Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

June 23, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:59:11

2412 Freedomain Radio Call In Show June 23rd, 2013

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses recent subscription cancellations, resolving property disputes, the 'I did my best' assertion as an attempt to escape responsibility for a lack of preparation, infectious personalities, setting boundaries and using reason and evidence as to gain clarity on relationships.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	23rd this fine day of June, I woke up to a minor, crystalline, fragile heartbreak.
	Over the last two days, do you know five subscribers have cancelled?
	They have cancelled their subscriptions!
	I can only assume that they are facing utter penury.
	And it's either this – well, obviously, they've sold one kidney already, but they have not.
	Obviously, I want them to have the other kidney.
	That's important.
	We are one kidney minimum for Freedom and Radio listeners and only one new subscriber.
	So if you'd like to fill in the gap, every now and then they cluster.
	I don't think it's anything to do with any particular shows.
	I've had a few exoduses.
	A few times.
	So I remember one time when I was quite skeptical towards the existence of UFOs and people fled their subscriptions en masse a few times with my stance on animal rights.
	The UFO is one thing I can really understand and sympathize with because I'm not really sure that I want people to say I fully accept the existence and anal abduction habits of UFOs and I'm really into freedom in radio.
	I think that's not a good...
	It's not a good group to be in.
	I'm very happy if people decide to leave the show because it is incompatible with their irrationalities.
	I think that's actually a fine thing.
	Many years ago, when I was still a temp, I was reading the Harvard Business Review.
	Yes, I was one of the more pretentious temps around.
	I read an article Two articles I remember from those days.
	The first was about participation of employees, how it really drove productivity.
	And I remember that when I became an entrepreneur and started hiring people by the barrel full.
	And also, I remember how important it is to fire some of your customers.
	In the business world, when you sort of really do the math, and it can be kind of painful to do the math, but it's important.
	The customer is always right.
	That may work in the restaurant, that may work in retail, where each customer is responsible for a small transaction for the most part, but it sure doesn't work in big ticket service industries.
	When we did the math, as most companies do, you find that 10% of your customers are responsible for 90% of your support costs.
	And it's really hard to make the case, unless they're paying a fortune.
	It's really tough to make the case to continue to support them.
	So calling the customer herd is important.
	I don't think this series of cancellations was due to that.
	But if you would like to step in and fill the gap, I would really, really appreciate it.
	And you can do that at fdrurl.com forward slash Donate if you haven't donated for a while.
	I haven't mentioned it really much for a while.
	And so I don't want to be Joe Pecker head, pester head, who's sitting on your shoulder, lightly pecking your cheek with financial requests.
	But if you could see your way clear to throwing a few shekels towards the show.
	Mike...
	James is unavailable today.
	He's at Porkfest, which is less of a porn shoot than it sounds, but it's the annual Porcupine Freedom Festival in New Hampshire, which is going to be – well, I'm sure it's a blast.
	I'm sure every year but one that I've gone, they've had catastrophic rain since I'm unable to travel this summer.
	For health reasons, I can't – I'm immunocompromised as a result of treatment for cancer.
	I'm not there this summer because, boy, I mean, I love the Porkfest people, but immunocompromising and Porkfest do not exactly go hand in hand because if they go hand in hand, one of their hands is going to fall off.
	So James is out there.
	Mike continues to demand food and shelter.
	I keep telling him, you know, sacrifice for philosophy, man, but he's just not buying it.
	I just can't believe it.
	Anyway, so if you could do a little donation run, I would always hugely appreciate it.
	With that having been said, I did a pretty good presentation on the true cycle of violence, which you might want to check out.
	We're just getting the final touches on it now.
	And I shamefully have recorded a few more Let's Plays.
	They're fun.
	They're fun.
	I'm still getting used to how to do them.
	I keep getting lost in the concentration of the game, but I think it's fun.
	And gaming was a very big part of my life for a long time.
	It's been much less so since I became a father.
	But I'd like to do a few.
	I find them quite enjoyable and relaxing.
	It's like gaming.
	While talking to ghosts, which is, I guess, nice.
	The ghosts of my enemies, enemies, enemies.
	So, with that being said, Mike, please remind me not to overmilk the first call.
	As usual, I lack the disability to do that.
	But if you'd like to bring up the first caller, I would love to listen.
	All right.
	Our first caller this morning is Nathan.
	Go ahead, Nathan.
	Hello, Stefan.
	How are you doing?
	I'm here with my wife, Irisha.
	Hi.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	How are you guys doing?
	We're doing great.
	So a couple things I wanted to do.
	First, I'm going to kind of thank you for some things you've done to our life.
	Then I wanted to kind of get into the idea of the land property and the status foundation of that, how we kind of untangle that, and then kind of get your take on that and also give the take of Henry George, the 19th century philosopher, and what his answer was that and how that might fit in.
	You're not doing my vow to keep the first caller shorter much good, but I'll certainly do my best.
	Go for it.
	Okay, well, I'll be brief with it.
	Except for the thanks.
	You don't have to be brief with the thanks.
	I mean, don't.
	I'm just kidding.
	Go ahead.
	We'll be lavish with the thanks.
	You're fabulous.
	I've been in the military for 12 years.
	We've just gotten out.
	I was actually listening to a podcast on a beach in Italy that I kind of made the decision that I was going to get out.
	I came home and told my wife about it.
	We didn't think we'd be able to get out, but a year later, things kind of fell into place.
	We've now got a beautiful home in Pennsylvania, really loving where our life has brought us.
	We've got two beautiful children.
	We've You know, your assistance in that life change was very essential, but also just as I kind of grew up in a more fundamentalist religious background, kind of felt like I was out without a compass for a while as I kind of questioned and became more skeptical.
	So, you know, libertarian ideas and particularly your ideas, UPB, non-aggression principle, voluntary relationships, those have all been real helpful in us and our relationship with our families, our children.
	So just many thanks for that.
	Well, that's a wonderful thing, and congratulations to you both.
	What an immense challenge to take on.
	We could probably do a whole two-hour show on that process, but I'm incredibly humbled by your thanks.
	I'm incredibly grateful that the show had some influence on you in that direction, and I'm incredibly admiring of what an unbelievable challenge you both took on, and amazingly successfully it sounds like.
	So I appreciate your thanks, but right back at you.
	Yes, we really got a lot of insight in dealing with your non-aggression principle for our children and upraising and upbringing.
	And it was just very insightful to almost even take that philosophy in everyday life and dealing with people, because I don't know about most people, but a lot of people drive you just batty.
	And just really learning another way of speaking to people, addressing the situation, staying focused on the goal, being more motivational and inspirational has really, really been such a powerful influence in every aspect of our lives, including raising two bouncing baby boys.
	Two.
	Are they close in age, it sounds like?
	Yeah, seven and four.
	How exciting.
	Yeah, you know, it's funny because libertarians say like about the economy, when you remove coercion, amazing things flower, like just incredible creativity and so on, right?
	And why would the same not be true with parenting?
	What amazing solutions can you come up with if you simply stop using aggression?
	We know that's true in the economy.
	We know it's true in the arts.
	And why wouldn't it be equally true of parenting?
	Just stop using aggression and amazing things can start to occur.
	But before you drop the aggression, it seems like, well, without the aggression, there won't be any control.
	There won't be any management of behavior.
	Which is basically like saying, well, if we free the slaves, we're all going to starve to death.
	It's like, no, no, then we get combine harvesters.
	It's a different thing, man.
	Let me go ahead and move on then with...
	Basically, with property rights and land, so much of that is tied into the state.
	The state has really defined who owns land, who owns property.
	So much of it is granted from state privilege.
	Homesteading is kind of a nebulous principle, and most of it, the homesteading occurs.
	That's really not how the current land has been established.
	It hasn't been established through homesteading.
	It's through government privilege.
	I mean, if you look at the terms of real estate, real estate, real, royal estate, right?
	The landlord.
	I mean, all those connections.
	And the idea that if someone owns a property, They are, in effect, a form of government because, again, if you are on their property, they can initiate aggression against you.
	They can curtail your free speech, your rights.
	All those things are limited if you're on their property.
	And, you know, I mean, Murray Rothbard talks about this when he talks about the slaves, and he says the slaves were really the ones who homesteaded the land.
	But really, there's no There's no way to rectify that.
	There's no way that the land is going back, that you can sort through who the heirs were, who belongs to here.
	The courts, the level of government and government privilege to try to disentangle that, it would take more government to do that.
	So I'm just curious on your thoughts, and I'll kind of give you the ideas I've kind of drawn from Henry George.
	Yeah, I mean, you're right.
	I mean, my family's ancestry is landowners in Ireland.
	And why will we landowners in Ireland?
	Because we were really good murderers.
	And we killed for the king, and in return, we got land.
	Sorry.
	I mean, this is, you know, people look at the family tree like it's some noble thing.
	You know, it's on the tomb of innocent peasants that you get your land for the most part.
	In history, this was the aristocracy that I come from.
	And my father is very keen on this history and he thinks there's something noble about it.
	I guess it's something where we don't quite see eye to eye.
	I just see the family home was built on the bones of the innocent.
	And so land has generally accumulated as a reward for murder or the direction of murder or the collection of taxes, which is the threat of murder.
	And this is one of the reasons why sociopaths are kind of hard to get rid of because they get incredibly rewarded for the crimes that they commit.
	So you're right.
	I mean, gosh, the serfs worked the land.
	What did the Lord do?
	Well, he went and killed serfs somewhere else to get the ownership of the serfs here.
	And service to the royal court always involved theft or rape or murder, and this is what is called royalty.
	And this is why having the queen on your money is like having Tony Soprano on your bitcoin.
	It just doesn't make any sense.
	It's the complete opposite of what money is supposed to be.
	So, as far as unraveling the historical problems go, there's a couple of different ways that you could do it.
	I mean, for the majority of people who, like, they have a house on a half acre or whatever, I don't think that's a huge problem.
	I mean that they have a house on a half acre and so on.
	As somebody who works farmland, that's their farmland.
	It's fine.
	Of course, not many people know.
	I was a bit surprised to learn the degree of government ownership of land in America.
	Government owns more than a third of the land in America.
	And what do you do with all of that?
	Well, I'm a big one for the efficient use of resources.
	And the best way to get the efficient use of resources is to sell off stuff In a free market.
	So if I were king of the world and got to undo kingship with a relatively untraumatized population, I'd just say, okay, government lands up for sale.
	Bid on whatever you want, whatever size you want, whatever parcel you want, and the highest price will win.
	Now, of course, that means I understand that there are some people who've got money unjustly through I didn't even start to go through the list.
	They've got the money unjustly through status and they're going to be able to bid a lot for that land.
	But the people who are going to bid the most for the land are the people who are going to find the greatest and most productive economic use for it, whether that's farmland or people who want to go hiking or camping or people who just want to preserve it and so on.
	They can let the environmentalists put their money where their mouth is rather than just hectoring everyone to submit to the government's laws at all times and at all places.
	So, I think that a sell-off of the land would be useful.
	Of course, the money would then go to pay off various government obligations and land would then not be fixed in any particular way.
	It would then start to do the usual things that resources do in the free market, which is to start to move around continually.
	Someone's going to come up with a great idea for some piece of land.
	And they're going to be able to bid more for it and somebody's going to have a great idea for half of that piece of land, bid more for that.
	And it will continually be changing hands until it, at least for a while, coalesces into its maximum economic value.
	Because that's really the only value that can be ascertained.
	It's the maximum economic value and there's no way to ascertain it without price.
	So you can't distribute the land without price, without it being political favoritism or whatever it is.
	And so I would support something like that, just a massive no-holds-barred eBay sale fest of a third of the land of the United States.
	I think that would be pretty fantastic.
	I'm sorry.
	Let me go back to my concerns with that.
	I think that's kind of the anarcho-capitalism idea, privatize the resources.
	We talked about the person who owns a family home, but the reality is most people don't actually own their home.
	They owe 70-80% of the value of the home to the bank, and the bank's been able to achieve that through fiat money supply, all they've been able to level control.
	Again, I think you could get the same money interest as collecting a large amount.
	You talk about them being the most productive, but they don't need to be the most productive if they're able to collect the rent.
	Well, sorry.
	Let me just point out, though, that if a third more land was being sold, house prices would collapse, right?
	Right.
	And if zoning restrictions were removed, which would be a free market solution, then housing prices would collapse.
	And so then some people would be underwater, but the banks would face such catastrophic losses that a lot of banks would go out of business.
	Hey, look, I suddenly own my house.
	Or they would be bought up for like 10 cents on the dollar or 40 cents on the dollar by some creditor, at which point there would be a renegotiation of the house price.
	So people would owe a lot less if a lot of land were privatized because, I mean, just it would be unsustainable to continue to collect the kind of mortgages that were there.
	Yeah.
	I mean, a lot of the value of land is location-based.
	I mean, you talk about, you know, a couple of square feet in Manhattan are worth more than a lot of these, you know, massive land holdings the U.S. has, which are mostly in kind of more wilderness, this area is.
	Sorry, and also let me just add to that as well, though, that the free market wants to remove the value of high-priced land and it wants to increase the value of low-priced land because that's how you'd make a profit.
	So, I mean, if land in Manhattan, yeah, sure, it's expensive because a lot of people want to be in Manhattan and so on.
	If you could find ways for people to work – I'm thinking of all the technology that has emerged to allow people to work from home and 3D faxing and all that kind of stuff.
	Technology would be heavily applied with more land and more houses around.
	Technology would be heavily applied to get people to work remotely, which would tend to depress some of the disparity in prices.
	And again, it doesn't mean it replaces everything.
	But again, once you get the free market involved, what we take for granted for now can't be taken for granted tomorrow.
	Okay.
	Yeah, so yeah, again, I guess you're saying open up a land that would allow new people to buy in land.
	There wouldn't really be a mechanism to rectify past injustices, or would there be?
	Well, and sorry, one other thing, too.
	Look at Manhattan, right?
	I mean, the government runs Central Park, which prevents building.
	The government has rent controls on huge numbers of places in Manhattan, which prevents redevelopment, prevents additional houses being added.
	The government has huge amounts of protections on historical land.
	The government has railway yards which are questionably used because of the amount of subsidies and so on.
	And the government prevents redevelopment because it protects historic buildings and so on, landmarks and so on.
	And the government has all these crazy roads.
	And so I just want to sort of point out that even in Manhattan, prices are artificially high because massive amounts of government control over housing.
	Now, as far as past wrongs go, can you sort of give me some examples?
	Well, you mentioned, well, American Indians, slaves, obviously, with the Rothbard example.
	Again, like you said, it's difficult to untangle that.
	I mean, how would – Well, the slaves are all dead, right?
	Right, the heirs.
	The slaves are all dead.
	The slaves' owners are all dead.
	I mean, the crimes must die with the person.
	I mean, we can't inherit – like, if my dad dies a million dollars in debt, people can't come after me, right?
	Right, but if you inherit a company – The obligations die with the individual, right?
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Well, you're saying the obligations die, but the benefit doesn't die, right?
	I mean, if you inherit a company, a CEO of a company, and you have massive land holdings with that company, you're the new CEO, you can't say, well, I'm going to take all this massive land holdings, but the debt, that was somebody else who did that.
	Well, no, because if there is debt, then the debt is discharged from the land holdings before, right?
	So if my dad has $2 million, he owes $1 million, and then he dies, I don't get to inherit $2 million, right?
	Because the creditors will go after his estate before I get my inheritance, right?
	So whatever I inherit is after the debt.
	Now, so let's say that there's some family, the Vanderbilt KKK racist jerks in Carolina, South Carolina or something, and they got a lot of their wealth from slavery.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, unfortunately, the moral crime has to die with the individual.
	And I think one of the things we have to recognize is that the vast majority of people do not have the capacity to think of law outside of what is legal.
	They don't have the capacity to think of moral law outside of what is legal.
	And so if you look at the average person, sort of the 1850s or whatever, in the south in America, well, slavery is legal.
	Slavery is approved of by the highest moral ideals in the land, right, of the local court system, the priests.
	The Pope.
	I mean, they all are...
	And the Bible.
	The Bible doesn't do anything.
	The Bible condones, praises slavery.
	Reminds you to get a good price for your human chattel.
	And so it's really hard to say to people...
	Well, you should have been wiser than your courts.
	You should have had a higher moral understanding than the sum totality of your moral experts called the priests.
	You should have placed your own moral reasoning higher than that of God himself, who you were taught from infancy was the highest moral ideal that was possible or conceivable.
	And therefore, you are morally responsible for the decisions that you made.
	I think that's...
	I'm not saying you're making an absurd statement.
	I think that's an absurd standard to have for people.
	Go ahead.
	I'm not necessarily trying to hold them responsible in the form of guilt, but the fact that To realize that they've had this massive benefit in these land holdings that were obtained through something.
	So again, they're getting the benefit without the debt, which is somewhat uneven.
	So the other thing is, as far as the sell-off of government land, so you would prefer a sell-off as opposed to like a homesteading?
	Because again, selling off, you're going to limit yourself to the distribution to Sorry to interrupt.
	That's a great point.
	I didn't mention that, but that to me is implicit, but it was not rationally implicit, so thank you for bringing it out.
	Yeah, of course, homesteading is a universal principle.
	So what would happen is basically the government doesn't have the right to sell the land because the government doesn't own the land.
	A concept cannot own an entity.
	And so, yeah, I mean, so basically the lands would be open to a state of nature.
	And I think that's a very good point.
	And, you know, yeah, because, of course, if you went in and, let's say, Yosemite National Park just suddenly was no longer owned by the government, it would kind of be in a state of nature.
	I guess there would be kind of a land or gold rush, right?
	Yeah.
	So people would then go in and start building homes on it or whatever, and there would have to be some way of arbitrating disputes around that.
	But that's been done by common law for thousands of years.
	I don't think that's something we would have to reinvent.
	But yeah, I guess some people would want to buy it, but who would they be buying it from?
	Yeah, if the government doesn't have the legal right to own it, yeah.
