Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

May 26, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:17:32

2390 Freedomain Radio Call In Show, 26 May 2013

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses telling his daughter about Jesus and speaks with callers about the cure of anger, escaping from prison, the tyranny of gatekeepers, when facts don't matter and the scam of false hope.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Good morning, everybody.
	It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio, 26th of May, 2013.
	I hope you're having a wonderful, wonderful week.
	I hope that you are getting as good a news as I am about potentially disastrous situations, a health that all seems to be going well, to say the least, and I count myself as halfway through the grueling...
	Regimen of having chemical cossacks ride all the way through my body, looking for all fast growing cells.
	Fortunately, that does not seem to be my frontal lobe at the moment.
	Which is most excellent.
	Although hair is even more scant than normal, which is fine.
	And so, it's fine.
	It's fine.
	I'm just happy to be getting this all behind me.
	And thanks to everyone who's given me good wishes.
	Just wanted to point out, for those who think, oh, it's all done and better.
	Well, not quite.
	It's about a five-year cycle to make sure that this kind of...
	Ailment is truly behind you, and of course there are some increased risks later on in life, so it's never exactly fully behind you, but boy, it's about as good a news as I could be getting throughout this whole process.
	So thanks to everyone for your support and your kind wishes.
	I am moved to tears every day by all the love that's coming in.
	I just really want to thank you and tell you how much that really does mean to me.
	It's wonderful.
	It's a great community.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	So it's interesting.
	So I was talking to Isabella about a man named Jesus.
	And we were talking about People who could do mean things to you or people who might do mean things to you.
	And she said to me, because I asked her, I said, you haven't actually had anyone ever do anything mean to you.
	And she said, no, no, she's not had anyone do anything mean to her, which I think is a pretty great place to be, pushing on a half decade with no meanness, which I think is wonderful.
	And so we were talking about Jesus because we were talking about two different approaches to people who do things who are mean to you.
	And one is called an eye for an eye, which is you pay back unkindness with unkindness.
	And the other is called turn the other cheek, which is where you moon people.
	No, wait.
	No, that's more Old Testament.
	The New Testament is where you repay unkindness with kindness.
	And we were talking about that.
	And the conclusion that she came to was that if people have generally been nice to you, Then, you know, if they're just having a bad day or they're kind of grumpy, then you can go and give them a hug and a kiss and make them feel better.
	But if people are generally not kind to you, that's not a very positive strategy.
	So it was a very interesting chat about how to deal with unkind people.
	And, boy, you know, I'm really seduced.
	And it is a very seductive idea to think that if you do nice to people who harm you, that you are going to...
	Turn them around and you are going to make them better people and you are going to awaken their innate kindness and empathy that is buried deep beneath them.
	Of course, as everyone knows, I am a slave to science as much as possible.
	Science is the philosophy of inanimate objects.
	We are the philosophy of inanimate objects with choice.
	But science is philosophy applied to inanimate objects.
	But the science of the brain seems to be quite...
	Quite powerful and quite incontrovertible that the development of empathy is, you know, close to a dozen highly complex brain systems that all need to work in concert.
	And I would make the argument, I think The Science of Evil by Borat's cousin is a book that as well was reading about this.
	And I would argue that learning empathy is more complex.
	And more difficult than learning Japanese.
	And so if you...
	For me, at least this is sort of my working model view of empathy.
	That if you grow up learning Japanese and you speak Japanese, then there's no problem.
	Because, you know, it's easy peasy, nice and easy.
	And so these are the people who've grown up with empathy in their lives.
	Now, if you've not grown up learning Japanese, then it is...
	You know, let's just say you've grown up learning some waspy language like English or Gaelic.
	Then if you're going to go and...
	Learn Japanese.
	This is a huge amount of work.
	It's like at least probably about half a decade of pretty consistent labor to become generally and genuinely fluent, like to the point where you can completely master Japanese.
	It's a huge amount of work.
	Now, the idea that you repay unkindness with kindness and then that teaches people empathy to me would be like somebody who doesn't speak Japanese and you just simply speak Japanese to them and somehow they'll learn Japanese.
	I don't see how that can transfer, right?
	Simply like showing someone or mirroring a behavior that you want in others does not teach them how to achieve that behavior.
	It does not create the brain systems.
	That are necessary for genuine empathy.
	So I think just repaying unkindness with kindness is like saying to someone, well, the best way to learn Japanese is just, you know, go and turn on some Japanese channel on TV and just keep watching it until you know Japanese.
	Well, it's not going to work that way.
	I think we all understand that.
	That is really a consciously applied system of study with a huge amount of work and practice and failures, mistakes, problems, and so on.
	And so I view empathy as – it's an analogy, right?
	And it's not an exact one because the reality is that learning empathy is much harder than learning Japanese because learning Japanese has no moral content, no moral problem to it, right?
	I mean if you grew up without empathy, then that was because of deficiencies in your environment and in your upbringing.
	I mean, significant moral deficiencies.
	And also, you have probably acted in such a way.
	If you don't have empathy, you've acted in a way that's been quite harmful and destructive to other people.
	So once you start learning empathy, it becomes a huge problem.
	Looking back upon your childhood, looking back upon the harm you've done to others, and you are probably embedded in a whole bunch of relationships that are mutually exploitive or destructive.
	Or at least kind of callous, cold, and who cares kind of stuff.
	And so if you go learn Japanese, you don't have to reevaluate all your relationships.
	If you go learn Japanese, it doesn't show you in a ghastly moral light.
	If you go and learn Japanese, it doesn't expose you to the agonies of your early history.
	So, when I sort of view people who don't have empathy, and again, I'm trying to be as scientifically consistent as possible, and as far as I understand it, nobody's found a way, lots of ways to learn Japanese.
	In fact, there's a whole contingent of FDR listeners who are going through the process of turning Japanese?
	Turning Japanese?
	I really?
	No.
	Mike's here.
	He's giving me the scroll by as if the jokes that work or not.
	Anyway, but they're learning Japanese, which is really a fascinating process and something which I quite envy.
	Me, my entire language system is based upon learning computer languages and fairly potent analogies, but not at all to do with learning other human languages.
	Computer languages and philosophy, yes.
	Other human languages, I'm just wretched at.
	But they're all learning Japanese, and I think that's just fantastic.
	But I don't think that anyone's ever been able to find a way to teach somebody empathy.
	Because these brain systems that need to be created during particular phases of development among infants and toddlers and young children, I don't think that there's any way.
	It's like that language window.
	Like if you don't learn language between the ages sort of two and five, you're always going to struggle with it and you're never going to develop it.
	It's just a particular phase of development that needs to be there.
	They've not found a way to be able to replicate it later.
	Maybe they will one day.
	And then, you know, they can inject you with something that makes you empathetic and hopefully then they'll be able to inject something with you that makes you speak Japanese so I can finally understand these kabuki bizarre game shows that they have.
	And so I just wanted to – we were talking quite a bit about this idea that you can't – I mean, Izzy and I were talking quite a bit about this idea that you can't just make people nice by showing them what nice looks like.
	I think that's – like you can't learn how to figure skate by watching people figure skate.
	I mean you just can't.
	You just completely can't do that.
	And again, these things are much easier than learning empathy.
	And so I just want to mention that at the beginning.
	And the second thing I wanted to mention was – That somebody had written on the message board.
	I believe that there may be a thread to do with determinism going on on the message board.
	And somebody put, I think, something quite interesting about how...
	Let me just see if I can...
	I'm just going to see if I can find the quote.
	Do you remember we were talking, Boo, about how some people think that everyone's like a rock?
	Yeah.
	And that was not exactly where I'm coming from.
	So he says here, I think it's interesting...
	If the free market is valid, which I believe it is, then a business that provides no value to anyone cannot and will not survive.
	The market itself will be shut down instead of governance.
	I don't know about that second sentence, but likewise, if a topic provides no value to anyone, it cannot and will not continue being discussed also without the need for governance.
	Whether or not a business in the free market has value is not determined by one person.
	Or even a governance of persons.
	It is likewise not determined by the validity of the product.
	The value of the business in the free market is determined only by the market that continues it.
	I am against this ban because it is consistent with belief in the validity of the free market to be against it.
	So, if I understand this correctly, the idea is that, well, I'm into the free market and therefore I should not say to people, do not discuss determinism on the message board, which I have said for many years because for a variety of reasons that I've talked about before.
	But I do genuinely believe and accept that determinism is not a valid topic for philosophy.
	The reason simply being, I mean, this is almost praxeologically, that if determinism is true, then there's no such thing as philosophy.
	There's only physics, right?
	If determinism is true and we are merely atoms and matter fulfilling the inevitable laws of physics, then there is no such thing as philosophy.
	There is only Physics.
	And this would be, human choice would be something that would not be studied as other than a prior delusion.
	In the same way that we may study people's belief in Thor, but we would not say that this proves the existence of Thor.
	We would view it as a historical anomaly.
	And so, for me, if you have a club studying Japanese and someone wants to come in and talk about penguins, then people are going to say, well, sorry, this is a club for studying Japanese, not penguins.
	Similarly, If I go into a convenience store and I ask to buy a car, they're going to say, well, that's not our product here.
	We don't do that here.
	And if I just sit there and stand around and say, but I really want a car, I need a car, and interrupt and interfere with everyone, then, of course, the store owner is going to say, this is not what we're doing here.
	If determinism is true, then, I mean, of course, everything that I've talked about in terms of the show here, right?
	The free domain radio has always been the logic of personal and political...
	Liberty, right?
	Freedom, choice, right?
	If determinism is valid, well, then there's no such thing as true or untrue, valid, or invalid.
	But it means that everything that I've certainly been doing and everything that every other philosopher has ever been doing has been a complete lie and a fraud.
	It doesn't mean that we've been lying and being fraudulent.
	It simply means that we're ridiculously and it's been a religion, right?
	If determinism is true, then all philosophy has been Fundamentally religious, superstitious, and the making up of characteristics like deities and souls which simply don't exist, i.e.
	free will.
	So given that it is a philosophy...
	Message board and determinism would eliminate philosophy and turn the study of human action into a subset of physics or perhaps even biology or neuroscience, perhaps.
	Then, well, it's a philosophy forum.
	And therefore, to talk about determinism is to come to a philosophy forum to talk about the opposite of philosophy.
	And so I just wanted to point out that the free market as a whole is...
	It's important, of course.
	I'm a big fan of the free market, but it's not – and I don't actually mind too much, and I have recently talked about determinism live with people, but I just don't.
	I'm just not going to do it in terms of the forum.
	Philosophy is a spoken discipline.
	Writing is not bad for exchanging information, but philosophy is a spoken discipline.
	I just really want to point that out.
	It's a very important characteristic of philosophy.
	To get to the truth is a very tricky thing, and a forum is not a great way to have intense philosophical discussions.
	It's not bad for exchanging information, providing links, and putting out some arguments and so on.
	But it's not a great environment at all, which is why I do suggest to people who have questions about UPB or determinism and so on, we'll talk about it.
	It's a much, much better way because you can actually sort of challenge definitions and get progress going pretty quickly.
	Anyway, so that's it for my introduction.
	Thank you so much for your indulgence and your kindness as always.
	Just to remind you, for those who don't make it to the very tail end of the It's always gratefully,
	gratefully accepted and most necessary and thanks again to Mike for coming up with these great These sort of end videos for the shows, which people can actually click on and donate and get to various videos right away.
	He's just doing some great stuff with YouTube, so thanks so much to him.
	And now, James, if we would like to bring up caller numero uno, I will maybe do the rest of the show in Japanese.
	Hello?
	Hello, go ahead.
	Oh, hi, Stefan.
	How are you doing?
	I'm very well.
	How are you doing, my friend?
	I'm okay, thank you.
	Thank you very much for having me on the show.
	I really appreciate it.
	My pleasure.
	Sorry if I'm a bit nervous.
	Yeah, so I'm sorry if this question comes across as a bit unspecific or annoying, but basically I just wanted to get some advice really on how to sort out what I perceive to be as quite I'm unhappy with life, basically, i.e.
	mine.
	And I've got all the reasons there to describe it like that.
	I know what is wrong with it, but I just find it hard to implement changes to sort it out.
	I'm just trying to think.
	Do you want me to ask questions, which I'm happy to do, or I'm happy to listen?
	Whatever works best for you.
	Yeah, I mean, if I give you kind of like a general overview of what I'm getting at, I'll do that.
	It's basically just, I don't know, it kind of lacks, I lack the enjoyment of it, and to me it's It's really frustrating and sad because I'm 25 and I've had friends who, well,
	I've got one of my best friends who, well, he died in 2012 and he was only about two years older than me and I kind of get a bit, I kind of feel a bit stupid as like, you know, he had no choice and he had all these, you know, desires and goals he never achieves and there's me who has a life, I'm healthy and I'm relatively young and I feel a bit ungrateful.
