The first one I had was even worse.
	My boyfriend said that that was probably a good thing.
	My brain was becoming more active or that I was becoming better able to deal with some of the things that happened.
	Yeah, I mean, there's a fighting back kind of thing, right?
	There's a fighting back kind of thing.
	And so, if I were to put my dream helmet on, which is full of rainbows and leprechauns, but if I were to put my dream helmet on, I would say something like this.
	So, there's nobody in the dead house.
	But you and some mangy cats that can't help you grow, they can only, in a very odd way, try to keep you safe.
	Right?
	Because they're just keeping you trapped on this bed, you're fully dressed, you're not tired, you don't want to be there.
	And so the paralysis that comes out of trauma is like, okay, last time I moved, a lion mauled me, so I'm not going to move.
	There's a paralysis that comes out of that, where you try and stay safe through immobility, and that doesn't work too well.
	It's a natural instinct.
	There's a third F, fight, flight, or freeze.
	Freeze is a very common response when in a situation of predation.
	In fact, that's what you're told to do.
	If a bear is mauling you, you play dead.
	The freeze part is part of what happens, right?
	And I would say as far as flight or fight, I'm definitely more like I run away or hide or just try to pretend like it's not happening.
	Yes, absolutely.
	And the dissociation in situations of extreme violence, such as a rape and obviously seeing your cats attacked and skinned and so on.
	Of course, and even your mom's blaming you for the A molestation.
	I mean, you can't process that as a kid.
	I mean, Jesus, you can even process that easily as an adult.
	So, here's someone, your mom, who's, let's say, not listening to you, right?
	And in your dream, you get enraged at her, right?
	And, boy, I mean, yes, that seems to me an entirely healthy emotion.
	I think too, attacking her hair, my mom has really long red hair, not naturally red, she has dark brown hair like me, but she dyes it red and she's very proud of her hair.
	So the only thing I can think is the reason I lit her hair on fire and I cut it off, it was something I knew she valued.
	But I thought that after I woke up, not so much like in the dream.
	Well, and I mean, the rage would be, I would imagine, why do you care for your hair more than me?
	My mom cares about most things more than her kid.
	Right, but I mean, that's, you know, that's, I think, where some of the rage, like, that's dead protein, I'm a live child.
	I mean, for God's sakes, what the hell are you doing, right?
	So, she still doesn't listen, though, even after you attack her, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	And even after I attack her and I drive her outside, she goes back to being dismissive.
	Yeah, she goes back to...
	But then you escalate even further to crushing the car, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Does she also love her car in real life?
	Um...
	Well, my mom has never been well-off, so most of her cars were junk cars.
	But my mom's always been very, her possessions, like very, very possessive of the things that she owns and us not touching them.
	Shallow vain, materialistic and anapathetic.
	Who would have thought that constellation could ever exist?
	Okay, so you go out, but you continue to want to escalate.
	Right?
	Which is, I will be seen by you.
	I will be seen by you.
	Right?
	And then what happens?
	I guess in the end I win.
	She gives me the vase.
	She gives me what I want.
	But it's not...
	It ends up...
	In the end it doesn't matter.
	It feels meaningless.
	But don't you die at the end?
	Yeah.
	I sit in the car until it crushes me.
	Right.
	Right.
	So I think that's...
	I think this is an important lesson from your unconscious.
	I think it's really trying to teach you something important, which is when to disengage.
	I know it's the most of my life like after I ran away from home and I was homeless for a while and I was in the military and I kept trying to stay in contact with my mom and kept trying to like establish a relationship with her and I would send her things and I would call her and most of the time like she wouldn't respond or she wouldn't interact with me or she would like you know like once every couple months she would you know call me back and actually like have a conversation with me but then it was Usually because she wanted something or she felt
	bad about something and wanted to have a conversation.
	And then she would go back to ignoring me.
	And then in the last year, she's kind of turned around and tried to engage me more, to call me maybe once a month or to have an interaction with me.
	And it's weird because that's what I wanted for a long time, years and years.
	That's what I wanted was just her to acknowledge me.
	I found that the last couple months or so, I just turned my phone off.
	I actually shut my phone plan off so I didn't have a phone and stopped responding to her calls.
	I just didn't have any contact with her.
	I talked to my boyfriend about it and there was a sense of bitterness.
