Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

July 14, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:17:18

2432 Freedomain Radio Call In Show July 14th, 2013

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Good morning, everybody.
	I hope you're doing well as we collectively steer across the post-apocalyptic landscape of the Traven Martin debacle acquittal.
	As you probably are aware, George Zimmerman is now what is euphemistically termed a free man, which means he's back to having to pay legal bills, taxes, and look over his shoulder for vigilante justice.
	Well, I guess it's one thing to be out of the slaughterhouse.
	It's quite another thing to actually be back in the jungle.
	So, thank you, of course, to everyone who shared and posted and commented on, well, not everyone maybe, but thanks to everyone who helped share and post and provide constructive feedback on my video, one of the most, I guess, interesting video blow-ups in FDR history released two or so days ago and is now the 11th most viewed video.
	It almost is like there's some value in doing current events.
	I don't know.
	Who the heck can read the tea leaves of the internet audience?
	It's really, really hard to say.
	But thank you everyone so much for your kind feedback and responses.
	I got some unbelievably fantastic questions and comments and criticisms from that video and I was up till 3.30 in the morning last night responding To those comments and questions and issues, and I guess, should I? Yeah, I know we got a lot of callers.
	Let me just, I'll just read the first paragraph or two.
	I never like to write and publish right away.
	Obviously, I like to get lots of people's feedback, and I want to make sure that the arguments are, unlike my verbal rambles, as concise and helpful as possible.
	So...
	I published sort of later today, but I think it'll be hopefully useful.
	And again, one of these things that hopefully helps calm people down.
	And if it introduces, you know, to me this is, I guess as of this morning, 125,000 people who got the anti-spanking message.
	Conversion rate of 10%.
	That's not bad.
	That means that, you know, 10,000 people or so may stop hitting their children.
	Not a bad day's work.
	in fact I really can't think of much of a better day's work but okay so this is what I was I'll just read the first bit and then we'll we'll head on so So, two days ago, I published a video detailing largely unknown facts about the trial of George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin.
	Tonight, Sunday, Saturday, 14th January, Tonight, Saturday, 13th January 2013, as of 10pm EST, the jury has agreed with my assessment and found him not guilty on all counts.
	Now, of course, the jury hasn't agreed with my assessment, they just happen to coincide.
	Before the verdict was returned, I received a large number of powerful, passionate, interesting and critical questions about my video I'm going to attempt to answer.
	And there were a few thoughts I had that I wanted to add.
	The child victim.
	So, as you all know, the media constantly refers to Trayvon Martin, who was 17, as a child.
	And this is low-life propaganda at its most obvious.
	Can you imagine a 17-year-old actor being referred to as a child actor?
	Given that most teenagers are allowed to drive at the age of 16, have you ever seen the media condemn the modern horror of allowing children to get behind the wheels of cars?
	Do you know you can join the US military at the age of 17 with signed parental consent?
	Have you seen many articles raging against the US Army recruiting children as soldiers?
	When a 17-year-old American soldier is killed overseas, do you see articles reporting the death of a child?
	Of course not the world.
	The word is only used to inflame prejudice and provoke base of the brain parental protection instincts.
	The unarmed victim With dull, monotonous metronome repetition, the mainstream media refers to Trayvon Martin as unarmed.
	Only hyper-liberal victim-mongers completely unaware of the reality of gun ownership could imagine that the word unarmed invalidates shooting an attacker in self-defense or that the word unarmed somehow translates into harmless or defenseless.
	One of the main purposes of gun ownership is to protect yourself from people who are going to attack you without a gun.
	I mean, come on, just think about it for a moment.
	How many people buy a handgun to protect themselves from snipers?
	Well, no one, because if someone is going to shoot you from a distance without warning, your handgun isn't going to do much to protect you now, is it?
	If Trayvon Martin was in possession of the handgun he was reportedly trying to acquire, and if he had decided to kill George Zimmerman, he would have shot him from the bushes without warning, and Zimmerman's gun would have done nothing to help or save him.
	So, yeah, Martin was in fact unarmed.
	So was Mike Tyson when he bit someone's ear off.
	So were Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Speck, all serial killers who didn't use guns.
	So were the little old lady poisoners in the movie Arsenic and Old Lace.
	So what?
	Self-defense does not require that your attacker be armed with a gun, a hand grenade, a rocket launcher, a bag of killer bees, or have the ability to call in an airstrike.