	And secondly, clueless really and a bit lost.
	It probably would be useful at this point if you'd ask questions, I guess, because otherwise I'll sort of ramble on in my nervous...
	No, I understand the...
	Like, I've had some friends who died.
	I had a...
	My best friend, when I was 11 or 12, he had a congenital heart defect.
	He just dropped dead of a heart attack.
	And that was very tragic.
	And then another friend of mine was beheaded in a motorcycle accident in my teens.
	And when I was in boarding school, a boy who was very popular and A great soccer player and all that, he jumped into a pool and bumped his head and was underwater for just that little bit too long and then was mentally crippled and physically crippled and was just wretched.
	So when you see some of these random bullets that rain down on people, the motorcycle guy was a bit of a...
	Nut job in some ways in hindsight, but when you see the random bullets that rain down on people, largely through no fault of their own, it does give you some pause.
	And the death thing doesn't always give you this feeling that life is something to be treasured and it can make you a little bit more alarmed about life, that there can be these random things occurring in your body and in just, you know, well, Jesus, I mean, just look at me.
	I wake up one day, it's like, hey, by the way, you have cancer.
	Fuck!
	Based on what?
	No family history, really.
	Healthy as can be and exercise and eat well and all that kind of stuff.
	So there is part of you that says, well, life is, at least for me, life is a treasure and not something to be taken lightly and love and enrich every day and so on.
	But there's another part of you that's like, well, some random bad shit can really happen.
	And it's not so much energizing as it is a little paralyzing.
	Sometimes.
	So I don't want to sort of tell you your experience.
	I just wanted to show you some of my thoughts.
	I can certainly understand why your friend who died might not lead you to have this wonderful appreciation of life.
	You know, like we've all had these situations if you drive where if you'd done something a second earlier or a second later, things could have gone really, really badly.
	And that doesn't make you appreciate driving and think how wonderful driving is.
	You're just sitting there sweating and your heart pounding and, you know, it makes you a little bit more alarmed to drive sometimes.
	So these near misses, I don't think that they automatically translate you into a deeper and richer appreciation of life.
	I think it reminds us of life's fragility and that sometimes blends some of our ambitions and commitments to our future.
	Does that make any sense?
	To me, it kind of...
	I don't know, because what frustrates me is I even said to him on his life, I've been moaning to all my friends about the same thing for the last at least three years, I think, and It's not that I'm a particularly stupid person or anything, it's just there's something stopping me from fixing these problems.
	So just a quick rundown, it's no sort of career path direction, bad relationship with my parents, lacking friends and lacking the people, well, lacking people I actually want to associate with because I live in the sticks or in the middle of nowhere over here and There's no offence to Redneck themselves, so to speak.
	I'm surrounded by people who are very prejudiced and hateful and it's uncomfortable to even spend time with anyone locally.
	I guess I'm always looking for people who have a like-minded way of looking at things, but it's really hard to find.
	Another point I want to make is one of the main things, I guess, which kind of frustrates me the most is that I don't really have this kind of focus that a lot of other people have.
	I'd really like to dedicate my life to something and try and find happiness that way.
	But at the moment, I'm just sort of not repeating mistakes, but just not getting out of things I don't like and not really enjoying anything.
	And even the things I used to love Like playing music and things like that and reading books.
	Even that's become dull and boring.
	Not boring, but just...
	I don't know.
	I haven't really...
	I've lost a spark.
	I haven't really...
	When people say, oh, you're a great musician or whatever, and I don't really care about it as much, and that sounds bad.
	So I guess I'm just looking for this...
	I would like to, in a way of Um, achieving sort of a happiness or goals and hopefully everything else around me, friends and people and, you know, moving out would fall into place because of this.
	But I just find it really difficult to actually pinpoint that exact thing.
	And I've been searching for years and it's frustrating and brings me down and down all the time.
	And my girlfriend picked up on it last night and she said, are you okay with me?
	Do you feel the same?
	And I said, oh yeah, I do.
	It's not you, it's this.
	And I explained to her and, um, I don't know.
	I don't know.
	She just sort of says, I'll pick anything and stuff, but...
	Well, let's, if you don't mind, let's start.
	Sorry, let me just...
	No, no, that's fine.
	If you don't mind, let's start.
	What are the...
	You said you had a bad relationship with your parents.
	How would that be characterized?
	How would I know that if I saw it?
	It's just...
	I don't know.
	I live with them as well.
	So it's not like you can escape.
	It's just been sort of...
	I basically live on a farm, so it's just always very, very stressful.
	Stress isn't dealt with properly, and I think it's just passed down to everyone.
	Family members just get sucked into the stress, and it's always an unpleasant place to live in.
	So the only cure to that is to move out, but because I've got anxiety problems, I tend to find a job and then have a panic attack and walk out and not go back to it and then end up doing a really crappy job and being too scared to go back to it.
	It's a constant cycle.
	I keep trying to get out of the household and live my own independent life and then come crashing back down, crawling back through the cat flap into a very I don't know, I have so much sort of anger in a way.
	I just don't like, I don't even sort of bother really.
	I think I'm almost as bad as I'm perhaps, but I'm not aggressive.
	I'm always just saying chill out, relax, don't be stressed.
	That never really helps.
	So that's one issue I guess.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	So you said that the farm is a stressful and anxious place to be because of the uncertainty of the weather and crops and prices of, I mean, yeah.
	And their capacity to be able to deal with stress.
	They can't process it in a very good way.
	It just comes down bad.
	And is it right for me to understand that if you're not available to work on the farm, that's tougher for your parents, right?
	Because they need the labor.
	And if you have somebody who's able to work for cheaper or for free, right?
	Well, I've always been involved.
	It's too much work, seven days a week, whatever.
	So I haven't got involved.
	So I'm not really part of their working relationship, but I am part of a family relationship, which sort of feels a bit of that.
	So that's one of the aspects that I enjoy, which is living here.
	And if nothing in particular changes, what do you see 35 as looking like?
	So what's happening in 10 years for you?
	Well, I'm still...
	I still have panic attacks in certain situations because of whatever reason for it hasn't been overcome and I'm still at home and it's still awful and terrible.
	I still haven't got the friends I want.
	I still haven't got the people around me that I want.
	And I haven't got the job that I would like, which I don't know yet.
	Desperate to find out.
	Right.
	Okay, and I imagine that things would be a little worse, right?
	I mean, just because...
	Oh, definitely.
	Panic in a situation that doesn't change tends to escalate until something changes, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	It would just be...
	Yeah, it would be horrible.
	And how were you disciplined as a child?
	Well, I can see it now of how they talk to other people.
	People and children.
	There's no reasoning at all.
	It's just yelling at a raised voice.
	And in the past, yeah, I would hear it as well sometimes.
	And so you hit and yelled at, and how was the hitting?
	I mean, was it spanking?
	Was it butt, face?
	How was that?
	How did that happen?
	Well, most of the time it would be spanking or whatever, but there had been a few extreme situations where I'd been chased at by my father and had a fist thrown at me or been hit by a mob or something.
	I was quite young.
	Right.
	Okay.
	And when you say that you weren't reasoned with, what did that look like?
	It just rather than sort of...
	Well, the situation when I was sort of chased was literally just me laughing with my friend.
	I don't know what I was doing.
	I don't think I was being particularly cheesy.
	I mean, I was laughing with my friend and messing around.
	And next thing, I was just chased pretty much.
	So there was no...
	There's no warnings.
	There's no, you're annoying me.
	There's nothing.
	Yeah, it's just from one extreme to the other.
	And I find that there isn't much...
	If I don't see your logic, they kind of laugh about it or say, oh, you're always right.
	Yeah, you're right, aren't you?
	You get very sarcastic.
	They sort of brush it off with that defence.
	Like, oh, you know the thing, don't you?
	Yeah, you know the thing sort of thing.
	Wait, so you mean sort of sarcastic?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, oh.
	Sarcastic British parents.
	Let me just make a note here.
	I've never heard of that before.
	Just, you know, I like to get something new out of every Sunday show.
	But yeah, eye-rolling sarcastic British parents.
	Anyway.
	Right, okay, so as far as I understand what you're saying, one of the major issues, if I were to sort of throw in my opinions from outside...
	One of the major issues here is unpredictability, right?
	Like you're just laughing with a friend.
	You're not breaking any rules, right?
	They don't say, don't go play with the wood chipper.
	And you're like, oh, I'm going to go play with the wood chipper.
	I hope I don't get caught.
	Oh, I've got caught!
	Right, now I'm going to get punished, right?
	It wasn't like that?
	Yeah.
	Mm-hmm.
	Right, right.
	This is something that Ayn Rand talked about, and she had a great experience with tyranny.
	Of course, growing up in Russia.
	And she said that the problem with tyranny is the unpredictable nature of it.
	So if there's a death penalty for spitting on the sidewalk, don't spit on the sidewalk.
	But the essence of tyranny is not harsh rules but no rules and random harsh punishments.
	Unpredictable, unguessable harsh punishments, right?
	Our fight-or-flight mechanism...
	It's designed to process particular information, right?
	Like there's a big giant lion's tail waving through the grass coming towards me.
	I better do something, right?
	Yeah.
	But if you're in an environment where punishments are random and unpredictable, then I think what generally happens is your fight or flight mechanism gets completely screwed up.
	And because it's random...
	You can't see the lion.
	Well, you can't see the lion, but there's always a lion.
	Right?
	The fight-or-flight mechanism is designed to spike.
	Like, you either get away, in which case you feel better, or you don't get away, in which case you feel nothing.
	Either way, your fight-or-flight mechanism, fight, flight, or freeze, is usually right.
	But if you're in a situation where you simply do not know what is permitted or what is not permitted, and if you cannot...
	If you cannot appeal to your punishers for any just explication of rules, right?
	So if you're being chased and hit and yelled at or whatever and you say, what did I do wrong?
	And if your punishers won't give you an answer, then you are in a situation of tyranny.
	And technically this makes the entire West a tyranny.
	I just sort of wanted to point this out.
	It's not just family.
	It's political.
	Um...
	Anyone can be audited.
	There are books out there which say we break an average of five felonies a day without even knowing it.
	We are all in a stressed out situation with regards to our governments.
	Because we are in a situation of no rules.
	There are so many rules, so many tax rules, so many regulations that it simply is impossible for us to be secure in avoiding illegality.
	And that's sort of the point, to keep us on edge, to keep us anxious, to keep us afraid of criticizing the powers that be.
	The whole purpose of these rules is to keep everyone on edge and to make the attack of the tyrant subject only to his whim.
	I point that out politically because it's probably easier to see that politically than it is to see it within your family.
	But if you're in a situation where you cannot appeal to the rules and where punishment occurs on the emotional whim of the punisher, then you are in a situation where...
	Your fight-or-flight mechanism is going to be likely in perpetual activity to some degree or another.
	You're never going to feel fully relaxed.
	You're never going to feel fully secure.
	And you're never going to feel fully safe.
	That'd be nice, yeah.
	Right, right.
	Right, so the panic attacks, you know, I mean, to me it's the difference between if you go into a boxing ring, you know, like, and you've got boxing, like, you may not be that great at boxing, but at least you can see the blows that are coming, right?
	Whereas if you're tied to a chair and they put a burlap sack over your head and then they hit you 10 times a day at random intervals, you never got to relax.
	You lie down in the boxing ring, game's over.
	You're not going to get hit anymore.
	You're done.
	I can relax and find my teeth, right?
	But if you're in a situation where the rules are not defined, the punishments are made up on the fly, and the attacks occur randomly, then you are going to be in a situation of great emotional challenge.
	And it has health effects, right?
	I'm sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, no, definitely.
	I mean, I've had, out of the family, but I know it's probably from there, I've had massive problems with anxiety since I was, well, Since 2004, so nearly 10 years.
	And that problem itself, that anxiety is the reason I'm not out of this situation, because in order to get out of the situation, I need a job which pays the bills and which I can actually stay in for more than a month.
	Because my last job, I was out after a month because of these panic attacks I have, and it causes a great deal of stress to my body.
	So it wasn't really...
	Me sort of leaving the job in a way is actually my body saying, I can't handle this anymore.
	I lost two stone in the month I went there and that was it.
	I just couldn't handle it anymore.
	My body just said, no, you're going.
	It's always going back to square one.
	I'm just pretty bad at finding this means of leaving the place.
	But I guess the problem is like the place itself, which created the anxiety, Sorry, the anxieties which were created as part of the place, I still persist outside of it.