	All the times that I needed help, that I was hurt, or that I was homeless, or, you know, like, all of the times that she could have protected me or helped me, she didn't want anything to do with me, and now that my life is good, I'm in a stable home, a stable relationship, I'm back in school, now she wants something to do with me, and I have a sense of, like, bitterness or resentment towards that, and I've just kind of been avoiding her.
	Yeah, I think that it's, I mean, I think it's saying that it's dangerous to re-engage.
	Because there may be part of you now who wants to get your mom to get, you know, that she wronged you, that you're really angry, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, part of me feels like that.
	Like, I've sometimes, like, thought about having a conversation with her and telling her some of these things.
	But then I just feel like a sense of, like, utility or hopelessness.
	And I don't try.
	Right, right, right.
	Because you can't, I mean, I would imagine it would be pretty tough to have a relationship with your mom without talking about all this stuff, right?
	Yeah, and I've tried to in the past, but I think ultimately now it hasn't worked.
	Right.
	So, I mean, you obviously have anger towards your mom, which is, God, I mean, ugh.
	I'd get behind it with bellows if I could, right?
	But you have anger towards your mom and obviously towards your dad, which we haven't talked about much.
	So anger in relationships can be, I mean, as I've argued before, it's important, it's healthy, it's helpful.
	Anger in relationships can be a terrific source of intimacy.
	And being in a relationship with someone who you can be healthily Angry with is really important.
	It's really, really important.
	When I started working for other people as a software executive, in the past, I just didn't want to buy new clothes.
	I'm not much of a clothes sort, to say the least.
	I was newly married, and my wife kept saying, we've got to go and buy you some nicer clothes.
	You're working at this level now.
	It's not your company anymore, so you can't be the scruffy founder kind of thing.
	I just didn't want to do it.
	And, you know, my wife just eventually got angry at me.
	You know, like, trust me, I know what I'm doing.
	You need to do this.
	Stop fighting me all the time.
	It's driving me crazy, right?
	And she was right.
	And we had a great conversation about that.
	She got angry at me.
	And I remember my therapist got angry at me once or twice, and it was a very intimate and connected thing to do.
	And she taught me a lot about that.
	So anger can be very healthy and it could be, you know, that in your relationship with your boyfriend you're able to get productively upset with each other and so on.
	But anger with people who...
	I actually have a couple of...
	I have a problem with anger.
	I have a hard time getting angry.
	Even if something doesn't make me angry, I have a hard time expressing it.
	I feel guilty.
	I'm afraid of being angry.
	So I try to not let myself be angry.
	My boyfriend just says that unless I want to be angry, I'm probably not going to get better or get over a lot of the things that are wrong.
	Right.
	Yeah, that could be true.
	I think certainly we don't want to let bad people take away from us the elemental self-protection and intimacy capacity of anger.
	But to get angry with people who are healthy is productive.
	To get angry with people who are seriously disturbed is usually not the way to go, in my opinion.
	Because people who lack empathy can't connect with us through our anger.
	And people who are incredibly manipulative will simply use our anger to harm us.
	Yeah, I definitely have that feeling like it would be turned against me.
	Yeah, so if you get angry...
	Against you, yeah.
	So if you get angry at somebody who's not empathetic and deeply manipulative and perhaps just downright evil, then...
	They will harm your capacity to express anger.
	There's a number of different strategies that they could use, and this is just off the top of my head.
	I'm sure there are more.
	But they can pretend to be really empathetic at the moment, which confuses you about their lack of empathy in the past and makes you feel unjust for being angry.
	That's a strategy that has been used on me before.
	Oh, I'm so sorry you're upset.
	I really get that it bothers you.
	If there's anything I can do, blah, blah, blah.
	But then you wait for follow through or you actually ask them to do something and then it all changes.
	So there's one defense which is to pretend to empathize and to pretend to be rational, to be nice and all that and that's a way of diffusing the anger and making you feel kind of crazy.
	The other thing of course is to blankly deny everything and to say that your anger is unjust and abusive which again puts you in a difficult relationship with your own anger.
	The other thing is to blow up back and that way you get the feeling that your anger is destructive because it causes another person to become Aggressive or abusive or whatever.
	There's more, but if you are dealing with people who have empathy and who care about you and have a history of all of that, then anger is a very productive thing.