	But again, homesteading, it's kind of a nebulous process in some ways.
	What do you need to do to homestead?
	How do you define off the borders?
	There's a lot of things that are up in the air about that.
	Well, sorry, but human ingenuity has been solving that for thousands of years, right?
	I mean, there's lots of great solutions out there.
	It's generally solved through the state.
	I mean, we talk about homesteading in the United States, but unless you're in Oklahoma, you almost certainly pay the government for the right to homestead.
	I mean, there's no open homesteading.
	And even in Oklahoma, you would have done it by kicking off the Indians.
	Well, but there used to be much more of a tradition where the government would recognize the The sort of common sense of the people.
	And the government was there to enforce people who didn't follow the common sense, right?
	So there was a way of homesteading which had to do with pounding in posts, you know, in a sort of – if you sort of pounded in posts in a square, then you got to use that square for a while.
	Now, if you developed something in that square, then it was yours in perpetuity.
	If you ended up just banging posts and moving on, you know, after a year and you put the date on the post, then after a year, it would revert back to a state of nature.
	Anyone else could do whatever they wanted with it and so on, right?
	But you – so I mean what happened was the government – this is way back in the day – but the government basically enforced what was common sense to people, right?
	So when neighbors build fences, they hire some guy to come and map the property line or whatever and then he draws a line down and everybody looks at it and they're like, okay, fine, whatever, right?
	And people do that without having to go to court.
	They don't go to call the lawyers.
	They don't – they just say, OK, well, that's our line.
	That's fine.
	I thought it was here, but I guess it's here.
	It doesn't really matter.
	So then they build their fences or whatever.
	Now, if somebody builds – tries to build a fence halfway through somebody's backyard straight up to their porch, that's against common sense.
	That's just – and then you need the government because somebody is just acting in some crazy fashion.
	And so when you say, well, they relied on the government for homesteading, the government didn't define the process.
	The government enforced a kind of collectively developed process that most people agreed on.
	And occasionally there were disputes about it which people would then go to the government for.
	And of course to register as well, you didn't want to start homesteading something, turn at it with someone else's.
	So the registry made sense because that could have been easily done privately and much more easily would be done privately now.
	But I mean you have a little app and you think, bing, green, hey, this is not owned.
	You can actually have that on your phone these days, right?
	It's crazy how easy it could be.
	So when you say people relied on the government, they had their own way of doing things and just for the occasional outlier like somebody who just acted nutty or was having a bad day or got too much sun or whatever.
	Then you'd go to the government, which would be done more privately now.
	So I just want to sort of point out that there's a whole common law tradition that the government would enforce the outliers but was developed.
	And that's stuff to look at when you look at resolving these disputes.
	Don't assume it was all just made up politically by the government.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I'm not sure if that's historically true.
	I think it relied on common sense.
	You look at the serfs who worked the land.
	A lot of it, there was a group of workers who worked the land of somebody else, and there was some landlord who was able to extract the rent.
	And again, you see the idea...
	No, but sorry, but the serfs weren't homesteading, right?
	I mean, this was land that was owned by the Lord.
	I mean, I agree with you, they were doing the labor and they should have gotten the work, but the land was owned by the Lord.
	But if you look at sort of the frontiers of the West, or if you look at the gold rush and so on, I mean, these didn't descend into mass orgies of anarchic violence or whatever, right?
	I mean, it was just common sense stuff that even way beyond the reach of the state, people were able to homestead lots of stuff.
	I think the American homestead...
	To the extent America did homestead, that was probably an exception from how property was established in most of the rest of the world.
	And even America's homesteading had more influence of state privilege than a lot of people think.
	So yeah, I mean, like I said, I want to try to...
	It's kind of the ideas of some of the problems, the issues of past injustice.
	How do you mark things out?
	The fact that freedoms are dependent on access to land.
	If somebody doesn't own land, if there's a class of people that don't They own land, they're kind of subject to the landlords.
	Again, there's more choice if there's a bunch of landlords versus the government.
	But in fact, they can extract rent...
	Sorry, but in a free market, what's wrong with a landlord?
	Well, no.
	The problem is not necessarily the landlord is...
	Well, I think...
	Let me get to the solution that Henry George offers, because he kind of makes a distinction between capital and land.
	So the landlord who extracts rent...
	Actually...
	The way economists divide it up is kind of labor capital and land.
	And a lot of people will lump capital and land together.
	You know, capital is what can produce interest, can produce income.
	So if somebody builds a building, they provide it a service.
	And so they can, you know, having people come in and rent it, they're accumulating income But if someone draws up a fence and says, this is mine, they haven't necessarily produced anything other than some kind of marketage of ownership.
	And historically, that's not necessarily the case.
	I mean, a lot of the traditional societies didn't own spatial land, they owned Moveable things.
	They owned resources.
	You know, the Indians or Native Americans would come in and hunt in different areas and they would pass through.
	They wouldn't say, we've hunted here.
	Nobody else can come within this area.
	And that's true of a lot of traditional societies, that there was not a sense of owning a fenced-off area of land.
	That's kind of...
	And again, I think that's okay if you're fencing off a reasonable portion, but as you extend what you fence off, if you own enough land, you're basically a de facto government.
	Again, if a king were to say, well, I'm going to renounce my throne, but first I'm going to claim all this whole country as my private property, I mean, he wouldn't lose any rights.
	He would be probably even more powerful as a private landowner versus a king.
	Mm-hmm.
	So yeah, so Henry George, I mean, basically his solution is, you know, to set apart the idea that capital is privately owned, that is fully yours, the government has no authority or business or, you know, it's theft to tax labor or capital or trade, those things.
	But the idea of land is a common resource.
	It derives its value from the community.
	That's why the lot in Manhattan is worth so much more than the lot in the country.
	So there's a sense in which when you exclude others from your property, there should be a sense that you're taking something from others.
	You're taking a right to access some land.
	Again, if you're doing your own property or one little piece, that's fine.
	But if you have a massive amount of property that you're excluding people from and collecting rent on, That's a mark of privilege.
	Sorry, I'm just trying to understand.
	How do you get 1,000 square miles of land in a free society?
	In a free society?
	According to what I've proposed, which comes out of the common law tradition, you can't.
	So would you abolish all that land ownership right now?
	Well, first of all, of course, we're talking about how land may be distributed in an unfathomably futuristic society 100 or 200 years from now.
	So it's a pretty academic discussion, which is fine, but I just want to point that out.
	But you seem quite intense about it, which seems kind of interesting to me because it's like, I don't know.
	I mean, you and I can't possibly figure it out.
	You know that, right?
	Because we can't replicate all of the We don't know what technology is going to be available to deal with this kind of stuff.
	We don't know whether land is even going to be that valuable by the time—maybe we're all living on asteroids.
	I don't know.
	Maybe there will be floating cities.
	We don't know.
	Maybe there will be underwater cities.
	Maybe we'll be living—half of us want to live on the moon because of low gravity.
	It's good for our joints.
	So you and I have no idea what the value of land is going to be in 100 or 200 years.
	We don't know whether other planets will be colonized.
	We don't know whether there will be faster than light travel teleporters to go to whatever planet you want to the entire galaxy or all of the 100 billion galaxies around.
	Like we have no idea whether this is even going to be an issue 100 or 200 years from now.
	I just want to sort of point that out.
	It's fine having an academic discussion, but it is completely unimportant in terms of what might possibly be the case when this comes to fruition, when a free society comes about.
	I just want to point that out.
	It's fun.
	It's a fun academic discussion, but this is an intellectual game of monopoly.
	It has no bearing on what's actually going to happen in the future.
	So let me just sort of point out that the common law solution is you pound stakes in You know, around an acre.
	And you have to do that for each acre.
	Because you have to indicate that you want to use the land.
	Because if you can't indicate you want to use the land, no one's going to use the land.
	Because nobody's going to start building a house when somebody can just start building another house right next to them or even on top of them.
	So you indicate that you want to use the land.
	So you're saying, I'm going to mark this land off for use.
	And I've got a year to do something with this land.
	Now, if I'm going to do something with this land, then it's mine, right?
	You know, I build a house and I've got the square around the acre.
	Then I own the acre and the house and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	That's the common law tradition.
	If I don't do anything with the land in whatever, six months or a year, then it reverts back to – I either have to go and repound the stakes or I have to – or it reverts back to common – like unowned and other people can do whatever they want with it and so on, right?
	And I don't just get to hop in a hovercraft and go from 1,000 kilometers each way and put corners.
	And now I own the entire 1,000 kilometers square or whatever, right?
	It's in one kilometer just to make sure that people just don't drive and then say, well, I own everything from where I started driving an hour this morning to now.
	They have to do it in some way that limits their massive land grab or whatever.
	And these are just ways that it's been done in the past.
	And so that would preclude people just being able to own massive amounts of land just by pointing at a map kind of thing.
	Yeah, so again, I don't want to get away too much from the abstract future and kind of look towards now.
	Again, what Henry George advocated was that all taxation, again, that there were forms of theft by taxing income, which is forms of slavery, by taxing trade, all those taxes should be moved to a tax on the value of the undeveloped land.
	That that would be – and again, you don't necessarily need a government, but the sense that by excluding this area, I'm taking something from the community.
	So there needs to be some kind of recompense, and that could be with or without any kind of level of government.
	Wait, sorry.
	When you say by excluding this area, I'm taking something from the community, what does that mean?
	Like you mean if I build a house on a plot of land, a square acre, I'm stealing a square acre from who?
	No.
	Again, I don't think necessarily the small things are...
	It sounds like if I'm taking a deep breath, I'm asphyxiating other people in the movie theater.
	It just sounds like a little collective, but go ahead.
	But are you saying in a free society, no one would own more than an acre?
	No.
	I mean, see, I think you're falling into a status trap here.
	How on earth could I know what's going to happen in a free society 100 or 200 years from now?
	And what would my opinion matter?
	I mean it would be a collective decision-making that people would come about and it would be refined as new things changed, as technology changed and so on, right?
	I mean Manhattan, let's say that people found a way to build skyscrapers that had 10,000 stories.
	I mean what would that do to land rents in Manhattan?
	It would change them considerably.
	I have no idea.
	What would happen if people had little floating platforms and teleportation devices?
	They could live wherever they wanted and they could fly around wherever they wanted.
	What would that do to land?
	Well, it would make it a whole lot less valuable, right?
	Because land is fixed, and if you've got a little floating house that you can push around with anti-gravity devices, then – I mean, it doesn't – so you're asking me, so will people be able to or not be able to own land how in 100 or 200 years?
	I have no idea whatsoever.
	Yeah, no, I don't want to talk about 100 or 200 years.
	I want to talk about now.
	I mean, now currently – No, no, no, no, but we're not talking now.
	See, but we have to be within the bounds of reality, right?
	The government's not going to privatize all its land tomorrow.
	It's at least 100 or 200 years away, right?
	I think what those who are, you know, geo-libertarians or LVTers, land value tax, would be to advocate that government switch away from the coercive taxation on person,
	income, and wages, and on capital, and that income should be switched We've shifted to a tax on the value of the undeveloped land, which is kind of a value...
	Are you proposing a tax as a solution?
	Well, again, I would not just call it a tax, but like I said, I would look to minimize government.
	You're the one who used that word.
	I'm not trying to catch you.
	You know I'm an anarchist, right?
	If you're proposing a government tax as a solution to a complex social problem, then we have a different conversation to have than something about land distribution, right?
	In the future, I would like to do it without any government, that people have an understanding of their obligation to To pay back for, you know, excluding others, that there's a sense of obligation that I'm taking something from, I'm excluding people from access to this land, I owe them something back.
	Right now, like you said, we're not 200 years in a future in a voluntary society.
	Now we're in a society where things are more compulsory.
	So, you know, the goal would be to move things away from the coercive taxes First, to understand that it's more a land-usage fee that, again, by excluding somebody else, there should be a compensation.
	I just want to understand this principle.
	By excluding someone else, you do have to compensate somebody else for their exclusion?
	Right, for their exclusion.
	Wait a second here.
	Why would that only apply to land?
	I mean, I can assume that you and your wife are both in a monogamous relationship, right?
	Very much so.
	Okay, good.
	Good to know.
	So does that mean you have to pay everyone else around you for stealing sex from them because you are not sharing your resources?
	No, it's a voluntary transaction.
	No, no, no.
	Look, the vagina and the penis are out of circulation from the community, right?
	It is a monopoly exclusive little state that you've got going on there, which I think is great, right?
	But you have taken one vagina and one penis out of the general community circulation, right?
	Does that mean you have stolen sex from the community and you must now compensate people for excluding them from your naughty parts?
	No, but let's take it to the extreme.
	What if I, again, if we're able to exclude a larger land area?
	Because if somebody doesn't have access to land, somebody doesn't have ownership in land, all their rights and everything is prioritized.
	Let's say that you start a group and you get 500 teenagers to all vow celibacy.
	Right?
	And you are like, you know, keepitinyourpants.com or whatever it is going to be.
	Don't check that website out.
	I'm sure it's nothing good.
	But let's say that you do that, right?
	So you have now taken 500 sexually attractive and available, formerly available people out of late teenagers, right?
	Late teens, early 20s.
	You've taken this – I mean you've then homesteaded a large number of naughty parts and excluded them from the community.
	Do you then owe the community money for taking sex out of the community?
	If I'm making these people slaves, I mean I can't control the people, right?
	I mean you're saying I'm controlling these 500 people.
	That would be a violation of non-aggression principle.
	No, no, no.
	I don't mean you're controlling them.
	But I mean through your eloquence or through whatever it is, you get them to not – to be celibate, right?
	Well, again, if that's their voluntary decision, that's not a violation of non-aggression principle.
	But if you have some amazing farming technique that produces 10 times the crops without harming the soil, this allows you to bid a huge amount for 100 acres or 500 acres and you either homestead that directly or you buy it from somebody who's homesteaded it before and then you produce this amazing bountiful crop and so on.
	The only reason you will get, in a free market, the only reason that you will get a big track of land is because you are producing something of value, for the most part, to the community.
	Or your workers are.
	Well, they're not your workers, but people you contract with to work in your land.
	Yeah, I mean, you don't own them, right?
	But if they don't have access to land, they may need to work for you.
	If they don't have their own land, right?
	If they don't have their own land to farm, they need to go through you.
	They need to pay you rent to use the land.
	But if access to land was the really important thing for making lots of money, then Manhattan rents would be almost nothing because there's almost no land you can use in Manhattan, right?
	Access to land is not that important when it comes to making money.
	I'm sorry?
	The value of Manhattan is created by the community.
	There's all the resources nearby, the subway access, the transportation.
	Right, but not access to land.
	That's what I'm pointing at, right?
	Oh, Manhattan.
	Well, access to land in Manhattan is hugely valuable.
	I mean, that's why it costs so much.
	Oh, so you mean real estate, not like farm?
	Oh, access, yeah, to real estate.
	Okay, all right.
	Sorry, I just – you said access to land.
	I thought you meant like so you could build a house on farmland or something like that because I was just talking about a big farm example.
	So I just wanted to follow that.
	So what you're saying is that – so is your concern that people will just end up with vast amounts of land and then people will end up with these mini states and we get a new serfdom and that kind of stuff?
	Yeah, I mean in fact a landlord, if the territory is wide enough, is his own state.
	And if people don't have access to land, that's what John Locke talked about.
	He had the Lockean Provisio that said people could homestead and generate land as long as there is equal access of land available to others.
	But once you have a group of people who have no access to land, they have no rights.
	They cannot speak, they cannot labor, they cannot produce their own goods, because it's all contingent on them getting approval of the landowners, who are, in fact, their own forms of estate.
	So that's my concern as far as moving towards privatizing everything.
	And then future generations will be born without land.
	Sorry, your issue is the balance between renting and owning.
	Is that right?
	So you view renters as economically disadvantaged relative to owners?
	Sure.
	Because the owner can produce income without doing any work.
	He can collect the rent just from having monopoly control of that land.
	I don't think – have you ever been a landlord?
	I mean, it's a lot of work.
	I just want to point this out.
	It's a huge amount of work to be a landlord.
	I understand.
	So the idea that he – sorry, just let's be clear about this.
	I mean because landlords get a lot of negative rap because they're associated with asshole aristocrats of years gone by or whatever.
	But being a landlord is a huge amount of work and it's very risky as well.
	People can damage your property.
	They can have loud parties.
	They can do illegal activities.
	You could be liable.
	They can slip and fall.
	They can – whatever.
	I mean they can sue you.
	I mean – It's a hugely risky and difficult and dangerous job to be a landlord.
	So even if you own an apartment building or whatever, just talk to people who own apartment buildings.
	I mean it's really hard work.
	It's risky.
	I mean the market can fall out.
	Like let's say you buy some apartment building because there's some factory that people want to live and the factory closes down.
	Your apartment value just went down by like 90 percent, turned from an asset to a liability.
	It can wipe you out financially.
	I mean, it's a lot of work and a lot of risk to be a landlord.
	I just want to point that out.
	It's not just you sit back and money rolls down a tube to you.
	No, I understand.
	I have property as well, but I wouldn't call that necessarily a landlord because, again, the apartment is not land.
	It is capital.
	And, again, you should earn a reward from capital, the owning the building.
	They're not going to damage...
	You know, the land, they're going to damage the building.
	And so, again, the building… No, no, you're switching because I just asked you if you were talking about land or real estate and you said both.
	So now I'm talking about real estate and you're saying, well, that doesn't count.
	Well, no.
	What I'm talking about as far as the compensation is only for the ground rent.
	The value of the undeveloped land is basically what it would say.
	That is what you're taking, the value of the undeveloped land.
	How you improve on it, the things you put on it, those are fully yours because you produce them.
	They're the fruit of your labor that you should derive the income from that value.
	But the land is more a marker of privilege.
	Again, where you can initiate force against somebody else for coming on On your land, you know, I think more of a spatial area that you're wardening off the spatial area.
	You didn't create the spatial area.