	It only requires that you believe with reasonable justification that you are in imminent danger of severe bodily harm or death.
	The capacity of human beings to cause bodily harm to each other did not magically appear with the first handgun.
	As propaganda goes, The worst part about it is it's also pathetically transparent.
	Personally, I prefer my neuro-linguistic programming just a little bit more sophisticated.
	This stuff is all sort of on the level of monkey want a banana?
	Anyway, so that's the intro.
	I go on to dissect a 5,000-word essay I wrote last night.
	I go on to dissect a lot of great questions.
	Some really moved me, and I really do want to thank people for sending them in.
	And this is, of course, a very important and powerful issue.
	If we're fighting amongst ourselves, rather than opposing the powers that be, then, you know, really the powers that be win out in pretty desperate and disastrous ways.
	Anyway, that's it for my introduction.
	Thank you, everyone, once again for all of your support, which makes this kind of communication possible.
	And now, let us open the gates to the listeners.
	Release them from the pound, pound, pound.
	Hello, hello.
	Hi, Stefan.
	Thanks so much for taking my call.
	You are very, very welcome.
	How are you doing?
	Good, good.
	How are you doing?
	Um...
	Okay, so Michael told me to keep it to specific philosophical questions, so I'll try to be brief on my background.
	My parents divorced when I was three, and then my dad immigrated to Canada, and then I came to Canada when I was 13, and I had lived with him until I was about 17-ish or 18, and then I moved out.
	So during that time, this was the first time when I really got to know my dad.
	I didn't remember anything about him.
	So, he was really, like, abusive in every way, like, verbal abusive, sexually abusive.
	And then, fast forward several years...
	I'm so sorry to hear that.
	I never want to gloss over that stuff or move past it too quickly.
	I'm incredibly sorry, but please continue.
	Thanks.
	So, fast forward several years, I keep having the dreams that, like, the nightmares, they're recurring, like...
	For the past, I think, years have been really frequent, and it's always like the same dream, just in a different context, where I keep running away from him.
	And he's like, no matter how fast I run or hide, he's always there.
	He's catching on to me, and sometimes I yell at my dream to leave me alone.
	Sometimes I try to punch him, but in the dream, the punches are really weak, so I can't get him.
	And so it's always the same.
	It's not going away.
	I'm wondering what that is and how I can deal with that.
	And how often do you have these kinds of dreams?
	Maybe they actually stopped somewhat, but the most frequently I've had them probably like once or twice a week.
	Right.
	And are they usually in similar circumstances or are they in different kinds of circumstances?
	Like are you usually in the same location?
	Is it a house or does it vary in locations?
	Yeah, the location varies.
	Like sometimes it's outside, sometimes it's in a house.
	I don't know, different places, but it's always like the same type of action that repeats.
	Sure.
	And in the dream, does your father's age vary or appearance vary?
	No.
	Just like the same as I remember him.
	Right.
	And in the dream, are there ever any other people, or are you sort of locked in this isolation chamber, this desert, with your abusive father?
	Yeah, sometimes there's other people present, but they're just outside.
	Let's say sometimes I'm running away in the public, so I can tell there's people, but they're not engaging with me or him.
	They're not engaging?
	So they don't notice that you're running?
	Do they notice that you're frightened and running?
	Or do they just ignore the entire situation?
	Yeah, more like ignoring.
	Right, right.
	And you don't have to get into any details, but can you just give me a sense in general of how safe and secure your current life and world and relationships and situation is?
	Yeah, pretty safe and secure.
	Sorry?
	It's pretty safe and secure, and I don't have a relationship with him right now.
	Actually, he tried to connect with me virtually, basically, and he's just written a letter to me asking me how I am, and that he's expecting a reply to me, not addressing everything that happened.
	Right.
	Right.
	Now, what about, see, okay, this is, I think this is an important, I mean, this is a very important issue.
	I certainly appreciate you bringing it up.
	And I'm just going to sort of share some thoughts about why I think it's important.
	So, if we've had an abusive history with someone, in this case your father, we tend to focus on, and rightly so, we tend to focus on That abuser, right?
	But that abuser never acts in isolation, right?
	And what I mean by that is not that there were more than one dad and he had a doppelganger or something like that.
	But what I mean is that an abuser, particularly a child abuser, cannot act Cannot achieve his goals, cannot affect his abuse without at least some level of enablement or support within the community.
	Can I give you sort of an example of what I mean?
	It's a tricky concept, but I think it's really important.
