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July 7, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:07:49

2425 Freedomain Radio Call In Show July 7th, 2013

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses signs of an abusive relationship, when curiosity hits culture, protecting the hearts of those you love, financial propaganda, alternative currencies, poverty as success, legal action against Sudbury schools and more. https://www.facebook.com/StopLegalActionAgainstParentsOfSVSStudents

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	Well, good morning, everybody.
	It's 7-7-13.
	I hope you're doing very well.
	Two things I forgot to mention.
	Three, in fact, I forgot to mention in my Man of Steel review.
	Number one, high definition makes everybody over 30 look like they're the moon.
	I just wanted to mention that.
	That's fairly important.
	Terraforming the Earth works about as well as transplanting democracy to a rather feral and medieval Middle East.
	That's Also quite important.
	And most importantly, Morpheus likes donuts.
	Anyway, it's still an interesting film to see.
	I'm afraid that the October conference that was going to be run by Steph Kinsella, Jeff Tucker, and myself is on hold.
	It will be delayed until next year.
	But one of the things I was chatting about with the tuck of the Jeffrey...
	Is that it might be interesting to do a conference in Rome next summer.
	And I know I've got lots of European listeners who said, dude, come over.
	Actually, they haven't said dude.
	But they said, come to Europe, and I would love to come to Europe.
	It has been, I guess the last time I was in Europe, I was traveling to sell a product with IBM in Paris.
	Which is a very interesting city.
	A... I don't know.
	A story?
	Do you want an inconsequential story?
	I guess so.
	Well, first of all, Paris is interesting because it really does look like...
	It feels like you're walking around the Death Star.
	These high buildings.
	But they're like tenement buildings.
	And so it really feels like...
	Tie fighters going overhead and all that.
	But I had some...
	This is when I used to live downtown.
	And I had some neighbors and the...
	The neighbor's wife was French from Paris and she said, oh, you must go and you must talk to my friend.
	Her name is like Giselle or something, some Parisian name.
	So when I was there, so I was there for a couple of days on business and Giselle and I... I ended up meeting up and she was going through a complete freakout because she had just bought a condominium at the bottom of one of these Death Star trenches with almost no light whatsoever.
	And so I ended up helping her to find a lawyer and find a way to get out of the contract and so on.
	And in return she said, oh, you must come to dinner with my friends.
	We are friends coming tonight.
	I don't know what accent that is, but anyway.
	And I said, well, you know, my French is really not very good.
	It's certainly not.
	Not to dinner table conversation French.
	And so she said, no, you must come.
	We all, my friends, we speak English.
	And, you know, to their credit, for about 90 to 120 seconds, they did, in fact, speak English.
	And then they lapsed into rapid-fire Parisian staccato Morse code French.
	And I think there was some Klingon in there as well.
	My French is a little rusty.
	And two of the guys actually there were also named Stéphane.
	So they kept a...
	Stéphane!
	Oh, me?
	No, no.
	So anyway, it was not the most exciting dinner, but I was certainly glad to have dipped it and give her some help.
	She did end up getting out of this wretched basement-dwelling dark condo situation, but it's almost good.
	You know, probably more memorable than going to the Louvre.
	Anyway, so that's it for my introduction, and I guess we might as well go straight.
	Oh yeah, so if you're interested, if you would come to Rome, or if you're in Rome and would like to come to a conference, just shoot me an email.
	And don't forget mailbag at freedomainradio.com is where you can send your questions for my pitter-patter of interrogating against the white background.
	900 lights mailbag session.
	So if you want to send your questions in, I will do my best to try and answer them.
	Mailbag at freedomainradio.com.
	Donations, of course, always massively appreciated and requested.
	I think I might need to upgrade my camera.
	It's about seven years old, and it cost about $800 seven years ago.
	I was down talking to a camera guy who said, you know, massive changes and so on.
	I've never really been too happy with the way the camera works in terms of how it picks up the light.
	I've tried all the manual settings in the world.
	I'm certainly no expert, and if you do have any expertise in that, please let me know.
	You can talk me through anything, but I just never seem to quite get the light right.
	I'd like something a little bit more automated.
	So, you know, it's the master of, you know, the philosophy show, so I'd like to sort of keep that humming along nicely.
	Other than that, I think we're okay for technical equipment, but if you would like to help out, it's fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
	Always massively appreciated.
	So, Mr.
	Mike, who do we have to chat with today, huh?
	Jeremy, you're the first caller up today.
	Go ahead.
	Hello.
	I'm sure you won't mind if I refer to you as Jer Bear.
	Is that okay?
	That's fine by me.
	Whoever floats the boat.
	I don't know if you remember, we had a talk like a month ago.
	I had a nasty breakup from a girl that was kind of a nut.
	I do.
	Well, anyways, that turned out to be probably one of the best things that ever happened to me.
	And the reason that is, is because after that whole incident, I kind of stopped avoiding the pursuit of self-knowledge I was, you know, putting off, I guess, and delved right in.
	Now, that doesn't mean that I've, you know, achieved, you know...
	You know, like a complete office or anything, but I've definitely examined my relationships very rigorously, I'd say.
	And since then, I've actually, I defood from my mom.
	Honestly, it was something that was...
	In the end, I don't even think it was really that hard a decision.
	And I'm not sure what it was that kept me from realizing the truth about the relationship.
	But when I examined it, it just seemed like she was the cause of so much grief for me that I was just obscuring and hiding.
	But anyways, that's not my question.
	My question is actually about the nature of love.
	Sounds like a good question.
	I just wanted to mention that I'm very sorry to hear about your mom.
	I know that's a big decision.
	That's a tough decision.
	I'm really sorry.
	I mean, the reason that it's obscured from us is that we've had a lot of information that has come out over the last generation or two about...
	An abusive relationship in horizontal terms.
	Just about everybody knows that in a marriage, what is an abusive relationship?
	If you're dating someone, if you're in a marriage, well, they isolate you, they put you down, they verbally abuse you, they embarrass you, they shame you, they may hit you, they may sabotage you, they may spend your money, they may You know, it may be one-sided, it may be, you know, whatever it is, right?
	Those are the signs of an abusive relationship.
	I don't know, you know, what, I'm certainly no particular expert on it, but there are lots of signs.
	About abusive relationships in horizontal dating relationships.
	And that's something that we're all becoming aware of.
	Now, a lot of people are still not able to solve that issue, you know, so get out of these relationships and so on, right?
	So, I just looked one up here.
	So, let's see here.
	Signs of an abusive relationship.
	So, someone pushes for quick involvement, comes on strong.
	I've never felt I've loved anyone like this before, blah, blah, blah.
	There's jealousy, possessive, calls constantly, visits unexpectedly.
	And again, if we translate these to parents' things, these are signs of an abusive relationship.
	At least, it would seem to me that that would be the case.
	He's controlling, right?
	Interrogates you about who you talked to and where you were, checks mileage on the car, asks for receipts, insists you ask for permission to go anywhere or do anything.
	Unrealistic expectations.
	A person expects you to be the perfect person to meet their every need.
	This isolation tries to cut you off from family and friends, deprives you of a phone or car, tries to prevent you from holding a job.
	He blames others for his own mistakes or her own mistakes.
	Do you have a parent who blames everyone else for anything that's going wrong?
	It's always someone else's fault if anything goes wrong.
	Do you have a parent who makes everyone else responsible for their feelings?
	The abuser says, you make me angry instead of I'm angry.
	I wouldn't get so pissed off if you wouldn't...
	So, again, this is just some thoughts about it.
	Again, I don't claim any expertise in this.
	There is verbally abuse.
	He criticizes you and says cruel things, degrades, curses, calls you ugly names.
	He will use vulnerable points about your past and life against you.
	Sudden mood swings, switches from angry to loving in a matter of minutes.
	A history of hitting, threats of violence and so on.
	So, financial control, you know, obey me or, you know, you don't get any inheritance, whatever it is.
	So, again, this is just off the top of my head, just something I did a quick search of.
	And the reason it's hard to see with parent relationships is that we've had a lot of information about how to spot abuse in dating relationships, in horizontal relationships, but it's really hard to see it in...
	In parental relationships.
	And there is, as I've mentioned before, there is quite a bit of change in the psychological field these days, psychological and psychiatry fields in these relationships.
	So Dr.
	Phil, I think I mentioned this before, but Dr.
	Phil has an advisory board composed of Dr.
	Philip Zimbardo and other past presidents of the American Psychological Association and other, you know, all the top luminaries in the field, and they review the stuff that's on the website.
	And in one of his articles, it basically says, if you were abused, it says, If you want to rebuild the relationship with your parent now that you're both adults, Dr.
	Phil has some advice.
	One, be heard.
	You won't be able to repair the relationship until your parent fully understands how the abuse has affected you.
	He or she may feel guilty, but you're the one who needs to be helped.
	This is something I've been saying for years and years, which is if you have issues with your parents, it's really important to sit down and communicate with them and attempt to be heard as much as possible.
	Second is redefine the relationship.
	It's up to you to express yourself.
	Tell your parent what you need now that you're not getting.
	Be honest and clear.
	This is your chance to say exactly what you need emotionally.
	Nothing can change the past, but you can create a new history with your parent.
	Treat each other as the people you are now.
	Number three, do what is best for you.
	Consider the possibility that it may not be healthy to have any sort of relationship with your parents.
	It's a difficult pill to swallow and it should be used as the last option.
	However, it may be the option that helps you the most.
	And I think that's important.
	You can find that at drphil.com forward slash articles forward slash article forward slash articles.
	35, and there's lots of other things there, too.
	So, you know, I know that sometimes people hear me talking about parents and abuse and voluntarism and so on, and they're all kinds of shocked, but this really is, it's mainstream.
	I don't think anyone can tell someone, you know, unless they're in imminent physical danger that you just got to get out of a relationship, but it is very mainstream in psychological circles to remind people that It may be healthy to have no relationship with your parents at all if you continue to be stuck in a cycle of abuse and so on.
	And it is hard.
	It's hard for people to hear that.
	We have this old thing, right?
	Sorry, I know you want to talk about something else, but we have this old thing, honor thy mother and thy father.
	Those of us who are into philosophy have looked at a lot of the Ten Commandments and found them to be somewhat wanting, but that's one of the ones that is tough.
	So I just wanted to point out that I'm really sorry that this is where it got to, but...
	If that's what's best for you, I'm certainly not going to be criticized.
	Yeah, I appreciate that.
	Go ahead.
	Well, I mean, one of the things, one of the most nefarious things my mom would say, and it took me a long time to really see the implications of it, is she would say that, well, she believed in this new age spiritual stuff, right?
	So she would say, you know, you actually chose to come into our family, right?
	Yes, I've heard that theory as well.
	So basically I realized that that was basically like putting the onus on me, right?
	So everything was my fault, right?
	Because I chose to come into the family originally, right?
	Right.
	Now, I've heard that theory before, the idea that we sort of float, our souls float above the world, and we have something to learn from our families, and that's why we choose them.
	And I mean, I've heard that.
	It's insane, of course.
	It's completely deranged.
	But even if it were true, I don't see how that would alter anything.
	I mean, it's like saying, well, you know, some guy beats up on his wife.
	It's like saying, well, you chose to get married to me, so you can't leave.
	It's like, no.
	I mean, people make mistakes in marriage all the time.
	And so even if you, I mean, you choose to get married, you can choose to get divorced.
	So even if you did choose...
	To enter into your family of origin, I don't see why that would mean you would have to stay forever.
	I mean, what on earth would that have to do with anything?
	Unless there's some sort of master spiritual thing, like you just have...
	Anyway, it's such an insane idea, it's probably not even worth discussing.
	But anyway, go on.
	Right.
	Well, anyways, this whole process has me, like I said, questioning the nature of love because, based on what you said in the book, On Truth, that love is an involuntary response to virtue in another person, something like that, right?
	It made me kind of realize that, I guess, by that definition, really, I don't have any experience of love in my entire life, you know?
	I know.
	Yes, I'm very sorry about that.
	I'm incredibly sorry about that.
	If you grow up in a very dysfunctional household, love is a distant rumor at best.
	And what do you get instead of love?
	You get neurotic attachment and sexual lust.