	Okay, let's move on after this because I don't even know what we're talking about before, but I think I've said about 10 times that as far as common law goes, you don't actually own the land until you develop it, until you do something with it.
	Like you can stake out a claim that says, I intend to build a house here or a farm or whatever it's going to be, or I intend to make this a camping area that I'm going to clean up after people and provide some water and electricity or whatever, right?
	So, you don't actually end up with any permanent ownership in the land, at least according to most common law traditions that I'm aware of, and I'm certainly no expert in this, but until you act like you put the markers around to say, I intend to develop something here, and your ownership goes away if you don't, or your claim goes away if you don't.
	Right?
	So, you follow me.
	Again, I don't know how it's going to work at 102.
	This is how it works historically.
	Then once you build a house, then that area is yours.
	So all this undeveloped land that people have all this magical ownership for is not part of the general common law tradition that I'm aware of.
	I don't think there's any other way that common law is practiced.
	Again, if you leave your property vacant, it doesn't revert to somebody else.
	There's no standard.
	I mean, basically, you can hold property.
	Oh, no.
	Sorry.
	This is exactly how it works in resource exploration, certainly up here in Canada.
	So if I want to – and I know this because I spent a year and a half looking for gold in northern Ontario.
	So this I have some knowledge about.
	And the way that you try to establish mineral rights in an area is you have to go in a one-kilometer square.
	Which is what?
	0.6 of a mile or something like that.
	And you have to go and you have to hammer little metal tags with the date and the ownership onto trees and you have to blaze trails, cut a little trail so you can't just sort of helicopter and you have to actually walk through and you have to blaze trails and you do it in a kilometer square and that establishes your mineral rights for, I can't remember, a year or something like that.
	And if you then find gold there and you want to build a mine, and you have to do this repeatedly, and it's a huge amount of work.
	I mean, God, I mean, Northern Ontario is half bogs, swamps, bugs.
	I mean, it's no small feat.
	And if you then find gold there, you want to build a mine, then that mine is yours.
	But you have to go back every year and do that again because that's why the date is on and you register it as well with the government.
	But the important thing is that it's called claim staking, stake your claim.
	This is why it's called you drive little stakes into the corner of the land, right?
	And that's how you establish mineral rights up here in Canada.
	That comes right out of the common law tradition because it's too sensible to have come out from the government.
	So when you say that this is not how it works anywhere, I actually have to – at least when I did it 20 years ago or whatever.
	Good lord.
	Was it 20?
	No, more than 25 years ago.
	That's how it worked, and I'm sure it's pretty much the same now.
	And that's how you establish mineral rights up.
	For a year, if you let it lapse, then it reverts back to common ownership and anyone else can go and stake their claim on it too, but they have to go through the same process and all that kind of stuff.
	So you have to invest a labor saying, I intend to use this land, and if you use the land, then it's yours.
	But if you don't use the land, if all you've done is stake the claim, then it reverts back to common ownership after some period of time or whatever that's generally sensible.
	It's not a millisecond and it's not a million years, something like that.
	I don't want to take up your whole show.
	I just have a post on the board.
	It's Homesteading UPB. I'd encourage you to look at Henry George.
	He's a philosopher.
	We've lost him.
	He's been buried throughout history.
	I'd encourage you to look at his thing.
	Progress and Poverty is his book.
	Just see the ideas there.
	I don't know if we've fully finished the discussion, but I know you've got other calls.
	The last thing I wanted to mention, too, is that I mean, renting versus owning is economically indistinguishable.
	I mean, there's pluses and minuses to both, right?
	Because if you rent, then you get to keep your capital, right?
	So most people, you're young and you're married, you generally will rent, and the reason you're renting is you want to save your money.
	So that you can buy a house if that's what you want to do.
	You rent.
	It's like saying, is leasing a car better than buying a car?
	Is buying a car with cash better than financing it?
	Well, they're economically indistinguishable.
	It's just a matter of preference, at least in a free market, right?
	It doesn't matter.
	If you, for instance, don't ever want to buy a house, then you should rent your whole life and then you should take the money you're saving.
	By not buying a house and you can either blow it on wine, women and song or you can invest it or you can do whatever – but you get all that money that you would have otherwise spent on the down payment and all the additional money you have to pay to pay off the capital and so on.
	And you get to save all the money because renting – you don't have to replace your sump pump or re-roof your house or whatever it is.
	A tree falls down and you don't have to fix it or replace it.
	It's all handled by the landlord.
	So there's nothing wrong with renting.
	There's nothing wrong with buying.
	Economically, they're irrelevant to each other.
	It's just a matter of personal choice and decision.
	So people who choose to rent are not economically disadvantaged relative to people who buy.
	People who borrow other people's property or people who work for other people, they just get to save the time, money and stress of starting their own business, which is not inconsiderable.
	I've certainly been an entrepreneur.
	It sounds like you've got some entrepreneurial blood in your bones.
	And so this idea that the people who rent or the people who work for others are somehow disadvantaged economically, it just doesn't make any sense at least in a free market.
	They're just making choices whether they want to do that or not.
	It's like saying that a guy who works as a waiter during the day and writes songs all night and tries to get a band going is somehow enslaved.
	No, he's just making choices.
	And, you know, he doesn't have to start a band.
	He can, you know, go home and go to the aforementioned website.
	I can't remember what it's called.
	I don't share my naughtybitswiththecommunity.com or whatever, right?
	And so it's not like it's...
	I sort of want to try and avoid this.
	Historically, of course, the serfs were incredibly oppressed and the slaves were unbelievably oppressed.
	That was all terrible.
	And we kind of got that hangover, like renting is somehow bad and the people who rent are somehow slaves.
	This is what Moscow are.
	The people who work are somehow slaves.
	And it's always interesting that the guy who had his foreskin cut off by his community is really interested in other people being oppressed by their community and never really thinks about his own history.
	But anyway, that's neither here nor there.
	But it's nothing wrong with it.
	It's nothing bad with it.
	It's just these are choices that people make in a free society.
	Now, if there's a government there that says, well, you can't own land.
	You're bought and sold with the land.
	You've got no rights.
	And I'm going to hand out all this land to the aristocrats who've killed most of you off.
	Well, that's horrible and that's an injustice.
	But going forward, I think that's a very different thing.
	It's important not to let all the stuff that went bad in the past color how we use the language in the future.
	In the future, in a free society, rent, buy, doesn't – It's a matter of personal choice, but it's not oppression or liberation either way.
	Stephan, we had a quick question about banking and how the bankers are actually hoarding property even right now.
	Is there any solution right off bat as what we could do?
	I mean, we see houses they place on the market, they do these short sales, and then they sit down and they, you know, all these people apply to try to get it, and then they yank it off the market, and they're literally holding so much real estate.
	I think that's where my husband's Real passion is coming from is just this concern of how they're able to get away with just hoarding so much like kicking people out of their homes, and then just holding the property, waiting for the value to go back up again, and then going back up and taking advantage of people all over again.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, I mean, banks are the new aristocracy, right?
	I mean, the financial sector, which is, I think, like a third of the U.S. economy these days.
	And the financial sector is, I mean, it's the only reason Barack Obama got elected, right?
	It's just that the financial services industry poured massive amounts of money into his campaign.
	And nothing to do with the will of the people.
	It has to do with the money of the banksters.
	The financial sector is an unfortunate, an unfortunately evil shadow of the power of the state.
	And – but the power of the state is driven by the greed of the people, right?
	I mean when a politician comes and says, I'm going to give you all this stuff for free – I mean we all know.
	Come on.
	I mean this is not brain surgery.
	We all know the government doesn't have a damn thing to give away.
	I mean it doesn't produce anything.
	It doesn't have a damn thing to give away.
	It takes one of your kidneys.
	It takes both of your kidneys in a wet bag and then claims it saved your life by giving one of them back.
	And so the banking sector is a very advanced form of predatory aristocracy, right?
	So they've realized of course that instead of owning land and instead of owning people, it's far more productive to own money.
	It's far more productive to have control over money.
	Because you can then steal from the people without having to bother with the nasty and possibly dangerous act of breaking a window and coming in and maybe facing a dog or a guy with a gun.
	That's no way to steal.
	I mean that's an idiot's way to steal.
	The way that you steal is through inflation.
	The way that you steal is through debt.
	The way that you steal is through the magical creation of money by typing whatever you want into your own bank account.
	That's how you steal.
	That's how intelligent people steal.
	I mean this is just – I mean the idiots are the ones with the knives in the alley and the smart guys are the ones with the suits at the Capitol.
	And so the modern – the greed of the people drives the promises of the politicians.
	The promises of the politicians are funded by the evil magic of the finance industry and then the poor – the children are sold off, broken into pots and sold off like a – Oh, Buick in Harlem.
	And this is wretched, absolutely horrible, wretched.
	This has got nothing to do with banking.
	I mean, why does banking even exist?
	I mean, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, right?
	So do you need a bank for your Bitcoin?
	Of course not, because Bitcoin can't be stolen, right?
	It's really hard to steal it, and there's lots of things that you can do to protect yourself that have nothing to do with a bank.
	So why do you even need a bank?
	You need a bank because the government can't protect you from property theft.
	So if you keep your money in your house and then someone comes and steals money from your house, the government is almost never going to go and get it back.
	So you've got to put it in a bank because the government can't keep your money safe.
	The government has no particular incentive to keep your money safe.
	Bitcoin does because it's a voluntary situation.
	So you need a bank to keep your stuff safe because the government couldn't keep it safe for you.
	And you need a bank because of inflation because if you stick your money at home, then it's going to lose value.
	And the reason it's going to lose value is because the government controls money supply, money printing and all that kind of stuff.
	And please, dear God, if another person emails me and tells me that the Fed is a private institution, my head is actually going to explode.
	So please don't do that.
	It's important.
	It's not a private institution.
	It's completely fenced off by the government.
	Anyway, so this is how smart people steal from the population by inflating the currency and by going into debt.
	And using the unborn as collateral to borrow against.
	This is how smart people steal.
	And not one person in a thousand can usually trace it.
	And not one person in ten thousand has a moral understanding to really know what's going on.
	So, yeah, you need banks because government can't protect your property.
	You need banks because government is inflating the currency.
	And you need banks because the government will steal your money unless you give it to the banksters who then uses it collateral to lend money to the government to bribe the people to buy more power and into the death spiral of the ancient Roman Empire we inevitably go.
	So banking to me is… I mean, what a load of nonsense.
	I mean, current banking has just become completely distorted.
	It's like saying, well, the imperialistic death star military of the U.S. empire is exactly the same as your local neighborhood watch.
	It's like, well, not really.
	No.
	So banking is something that is – it would be – It's incomprehensible in a free society of the future to have anything to do with what's going on right now.
	It has nothing to do with it.
	I mean, so, but say, wow, well, people want to borrow money to buy a house.
	Well, okay, sure.
	People can do that and maybe they can do that with an accumulation of microloans, right?
	I mean, this is something that's been quite – maybe they can – I don't know.
	Maybe they can kickstart it.
	You're using some web thing to get a bunch of money from people.
	Maybe they borrow more from relatives and so on.
	Maybe there will be institutions that lend you money to buy a house and then will take money back over time.
	A perfectly honorable and reasonable thing to do because we all have time preferences because the Grim Reaper is a step-by-step approaching.
	He's turned back from my garden, which is good.
	But it would be a pretty inconsequential part of the economy.
	There's the old banking 363 rule, right?
	Banking, you borrow at 3%, you lend at 6%, you go play golf at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
	I mean that's really as complicated as it would be in a free society and the profits would then be much less accordingly.
	So I just wanted some minor rant but banking as far as it stands in the here and now is completely mutated and it's just another apparatus of the – know squid brain money sucking child eating predatory state no Yeah, that's true.
	That's good.
	That is good.
	The biggest thing, make sure there's not a land auction before we take care of the banking system because, again, the bankers will end up buying all the property based on their status system.
	Yeah.
	The failure of the bank is going to be one of the main reasons why we have an opportunity.
	We are tragically locked into such an addictive death spiral as a culture.
	And people are so dissociated from the consequences of their day-to-day decisions.
	That we literally are going to – almost guaranteed we're going to have to hit a crisis point before anybody is going to get off their asses, turn off their TVs and take to the streets for change.
	I mean this is what's happening in Brazil right now.
	I mean Brazil has had corruption for – I don't know, ever since the white man cometh.
	And only now are they making some protests.
	And generally, of course, what they're protesting for is more government.
	Hey, man, you took away my subsidies.
	I mean, restore my subsidies.
	Well, there's a battle cry for freedom.
	But no, I mean, so the banking system is going to have to collapse.
	The currency system is going to have to collapse.
	And people are going to have to be short of food.
	I mean, this is how social change occurs, tragically.
	And we can only hope that we have the right ideals in place, that people won't clamor for a return to the old evils but will instead look for some new virtues.
	But the banking system will be gone long before there's any freedom.
	I can guarantee you that.
	Wow.
	Thank you so much, Stefan.
	You have just been such a beacon of light for us, and we just cannot thank you enough for all that you have shared, your passion, your encouragement.
	I mean, you really, really motivated us to take a huge leap of faith, and our lives are just so much more enriched because of you.
	Thank you, thank you, thank you.
	Thank you so much.
	Well, thank you as well and I wanted to point out that I think your correction of the government doesn't have the right to sell the land but it would rather be homesteaded is a very important thing.
	I've never really considered that before but that's a huge correction that is very important because morally they don't have the right to sell it because they don't own it.
	Anyway, I wanted to point that out.
	So thank you for the instruction.
	Always valuable and great stuff to hear, man.
	I'm so happy you have some very lucky kids there and – I say, you know, kids don't choose their parents, but, you know, act as if they could.
	And, you know, I think it sounds like the way you guys are going, that if your kids could choose anyone, they would choose you.
	And that's a very honorable and wonderful position to be in.
	So good for you.
	Thank you.
	An hour of the first caller.
	I did it again.
	Ah, too interesting.
	Too interesting.
	Anyway, let's move on to the next one.
	Sorry!
	All right.
	Take care, guys.
	Take care.
	Bye-bye.
	Bye.
	Alright, the next caller today is Steve.
	Go ahead, Steve.
	Hello, Stefan.
	Hello.
	I am the son of two teachers, and it is quite odd coming out to them on an anti-statist, I don't know, I'm kind of nervous right now.
	You mean public school teachers?
	Yes, public school teachers.
	My father is currently the union representative for his school district at the moment, and my mother has retired from teaching and is collecting para and is substitute teaching on the side.
	It's collecting para?
	Para, it's kind of like a pension fund.
	Oh, okay, so she's getting her pension, right?
	Well, not her pension, but the pension.
	Yeah, the pension, and then she's subbing.
	But it's really kind of weird coming out to them.
	Well, I'm going to jump into this.
	My parents...
	Well, I'll start with my mother.
	My mother grew up on a farm in Minnesota with five other kids.
	So, she moved out to the Rocky Mountain West and, you know, but when she was raised, she was hit, you know.
	And then she met my father who, he grew up on the East Coast and he was also hit.
	One of the kind of highlight stories of, just to make it quick, of his childhood was he would tell me this story about after it would rain, he would go outside and he'd find these frogs and they'd be all over the place.
	And he'd toss him up in the air and he'd hit him with a baseball bat.
	And that's just kind of trying to frame his childhood in the quickest way possible.
	Wait, do you mean he would hit the frogs and kill them with his baseball bat?
	Yes.
	Jesus.
	Yeah.
	Kind of a weird thing to grow up with.
	Wait, wait.
	I mean, that's a horrifying story, right?
	Yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	Because I remember when I was a kid, I would, you know, go down to this creek and I'd, you know, catch these frogs and I'd like keep them for a week.
	And I thought they were the greatest things on Earth.
	And hearing that story, you know, really helped out.
	But I just kind of want to jump into how that how that kind of affected my life, because I was born in February and my mother had taken off.
	Like four months before the summer break and then she had the summer break.
	And then after about the eight-month mark, I was essentially raised in child care, if that makes sense.
	You mean you went to sort of like daycares and nursing schools?
	Yeah, daycares.
	Was it relatives or was it institutionalized?
	It was institutionalized.
	It was, what I understand was it was a It was like a household daycare.
	And then once I hit about the age of two and a half, I was moved to a church-run daycare.
	I was in daycare from age one and a half to probably about ten.
	Like, eight hours a day.
	And that's not including school.
	Like, I would be woken up at, like, 6.30 and I'd be dropped off at these institutions.
	And then I would have to wait for my mother to, you know, pick me.
	She'd go to work.
	Sure, work was, like, about an eighth of a mile away from where my daycare was.
	And I would have to wait for her to...
	Sorry, your mom was a teacher, right?
	Yes, my mother was.
	She was a middle school teacher.
	So why couldn't she get you in the afternoon?
	I mean, she's down at three or whatever.
	Yeah, but she had a bunch of extracurricular activities, I guess, to make more money, if that makes sense.
	You mean she had a job after school?
	It was a job after school through the public school system.
	Like taking care of children?
	Kind of.
	It would be like clubs.
	So yeah, essentially taking care of children.
	Okay, so she would get paid...
	To take care of other children, then she would take some of that money and pay people to take care of you.
	I've not quite understood this flow through economy thing.
	Anyway, go ahead.
	Yeah, but that continued and I went to different daycares for the first five years.
	Then once I hit the, you know, kindergarten age, they sent me off to kindergarten.
	I had a morning program that I went to for daycare.
	Then I went to class, and then I went to another program after school.
	And then at age seven, I think I was in second grade, my parents had gotten a divorce.
	And from what I remember correctly, the marriage was never quite that happy.
	And My father, I think he took out a lot of his anger of the marriage on me and my sister.
	And that kind of really kind of hurt.
	Let's see here.
	My mother was kind of like, if I can equate my father to anything, he was like the bear at the end of the table.
	And my mother was the person who kept the bear, if that makes sense.
	You mean he was dangerous and volatile and your mother would manage him?
	Is that right?
	Yeah, and she would kind of use him as kind of a threat to get things done.