	It kind of always brings me back because of, yeah, I have massive panic attacks and have to walk out of these situations.
	I've had therapy for a long time with the NHF and also privately as well, and I've taken antidepressants.
	I'm not on them now.
	I don't know, there have been improvements because I used to have issues with getting on public transport and going to supermarkets, but that's fine now.
	So there's been some improvements, it's just actually finding...
	Okay, I don't want to talk about the stuff that's going right, if you don't mind, just because I understand that.
	So there's two things that I would talk about.
	Again, this is all just off-the-cuff, idiot amateur hour as usual, but the first thing that I would focus on is the degree to which anxiety breeds isolation.
	Anxiety breeds isolation, and I think that's obviously one of the major issues that you're facing.
	But we're so focused on the anxiety that we sometimes miss the isolation.
	All abuse breeds isolation.
	All abuse is designed to breed isolation because when you have horizontal support systems, they reveal hierarchical abuse in your environment, right?
	Because people, they come over and they say, holy shit, your parents are treating you, this is not good, whatever, right?
	And so the sole purpose of abuse is to isolate.
	And also isolation because it removes horizontal support structures, i.e. friends and lovers and companions who can give you a clearer view of your situation.
	What happens is you end up with this hysterical empty bond with your abuser.
	Because you can't spread out horizontally and get your own life, so you end up kind of attached in a very non-productive way, in a very empty way, you end up attached to your abusers.
	So you lack the view from outside and you end up with this completely unsatisfying bond with your abusers that doesn't nourish you and doesn't let you get free and you just hang in this empty dead orbit.
	You know, like a little rock floating around mercury.
	It doesn't get anything satisfying and you can't leave and you can't connect.
	And this is the null zone.
	This is the dead zone, which I think is really, really important.
	Yeah, I mean, Stockholm Syndrome is one way to put it.
	That's usually a bit more of an extreme situation, but there is this issue that occurs.
	So that's number one.
	Number two is that The antidote to anxiety, in my opinion, one of the antidotes to anxiety is anger.
	And I've been listening while you've been talking for any sense of anger.
	Like, you got kind of fucked, if you don't mind me putting it so bluntly.
	Of course.
	I mean, your whole neurological system is kind of hardwired.
	Freedom, progress, liberty, security, growth, adulthood, all of this stuff, right?
	You got hardwired against yourself.
	Through no fault of your own.
	I couldn't feel it better, yeah.
	I couldn't feel it better, I was just going to say.
	You've become your own tripwire.
	And through no fault of your own, and through no desire of your own, and through no error of your own, just because of what you had to survive with this...
	Random attacks on high.
	For me, it was the spiderweb versus the flamethrower.
	That was my experience of beginning to really deal with this stuff.
	I felt like when I was younger, I felt like everywhere I moved were these spider webs and they weren't like chains because chains are obvious and chains are like, well, I'm going to saw through these bastards and get out, right?
	It wasn't like a bear trap.
	It's like these little acidic lashing little spider webs that just kind of irritate your skin and they kind of paralyze you and you don't want to move anywhere and it's not that bad but you can kind of get by and for me, I think I had a dream about this when I was in therapy.
	I don't know if I remember right.
	But it basically was like a big-ass flamethrower.
	And the flamethrower was the anger that burned away the spiderwebs that did not even give me the dignity of being chained.
	You know that story of Gulliver with the Lilliputians, right?
	And there's all these tiny little threads holding him down.
	I think that's why – I mean there's all these tiny threads called culture or history or family or religion or nationalism or whatever bullshit we're forced to swallow as children.
	So it's these tiny little threads.
	You can't identify any one of them and you can't unpick any one of them.
	Lock on your leg.
	You know what to focus on.
	You saw on that mother – until you get free.
	But if you've got all these tiny little threads and nothing is particularly obvious and it's all just kind of binding you.
	It's like it's cocoon.
	It's like being tied down by ants.
	And it's just one big-ass flamethrower, which is – I'm angry about the whole situation.
	I'm angry about the degree – personally, I would speak for myself.
	I don't want to tell you your experience.
	My experience was I'm very angry that that which was supposed to help me, my fight-or-flight mechanism, which was supposed to protect me from evil, is now keeping me from good.
	My whole fight-or-flight mechanism, which was supposed to make sure that I got to freedom, is now keeping me from freedom.
	My whole fight-or-flight mechanism, which was supposed to serve my life, is now throttling my life.
	Yeah.
	I was very angry, and rightly so, and justly so, and healthily so, at the degree to which my body, which was supposed to be my protector, my savior, my temple, was turned against me and became my prison.
	My body, which was supposed to liberate me and propel me to the future, became my prison.
	And that was an incredible injustice that was done to me when I was younger.
	That is exactly how I feel now.
	Do you think it's possible that this path has led me to not be able to make important life decisions now, i.e.
	career, path, job, path, and important things like that?
	Well, of course.
	I mean, if you are worried, like, listen, sorry, if you lost two stone, also known as balls, if you lost two stone in your last job in a month, that's dangerous, right?
	Yeah.
	So, of course, your ability to make decisions about your future has been violently interfered with.
	Yeah.
	I mean, you might as well be on a freaking space station, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	As far as your access to the rest of the planet goes, right?
	Yeah.
	It's like whenever I think I know what I'm going to do, I'm interested in economics.
	I'm not so sure about pursuing it in this country because it's, you know, Keynesian.
	Mainly in universities.
	I used to be interested in writing and things like that, but whenever it comes to me getting close to doing it, I stop.
	No, no, no, no.
	Listen, sorry to be annoying, but you're trying to overleap your history to get to your future.
	There's nobody with long and strong enough legs to overleap their history to get to their future.
	You can't do it.
	You have to go back.
	You want to find a way to break out of your prison and get to the wide and open fields of your future.
	But the whole point is you've got to pick the lock.
	You're just running at the wall saying, damn, I'm really trapped now because every time I run at this wall, I hit it and fall back.
	But you've got to spend the time, effort, and energy to pick the lock.
	Do you know the best way?
	In my opinion, the best way is the simple virtues.
	Right?
	You sit down with your folks.
	Sorry, that's a ridiculous Americanism, which I really dislike.
	They always use this in political.
	You know, the folks who are trying to help you are the folks who really want to be folksy with you, and I think there's some folks over there.
	We all got a big pile of folks over there, and oh, we're all so folksy.
	You're from Hawaii!
	You don't have folk!
	Anyway.
	Anyway, so, but sit down with your parents, with the people who were around you when you were a kid, and say...
	Hey, I got some stuff I want to talk about.
	You know, you blow on the lock with honesty and it falls away.
	It's not easy.
	It's terrifying.
	It's terrifying.
	But you've got some legitimate complaints about how you were raised.
	And you sit down with your family and you say, I need to talk.
	Like, you may have noticed I'm kind of fucking stuck here.
	Yeah.
	And I have some complaints about how I was raised.
	I have some issues with how I was raised.
	And I'm angry.
	And I'm not saying that this means I'm right.
	I'm not saying this means you're wrong.
	But this is my genuine experience of being in this family.
	I have some problems.
	I want to talk about it with you.
	They say that the blood is thicker than water and family is everything.
	Great!
	If this is the strongest bridge known to man, let's drive the tank called honesty across it.
	I mean, if family is everything, then let's talk about it.
	If in my family I am to be censored, if in my family I am not to be allowed to speak the truth, if in my family I am not allowed to criticize, if in my family I am not allowed to have any genuine emotional experiences that are somewhat inconvenient to other people, then I better damn well know that.
	Because then, lies are thicker than blood.
	Suppression is thicker.
	Than family.
	And family is an incredibly weak structure.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	No, sorry.
	I just think by bringing that up, it would be...
	I know it's bad to sort of assume the response or reaction, but I can imagine it being like me suddenly speaking Spanish to them, and then just saying, what?
	And almost laughing, saying, are you mad?
	And then they'd also be assuming that, Oh, you're so ungrateful.
	We did all this and all that.
	And then I just basically don't… No, but sorry.
	Look, first of all, sorry.
	I want to point out, first of all, it's not bad to anticipate the response.
	It's impossible to not anticipate the response.
	You know your parents, right?
	A quarter century, you know your parents.
	So it would be insane for you to not anticipate a response.
	Right?
	So, I mean, that's not bad.
	And, you know, gosh, I hope that you won't get anything out of this like what you're going to do is good or bad.
	But what you want is the truth.
	You know, there's...
	I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Aladdin.
	But in it, Robert Williams plays this hyperkinetic blue puff of smoke genie.
	And at one point, the prince is like, oh, I don't know what to say to Jasmine.
	I don't know.
	And he's like, how about the truth?
	And there's this big flashing sign, neon, the truth.
	You know, it's so simple, right?
	You're not a prince.
	You're the truth.
	Well, this is what my life is.
	How about the truth?
	Yeah.
	Because if they attack you, if they mock you, if they laugh at you, if they dismiss you, then you have a pretty fucking important truth about your family.
	Which is they choose their own immediate emotional comfort over the reality of your genuine experience of the family.
	That they do not want to hear the truth from you.
	And in fact that they will attack and oppose you for speaking the truth to them.
	That's just information to have.
	And we should never deny ourselves accurate information about our relationships.
	The degree to which we deny ourselves accurate information about our relationships is the degree to which we remain futile, empty, lost in space, and lose time forever.
	You need accurate information about your relationships more than you need accurate information about the weather, about whether cars are coming when you're about to cross the street.
	That's what you need is an accurate map of your relationships.
	And the accurate map of your relationships cannot be generated by you, but can only be generated by you in interaction with others.
	You speak the truth to them and you see and you feel their response to it.
	It's not a one-time thing.
	It can be a whole couple of runs at it.
	I spent months on this particular process when I was mapping out the truth about my relationships.
	I just needed some facts.
	When you're lost, when you're paralyzed, it's because you have no facts.
	If you're in the woods, you've got no GPS, you've got no compass, you've got no map, what the fuck are you going to do?
	You're paralyzed.
	I don't know what to do.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	And so if you're lost in life, it's because you do not have an accurate map of your relationships.
	You do not have the truth about those around you and their perspectives and opinions and views of you.
	So you need to get to the truth about your relationships before you can build any kind of change in the future.
	Otherwise, you just, you know, I put you in the middle of the ocean in a little boat and I say, go to Calais.
	And you're going to be like, wow, I don't know where I am.
	I don't even know which ocean I'm in.
	I don't know where the wind, I don't know.
	You need a map before you can get anywhere.
	And the first map that you always need is a map of your primary relationships.
	And the only way to get that is to be honest with the people around you.
	And what does the map have to say?
	What sort of information do you need in the map to sort of encourage you?
	Because I'm thinking maybe you can just break away and try and escape that way.
	But escape from what?
	See, if you don't have an accurate map of your relationships, then you don't even know what you're escaping from, which means that you're very likely to recreate it somewhere else.
	Right.
	Like just running blindly in the woods, you get away from where you were, but you don't know if you're getting anywhere useful.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Because look, let's say that you try and get this map and you find out, I'm not anticipating, but you know, if I were to put money down, you find out that your family does not choose to listen, does not choose to examine, does not choose to be honest, does not choose to heal.
	Yes.
	Well, I bet you they've never told you that, honestly.
	I bet you they've never told you, listen, we're a family and we appreciate you being around here, but we never want to know anything about your genuine experiences.
	And we certainly, although we criticized you heavily and punished you as children, we never ever want to be criticized or punished or not punished, but we never want to be criticized as adults.
	And that this family is merely a convenience of biological life forms living under the same roof structure, but it has nothing to do with love or intimacy.
	And if your parents have ever said things like, Oh, you know, we love you.
	We'll do anything for you.
	This and that and the other.
	We're family.
	It's everything.
	And then you actually put that to the test.
	And then you find out that it's all nonsense.
	Oh, well, what happens?
	what's your emotional reaction likely going to be?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	What's your emotional reaction likely going to be?
	Well, that has happened before.
	Yeah.
	What was your emotional reaction?
	Just...
	That exact night I ended up getting very drunk and arrested.
	You ended up drunken and arrested?
	Yeah, I was younger.
	What if you didn't suppress your emotional reaction with alcohol and acting out?
	Well, I burst into tears the second it happened.
	I don't often do that.
	Okay, let me give you an analogy then since you are having a tough time getting to this which is probably why you're paralyzed, right?
	So I say to you, listen, I'm going to sell you this car.
	It's a really good price.
	If you have any problems with it whatsoever, I will pay for the maintenance for the next five years.
	Right?
	You get the car, and the next day, the brakes fail.
	And you bring it back to me, and I say, no, I'm not paying anything.
	I'm just kidding.