	So, I grew up, as you may or may not know, with a very loudly abusive mother.
	And what I mean by that is, you know, screaming, hitting, throwing, punching, that kind of stuff.
	And I grew up in a series of apartment buildings.
	I was loud!
	And so hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people heard all of this abuse occurring.
	Now, I'm not even talking about friends or friends' parents or extended family or teachers who could clearly see the effects of abuse and so on.
	I'm just talking about people who could hear it through the walls.
	Now, one of the most difficult but instructive things that I learned about society through this experience was the degree to which my mom understood society a whole lot better Than I did.
	Because my mom felt perfectly comfortable screaming and hitting and throwing and punching and all that kind of stuff.
	Knowing that throughout the course of my childhood, probably over a thousand people at least had direct, immediate, visceral, audible knowledge, direct knowledge of the abuse that was occurring, right?
	And she felt perfectly safe In continuing that abuse, despite the fact that maybe a thousand people heard it, and all it would take is one person to pick up the phone, call the authorities, and leave an anonymous tip.
	They wouldn't have to put themselves out at all.
	It wouldn't be difficult for them.
	It wouldn't be hard for them.
	They didn't have to confront my mom.
	They didn't have to take down bears with chainsaws.
	They didn't have to run in tin suits through a lightning storm.
	To pick up the phone, dial the authorities, and report what they heard, and hang up.
	And this is back in the days when there was no NSA, so nobody could have even been traced, right?
	This is back in the days where if you were some creep with an asthma problem, you can call up women and heavy breathing to their ears and freak them the heck out, and nobody would ever find you, right?
	So the reason that I'm saying all of this It's that my relationship with my mom, I can deal with, right, that was something that occurred, and I can choose to see or not see my mom.
	In my case, I've chosen to not see my mom.
	And that then is in the past, right?
	But the society that I live in, which has not changed much in the 30 years or so since this all occurred to me, or I guess last all occurred to me, the society that I have to live in is that society of people who Who enabled, allowed, encouraged, and supported my mother in her abuse?
	The problem with being the victim of abuse is not primarily, in my opinion, your relationship with the abuser, terrible though it may be.
	That can be dealt with.
	That can be moved into the past.
	It is the society as a whole that allowed it to happen.
	That's first and foremost, because that society, I mean, unless you want to go live in the woods, that society you still have to live in.
	So that's the first thing, and the second thing is much quicker.
	The second thing is that if you are a victim of abuse, right, the main purpose of abusers is the main goal, or at least the necessary but not sufficient thing they need to achieve is your isolation.
	Yes.
	Right, so the way that the abuser continues to isolate you in adulthood, even if you have no relationship with the abuser, not that you ever did, right, you're just an object, a thing to be used.
	But the isolation occurs because if and when you talk about a history of abuse, so you have a close friend, close friend says, how are you doing?
	You say, well, I'm having a tough day.
	You know, I was at the coffee shop this morning and a man turned and snarled at me who had the same mustache as my dad.
	It kind of freaked me out and I've been experiencing this and I've been dealing with that and so on.
	How many friends that we have are comfortable and empathetic and compassionate and humane In listening to and helping us out with the tragic histories which were inflicted upon us and how many people get kind of uncomfortable and you can see them squirming and wanting to change the subject.
	To which we are almost feel compelled to say as victims of abuse, oh I'm sorry, is my tragic history of child rape making you uncomfortable?
	The whole time we're told never blame the victim, never blame the victim, right?
	But at the same time, when we reach out for simple human compassion to help us deal with the horrors that were inflicted upon us when we were helpless, independent children, people get kind of uncomfortable.
	And that's how we are isolated.
	It's that we are taught repetitively with literally monotonous metronome regularity that to be harmed makes other people uncomfortable.
	To have been an innocent victim of child abuse makes other people uncomfortable.
	And thus, the abuser wins because of the cowardice of those around us to listen to the simple human tragedy of having been harmed as a child.
	Because they give you a kind of history that either you cover up and pretend isn't there, which isolates you, or you attempt to share where legitimate and appropriate, which also isolates you.
	Because people don't want to hear, right?
	I'm sorry, maybe you live in an environment where people do want to hear, in which case, though, I don't think you'd be having these dreams.
	That's a really interesting aspect.
	Actually, you're completely right about isolation, and it's not even...
	Actually, the way the whole situation happened, of course, it evolved over time, or progressed, rather...
	He completely isolated me and really watched me to just not talk to anybody.