	Oh, not manage him, but use him like a weapon, right?
	Yeah, the bear keeper.
	That's how we kind of figured that kind of thing.
	Oh, I see.
	So more like a trained bear, an attack bear that your mother had thought of sometimes.
	Right.
	I'm so sorry about all this.
	I do want to interrupt and say I'm incredibly sorry about all of this.
	I mean, sorry about you handed off to other people to raise.
	I'm sorry that, I mean, geez, this is the frog story, right?
	Just, oh, it's terrifying.
	And that you tell a child this too is astonishing, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, it's kind of a threat against the child, right?
	This is what I'll do to a frog.
	I care about the frog a lot less than I care about you.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, so I just wanted to...
	I just want to...
	Please don't let me interrupt your whole story, but I just want to tell you this is...
	I mean, it's very tragic stuff.
	I'm really sorry.
	Okay, well, thank you for that.
	So at around age seven, my parents had gotten divorced, and what had happened is my father was essentially kicked out of the house, and the reason for the divorce was my father is a functioning alcoholic, and...
	My mother really was never behind that, and there are issues with that that I don't really want to delve into at this moment.
	But after he left the house, he was kind of like the headstone of the financial.
	He would allow things to happen to the house.
	He'd be the guy who was running the budget.
	And after he left, my mother kind of went insane.
	She dug up our yard and did this landscaping things, which we didn't have the money for.
	Then after that, she hired these contractors to fix our basement, which there was nothing wrong with the basement.
	It was a luxury thing that she did, but she ended up losing $15,000 on these workers.
	These guys weren't what you would see like These are the kind of guys that you don't want working in your house.
	These are the, oh I know a guy and he's struggling right now, but if you give him a chance he'll do a really good job and that of course never works out.
	So I was living in kind of a fearful state at about the ages of 10 and 11 and at that time one of them had stolen my mother's checkbook and My mother had called the authorities on him.
	He apparently was arrested.
	I have no idea what the status of.
	But my mother instilled fear into both me and my sister that this man was going to come after us because we had, you know, gotten him in trouble.
	So for about three years, I was scared that this man was coming to my house and burning it down or something along those lines.
	But to continue...
	After about fifth grade, things kind of settled down with the divorce, and I was starting to get used to it.
	I was still being in daycare for about, or I guess, outside of parental custody about 12 hours a day.
	And then I hit sixth grade, and I was prescribed Adderall.
	And that was probably the worst thing that I could have taken after I'm not sure if you're familiar with the dosages of Adderall, but the average college student takes about a 10 to 15 milligram tablet, and I, at the age of 12, was taking a 30 milligram tablet.
	Well, that seems like a lot.
	What were the circumstances that provided the, quote, justification for this?
	I mean, you know I'm enormously against these kinds of drugs, but what was happening that drove the diagnosis and infliction of this kind of medicine, drugs?
	I had been acting out in class, and this was in sixth grade, And what pushed the threshold was I insulted my teacher directly in front of the entire class and I was sent down to the principal's office.
	They talked and whatever.
	I went home and she was like, maybe my mother was the person I talked to and she was like, maybe we should go talk to your doctor and do all this and then the doctor prescribed it and That kind of...
	I could see kind of a rebuilding of a social development at age 12-ish.
	But then that kind of got arrested once the Adderall got in my system.
	You mean you were getting friends?
	You said rebuilding of a social...
	You mean you were having friends and then that sort of fell away?
	Yeah.
	Friends that were outside of the daycare system.
	Because if...
	I don't know if you were in daycare ever...
	Ever.
	I come from a single mom household.
	I mean, daycare, you can't even survive without it.
	Yeah, I was in home care, daycare.
	I was sent away to relatives.
	I was in boarding school.
	I mean, yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, home was a place I visited from time to time, it felt like.
	But yeah, so I get what you're coming from, but go ahead.
	So I was developing this kind of social thing, and I stopped going to daycare right around the time that I was starting to take the Adderall.
	And so once that Adderall hit my system, I was kind of deadlocked.
	Yeah, because you go kind of emotionally, right, as far as I understand it?
	Oh, yeah.
	You're taking amphetamine, for crying out loud.
	So I went through my middle school.
	I had one friend.
	And this has been a very common thing with me my entire life where I've only had one friend at a time because I can't.
	I can't stand having other people around me that aren't kind of in that same mindset.
	I don't know how to exactly explain it, but I stopped taking the Adderall when I started college, and that was last year, and after that I saw immediate improvements and all that, but Once I hit college, I started looking at kind of the issues that were going on in the world and all that.
	What really started it was a video by Girl Writes What, and I know you two do talks together.
	But from that, I found you.
	From you, I've started looking into the self-improvement, self-knowledge kind of thing.
	And right now I'm seeing a psychologist and I'm really making the steps to improve myself and, you know, solve these issues that have happened in my past.
	And I got to say, a lot of it is listening to your philosophy, learning all sorts of, I mean, just the deep stuff that you have on self-knowledge.
	Listening to your Sunday shows and your explanations, it's really pushed me to get better at this kind of thing.
	Well, I mean, obviously, first of all, I'm incredibly sorry.
	I mean, what a mess.
	What an undeserved, unearned, accidental, bad fucking luck mess.
	And I'm incredibly sorry about that.
	But boy...
	What an amazing thing you're doing.
	I mean that's incredible.
	I mean it's always amazing to me how much of a spark can survive so much shitty ash pouring down a tube.
	You think the fire is out.
	It's got to be out.
	Look at this guy.
	Look at his family.
	Look at his upbringing.
	Look at his lack of bonding.
	Look at his – I mean the lack of intimacy in the family, the dysfunction, the fear, the inappropriate sharing of ridiculously adult topics like frogs mashing with bats and guys coming to burn the house down.
	I mean what lunatics – what lunatic parental behavior?
	You know, and then, oh, you oppose a teacher.
	You must be drugged.
	I mean, that's Soviet, right?
	I mean, that's like, you know, question the Stalin and we're going to shove horse tranquilizers up your ass.
	I mean, this is, it's Soviet is what it is.
	It's totalitarian.
	And yet, and yet, you see, you know, like, Wally, you see the stars through the clouds, right?
	And immediately, I mean, it seems like you heard something, it was like, bam, this is what I got to do.
	This is where I've got to go.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, isn't that amazing?
	How much potential was there for you with just the right comment, the right question, the right touch, and you are a way to reclaim yourself.
	I mean, isn't that amazing?
	Yeah.
	You know, I don't know what to really think of it, because it's just something that...
	Does the question make sense, though?
	I mean, because it is...
	It's not something you would expect from history, right?
	We'd expect you to be, you know, teeing up some more frogs, right?
	Not doing what you're doing.
	Oh, yeah.
	I would definitely say my father did try and make steps into improving the way that I was raised and the comparison of the way that he was raised, but...
	Whenever they try and give me the statement, we did our best.
	You didn't do your best, because if you really wanted to do your best, these wouldn't have come up.
	Well, the other thing, too, is what does best mean?
	Exactly.
	I want to point this out, because when people say, I did my best, that to me is...
	It's a very interesting statement.
	Let me spend a second on this because it's something that comes up so often.
	Let's say that I promise you I'm going to win the Boston Marathon.
	The Boston Marathon is next year.
	I spent the year eating ice cream, sitting on the couch, watching TV, Video gaming and not even like off your ass connect stuff but like serious thumb mashing feet on the ottoman kind of stuff.
	And I put on 40 pounds.
	I don't do – my cardiovascular system is shot.
	I'm a complete physical wreck.
	Joints are aching and all that.
	And then you see I – but I'm like, hey, I promised I was going to go to the Boston Marathon.
	And lo and behold, it turns out I don't actually win the Boston Marathon.
	In fact, I get 200 yards out of the gate and collapse in a heap on the ground and have to be taken with an oxygen mask to some local hospital, right?
	Now, I can legitimately say to you, when I started that race, I did my best at the Boston Marathon, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	I ran until I collapsed.
	What, did you want me to keep running after I collapsed?
	Are you crazy?
	Are you a sadist?
	I did my best.
	Now, that's a true statement, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	But the point isn't, did you do your best while parenting?
	The point is, did you prepare for parenting?
	Right?
	So parents can always say, I did my best.
	The same way I can say, I did my best in the Boston Marathon, though I only made it 200 yards, I'd be taken to a hospital.
	I did my best.
	I ran until my knees gave out, you ungrateful little whelp, right?
	But the point is, the point is not whether you did your best in the moment of parenting.
	The point is, did you prepare for parenting?
	Did you prepare for the Boston Marathon?
	If you make a commitment for someone to do well in the Boston Marathon, you owe it to them to prepare.
	And if you make a commitment to be somebody's primary caregiver for 20 years, Then you damn well owe it to them to prepare.
	Slightly more important than the Boston Marathon.
	Did you take parenting classes?
	Did you read parenting books?
	Did you look at the latest research?
	Did you figure out the data?
	Did you approach this with an ounce of responsibility?
	I'm not saying you had to train two hours a day for a year.
	We're not asking that of parents-to-be.
	Just, you know, crack five or ten books.
	Look up some experts.
	Figure out how you're going to do it.
	I mean it's a human life.
	It may be worth something.
	You're in complete control and command.
	You're shaping that human brain.
	You are delivering that child into a future society where he or she is going to roam around completely unprotected and unmolested and uncontrolled.
	So yes, it is kind of important.
	Read five or ten books.
	I mean, we'd never want a dentist to operate on us without practicing.
	I mean, if I open up a dentistry shop in my front yard tomorrow and I end up breaking people's teeth, I can literally say, I did my best.
	Well, sure.
	But it doesn't matter whether you're doing your best at the moment.
	The only thing that matters is, did you prepare for the most important job you're ever going to take?
	It's the preparation that counts, not the claim of doing your best.
	Who gives a shit about whether somebody did their best in the moment?
	I don't give a rat's ass whether somebody did their best in the moment.
	Yeah, thanks for bringing your car in, Steph.
	I'm afraid that we've completely wrecked your transmission because I let my dog operate on it.
	But, you know, he was doing his best and I was offering him treats to fix it.
	It's like, are you a lunatic?
	I don't care about your dog doing his best.
	I don't care if your second cousin was blindfolded and hitting it with a wrench, but he was doing the very best he could under the circumstances.
	I don't care about people's best.
	I only care about their preparation.
	Because anybody can claim that they're doing their best.
	I just took a class in Japanese kanji writing and I never studied and I never went, but I did my best on the test.
	Well, what the hell does doing your best on the test?
	It doesn't mean anything.
	The only thing that matters is did you prepare?
	Did I actually practice?
	Did I learn?
	Did I try to understand?
	Did I come to the teacher when I had problems?
	The doing your best thing, this is the claim of the failure.
	Doing your best.
	I did my best.
	This is the claim of people who have failed to prepare and they're looking for an excuse to avoid the consequences of that failure.
	So I just – sorry for that rant but this idea that there's this magic spell called I did my best that removes people's responsibility is completely ridiculous because you can say it about anything and it doesn't matter.
	It's completely unverifiable.
	Who knows whether somebody did their best or not?
	I mean it's completely a subjective opinion.
	I was a good parent because on every alternate Thursdays for 12 minutes I thought about the word blue.
	I don't know.
	Did you?
	Did you not?
	What does it mean?
	There's absolutely no way that you can tell whether somebody did their best or not.
	What you can tell is did they have knowledge, right?
	If I'm claiming that I'm going to be a dentist and go in there with a black and decadrill, I'm sure as hell going to damage a lot of people's mouths and jaws, possibly their tonsils accidentally.
	Right?
	Nobody can tell whether I'm doing my best or not doing my best.
	It doesn't matter.
	We can tell by the consequences and the preparation.
	It's the only thing we judge people by.
	The preparation and the consequences.
	It's the only thing we judge people by.
	How do you get to be on the Olympic team for gymnasts?
	Well, you've done gymnasts for 10 or 12 years and you've worked what's left of your ass off, right?
	That's how you get to be on the gymnast team.
	How do you get to stay on the gymnast team?
	You do really well.
	Preparation and consequences.
	That's all that we can judge people by.
	I don't give a rat's ass about their intentions in the moment.
	Who cares about such unverifiable?
	That's religion.
	That's nonsense.
	That's just superstitions.
	Make up whatever you want.
	Preparation and consequences is the only thing that we judge people by.
	And as far as your parents go, the consequences were pretty wretched.
	And I would imagine that if you pressed them on their preparation, hey, which books influenced you most when you decided to create a human life and be its primary caregiver and intimate shaper of brain and body for at least the first decade?
	What books did you read to prepare for this?
	Which parenting philosophies did you most pursue?
	Which ones did you reject?
	Which data influenced you the most in your choice of parenting discipline techniques?
	Which researcher influenced you the most, right?
	And again, we're not talking about people got to get a PhD in child psychology.
	But at least when it comes to the raising and shaping of a human mind and body, at least can people put as much preparation as they do into the purchase of the average piece of soon-to-be-obsolete electronics or electronics.
	A car, let's say.
	I mean, people don't just go out and buy a car randomly, close their eyes, point at something in the lot and say, well, I did the best I could.
	No, they do lots of research when it comes to buy a car.
	Well, what mileage does it have?
	And what features does it have?
	And how good is the warranty?
	And what's the interest rate?
	I mean, all that sort of shit, right?
	And people know that stuff.
	So, yeah.
	I mean, we have every right as...
	Adult children to say to our parents, okay, so which was your philosophy?
	Which books did you read before you became a parent?
	Who did you talk to?
	Which parents were your role models for success?
	And how did you talk to them to ask them how to emulate their successes?
	Because this was the most important decision.
	The most important decision you make as an adult is to create another human life and then have care control and shaping of that life for at least 20 years, about a quarter century by the time the brain development is all done.
	So that was the most important decision that you made, and obviously it was the most important decision that you should have prepared for.
	So what were your major influences?
	Which books did you read?
	Did you like Spark?
	Did you like Parent Effectiveness Training?
	And which data was it that really made the difference?
	And also, if you liked a particular parenting philosophy, you know, spare the rod, spoil the child, did you look at counter-arguments to that, right?
	Because...
	That's important, right?
	If you have a particular position, you have to examine the counterarguments in order to know that that position is valid.
	Otherwise, it's just bigotry, right?
	I just – confirmation bias.
	I just like this.
	I was brought up hitting kids.
	I thought hitting kids was a good idea.
	So, hey, what did you know?
	I gravitated towards philosophies educated hitting kids.
	Well, did you actually look at the data to counteract that possibility?
	Because when I was a kid and I ate lots of chocolate, you said to me, well, okay, it feels good in the moment.
	It's going to have negative consequences.
	You need to think about that.
	When I was a kid, I wanted to stay up late.
	You said, oh, yeah, it feels good in the moment.
	It's going to have negative consequences.
	You're going to be tired tomorrow.
	So you have to give up that which feels good in the moment sometimes so that you can gain the rewards of that down the road.
	You see, that's what you tell your average three-year-old or four-year-old when they're eating too much chocolate, too much cake.
	Screaming too loud, jumping off things that are dangerous, wanting to stay up too late.
	You say, no, no, no.
	It's important to defer gratification for the sake of that which is good in the long run.
	So clearly when parents are inflicted that on a three and four and five-year-old, and some of them inflicted like crazy people on one and two-year-olds, so clearly parents then have to accept that that parenting which feels right to them may be exactly like how chocolate tastes good to a three-year-old.
	Got to look at the facts.
	Sure, it tastes good in the moment, but cavities, diabetes, weight gain, whatever, right?
	Tiredness later.
	This is, you know, this is important just because the parenting felt right, just because the religion felt right, just because the culture felt right, just because the approval of others felt right.
	Well, what were the facts?
	That help you condition that decision so you weren't just going for confirmation bias.
	You say, well, you know, it seemed right at the time.
	It's like, well, I didn't get away with that when I was three and four and five years old, so how on earth did you get away with it when you were 30 about something much more important than a piece of chocolate, which was how to raise me.
	So it is important because this magic mantra of I did the best I could with the knowledge I had at the time, you know, doesn't get anyone 201 yards into the Boston Marathon if they collapse for lack of preparation at 200.
	So anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
	Sorry for the long rant, but please continue.
	Oh, well, I'm seeing that we have very little time left.
	So if it's okay with you, you can move on to the next caller.
	If you had something that you – I'll go over because I just – the rants don't count.
	I mean you can get the rants without calling in.
	So if you had something you wanted to ask specifically, I would be happy to take a shot if that would be of use to you.
	I do have one question of interest.
	I know you're a vegetarian.
	Do you eat fish?
	I will occasionally eat fish and full confession time, when I'm on chemo, I am not a vegetarian.
	My body just craves meat like unbelievably.
	So, I'm afraid that I have stepped outside the bounds of vegetarianism during the time.
	And, you know, partly due to, I mean, it's hard to eat food and I need a lot of calories when I get my food.
	So, I just wanted to point that out.
	I do eat fish from time to time.
	I'm not a huge fan of fish.
	The only fish I like is the fish that doesn't like my arteries back, which is deep fried headache.
	So, I don't mind fish.
	You know, prepared rider can be good, but, you know, it's kind of fishy.
	So, I don't eat fish very much, but occasionally I will.
	All right.
	Well, thank you for the call, and I really appreciate it.
	Yes, and thank you for everything that you're doing.
	I mean, this has a huge ripple effect.
	I mean, I really believe that the work that you're doing changes the entire path of probably multi-generational dysfunction.
	So, good for you, man.
	This is how you save the world.
	You turn your own corner, and it changes...
	You know, but does it change the whole world?
	No, but I tell you this, if you have kids, it's gonna change the world for those kids and all the kids who come after them, so good for you, man.
	Alright, Mr.
	Mike, who we got?
	Alright, Vanessa, you are next up.
	Hello?
	Hello, hello, how you doing?
	Hi, I'm doing great.
	First of all, thanks so much for taking- Wow, you sound happy.
	I've got to have another coffee shot to the eyeball, because you sound pretty good.