	I mean, that wasn't true.
	That wasn't real.
	How would you feel?
	Well, betrayed.
	And, yeah, not...
	You'd be angry.
	Yeah.
	Because I had made a claim which was the basis of an interaction of a relationship and then I did not fulfill my end of the relationship.
	So the people in my life who said, I love you and I care for you and I do anything for you, I said, okay, well, I want to talk about these difficult things.
	Well, no, we can't do that.
	Well, I'm angry about this stuff that happened in the past.
	Well, too bad.
	Deal with it.
	Grow up.
	Move on.
	Put it behind you.
	It's all in the past.
	Forget it.
	Forgive.
	Forget.
	Move on.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	So, the people say they'd do anything for me.
	Anything!
	And then I needed a half-hour conversation about something that was difficult.
	Wouldn't happen.
	Well, if I'm going to be pissed off about a guy not fixing the brakes when he promises, how much more am I going to be pissed off about people who made all these promises not because they had any intention, any intention of doing anything for me, but simply to lull me into a situation where I could be exploited?
	A little bit more important than second brakes on a car, right?
	Yeah.
	So this is where you get the honesty and you get the map and you find out if these limitations exist.
	If your parents are like, well, we'll do anything for you.
	We love you.
	Then, hey, you want to talk about this difficult stuff in your past?
	Of course.
	We're your family.
	Of course.
	We're your family.
	We will sit down and we will talk about it as long as it takes until you feel better.
	We will be honest.
	We will be open.
	We will grit our teeth.
	We will all go to therapy if we have to.
	We will find some way to help get you past this.
	The fucking marines who are strangers don't leave dead bodies behind.
	They go back and they risk getting their skulls blown off to go pick up a corpse.
	Can we at least get one-tenth of one percent of that from the people who claim that we're everything to them and we're family and we want to talk about something that's difficult?
	Can we at least get one-tenth of one percent of the commitment that relative strangers have in a war zone from the flesh and blood who raised us?
	That's all I'm asking.
	I mean...
	Can we at least get the guarantees in writing to be enacted in the real world?
	So you go and you find this map.
	And if the map is false, if the map is a lie, if the map is manipulative, if the map has been to keep you around to exploit you or to avoid the past or for the emotional convenience of self-involved people, well, then you have a clear view of where you are.
	And once you have a clear view of where you are, you can then find that the paralysis about where you want to go will lift.
	But if you do not have the fog lift from where you are, if you do not get a map, a compass, a GPS, which is the truth about your relationships, you can't get anywhere except to another place that's pretty much the same as where you started.
	Right.
	No, that makes a lot of sense.
	Yeah, I'm doing that now, I guess.
	Now, unless there's – I recognize this is a somewhat costly call for you, not even just in terms of money.
	But I do have lots of other callers and I do want to make sure that we get to those.
	But if you do get a chance, drop me a line and let me know how it goes.
	And if you do have a chance to talk to a therapist and you are going to sit down with your family and be honest about your thoughts and experiences with them, which I – I mean, unless you're in immediate physical danger, in my opinion, this is just so important.
	It's a weird thing to even say.
	Be honest because what I'm saying is be honest to the people who you claim to love and who claim to love you.
	I mean, that to me is like saying to someone, if you don't like the wet, come out of the rain.
	It feels that ridiculous and that obvious to say.
	And I don't mean this in any way, shape, or form to be any kind of deficiency on your part because it took me an embarrassing amount of time to come up with this principle myself.
	We all said honesty is a virtue.
	Well, be honest with the people in your life.
	And it's just – it's weird to have to say that, but it is what needs to be said and it is what needs to be done.
	So if you – I would definitely work it out.
	Prepare with your therapist and if you're going to go into any fundamental conversations about history with your family and you don't have any prior experience of that and you fear and feel that it's going to go badly, I strongly, strongly, strongly urge to engage with the therapist ahead of time, to do the role plays, to have the support that you need because it can be a brutal and grueling experience.
	My hope and my goal is always that there's a breakthrough in the families.
	There's an honesty.
	There's a communication.
	There's a commitment to something better.
	That is not the most common reaction or response, but it's certainly something always to be hoped for.
	And the best chance of achieving that is to engage with a therapist, a really good therapist ahead of time, and not one who's just, you know, well, family is everything, forgive, forget, and who's just there to manage their own bullshit by getting and keeping other people in dysfunctional relationships.
	But focus on that, and I hope that you will give it a chance.
	I think it's the best way.
	To break out.
	And the breaking out is not breaking out of the family.
	It's breaking out of the paralysis, right?
	Because the solution to paralysis in a dysfunctional family is not to leave the family.
	You know, it's simply to get the truth.
	And what happens after that is usually pretty obvious, you know?
	I mean, if the truth is that you finally get a breakthrough and you can really talk about things that matter and important, fantastic!
	And if you end up just being completely brutalized, dismissed, and attacked, and minimized, and so on, Then I think that your fight or flight mechanism will kick in in quite a different way and much more productively.
	So if you get a chance, do drop me a line and let me know how it goes.
	But those would be my suggestions.
	I really appreciate it.
	Thank you very much.
	You're very welcome.
	Great chat and best of luck to you.
	I'm positive that you can get the life that you want.
	I am absolutely positive that you can get the life that you want.
	And I'm very sorry.
	I'm incredibly sorry that this is the barricade you have to climb over because it's barbed wire, shark's teeth, glass, broken bottles.
	But on the other side is...
	It's some amazing stuff, and I'm very sorry that you have to go through this and you have to do this.
	It's not how your life should be beginning, but I really do feel very strongly that once you pursue it, you will get some amazing stuff.
	We appreciate it.
	Thank you so much again.
	You're very welcome.
	Okay.
	Take care, everyone.
	Take care.
	Okay.
	Bye.
	All right.
	Next up today, we have Gregory.
	Hello.
	How are you doing?
	Hello, I'm fine.
	How are you doing?
	I'm doing very well.
	And I just wanted to have one cheesy line here.
	I'm a long-time listener, first-time caller.
	Ding, ding, ding!
	And since I love the work that you do, I've been a donator, I think, for about a year now.
	Ah, well, let me just cue some sweet, sweet nothings into your ear.
	Hello, donator.
	How are you today?
	What are you wearing?
	I'm wearing a smile.
	Well, I guess I have two questions.
	The first one is I recently just finished writing a book.
	It's a fictional piece and I guess I'm looking for tips or suggestions on publication.
	Oh, you know, you're asking me for suggestions on publication.
	Mr.
	Self-published guy.
	Well, I mean, for publication, especially if the book has any kind of original content, I was just listening to Ann Coulter talking about for 10 years, nobody would publish her.
	And even after she had a couple of New York Times bestsellers about Bill Clinton and then I think Scandal was the next one.
	Nobody would take her weekly columns.
	For 10 years, the only thing she was able to get from her agent were things called kill fees, which is where somebody requests an article for you, and then if they don't publish it, they'll pay you some money just for your time.
	So for 10 years, she got nowhere in the publishing world, and now she's quite a phenomenon, and I think a very good writer, and a very challenging writer to read in many ways for me.
	But...
	That's what I keep hearing.
	I've got to live in the poorhouse for about five years before I... I'm sorry, say again?
	That's what I keep hearing is I've got to live in the poorhouse for about five years before I can...
	Well, I don't think that's necessary.
	I don't think that's necessary.
	But for me, the traditional publishing route was not the way to go.
	All existing structures in society serve the past.
	No existing structures in society serve the future.
	This is really, really important.
	If you're trying to do something innovative, binding yourself to any existing structure will be swimming against the current.
	So if you're looking – if you're trying to do something original – like, okay, so if you're trying to publish a police procedural, you know, like this is like Michael Connelly's work.
	Well, okay, then there's agencies out there and there's publishing houses out there that specialize in that stuff.
	There's a predefined market and, you know, people like this.
	It's a good airport book.
	It's a combination of Jaws meets Star Wars meets The Devil and Miss Jones.
	I don't know.
	But whatever it is that you've got, if it's facing the past, if it's not particularly original, if it's not really adding much value to collective human thought, then I guess you could hook it to existing structures.
	But if you're doing something new, right?
	I assume if you're listening to this show, you're not doing something same old, same old.
	Then...
	Well, you have to bypass and go for new structures.
	And the newest structure is the internet.
	And so I've had, I don't know, 200,000 books downloaded over the course of the last couple of years.
	And there's just no way that I would have had any kind of impact if I had tried to go the traditional publishing route.
	You know, in Canada, a book is a bestseller if it sells 5,000 copies, for God's sakes.
	Right.
	You know, 40 times that just by going to the internet.
	And I would argue more money based upon donations than I would have ever gotten going the traditional publishing route.
	Right?
	So, it's because in the traditional publishing route, an author is likely to get 5 or 10% of the sales price of the book.
	So I just need 1 out of 10 or 20 people to donate based upon downloading a book, and I'm doing the same.
	But without all the contracts, without all the overhead, without other people chasing everyone all over the planet for copyright violations and other things that would be vile to my sensibilities and so on.
	So just self-publish.
	I'm a big fan of Lulu, lulu.com.
	They have been my publishing house, so to speak, for a long time.
	And I've always found that their books are quality, their shipping process is fine, they're easy to work with.
	And if you can format it in Word, you can get it out.
	And you may want to pay a little bit to get a nice cover done.
	That can be helpful.
	But you can read it as an audiobook and publish it as an MP3 file or wherever you want to You can convert it to EPUB, make it available.
	Amazon allows you to make your EPUBs available if you want.
	So in terms of getting your work out, I mean, it's crazy.
	It's crazy how easy it is now compared to the past.
	Gatekeepers are assholes, frankly.
	That's my basic.
	The gatekeepers, and Jeff Tucker's got lots of stuff, although somewhat more elegantly put than my salt of the earth language, but gatekeepers are there to shield the human population from anything that might startle them with originality.
	The TV gatekeepers and the movie gatekeepers, they're all there to make sure that you're not frightened by anything you haven't seen before.
	They're there to massage anything even remotely original into something that is very familiar to everything that you've seen before so that you're not startled into actually thinking outside the matrix.
	So the gatekeepers are not people that you want to be dealing with.
	You want to be a node gatekeeper kind of person.
	And the best way to do that is to go through the internet.
	That's good, I guess, because I was able to scare myself enough with my own imagination, so...
	I'd probably scare the gatekeepers, too.
	But that was earlier, kind of leading to my other question, which was, I guess, the best way to incorporate, I guess, philosophical truth within fictional writing.
	Yeah.
	Well, the best way to incorporate philosophical truth into fictional writing is to – for me, it was to focus on childhood, right?
	So I've got a novel called The God of Atheists, and in that novel, the children – I don't want to give anything away.
	Everybody should just read this novel, in my opinion.
	I mean it's just – I know it's not the cheapest thing in the world.
	I've tried to make it as cheap as possible, but – and people who donate, you know, for – You go get it and it's in the...
	The gold section of the donators, like there's hundreds of podcasts and some books and all that that are just there for donators.
	You get it, I think it's the PDF, it's available in the gold.
	So 20 bucks a month or whatever it is, something like that.
	But everybody should just read this, right?
	So you get to just do it, just sign up for a month.
	I don't care.
	Sign up for a month, give me 20 bucks, get a free book and enjoy it.
	But my approach was to have the children be curious about the moral nature of their society they lived in.
	Now, finding a way to make that believable and make that work and all of that was a challenge and all that.
	But to me, that was...
	Philosophy comes from youth upwards, right?
	Because philosophy is about an original relationship with reality.
	That's all it is.
	Philosophy is about the original, uncluttered, authentic relationship with reality.
	And we're all born that way.
	No one's born a Christian or a Jew or...
	But, you know, fundamentally in terms of culture, black or white or Japanese or nobody's born Anglican, nobody's born even male or female.
	These things are to some degree socially constructed.
	So the original relationship with reality is philosophy.
	We're all born Socrates.
	We're all born philosophical.
	I mean, my daughter is four and a half and we have some incredibly great conversations about philosophy.
	You know, somebody was asking me the other day, you know, do you have a UPB version for five-year-olds?
	And yes, there is a podcast called The ABCs of UPB, which is Philosophy Explained to Children, which I did long before I became a parent.
	But my daughter, she's a UPB machine, right?
	I mean, she gets that the word tree applies to more than one tree.
	She's a universalizing machine.
	Of course, we all are, right?
	And all the UPB is that, right?
	So for me...
	If you can find a way to harness the creativity and curiosity of children in fiction, I think that makes for a very powerful and very true examination of philosophy.
	Because you know what the world is fundamentally?
	Boy, I really am making some grandiose statements today, but why not?
	I've had a coffee and a half.