	If my 20s is any indication, I'm sorry to mean to laugh because it is tragic.
	But the problem is when you're surrounded by toxic people, they are a human shield.
	Against virtuous people.
	You know, what on earth was any decent man or woman going to have to do with my mom?
	What on earth would they ever have to do with her?
	It would make no sense for them whatsoever to sort of come into her life and be friends with her, right?
	It is truly tragic that when you grow up with dysfunctional people, Love is a galaxy away, and it's not something you ever even hear of.
	You know, let's say that there's, you know, a 5% or 10% variation in toxicity that's possible in a relationship.
	So somebody who's like 80% toxic might hang out with someone who's 75% toxic or 85% toxic or whatever, right?
	So think of these concentric rings, these shields around you.
	When you find people who are not only 85%, not 85% toxic, but 85% healthy?
	I mean, you're talking like 20 degrees of separation.
	Right?
	Like 20 people who would know each other, you're 20 layers away from a healthy person.
	And that's assuming that it's as optimal as possible.
	It's probably like 40 or 50.
	And you're never going to meet these people.
	And so it is tragic the degree to which the concentric rings of dysfunction that surround a child in a highly dysfunctional family keep virtuous people at bay and away.
	It really is tragic.
	You know, we should all, in a sense, be doing relief.
	Those that are healthy of us should all, in a sense, be doing relief work among the people who need help.
	But in families it's almost impossible because Parents will, dysfunctional parents will almost invariably, I believe, keep healthy people away from their children because the healthy people will begin to provoke perspective in the children that are destructive to the selfish interests of the dysfunctional parents and so on and so on.
	It's really tough.
	Parents do not want to expose their children to functional people.
	Parents want to be the pinnacle of health and so on.
	And I'm sorry.
	I know this is a long lecture, and I do want to listen to what you want to say, but I believe you.
	I really believe you when you say that you didn't know what love was.
	I didn't find it until I was in my 30s, and I didn't even know really what I was missing.
	Let me just tell you one last thing, too.
	When I was in a bad relationship in my 20s, the reason why it was so hard to get out of it was because everyone around me approved of that relationship, thought it was good and great.
	My brother went to help me find a ring to marry this crazy woman.
	My mom didn't say anything when I announced and all this.
	Everybody was kind of In on it, right?
	And to peel back the layers of how destructive that relationship was exposed a hell of a lot more than me and my girlfriend.
	It exposed everybody around who was the support structure who either couldn't see that that relationship was dysfunctional Which meant that they were dysfunctional or saw that it was dysfunctional and felt that it was just great and fine and dandy and wonderful for me to be in that kind of relationship.
	You see, when I got out of that relationship, that's when everything began to fall apart for me.
	Because our dating relationships are mirrors of our original relationships, of our family, of origin relationships.
	And that's what...
	If you get out of dysfunctional relationships...
	I mean, just imagine, right?
	You get out of dysfunctional relationships...
	And then you go meet someone really healthy, confident, wise, articulate, curious, empathetic, virtuous, all these kinds of things, right?
	And then you take that new lover, genuine lover, and you take that lover to your crazy messed up family...
	Well, what's going to happen?
	Are they going to like her?
	No.
	Is she going to like them?
	Hell to the no!
	Right?
	My wife has never met my mother.
	They share the name, but my wife has never met my mother and never will.
	I couldn't do it.
	I just couldn't do it.
	So this is the problem.
	If you try to swim away from the dismal, dirty, volcanic ash and lava spiky little island of dysfunction, it's not something that you can't blend the two.
	You can't sort of drag that island to a better place.
	To me, you've just got to leave that island of screwed up people and get to someplace healthy.
	They all made their choices.
	They all had their lives.
	You can either stay with them To no purpose whatsoever other than to repeat the dysfunctional, spiky, unicorn-horned, gouging DNA of dysfunction, or you can go to someplace healthier.
	This is my opinion.
	It's not an absolute.
	This is not a reasoned argument.
	I think there's good reasons behind it.
	I've not been able to find a way to join health and sickness together.
	To join virtue and vice together.
	To join love and exploitation together.
	These two tribes are at war!
	Forever.
	For the future.
	Hopefully not forever.
	Hopefully not forever.
	And so, if you are looking for love, there are things that must be left behind if they can't be fixed.
	But go ahead.
	Well, I wanted some clarification, though, because you said that the sort of bond between, like, you know, parent and child, let's say, for example, the parent is an enlightened person, right?
	Even so, that's more like you said it was an attachment in the book, right?
	It's not mature love.
	I mean, is that a right way of putting it?
	Oh, you mean when I did a podcast called Your Children Do Not Love You?
	Well, and on truth, you also mentioned that, for example, the bond between a mother and her child, it's more like a form of attachment than a mature love.
	Well, absolutely.
	Look, we can all understand that when a baby is seven days old, you don't love it for its virtue, right?
	Unless by virtue you mean pooping so ferociously that you've got to clean the wall, right?
	That's not virtue, right?
	So you don't love a child for the child's virtue.
	And the other thing, too, is that, of course, you hope that you teach your children virtue through your own example and through verbal instruction.
	You teach your child about virtue.
	And then you're not loving that child for the child's virtue, in a sense, any more than if you teach the child the correct word for tree, you don't love the child because the child knows the correct word for tree, because that's kind of narcissistic, right?
	Hey, all these things I taught you, I love you for all the things that I taught you, and so on.
	And of course, the child doesn't have a comparison between you and other people, and the child does not have a choice in the relationship, and the power imbalance is so enormous.
	Between a child and a parent that it's really, you know, that there's no choice.
	There's no, I mean, obviously you try and inculcate choice as much, but my daughter doesn't have the choice to say, well, you know, baldy, I've had enough of your yammering.
	I think I'm going to go and try out another family for a while and I'll let you know how it goes, right?
	I mean, there's nothing like that that occurs.
	So I can't compare the kind of love that That I have with my daughter, with the kind of love that I have with my wife who has choice and virtue and has earned all these great things and, you know, come through many struggles to be such an amazing and wonderful and delightful and funny and warm and caring and committed person, I just can't compare the two.
	Now, I think that as a child grows, I think that you can get more love in the relationship, more sort of adult-to-adult respect and love.
	But it's really hard to use the same kind of word for an infant that you would with an adult.
	I just think that wouldn't make a huge amount of sense.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	Well, do you think that that form of like, I don't know, I'd call it attachment love maybe or something like that, is something that in a lot of relationships with parents never, so it just stays at that stage, it never matures to an actual reciprocal sort of love, right?
	Well, I don't think it can stay at that stage, right?
	So, there's somebody, Laurie mentioned in the chat, There's a bond, oxytocin, that occurs.
	It's a chemical bonding that occurs, which is similar to, obviously, it's similar not in content, but just in sort of, you know, when you meet someone you're very sexually attracted to, there's a lot of...
	Hormones and so on that kick in.
	And this usually doesn't work out very well.
	You know, it's nature's very primitive way of making a baby in a very sort of fly-by kind of way.
	But the bond that occurs...
	First of all, this bond is not...
	It certainly doesn't occur with everyone.
	I mean, lots of people just don't have the capacity for this bond.
	You know, what is called postpartum depression.
	I don't really know much about it.
	But it's one of these things that sounds very suspicious to me.
	But...
	With some people, the bond doesn't occur at all.
	And that sets you up for a hell of a rough time because, you know, babies are very hard work.
	And the bond is so that you'll do the work.
	And if you have to do the work without the bond, it's really hard.
	And I think you miss out on one of nature's great, beauteous, sunlit moments of attachment and merging in a positive way.
	If you don't have that bond...
	Oh, she says she has a whole blog on that.
	If you'd like to give me the blog, I will pass it along to the listeners.
	So I think that a lot of times there is this attachment, there is this excitement about the baby.
	And then the problem is, of course, that the children then begin to have ideas that are different from the parents.
	And of course they do, right?
	Because most of the parents' ideas have nothing to do with reality, right?
	I mean, the nationalism, the superstition, the religiosity, the I mean, you name it.
	The cultural nonsense that goes on, it's completely anti-empirical.
	And so the children don't agree with the parents at all and find the parents' thoughts as they get older kind of incomprehensible.
	And they find the parents' hypocrisy so often pretty incomprehensible.
	You know, the parent who yells at you not to yell and hits you for hitting.
	It's just crazy, right?
	And so what happens is the natural rational empiricism of the child...
	It collides with the House of Cards personalities of the parents that is built on culture, that is built on lies, nonsense, right?
	I mean, we drive to the United States.
	Why do we have to stop at a border?
	I mean, we can make up these words to tell my daughter, well, you see, we're going from Canada to the United States.
	But what the hell does that mean?
	It doesn't mean anything.
	I mean, that doesn't explain to her anything.
	It doesn't tell her anything.
	I mean, do we then say to her, well, you see, there are guys with guns who run this particular gangland, and there are guys with guns who run this particular gangland, and they don't want people slipping from one zoo cage to another.
	And, well, I can't tell her that yet.
	So, there's a lot of things that...
	The natural and curious empiricism of children collides against the incredibly fragile spider-string superstructure of the parents' false selves, and the false selves react with attack.
	And the attack is how the irrationality reproduces itself.
	Irrationality always reproduces itself through attack, because it doesn't have good arguments.
	If you want to know the general mental state of humanity, just look at comments on On the internet.
	This is all of the irrationality that is striving to reproduce itself through attack.
	Irrationality has nothing of value to offer other than relief from attack, right?
	I mean, it's like when Winston Smith in 1984 loves O'Brien because O'Brien stops torturing him.
	Well, that's all irrationality has to offer.
	It's the cessation of pain that it itself is inflicting, which is also called the law.
	So, thebluemoonturtleblog.blogspot.com.
	Thebluemoonturtleblog.blogspot.com.
	I really believe that should be a Sting title album.
	Anyway, so I think it actually does deteriorate quite quickly, even if there is that bonding at the beginning when curiosity hits culture.
	The result is almost invariably abuse of some kind or another.
	Doesn't it seem to repeat in adult relationships where you have this sort of like the romance period which kind of withers away and then you actually get into the meat and bones of it and it's just all false, right?
	So it's like a repetition of what you did with your parents if they were irrational, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, it's the consolation prize for love is...
	Is lust and codependency and detachment and all that kind of stuff.
	That is the consolation prize.
	Like, nature itself, it doesn't give a shit how you make a baby, frankly.
	I mean, it cares to some degree that it wants someone to be around to raise the baby, but I think in the ideal healthy scenario, it wants a pair-bonded couple who can raise the child and give it love and all these kinds of juicy, wonderful things.
	But, you know, in the absence of that, which was mostly absent throughout human history, in the absence of that is like, hey, you know, big tits, pec muscles, go to it.
	Have sex.
	You know, it doesn't...
	So, you know, the consolation prize for love is lust.
	And it is, frankly, dissatisfying.
	And in the long run, it's kind of shameful.
	And the reason that it's kind of shameful is it's very hard to...
	To be honest with yourself about lust.
	Right?
	So, if you basically say, well, I just want to fuck this person because they're so hot.
	I mean, I know some of the players out there and the guys, you know, the sort of seduce and destroy guys, they're very honest about it, I guess.
	If you want to call that honesty, I suppose it's honesty.
	But it's very hard to be honest about this kind of stuff.
	It was for me.
	Like, I remember...
	I wanted to go out with this girl just because I found her sexy.
	And I was going to ask her to a dance in grade nine or something like that.
	And she was just, she was sexy.
	And she was a total troll as a human being.
	I mean, it was nasty and unpleasant and coarse and all this kind of stuff.
	And I just remember, you know, people were bugging me.
	Who are you going to ask to the dance?
	Who are you going to ask?
	I'm going to ask this girl.
	And everybody immediately gave me this look, like, yeah, okay, we know she's sexy, but she's a total troll.
	What are you doing, right?
	And unfortunately, she made some really coarse joke and laughed like a hyena suddenly surprised by an electric toothbrush in the nether regions.
	And I felt ashamed because I couldn't be honest.
	But she's sexy, and that's why I want to ask her to the dance.
	Now...
	I mean, I was 14, what the hell would I know what to do with sexy?