	I went to sleep kind of late last night, so I'm running on coffee calendar, but go ahead.
	What's on your mind, Vanessa?
	That's okay.
	It's actually the other side of the day for me.
	It's a little past midnight, so I've had my energy for the day already.
	Oh, good.
	Okay.
	Okay, good.
	Well, first of all, I just wanted to say thank you for all the effort and time and energy that you put into all your podcasts and videos.
	It's really been influential in my life as well as in my husband's life.
	We listen to Free Domain Radio all the time.
	In fact, sometimes while I'm lying in bed, I look over and see my husband listening to headphones and a familiar voice eking out of them.
	Yeah.
	You're in bed with us.
	Into marriage moments.
	That would not be...
	That's one area where freedom in radio dare not tread.
	But that's good.
	Good.
	I appreciate that.
	And do tell them thanks.
	And I appreciate your kind words.
	Oh, yeah.
	So I am calling today to...
	Get your advice about what you think would be a reasonable boundary between myself and my mother, considering our past history.
	I know the last caller talked about family, but I think this is a little different twist.
	Yeah, it's your show.
	What's in your mind?
	I guess I can give you some background about my mom.
	Well, as far as her past, her parents, my grandparents...
	As far as I know, most of what I know is kind of sketchy since I only know it from my grandparents or from my mom.
	But they're really super spiritual into a little bit of everything.
	When she was younger, there was lots of alcohol, drugs, etc.
	She was in and out of the hospital a lot as a child.
	And her brother was in and out of jail and prison for most of his life.
	So from what I gather, her childhood experience...
	Does that mean even when he was kind of young?
	Yeah, yeah, throughout most of his life.
	So, and he, well, he was actually murdered when I was in third grade.
	So that kind of was a culmination of a lot.
	Yeah.
	But she...
	From what I gather from her relationship with her parents and her brother, she was kind of the forgotten good child who never really caused many problems but maybe didn't get the attention because her brother needed that attention or had to have that attention.
	Right.
	Yeah, I know the kind of kid that's like, not currently bleeding, move on.
	Right.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, so...
	I have kind of come to the conclusion that through her experiences she has developed borderline personality disorder, and I think I can kind of establish that throughout my story of her relationship with me.
	But the finding of her possibly being borderline has really established a lot of freedom in my relationship with her.
	Realize that I am not alone in dealing with someone like her, but I guess I can talk about my childhood with her to give you some background.
	My mom was actually married before she married my dad, so she married, I think, as a late teenager, early 20, and that lasted for six months, and then he left her, and I guess there was a state of panic, whatnot.
	I actually didn't know that she was married previously until two years ago, three years ago.
	And she didn't tell me.
	She doesn't know that I know actually.
	So that was quite shocking.
	There's a lot of hidden ghosts in her past.
	But from what I remember about my childhood...
	I remember it being quite stable.
	She stayed home with us.
	There weren't really any emotional outbursts.
	Yes, we were occasionally spanked, so there can be cause for saying it wasn't perfectly stable.
	But as far as super abuse or super really terrifying moments in my past, those are kind of non-existent until I hit puberty when I started to notice tensions within our family and how she treated my grandparents and how she treated me.
	My family has a pretty Christian background.
	So growing up, I was kind of a goody-two-shoes Christian girl.
	A lot of that has changed in the last few years.
	But that's how I grew up.
	And as a teenager...
	I thought that my relationship with my mom was just kind of normal.
	Maybe it was just because I was a teenager.
	This is how relationships with parents and teens are supposed to be.
	But I would often make extensive budgets for myself to try to find ways to get out.
	Like, how much money do I need to move in somewhere else?
	Leave the home because late high school, my senior year, I had a boyfriend just for a year.
	He as well was a goody church boy, so really there wasn't anything to be worried about in my mind, but at some point my mom approached me and said, I needed to break up with him.
	It was either him or my mom, and I had to choose, which is quite a ridiculous choice, considering the depth of both of those relationships is not even equal.
	So that happened, and then once I started college and started dating my now husband, He kind of opened my mind to seeing that my situation or the way my mom had treated my relationships and Treated me was not normal.
	That wasn't something that is to be expected.
	His family is quite Open with each other and I never experienced that kind of relationship in a family before So when we started dating my now husband My mom always expected the worst of me even though pretty much everyone else I knew I don't know, just couldn't fathom that she would think those things.
	She still expected the worst of me.
	For example, one time she called the dean of our college and told him that my boyfriend had, quote, posted inappropriate pictures of me on the internet, which completely blew me away.
	The dean called both of us into his office and said, you know, This happened.
	She called.
	Just wanted to let you know, guys, be careful.
	He's not really my authority in that way and can't really punish me if that were even true.
	But it wasn't true and I was completely shocked.
	Really hurt that my reputation had been harmed in such a way, so I tried to explain to him.
	My mom was upset for some strange reason because we were in goodwill, took pictures in 80s wedding clothes.
	That was it.
	And for some reason that offended her.
	But in the end, my reputation was hurt, and I felt quite upset about being talked about for other people.
	As well as my husband, my boyfriend at the time, he only met my parents five times over the five years that we were dating, and three of those times were before we were dating, I believe, before we got married.
	And one of those times, my dad invited him over to the house to talk, just the usual daughters dating someone, let's talk, kind of talk.
	And my mom sat there, then all of a sudden ran upstairs and vomited in the upstairs bathroom quite loudly, then ran back downstairs and vomited slash gagged into the kitchen sink almost right beside us, then came and sat in the room.
	And my dad especially was very embarrassed for...
	What just happened?
	So he asked her, can you please say at least one nice thing about him?
	And she said, well, at least he's not fat.
	Anyway, so...
	I think I felt very misrepresented in her eyes, and especially when we got engaged.
	I was living overseas for the year we were engaged, but she didn't help with our wedding and kind of just ignored it.
	I ignored the fact that I was going to be getting married if I talked to her.
	And the strange thing, when we got married, the next week we came by the house to pick up a few belongings and she flung open the door and threw my husband in her arms and hugged him and was so happy that we were married, that we were together, that we had each other, which makes me want to throw up.
	So that's kind of where we are right now.
	She's under this guise of everything's happy on her side.
	Forgetting that things ever happened between us, but obviously that's still quite present in my mind because...
	I'll try to make this quick, but the current situation with my family a few months before our wedding, which was actually three years ago, so a little over three years ago, my dad, who is her knight in shining armor, always had done everything perfect, probably after her past relationships, was much better than what she had before.
	Over very tragic events in the last two years, she divorced him about three months ago.
	She was living in our house, and then she moved out, and my dad moved back in, but she has moved out and hasn't told us where she's living, even though, because our town is quite small, we know where she's living, but she refuses to tell us.
	I feel the urgency of this situation with her and my relationship with her and the reason I came to you is because in the past she has been suicidal.
	I mean, from what I've researched about BPD, people who have borderline or are borderline, I have a tendency to be fake suicidal, but there's still a huge percentage of suicidal-ness in the BPD community, so there's always still that chance.
	But the things that she said, the way she's phrased it, have been quite serious, not just threats, but a couple months ago, right before the divorce, And one of my mom's counselors that she has seen called my dad and my sister urgently, and she couldn't get a hold of them, so she emailed my sister and asked where my mom was living, because I guess she's not telling even her counselor.
	And the counselor told my sister in the email that it was urgent because my mom had said that she was going to kill herself that night.
	So, and that was the same, that morning I had talked to her on Skype and let her know that, just I guess out of politeness, that I would be testifying for my dad in court because she was going to take my dad to court for the divorce.
	And I wanted to testify on his behalf, but I wanted to let her know ahead of time instead of just seeing her in court all of a sudden.
	So that night she said that she was going to commit suicide.
	Obviously she didn't go through with it, but that left a really big pain on my heart that That's terrifying.
	The two events could be so close.
	So, my idea with her, some of this has been thrown around by me, by my husband, just talking back and forth.
	He's been a big influence, and talking with her, I feel like I'm kind of worn down through years of trying to talk with her, trying to reason with her, and he kind of presents a fresh perspective.
	But I feel like I need to When I talk to her, it needs to be either pretend like everything's okay or really get down to the nitty gritty anytime I have a conversation with her.
	And I occasionally just talk to her, la tida, this is what's happening in my life.
	But I'm not the kind of person that can really keep that up.
	I feel like if there's an elephant in the room, you need to talk about it.
	And so I feel like it's kind of come to be the time.
	I'm living overseas now, but we'll probably be moving back closer-ish to my family that it definitely needs to be established where the lines are.
	But my idea is that even though I've approached her many times just as a final effort on my part to approach her with the truth, I know she is unreachable at this point, but I feel like for my own sake...
	Well, as opposed to when?
	You said she's unreachable at this point, as opposed to when?
	Well, I guess...
	Right, because you're saying you want to...
	You said, well, you know, I want to...
	You know, if there's an elephant in the room, I want to have these conversations.
	And I mean, I can't give you an answer, of course, right?
	But the first place I look to is to the evidence, right?
	This is not something you can reason out because this is not a problem that involves physics or math, right?
	Or logic.
	This is a problem that involves a human being.
	And with a human being, you can't reason out what you should do.
	I mean there are some principles obviously and so on, right?
	But you can't – this is not a problem to be solved by logic.
	This is a problem to be solved by empiricism.
	This would be at least how I would approach it, whether or not it's the right approach objectively.
	Who knows, right?
	But – so if I have an impulse with someone, I say, well, I want to sit down and have a conversation.
	With this person about something.
	Well, if I have no history with the person, then I will probably do that, right?
	Assuming they're not some guy in a street corner yelling at the pigeons.
	And I will do that, right?
	But if I know that person quite well, then I will look at what evidence is there in the past that this is something that they can do.
	Okay.
	Right?
	So the first place to go is to the empiricism.
	Now, with our parents, we have...
	As much empiricism as we can conceivably imagine, right?
	Because we've known them for decades, right?
	And not just like we meet them, but we grew up with them, right?
	They were in the house, right?
	And so there's no...
	You're not short of empirical evidence as to a productive route with your mother.
	Does that make sense?
	Mm-hmm.
	Like if you can't – if through evidence you don't know what to do, then you have obviously no idea what to do with your husband until you've known him for 40 years or something, right?
	I mean that wouldn't make any sense, right?
	Right.
	We have to be engaged for three decades before I can marry you because I still don't know what to do with my mom.
	So – So when it comes to people, I think it can be quite risky, if not downright dangerous, to place principles above evidence.
	So if I have a brother-in-law who never pays me back debts, But I have this standard called, well, you lend money to family because you do for family or family is everything or whatever, right?
	If I have a principle but I'm not looking at the evidence, then I'm subject to exploitation, right?
	The only thing that protects us from exploitation is empiricism, is evidence, right?
	Yeah.
	This is why I'm sort of asking – because you said things like, well, I can't do small talk.
	I really have to talk about the elephant in the room.
	And what you started out – In the conversation with them, what you ended up in the conversation with was, I need to establish these boundaries, right?
	Sure.
	Yeah, I do.
	Well, you can't.
	Right?
	You cannot establish boundaries with another human being.
	Because it's not under your control.
	You don't have control over that person.
	Right?
	You can ask for, you can request, you can negotiate, but you, right, cannot establish boundaries with your mother.
	Right?
	You can request them.
	You can say, this is what I want.
	You can write.
	But I just really want to – this is a basic reality thing, right?
	And I apologize for having to mention the obvious, right?
	But you did repeat it a few times.
	I just want to make sure that it's clear.
	You can't possibly establish boundaries with your mother.
	And I don't mean that boundaries are impossible to establish with your mother.
	That's not the same thing, right?
	Like if you said – I can personally fly to Miami, like without an airplane.
	I could just flap my wings.
	I would say, you can't fly to Miami.
	And then somebody would say, what, she can't take a plane?
	It's like, yes, she could take a plane, but she can't fly directly to Miami, right?
	So when I say, you can't establish boundaries with your mother, what I mean is that you do not have ownership about whether boundaries are respected.
	That is something that the other person has 50% ownership of.
	Does that make sense?
	Okay, yeah, that makes sense.
	You can request boundaries with your mother, right?
	But you cannot enforce boundaries with your mother.
	Okay, I guess I would like to request boundaries with her.
	And for my own sake, have it be spoken why I am not communicating with her instead of communicating small talk with her.
	Have her know this is why I'm not responding to emails or a certain...
	Well, sorry, just before we get to that.
	Sorry, just before we get to that.
	And I'm done with the nitpicking.
	Oh, at least for now.
	But it's such a delicious pleasure.
	I'm so sorry.
	But so the question is, right, so you say, well, I want to establish boundaries with this person, right?
	And the first thing you would do, I would say, is say, well, what is this person's history with boundaries?
	Right.
	Right, so if I say, listen, let's you and I switch this conversation to Mandarin, right?
	And I just start talking away in Mandarin, I would not be a very successful negotiation.
	I assume you can't speak Mandarin.
	I know I can't.
	But, right, because the first thing I would do is say, hey, do you speak Mandarin?
	And if you said yes, then maybe we could if I did.
	And if you said no, then I couldn't switch, right?
	Because the first thing I would ask if I wanted to change the parameters of our relationship is say, Do you have any history with this new language I want to talk with, right?
	That's the podcast you had recently, Negotiations.
	Right, right.
	So, and again, this is stuff you just observed.
	So, what I would do, again, I'm a big one for a piece of paper, write it down, right?
	So, and you can mention this if you like, examples of my mother respecting boundaries in the past.
	Hmm.
	Right?
	No, this is important, right?
	Because...
	It's different saying, let's switch to Mandarin.
	That's very different from saying, let me teach you Mandarin.
	Right?
	So if your mother has...
	I don't know about the diagnosis.
	Be careful with the diagnosis just because.
	I know it's helpful in many ways, but it can then just define that person for you.
	But borderline personalities, one of the things that's fundamental, to my knowledge at least, is that a lack of respect for boundaries is one of the foundational characteristics of the disorder.
	Does that, I mean, you've read more about it probably than I have, but that's my understanding, right?
	You know, hyperimpulsivity and chaos in relationships and unpredictability, right?
	I mean, one of the things I was really struck about with your mom was just unpredictability, right?
	I mean, guy comes over, she's throwing up, guy comes back, he's married, she's hugging him, she's beautiful, right?
	Right.
	Unpredictability.
	Well, the whole point of boundaries is predictability, right?
	Boundaries is a contract.
	Contracts are all about predictability.
	I will commit to this predictable series of behaviors.
	That's called boundaries, right?
	And unpredictability and chaos do not work very well with boundaries, right?
	Sure, yeah.
	People who don't have the capacity to restrain Massive impulsivity, and it sounds like she doesn't even have the capacity to recognize later that she was chaotic or confusing.
	Not at all, yeah.
	Right, because she doesn't later say, well, I know when I first met him I threw up and said, well, at least he's not fat, but then I really liked him.
	I know that's a big change.
	Let me tell you what happened, blah, blah, blah.
	So if she doesn't know beforehand that she's very confusing, and then if she doesn't know in the moment that she's being confusing, and if she doesn't know afterwards that she was confusing, then boundaries are going to be kind of a challenge.
	Hmm.
	This presents a new twist.
	And again, I'm looking at the empiricism of the principles, right?
	I mean, boundaries are basically saying, listen, I would really like it if you didn't Tell scary stories to my children, right?
	Right.
	I mean, let's just say some, I don't know if there isn't anyone, but let's say that there was somebody who was telling terrifying stories to my daughter.
	Well, I mean, I'd have a lot more problems than just please don't tell scary stories to my daughter, right?
	Because that would be indicative of a kind of sadistic pathology and a personality that I would not want my daughter to be around.
	At least until it was dealt with for a couple of years in some pretty intensive therapy, right?
	So, boundaries are usually requests from rules, requests for people to follow rules rather than deal with core issues.
	And boundaries are usually also a request for people to follow rules as a direct result of their historical inability to follow rules.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	I don't have to negotiate boundaries with my wife because we're very considerate with each other and so on, right?
	We usually talk about having boundaries with people who are intrusive or chaotic or confusing or abusive or disorienting or whatever it is, right?
	Unpredictable.
	But we're asking them then to follow external rules when they usually don't even recognize the possibility of internal rules.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	Then I'm asking you not just to speak Mandarin, but to speak Mandarin with perfect grammar.
	Follow the rules of Mandarin.
	It's like, well, if I don't even speak Mandarin, how am I going to know what the rules are?
	Yeah.
	And the reason I'm saying this is I certainly don't want to discourage you from following principles with your mom.
	I don't want to discourage you from having conversations with your mom.
	But you have enough empiricism to have, with some reasonable degree of confidence...
	An ability to predict how the conversation is going to go, or at least to recognize what it is you're actually trying to negotiate.
	Yeah, I feel like I can definitely predict.
	Well, I do feel like since partway through college, once I begun to piece together what had been going on from my high school years, college years, that I got some advice from a few professors, counselors, whatnot.
	It kind of led me to the not so novel idea, but novel to me then, that I couldn't change her, no matter how much truth I tried to tell her, it just didn't work.
	So the advice I was given, very simple.
	I can only change myself.
	That's quite obvious, but from being in a household for so long...
	Sure.
	It's quite difficult to come to that conclusion.
	I guess with her, I know I cannot stop her from acting in any way towards me, but I think in my future it would provide a lot less stress in my mind if I not only in my mind laid an idea for how I will act with her,
	but let her know that Whether it's not responding to emails or not letting her know I'm coming to town and I'm going to spend the day with her because I choose not to have those kind of relationships in my life.
	But like you said, she's not going to understand.
	And I know from empirical evidence she will not understand what she has done wrong.
	Or why I'm choosing that?
	So do you think it's still fruitless to explain that and to kind of lay down that law that I am choosing to act like this, I am not sure how it will affect you, but it will affect me in this way?
	And letting her know why I am acting the way I am?
	Do you think that's even a good idea then?
	Well, look, I mean, I've just talked to you for like 20, 30 minutes, right?