	And Willie's in houses the entire time.
	We moved a lot, but it was all the way in houses.
	And he always kept it within the confines of the house.
	So I don't know if anybody could really...
	Nobody really knew.
	Anybody from the outside, the acquaintances I had, they always thought, because I'd be smiling and happy, they thought everything was...
	Happy and dandy.
	But what you said about other people not listening, I do have some people in my life who unfortunately share those experiences and they can actually relate, but some people, they're no longer close with them, but there was a person who was close with me whom I shared some things and he was really empathetic, but he said that he just didn't know how to respond.
	He himself has a really, I guess, violent He has a history of suppressing his emotions and dealing with it physically rather than resolving it.
	He just said, I don't know what to say.
	When you say dealing with it physically, do you mean self-medicating?
	Yeah, like that.
	That's not dealing with it, right?
	That's not hiding from it physically, avoiding it physically.
	Exactly, exactly.
	I mean, if I take heroin for a toothache, I'm not dealing with it.
	I'm avoiding it, right?
	Yes, so does that person have a potential to improve in that area?
	Well, no, let's go back if you don't mind.
	Was it just you and your dad?
	Yes.
	Well, sorry, actually my sister too, but she's like 13 years older than me.
	So, similar things happened, but when she was older.
	Sorry, similar things happened to her in the abuse?
	Yeah, with dad.
	And your mom?
	No, no, no.
	They divorced when I was three and they're in different countries.
	They're in different countries.
	So your sister would have had some exposure to you at the home and your mom obviously didn't visit.
	She's my half-sister by my dad.
	I've only met her when I came to Canada and she's similar.
	I came to Canada but we lived in different parts before that.
	Right.
	Now, are you trying to say, if I understand this correctly, I don't mean I'm just curious.
	Are you trying to say that you were able to mask the effects of this kind of unbelievably horrific abuse in such a way that you actually appeared as completely normal to everyone?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Do you think that's believable?
	What do you mean?
	To you or to everybody else whom I was masking it for?
	Do you think that it's possible?
	When did the abuse start?
	Well, I guess some of it must have been around.
	It started when I came, I was like 13, but it was like really gradual and then getting revolution.
	Right.
	And was there any abuse before that?
	You said, I don't think sexual abuse, but were there other kinds of abuse before that?
	Yeah, other kinds.
	Like, very different kinds.
	Like, with my mom, like, neglect and just, like, bad parenting, even though I didn't really realize it and I was really, really attached to my mom, which I thought was love at the time.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	I just felt like my mom...
	Didn't put me as a priority.
	She was very promiscuous sometimes with different men, and I had witnessed a lot of that.
	I didn't feel like she had a spine, and basically I didn't want to be like her.
	So that about summarizes.
	Sorry, did you say that your mother had witnessed some of the abuse?
	No, no, no.
	I witnessed some of her promiscuity.
	Oh, your mother's promiscuity.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	And did your mother witness any of your father's cruelty while they were still married?
	She said that when I was born, she also had a son, my brother, from a different marriage who was 13 years older than me.
	And she said that he's been really attentive and nice to him and considered him a son, adopted him.
	Until I was born, then there was this division between mine and...
	What is this kid?
	And he started treating him aggressively, and then one day he just said, like, I'm leaving, basically.
	That's my mother's story.
	Sorry, sorry.
	I just want to make sure I understand that part of the story.
	So your mother says that your father was more attentive to this other son?
	Yes.
	Not until I was born.
	Yes.
	Right.
	And then when you came along, he became more aggressive?
	Yes.
	Yes, he became aggressive towards him because, I don't know, he felt like this, he felt like a biological attachment to me, that he felt like I was his daughter and then he wasn't his son anymore, something like that, and he felt like he was foreign and He didn't want him with me.
	And then to the point when he went to Electric Canada, he'd be calling my mom saying, come over, except don't bring your son.
	Just the daughter and mom.
	Wow.
	I mean, of course, I shouldn't be shocked.
	I shouldn't be shocked that he was pretty much a dick this way because, of course, he's...
	According to your reports, pretty monstrous in other ways.
	But, I mean, that just sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me.
	You know, people so often sort of make up these stories about why people do the things that they do, and it's almost always just nonsense.
	So she certainly knew that your father had the capacity for cruelty and neglect and so on, right?
	Because she saw that with her own son.
	Yes.
	And I mean, what she described is like he was this, you know, fluffy rabbit when they got married.