	No, the world fundamentally is there's this bulwark called bullshit.
	Right?
	And it's this big, giant dam.
	And there's these succeeding generations of original new young minds that come like a big tsunami crashing into this bulwark of bullshit.
	And the more aggressive and violent the bulwark is, then the more the brains are smashed and broken.
	And the more...
	That philosophy reinforces the natural curiosity of children, the more they can make cracks in this bullshit.
	Damn.
	And it's just smash, smash, smash, generation after generation after generation of scalding and caustic and curious and skeptical minds go crashing into all of the accumulated bullshit of history.
	And sometimes the bullshit holds and sometimes the bullshit breaks.
	And I'm really aiming, right?
	This is the curiosity principles, open and honest conversations.
	Let's just find out where the bullshit is and break through it.
	So that to me is...
	So for me, having these sort of young waves of curious minds go up against the corruption of their elders was to me a very compelling storyline, and that's the essential storyline to the god of atheists.
	And so whereas most philosophical stories, whether it's the sort of minor drama plays of the Socratic dialogues written by Plato or all the way through to Atlas Shrugged, what whether it's the sort of minor drama plays of the Socratic dialogues I mean where are the children in these stories?
	They don't exist.
	It's all a bunch of pompous old guys waffling on about truth, reason and never interacting with a single goddamn child.
	Well, what the hell is the point of that?
	I mean where do they think philosophy is coming from?
	It's not coming from adults.
	Adults are mostly bound into the big bulwark of bullshit, right?
	They're just embedded in the dam like fossils 300 feet under the ground.
	And so the fact that there are no children in these stories always bothered me.
	And so when I wanted to write my great philosophical novel, I wanted it to start with children.
	And also, of course, there's the natural sympathy of watching children get ground up, right?
	I think about these poor kids in the Jewish schools or the Mormon schools or the Islamic schools, I mean, just sitting there, and I was one of these kids!
	Just sitting there learning all this insane crap.
	Hour after hour, just having massive viruses of insanity injected directly into your brain for them to breed and fester.
	And scrub away the natural empiricism of the body and the mind.
	I mean, there is a natural sympathy.
	You know, if we see these brains, these young, tender brains smashing into the bulwark of bullshit in slow motion, don't we feel like our heart's breaking every time we see it?
	It's horrible.
	I see this in school all the time, patriotism.
	I pledge allegiance to the flag.
	I mean, I can't love cloth.
	I just can't...
	Get round to that particular perspective.
	I cannot worship dye.
	You know, the dye in the cloth.
	The dye of the worshipping of the dye in the cloth.
	So, I think if we slow down our view of society and we recognize that all children are born philosophers, and they have to, basically what happens is, and I don't think this is too subtle a metaphor, You know, the giant ham fist of ancient culture grabs those brains and rubs them repeatedly against a cheese grater of bullshit until they're just shredded and broken and infected and diseased.
	And then you can try and put the pieces back together later, and I think we can have a good degree of success with that.
	But the brains are cheese grated by culture, and it's a brutal and destructive and hideous process of intense, violent propagandizing.
	And propagandizing is simply the substitute of insane punishment for rational reality.
	And if we see that process, then our love of philosophy can be reawakened.
	But the idea that philosophy just rains down from old guys in robes talking in a marketplace is not the reality.
	Because that's saying that we have to develop into philosophy.
	But that's not true.
	We are philosophical when we're born.
	We are philosophical when we're born.
	And it has to be smashed out of us.
	And if we get that process and we get how hideous and what a fundamental violation it is to place violent and abusive punishment between a child's natural integrity and the health of reality, once we get how fundamentally abusive that is, Then we will recoil from it and then philosophy will simply be part of our natural existence, right?
	In the same way that, you know, those African tribes, they put those hoops on children's necks to make their necks grow elongated like little giraffes because they're supposed to be attractive and then they can't actually walk around without those hoops anymore because their necks will fall over.
	They can't support their own strength anymore.
	Or in the Victorian era where they put these corsets on women to the point where they lacked the abdominal muscles to even push out babies and died by the millions in childbirth.
	Well, if you get that putting the corset on the woman's body and squishing her innards and destroying her capacity to have diaphragm muscles or abdominal muscles, the solution to that is not doing sit-ups later on in life.
	The solution to that is don't put this fucking stuff on the kids to begin with.
	So anyway, that's my particular rant about it.
	I hope that makes some sense.
	Oh, absolutely.
	And that's why I'm glad, you know, I mean, after hearing that, I don't have to change my story much because...
	Oh, good.
	It is a story about children, basically.
	It's science fiction, so obviously it's a little bit out there.
	But essentially it is a story of children basically finding the world around them and realizing the truth.
	And maybe...
	I don't know how touchy this would be with publishers, but what I've decided, or who I have decided to make the actual antagonist of the story, because this is going to be a trilogy as well, is the main character's mother.
	Well, I'll tell you, it was my particular ignorance about the state of the culture, or my avoidance of the state of the culture, that had me have great hopes.
	For publishing this novel through traditional publishers, for which I got some significant interest and some great praise for the work.
	People called, like, independent reviewers called, this is the great Canadian novel.
	This is the best this country is ever going to produce.
	And I was like, well, this is great.
	I guess I'll be a famous writer now.
	But it was, of course, one of the grave difficulties of people with empathy is to recognize the reality that few people have empathy, right?
	Because we have empathy and it's automatic for us.
	At least those of us who have empathy, one of these people.
	We who have empathy imagine that empathy is, if not present in someone, just a layer or two down.
	You just have to pick the lock, plug it in.
	Whoa!
	The lights are all coming up, right?
	Because I grew up speaking Japanese.
	I just think that if I coax other people with a few Japanese phrases, suddenly they're going to be fluent in Japanese.
	But recognizing the fact that because I have empathy and this stuff was easy for me, Recognizing the degree to which it's impossible for other people and that they react strongly against it was the degree to which I actually was not being empathetic.
	To empathize with a lack of empathy is the great challenge of justice and truth and virtue and progress.
	And that's something which I have repeatedly failed at over the years.
	I still continue to have to work on that as a challenge.
	That which comes naturally to us, which is an essential part of our own happiness.
	I spent most of my life putting face paint on zombies and pretending that they're healthy.
	Sad but true.
	It's going to be a journey here because I'm selling my house to...
	Yeah.
	Oh, you mean for this or for some other thing?
	Oh, just for that.
	Partly for this because I guess I've been wanting to quit my job for a while and start this.
	And now that I have a great person in my life who wants to support me in this, making it a little bit easier to go down this route.
	And actually what I feel is my passion, what I'd really, truly love to do.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, I think you should be very happy that The gatekeepers are down and original thought can flow between like-minded minds with almost no impedance.
	But the other thing I just would recommend before we move on to the next caller is when you're an artist, you hate to be a salesperson.
	You hate it.
	You hate it because what you create is so precious to you that you feel you shouldn't have to make people – you shouldn't have to go down to the lakeside in the middle of the night when you're shooting off the most astounding fireworks show and say to people, hey, look.
	It's pretty.
	Go look up for heaven's sakes, people.
	Look up.
	This is beautiful fireworks.
	You think people – you just shoot your fireworks up.
	People are like, ooh, ah, and they won't – don't stop.
	Keep going with the fireworks.
	It can't get any better.
	But you do have to sell.
	You do have to sell what you create.
	That is how you honor what you create is you get behind it and you push it out into the marketplace.
	And don't be the guy who creates and lets it sit on a website and crosses his fingers.
	Get out and push that mofo up the ramp into people's visibility.
	It's hard to do.
	Look, I don't like having to sell what I do.
	Of course not.
	I owe it to the world, I believe.
	I owe it to philosophy.
	I owe it to the gifts that I have in explicating this stuff.
	So yes, I will go and ask people for money, and I will go and attempt to market, and I will go and do sometimes, now Mike's taken over some of that stuff, but do all the dull stuff of pushing this stuff out there.
	You have to get behind it and push.
	Your urge will be to go put it on a website and then go write the next book.
	Don't do that.
	Try and get it to people.
	Try and get interviews about it.
	Try and buy some advertising for it.
	You really got to try and push this thing out there because art that doesn't make it into people's hands may do you some good, but it won't do the world any good.
	So if you've got something that does the world good, really work on trying to get it out and Grit your teeth, you know?
	I mean, the people who really succeed are not just those who can create, but those who can create and sell, right?
	Steve Jobs, not the Wozniaks, so to speak, right?
	So that would be my suggestion as well.
	Good.
	Thank you.
	Thank you very much, and best of luck.
	Let me know how it goes.
	Thanks.
	And post it on the message board at freedomainradio.com.
	It's a good place to get, or send it, yeah, operations at freedomainradio.com.
	You can send it to Mike, and he can also give you some ideas about how to get the material out.
	Sure.
	All right.
	Thanks, Ben.
	Have a good one.
	Take care.
	Bye.
	Our next update, we have Ben.
	Hello, hello.
	Hello, Steph.
	What's on your mind?
	First, I want to say thank you.
	There have been two people that have really changed my life.
	The first was my therapist, which Ironically, it helped me to learn empathy and get me right side up.
	And you that pointed my life in the right direction.
	And so I very much appreciate everything that you have done.
	Oh, it's my pleasure.
	Thank you.
	So some background on my question.
	So I've been listening to the podcast in order.
	For probably a couple years now and I've finally finished up what you have, what you created back in 06.
	And so one of the points that has really stood out in my life has been to be curious and open to new ideas.
	I have recognized in myself a tendency to...
	To have a problem with cognitive dissonance, to instantly accept the things that I believe and to instantly reject things that don't fit with what I believe.
	And so this was – even knowing this, this is something that has taken conscious effort to try and get past.
	And so I have made an effort to try and be open to new ideas, to be open to facts and evidence, logic and reason, and to not just dismiss opposing ideas, to at least understand what the other side is saying.
	So this mindset was put to the ultimate test recently, and it really left me quite disoriented.
	I got a...
	Facebook friend message that had a video link in there and said, you know, you've got to watch this.
	So it was a series titled Hitler, The Greatest Story Never Told.
	And after watching the trailer for the series, I responded a little incredulously.
	Really a pro-Hitler documentary and just watch it was the response that I got.
	And so I figured, okay, going to keep an open mind.
	I'm going to try and see what the other side has to say.
	And that's World War II stuff, so it's kind of interesting.
	But the whole thing, from beginning to end, had a sort of a propaganda feel to it.
	Totally slanted, pro-German, like everything.
	So they acknowledged a little bit of the negativity.
	But...
	So this series was really long.
	It was 22 episodes, 15 minutes each.
	And each episode had a lot of relevant points.
	And there's a bunch of the stuff that I already knew and a lot of stuff that I had assumed to be true.
	But there was a lot of stuff that was new and, to say the least, shocking.
	But not just shocking.
	It was plausible, and it was presented with evidence.
	I mean, of course, you can always manufacture stuff, but it's not like they were just saying, you know, just throwing random facts.
	Sorry, just because this is all very abstract, can you give me some content?
	Well, sure.
	So I had heard for the first time recently about the blockade of Japan, and this is not on the German side, but they cover all of World War II. And so this was something that never came up in my history books.
	So it was the blockade of Japan that left them without the oil resources and sort of forced their hand.
	Yes, I think that's not particularly revisionist anymore, right?
	So for those who don't know, there was a blockade of – Japan has no natural resources.
	One of the great challenges of being a small island, I suppose, right?
	And so the reason that they attacked Pearl Harbor was because they – We're imperialistic and expansionistic and all that throughout the 30s, and the Americans were blockading them, and they were going to run out of oil, which meant their existing war machine and economy could not continue.
	Because what a ridiculous thing to do.
	We go bomb America.
	I mean, what the hell do you think is going to happen, right?
	So anyway, I think that's not as controversial as it used to be.
	And I even mentioned that a little bit in the Pearl Harbor film that Ben Affleck was in or something like that.
	It's touched on, of course, not very much.
	But anyway, go ahead.
	Yeah, so that was something I had heard previously.
	What was new to me in that area was...
	So FDR, he gives a speech saying, you know, this is a totally unexpected, unprovoked attack.
	And so some of the evidence that they show that this is just not the case was that newspaper, front page newspaper photos...
	That show the headlines where something like Japan may attack over the weekend.
	It's like, so if everybody on the island knows this, how is it that the government doesn't know?
	So that was one example.
	I think, if I remember right, the invasion of Poland, the excuse for that was, if I remember right, it was, there were some Polish soldiers that were shot, they were dressed up in German uniforms and then the Germans claimed that the Polish had invaded and attacked and that the attack was a response.
	So what the documentary shows was that after World War I, Germany was broken up and the ethnic Germans were just brutalized.