	But nonetheless, you know, the hormones were still raging away.
	And so, it's hard to be honest about lust, which is to say, I basically want to use someone as an orifice, as a human Kleenex, and then toss them aside.
	I don't like this person, but I will have, you know, intimate sexual vulnerability with that person, even though she repulses me as a human being, you know, as a warm, wet hole, she'll do the trick.
	So it's, you know, without sort of colliding with your own inner sociopathy, it's really hard to be honest about lust, and that's one of the reasons why I think it's kind of shameful afterwards, because it's the degree...
	Anything which tempts you to lie to yourself is innately dangerous, right?
	Anything which tempts you to have to reshape your motives and to pretend that you're doing something other than what you're doing is innately dangerous, and lust is one of these things that is the case.
	I would actually, you know, just by the by, you know, let me just...
	Just by the by, I want to sort of mention this very, very quickly.
	One thing I wish that...
	With men, I don't know if this is the case with you, but with men, if you decide that you want to just go out with some girl because she's hot...
	Then, at least if you have friends like mine, they'll roll their eyes at you.
	Like, when I was sort of in my 20s or whatever.
	I mean, so some of them might be envious or whatever, but...
	And I certainly did date some extremely attractive young ladies when I was younger.
	But they will kind of roll their eyes.
	Like...
	Because they get what's going on.
	I do kind of wish that women would start to do this a little bit more as well.
	I don't just mean with the hot guys.
	I mean, that's so obvious.
	Who even bothers, right?
	But, you know, like, I mean, at some point, young women or girls, I guess more girls, they have to sort of say, oh, come on, you know, you're into Justin Bieber because he's such a wonderful, kind, virtuous guy who drives drunk and beats up photographers.
	Um...
	So, I mean, at some point, you know, it has to be, you know, oh, they're just pretty boys, right?
	That's fine, you know, okay, we all like looking at pretty people, but that's not where you, you know, stick the wick of your future anywhere close to.
	But more importantly than that, I would like to start to see women roll their eyes when someone's just obviously going for...
	The provider, like the alpha male provider.
	So, you know, if some woman is like, oh, you know, he's great.
	He's going to be a lawyer.
	He's this and that and the other.
	That'd be a little bit of eye rolling.
	You know, as in, well, you just want...
	Money, resources, or whatever it is, right?
	I mean, your daddy's rich and your mom is good-looking, as the song says, right?
	Summertime.
	I think it would be great if women would start to roll their eyes a little bit at each other when they were obviously just going for status, you know, pretty boys or money boys or whatever it is, and just say, look, I mean, if you want love, if you want a great dad for your kids, you probably don't want some...
	Cold-eyed, fish-lipped lawyer who may make partner because he's working 70 hours a week and he may give you a big house, but it's going to be as empty as the hearts of your children when all is said and done.
	I would like for there to be a little bit more skepticism about some of the natural drives that women have in terms of wanting men with resources in the same way that there are some eye-rolling skepticism around men's natural drives to go for hourglass fertility silhouettes.
	Anyway, I just want to mention.
	Yeah.
	But the last thing I just want to ask you about love was, because I've not seen it in any of your podcasts specifically mentioned, but do you have a concept of self-love?
	Like, I don't know, I guess just learning to love yourself authentically, and maybe that's a process of self-knowledge in the pursuit of understanding your I mean, is there a concept of self-love that you kind of – can you detail?
	Yeah.
	I mean, to me, self-love is like health, right?
	So you can't aim directly at health, right?
	You just can't.
	You can't aim directly at weight loss, right?
	You can't say, today I'm going to be healthy and lose weight.
	What you can do is you can aim to exercise, you can aim to eat well, you can aim to expand your knowledge about whatever activities are necessary to make or to keep you healthy.
	But you can't aim at health.
	Health is an effect of specific actions that you can take and each of those actions have to be studied And have to be understood and have to actually be enacted, right?
	I mean, we've all had that moment where, you know, you've had a good meal and, you know, like, so I've gained five pounds doing chemo.
	Why?
	Because I'm a contrarian?
	I don't know.
	Well, I know why.
	It's because I got this chemical taste in my mouth from the chemo and I have to eat to, even gum doesn't really help, but I have to sort of eat to make it go away.
	And so I put on a little bit of weight during chemo, which is kind of the opposite.
	And so we all have these moments where you have, oh, should I eat this?
	Should I not eat this?
	And you put it down.
	So yeah, it was a good meal, but I'm not going to have the cheesecake.
	I'm just not going to do it.
	Or you're at the grocery store and you're like, ooh, I like chips and onion dip.
	It's one of my weaknesses.
	I haven't had it for years.
	I've had it during chemo because it's one of the few things that takes away that taste.
	And so you're at the grocery store and you're like, ooh, three for $8.
	I should buy them.
	And you're like, nope, you know what?
	Because if they're not in the house, I'm not going to eat them.
	And if they're in the house, I'm going to eat them.
	And so you just make those choices.
	Now, the end result of making a whole bunch of those choices is hopefully you get some weight loss or you get some health or you get whatever it is that you're aiming for.
	It's the same thing with self-love.
	It's the same thing with self-love.
	You just are conscious of your decisions.
	You find a woman attractive, well, you scan her.
	You get your tricorder of FDR virtue detection out, right?
	And you ask her about her childhood, and you ask her, and you examine her capacity for self-knowledge.
	You examine her capacity for self-criticism.
	Right?
	I went out with a woman many years ago.
	She never understood.
	I went on two or three dates with her, and she never understood why I didn't call her again.
	But the reason I didn't call her again was because she, you know, she found out, oh yeah, I was in this relationship for like two years.
	And we were living together, and then One day I came home and he just cleared his stuff out and moved away.
	I didn't even know where he'd gone.
	He didn't leave a note.
	I had no idea.
	I had no idea that anything was wrong.
	He had just cleared up and moved out of our condo and he was just gone.
	And I never saw him again.
	Still to this day.
	I have no idea.
	No idea what happened with him.
	Right?
	Thank you for playing.
	Pole position Steph, but this ride is now closed.
	We didn't actually have sex because third date.
	Are you kidding?
	Anyway, so you scan and you look and you can either make those choices or you can fog out from those choices.
	You can either specifically say, is this good tasting cheesecake that's going to give me a heart attack?
	Is this going to James Galdolfini me into an early grave?
	Or is this something that is really good for me or not?
	You just have to be conscious of it.
	Make those decisions.
	Be skeptical and critical with your friends, with your family, with yourself, and aim for virtue.
	Aim to find the right people in your life.
	Aim to find the people you can talk with.
	Aim to find the people who make you a better person.
	Aim to find the people who can listen, who can help you in life's journey towards the summit of virtue that we should all be striving towards.
	And when you make those specific decisions, you end up with self-respect and you end up with self-love, but you can't aim at it directly.
	I did this interview recently with a guy who's skeptical of self-esteem.
	And self-esteem, I think it's just accurate or inaccurate evaluations of the self.
	As a philosopher, I'm pretty good.
	As a gymnast, I'm not.
	What does it mean to have self-esteem?
	Or just have an accurate evaluation of your own capacities and so on.
	But just try and do the right thing.
	And each of those specific decisions will lead you more and more towards self-respect.
	But you can't aim at it directly.
	And the idea that you can...
	Encourage people to have self-respect by telling them that they're worthy of respect.
	It's just like yelling at your fat to go away.
	I guess it's just not going to work.
	I hope that helps.
	I was going to ask if self-love has to precede mature love for somebody else, but it sounds more complicated than that.
	It's not just an A to B kind of thing, right?
	Well, I mean, it is kind of a truism that you have to love yourself in order to be loved.
	But I don't...
	I don't know.
	I mean, I've never really cottoned on to the concept of self-love very much.
	I mean, other than the, you know, Baby Oil and Tom Waits record.
	What does he say?
	Making a scene with a magazine.
	One of his old songs.
	Of course, that won't mean anything to anyone with a DSL connection.
	But I don't...
	I wouldn't sort of say that I wake up and I love myself.
	I respect the choices that I've made.
	I've made some good choices.
	I've made some bad choices.
	I strive to consistently make as good a choices as I can.
	I give myself the forgiveness and latitude to make bad decisions in complicated and unprecedented situations with the full knowledge that My adult self is largely constructed from philosophy and not inherently or organically inherited from history.
	So I certainly, you know, I'm happy with what I'm doing in the world.
	I'm happy with the degree of virtue that I'm bringing to the world.
	I am satisfied that I'm doing as good a job as I reasonably can with the resources at my disposal and the abilities that I have which are limited like everyone's.
	But I wouldn't, you know, I sort of get out of bed every morning and, you know, James Brown, I step back, I kiss myself!
	I mean, that's not, you know, my, I think that's sort of like, I'm the greatest, you know, that kind of stuff that doesn't really resonate with me.
	I think maybe you can feel that way if you've had your head jackhammered by George Foreman for about a month or so, like Muhammad Ali, but I just don't know that you can do that when you're just, you know, striving to make your way through a challenging world and, you know, trying not to get lynched.
	That kind of thing is important.
	I don't know about self-love.
	I don't really think about it that much.
	I focus on how much I love my wife and my daughter, how much I love the show, how much I love the listeners, how much I'm proud of the conversation that we're all having.
	But I don't know.
	Self-love has just never really resonated that much with me.
	Listen, I'm sorry.
	We must, must, must get on to the next caller, so I apologize for Okay, thanks a lot, Steph.
	But yeah, great questions, and yeah, well done.
	All right, Corbin, you're up next today.
	Wonderful.
	Hello, Stefan.
	I knew you weren't going to be a young guy.
	I've never known anyone under 40 with the name Corbin.
	But anyway, go on.
	Well, technically, now you know me, I'm just a hair under 40, so...
	How are you?
	I do fill the role.
	Okay, fair enough.
	Just a bit.
	I'm really excited to be on the call.
	And what I wanted to talk to you about, it affects me and my girlfriend as well.
	And she's here with me listening, so if you need any details from her, they're available.
	I started dating...
	Herb three years ago, three and a half years ago, and I started listening to FDR about two years ago, and what a wild ride that has been.
	It totally changed our relationship, and I started to become more real-time relationship-centric, and that's been really cool.
	So there's just some gratitude there, but the background for us is that We both came from various forms of broken households.
	In my girlfriend's household, she was the fourth child of her father.
	And just not long after that, maybe within six months or a year, her parents divorced.
	And the strange thing is that A little bit later than that, they actually split up the kids.
	So they sent her three older siblings to live with her father.
	He insisted on that.
	He had some grand scheme that would be a good idea.
	And left my girlfriend with her mother.
	And throughout their life, you know, she would sort of vie for his, you know, to be in the spotlight with him.
	She was attracted to being with her siblings, and there was a lot of family worship, like usual.
	And she, about four years ago, she sent him a letter, sent her father a letter, because he was just deteriorating as a human being.
	I mean, he's completely...
	Pickled his brain with various intoxicants, including one that's generally known as a date rape drug.
	Yikes!
	But he applied that to himself?
	Oh yeah, consistently, like daily.
	I mean, it's strange because he, yeah, it's GHB. I don't even understand why anyone would ever put that in their self, but he does it regularly, so his brain is pickled.
	I mean, I've met the guy and he's out there.
	His head's in the clouds, big time.
	Yeah.
	But luckily, four years ago, she began the process of ostracizing him.
	She sent him a letter and said, I need some space.
	I'll talk to you when I can, if I can.
	Just kind of left it open.
	She sort of gave him a second chance a couple of years ago, and I was around for that, so that's when I sort of met him, and I didn't like him one bit.
	He was charming, but he's a nightmare of just like hippy-dippy craziness and no regard for The fact that he created children and then turned them against each other and just, I mean, he did awful things.
	Well, I mean, I think to some degree drugs are often involved with shame management, right?
	With, I've done bad things that I can't recompense, that I can't make restitution for, then to manage the guilt I use drugs.
	But anyway, that's neither here nor there, but go on.
	It's totally accurate.
	I'm sure he's racked with guilt if he actually thinks about what he's done.
	So, as time went on, he would occasionally reach out with a text message or something, just really pathetic text messages.
	Nothing...