	And they worked together for like seven years before I was born.
	And then all of a sudden, he became this monster.
	And then when he left, he called.
	He started calling me when I was about 10-ish or something.
	And he'd always be calling me and he was very aggressive.
	Basically, it was just like listening to his monologue saying like how stupid everybody is, including myself.
	And she knew all that, but basically she encouraged me to keep talking just so I can please him so that he invites me to come to Canada so I have more opportunities.
	Why wouldn't she go for full custody if she knew that he had this capacity for cruelty?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I bet you do!
	We can say I don't know about a lot of things, but when it comes to our families, you know, who we've known for decades, we may not know down to the last detail, but we usually have some pretty good ideas, right?
	Like when you say full custody, meaning that he no longer has custody over me, right?
	So, well, like she wanted me to come here so then she eventually can as well.
	Uh-huh.
	Okay.
	Alright, so there's obviously a pretty selfish motive there then, right?
	That she uses you as sort of an anchor baby or a grappling hook to get into the country, right?
	Sure, although I would like to believe she would also like a better future for me, sort of, in a sense.
	Well, was it a better future?
	It doesn't sound like it.
	Here, I got a pedophile for you.
	Is that a great future for you?
	No, it's not.
	It's not, right.
	I mean, you can't possibly expect me to accept, and I don't mean this with any hostility towards you, but you can't possibly expect me to accept that you being handed over to a pedophile is out of concern for your future and love for your potential.
	I don't think she ever realized that she was this way, maniac.
	Well, she knew him for ten years, right?
	You say they were together for seven and then he left when you were three?
	Yes.
	Well, I don't know what she knew, but I can tell you this.
	If for some incomprehensible reason I was forced to send my daughter to somebody who I knew had at least the potential for cruelty, Or neglect?
	I would be all over my daughter's experiences.
	I would be cross-examining her.
	I would be grilling her.
	I would be trying to find out as much as possible about everything that occurred because I knew, for whatever reason, I would be sending her into a situation that might be dangerous for her.
	See, we didn't really have that kind of relationship with my mom, even though I was very much attached to her and I was always with her.
	Well, I was just in proximity with her, but we didn't really connect.
	We didn't really ever talk.
	She didn't have discussions about me or asking how I am.
	We never really talked.
	Hang on, you say you didn't have that kind of relationship?
	This is not a kind of relationship, like a different kind of horse.
	It's a relationship where you actually talk about things that are important and you have a soft place to land and you have a connection with someone who can help protect you from what's happening.
	That's not a kind of relationship, like a different kind of juice.
	That is a relationship.
	That's right.
	I don't know.
	So what I mean to say, I don't really have a connection with my mother.
	I didn't really have a parental relationship with her.
	Okay.
	And again, I have to correct you because you say, well, I didn't have that.
	Sure.
	But the truth is that that's your mother's job to provide.
	Yes.
	Right?
	Like, if I say, well, I just didn't have enough food as a child, that's not a very accurate statement, and that absolves the caregiver of responsibility.
	The truth of the matter is, I was not provided with enough food when I was a child.
	When you say, well, I didn't have that with my mom, like it was, you know, well, we just, you know, we didn't have a hula hoop.
	No, that's not what I mean.
	It was just, you know, we must have left it at the park somewhere, right?
	I mean, that's not the reality, right?
	And people have this story, and I've heard this story so many times before.
	Often it comes from moms, right?
	So the adult child goes to the mom and says, Mom, you know, Dad was a jerk, or Dad was mean, or Dad was cruel, or in your case, Dad was like the embodiment of human evil, or whatever it is that you want to, however it is you want to call it.
	And the mom says, I'm shocked because he was nice at the beginning.
	And I've heard this, I don't know, so many times.
	And the reality is, of course, I mean, to me, it's never true.
	I mean, it's just not true.
	I mean, if your mom has no idea who your dad is after 10 years, that's just not credible, right?
	It's like me studying Japanese for 10 years, speaking it, practicing it 8 hours a day, 6 hours a day, writing it, getting tested on it, getting passing grades, studying it for 10 years, and then claiming later on, well, I didn't know anything about Japanese.
	You can't live in proximity with someone and then claim to have no idea of their character.
	It's just not believable.
	We just can't.
	I don't understand a lot of reasons.
	Hang on.
	Sorry.
	Let me just finish the second point.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	And the second point is, but let's say even it's true.