	So I can't obviously answer whether it's going to work or not, whether it's going to be a good or bad idea.
	I could give you odds.
	You know, like if I was a betting man, I mean, I could tell you where I'd put my money.
	I can't, I mean, I can't tell you.
	I can tell you with, you know, close certainty based upon my, you know, from what I've heard.
	But, you know, it's, you've got the history and you have far more information.
	You have infinitely more information than I do, right?
	Because, you know, I've heard, you know, some stories for 10, 20, 30 minutes, right?
	But you have known this woman for decades, right?
	Right.
	So the reason that you're asking me for an answer is because you're avoiding the answer in yourself.
	Ooh.
	No, I mean, that's right, isn't it?
	I mean, you know, it's like me.
	I've studied Mandarin for 30 years.
	Sorry to use the Mandarin thing, but I've studied Mandarin for 30 years.
	And then I come to somebody in their second week of Mandarin and say, is my Mandarin good or bad?
	Well, I know, because I've studied it for 30 years, right?
	Yeah.
	Right, so for me to ask somebody who's new to the situation, it's a way of deferring what I know, right?
	You know how it's going to go.
	Okay, and I mean, I feel like I know what I would like to do, what I would like to say to her, but through...
	Talking it out with somebody or, I mean, I've talked it out with my husband a lot and I feel like we've come to pretty good conclusions, but like you said, she doesn't speak the same introspective language.
	So I can predict how she will react.
	So is that, I don't know if that conversation is even worth it, but I guess if it's worth it in my mind, then it will mean something to me.
	As I've always said, if you have doubt about the nature of your relationship with someone, and now with parents, I don't really think that there's any reason to have doubt because we know so much, but obviously it's difficult, complicated to come to the conclusions, and if the conclusions are negative, it's pretty heart-wrenching, right?
	So if you have doubt, then my suggestion is sit down and have a conversation.
	Now, with the suicidality, of course, it's not exactly a neutral position, right?
	Because if she freaks out enough, she might do something pretty tragic, right?
	Right.
	So that is not an inconsiderable thing to be hanging over the relationship.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Attempts to redefine or put boundaries in or to fundamentally...
	Recreate a relationship with somebody who's borderline and has expressed suicidality may not be the wisest thing.
	Because if you're basically saying, Mom, you know, some very essential things have been missing from our relationship for the last few decades.
	I mean, how do you think, given her emotional sensitivity...
	To criticism and I imagine her, you know, intense capacity for self-attack, which is what suicidality is.
	Do you think that, at least in my opinion, I mean, how do you think she's going to hear that?
	How do you think she's going to be on the receiving end of a daughter saying we fundamentally need to redefine our relationship?
	There's going to be a lot of self-blame and I think she...
	In the past has, in those situations, when I've talked to her about problems in our relationship, blamed herself without thinking about it, and thus started the negative spiral of feeling bad for herself or...
	Yeah, which then quickly, unfortunately, with BPD, quickly becomes manipulative, right?
	Like, you must now rescue me and make me feel better and all that kind of stuff, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Like, I'm going to self-attack so that you will stop criticizing me, not because I actually want to take responsibility for anything, right?
	Yeah.
	I guess I... I would like to not...
	I mean, honestly, I would like to not be in a relationship with her.
	Like, I would not like the...
	I haven't lived in the same city as her for a while, so when I do come back to the same city, I feel...
	Kind of obligated to let her know or let the friends and family know that I'll be in town.
	But when that happens again, last time when I went back, it was really bad.
	I mean, it's just escalation.
	You bet it was really bad with your mom or with the extended family or both?
	With my mom.
	My parents were in the middle of Divorce, messiness, and when I am there, my dad wants to spend time with me and my mom wants to spend time with me, so they ended up kind of spending time with me together, but that's really not a good situation.
	Especially if they're going at each other in court, right?
	Yeah, I mean, my dad doesn't, they just didn't talk to each other, but there was kind of this common glue that was me, which I don't feel like either of them maybe intentionally did, but I don't really want to be in that situation my whole life if I live anywhere nearby, or, you know, I'm going to go back and visit every now and then, so I kind of want to seal the deal.
	Me?
	Yeah, no, the other woman.
	I'm sorry?
	You're going to have kids, do you think?
	Uh, yeah, yeah.
	So, another consideration, right?
	Yeah, that's actually what we've been doing a lot of, my husband and I have been doing a lot of research about parenting and whatnot, so I think that's been another aspect.
	The other parent in the relationship.
	You are responsible, of course, as a parent to all the influences your children are subject to, right?
	And I don't believe that we have, like, as parents, we don't have the right to subject our children to toxic personalities any more than we have the right to subject them to poisons or other toxic substances.
	Yeah, and I would never want to submit my children to her.
	Yeah, it's bad parenting to give your children a drink from a muddy moose track with microorganisms in it when they get sick or something.
	That's bad parenting.
	But at least that's just a physical sickness that will pass.
	Repeated exposure to toxic and destructive personalities is...
	Is fundamentally bad parenting.
	We don't have the right.
	Like, let's say my mom, I was just crazy and I thought my mom was like the best person ever, right?
	Well, objectively, my mom is severely dysfunctional.
	And I don't have the right to put my daughter in the proximity of somebody who's toxic and dysfunctional and certainly has a history of aggression towards children.
	Even if I wanted to, even if it was the best thing in the world, even if I thought moose tracks would produce the tastiest water ever.
	I don't – I still don't have the right to put that in our body and I don't have like – our brains are not our own.
	This is – there's a lot of individualism in libertarianism and objectivism and so on, which is fine.
	It's great.
	Politically, blah, blah, blah, yes.
	But the reality is our brains are not our own.
	Our personalities are contagious.
	We are social beings.
	This is not just my theory.
	This is a fact.
	That personalities leave imprints.
	We share our souls every time we're in the same room.
	Everything is cross-pollinating all the time.
	We are highly contagious to each other.
	Think about what portions of your brain, what portions of your personality, what portions of your thoughts are not influenced by other people?
	The answer is zero.
	I don't know, maybe breathing, which is influenced by the people who were able to breathe in the past and pass along their genes.
	The very language you were using was invented by other people.
	The contents of my thoughts, logic was invented by other people.
	I'm heavily a big fan of a variety of philosophers who had massive impacts on my thinking.
	The facts that other people come up with data, the arguments they make, massive import.
	I mean, what part of my brain is just purely individualistic and my Howard Rourke standalone stuff?
	I have no idea, but I bet you it ain't much.
	We are a collective brain.
	And I'm very conscious of that as a parent, right?
	I mean I see a dysfunctional person and that to me is pretty much like somebody coughing up blood into their hand and then offering me a handshake.
	Because I know it's contagious.
	Like whatever shit they've got going on in their brain, the more dysfunctional they are, the more it's going to be projected into me.
	The more they're going to try and get their shit to go into me.
	So we have to be very careful.
	I'm thinking about this because I'm sure you know I've got this going through this chemotherapy so I'm immunocompromised.
	I have to be very careful of germs at the moment because my white blood cell is low.
	It's going to start going back up this week so I think I'm past the worst of it.
	And it sort of got me thinking about this contagion thing because I've had a pretty robust and healthy system prior to this wee detour.
	But...
	I'm kind of a germaphobe at the moment because I have to be this at least for the next month or so going through the remainder of this treatment.
	And it's really got me sort of thinking about social contagion and all that kind of stuff.
	It's not really something I've thought about much before.
	At least I don't really worry about germs.
	You become more concerned about this when you have a kid or whatever.
	But I took my daughter to – she loves to go to animal shelter.
	I took my daughter to the animal shelter the other day.
	And, you know, I clean my hands and all that kind of stuff.
	But yeah, they keep it pretty clean or whatever, right?
	And anyway, oh God, it was terrible.
	So this cat, I put this cat down.
	It walked over to the litter box and then sneezed against the wall and there was blood in the mucus.
	And so I called the people and said, the cat's sick.
	And I was like, ah, my hands are burning with cat...
	Disease!
	Rub my hands like some anal obsessive compulsive surgeon operating on himself or something, right?
	And so I'm just sort of aware of that, but I'm really conscious of the fact that you can experiment on this for yourself, right?
	And what does it feel like to be around other people?
	When you're around certain people, your entire personality may change.
	You feel guarded.
	You feel relaxed.
	You feel happy.
	You feel tense.
	You feel curious.
	You feel like you've got to really manage other people.
	Do you have to manage other people?
	Do you not have to manage other people?
	Do they make you enthusiastic?
	Do they make you depressed?
	Do they just sit there and stare and you have to do all the work?
	Or do they engage?
	Do they notice how you feel?
	Do they not notice how you feel?
	If other people don't notice how you feel, does that impact how you notice how you feel?
	Of course it does, right?
	Our experience is immediate and collective.
	And it really matters who you surround yourself with.
	Now, you as an adult, you have a history with your mom, whatever.
	You can still make that choice, right?
	Your husband made that choice because he knew your mom got married to you, right?
	But you have children.
	That's not a choice they can make.
	You have to make that choice for them.
	And toxic, destructive, dangerous, irrational, random people, you can't There's two levels, right?
	So you don't have the right to inflict those people on your children.
	I mean, obviously, right?
	Any more than you have the right to bring home a cat sneezing bloody mucus on a wall and say, here, kids, play with the cat, right?
	Just don't.
	Because it's going to infect them.
	But the other thing, it's not just about your mom and your kids, but it's about your mom and you and your kids, right?
	So if my mom was over...
	Sorry.
	If my mom was over...
	Not only would her personality and her craziness infect my daughter.
	There's no way to resist it.
	But my daughter then knows that I'm somebody who brings this person over.
	And please understand, I'm talking about my mom, not your mom.
	Your mom sounds different than my mom.
	I just want to sort of point that out.
	So I'm not trying to equate the two.
	I'm just talking about my personal experience.
	But my values would also then be transmitted to my daughter, which is that this person is obviously random and dangerous, but I'm bringing them over because of X, right?
	In other words, I have X more than keeping you safe, whatever X value, more than keeping you safe and whole.
	But also, I am a different person around my mother, and I am a less effective, capable, emotionally tuned in, emotionally available, empathetic, sympathetic, loving person.
	Father, when my mother is around, I would have to be because I would be going back to a dysfunctional place in my past, to an unprotected time in my past, to a dangerous time in my past, and I would be guarded about and frightened of everything my mom was going to do.
	So my daughter would gain one crazy person and lose one sane person in that interaction.
	And then how long would it take for me to recover from that experience?
	Would it take me a day or two days or five days until I got back to my former loving, caring, warm, empathetic before I recovered from that historical reactivation, if that makes any sense?
	And so I don't have the right to – yeah, I don't have the right either to expose my daughter directly to dysfunctional people or to diminish my capacities as a father through my exposure.
	So even if I went to go and see my mom for lunch, it's okay because my daughter is not going to – I'm going to go see her for lunch.
	What would it be like for me to have lunch with my mom and then come back and take care of my daughter?
	Would I be distracted?
	Would I be traumatized?
	Would I be upset?
	Would I be less empathetic?
	Would I be more snappy?
	Like I don't have even that right if that makes any sense.
	Yeah.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, I can totally see how my interactions with my mom, after I talk to her, after I have a conversation, and even just email her, I have changed in that moment, and it affects the next hour, maybe the next day, and I have no right to do that to another human being, to act in any negative way because of that, to another human being, especially a child, so I can see how that would be really important in the future, too.
	Yeah, so I just wanted to point that out, the question around children.
	I mean, pathologies are, I mean, they literally are like viruses.
	And if they can't be reined in other people, I don't think it's at all good parenting to expose your children to pathologies, whether they're physical or psychological.
	It's just not a good idea.
	I mean, it's the only way we can protect them, right?
	You know, our body needs some exposure to germs to stay healthy.
	I mean, but that's not the same thing with...
	It's more like cancer.
	I'm not going to be healthier because of my exposure to cancer.
	I'm actually going to be more prone to cancer in the future.
	But if I get a couple of germs here and there and my body fights them off, that's fine.
	But it's more like cancer, less like germs kind of thing.
	So I just really wanted to point that out.
	These are all somewhat validated opinions.
	I think that – I've always wanted to do an experiment where – I talked about this with a researcher but the price was too prohibitive.
	Have somebody roleplay a father and then see how the brain works while they're roleplaying their own dad and then actually get the dad in and ask the same questions and see whether the brain lights up the same way.
	I bet it would.
	People – I mean you've heard me on this show.
	People roleplay their parents down to a T. I mean it's really amazing.
	And that's because the parent's personality is inside the child.
	The parent's personality transfers to the child, and the grandparents' personality will transfer to the child as well.
	And if it's a destructive or abusive or highly dysfunctional personality, it's just a way of the virus clawing down through another generation, and we can't allow that as parents.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, I feel like in that case it's even more vital to make sure that if there is a chance that I would interact with her that I say no to those opportunities because, I mean, even without children, that affects probably the way I talk to my husband.
	Oh, certainly it does.
	Yeah, and I mean, if you were to add up the amount of time you spend thinking about this during the week, you'd be shocked at what a part-time job it is.
	I know you would.
	Literally, you would be shocked.
	It probably is at least 20 hours a week.
	Hmm.
	Because the way that our brains generally work is we return to a problem until the problem goes away or it's solved.
	Like until we can resolve the problem, either, you know, whatever, right?
	That's what our, like, you know, in the ancient jungle or whatever, you know, if we think that there might be a tiger in the grass, we don't then get distracted by something else, right?
	Until we confirm that it is or is not a tiger, we keep watching the grass, right?
	Our brains lock back into particular problems until we can resolve them.
	And since this problem remains unresolved and it's a primary relationship, I think, and you might want to try, you know, just get a little iPod or something, just note down, start the stopwatch, start the timer or whatever.
	The problem is you say you have to stop, but then you have to remember it again, right?
	I think you'd be shocked at how much time you spend thinking and talking about this particular issue.
	It probably is at least a part-time job.
	Especially in the past when I was a lot more dependent on my parents, on living at home, that definitely consumed a lot of my thoughts.
	Sure.
	Yeah, of course.
	But even now, right?
	I mean, gosh, especially with the suicidality thing, I mean, that is such an escalation that it's just horrifying.
	And I'm so sorry that that's anywhere near your heart and mind.
	I'm so sorry.
	That's just appalling.
	It's awful.
	It's an awful thing to have in your environment, and I'm so sorry for that.
	Yeah.
	Well, thank you for your empathy.
	I guess from our conversation, I'll probably listen to it a couple times.
	Just think about, I guess I'll think about what, if something should be said to her, or if I should just make a decision within myself, because I do know how that conversation will turn out, that is quite predictable.
	Well, I would talk about – I would personally – if she has a therapist, I think you said she has a therapist.
	I don't know if the therapist can see you as well, but the therapist has a lot more information about her state of mind, I would imagine.
	So if you can talk to your therapist – if you could talk to her therapist without discussing any of her treatment, just talk about what you're thinking of doing.
	He has more experience and professional judgment and so on.
	He may decide – or he may say, listen, she's pretty fragile right now.
	I would not attempt to rewrite the relationship with all the implicit criticism of everything that's come before that that entails.
	This would not be a good idea, a good time to do it.
	In which case, you know, I might want to grit your teeth and do some small talk or take a break or whatever it is, right?
	But I would definitely not – I've always suggested to people, don't attempt to rewrite core relationships without professional help.
	That really is like trying to rewire your own house in a rainstorm when you don't know what you're doing.
	I mean you might get it right but I think professional expertise is worthwhile and if there's a therapist who can see you, that may be well worth it to – I don't know.
	Again, I don't know whether he can talk about – I know he can't talk about anything that your mother said during therapy but he might be able to give you some red or green lights about these kinds of conversation given where she is.
	You want somebody – Shoots up the flare of suicidality.
	I mean, I think everybody needs to proceed with extreme caution.
	I mean, that's kind of what it's about, right?
	So that would be my suggestion.
	I wouldn't engage in these conversations without professional help.
	And if you can talk to your mother's therapist, I think that would be even better.
	That's good advice for sure.
	Getting my hands on who that is.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I mean, I don't know if you can wild that out somewhere, shape or form.
	But even if a therapist who, you know, you can call a therapist and, you know, before you go in, just say, you know, you can spend a few minutes saying, you know, my mom has expressed suicidality, but I'm very dissatisfied with the relationship and I'd like to talk about what my options are at this point.
	Do you have experience in helping people deal with suicidal family members?
	It's pretty important, right?
	Yeah.
	You know, if you bring your Volvo into the car dealership, to the repair shop, you'd like to ask them if they have any experience fixing Volvos.
	I mean, that's kind of important, right?
	And I think that's, you know, I think that would be very helpful, because it's a, I mean, it's a minefield, as you can imagine, right?
	Well, you don't even have to imagine you're there.
	Yeah, and I think, at least from my personal dealings with her throughout my life, and from what I've heard on her side from the counselors that she's seen, if If anyone presents any kind of challenges to her status quo, thinking she's paying them so she can just leave and go to somebody else who gives her what she wants, tells her what she wants.
	Yeah, she's probably quite keen on the getting to know you phase and a lot less keen on the let's make some changes phase, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I'm not sure how deeply into her psyche the therapists she's seeing are, but yeah, I could try to see what I can find out.
	Because I definitely don't keep in daily contact with her to know what's up every day.
	Well, and you may not get enough information from somebody who's not in touch with themselves, right?
	Yeah.
	Anyway, I'm really sorry that you're facing these challenges.
	I mean, I'm not a big one for the that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger thing.
	I mean, stuff's just kind of debilitating and weakening for a period of time.
	I mean, this is a time when...
	Ideally, I mean, and not even that much of an ideal.
	I mean, this is a time when your mom should be helping you settle into married life with all the wisdom of her experience, having been happily married for decades.
	And, you know, she should be really enjoying getting to know your husband and helping you set up house or whatever it is that you're doing.
	I mean, you should be leaning on her for strength, not trying to manage her randomness.
	I mean, you know what I mean?