	Nothing heartfelt or like, oh my god, I apologize and let's try to have a relationship.
	Just sort of silly stuff that wasn't very meaningful.
	Eventually, we moved away.
	We moved far away.
	We moved to Texas.
	It was 20 hours away by car.
	She gave him one last chance.
	Do you want to say goodbye to your daughter for a minute?
	He completely dropped the ball and I'm so glad he did because it just showed that he had no interest in healing the relationship or anything.
	So she blacklisted him.
	Electronically, he's blocked.
	He has no way in.
	So he's a done deal.
	But the question, and the answer will sort of apply to me as well, because I've done the same thing sort of with my older sibling, my older sister, who was abusive.
	So the question is, do you think it's important to go through the actual explanation to him, or just cutting him off?
	Because the cutoff has happened.
	And now we're trying to figure out how important is it to actually detail to him, even if it was just a letter that we never, you know, there's no interaction, but how important is it to detail to him why this has happened?
	Why would it be important to do that?
	I'm not saying it's not, I'm just, what would the theory be behind?
	Like, if you say, why would it be important to go to Pasadena?
	I'd be like, well, why do you want to go to Pasadena, right?
	And if she's available to talk, it might be better to chat with her, unless she's actually using you as some sort of gravelly-voiced hand puppet.
	But what would be the impetus to get him to understand?
	What would that do?
	That's an excellent question.
	All I can imagine, I mean, I guess the reason that it haunts me, well, it kind of haunts us in our own ways, is that I don't want it to be a situation where that person can just say, oh yeah, they just whacked out on me and stopped taking my calls.
	It feels like if they at least just knew that it was an official thing, and maybe a couple of reasons why, or however detailed, that there'd be no mistaking That it was on them.
	Or that at least that it was like, hey, you did this.
	It was your chance to have a good relationship.
	And you were an abuser.
	Oh, okay.
	So you want him to not say things that are untrue about why the relationship ended?
	I suppose it's...
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	I think that's the main thing.
	You can criticize that approach, I'm sure, quite easily, right?
	Why does that seem like an odd perspective?
	I suppose the first thought is, you're ostracizing this person.
	Why would you really care?
	Why are you looking to them for any kind of validation?
	Well, you're assuming that the person is going to have the integrity to understand, the integrity to be honest, the self-knowledge to self-criticize and not to take retreat in lies or drugs or falsehoods and so on, right?
	And based upon the pattern of the person's behavior throughout life, that seems like sort of asking the impossible.
	Like, I want this guy to now grow a conscience.
	I want him to have integrity.
	I want him to be honest.
	I want him to reveal things that put him in a very negative light to other people around him.
	I want those other people to respect and respond positively to his honesty.
	I mean, it seems to me like you're just trying to look for an alternate dimension where he's a different person.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, it does.
	And I feel like we knew that, and I think that's why we really haven't bothered being too detailed with anyone.
	I've withdrawn from a few family members, and I know for my girlfriend, her father was the main The main one, and so that makes a lot of sense.
	Under the surface, you know that it doesn't matter that much.
	It matters what we do with ourselves.
	Look, she's had decades to connect with the guy, and it hasn't worked, and I'm incredibly sorry about that.
	I mean, I want to just pause on that and not just sort of blithely go on, but that's heartbreaking.
	I mean, it's heartbreaking.
	I mean, those of us with dysfunctional parents, we've We don't want the burden.
	We don't want the challenge.
	Just be helpful.
	Be useful.
	Be wise.
	Just don't be some combination of King Lear and Mike Tyson or whatever the hell it's going to be.
	I'm incredibly sorry that this is even something that's That's in your lives.
	I just want to say this to your girlfriend as well.
	I mean, it's wretched.
	I mean, this is not where you want to be in your life with your father, right?
	I mean, you want him to be someone who is enjoyable to spend time with, who makes you feel better, who's your port of call in a storm, who is a soft place to land, who is your Cheerleader, your supporter, and who can see keenly around the corners of life and help you avoid problems and mistakes.
	I mean, this is who you want in your life.
	And I'm very sorry that you have this brain-addled wreck of a human being who seems to have made some pretty bad decisions, to put it as nicely as possible.
	And I'm really sorry this is even in your life.
	The other thing that I would say, and I really want to say this to people as a whole, so I'm sorry to use you as a bully pulpit.
	I'll keep it brief.
	And if you love someone and people in their life are doing harm to that person or making them angry or upset or hurt or something like that, help them.
	Help them.
	Give them clarity.
	Ask them questions.
	Get the history.
	Figure out the standards of behavior.
	This is the most important thing, I think.
	Just figure out standards of behavior that you can universalize.
	Figure out standards of behavior.
	I don't want people in my life who lie to me.
	I don't want people in my life who silence me.
	I don't want people in my life who aren't curious about what I think and who I am.
	I don't want people in my life who exploit me.
	I don't want people in my life who use me.
	And I don't want people in the lives of those I love who do these things either.
	Let us throw ourselves as a shield over the hearts of those we love and help protect them from that which they often cannot see because it is not to the advantage of exploiters that we see them.
	Let us throw ourselves as a shield over the hearts of those we love and help them to see the people in their lives who are doing them harm and help them to either build the standards up and to have the conversations where the harm can be reduced or if the harm can't be reduced or only escalates, protect.
	Protect the hearts of those we love.
	We can't see our own histories very clearly.
	The histories Of others, we can see much more clearly.
	Because seeing your own history is like trying to hear a sound, like a little whine that you've heard for 30 years.
	I mean, you stopped hearing it 29.9 years ago.
	It's hard to see your own history.
	But, you know, if your girlfriend was...
	In a zoo and you knew a tiger was out, you would rush to get her to safety.
	But there are tigers of the hearts.
	There are tigers of the soul.
	There are tigers of the mind.
	There are tigers from history.
	We must work to protect each other from the exploiters and the sociopaths and the psychopaths and the abusers.
	We must work to help protect each other.
	I believe we must work to protect the abusers from their own worst natures if that is at all possible.
	If through conversation and if through provoking them into getting into therapy and getting whatever help they need to temper the ragged and silver-toothed edges of their own tempers.
	If that is possible, I think that's wonderful.
	If it is not possible, if there is no way to tame the tiger, stay safe from the tigers.
	And we must watch each other's backs about this.
	And don't fall into history that way.
	Don't fall into conformity that way.
	Don't be a salmon just swimming with the current of all that came before.
	But fight the tide, because that's how we change the world, and there's no other way to do it.
	So I just wanted to mention that.
	I think that hit the spot.
	Well good, I'll stop talking then for once and not keep going on and on.
	Yeah, right.
	Don't do it.
	Don't even dream of stop time.
	I think that's absolutely what we needed to hear, both of us, because these thoughts were lurking, and I think that helped with the clarity, and we know we need to move forward.
	I think that we've both tried to throw ourselves over the hearts of each other and be that shield, and I think that's why I She and I have a really great relationship.
	In my whole life, I've never had a relationship that was so free of manipulation.
	It's really wonderful.
	It wasn't that way at first, and I attribute it to learning a lot from you.
	I'm maybe like 700 podcasts into the whole series.
	I mean, every day, I weep every day, and I really appreciate that very much.
	Well, good.
	Listen, I'm very glad that, you know, usually when people say, I got into a relationship three years ago, I started listening to FDR two years ago, you know, what's usually the next sentence?
	Oh no, and what happened to my relationship?
	It's terrible!
	Right?
	So I'm incredibly glad that you guys were able to navigate the introduction of, maybe it was not the first time, the introduction of philosophy and all this kind of stuff into your relationship.
	Man, good for you guys.
	Congratulations.
	And so I really wanted to thank you for telling me that because, you know, it can be rough.
	And, you know, the last thing I'll say is, you know, let the trolls have each other.
	You know, let the...
	You know, people...
	Let's say that your girlfriend's father is like, well, she just stopped talking to me.
	I have no idea why.
	I didn't do anything, right?
	I mean, this is the grade.
	What was it?
	I just read that the signs of an abuser is somebody who blames everyone else for everything that happens.
	That's abusive because it puts the burden on everyone else.
	It demands that everyone else change and it demands that everybody else carry the weight of that person's dysfunction.
	That is really destructive.
	And it also puts everyone else in a constant state of anxiety because then when anything goes wrong, somebody is going to have to pay for it.
	Somebody is going to be lashed out.
	Somebody is going to be hurt and attacked for it.
	But, you see, it's not just your girlfriend's father's integrity that would be necessary for that letter.
	It would be the integrity of everyone around him.
	Right?
	So, if your father says, well, my daughter just stopped seeing me and...
	I didn't do anything and for absolutely no reason, right?
	I was a great dad, but I don't know, she just fell in with the wrong crowd, she got under the wrong influence, she listened to a podcast or something like that, right?
	I mean, anybody with any brains whatsoever would say to that person, come on, what are you saying?
	Are you saying that a 30-year close, bonded, wonderful relationship Vanished for no reason whatsoever.
	I mean, when I was dating this girl in my 20s, dating, three dates, and she said her relationship ended for no reason whatsoever and she never...
	I mean, that's just...
	The reason I stopped dating her was that it's completely unbelievable because there are two possibilities, right?
	Let me sort of tell you another little story.
	So, I met a girl in yoga class when I was in my 20s and...
	We ended up chatting and we agreed to go to a movie together.
	And I was going to go and meet some friends to go and see a movie.
	And this is when I was in therapy.
	No, I guess it was my early 30s.
	It doesn't matter.
	Anyway, so this woman, I said, you know, I said, love to see a movie with you, but this is sort of prearranged, so you're going to have to hurry to come out because we're going to, you know, meet my friends in 20 minutes and it's a 10-minute walk to the movie.
	So if you could just, you know, real quick, that would be great.
	And she said yes.
	And she came out 45 minutes later.
	And, you know, we were very late seeing the movie and all this, that, and the other, right?
	And she didn't sort of say, wow, you know, I lost track of the time, this, that, and the other.
	And I was talking about this with my therapist.
	And my therapist said, and I said, I don't know whether she remembered that she'd agreed to come out in 10 minutes and came out in 45 minutes with no apology.
	I don't know if she remembered that or had completely forgotten.
	And my therapist said...
	What does it matter?
	And that was a very important moment for me.
	Because it's when you stop trying to figure out the motives of crazy people that you begin to become truly free in this world.
	Because crazy people, almost by definition, the whole point is that you can't figure out their motives.
	I would go to my grave not knowing what makes my mother tick.
	Like I don't.
	I've lived with her for years.
	Years and years and years.
	I still have no idea.
	Why she feels certain things.
	Why she had responses to this, that, and the other.
	Why she fixated on this, that, and the other.
	I do know that as her romantic attraction waned, she became much more into conspiracy theories.
	I know that.
	But, you know, the whole point is you can't figure out the motives of crazy people because they're crazy.
	It's like Brownian motion.
	Predict it.
	You can't.
	It's Brownian.
	It's the point, right?
	And there is such a relief and such a liberation in no longer trying to figure out what makes crazy people tick.
	Why are they doing this?
	What was their motive in that?
	Why did they blow up at this?
	Why would they calm about this?
	It doesn't matter.
	You know, if you get a thousand-piece puzzle Like a jigsaw puzzle and each piece of the puzzle comes from a different jigsaw puzzle, you will never put it together.
	You will never put it together because the pieces don't fit and they're disparate and they're broken up and they don't mesh.
	I don't try to puzzle out crazy people and I haven't for years.
	I go, hey, they're crazy.
	This puzzle doesn't fit together, so I don't sit there trying to jam all the pieces together, getting frustrated.
	Doesn't fit.
	And the other thing, too, is that, you know, crazy people, they have no center.
	Everything is a manipulation.
	Everything is a manipulation.
	And therefore, any time...
	And now people who manipulate hate having rules imposed upon them because rules are the opposite of manipulation.
	Religion is manipulation.
	Science is rules.
	Fraud is manipulation.
	Math is rules.
	Culture is manipulation.
	Philosophy is rules.
	And people who want to exploit and manipulate you never want any rules, any standards, because rules and standards puts limits on their behavior.
	They can be universalized, which is the opposite of exploitation.