	In fact, I think they claimed something like 50,000 ethnic Germans were killed in Poland prior to Germany's invasion.
	And the same thing, of course, was true of Czechoslovakia, right?
	Czechoslovakia was...
	Patched together and on the western third, I think, of Czechoslovakia were Germans who desperately wanted to reunite with Germany and so on, right?
	Yeah, so everything that I'd always been told, learned through history, was that Germany was just, you know, they're power-hungry, they want to take over the whole world, and it was just ruthless, and there was no legitimate reason.
	Everything was just made up excuses, and So, and it continues on, and the biggest, the one that is just, you know, the one that really left me, left my head spinning, was the claim that six million Jews weren't killed.
	And the evidence that they provide is, it was enough to leave me thinking, you know, maybe not.
	And I think that's probably as close as I could get to A religious person having, you know, being proven that God doesn't exist.
	I mean, it was that disorienting.
	Well, and sorry, I don't know much about the, you know, what they call Holocaust deniers, which of course is sort of begging the question, but what are the arguments against the six million Jews figure?
	And, you know, part, of course, of what's annoying about that is that It was not just Jews, right?
	Gypsies, homosexuals, intellectuals, academics, you name it, right?
	It was all enemies of the state.
	But so what are the major arguments against the six million figure?
	Well, so what they do is they start with the evidence for.
	And so if you go to the Auschwitz Holocaust Museum, they have piles of human hair, they have piles of shoes, they have piles of clothes.
	And so when they started to look, everyone that came into the prison camp, they had their head shaved, all their clothes were taken, they were issued new shoes and new prison uniforms, and after they were stripped down and head shaved, they were deloused.
	I guess typhus was just widespread in all of the prison camps and spread through lice.
	So, you know, strip them down, disinfect them, give them new clothes, and then they go into the camps.
	And so released recently, so I guess they declassify information after so many years, 50 years or whatever.
	Released recently was aerial photos of Auschwitz.
	And so the train comes in through the middle.
	The barracks are all around either side, right up by the front.
	It is the building that they claim to be the gas chamber.
	And so people would have to come to kill.
	I think Auschwitz was supposed to be responsible for 3 million deaths.
	And so for that number to be right, you'd have to have like 2,000 to 3,000 people per day, every day, go into the gas chamber and never come out.
	And there are no witnesses that say that anybody ever did.
	And so in this, there was a separate documentary and they referenced parts of this.
	The guy went in and just looked at the building.
	And there was remnants of old plumbing.
	So it looked like it was just a bathroom that had the walls knocked out.
	And in a Holocaust denier case...
	A guy in Canada sent his, I guess it was a gas chamber design expert, I guess used for executions in the United States, sent over to look at this and he says, no way, it was impossible.
	There was no way to get the gas in.
	There was no way to evacuate the gas.
	The doors don't close.
	The windows don't close.
	The holes in the roof where the gas was supposed to come in, the The curator of the Holocaust Museum acknowledged that those were cut in after the war on the instructions of the Russians and said, you know, this is the story we're going to tell.
	And they also did tests for Zyklon B in what was supposed to be the gas chamber, and they didn't register, where they went over just to verify the test.
	Where they did the de-lousing and the Zyklon B tests were like off the chart.
	And so then also they did have a crematorium for burning the bodies that were of the people that died of typhus.
	And those are, you know, you get sick and die of typhus and you end up looking like the skeletons that had the stacks of bodies.
	Well, the Russians came in and built after the war, according to, you know, all this according to the video, of course, and built a giant chimney next to the crematorium that wasn't even attached.
	And so you can't tell exactly how big the crematorium is, but you do have the aerial photo.
	And so just think, and I've heard that the human body, if you just set it on fire, can burn for like three days.
	And so I don't know how hot you have to get it to burn faster, but if you've got a room that's got 10 ovens in it, and you can do two bodies a day, thus 20 bodies, and I mean, they're supposed to have done 2,000 or 3,000, and that just doesn't seem plausible.
	Okay, I mean, sorry, let me just, from an anarchist perspective, let's say that it wasn't 6 million.
	Right.
	Let's say.
	I mean, I don't know.
	I mean, I'm no expert in this.
	Let's say it was three million.
	So, from an anarchist perspective, we're still three million dead, right?
	Well, I'm sure lots of people— Let's say it was a hundred thousand.
	I mean, again, I don't—I have no reason to pursue or not pursue.
	But, you know, the serial killer killed ten people.
	No, it was eight people.
	No, it was three people.
	No, it was twelve people.
	Well, from a philosophical perspective, of course, the issue is not the final number.
	And of course the final number will never be known.
	Never going to be known.
	But let's – it's six million, seven million, three million, five million.
	From a sort of – from an anarchist philosophical perspective – It matters, obviously, to the people who were alive or dead, but the fact that you had a dictatorship, and I think it's fairly clear that countries that are murdering millions of their own citizens are pretty much a dictatorship, that this power is unjust.
	To me, quibbling, and I use that word with all due sensitivity that we are talking about human lives here, but quibbling about the numbers murdered by their own governments is...
	I don't think the point.
	That's not the point I'm getting to.
	Yeah.
	So I went in, you know, anti-statist, and I went out anti-statist.
	The thing that changed, though, was that I think that now, having watched this, there's a very real possibility that my country was worse than the country that, you know, is associated historically from what I've been taught as the worst country.
	Oh, your country being America?
	Right, yeah.
	So the question I got to was like, how can I possibly ever know what that has been presented as history is accurate?
	But you see, because what are we supposed to get out of history?
	Right.
	I think it's a very important question.
	For me, what we're supposed to get out of history is that the initiation of force is immoral.
	And that covers so many gamuts of human interactions, from child abuse to genocide, which are really two distant sides of the same unholy coin.
	So the purpose of history is not to teach us facts, but to teach us principles.
	Because the facts can't be changed, right?
	And so the details of history to me, and again, with all due sensitivity to the fact, we're talking about millions of deaths here, and I don't mean to say that that's a detail like it's unimportant.
	But the number of people murdered, that can't be changed.
	And if the number is revised upwards or downwards, the fundamental principle remains the same, that human beings are corrupted by power.
	And to have a state is to give a minority the power of life and death over currencies, over children, over human beings in general, over economies as a whole, over war, over peace, over prisons, over what is laughingly called justice in the statist paradigm.
	Power corrupts.
	The initiation force is immoral.
	Because no matter what facts...
	We arrive at about the past, those facts will never change anything about the future.
	But if we arrive at the principles that produce those facts, then we can change the way that we organize society in the future so that we don't have a repetition.
	So let's say the number is 5 million or 7 million or 6 million.
	That will never change the actual number of people who died because that's all in the past.
	But the principle which produced those deaths, we can change in the future.
	And that, I think, is the purpose of history.
	Like, we study what we ate so that we can change what we eat because what we ate is in the past and is part of our bodies and our systems and can't be altered.
	Does that make any sense?
	I didn't actually think you were going to come up with a good answer for this one because I figured you could pick any couple of point of these and spend your entire life looking and maybe not even be able to come up with a positive answer.
	I think that really does make sense to not really worry.
	Let's say that you and I are lung doctors and we're trying to figure out How many cigarettes have been smoked in the world?
	Ever.
	Obviously we would never get to the correct number.
	We would have more or less accurate estimates which would be constantly revised, right?
	And let's say that we dedicated our entire intellectual energies into figuring out how many cigarettes had ever been smoked in the world.
	Well...
	Waste of time.
	Well, I don't know that it's – it may not be completely unimportant, but fundamentally what we want is for people to stop smoking, right?
	Yeah.
	It totally makes sense.
	Yeah, so I think that's – to me, smoking is bad, so let's not smoke, right?
	Yeah.
	So that, to me, it's easy to fall into this pit of infinite details.
	And you see this happening among what is sometimes called the conspiracy theorists, which I think obviously is an ad hominem argument to say that, because yesterday's conspiracy theory is tomorrow's factual history.
	But to fall into the details of the 9-11 stuff, or to fall into the details of false flag operations, it doesn't matter.
	It doesn't matter because we know the principles now.
	We have enough history.
	We have enough examples.
	We have enough unrolling of the bloody carpet of the tapestry of human life.
	We know the principles that lead to these disasters.
	At what point did the American president know when Pearl Harbor was going to happen?
	It doesn't matter.
	The problem is he had the power To initiate a blockade against another country.
	The problem was another country had the power to indoctrinate its children into becoming kamikaze pilots.
	The whole point is it doesn't matter when these details occur, which set of dominoes toppled over at which time.
	The fact is that there are dominoes to begin with that fall down like coffins on the faces of innocent people.
	That's what matters.
	And I think that people, I don't mean you, but I think people can get lost in the details because they want to avoid the principles.
	Because the principles are things that are actively around us at all times.
	The details are lost in the past and the details can always be quibbled and you can never come to final resolutions.
	Nobody will ever know how many Jews died in the concentration camps.
	It's a pretty fucking awful number no matter what it is.
	Because, you know, starting from one up is a pretty fucking awful number.
	But we'll never know.
	And going back and forth about the details and, you know, were there holes in the sides of the buildings and how big were the smokestacks and were they attached and so on, I think is missing the forest for the trees.
	Right.
	I agree.
	So on conspiracy stuff, do you just keep an open mind?
	Do you ever just decide for yourself this is what I think happened?
	I don't care what happened.
	No, I wasn't there.
	Right.
	And everything that is coming to me is coming to me through an agenda.
	Let me tell you an interesting story about my first day in university.
	My first day in university, my very first class was Canadian history.
	And I was so eager to be there.
	I just spent a year and a half scratching my ass for mosquito bites in northern Ontario.
	So I was very happy to be in a classroom and learning something.
	And so I was asking questions of the teacher and the purpose of history and, you know, all that kind of stuff, right?
	I was engaged.
	The professor, sorry, professor, I guess.
	So naturally, the next thing the professor did was, like out of nowhere, she threw her glasses at me.
	And I caught them.
	I've always had pretty good reflexes.
	Like a ninja.
	I caught them.
	And she then said to the class, what happened?
	You wouldn't believe the answers.
	Ten different answers.
	He threw his glasses at you.
	You threw your chalk at him.
	He dropped something.
	Space aliens replaced him with an exact replica of himself holding your glasses.
	Like, seriously, almost nobody got it.
	Eyewitnesses and no one can come up with the same story.
	As she said, that's history, man.
	I think she said man.
	But that was a very instructive moment, and I'm glad she did that because everybody is pursuing stuff for their own agenda.
	Everyone is emotionally involved for quite likely irrational reasons unless they have a great degree of self-knowledge, in which case I would not assume that they would get lost in the details.
	But even if you're in the room and you see it, most people will get it wrong.
	You've seen all these experiments where...
	You know, people are watching a particular video and some guy in a giant gorilla suit walks by in the background and like 10% of people notice it.
	Right.
	Yes, I've seen that.
	Human memory, human observations are unbelievably fallible.
	And you start to remove it to other people who've got own political agendas or religious agendas or psychological agendas.
	And I mean, my God, I mean, you can't reach back into that fog and grab anything real.
	Yeah, that's a problem.
	Yeah, it's a museum of fiction.
	It's a problem.
	And the only thing that you can get is principles.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	It's been a bit of a problem for me in that I have many friends on Facebook that are very into the freedom stuff.
	And there are a lot of people that will get very upset if you aren't convinced of whatever conspiracy theory type thing.
	And I try to keep an open mind and I try to look at both sides.
	I just was really getting stuck on...
	How do you resolve this?
	And I think that focusing on the principles totally is the answer, because just like you were saying, what really happened doesn't matter.
	Facts are, and I hate to put it this bluntly, but facts are chicken shit.
	No, principles is power.
	People have this idea that if you accumulate enough facts, then you will change people's minds.
	Right.
	But human beings' minds are not changed by facts.
	They're not changed by facts.
	Look, we all know if we buy a sports car, it doesn't come with the bimbo, right?
	Right.
	We all know that.
	It's like that old Simpsons episode, you know?
	Do you come with the car?
	Do you come with the car?
	All the guys lining up in front of the Corvette or whatever it is, right?
	We know all this stuff.
	We know that if you buy that light beer, you're not going to get a six-pack and a bunch of bikini babes in your swimming pool, which you don't have.
	And yet this stuff remains facts that we are manipulated by.
	Everybody knows...
	That their deity is one of 10,000 other deities that everyone worships, and they also know, for a fact, that almost everything they claim to be virtuous is a mere accident of history and geography.
	Right?
	USA, number one!
	Hey, if you were born in Thailand, you'd be like, Thailand, number one!
	I mean, whatever it is, right?