	But if you get angry at crazy people or evil people, they're very skilled at making anger bad.
	Because anger is the defense against evil.
	Anger is deeply moral.
	Anger is deep virtue.
	Anger is the immune system of morality.
	Like pain, telling you something's wrong.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Yes, exactly.
	Except anger is not painful, right?
	Anger can be very healthy and helpful.
	Anger lets you know when you're being manipulated, when you're being exploited, when your interests are being harmed, and that you need to do something about it.
	Anger, you know, we didn't develop it so we could hurt people.
	Developed it so we could save ourselves from being hurt by people.
	And so, the first thing that evil people want to do is to disarm anger in those around them.
	And, you know, we heard some of this in the roleplay, with me and the fellow playing his dad.
	And this is...
	Anybody who has a problem with you being angry, assuming you're not, like, screaming at them and, you know, whatever, being abusive...
	But anyone who has a problem with you being angry is, I would argue, almost certain to have malintent, to put it as nicely as possible.
	But the first thing that evil people want to do is to disarm your anger.
	And this is why I have such a significant problem with some of this Eastern philosophical stuff, you know, like, to be zen, don't get angry, you know, to get angry is to lose control, to get angry is, no, no, no, no, no.
	No, to be angry, to have the capacity for anger is healthy.
	There is no part of our emotional makeup that is there to destroy us, that is there to be abusive.
	I mean, okay, yeah, anger can be twisted, yeah, anger can be abusive if it's turned into manipulative rage or whatever, but so what?
	You know, lovemaking is a beautiful thing.
	That doesn't mean that there can't be harmful lovemaking or harmful sex, right?
	Sorry, harmful lovemaking is sort of a contradiction.
	So, in the dream, You continue to get angry and to escalate with somebody who's not present, who's not listening, and who's like your mom, and it does not end well for you, right?
	Yeah, I mean, it's basically saying it is suicidal to get angry at evil people.
	That's pretty accurate to how I feel most of the time.
	Good.
	Okay, good.
	So there's some, you know, the dream, I think, is trying to reinforce that.
	That if the escape from the dead house is not through, I mean, it's through getting angry, but not engaging in anger with the abuser.
	Does that make sense?
	Right, like confronting her is important to...
	Well, I think it's saying that it's going to be worse, right?
	Look, children get angry and want to express anger at their parents.
	That's a natural and healthy part of being a child.
	Certainly, my daughter has expressed anger towards me on occasion, and she's right to do so.
	And I, you know, listen, we will sometimes talk about it for quite a while and figure out what happened and she's entirely right to do so.
	I want to protect and respect and encourage and nurture her capacity to get angry at things that I do that are insensitive or wrong or whatever.
	I want her to have that.
	I need her to have that.
	And so, in that situation, anger is a connective thing.
	But everything that you needed your mother to provide is so far in the past I've gotten to a point where I've actually dealt with a lot of things and I've managed to pull my life back, anchor it and move forward and improve my life.
	She can't help now.
	I've done all the work.
	There's that old phrase, a day late and a dollar short.
	I'm 46 years old.
	Anyone in my family of origin who wants to help me with childhood issues is like 30 plus years ago.
	What the fuck good is it going to do me now?
	There's this whole thing about banks, you know, that the banks will ignore you while you're drowning.
	And then as soon as you get to shore, they'll throw life preservers at you and hit you on the head, right?
	And what that basically means is when you most need money, nobody's going to lend it to you.
	But when you don't need money, because you have lots of money, people want to lend you lots of money, right?
	Nobody gives gold cards to homeless people, right?
	But once you make a lot of money, you're showered with credit card applications.
	I mean, that's sort of facetious and there's nothing wrong with that economically.
	But the time for people, just to talk about myself, I mean, the time for people to help me with my childhood abuse and childhood trauma...
	It was about 45 years ago.
	Like, rushing forward now to help me is, you know, I mean, you know, it's like, it's almost abusive now.
	I mean, it's like somebody trying to give me the Heimlich maneuver four days after I swallowed the chicken bone and was fine.
	Like, what the hell are you doing now?
	Maybe you could have been helpful four days ago when I had the chicken bone stuck sideways in my throat.
	But now...
	She wants that mindset of, oh, I'm a good mother, I care about you, I've done all I can for you.