	And so the point with crazy people is they want ultimate freedom for themselves, which means that their personalities have nothing to do with any predictable rules.
	It is only the expediency of the moment to maximize what they get and minimize what it costs them at everybody else's expense.
	It's literally like trying to hold a cloud to try and figure out what makes a crazy person tick.
	Manipulators and exploiters and abusers are only looking to win in the moment will make up whatever bullshit rules they can make up to win in the moment.
	There is no center to the personality.
	There are no rules to the personality.
	There is no physics to the magic madness of their non-being.
	And so trying to figure out crazy people is a complete waste of time.
	It's like trying to get your physics from the Bible.
	It is like trying to get your morality from the tax code.
	That's not what it's for.
	And if I could harness the solar power, the literal solar power of everyone's mind in the world who spends so much time and energy, as I did for many years, Trying to find patterns in craziness?
	Well, Jung would have been listening to Mandela's, and we would literally be able to power the planet with all the saved psychological energy.
	Anyway, I just wanted to mention that, but congratulations.
	It sounds like you guys are doing well, and it's great, great, great to hear.
	So, if we could move on to the next caller, I would really appreciate that.
	Thank you, Stefan.
	Thank you.
	All right, Joe, you are up now?
	Good morning, Stefan.
	Hello, hello.
	Short-time listener, big-time fan.
	Well, thank you.
	The last 10 years I've been researching areas that scientists have been neglecting, so I've been pretty much blinded to the advancements of our crashing economy until recently when a lot of your shows have been opening my eyes.
	I know there's so much propaganda from the economists and the government to make investing in our country attractive, but they're snowballing us to the fact that housing prices are all inflationary and market growth is all inflationary, yet they make it sound like, oh, the market is growing.
	Meanwhile, we're crashing underneath piles of debt and And it's getting very much tougher as it goes along.
	Is there a question you wanted to ask?
	Otherwise I could go on a generic ramble, but that may not be as focused as would be helpful.
	Oh, I'm just wondering your thoughts on all this propaganda and everything that we have all been manipulated and believe that everything's rosy and meanwhile it's crashing down around us.
	Yeah, I mean, there is a genuine sort of a basic reality check that I always look at when it comes to evaluating people's views of the economy or something like that.
	So, I mean, does the person talk about unfunded liabilities?
	Do they talk about debt, deficits, and so on?
	Do they have any sense of historical patterns and so on?
	I mean, this is important.
	So, I mean, there are people like, you know, Paul Krugman.
	Sorry, he always makes me cough up a hairball.
	But Paul Krugman and so on, and they talk about the need for more stimulus spending and this.
	This is...
	I mean, people who want to control other people want to replace the market with central planning, of course.
	People who are, you know, hollow, broken-out sociopaths.
	I don't know what the hell this guy is.
	I mean, I don't know anything about his childhood or anything, but...
	But I was reading an article in the New York Times about a political operative, like one of these West Wing kind of guys, and where he came from.
	Well, he was abandoned on a church doorstep in South Korea, spent the first couple of years of his life in an orphanage which was incredibly crowded.
	He was raised by one – he was adopted by one couple.
	The dad left when he was three, and then he had a stepdad who then also left, and then he had another dad who he's now estranged from.
	I mean this is just a really pathologically disturbed upbringing.
	That doesn't mean the person can't be healthy, but it sure means that if they're in Washington, power hungry for politics, they're making up for some incredibly destructive deficiencies in their early lives.
	And they desire power over others to make up for a feeling of intense powerlessness and lack of connection.
	And they wish to dominate others because the absence of others dominated them as a child.
	All this sort of nonsense.
	There's really crazy stuff that goes on.
	And people who don't sort of start off by saying, well, you know, we have this unsustainable system, so what are we going to do?
	I mean, it's the first thing that I look for.
	And the people who I like to hear talk, you know, the Peter Schiff's, the Doug Casey's, the Woody O'Brien's, the Jeff Berwick's, the people who, like, they actually have that founding in basic mathematical reality about the degree to which The system is completely unsustainable.
	And literally to me, it's like an airplane that is out of fuel, you know, still half a mile in the air.
	An airplane that is out of fuel over the, you know, over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and people are genuinely talking about how we're going to get to Australia.
	I mean, if they don't see the meh, meh, meh, empty, empty, empty, we're out of fuel.
	We're done!
	There's no motive power to To get to land, let alone to Australia on the other side of the world.
	And this level of unreality is really chilling when you look at it.
	I mean, when you read about people who are talking about the economy and so on, and, you know, there was this big kerfuffle recently about these professors who were saying that when debt to GDP goes over 90%, you know, productivity crashes, and it turns out that they left a bunch of Numbers seem to have jigged the numbers to make the case.
	It's a big scandal and therefore now austerity is bullshit and so on, right?
	Austerity occurred at the end of the First World War.
	Government spending went from like $7 billion down to $3 billion in a matter of a couple of years.
	I mean, can you imagine that?
	A cut of like 60% or so in actual, not just in projected growth, but in actual government spending.
	That's what used to happen.
	When government was cut and that's why The economy was able to absorb all the people coming back from World War I, the millions of deaths from the Spanish Flu, and all of this mess that occurred with the Treaty of Versailles and the 6,000 billion marks or something that Germany was supposed to pay up until the 1980s.
	The economy could handle that because the government shrank and therefore there was this six month or eight month recession.
	It's pretty short relative to the Great Depression that started in 1929.
	It was just a very short, you know, sharp and corrected itself and so on.
	That's what can happen.
	But the people who, through their own psychological pathologies and deficiencies, wish to rule other people, like wish to control other people, they hate the free market because the free market puts them out of a job.
	And so my sort of first basic question when somebody starts talking about the economy is, do you know that it's not sustainable?
	And it's vastly not sustainable.
	Well, you see, national debts aren't a problem, really.
	You know, we've had debts for a long time and nothing bad has happened.
	But that's ridiculous.
	I mean, it's literally like saying, well, I've been smoking two packs a day for 20 years.
	I'm not sick yet, am I? You're insane.
	I mean, you're just insane.
	I mean, so the people who just – they can't function or process any kind of reality because they're not interested in processing reality.
	They're interested in controlling people, which means that they just make up whatever lie they want.
	And so people who want to control other people, I mean, they love having – Propeller heads, intellectuals, Nobel Prize winners, who will say the government needs to increase its spending.
	Of course they're going to be enormously popular, particularly in the left, right?
	Anyone who, right?
	All the people who say more spending, other than the military Keynesians of the Republican Party, but all the people who say that we need more government spending, they're all handing power to the government, because when the government gets to spend more, it gets to buy votes, right?
	It's how you stay in power.
	And this is a constant pattern that happens in the left, right?
	I mean, after Obama's disastrous first term, Why was he going to get re-elected?
	Was this Hopi-Change-y thing going to work again?
	Of course not.
	I mean, it was catastrophic.
	His record was even worse than Bush.
	He'd broken just about every campaign promise he made.
	And so what did they have to do?
	Well, they had to gym up the racism thing again.
	If you're against Obama, it can only be because you're a racist, which is an incredibly racist thing to say.
	You know, I can dislike someone for the content of the character, not just because of the color of their skin.
	In fact, I don't think I've ever disliked anyone.
	for the color of their skin.
	And so, you know, you had to brew up this Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman thing so that You could get everyone talking and paranoid about race again so that people wouldn't say...
	So people would end up voting back in Obama.
	So proof that they weren't racist.
	I mean, it's all nonsense.
	People use whatever they want to gain power over others and so on.
	So yeah, I agree with you that it's just a massive amount of unreality, but they're not interested in reality.
	They're interested in power.
	And to do that, they have to ignore reality.
	And the...
	The level of collusion that occurs among people in the media is well documented and all of that kind of stuff.
	So, anyway, just my sort of two cents on it.
	Right now, my wife is sort of dependent on some of the government programs because she's disabled.
	And to her way of thinking, she's entitled to all this because apparently she's paid into it.
	Meanwhile, I'm trying to explain to her, hey, that's not the way it works.
	But the government's got everybody sort of brainwashed into believing that they're the Almighty God.
	So what is your take on it?
	Sorry, your wife's right in a way in that the money was taken from her, right?
	I mean, it's like the people who say, well, I should get Social Security because I paid into the system.
	Well, no, the money was taken from you by force.
	You didn't have a choice.
	It isn't like you paid into the system like, you know, some of you put money in a piggy bank.
	I mean, it was taken from you by force.
	So from one standpoint, she's right.
	She did pay into the system, but it's more akin to saying, well, I went to a casino and I paid into the system, so now I should get a huge payoff.
	It's like, no, you gambled.
	And when the government takes your money, it's a huge gamble.
	I mean, it's a gamble that pays off for some and doesn't pay off for others.
	But the people who are getting health care in America are getting three times more out of health care than they ever paid into it, and somebody's got to pay for that.
	And there's no money, right?
	There's no money in the social security.
	There's only these treasuries, these IOUs, right?
	There's only debt.
	There's no money in the social security system at all.
	So the money is, you know, it's been stolen.
	It's been spent.
	It's been used to bribe, or as Harry Brown used to say, it was used to prop up the Russian ruble 20 years ago for three hours so that somebody could make a pretty penny.
	But there's no money left.
	It doesn't go into a lockbox.
	It goes into the government's hands.
	I mean, it's just crazy.
	I mean, if you leave your car, you know, you leave your Lexus in a ghetto, and you come back and it's been stripped.
	I mean, yeah, the people who took it were wrong, but...
	I mean, you left your Lexus in a ghetto, for God's sake.
	So, I mean, you give your money to the government.
	And they took it by force and so on, right?
	I get that.
	And I don't blame the people who fought against the system and said this is wrong.
	Because, you know, you fight against the system, they still have all the guns that take your money at source.
	You can't get it back.
	But I think that we at least need the basic honesty to say that the fact that you paid into the system gives you no right.
	To take out of the system.
	You can pay into a Ponzi scheme, that doesn't mean that it's right for you to get the money out.
	I think that's just the basic honesty.
	And she can still take the money, because they did take her money and so on, but I think we just need that basic honesty to say that it's not there, it's not real.
	And it is taken from others.
	Thank you very much, Stefan.
	You're very welcome.
	And I'm sorry to hear about your wife.
	I hope that she is in a situation where she can recover.
	Not really.
	But we're living with it.
	Okay.
	Well, good for you.
	Take care.
	Yeah, I hope, I mean, I'm not sort of trying to provoke guilt in her for, you know, but this is the system.
	I think we need to at least be honest about, you know, that it's not.
	There's none of the money is left that was paid in.
	It's all gone and it's been replaced by debt.
	She can take the money out, but anyway, it's just not there from when she paid it in.
	All right, Steve, you're up next.
	Alright, let us continue with the Sunday Show Sausage Fest.
	Steve, go for it.
	Hello.
	I'd like to talk about sensible solutions to ending the Federal Reserve.
	I think going out and protesting and asking for legislation is a waste of time and it's degrading to anyone who would partake.
	You're basically asking to be ruled all over again.
	Instead, I think educating people about alternatives to Federal Reserve notes and any central bank-issued currency is probably the more feasible way to create actual change in the world.
	Most people don't know the value of precious metals, and they don't know about Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other virtual currency exchanges.
	They don't know about alternate currency cards, which actually contain precious metals in them.
	They don't know about local currencies, like the Ithaca Hours, the Berkshares, Mountain Hours in Vermont.
	I was just wondering what you would think would be an effective way to educate people about these sort of things through social media and Organizing events.
	I recently organized an event to rally at the Federal Reserve to have a sort of volunteerist-oriented protest.
	I can see a state-oriented protest as people with signs saying, make a law, repeal a law, or spend everyone's money.
	But a volunteerist-oriented protest would be more like, this is the problem, here's the solution, invest in the solution.
	Do you think it's important for voluntarists to have rallies and do it in their own unique, unstatist way so that we can help defeat the state by outmoding it and making it obsolete with better alternatives?
	Well, I'm fine with alternative currencies.
	I'm holding on to Bitcoins even though they're dipping just because I try to make my investment decisions based upon the best philosophical principles that I can think of.
	And I think that Bitcoin and Litecoin and other things are great just because they are relatively free market solutions to the complex problems of currency and so on.