	I mean, it's all accidental.
	And people, I mean, we all know that good-looking people are not better than people who aren't good-looking.
	We know that!
	And yet we only ever want to look at pictures of pretty people, right?
	Facts don't matter when it comes to people making decisions.
	I mean, we look at Mormon's addiction to magic underpants and view that as lunatic.
	You know, as Hitchens talks about, you can see this cargo cult being developed in these islands in the South Pacific, I think, where they continue to build control towers and artificial airports out of trees because they're waiting for the airplanes to come back and give them more gifts when the gods return.
	You can see these religions being formed in the process.
	And everybody looks at this.
	There are so many documentaries out there about how All these televangelist faith healers that it's all lies and nonsense and plants in the audience and trickery.
	I mean, this is all completely well described.
	And it doesn't change anybody's fundamental faith in any of this stuff.
	Human beings have an unbelievable capacity to reject facts.
	So does using principle in debate over facts make the argument more powerful?
	Well, it makes it more volatile.
	But if there is a chance to lever someone out of delusion, the only lever that will work is principle, not facts.
	Because facts, you will always find a counterexample to the facts, especially with the internet.
	You can always run around and find some counterfacts.
	Right.
	Right?
	I mean, like the global warming thing, you can find the pros and you can find the cons.
	All that kind of stuff.
	But, you know, as Mike says, it doesn't matter what the problem is.
	The solution is not the state.
	Right.
	So, I think that people who are focusing on facts are doing so because they don't want to confront people based on principle.
	You know, is welfare good or bad?
	I don't know.
	I mean, some people like it, some people don't.
	Lots of people will fight to keep it, whether it's, you know...
	But it's the initiation of force that's used to pay for it is immoral.
	So it doesn't matter whether people like it or not, or whether there's some guy who...
	Did well out of welfare and another person who did badly out of welfare.
	Like, the moment you get into the details of the after-effects of principles, you're missing the capacity to change the world.
	Some slaves loved slavery.
	They loved it.
	Right.
	I mean, if you're some 60-year-old slave, and, you know, you may not want to go and start competing in the free market with, you know, some people loved serfs, being serfs.
	So...
	And lots of people love war, emotionally, financially.
	As I think I mentioned, war is just welfare for the rich and evil, right?
	Right.
	And so, if you start focusing on the after-effects, facts are the shadows of the statues called principles, right?
	Sure.
	And people do not change...
	Like you can't shift the shadow of a statue without moving the statue, right?
	You're missing it, right?
	So for me, and look, I make this mistake continually still.
	So I say this with all humility, but we avoid principles because principles will define that interaction very quickly.
	And principles allow you to not waste time extremely quickly.
	And facts you can push back and forth like endless chess forever.
	So facts are procrastination.
	Facts are the avoidance of fundamental moral principles where the relationship is defined very quickly.
	You know, families do this all the time.
	Families will argue about facts, what happened in the past, as opposed to the principles of how things happened in the past.
	So, I view facts with, you know, and I'm an empiricist, so don't get me, I mean, data, facts, this is all great.
	I'm not saying facts are, you know, irrelevant or unimportant, but...
	To focus on facts at the expense of principles is to, I think, render yourself futile because what happens is you end up with a collection of people who are seeking out your same facts out of confirmation bias, which means that they're not seeking to change their minds but rather reinforce their prior opinions, and that is turning a dance into a forest of statues.
	Yeah.
	The devil is not in the details.
	The devil is the detail.
	That really does help.
	Good.
	Good.
	Well, I'm very glad.
	And look, I appreciate you sharing this information, and I don't want to be the clichéd, oh my god, that's Holocaust denial and so on.
	I mean, hey, facts, you know, information is always subject to revision, and I claim no expertise whatsoever.
	Having studied any of this stuff, I just know that there was some Canadian guy named David Irving who got into a whole bunch of trouble for all this kind of stuff.
	And I don't mind the trouble.
	I think we need to remain curious and open.
	But to me, the best honor that can be done to the Holocaust victims is not to count the atoms of their demise, but to change the physics of their ending.
	Right.
	All right.
	So I think we've got another caller, if you don't mind.
	Yep.
	Thanks, Steph.
	Thank you so much.
	Great for a great topic to bring up.
	All right.
	Next.
	Next up, we have Cain.
	How you doing, Steph?
	Hey, brother.
	How you doing?
	I can't do anything as sexy as you can.
	Go for it.
	If I have a cold, maybe, and a cigar.
	But anyway, how you doing, man?
	I'm doing good, man.
	I really want to thank you for the birthday shout-out.
	I really appreciate it.
	Oh, you're very welcome.
	Yeah.
	So, I guess my question today would be, I listened to your podcast, The Hatred of the Free Market, and I wanted to know what are some steps a person could take to start to To start to build that kind of human capital that you were talking about.
	Outside of getting a degree and maintaining a job for a year.
	Those internal principles that you were talking about.
	I really want to know what steps a person could take to start to build that kind of capital.
	If they haven't had it in their upbringing or Or from the past.
	Right, right.
	Well, I mean, so this, of course, is the challenge of me remembering a podcast I did probably seven or eight days ago.
	So, first of all, thank you for that challenge.
	Something to do with the free market and hatred, so I think that – no, I think I remember it fairly well.
	So – The couple of things that I would suggest – and I don't believe that the fundamental human capital is to do with education because we can always learn more and education is a continual process.
	But I think that the fundamental human capital that we need is courage, integrity and negotiation.
	I think those are really the major things.
	And the best way to… Improve your courage is to do the hardest stuff first.
	You know, some stuff you build up to, right?
	If you're going to try and bench press 500 pounds, you don't start with 600 pounds, right?
	You start with, you know, my little girly girl guy tassel weights and start moving up from there, right?
	So with some things, you start with that which is easier and you move up to that which is harder.
	I would argue that with other things, you have to start with that which is harder and then move to that which is easier.
	So when you're quitting smoking...
	The first cigarette you don't smoke is the hardest one you're not going to smoke.
	There's no way to start with the easiest one.
	The thousandth cigarette you're not smoking, you may not even notice.
	But the first one that you don't smoke is like, whoa.
	I really would like a cigarette right now.
	In fact, I'm just going to go outside 40 feet from a hospital entrance and go sniff the air.
	Kick a straw and just mainline the oxygen, right?
	Or what's left of it.
	So with some things like quitting addictive habits or whatever it is, right?
	Have a man-whore side, then turning down that first sexual encounter is a lot harder maybe than turning down some difficult or dangerous sexual encounter the 50th time or whatever, right?
	So with some things you build up, and with other things you start with that which is hardest, almost by definition, because you can't get to that which is easiest without getting through that which is hardest, right?
	You can't get to how easy it is to not smoke the 100th cigarette without going through how hard it is to not smoke that first cigarette you don't smoke.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	So to me, courage is...
	Kind of along the lines of the quitting smoking.
	Quitting fear is like quitting smoking.
	You can't start off easy and you can't build up to it.
	So if you want to increase your human capital, fear is a great inhibitor of human capital.
	Because fear means that you can't stand up for yourself, you can't negotiate, you can't challenge yourself, you can't confront people, you can't go and make that sales call, you can't ask for that raise, you can't go start that business, you can't ask that woman out, you can't whatever it's going to be.
	Fear really inhibits.
	Fear is the paralysis of human capital.
	And how do you overcome fear?
	Well, you do that which is courageous.
	And to do that which is courageous, I think it's generally better to do that which is even harder first.
	So this is why I say to people, you know, if you've got issues in your personal relationships, go talk to people about it.
	That's the hardest thing.
	I can no doubt.
	No doubt.
	But after you've done that, things just get a whole lot easier.
	You know, after you've sat down with your mom and talked to her about difficulties you had in your upbringing, go and ask for a raise.
	Pretty weak sauce, man.
	You know, I wish I could get scared of this now so I could feel like I used to.
	You know, but start with the hardest stuff and the most challenging stuff.
	That clarifies and that defines where you are.
	And the legitimate pride from coming straight out of the gate and doing the hardest stuff when it comes to courage and fear, the legitimate pride that you get out of that massively adds to your human capital.
	Legitimate pride is foundational to human capital because it means you have self-esteem, you have self-worth, you have respect for your own abilities, and you have...
	A genuinely true view of your own capacity to do that which is hard for the sake of that which is true and real.
	So your confidence is a great aspect of human capital and these things you can get without going to school.
	In fact, going to school is probably a way of running away from those kinds of things.
	So I think getting to a true and accurate reflection of Your own relationships and being honest.
	I say confrontational, not in that you sort of yell at people, but bringing the truth of your experiences to people around you.
	It really adds to your human capital.
	Nothing's going to be that hard after that.
	And so I think that's a very important thing to approach.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, actually.
	You know, mostly because I feel like that's something that I've...
	I've tried to kind of rationalize it in my head, but it's something that I've actively avoided.
	Yeah.
	You know, I've done a lot of self-work with therapy and things like that, but I still, to this day, I haven't had those kinds of conversations with my mom or even my close relatives.
	And I've kind of rationalized it.
	So, like, it's just like, yeah, I know what kind of reaction I'm going to get once I bring this up.
	And I don't want to go through that kind of me-grinder.
	But, you know, on the flip side, I've still avoided it, you know?
	Sure.
	And to me, the avoidance is not...
	You know, avoiding those conversations is not the end of the world, obviously, right?
	I mean, nobody has to do anything as long as you're honest about it, right?
	I mean, I think that's, you know, as long as you say, well...
	Because in a sense, you've already gone through those conversations if you're avoiding them because you think they're going to have such a terrible outcome.
	You're not giving people the chance to redeem themselves.
	You've already damned them in your own mind to the point where you're not even going to have the conversation with them because it's going to go so badly.
	That's not giving them a chance to redeem themselves.
	To prove you wrong.
	Yeah.
	And I think that we want to be empiricists, right?
	Look, if you were genuinely certain that – I mean I'm not saying this is true.
	But if you were genuinely completely 100 percent convinced that all your relationships were corrupt and there was no possibility of honesty or intimacy or integrity in any of your relationships, then you wouldn't really have any desire to be around those people, right?
	I mean that would be historical pull of tradition or history or whatever.
	But so the fact that you're still around these people means that you believe that there's a chance.
	But if you're avoiding the conversation, then you believe that there's a chance but you're not giving people the chance.
	I think that's not fair to their possibility, to their opportunity.
	Okay.
	If that makes sense.
	Well, just to kind of clarify things, I haven't been around any of my relatives or immediate friends for about two years.
	So you didn't have the conversation, but you also aren't spending that much time or any time with the random anyway, right?
	Yeah.
	And do you feel that you have closure with that stuff?
	It's weird.
	I'm on the fence with it because a part of me feels like...
	If you're on the fence with it, that's not closure.
	Yeah.
	The answer to that would be no.
	I guess it would be no because I don't know what kind of answer I could give you.
	I guess I'm still kind of flip-flopping with this.
	Should I go back and have these kinds of conversations or am I completely done?
	Yeah.
	A month ago I felt like I was just completely done with it.
	I know what kind of results is going to come from me trying to assert myself or be honest and open.
	And I didn't want to put myself in that vulnerable position.
	Because I've done it and I've approached Similar topics in the past, and the result has always been this annoyed, manipulated kind of thing that happens.
	I guess after those last few occurrences, I was just kind of done.
	Well, but if you are kind of done, then where's the fence sitting or the ambivalence coming from?
	Because those are sort of contradictory statements, right?
	Yeah.
	Like, I'm never going to go back into that fire because it burns like hell.
	But part of me wants to go back into that fire.
	Well...
	Which is it, right?
	Yeah.
	Um...
	I guess it's...
	You know, I guess it's that...
	You know, that...
	That kid in me that still, you know, still holds hope out, you know, that mom will still have it.
	I'm...
	Yeah.
	The kid in you that still holds out help?
	I'm afraid that comes from the Hallmark card of sentimentality.
	The kid in you is the one least likely to hold out hope because the kid in you was the one who was really there, right?
	Yeah.
	Right?
	So, again, this is my opinion, right?
	But the kid in me...
	Was not the one who held out hope.
	The kid in me was the one who wanted to get out.
	Because remembered very clearly what it was like to be under that power.
	Right?
	I mean, it's hard to...
	I mean, for me, it was hard to sort of...
	Because when you become an adult, you're out of the power of your parents, right?
	At least legally, economically, and so on, right?
	Physically.
	And the way that I tried to remember is I thought, okay, well, what if I got paralyzed and my mom was my caregiver?
	What would that be like?
	That gave me some clarity about what it was like to be a kid with her around.
	And again, I can't give you the answer.
	It's just a thought experiment, right?