	Let's say that you have kids with a guy, and he's perfectly nice for the first two years, three years, or whatever, and then he just turns mean.
	Well, so what?
	I mean, that's like if I bring a dog home, and the dog is really nice, and then when my daughter is three, it just starts biting her, and then I continue to have that dog in my daughter's life for the next 15 years, and she's terrified of dogs, she's got bite marks all over her goddamn body.
	What the hell does it mean if she comes to me and says, Dad, what the hell did you let this rabbit, crazy-ass dog around me all the time biting me?
	And I said, well, but when you were a baby, the dog, he was quite nice.
	What would that mean?
	It doesn't mean a goddamn thing.
	Still have the responsibility to protect.
	Dog starts biting your children, get rid of the goddamn dog.
	Anyway, so it doesn't, even if it is true that it's nice and then it turns not nice, it doesn't change a damn thing about parental responsibility to protect.
	Absolutely not.
	I don't understand a lot of her reasoning.
	She actually knew some of the things, but she stayed in the marriage, because I asked her why, and she's like, um...
	More or less for economic reasons.
	And she was like, I guess, at the point she would have been a single mother of two, which she ended up being anyway, but I don't know why she stuck it out with him.
	Again, like I told you, I felt like she had no spine again, goes back to her own childhood, I guess.
	But then now, actually, I do want to have a...
	Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
	Ah.
	Oh.
	Okay, Claude, go ahead.
	What do you do with moms?
	And look, I'm just sensitized to this because I've just been reading a lot about women's role in the cycle of violence.
	I've been doing a lot of shows on it.
	Okay.
	And always the same thing, right?
	So the evils of the dad are presented as standalone evils that are just terrible.
	But then when the immoralities of the mom come up, what happens?
	No, no, I've linked both of them.
	Like I understand, both of their childhoods have been the influence of how they are now, which is not good.
	I'm not saying that she...
	I'm not excusing her.
	I'm just saying that the first person you started to excuse based on childhood was your mom.
	And listen, look, obviously everybody knows that childhood has an influence on adulthood.
	Of course.
	Nobody's saying otherwise.
	But we don't ask the victim to pursue that line of reasoning, right?
	So if your mom goes to a psychologist, which I'm sure would be a fine idea, but if your mom goes to a psychologist, then a psychologist can, in a non-judgmental way, examine the influence of your mother's childhood on her terrible decisions as an adult, right?
	But I'm not going to Fix my own tooth if I get a cavity.
	I'm not going to do my own appendix removal if I get appendicitis if the only thing I have is a rusty spoon because that's the job of the professional.
	But the job of the victim is to process the feelings of outrage and particularly anger That's scientifically the best way to avoid recurrence of the abuse, right?
	Is to process the feelings of anger and so on.
	But what happens is we generally, I don't want to define your experience for you, but generally what happens is we start to get angry and all these social defenses kick in.
	Particularly with moms, right?
	Sometimes it's always, as I've said for years, there's always one parent who gets away in these kinds of situations, right?
	And this is why I think you're still having the dream.
	Until you have moral clarity about your history and assign the proper responsibility to everyone.
	Because what you need to process, of course, is what happened to you as a child when you were a child.
	And as a child, you didn't know about your parents' childhoods and the role that early childhood experiences have in influencing positive and negative decisions as adults and blah, blah, blah.
	You weren't protected.
	You were harmed.
	You were abused.
	You were isolated.
	You were violated in every conceivable way.
	And those are the original and true experiences of your history.
	Now, if...
	I mean, I was going to say if you were a rape victim, but you are a rape victim, for which I'm incredibly sorry.
	It's monstrous.
	Monstrous!
	I can't fathom these human predators, and I can't tell you what I think we should do to them.
	But...
	We do not ask the rape victim to empathize with the childhood of the rapist, right?
	Right?
	That would be inhumane and inhuman.
	It would be to continue the abuse.
	Because, of course, if empathy for childhood was such a value, we would focus, I think, a little bit more on the child's rapist rather than the victim of child's rape.
	Right?
	Because you did not violate your father's childhood, and you were not responsible for who your father became, but your father sure as hell violated every conceivable aspect of your childhood.
	Right?
	Right.
	So if we're supposed to have empathy for people's childhoods, then you still have every reason to get angry because your father violated yours in unbelievably egregious ways.
	So you're saying to help stop having those nightmares, I should resolve what happened?
	Because I've been trying to do that for like years now.
	No, I think the reason that you're still having dreams about being in danger is because you're still in danger.