	So I'm holding on to them.
	I think that in the long run they're going to be of great value.
	And so I think these things are wonderful.
	I don't think things like Bitcoin and so on are going to take down the state.
	I don't think that's going to occur.
	I think for people who want to barter and so on, it's a good medium and a good way of being able to do that.
	And I do think that they will increase in value and I'm certainly holding on to them.
	And I don't plan on selling at any time, but I do at any time in the sort of near to medium future.
	But I don't think that alternate currencies are going to do it.
	Corporations are so embedded in the state.
	They're so dependent upon the state.
	They use the state for so much of their pseudo-competitive advantage over the young, the nimble, the poor, the hardworking, and so on.
	The great challenge of becoming rich is that you become less competitive.
	This is supposed to be the natural cycle of the free market.
	The rags to riches to rags in three generations.
	So what happens is you come up with some great idea, you make a You know, a couple million dollars, maybe a couple billion dollars or whatever, right?
	And then you buy these big-ass houses and your expenses go way up and your work ethic if your children goes down and so on, right?
	I mean, and then you can't compete with the next brilliant guy who's got a great idea and who makes money and takes away your market share and does all these kinds of things.
	There's supposed to be this natural cycle.
	And in the absence of the state, the fluidity of the classes...
	Would be far greater.
	I mean, it'd be like a washing machine.
	Round and round, up and down, round and round, up and down.
	But what happens, of course, is that people who become wealthy immediately glom onto the state and start using the state to keep the poor from competing with them.
	They really have to keep the poor from competing with them.
	The poor have lower expenses, so they can be paid a lot less, which renders them to be more competitive.
	They have greater ambition.
	Why?
	Because they're poor, right?
	I mean, so they have a really great ambition to not be poor.
	So they're incredibly hardworking, and they have very low expenses, and they have time, and they don't have to meet with their accountants very often.
	And so the best thing for the poor is a free market because you have an automatic advantage in the free market just by being poor.
	You have disadvantages too, right?
	Less access to capital and so on, but those can actually be advantages as well because you don't have to dilute your ownership in whatever enterprise you're building and so on.
	So the poor have a huge advantage if they want it in the free market and the rich have a huge disadvantage in that they They work less and they need more money for what they work.
	So from that standpoint, the state is just terrible for hardening class divisions.
	And this is not a theory.
	I mean, you can see this very much borne out, in fact, in that as the state has gotten bigger, more and more wealth has accumulated.
	To the top 1% or the top 5% of people, right?
	Let me just see if I can look this up.
	I just read this the other day, but I don't want to get these numbers wrong.
	It's increased over the past few presidents in the United States.
	And this is really important that So much more money accumulates.
	So let's see here.
	So the top 1% wealthiest U.S. households own 32.7% of the total U.S. household wealth.
	The top 5% hold well over half of all the household wealth.
	The bottom 90% hold only 30% of total household wealth.
	And this is increasing.
	This is increasing over time.
	And this is a huge problem.
	The portion of US households reaching the Million Dollar Club grew from a mere 1% in 1965 to an estimated 9% as of year-end 2005.
	The US population grew by over 100 million from 194 million to 296 from 1965 to 2005 then.
	The number of family members living in a household with a net worth of more than a quarter million increased nearly tenfold from about 11.6 million in 1965 to nearly 100 million today.
	What's happening is the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is stagnating at best.
	And when people say the middle class is stagnating, they're failing to understand that the middle class is losing money because it's like saying, well, I'm stagnating but I'm going heavily into debt.
	Well, no, that actually means I'm falling behind.
	So the huge problem is that when there's a government, the rich will use the power of the state to reverse Their historical disadvantage in the free market, right?
	Their higher costs and lower drive, lower ambition, lower work ethic.
	They will use the state to continue to transfer wealth to them even though they should be turning over in the spin cycle of the free market and going back down relatively quickly after they go up.
	Of course, everybody who gets to the top wants to stay at the top, but it's really hard to do that, right?
	I mean...
	It's not particularly relevant, but Kenya is very big on running, right?
	They do very well in the running games.
	Somebody said, well, how do we stop Kenyan dominance in running?
	It's like, well, we need to get them some school buses, right?
	Because the kids there all have to run to get to school.
	Kids always wake up late, they're always late for school, and they run to get to school.
	And after 10 years of running from 5 to 15, you're pretty good at running, right?
	But if you subsidize and get them some school buses, then they'll sit there and, you know, pick on the pimply kids instead and won't get any running done.
	So their poverty is their success.
	This is very often the case in the free market.
	I mean, because I came from a dirt poor family background.
	Like, eviction notices, like, couldn't rustle up seven bucks for a swim club, like, no money at all kind of situation.
	Yeah, the rare times where we'd actually have some pop in the house and I'd have friends over.
	I'd have to put like nine ice cubes in everybody's glass to make one small bottle of pop go to three people and then would be roundly mocked by everyone for being cheap.
	Well, I'm not cheap.
	I had to eat food that was moldy sometimes just because I was so hungry.
	I mean, it was poor.
	And so when I got a chance to get involved in the business world and make some money, oh my God, I was like a rocket.
	There was no amount of work.
	That I wouldn't do.
	I was so excited and grateful.
	Thrilled!
	Took nothing for granted.
	Worked like a demon on fire.
	But, of course, the state is what people use to keep the poor down.
	Let's give them shitty schools.
	Let's give them welfare.
	Let's give them games.
	And let's raise the minimum wage.
	And let's...
	Make sure that we create as many inducements to single parenthood as possible, because that will keep the poor from competing with us.
	I'm not saying it's all a conscious plan, it's just the way that these things play out.
	So, yeah, I'm a big fan of keeping the free market in place, but the government...
	The corporations are so heavily embedded in the government that I don't think they're really going to have the option to switch to alternative currencies.
	They're going to side with the government to crush alternative currencies because corporations have become an extension of the state.
	It's fascistic, fundamentally.
	And so the major economic activity has become so corrupted by state power that they will fight against the free market and have been for many years.
	If you believe that corporate power holds control of government and you don't believe an alternative currency will render obsolete the debt creation, wealth-stealing central bank scheme, then do you agree with the libertarian approach to taming government and corporatism through legislation?
	Oh, no.
	We bought that.
	No, not at all.
	And I'm just organizing a rally right now called Rally at the Fed Banks.
	I'm trying to show people a different way of protesting that doesn't involve just holding a sign and begging and growling to your government.
	Sorry, let me just mention too, I think education is a great thing.
	I think educating people about the nature of fiat currency and inflation and the Federal Reserve and the The ultimate corruption that comes from being able to type whatever you want into your own bank account, I think educating people about that stuff is very important.
	It's very important.
	But the only thing that we need to defeat the state is truth.
	I mean, I know that sounds ridiculous and simple, but the reason that people can't speak honestly about the state is because the state is so morally abhorrent in its structure and its violence.
	That we have to create all these euphemisms.
	You know, it's the same thing you always hear with people with spanking, right?
	Spanking has all these terrible...
	Well, spanking, giving a little light swat on the butt is different from beating a child.
	It's like giving a child a little light swat on the butt is not spanking.
	Spanking is a correctional behavior modification assault which causes pain and humiliation because it has to cause pain and humiliation in order to change behavior, right?
	I mean, I will pat my wife on the butt from time to time.
	That is not the same as me hauling off and spanking her and leaving red marks and shaming and painting and humiliating her, which is impossible to imagine, of course.
	So people, they can't speak honestly about the evils that they do.
	And all that we need to defeat the state, which is not inconsiderable, is the truth.
	It's a monopoly of violence.
	It's coercion.
	It reserves for itself the moral right to do that which it imprisons everyone else for.
	It is hypocrisy incarnate.
	It is a living monstrous Balrog-style institution of hell on earth which will destroy civilization and let us never ever confuse society with the state.
	Let us never ever confuse civilization with the government.
	These two are absolutely opposite forces.
	And so the question is how can we possibly Raise or have human beings in the world who can handle even a modicum of truth.
	It's a hard question.
	People are like, they recoil from the truth.
	The truth is a tiger to the vast majority of human beings.
	Bringing somebody into a philosophical conversation is like tying them to an anchor and throwing them into a shark tank.
	I mean, it's not even an allergy.
	It is a physical jump out of your skin recoiling from the truth.
	And why is it that they recoil from the truth?
	Because the truth would end them psychologically.
	Because they have built their personality so much on lies, or so many lies have been inflicted on them, that the truth ends them psychologically.
	It is a sort of mini-death that people will avoid.
	And it literally feels like a death.
	It feels like You know, if you've ever gone through one of those massive changes in your life where you realize that you're living in a matrix, well, it feels like you're dying, which is why Keanu Reeves has this rebirth thing when it comes out of this pod, right?
	Because it feels like you're dying, and the born-again thing is, you know, when we're born again in the truth.
	Now, how do we get people able to handle the truth?
	Right now, we're trying to run 10,000 volts through a piece of string.
	Well, all it does is burst into flames, right?
	So how is it that we can make people strong enough to handle the truth?
	Because once they accept the truth, the system will change immediately.
	Well, we have to raise them with fewer lies.
	Because as long as people's personalities are built on lies, they will be ferociously averse to the truth.
	And they will make up any more lies that they want to stay away from the truth, to keep the truth at bay.
	And this is why I believe education is important, but the most important education is around child raising.
	Stop lying to your children, and they will be able to handle the truth about the state.
	Once they can handle the truth about the state, there will be no state.
	Well, I appreciate your comments.
	My three-year-old definitely knows that Santa Claus is bullshit, and so is the state.
	I think you're right on that point, that it's going to take the next generation to raise the next generation in the appropriate way, and we need We need a new mindset in all people that doesn't have this violence and force at the center of its theory.
	You're doing a lot of good work and I appreciate it.
	Thanks.
	I can't wait to finish the UPB. I'm about halfway through reading it right now.
	It's some very interesting and enlightening things.
	Oh yeah, thanks.
	I appreciate that and congratulations on being a dad and I'm sure your son is incredibly lucky to have you.
	Good for you.
	And I appreciate the work you're doing to educate people.
	I think it is important to educate people.
	You know, whatever chips away at the matrix is a good thing.
	You know, whatever chips away at people's...
	Chipping away at cataracts is a pretty gross metaphor.
	Whatever helps clear up people's cataracts is a good thing.
	Whatever can let a chink of light into the tunnel is something that can draw people to it if that's where they want to go.
	So congratulations.
	And if there's anything I can do to help you publicize your event, just email me, operations at freedomainradio.com, talk to Mike, and we'll see if we can get some publicity out.
	For you, because I certainly do want people to become more aware of...
	But, you know, I mean, the government's not going to have much trouble with Bitcoin.
	They'll just say it's illegal, or whatever it is, if at some point they want to.
	And most people won't know what that means.
	They'll just stay away from it.
	They don't know that it can't be tracked.
	Anyway, but all kinds of nonsense.
	But I do really applaud you for the work that you're doing to educate people, and I think it is a good thing, whatever draws people...
	Out of the matrix in whatever way possible is great.
	So good for you for doing that.
	I also wanted to mention that I'm actually going to start releasing chunks of my parenting book.
	I think for gold...
	Plus donators, so there's $20 a month or more, or people who've donated, I think, $150 or more.
	They can get chunks of the book as it comes out.
	I'm certainly looking forward to feedback.
	I'd like it to be a little bit more collaborative, simply because I can't claim in any way, shape, or form to have the final say on parenting in any way.
	But lots of other parents out there would have great solutions to problems I've never experienced or problems that I've experienced and dealt with less optimally than I could.
	So if you are a gold donator to Freedomain Radio, look for the email with the book as it's coming along.
	I look forward to getting your feedback on it as we're moving forward through that.
	So thank you very much for your comments.
	And we will move to the next caller.
	Thank you.
	Appreciate it.
	All right, Mia, you're up next.
	Oh?
	Mia?
	Oh, hello!
	Ah!
	We've got one!
	I'll try to be nice.
	How's it going?
	Oh, I'm fine.
	I was just wanting to speak about Sudbury schools.
	Oh, please do.
	Oh, yeah.
	In particular, I don't know if you've heard about a Sudbury school in the Netherlands that the parents are being threatened with legal action.