	And she wants to go through the motions now.
	Like, she cares now, but all of the time that I was in trouble or needed a mother, she wasn't there.
	So why should she have the benefit of patting herself on the back now and saying she's doing a good job?
	Well, she's drawn to you now because you have resources because you're not needy in her eyes, right?
	Right.
	So, I mean, obviously everybody makes their own choices with regards to this stuff, but certainly for me, Like, I recognized years and years ago that there was no fixing my childhood.
	And therefore, for me, the allure of someone coming along and making everything better or filling up a need that I... I mean, that just...
	That need I had for a good childhood will never be met.
	There is no...
	You know, time is linear.
	It is a one-way moving sidewalk.
	There is no going back and fixing what was broken.
	I mean, you can...
	Do stuff in the present to make it better and so on.
	But the needs that I had in my childhood will never be met by any human being.
	It's not my wife's job.
	It's not my daughter's job.
	It's not my friend's job.
	It's not my listener's job.
	It's not anybody's job because it's impossible to do.
	It's impossible to do.
	Like if somebody comes up to me and says, Steph, I'd be really happy to change your diapers, assuming I'm not 90 and crap it on myself.
	It's like, I'm sorry, the need to change my diapers is long past, right?
	It's 45 years ago.
	So coming up and telling me that you'd be happy to change my diapers now, doesn't, like it's ridiculous.
	It's insane.
	It can't be fixed.
	And if people get that childhood can't be fixed, they'll be a lot more careful.
	I mean, if you're holding an iPad made out of thin glass, you will be very careful not to drop it, right?
	Because, you know, it's very fragile.
	Childhood is immensely fragile and childhood cannot be fixed.
	Doesn't mean you'll forever be unhappy if you had a bad childhood.
	There's lots of things that you can do to make yourself happy and maybe even happier than if you hadn't, but it can't be fixed.
	You can work around it, but it can't be fixed because you can't go back in time and fulfill needs that you had that weren't met or that were not opposed.
	A lot of times I feel like I'm probably a different person than I would have been if I'd had a better childhood.
	I'd probably be more assertive.
	I probably would have a different personality than I have now.
	But you can't go back.
	I have the personality I have now.
	There's no doubt that you would have been a different person without this childhood.
	And I'm incredibly sorry that you had The cavalcade of horrors that you had as a child.
	I mean, God, I'm immensely sorry for it.
	And, my God, I mean, it sounds like there's almost nothing.
	I mean, we haven't even talked about the crazy-ass beliefs of Mormonism, but there was almost nothing that I wouldn't change after childhood if I had a magic wand.
	So, I'm really deeply sorry.
	I mean, you got it from all ends, right?
	I mean, sexual abuse, rape, divorce, absent father, crazy parents, skin cats.
	I mean, Lordy, lordy.
	I mean, there's really nothing bad that could have happened that you could invent that didn't happen.
	And I'm just so unbelievably sorry for that.
	And I, you know, I hate the fact that we live in a planet where this shit happens.
	I mean, I hate that so viscerally, so fundamentally.
	I fucking hate that we live in a world where shit like this happens to children.
	Excuse my French.
	But I really hate that and that's, you know, why I'm setting all the sails of my not inconsiderable abilities and setting all the wind of my abilities behind the sails of moving the world in a different direction as best and as hard and as much as I can.
	I just hate that so many children live in these kinds of horrors.
	This is absolutely unacceptable to me and of course I know it is to you as well and I just really want to express My incredible sympathy for what you went through.
	It is about as bad a tale as can be told, and it is immensely to your credit that you are pursuing self-knowledge, that you have kept your spirit alive, that you have kept the deep creativity of your bottom brain going in such a vivid manner, and that you're in a stable relationship, that you're not in the army anymore.
	This is going back to school, as you say.
	That is enormously to your credit, and God, I mean, what an incredible stand to break the cycle you were making.
	And that's the best that can be pulled out of this wreckage, I think, and good for you and well done.
	Thank you.
	And I want to say thank you as well.
	I feel like you've helped in a lot of ways in the last half year or so I can listen to your podcast.
	And I have a three-year-old daughter.
	She'll be born next month.
	And I think, you know, I was never, like, abusive or I never spanked her or did anything Terrible like that, but I think that I've learned a lot about negotiating with her and more positive additions to her relationship from her.