	I mean, that was sort of my experience was like, dear God, that would be about as bad a situation as could conceivably happen, other than death, which may eventually be preferable.
	But to be helpless and dependent on your parents, again, if it was a negative relationship, I think that it's not the kid who has hope.
	The people who do us wrong, when we have a yearning or a belief that they can give us what they want, that is a trap usually set by the people who have no intention of giving us what they want.
	The con man always has to give you the belief that you're going to get something from him that you want.
	Like the Nigerian emails offer you $10 million, right?
	Yeah.
	Because you want $10 million.
	I guess you want $10 million and so...
	If you've had someone who's done your harm in the past and you're holding out for something positive from them, that's a trick.
	That's a trap.
	That's not because you have some genuine experience of getting something positive from them.
	That's just what they're telling you, consciously or unconsciously, so that you'll stick around, so that they can get the value of having you around without actually having to do the virtuous actions that make you want to be around.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, no mean person is mean all the time.
	The whole point of being mean is to fluctuate, right?
	So that you can hold out the hope for someone.
	So someone will hold out the hope that they're going to catch you on the sunny side or that you're going to be nice this time.
	Again, it's the inconsistent rules.
	The tyranny is inconsistency.
	Somebody is consistently mean, it's pretty easy to sort that one out.
	But the reality is that the meanest people can be wonderful sometimes.
	That's the whole point of meanness is to be wonderful sometimes because otherwise it's too obvious, right?
	Yeah.
	You know, like there's this – what's the movie?
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
	Yeah, so there's this Porsche and he gives it to these greasy slimeball guy parking attendants.
	You know, hey man, we'll take really good care of your car, man.
	You know, they've just got car thieves written all over them, right?
	And it never really works out that way.
	That's not how things are in life.
	You know, the honey trap is called, right?
	I mean, it's the niceness that gets you trapped in the dysfunction.
	That is the problem.
	And so, the fact that you have this, you know, you say the child's belief that there's some hope in the relationship and so on, that's, to me, foundational to the dysfunction, is the provision of hope.
	My mom said some things that were great about her.
	When I was sick as a kid, I mean, she would set me up on the couch in the living room with comics and Hot lemon tea or whatever it was.
	She was great when I was sick because I didn't pose any threat to her.
	I wasn't challenging her.
	I was under the weather.
	She could take care of me without there being any danger of resistance or equality or me having any needs of my own.
	I was passive.
	I was limp.
	I was sick.
	So she could allow her nurturing side to come out because there was no possibility of any negative repercussions for her at that time.
	And this Hitler...
	Was very affectionate to his animals because his animals never challenged him psychologically, right?
	They never provoked any of his defenses.
	And the king is always the giver of gifts.
	That's part of his power.
	He is the bestower of punishment and the giver of gifts.
	That's the whole point of power, is the ability to bestow positive things on people.
	Because if the king is only punishing, there will be a revolution and he's done, right?
	And if the king is only giving stuff and never punishing, then he'll just be taken advantage of.
	The treasury will be bled dry and nobody will be afraid of him.
	So you have to give the gifts and the punishment.
	That's the whole point of power.
	It's a multiplicity, right?
	The power is an ecosystem as much as a personality is.
	And the fact that you are expecting goodies from those in power is precisely why they are in power.
	But the fact is that you can't trust the goodies coming from people who are exercising power.
	You can only trust the goodies coming from people who are exercising virtue.
	Sorry if this is too abstract, but...
	No, it makes a lot of sense.
	I guess it's just a testament to the kind of shit that I went through as a kid.
	Like my degree of ambivalence.
	Well, you say it's your degree of ambivalence, but again, I wouldn't internalize that necessarily.
	I mean, this is the environment that you were in.
	You know, to be exploited fundamentally means to be confused.
	Because when you're not confused, you can't be exploited because you have clarity about the situation.
	And to confuse people, you must provide them contradictory information.
	You must blame them for the negatives, right?
	So everything that's negative that comes out of an abusive relationship comes out of the victim's dysfunctional problems or badness or naughtiness or evil or disobedience, right?
	So the punishment for the child is always generated by the wrongness of the child.
	Whereas the love, the quote love of the abuser is always generated by the virtue of the abuser.
	So the punishments are always because of the badness of the child, but the love is always because of the virtue of the abuser.
	And that is so disorienting for children.
	And it makes them, of course, desperate to please.
	The desperation to please is another fundamental mark of tyranny.
	The desperation to please comes out of the fear of punishment.
	And the desire to be in somebody's good graces, which is sort of two sides of the same coin, or to get the rewards of being in somebody's good graces.
	I don't want my daughter to care about my moods.
	It's very important to me.
	I don't want my listeners to care about my moods.
	Oh, I'm going to call into the Sunday show.
	I hope he's in a good mood.
	I don't want my moods to be fundamentally influential.
	To the people around me.
	It doesn't mean I don't want my wife to care about whether I'm in a good or bad mood, but that's sort of a different thing.
	But I don't want people to care about my moods because that is to focus on me rather than on what they're bringing to the conversation with me, which means we can't connect.
	If people are focusing on my moods, we can't connect as individuals because they're just conforming.
	And it's prior.
	It's historical, right?
	So focusing on somebody else's positive reactions to you is, I think, just another mark of a kind of subjugation that I think is problematic.
	But yeah, I'd really focus on, it's people who really want to do you harm will provide you confusing measures of good and bad feedback.
	Because that keeps you disoriented, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	If you really want to get lost, then the GPS that takes you to the wrong place is the perfect thing.
	Because if you don't have a GPS, you'll stop and ask directions, you'll pull out a map, you'll figure it out, or you'll just decide not to go, right?
	But the GPS that gives you confident directions to the wrong place is the one that's really going to screw you up.
	That's going to make you late, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Somebody just wrote, it's hard for me to see the difference between true niceness and false niceness.
	It is.
	It is hard because...
	I mean, that's the whole point of camouflage, right?
	Evil always wants to camouflage itself as virtue.
	Which means all the bad things that evil does is called justice against immorality.
	I spanked the child because the child was bad.
	Right?
	That's what evil...
	People do when they hit children, as they say, I am disciplining, I am being a responsible parent, I am making sure the child is prepared for life, I am making sure the child doesn't run into the road or grab something in the hot stove.
	So they camouflage their brutality with the mask of virtue, of course.
	I mean, camouflage is so fundamentally an aspect of the predator-prey relationship.
	Right?
	I mean, just go try looking for frogs in a froggy pond.
	I mean, they're really damn hard to see because they're really, really well camouflaged.
	And camouflage is the most fundamental aspect of evil.
	Now, there's two aspects of this though, right?
	Because the mugger doesn't camouflage himself.
	He just comes up to you, sticks a knife in your rib and says, give me your wallet.
	He's not camouflaged, right?
	But that's because he can leave.
	He's going to run off and, you know, you're never going to find him or catch him or at least that's the goal or the plan, right?
	You know, the guy who comes to rob your house in the middle of the night doesn't pretend he's a mover.
	He doesn't ring the doorbell and say, I'm a mover, you know?
	He just, you know, because he's going to be gone, right?
	But the relationships where you're supposed to stay and continue to provide resources, those are the ones where the camouflage is most essential.
	Because you're constantly looking at somebody who's a predator and they have to continually...
	Camouflage themselves as somebody who's not a predator.
	And the most fundamental thing is the camouflage of non-empathy with empathy.
	This is why people who lack empathy always use the language of empathy.
	That's the most fundamental camouflage.
	And that's what's so confusing.
	And there are lots of great antidotes to this, right?
	I mean, you just ask that person questions about yourself.
	That they don't have any self-interest in knowing and find out whether they know the answers, right?
	You know, what's my favorite book?
	What's my favorite movie?
	What's my favorite writer?
	Why?
	What's my favorite style of dress?
	You know, what motivates me in my life?
	All the things that are personal to you that don't have any direct impact on the other person.
	It's a great way to find out whether they have empathy or curiosity about you or not.
	Are they interested in you with regards to you?
	Are they interested in you as regards to resources they can get from you?
	Do they know you like a farmer knows his cattle?
	Not because he wants the cattle to be happy, but because he wants their milk.
	And the farmers are nice to the cattle, but not because they care about the cattle, but because they continue to want to get the milk from the cattle, right?
	So the farmers will give the cows medicine when the cows are sick.
	If the cows are beating their heads against the stalls that are too wide, the farmer will widen them, but not because he's about to set them free and wants them to be happy and independent, but because that's the way to get better milk.
	And we couldn't miss being taxed livestock...
	if we didn't understand that so many of us are parental livestock.
	So I would just be careful and be skeptical about where your belief that love can be around the corner with victimizers comes from.
	I would be skeptical of that.
	And just look at it as possibly a manifestation of camouflage with the goal of further exploitation.
	Okay.
	And if you can figure that out, human capital is about providing value and avoiding negatives.
	That's a really bad way of putting it.
	To become wealthy, you must make money and you must save money.
	Making money without saving money isn't enough and you can't save money if you don't make it.
	So there's two sides, right?
	One is acquiring resources.
	The other one is not losing resources, right?
	Making money and saving money is how you become wealthy.
	And it's the same thing with human capital.
	Human capital is about providing value and avoiding negative values.
	So if you can provide value to people, that's fantastic.
	But the moment you can provide value to people, you become a cow that can be milked.
	And then exploiters will be drawn to you.
	If you really, really want to be successful in life, you must be able to provide value and keep people the fuck away who are going to exploit you for that value.
	Right?
	So if you can identify the takers, if you can identify the exploiters, if you can identify the unempathetic, the sociopaths, the livestock farmers, if you can identify those people while you are providing value, then you get to produce milk but keep it and share it with those you love, right?
	You're not just going to get milked and tossed aside.
	Because the moment you can start producing value, every clusterfuck sociopath in the world is going to start raining down on you to try and exploit you.
	So you need to be clear about exploiters versus nourishers.
	Otherwise, it's almost worth to provide value if you can't identify the exploiters because you're just putting big giant laser sniper lights on your head, right?
	Yeah.
	So hopefully that helps about the non-academic ways to improve your human capital.
	Do the stuff that's terrifying.
	Learn how to negotiate and identify the people who are exploiters and rid yourself of any illusions you have about your relationships, both positive and negative.
	I think that's the best way to accumulate capital and to become effective and productive in the world and not just be productive but get to keep the fruits of your labor as well, which means To, you know, resolutely keep arm's length and distance and fences and flaming crocodile-filled moat fortresses between you and the people who take without returning.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Thanks, Steph.
	I really appreciate that answer.
	I think that really, yeah, that answered that.
	You're very welcome and I'm very sorry that it ended up in a situation where you have not seen your family of origin in years.
	That is tragic.
	I fully support people who make those decisions because virtue is virtue and governments do not get to escape UPB and neither do families because family member is not a different life form, neither are politicians or soldiers.
	I'm very sorry that this ended up being the situation, but I fully respect the decision that you've made.
	So, for what that's worth, I just wanted to share that.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	Well, thank you, everybody.
	Sorry we went a little bit over, but as usual, such fantastic questions.
	Oh, yeah.
	So, I'm not going to be going to a bunch of conferences.
	I won't be at Liberty Masterminds.
	I won't be at Rethinking Everything.
	I won't be at Libertopia.
	So sorry for those who wanted to meet me there, but unfortunately I will be immunocompromised.
	And so I just wanted to mention that it's not the best time to go meet and greet lots of people.
	Oh yeah, no Porkfest.
	I'm sure everyone knows that by now, but just in case you haven't, I will try and of course attend these things remotely, but I won't be at the conferences this summer, which is a shame.
	I certainly do love to come out and meet people, but it is no wise to do it with the current regimen that I'm under.
	I think October the 26th, in Houston, Steph Kinsella and Jeff Tucker and myself are looking at putting together a conference, which should be a lot of fun.
	This is all very tentative to don't book anything yet, but I just wanted to mention it.
	I will be down there because I'll be all better by then.
	And so I look forward to meeting anyone who can make it out to that.
	I'll keep you posted with more details as things move forward.
	FDRURL.com forward slash donate if you'd like to help out.
	To all the people who've cancelled their subscriptions, thank you for switching to Bitcoin.
	I appreciate that.
	You can, of course, switch to Bitcoin if you'd like, and the Bitcoin address is available on the website.
	If you'd like to help out, that's hugely, hugely appreciated.
	And have yourselves a wonderful week, everyone.
	I love you guys so much for the conversations that we have.
	It is...
	Miraculous and a beautiful thing to see the honesty, openness and curiosity that occurs in these conversations.
	I feel incredibly privileged to be a part of this and thank you so much.
	Everyone have yourself a great week.

▲