	I've heard that, yeah.
	Can you tell me a little more about that?
	Oh, well, basically, the authorities in their wisdom have decided that it's not a proper school.
	And because of that, they're threatening their parents with legal action.
	Wow.
	Now, what sort of legal action?
	Is it criminal?
	Is it civil?
	I mean, what are they saying?
	Civil legal action.
	Ugh.
	Yeah, homeschooling is illegal in the Netherlands, so these children will probably be forced into mainstream school.
	Oh, terrible.
	Yeah, so I actually started a petition to stop the legal action, and quite a few people have signed it.
	I've got a little under 700 signatures so far.
	Wow, that's quite something.
	Now, it's private schooling.
	The private schooling is legal there too.
	It is legal, right?
	Is it just that this school is not considered to be accredited?
	Is that right?
	I think that's probably what the case is.
	But I think, to be honest, I think it's because they don't follow, like, the more traditional methods of schooling, because there's much more sort of...
	I mean, to be honest, I think the fact they don't class it as what would be called a proper school is a compliment, in a way, because they're sort of more focused on the child.
	Right.
	Now, I just saw something on Facebook here.
	It says, Stop Legal Action Against Parents of Subbury School Students.
	Is that yours at all or is that someone else's?
	That's mine.
	I'm just curious under what rules they are.
	Oh, here's the petition I think I found.
	It's at advice.org.
	Yes, I think that's it.
	Yeah, this is yours, Mia.
	Yeah, this is yours.
	Okay, well, we'll put this on the video and we'll put this on the podcast if you can remember Mike as well.
	Yeah, I'm curious.
	I haven't been able to find it here, but I haven't seen what kind of legal action.
	I mean, whether it would be considered abusive or whether they would be criminal, whether it would be, you know, you might lose your kids or, you know, that kind of stuff.
	I'm not sure what...
	Yeah, I think it's civil action and sort of, I think they'd probably ensure that these children have to go to mainstream schools, which is not good.
	I've heard that...
	They're applying to the European Court of Human Rights, but that might not be successful.
	I think it's something like five or less than five percent of cases are ever successful.
	Right.
	And it's an issue that I feel very strongly about because I had a very abusive school life as a child.
	I went to one of those private schools in the north of England.
	Ah, I was in the west of England.
	Did you get caned as well?
	I didn't get caned, but I did used to get hit, kicked, force-fed, all that sort of thing.
	I'm so sorry.
	Gosh, how terrible.
	Yeah, so I'm very keen to ensure that other children don't go through that.
	And also, not just the corporal punishment, but also things like It's just sort of a very abusive nature.
	I mean, you don't have to hit a child to abuse them or to misdead them.
	I mean, it's a very coercive environment and a very abusive...
	And also, a lot of schools don't listen to what...
	What it is the children need and the children are interested in, which is why schools like this are good in that they focus on what the child's interests are.
	Well, I appreciate you doing this, and if you get the state to back off, I suppose, it's worth doing a sign there.
	Is there anything else that you wanted to mention or ask about?
	And we'll certainly do what we can to help publicize the petition.
	No, not that I can think of, but I very much appreciate you agreeing to publicise the petition and I hope it'll be of interest to listeners as well.
	Good.
	Well, I hope so.
	I hope so, too.
	And keep me posted, if you can, about how it goes.
	And certainly my heart goes out to the parents who are trying to keep their kids out of these brain-deadening status institutions.
	And it is tough.
	I mean, homeschooling or unschooling is tough and a lot of places to try and get to work.
	So I hope this helps at least keep the beasts back from the kids a little bit.
	He's hoping.
	He's hoping.
	Thank you so much for your call, Mia.
	I appreciate it.
	Alright, we got time for another caller.
	Maybe even more than one.
	Let us see.
	Alright, Alex, you're up next.
	Go ahead.
	Where should I start?
	Well, I mean, since I started doing the research and kind of bumped into your YouTube feed, I had some pretty bad family problems, mostly from my father's side.
	We just went on a trip.
	Some of the things that happened, like yelling and all that on the plane, you know, I kind of Try to understand what has been happening since I've kind of been more apprehensive with my father about yelling at me or at my brother and why he's doing it.
	I'm really trying to figure out how to solve this.
	So for the past couple of months, I've been trying to find ways to get out of the house because we actually live in America.
	We've moved there, I'd say, 12 years.
	I'm not even sure if the relationship was that good before between my parents, between my mom and my dad, but my dad moved first to America about 12 years ago, and then we moved there 11 years ago.
	From there on, I mean, there's just been yelling and pretty much all the nasty things that I've done through your podcast and stuff, through the philosophy that were pretty much negative against me growing up, you know?
	I'm 21 now and I'm trying to figure out how to get out of the household.
	That's one of my main motivations right now.
	Sorry to interrupt, but what's the yelling about?
	Just basic examples from even today.
	Today was mostly towards my brother, but things off the top of my head like my room not being clean or I mean, the yelling is pretty much just...
	They're pointed at either whatever is thought to be the bad behavior in me, like not eating on time or not eating vegetables or, you know, just...
	I mean, I don't know how to explain it.
	Not eating vegetables?
	You're 21, right?
	Oh, no, no.
	Okay, so this is happening to my brother now.
	This used to happen to me when I was younger.
	Oh, okay, okay.
	I mean, I'm still being apprehended by that.
	I mean, I'm not being apprehended.
	I'm being asked more politely.
	I think it's probably because of, you know, age.
	As you said in your podcast, you know, with age, there becomes the disparity of power is a little less.
	But it's pretty much anything, like even having the computer on when I'm Going downstairs, we live in a two-level house, and if I go downstairs and have computers on, I'll probably get yelled about that, or going out with friends and everything like that.
	I've already looked at this, and obviously I figured out that it was...
	His basic argument is that if you're living here and using my money, you should pretty much obey the rules that are set up.
	Let me just make a suggestion.
	I don't know, obviously, whether you should stay home or not.
	That's not my place to say.
	But sometimes, giving people a new perspective can really shock them into something that's quite interesting.
	So...
	Let me give you a tiny...
	Really, I will promise.
	Let me give you a tiny speech that might be helpful.
	Just in terms of breaking people's habits.
	Because people...
	You know, the old saying, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
	If you've got just one way of doing things, that's all you do.
	It's like, well, if there's a problem, I yell at someone until they do what I want.
	Well, then that's all you end up doing, right?
	But what you could say is something like this.
	Say, look, I'm 21 years old.
	You've been trying the yelling thing.
	For 21 years, right?
	You can say to your mom and dad.
	Or your dad.
	So you've been trying the yelling thing for 21 years.
	Now clearly it's not working that well, right?
	Because you have to keep yelling.
	I mean the whole point of...
	Of trying to modify someone's behavior is you should stop having to do it after a while, right?
	If you have to keep chasing me around and yelling at me whenever I do something you don't like, then it doesn't ever have an end, right?
	You never get free of yelling at me.
	I mean, I said, I'm sure you don't want to yell at me all day, and I don't want to be yelled at all day.
	Now, you are the parent, right?
	So you defined the yelling thing.
	You made this choice, or maybe it was just a habit or something like that, but you basically said, well, the way that I'm going to deal with My kids, when they don't do what I want, is I'm going to yell at them, right?
	Now, that's not the only way to do it, and there's lots of people who say that's not the best way to do it, but wouldn't it be great if we could have a family life which didn't involve all this yelling?
	Like, wouldn't that just be fantastic?
	Now, I'm interested in exploring that.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Do you mind if I just interrupt really quick?
	No, no.
	This is a problem that I've been having because the yelling thing has been a part for such a long time and the problem pretty much is that the yelling has sort of diminished for me at least but actually on this trip that I said we're having I've mentioned this that I told them as in from the book Real Time Relationships that you're scaring me when you're yelling at me and That's exactly what I said and he said,
	this is my tone of voice and you shouldn't worry about how my tone of voice is.
	Wait, sorry, let me just say, your father said, sorry, you said you scare me when you yell at me and your father said you shouldn't worry about my tone of voice?
	Yes.
	But, I'm sorry, I don't quite understand.
	Isn't yelling supposed to be negative for you?
	Well, yes.
	So, if he's saying, I'm going to do something negative to you called yelling, but you shouldn't focus on the fact that it's negative, that seems like a contradiction, doesn't it?
	No, I fully understand this.
	To be honest, I do not know what to do in this situation because, I mean, I say that I'm scared of him yelling and then it keeps happening.
	Or at least it diminishes if my mom intervenes or something.
	Sorry to interrupt, but with this kind of conflict, my belief is, it's just my amateur opinion, but you can't solve conflicts in the moment.
	I have to keep remembering this with my daughter.
	You can't solve conflicts in the moment.
	All you can do is prevent them.
	So once you're being yelled at, it's really, really tough to turn that around.
	So what you have to do, in my opinion, is you sit down when you're both calm, right?
	And say, I know the yelling thing is diminished, but I don't like it.
	I don't like being around it.
	I don't like it with my younger brother.
	Can we not try and find a way that we can all get what we want, but without the yelling?
	Because it's intimidating, right?
	You're the dad.
	You're bigger.
	You've got this historical power relationship.
	It's intimidating.
	And it's supposed to be, right?
	It's supposed to be something that is unpleasant for someone.
	It's a verbal form of spanking, right?
	So yelling is scary.
	It's intimidating.
	And, you know, let's at least consider the possibility.
	And it doesn't work that well because we still have a lot of conflicts, right?
	So it hasn't solved the problem.
	It's like hitting a puppy with a stick, you know?
	It may get them to change their behavior, but it's not exactly warming the heart of the relationship, right?
	And so I think that you...
	What happens so often in these kinds of conflict-based relationships, if that's what it is, is when you're not having conflict, you don't want to provoke conflict because the conflict is unpleasant.
	And so when you're not having conflict, you don't try and solve the next conflict ahead of time because you can't have a reasonable discussion about it.
	And so you just kind of hang out hoping that nothing's going to happen, then it always does, right?
	But if you can sit down with your dad and say, listen, I don't like the yelling thing.
	I never did.
	I don't think it works really well.
	I think there are other options or other ways that we can work on things.
	And I don't think that you want me To turn the computer off just because you're going to yell at me.
	I think you want me to turn the computer off for other reasons.
	So let's try and figure out.
	Because I don't like being yelled at, so I'm going to have resistance to doing things just because someone's yelling at me.
	So let's try and find some other way that we can figure out how to have a happier and better time living together other than the yelling.
	Because I'm an adult, you're an adult.
	You know, my youngest brother is growing up, at some point he's going to be an adult, so let's try and find a way that we can have conflicts which is inevitable in all relationships, even with ourselves.
	We're going to have conflicts, but we'll find other ways to resolve them rather than just yelling, because that doesn't feel like the right thing to do as we get older.
	I don't think it ever was the right thing to do, but let's just say it was.
	It's certainly not, I think, the best way.
	And that way, you can at least have a conversation before or when you're not already in a situation of conflict.
	Does that make sense?
	Oh yeah, it totally makes sense.
	I'm still having a little bit of a doubt since my habits have changed.
	I mean, I'm not sure because of the yelling, but like for example, the computer problem.
	I mean, I always try to turn it off because I understand why I shouldn't have the computer on if I'm like downstairs or if I leave the room or something and take it too long.
	It's a choice that I make gladly because I don't really want to have the computer on and it does nothing.
	And this has been with a lot of other choices as well.
	I do see where you're coming from with the idea because I can't remember right now any times where I have spent any of this time talking when My father is calm, but that's the thing.
	Because these things happen so often, so often either to my mother or to me or to my brother, I don't know, I just feel like I'm kind of locked into this mode, trying to figure out what's happening, but not actually dealing with it.
	I mean, I'm trying to deal with it.
	That's the problem because the frequency of these things I mean, I'm not sure, maybe I'm just over-exaggerating, but I think if it happened a couple of times during the day, for example, my dad was, today was, as I said, we're on a trip, and my parents are staying in the house, and it was nice outside, and my father was being, I mean, quite pushy about my brother taking his shirt off to go in the sun because I think that's a good thing.
	Yeah, sorry.
	I think that we may be getting into a bit too much detail here.