	I think people like you help a lot.
	So I want to say thank you as well.
	I appreciate that.
	And as unlucky as you were, your daughter sounds equally lucky.
	And for that, of course, I've immensely Thrilled to have had any part to do with improving that.
	And again, without wanting to disregard your thanks to me, the thanks also spread out to the listeners and to the people who are sharing the show, the people who are supporting the show.
	I mean, this is really what we're trying to do, is to build a little cocoon.
	You know what we're doing?
	We're taking a little slice out of the future, casting it back through time.
	Yes, I know time was linear, but let's break the metaphor for now.
	We're taking a little slice of the future and we are bringing it back to the present.
	That's the only way the future changes, is you bring the future back to the present.
	And you raise people as if we were all free.
	You raise your children as if the world was free, as if the world was rational, and that is the only way that the world will become rational, right?
	If you want something to grow, you have to plant the seed now.
	And what we're doing is we're creating little households of the future.
	And these households will grow, and these households will merge, and these households will spread.
	And that's the only thing that we can do that is measurable, that is productive.
	This is the only way that we can empirically reduce the amount of aggression in the world as in the only spheres that we control, which is what we do and say, how we act and what we think and what we contribute to those around us.
	And you are creating a wonderful cocoon Hello?
	Hello?
	Sorry, looks like Steph might have cut out a bit there.
	Oh yeah, it just disappeared.
	Yeah, he just dropped...
	Before I go, there was something else I wanted to mention to him.
	He said something that really resonated with me.
	He had been talking about Viper Vendetta and he commented on the movie.
	One of the flaws with the movie was that they portrayed trauma as making a person stronger.
	That it doesn't make a person stronger.
	And I think him acknowledging that or saying that is really a good thing, because most of my life I've always felt like my obligatory answer is always, oh, well, it made me a stronger person, or that sort of mentality.
	And I think being able to say that it doesn't make you stronger, that it actually has an impact on you, I think that was a very insightful perception.
	Right, right.
	The lie.
	The lie that whatever does not kill you makes you stronger.
	It's not true.
	Simply not true.
	Right, right.
	That was just something that I had been thinking of that I wanted to tell him.
	I appreciated him saying it most of his own.
	A minute and a half.
	Oh, okay.
	So, I'll just finish what I was saying and then I should probably get on with the day, but I just wanted to say just how Immensely humbled I am by the courage of people like you, dear lady, who are so strongly and deeply examining what happened and deeply and genuinely committed to changing it.
	It is a truly humbling experience to see this depth of commitment, this level of communication with the deepest aspects of the self, this level of conversation between your life and your unconscious, this attempt Which I think is ongoing and significant and successful to reintegrate and to not be split and to not be dissociated and separate.
	To stand up for what is best and what is most hopeful within you.
	I just am incredibly humbled and incredibly moved To hear about these kinds of stories.
	And it represents, as I said, the level of heroism that is amazing to me.
	I mean, it's a force of nature, what you're doing.
	It is a force of nature.
	We've had this snarling face, blind photocopy page coming out from the beginning of our species and probably even further back than that.
	And unplugging that blind, snarling, photocopied face that just keeps coming out every single generation.
	Unplugging that.
	Walking away from that, getting out of the dungeon, getting out of the copy room, out into the sunlight, bringing our children with them, creating with them a safe world which will make the whole world safe in time is just incredibly admirable.
	It's a beautiful thing to see.
	It's a beautiful thing to hear about.
	And I just really wanted to tell you how astoundingly grateful I am that you shared with this, how astoundingly grateful I am and I assume that the future around you is going to be.
	For everything that you're doing.
	It is incredibly impressive and it takes a level of heroism that I can really only stand in awe of.
	Thank you.
	I don't know what to say.
	Thank you.
	You're welcome.
	Hopefully I do a good job.
	Yeah, I think you are.
	And with that I should move on with my day.
	Thank you all the listeners so much for calling in.
	Thank you everyone for supporting that This show, I really appreciate that.
	And have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week.
	We've got a great show coming up this week, which I think will be very exciting for you.
	It's a new thesis, which we've got researchers on.
	And I guess a pretty cool announcement towards the end of the month, which we'll be talking about as well.
	Have yourself a great week.

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