	I mean, it's not, right?
	The reason you're still having dreams about being in danger is that you're still in danger.
	Like, I used to have tons of dreams about my mom.
	Why?
	Because I kept seeing her.
	Now, again, I know you're not seeing your dad or whatever, right?
	Right.
	But in your dream, this is why I asked about the people around in your dream, right?
	Yes.
	So, if you're in a situation with people who had a duty to know, See, people claim ignorance all the time.
	Well, I didn't know your father did this or I didn't know your mother did that and so on.
	It doesn't matter.
	If you hire a lawyer to do a job and then that lawyer screws it up completely and then says, well, I don't know the law, is that a valid defense?
	Yeah, are you saying that my friends...
	No, no, wait, wait, wait.
	One step at a time.
	Oh, is that a valid defense?
	No, it's not.
	Why not?
	Well, because as a lawyer, that's his responsibility to know the law.
	Yeah, he has a duty to know.
	Because that's what he's...
	That's what he's advertising his services as a lawyer.
	So he then doesn't get to say, well, you know, I studied...
	It turns out I studied ancient Celtic law from 1,500 years ago, so I screwed up your case completely.
	You don't get to say, oh, well, if you didn't know the law, that's okay, because you didn't know what you didn't know, right?
	And if you're going to be a parent to someone, you're going to have children with someone, then you have a duty to know how your child is doing.
	You have a duty to know the possible risks for your child.
	You have a duty to protect your child.
	Like, if your child has some gut-awful skin disease, and you don't take that child to the doctor...
	You don't take that child to the doctor and then you say, well, I couldn't treat the disease because I didn't know what it was.
	That's not a defense, right?
	You have a duty to know what that disease is.
	You have a duty to protect your child.
	You have a duty to support and nurture and love your child.
	I mean, that's the job as a parent.
	So, parents who say, well, I didn't know that this bad stuff was going on, that doesn't matter.
	You have a duty to know.
	You have a duty to find out.
	And if you don't find out, that's actually even worse.
	So I think that you are surrounded by people who are making up innocence-sounding stories.
	And because of your history, it's hard for you to see them clearly for what they are.
	Which is people excusing themselves at your expense.
	Refusing to own up to the wrongs that they did.
	And thus defusing the natural and healthy anger that you should be feeling at having been so royally trashed as a child.
	They are defending themselves.
	They're fogging your history.
	They're fogging your moral self-righteousness.
	They're fogging the anger that you need to experience as far as I understand it.
	Of course, I'm no psychologist.
	It's sort of my layman's understanding of how it's supposed to work.
	The experience of anger and betrayal and violation from people who had a sworn moral duty to protect you from all harm and instead exploited you in medieval Old Testament primeval with shame and ape kind of ways and I think until you see that stuff clearly the degree of violation and that
	your parents and your community are responsible for what happened.
	The effects of childhood abuse cannot be hidden.
	I cannot imagine any child who is being raped at home who can look completely normal outside the home.
	Because either that means the child feels completely normal, which is obviously crazy.
	You can't get raped and feel completely normal.
	Or the child can fake a normalcy which the child has never actually experienced.
	Do you understand that?
	That can't happen.
	Like I could pretend to speak Japanese, right?
	But I'm not going to speak Japanese unless I study, learn, and know Japanese, right?
	Yeah.
	So if you've never experienced normal, you can't fake normal.
	That's like me pretending to speak Japanese having never studied it.
	I may make some Japanese-ish kind of sounds.
	Right?
	So you couldn't fake normal.
	Which means that everyone around you had to have some kind of intuition that something was off because you weren't normal.
	You'd never experienced normal.
	Right?
	So how could you pretend it in ways that were completely convincing?
	Can't happen.
	Well, actually, it's just that I was brainwashed to the point, like, to keep everything to myself, so I didn't really share anything, and then on the outside— Right, but not—this is my point.
	Children share.
	The fact that you weren't sharing everything is my point.
	I mean, I can't get my daughter to not share a thought that goes through her head.
	Not that I'd want to, but I'm like, at some point, take a breath!
	You know?
	You know, like, she'll talk before she even wakes up in the morning.
	Okay.
	And then I have to tell her to stop talking at the end of the day so she can fall asleep.
	So when you tell me, well, I appeared normal because I didn't share anything, that just reinforces to me the reality that you don't know what normal is.
	How could you?
	And therefore you were signaling everything that was occurring.