	She should be helping you.
	I mean, I've thought about this.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	When I do think about it like that, I feel like that's really a painful thought.
	Just thinking about maybe what could have been.
	I've never really been one for super self-pity.
	I don't think that's pitiful to think about what should be happening.
	But when I, like my husband's family is...
	Yeah.
	Like his family is very put together and they've been really influential in our relationship.
	So when I see the possibility for good relationships, it's sad to see what...
	What has happened in my family, but I am grateful to have a second family, but be nice if...
	And that is great.
	And you also, depending on your relationship with them, you also want to lean upon them for advice in these situations as well.
	I don't know the degree to which you've opened up about the challenges that you're facing, but it sounds like they could be very helpful.
	Yeah, they're pretty open.
	They've been pretty open in the past.
	And this is not a problem.
	I mean, this is not like you smoked and now you're sick.
	This is not a problem you caused yourself.
	I hope that you don't feel like, well, I can't talk about it.
	It's kind of shameful.
	It's kind of negative.
	It's kind of...
	This is not...
	I mean, this is just an affliction that has occurred to you.
	I mean, you didn't choose the family that you were born into.
	You certainly don't run your mother's brain.
	And so I hope that you don't feel any shame at all for having this in your life.
	This is not your doing.
	This is not your fault.
	This is not your cause.
	This is not of your making.
	This is something that you're struggling with...
	It's literally like a genetic illness.
	I hope that there's no shame.
	There is that tendency to some degree.
	I think we all feel that.
	A lot of people will judge you by your family and if your family is really dysfunctional, then you're just viewed as more negative, in a negative light.
	Who wants to really be viewed in a negative light except a masochist?
	So – but I've really sort of worked to try and overcome that stigma in myself.
	I mean I started pretty early in podcast six talking about self-defense, being open about my family history because this is something that happened to me.
	It's very important.
	It's a very foundational part of who I ended up becoming.
	It's still a part of who I am.
	But I will not take a moment's shame for the family that I happen to be born into.
	I mean, that's like taking pride in being white.
	I mean, that's just an accident of birth.
	And I'm not going to take shame for an accident of birth.
	I'm not going to take pride for an accident of birth.
	Virtue is earned.
	It's not accidental.
	And vice is earned.
	It's not accidental.
	And so the immoralities and chaos and confusions and nuttiness within your family is zero reflection upon you.
	And it's zero something to be ashamed of and to hide, particularly from your husband's family who sound miles away from dysfunctional.
	Yeah, I think it's taken a long journey to get to that point that, you know, realizing it's not my fault.
	A lot of that manipulation and blame has been put on me in the past.
	So through many years of reflection, I'm finally getting to that point.
	Sometimes, as you said, talking to her, reliving those moments and those memories in my mind can bring you back to that state.
	So that's pretty toxic.
	The other thing I think talking to a therapist would be helpful is that I think you said earlier that from what you can remember of your childhood, it was pretty good up until you were 12 or pre-buddy, I think you said.
	Sure, yeah.
	I would question that to say the least.
	I would question that to say the least.
	As you know, BPD tends to diminish over age, right?
	So it wasn't like she was saying it when you were younger.
	So again, you don't have to get into it now, but with a therapist, you might want to.
	That may be a bit of an artificial divide.
	And also the key part of that is from what I can remember.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, I kind of asked my dad a little bit about that because he was there.
	Maybe he remembers something, but...
	Well, of course, you married your mom, right?
	So it's going to be hard to know exactly how much truth is going to come out of that.
	Again, it's just somebody who could live with someone like that and be married and have kids with them for decades obviously has some judgment issues as well, right?
	Yeah, that's true.
	Totally true.
	How's the conversation been for you?
	Remotely helpful?
	Somewhat?
	Medium?
	A little?
	Not at all.
	Counterproductive!
	I give it an A+. I think your advice about being wary about taking major conversation steps has been really helpful, especially because of her suicide reaction or just any kind of overreaction.
	That's definitely valuable.
	That could be, who knows, relation, life-saving, just...
	Being careful when I talk to her, if I talk to her about our relationship.
	Yeah, because you've had a model of somebody who focuses on their own needs and doesn't think about the consequences, and that's a trap for you too, right?
	And not because that's who you are, but that's just a template you've got in your head, right?
	Yeah.
	I need to have this conversation to redefine my relationship, and it's like, whoa, whoa, let's see what happens after you fire that cannon, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that's been good advice.
	Okay, well, I'm glad it was helpful.
	And again, I'm very sorry that you have this, but I'm very happy that, you know, you're still thinking about having kids.
	I'm very happy that you don't have kids yet while you're going through this because it would be very distracting.
	And I'm enormously happy that you have a great husband who's got a great family.
	I mean, you traded up.
	Good job.
	I am quite pleased with that decision as well.
	All right.
	Well, thank you so much.
	I really appreciate your time.
	And James, sorry, Mike, Mike, Mike, do we have anybody else?
	I don't mind going a little over.
	Oh, we actually do.
	Someone else on the line.
	Ian, if you want to go ahead.
	Ian.
	Hello, how are you doing?
	I'm well.
	How are you doing?
	Very well, very well.
	Yeah, we've been emailing throughout the couple weeks.
	This is something that's been kind of bugging me.
	I'm aware that you, I think you may have said that you spoke about this in RTR. I've read it or listened to it and or In that way, it's three times.
	Maybe I'm missing the point here.
	My main concern is one of them that I want to cover was my friendship circle.
	There's some people that I don't believe are the best kind of folks to hang around.
	And there's all these feelings of confusion and ambivalence with certain things.
	They're all into different things, and I'm not quite sure You know, how to deal with this, and I was trying to see if I could petition you for some perspective on this.
	All right.
	Petition away.
	Sure.
	Well, I mean, I have one friend that, for example, I've talked with her about my parental history, so she's a little more closer than other people are.
	So, you know, I express that I'm very angry about what happened in my history, and she says, oh, you're just being bitter.
	Just being bitter.
	And another one that says, you know, there's a couple people that, when I told them I was in therapy.
	They gave me these smug looks.
	Disapproval that I did this step.
	Another one that I've...
	I keep thinking about this one conversation I had with her at one point at dinner time.
	It was that she believes that the relationship between she and her kids are kind of...
	She's the one that tells them what to do.
	The powerful one.
	They obey me.
	No questions asked, whatever.
	And a fourth one is a pretty important one too.
	It's a business venture he's starting up.
	He's getting into very esoteric topics like UFOs and politics is another thing that he's doing.
	And I made a case for him that a lot of this stuff doesn't exist really.
	UFOs is one thing and doesn't exist.
	Politics, all you're doing is basically petitioning one criminal gang to replace another criminal gang.
	You're against a republicratic establishment, so you want libertarians and Green Party in there.
	It's basically the same thing with a different name.
	Rose is still a rose.
	It doesn't quite smell sweet.
	I don't know what it is.
	Maybe something that I'm doing is attracting these kind of people Or perhaps maybe I could also get some answers as to how I can maybe get the courage to honestly come and tell them because a lot of times I feel helpless to kind of lay out certain truths to them that I feel that they may not be seeing.
	Yeah, I mean it seems like what's missing in many ways is empathy for you, right?
	Okay.
	You say, okay, like I'm going off on a tangent here.
	No, no, I'm listening in.
	I'm listening in.
	No, tell me what you think about the first thing I'm saying.
	Well, yeah, I do feel a lot of the time, a lot of empathy is missing.
	I mean, you said I'm trying to get my own empathy, but I mean, that's a tough thing too.
	I remember your podcast being like, the road to getting empathy is really tough because you really are facing a lot of your history that you may not necessarily be proud of.
	I'm going to therapy and I'm talking about this.
	Even now, I'm still kind of nervous.
	But the first time I went there too, he was like, oh man, I let out so much, I even cried through the whole session.
	It was crazy.
	No, that's good.
	That's good.
	Now, when you were a kid, what was the level of empathy of those around you, in particular your parents?
	I don't know.
	I never thought about it that way, like how empathetic they are.
	I know in my current workplace, there's not a whole lot of that going on, too.
	Don't you start drifting off to your workplace with me, brother.
	Come on.
	I asked you about your childhood.
	You start talking about your workplace.
	What do you think I'm going to say?
	Yeah, no, I understand that.
	I understand that.
	I don't know.
	I can't quite say.
	I mean...
	Empathy in terms of, like, what, did my parents listen to me?
	And, like, kind of...
	Let me express their purposes.
	Yeah.
	Were they interested in you independent of themselves?
	Right?
	So, I mean, I know it's a little abstract, right?
	So I'll sort of give you some examples.
	So if somebody would have asked me, what's my daughter like?
	What does she like?
	What does she not like?
	What are her favorite things, her least favorite things?
	What motivates her?
	What unmotivates her and all this kind of stuff?
	I mean, I could go on for days.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I'm interested if she seems upset.
	I want to know why she's upset.
	Now, I don't want to know why she's upset because her being upset bothers me and I want her to stop it.
	I want to know why she's upset because I want to know why she's upset.
	I don't even want to know why she's upset to make her feel better.
	I just want to know what's upsetting her, what's bothering her.
	Just for the sake of knowing her.
	Not because I have some need or something that I want to fulfill in myself.
	Just to know her.
	I know when I deal with my parents now, a lot of the way, I guess, it is kind of alien now.
	No, I'm talking again.
	You're going to work now, you're going to now.
	I'm talking about when you were a kid.
	I don't know.
	Because I don't really remember them in terms of empathy.
	That's the thing.
	I remember events.
	But I don't remember certain empathy.
	A lot of the times I'm having to extrapolate backwards from now.
	And kind of going back.
	I would say a lot of empathy really wasn't shown for me all that much.
	That's a very ambivalent statement.
	A lot of empathy wasn't shown all that much.
	Right?
	So, I mean, can you think of a time when your parents really sat down and asked you how you were doing, what you were thinking, what you were feeling, without having some agenda that they wanted to fix or change or whatever it is?
	No, I don't think so.
	So, if you can't think of an example of that, that's kind of important, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it is.
	It is.
	And that would explain why the...
	People in your life don't show you empathy and they're still in your life, right?
	Right, right.
	Because that's what you're used to, right?
	Kind of like that boxer story?
	Yeah, like the Simon the Boxer thing.
	I mean, you're used to managing a lack of empathy, so you're drawn to people who don't show you empathy.
	And then somebody who does show you empathy may not even come in, right?
	Oh gosh, what was the name?
	Okay, I'm trying to remember some game.
	People will email it to me.
	So there was a game I used to play where there was a spaceship in the middle and three rotating rings of energy around it.
	And you flew this spaceship around, you had to shoot through all these rotating rings of energy.
	Star Castle.
	I think it was called Star Castle.
	You were way too young to even know what the hell I'm talking about.
	This is back when ray tracing was a cool new thing in video games.
	But...
	Yeah, I guess I am kind of young there.
	Yeah, you don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
	But just think of three rotating shields, right?
	You blast one little bit away, and it starts rotating.
	And then you blast another one, and then you have to shoot through that one that you blasted away to get to the next one, which rotates the other way.
	And then they regrow if you don't shoot them for long enough.
	And so you had to basically go through all these defenses, and then you had to shoot the ship in the middle.
	And in the meanwhile, it kept shooting these little sparkler things out to chase you around.
	It was a great game.
	It was a really great game.
	Yeah.
	Very...
	Exciting but frustrating at the same time.
	I finally get through.
	Oh, it's regrown.
	It's not again, right?
	Then these guys are chasing you over the screen the whole time.
	But the point is, so the people that you have in your life are shields for the opposite kind of people.
	Right?
	Right, right, right.
	So if you have non-empathetic people in your life, they will shield you from empathetic people in your life.
	Because they are not going to know empathetic people.
	So you go to a party with someone who's a friend of yours who's really non-empathetic, then all their friends are going to be non-empathetic.
	Right, right, because the lack of tracks.
	And all their friends are going to be non-empathetic, right?
	It's like, you know, since I started listening to the podcast and even going to therapy too, like it really has redefined a lot of my relationships and what I didn't notice now is really clear to me.
	And it's kind of like, you know, how the hell did I end up here?
	Like, shit, how did I end up here?
	What happened?
	Well, I mean, this is sort of – we're just touching very briefly on this, right?
	Now, it works to the negative, right?
	That the people around you shield you from the opposite kind of people.
	That's just a general principle that I work by and I think it's pretty true.
	Like attracts like self-esteem, attracts self-esteem, that kind of stuff, right?
	Birds of a feather flock together.
	It's not – this is not any kind of revolution in philosophy that I – I'm just sort of phrasing it in a way that I think is more actionable.
	Right, so – The people who are around you shield you from the opposite kind of people.
	Now, it works the other way, too.
	So if you end up with people around you who have empathy, they will shield you from non-empathetic people around you.
	Right?
	Like, you invite me over to a party, I'm not going to bring an asshole.
	Right, right, right.
	Because I don't know any assholes.
	Right, they wouldn't come to you anyway.
	Yeah, I mean, assholes wouldn't want to have anything to do with me because they're not going to feel like an asshole until they're around me, right?
	So I'm shielded from assholes just by not being an asshole.
	And the people around me...
	What I'm trying to say is you need more biological carbon-based asshole repellents around you.
	That's really what I'm trying to say.
	But right now, you grew up, as you describe, in a situation where, to put it as nicely as possible, it's hard to remember an excess of empathy.
	People aren't used to that.
	You're not used to that.
	That's just kind of the language you speak.
	So then the people around you, you say, oh, I had a childhood.
	It was bad.
	People say, oh, you're just bitter.
	Yeah.
	She had a bad childhood too, this one that's called me bitter.
	And I'm kind of wondering, she said her father was a bad person to her.
	He may be in a terminal illness phase or something, but she's kind of going back and trying to restart a relationship with him at this time.
	And I'm like, I don't know.
	There's something I don't think she's processing there.
	And I'm not sure how much credibility she has in calling me bitter about my own family when I'm in the middle of trying to process that kind of relationship, too, with my therapist and so forth.
	And I guess through talking— Yeah, but see, that's not just a lack of empathy, right?
	See, and a lack of empathy is a nice way of putting it.
	That's anti-empathy.
	I mean, it's cruelty, right?
	There's literally almost six billion people in the world who have no empathy for me at all.
	They don't even know I exist, right?
	I mean, I saw one in the chat room just now.
	Who?
	Like, what?
	Yeah, okay.
	Oh, somebody who's saying something mean in the chat room?
	Well, yeah, but that's whatever.
	Continue, continue.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Okay, but so there's six billion people.
	They have no empathy.
	They may be empathetic people, but they have no empathy for me because they don't even know me, right?
	So non-empathetic is not that helpful a term.
	People are usually either empathetic or they're cruel.
	There's usually not a lot in between.
	I mean, once people know you, right?
	I mean, people who don't know you, it's sort of a, who cares, right?
	Yeah.
	You know, Marshall Rosenberg may be a very empathetic person, but he's not empathetic to me because, you know, maybe if I chatted with him, it doesn't matter, right?
	Right.
	But it's a cruel thing, right?
	Because you're saying, I was, you know, I was hurt as a child.
	I was hurt by people who were supposed to take care of me, and that was very painful.
	And then somebody says, well, you're just bitter.
	What they're doing is they're saying that you are the problem, that your lack of maturity in emotionality is the problem, that you weren't victimized, and that you're now irrational and you're actually just being negative and destructive towards other people.
	But that's a very harsh thing to say to somebody who was victimized as a child.
	That's a really fucking cruel thing to say to somebody who was victimized as a child, right?
	Yeah, and you're right.
	I did feel kind of hurt when she said that too.
	Yeah, it's hurtful.
	That's a very hurtful thing to say to someone.
	It's not non-empathetic.
	It's cruel.
	It's using our perceptions of other people's emotionality to do them harm rather than to do them good.
	Like a torturer really knows how the human body works because he knows where the nerve endings are, right?
	Right, because he applies pressure or whatever.
	Yeah, he'll put a nail through your testicles.
	He won't cut your fingernails, right?
	Right, yeah, yeah, because that's what causes the most pain.
	Because he's got empathy, right?
	In a weird way, right?
	It's cruelty, right?
	But the best sadists are the ones who have the greatest knowledge of other people's emotional responses because they know how to hurt, right?
	And I'm not saying that she's the best sadist.
	I'm just sort of pointing out a principle, right?
	Right.
	But that's cruel.
	Right?
	And parents who have a child around who don't show interest in that child, that's cruel.
	It's not neutral.
	It's not like some guy in India who doesn't know anything about me.
	Hey, he's not showing interest in me.
	That guy's cruel.
	No, he's not cruel.
	He's just a guy with his own life, right?
	Why the hell should he care about me?
	Right?
	I'm remembering a lot of my childhood.
	I did kind of bury myself into video games and books a lot, a lot of solitary activities.
	And I didn't really remember too much bonding with my mother and father all that much, especially as I got older.
	So, yeah, I think I'm beginning to understand a little more now.
	Right.
	That's what you're used to.
	And then if somebody says to you something cruel like, well, you're just bitter, you know, my guess would be that you just kind of say, okay, well, I guess I won't talk about this.
	You feel hurt and then you bury it, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And then you avoid that topic again in the future, right?
	But you still will hang out with them.
	And you also won't confront them about doing something that hurt you, right?
	Right.
	At least with her, I haven't really talked with her about parents.
	Neither hers nor mine.
	You tried.
	You tried.
	And she said you're just bitter, right?
	I've tried, yeah.
	But it's also kind of like I find myself not wanting to talk to her sometimes.
	I mean, there's parts of me that say, I have to go talk with her.
	You said you're your friend or whatever, but there's part of me that's like, She did kind of slap you in the face a little bit with that bitter comment.
	And you can't confront her on it, right?
	Or you haven't?
	Well, I mean, I haven't done so, but I've kind of seen how she is when you touch on a touchy subject like that, though.
	Sorry, I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, right?
	I'm just saying you haven't, right?
	Yes, I haven't confronted her about that, I don't think.