	Let me just mention something.
	A good play to read, it's obviously a bit darker than your family situation, is by Eugene O'Neill called The Long Day's Journey Into Night.
	It's about his childhood, and it's a brutal play.
	It's very powerful.
	It's one of the masterpieces of 20th century drama.
	He actually wrote it and refused to have it staged until at least 10 years after he was dead.
	He'd written such a magnificent play, but he couldn't bear to see it on stage.
	And it's one of the things that – I mean, there's a lot in the play that is harrowing and terrifying and powerful.
	But one of the things that struck me when I did scene studies from it as an actor was...
	The young man is talking to his father and his father is constantly obsessed about turning the lights off, you know, because the lights are on and cost money and this, that, and the other.
	Now, I get that.
	I mean, when I was a kid growing up, you know, we had little coins we had to put in the heater.
	to get heat and we didn't have a lot of these coins because as I mentioned we were kind of broke and so we just you know we'd space them out a little bit so that we wouldn't get too cold and you know you really do get a sense that power costs money when you're feeding coins in and you're freezing your ass off because you don't have enough but the son keeps saying to the dad he said dad I've shown you the math it costs pennies it's nothing and his dad was a famous actor at this point and was making lots of money Just
	like Eugene O'Neill's father in a play that had consumed his, it was a popular play, sort of had consumed his artistic ambitions.
	He'd done a great Hamlet.
	He ended up doing this Three Musketeers style play.
	So his dad had a lot of money.
	But we're still knowingly obsessed with the lights have to be turned off.
	And his son says, look, it's like.0001% of your annual income, even if we had all the lights on all the time.
	And I really got a strong sense, and I feel this even now when I'm thinking about it, about the frustration with non-empirical parental stuff.
	In other words, when your parents have unprocessed stuff from their childhood, And you get this broken record thing where it's all just about anxiety management and repetition.
	It's incredibly frustrating because you want your parents to see reason, right?
	And you want your parents to be empirical because that's what they ask you to do.
	They ask you to be reasonable and to be empirical and so on.
	And I get, like, the energy thing, I still have this thing.
	It's like, oh, I've got to put my computer to sleep before I go to bed at night because, you know, why would it want to run all night?
	And it's not much money.
	So I kept bugging my wife to, she's got an iPod touch, right?
	Oh, you know, don't leave it plugged in overnight.
	I mean, it's just wasting power.
	Like, oh my God, it's insane, right?
	And then I looked up and it's like, I don't know, 50 cents or a buck a year, even if you left it plugged.
	Like, the amount of time I was spending talking to my wife about this ridiculous power consumption relative to how much it cost us was insane.
	Like, a computer is like 20, 25 bucks a year, even if you left it on all the time.
	I mean, again, I'm not saying that's unimportant and, you know, whatever it is, but we have this kind of energy conservation thing going on, and that's different than it was in Eugene O'Neill's time.
	It was a bit more about price, a little bit less about environmentalism and so on, right?
	For me, it's a huge relief.
	Like, I don't care.
	Leave it plugged in.
	Ah, who cares, right?
	I'm not going to go down there, you know, oh, I've got to unplug the phone.
	It's been plugged in for three hours and it's fully charged.
	We must unplug it.
	It's like, oh, forget it.
	Forget it, right?
	Even the phone tells you my phone.
	Oh, don't forget to unplug your charger.
	So, and the reason I'm talking about all of this is you can show your dad the math.
	The computer's on, you know.
	Like, we're fighting about, even if I turn the computer off half the time, And let's say I want to leave it on all the time, which I don't.
	Let's say I turn it off half the time.
	We're talking about $10 a year.
	Now, somebody said, here's $10, Dad.
	Now you don't have to yell at me about the computer.
	I know it's not about that.
	I mean, I get that energy is pollution and so on, right?
	But let's keep things in perspective.
	We're talking about $10 a year.
	Now, for $10 a year, wouldn't it be nicer to not yell at each other?
	And also, if you don't yell at me, I'm more likely to turn...
	Because I'm not gonna resist it because I'm being yelled at, right?
	And so, when it comes to these kinds of conflicts, I think it's really important to understand what's really being fought about.
	What's really being fought about is not ten dollars a year.
	It's not, you know, pennies for the light in the actor's home in a long day's journey into night.
	It's, you know, because the whole issue with the The family in a long day's journey into night is that the mom is a morphine addict, which is a little bit more important to the family's happiness than whether the porch light is on for an extra hour or not, right?
	You see, people get focused on these little stupid things as a way of avoiding the big important things, right?
	If your dad's yelling at people a lot, that's a little bit more important than whether you're saving 10 bucks a year in computer electricity, right?
	Right.
	And, I mean, I fully understand that this is the problem.
	It's just solving it...
	You can't solve it.
	No, you can't...
	No, listen, listen.
	You can't solve it.
	As long as your dad thinks it's about the computer power, you can't solve it.
	Right?
	I mean, the most fundamental thing about self-knowledge is to understand the degree to which emotional upset is almost never about the cover story.
	This is, you know, the most important thing I probably got to say today, maybe even this month.
	Emotional upset is almost never, ever, ever about the cover story.
	The cover story is invented to avoid the real issues that are going on.
	Right?
	So the real issue is that your dad sounds like a bit of a bully, right?
	He's yelling at people and all this kind of stuff, right?
	And he says it's about the power or it's about the vegetables or it's, you know, about this, that, and the other.
	Now, you really can't make progress with people when it comes to solving conflicts if you think it's about the cover story or if they think it's about the cover story, if they genuinely think that it's only about the vegetables, right?
	Right.
	So, I mean, this doesn't take a lot of rational understanding, right?
	And the reason I say that is that if the parent says, well, I'm interested in the vegetables because I want you to be healthy, right?
	Then you can say, well, don't you realize that yelling at me is really stressful and that's bad for my health?
	So if you were really into my health, you wouldn't be yelling at me.
	You would find other ways to get me to eat my vegetables, right?
	Right.
	Because if you're really into my health, then yelling at me is stressful and unpleasant and difficult and I can't sleep and I get upset and my cortisol levels go high and, you know, all this kind of stuff, right?
	It's bad for me to have this fight-or-flight mechanism kicking in all the time, right?
	So, the cover story called, you need to eat your vegetables because I'm really concerned about your health, so I'm going to yell at you, that cover story takes about 90 seconds to dismantle, right?
	Does that make sense?
	No, it totally makes sense.
	You were saying with the vegetables thing, how I would apply it.
	I would apply it very pragmatically.
	Would you mind if I share an example that happened on this trip?
	I'm just trying to figure out what would be the best approach to even go with this.
	Okay, so the situation was about the sunburn, right?
	Afterwards, I turned it into pretty much telling my dad that, you know, It's like, just leave my brother alone.
	And then he switched to me, like, take your shirt off, you know.
	And I already had a little bit of sunburn.
	I was like, I'm done for the day.
	You know, I stayed four hours in the sun.
	It pretty much just escalated to him repeatedly telling me to do that.
	No, no.
	Say, okay, listen.
	This would be my suggestion.
	I think I understand it.
	This would be my suggestion.
	And it's a fundamental thing about parenting.
	Or really, like any relationships, right?
	So...
	I would say to him, Dad, do you want me to obey you because I'm scared of you?
	Or because I'm afraid of negative consequences?
	Or do you want me to do the right thing because I understand what needs to be done and why?
	My belief is that a parent's job is not to get children to do stuff.
	But rather to have the children understand why things need to be done.
	Right?
	I mean, you know, when I was a kid, my mom would like, oh, you got to brush your teeth.
	And she'd like smell my mouth.
	Oh, you didn't brush your teeth.
	You didn't brush it long enough, right?
	And so there was this cat and mouse game where I didn't want to brush my teeth because I was being bullied into brushing my teeth, right?
	And then I realized, as I mentioned before in the show, like I kind of got, oh, okay, so if I don't brush my teeth, I'm the one who has to go get them drilled, right?
	I'm going to get cavities and, you know, all that kind of shit, right?
	I'm the one who gets needles in my gums and all that ugly stuff, right?
	And so I internalized that and since then I've had really good oral hygiene and my teeth are doing great.
	I still have my wisdom teeth.
	Got one in a thousand people over 40 with their wisdom teeth, right?
	And so I've, you know, because I got it.
	I internalized it and that's really what parents are supposed to be doing.
	They're supposed to be getting children to internalize the values, not obey the behavior.
	Right now, your dad, it sounds like he's kind of stuck in this paradigm of, well, I've got to get them to do stuff.
	And as Dana Martin has said, it's pretty exhausting spending your whole day running around trying to control other people.
	It's tiring.
	You've got to constantly be on your guard.
	You're constantly irritated, constantly annoyed, constantly snapping at people.
	You're just controlling them, trying to control them all the time.
	That's not good parenting.
	That is not good parenting.
	It is not good parenting to be...
	Snarling at your kids, especially you're 21.
	You should have internalized these values by now, but you spent your whole time dodging your dad's verbal aggression.
	Rather than internalizing the values, you're just fighting with the yelling.
	I don't, I mean, I'm just going to, one second, I think a lot of the things that he's told me, like, with the computer stuff, from early on I have pretty much just, like, with the vegetables, I think I've internalized a lot of those things on my own just by doing the research and kind of understanding those consequences and everything.
	But you've done that, no, sorry, but that's like saying that, but you've done that despite what your dad's been doing, right?
	Like, I figured out how to take care of my teeth despite what my mom was doing.
	But the point is that it's still not good parenting to be snapping into children and you said he was still yelling at you about the computer and the power and all that kind of stuff.
	So yeah, I mean you can appeal to his – what did they say?
	Appeal to his greed and you can say, look, you don't want to be spending your whole day yelling at people.
	You don't want to spend your whole day like ordering me – To not be at the beach but not be able to go to the hotel.
	That's not fun.
	That's not how we want to be spending time together as a family.
	Wouldn't it be more fun if you could let go of this?
	I mean, I'm 21.
	Wouldn't it be fun if you could just let go of this control now?
	And if I make mistakes, I make mistakes.
	But what parents often do, particularly dysfunctional parents, is they paint a picture and then they say that the picture is somehow wrong.
	You know, it's a bad picture, something like that.
	It's like, well, you painted it.
	You know, and so if parents who are critical of their children, it's like, well, you're the parent, for God's sakes.
	I mean, how the hell do you get to be critical of your children?
	I mean, it's like, you know, oh, this painting I made is terrible, it's bad, it's an ugly, as if you had nothing to do with it, right?
	But, of course, so you can appeal to his greed and say, you know, what if we could have a family, you can talk to your mom about it too, and, you know, what if we could have a family situation where there's less of this snarling and less of this yelling and less of this bullying and less of this, you know, I mean, wouldn't that be great?
	I mean, it's stressful for you, it's stressful for me, it's stressful for everyone.
	And it doesn't help us to internalize the values that you want us to internalize.
	Because, you know, Dad, you don't want us to just be doing stuff because you're going to yell at us.
	I mean, because you're going to be dead one day, and what the hell are we going to do?
	Just stand in a corner and not move because no one's yelling at us?
	That's not going to help us learn how to become effective and positive human beings with our own internalized value systems.
	There's got to be a better way.
	And just start to explore.
	See if he's willing to explore those.
	I mean, I'm sure he's getting pretty tired of yelling at people too.
	At least that would be my guess.
	And...
	If you can look at other things, other ways to do it, that would be my...
	But you have to do that when it's calm, not when you're in the middle of a fight, because then people's reasons are usually out the window to begin with.
	So that would be my suggestion.
	I'm sorry I can't give you any more help.
	I feel it's a little bit foggy trying to figure out what the issues are, but this would be my approach if that helps at all.
	Thank you very much for calling in, and I certainly wish you the best of luck with that conversation if you pursue it.
	No problem.
	Thank you.
	You're very welcome.
	Well, I'm sorry we went a little bit over.
	Thank you so much for the callers.
	It's 1221.
	Look at that.
	And again, if you'd like to drop off some bitcoins or some, we also take fiat currency at fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
	Thank you so much to Mike for keeping the show running.
	And five callers, not too bad.
	And have yourselves a wonderful week.

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