	Right, and that's because when you were growing up, and I'm just going to be blunt here because it's been a long show, but I want to be blunt, that the reason that you don't confront people on things they do to hurt you is because you couldn't talk to your parents about things they did to hurt you.
	Right, right.
	I mean, I haven't even confronted them about stuff either.
	Right.
	And the reason that you didn't...
	Everything is kind of fine.
	My mom I'm not talking to, but my father, you know, the relationship we have is not even a shadow of the former self.
	I'm sorry if I continue.
	And I'm very sorry about that.
	But, look, I'm a parent.
	I do things that upset my daughter.
	Yeah.
	And she can come to me and talk to me about it, and I will continue to ask her about it.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Until it's resolved, right?
	I want her to always know that she can be upset with me, come to talk to me about it, and we will work on it until it's resolved.
	Since it's essential.
	Right, right, right.
	It's essential, right?
	Because, you know, she ain't here by choice.
	She's a prisoner of biology, right?
	She is my delightful little prisoner.
	And so she's got to have as much freedom as I can possibly give her.
	Of course, the first freedom is honesty and openness and so on, right?
	So, when you were a kid, if your parents did things to hurt you, and this may be ignoring you as well, neglect is a terrible way to deal with children, and if your parents did things that hurt or upset you or alienated you, you did not have the capacity, and I bet you were right, to talk to them about what was bothering you.
	So, what you do is you say, okay, well, I guess...
	It's my problem to deal with, so I'll find some way to deal with it.
	I'm not going to talk with them because if it escalates, things are going to go really badly.
	So I'm just going to work on it myself and eventually what happens is you end up sort of blaming yourself, right?
	So if somebody hurts you, you say, oh, I guess maybe I'm a little oversensitive about that stuff or maybe it bothers me too much or maybe they're right.
	Maybe I'm just bitter or whatever.
	You just internalize this stuff, right?
	Because it's easier than the truth, right?
	Because the truth is I can't talk to people who claim to love me about problems I have with them.
	So what the hell do they mean when they say love?
	Like love isn't for the easy stuff.
	Love isn't for the – let's just say, well, my diet is chocolate.
	That's my tough diet is how to eat chocolate and like it.
	Well, you don't – look, if chocolate and all the tough stuff that tasted great for you was all you ever needed to eat and everything that was bad for you tasted bad, we wouldn't need nutrition, right?
	Because everything that tasted good would be good for – we need nutrition because we have to go against that which is easy sometimes.
	You know, like yesterday, last night, I had like a – Hour and a quarter long workout.
	I don't really like to do it.
	I mean, I don't really like workouts, but I've been doing them for 30 years because they're good for me.
	And that way I get to eat more chocolate.
	So love is for the stuff that is hard.
	It's like saying, how hard is it to get along when you're both having a simultaneous orgasm?
	Well, it's really not that hard to get along when you're both having a simultaneous orgasm, right?
	It's when the dog is sick and someone has to visit the dentist and the roof is leaking and whatever, right?
	Yeah.
	The love part is for the difficult part.
	And people who say, oh, we love you, I love you, and this and that, but you can't talk to them about anything that's problematic or difficult, I would really question that definition of love.
	The whole point of the love part is to do the stuff that's less comfortable, that's not quite as easy, that's a little more challenging, to say the least, right?
	Yeah, it is.
	Anyway, sorry for that little lecture, but I hope that...
	No, it was good to know that.
	But, I mean, I'm not sure, I mean...
	So what am I to do regarding these people that are unempathetic in terms of, like, they're shielding me from meeting actual empathetic people?
	But you come to the truth, right?
	This is what this show has always been about.
	And I'm not trying to say that you don't know that.
	I just want to point it out.
	We're always aiming for the truth, right?
	And I aim and I sometimes hit and sometimes I miss and it's part of the conversation, right?
	I got a great correction earlier in the show.
	So we aim for the truth and we aim to get...
	Facts, right?
	And you can get facts one of two ways, right?
	And both is best, right?
	So you get facts.
	So you have a thesis.
	You have a question, right?
	Let's call this friend Sally.
	Is Sally empathetic?
	And that's the question.
	And so we say, well, we need facts.
	So there's two ways that we can get facts.
	We can...
	Reason them out through logic, right?
	Analytic, synthetic, rational, empirical.
	We can reason out our facts, right?
	And we can figure that out.
	Or we can look to evidence, right?
	Okay, okay.
	So, I mean, and reason and evidence are not complete opposites.
	Of course, they do overlap.
	So we have a principle, which is the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, right?
	That is about as factual a principle as you can get.
	In the realm of human behavior.
	This is the foundation of psychology.
	The best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior.
	Right.
	So if somebody has shown no empathy to you in the past, then they are going to show no empathy to you in the future.
	Ah, okay, okay.
	So that's the logic principle.
	Now, there's some evidence in there that you have to sort of see if they've shown empathy to you in the past.
	Now, if they have occasionally been mean and then apologized, which is true for every human being I think in the world, you can't get perfection.
	So if she said that to you and then the next day she called up and she said, you know, that really bothered me.
	It really bothered me that you were talking about your difficult childhood, and I just gave you some stupid, snappy-ass comeback called You're Bitter.
	I thought about that.
	I thought about my own history, and it really kept me awake.
	It bothered me.
	Well, hey!
	Sally has a conscience!
	Yay!
	That's good, right?
	Because the conscience is like that big-ass fin on the bottom of a yacht.
	It's just what writes you back up again, right?
	Right.
	Right?
	So we make mistakes and our conscience, which is UPB, UPB conscience and UPB, I've got a whole podcast and premium section about this.
	But anyway, so the universalization part of our brain says, hey, wait a minute, that was a deviation.
	You were not being very kind there.
	And it troubles us, right?
	Yeah, it does.
	It does.
	Yeah, and so then you come back and you think about it and you say, you know what?
	I made a mistake.
	The past overcame me.
	I left my principles behind, blah, blah, blah.
	And then the person comes back to you and says, oh man, I was a dick.
	Sorry about that.
	Here's what happened.
	Here's why.
	I hope you didn't take it personally.
	It's a shitty thing to say.
	I'm really sorry.
	And then you – wow, fantastic.
	That means so – and then the next time the person is cruel, since again it's always going to happen from now on, then you have something to appeal to.
	But you know that person has a conscience even if they don't – it's going to right itself, right?
	Yeah, eventually, yeah.
	If they have a conscience – Well, hopefully not eventually because you don't want to sit around for 20 years waiting for the person to see if they have a conscience, right?
	Usually it's 24 to 48 hours.
	If somebody has done you wrong – and again, this is my rule of thumb and I think it's a pretty good one though because a conscience really bothers someone.
	And if they're not bothered by their conscience, then – like the conscience hits pretty hard and pretty fast.
	And so usually if somebody has done me wrong, I'll give them 24 to 48 hours.
	For their conscience to, for them to find out if they have a conscience or not, right?
	Right.
	And if they don't contact me in 24 to 48 hours, then I know with virtual certainty that they have no conscience.
	Okay.
	Because it's never once happened in my life that it comes after that time period.
	That's the crucial window.
	Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
	And so if they come back, great, we have a conversation.
	Now, I may choose to have a conversation with them anyway, but I don't usually bother because if somebody doesn't have a conscience, you can't have a relationship with them because they can't self-correct and they're just going to be impulsive and, right, they're just going to be random and, I mean, God, this is a horrible situation to be in, right?
	Yeah, it is, it is, and it's caused me a lot of consternation.
	I mean, so I guess what should Should I kind of re-evaluate, I guess, where these relationships are, perhaps?
	Well, sorry, let me just finish the long, boring lecture about reason, evidence, and relationships.
	Sorry about this, but I'll keep it brief.
	So...
	So you can reason it out.
	You can say, so if you have a long history with someone, you can say, okay, well, they've been cruel to me in the past, and they've never shown a shred of conscience, and I've never had an impulse to talk about it with them.
	There's never been an opening, and I've not observed them being really kind and empathetic with other people, and I know about their history, and no, eh, right?
	No empathy, no conscience.
	Sorry about that.
	Would it behoove me to separate myself from them, I guess?
	Well, again, I'm just giving you the process, right?
	I'm just giving you the process.
	What you do with it is up to you.
	But you have to know what it is that is going on, right?
	Because if they have no conscience and no empathy, there is no relationship.
	You're not separating yourself from anything other than an illusion, right?
	For somebody to have a relationship with you, they have to have empathy.
	Otherwise, you're just a prop to them.
	You're like...
	Paris Hilton's handbag, right?
	Right, I'm just kind of there, the plus one.
	She may be very attached to it, but she does not have a relationship with it, right?
	Right.
	Because she doesn't sit there before her evening and prop her Hermes handbag up and say, ah, Mr.
	Hermes, I feel like going to this gallery opening.
	Oh, gallery opening.
	Who are we kidding?
	I feel like going to this club, right?
	Do you feel like going to a movie, Mr.
	Handbag?
	Well, I don't know.
	Let's negotiate and figure out.
	She's just like, hey, I'm going to the club.
	I'm going to bring the handbag.
	Now, if she can't find the handbag and the handbag's unavailable, she may be very upset, right?
	Oh, that handbag goes perfectly with my chihuahua that I'm going to Blow coke up its ass or something, right?
	So she may be very upset that the handbag's not there, and if your friend wants to go to a movie with you and they have no empathy, they may be upset, right?
	But that doesn't mean they have a relationship with you.
	It means they just want you there.
	Because maybe they don't like going to movies alone or whatever, right?
	Well, you know, that kind of brings me to the whole realization, too, that I think that really is probably killing me softly here, too, is that That I may be living in kind of that whole illusory universe still.
	Sure.
	Yeah, I mean, that is the great challenging question, right?
	We're asking the truth about our relationships.
	Because if we can't get the truth about our relationships, we cannot get the truth about anything.
	People think that you find out the truth about the world and blah, blah, then you apply.
	No.
	We find out the truth about our relationships first and foremost.
	First and foremost.
	Because if we have people in our lives who are deluded, we will never get to the truth about the world because we will constantly be pulled back and blinded by all the illusions of everyone around us.
	Because the exploration of the truth of the world is a social context.
	It's a social construct.
	It's a tribal communal activity just like the scientific method is a tribal communal activity.
	Medicine, finding accurate cause and effect in medicine is a lot of experiments, a lot of double-blind, a lot of peer review, a lot of data review.
	It's a collective process.
	Right, right, right.
	And you can't have a whole bunch of great science with one scientist and 10,000 witch doctors.
	You just can't get good science out of that.
	Oh, okay.
	I see your point.
	I see your point.
	You see what I mean?
	So we have to be surrounded by good scientists before we can even...
	Attempt to have consistently good science.
	We can't get to the truth about the world until we get to the truth about our relationships.
	People always aim at the truth of the world, they ignore their relationships, and then they wonder why the world doesn't get better.
	Right, right, right.
	So, aim for the truth about your relationships.
	Do these people have empathy?
	Do they care about what I feel when what I feel is inconvenient to them?
	Look, if you go to a sports game and you see every empty-headed, chuckled nutjob cheering away with blue paint on his face, look, they're all getting along!
	Because they're all on the same side, they're all cheering for the same thing.
	Oh, the goal!
	Hey!
	Oh, let's jump up, right?
	Right, yeah, but it's like...
	Like a bunch of extras from World War Z, right?
	But that's easy enough because everyone's all there doing the same thing.
	You don't need to, you know, they don't go to couples counseling because they're all cheering at the same time because that's easy, empty-headed, stupid stuff.
	Who cares?
	Doesn't matter.
	And so on, right?
	The empathy is for when you, right?
	I mean, do they have empathy for each other?
	Sure.
	They're all cheering at the same time.
	Do they have empathy for the team?
	Yeah, they want their team to win.
	But that's not, right?
	The empathy, again, the virtues, the nutrition, the empathy, the reason, all for things that don't come easily and obvious to us, right?
	I mean...
	You don't need to be a physicist to catch a ball, but you sure as hell do need to be a physicist and a mathematician if you want to fly to the moon and back, right?
	So it's for the stuff that's not natural, not easy, that's more challenging.
	That's the stuff where you really need the empathy.
	So the way that you find out if people have empathy for you is you talk to them about feelings that you have that are inconvenient to them.
	Okay.
	And if they will...
	Have those conversations with you.
	It may not be perfect, but they'll continue.
	Then, by gosh, they have empathy.
	Because you care about it even though it's inconvenient for them.
	So they'll have that conversation because they care about you.
	But if you say something, and it may not even be about them, you say anything that is inconvenient to them, and they just shut you down, then no.
	Wait, hold up a moment.
	I'm on a phone call.
	Let me get you later.
	Say again.
	Well, so if they just shut you down every time you say something that's inconvenient to them.
	Now, philosophy, of course, why does it challenge our relationships so much?
	Because philosophy is intensely uncomfortable for other people.
	It's intensely comfortable for us sometimes, too, right?
	But we stick with it because we happen to prefer facts to fiction, truth to fantasy, right?
	And so philosophy...
	Go ahead.
	It's extremely uncomfortable.
	I mean, it's like you were saying before.
	It's like you really have to come in touch with a lot of stuff in your history that you may not necessarily be proud of.
	And you're putting a lot of your personality in potentially – what's that word you use?
	In a negative light sometimes.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Philosophy is always uncomfortable to people.
	I mean if it wasn't uncomfortable, it wouldn't be necessary any more than – like changing your diet is uncomfortable for people too and that's the whole point of nutrition.
	I mean if nutrition didn't change anyone's diet, it wouldn't be anything.
	It would be nonsense, right?
	It would be graffiti.
	Right.
	So philosophy will always challenge our relationships.
	And so what philosophy does is it exposes those of our relationships which have empathy and those of our relationships which do not.
	Because by its very discomfort, it requires empathy to stay in conversations with people undergoing philosophical rigor or self-knowledge or whatever it is.
	Do you care about your illusions or do you care about the other person?
	That's really fundamentally what it comes down to.
	And philosophy, by focusing on disrupting illusions, causes great discomfort in personal relationships, which exposes whether there's empathy or not.
	And then people get all mad at philosophy rather than their own lack of empathy for the problems.
	So it's kind of like a natural progression of the path I'm on is that I'm going to be seeing this a lot more often with people.
	And so I guess the main thing is that I have to achieve the truth by looking at the evidence involved in these relationships, whether they're past histories, asking those uncomfortable questions, do they have empathy for me, and so forth.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Do they care about you?
	Even though it's a topic that may be uncomfortable to them, do they care about you enough to talk about it?
	Well, if they don't, then what the hell does caring about you mean?
	Well, as long as I'm enjoying everything that we're doing, it's great.
	But the moment it becomes remotely uncomfortable, I'm going to lash out.
	Well, that's not having a relationship with anything other than your own egotistical narcissism and fragility and insecurity and pettiness and smallness and inconsequentiality and I don't know.
	Defending an empty castle from people who are never going to come.
	Anyway, so I just wanted to point that out.
	I mean, this is why I focus on relationships.
	We cannot consistently get to the truth until we have the truth about our relationships.
	And we cannot heal the world until we have an empathetic community.
	And I think that libertarianism and also great stuff when it comes to economics and politics.
	Yay!
	Fantastic!
	But...
	But it still has a lot to work on in terms of empathy because that is the greatest activism.
	It's not getting arrested for smoking pot.
	The greatest activism is to promote deeper and greater empathy in a community because that community will rule the future in a non-ruling kind of way, if that makes sense.
	Gotcha.
	All right.
	Well, I'll let you get back to it.
	Thank you again for taking my phone.
	I appreciate the respect.
	Thanks.
	I appreciate that.
	Great chat.
	And yeah, if you can't come to conclusions about your relationships based on past evidence and reasoning through all the examples and reasoning through their histories and so on, if you are still ambivalent or doubtful, it could be because you're just denying the information and don't want to get there.
	But either way...
	Yes, if you have doubt and it's safe to do so, then have more conversations.
	There's nothing like experiencing the empiricism of the present to free you from the illusions of the past.
	So sit down and say to your friend, hey, when you said this, it really hurt and upset me.
	And let's talk about that and see what happens from there.
	Because, I mean, evidence trumps everything, right?
	And so if you're short on conclusions, you can always get more evidence in your relationships by having the challenging conversations with people and see how they react.
	All right?
	Gotcha.
	All right, then.
	Thanks, Emil.
	Drop me a line if you can.
	Let me know how it goes.
	Please send your listener comments and questions to mailbag at freedomainradio.com.
	Mike's email operations at freedomainradio.com.
	My email, januaryfirefighterbigstudmuffin6205 at freedomainradio.com.
	Actually, I don't even think that works because I was, I think, Mr.
	February.
	But thanks everyone so much.
	I appreciate that.
	Donation is always welcome, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, just to let you know as well.
	I start my last round of chemo at the beginning of July.
	I may be out for a while.
	This is progressively a little bit more weakening each time.
	And I also am going to have a bit of radiation on my throat, which may cause sore throat, so I don't know the degree to which I'll be able to operate in August.
	But I will be thinking of you.
	And I will be continuing to work on the parenting book, which currently is sitting in a timeout at the moment for lack of cooperation.
	But actually, it's going all right.
	It's just hard to find the time.
	So, yeah, I just wanted to let you know August may be a little light.
	We have some shows that we've done before that I've done sort of recently.
	They were holding back until then.
	But I just wanted to let you know, if my productivity takes a dip in August, it's not because I am sunning myself on the Riviera, but rather being blasted with exciting tumor-killing radiations and all that kind of stuff.
	So I hope you will forgive me for any lack of productivity and sample from the 12 billion podcasts that are already out there.
	Thanks again, Mike, for listening to the – for running the Sunday show.
	I really appreciate it.
	And to have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week, everyone.
	Love you all.
	Love your support.
	And thank you so much, as always, for your honesty, your generosity, your kindness, and for giving me the opportunity to speak the world to the world in this way.
	The world is ever increasingly listening and, even more importantly, acting.

▲