	People maybe have chosen to ignore those signals, right?
	Of course, right?
	Right.
	It's a whole lot easier to ignore the obvious signals of child abuse than it is to get involved in actually protecting children.
	And again, I'm an anarchist, but we're just talking about the general societal norms.
	You know, make a goddamn phone call.
	Report a problem.
	Have an expert come in and investigate.
	This child never shares anything.
	This child appears to have no emotional life.
	This child is incredibly guarded.
	And we know there's divorce.
	We know that there's brothers, stepsisters.
	We know, right?
	Let's find out what's going on.
	I'm still in danger because of my mom, because I'm still in touch with her.
	Well, I'm not saying do or don't be in touch with her, but what I am saying is that if you care for people, and I get that you care for your mom.
	You said you were very attached to her and so on, right?
	I'm not going to try and talk you in or out of that.
	That's your experience or whatever, but if we care about people, The most essential aspect of love is don't accept bullshit.
	If we care about people, don't accept their shallow stories and excuses.
	Keep pushing.
	Get to the truth.
	So sit down with your mom.
	Talk about this stuff.
	It was her duty to protect you.
	It was her duty to protect you.
	And you got raped.
	I mean, you understand, if I hired someone as a security guard and that security guard fell asleep and my house or my business got robbed, I would sue, right?
	Right.
	As an average statist, right?
	Because there was a duty to protect and that person failed.
	Oh, and what's more important, something that gets stolen from my house or my entire childhood?
	That's the thing.
	Like, she's in a different country right now, so, like, we sort of have a long-distance relationship, and I like to keep it at a distance up until, like, we're able to meet in person, and I don't know how to confront her, because, I don't know, it's almost like when I'm with my mom, I go back emotionally, I go back into being that little child where I'm so inhibited, and, like, I don't know how to talk to her.
	You comply with her needs.
	You hide yourself just as you did, right?
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Well, this is where idiot internet philosopher steps aside and makes its usual recommendation, which is to talk to a therapist.
	Ah, yes.
	That was my other question.
	How would you recommend finding a good therapist?
	Or would you recommend anyone?
	Because I'm in Toronto.
	I would not want to take on the onus of recommending you to someone, but what I will say is that I've done a show or two on this.
	Mike, if anybody knows the FDR number of the show, I think it's in the four digits.
	It's how to find a great therapist.
	You can look into that.
	These are my thoughts on it.
	But practice for these kinds of confrontations.
	You practice with a therapist and you journal about it, you read about it, and so on.
	Okay.
	Thanks a lot.
	Okay.
	Well, listen, I'm incredibly sorry about what happened to you.
	I mean, words can't express.
	I'm so sorry.
	I mean, I just start to cry even just thinking about what happened to you.
	I'm just so incredibly sorry.
	This is the exact opposite of what you should have had as a child.
	What a terrible burden.
	To be placed upon such young shoulders.
	I'm so incredibly sorry for what happened to you.
	I'm sorry that you were harmed so greatly by the people who were supposed to protect you the most.
	I'm sorry that you live in a world where this stuff goes unnoticed, unremarked, avoided, enabled, and supported by almost everyone you'll ever come in contact with.
	It's something I aim to change, but I'm just so sorry that you even have this to deal with now.
	That having been said, you know, that which doesn't kill us, blah-de-blah-de-blah, you know, makes us stronger and so on, right?
	Yes.
	I believe the philosopher from American Idol is probably quite correct.
	Kay Clarkson, I think.
	Anyway...
	I can't believe that Mustachio Bassett Nietzsche ripping off a waitress.
	It's astounding.
	Anyway, but...
	You can get incredible wisdom and depth and truth.
	Only those who've been greatly harmed can get to the essential truth about a harmful society and you will get to that truth and through that truth you will achieve a kind of love that people who weren't harmed will never achieve.
	So I just want to tell you there's of course a light at the end of the tunnel and all great things can happen but I'm sorry that this is the path.
	Right.
	Thank you so much, and thank you.
	Your work is so invaluable, and it's been life-changing, and thank you so much for taking my call also.
	You're welcome.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Bye-bye.
	Mike, did anyone get that FDR number for the How to Find a Great Therapist cast?
	Yeah, it's podcast 1927, How to Find a Great Therapist.
	1927.
	Mm-hmm.
	Two years before the crash.
	All right.
	All right.
	Next up on the line today, we have Yasin.
	Hello.
	Hello, Steph.
	Thank you for having me on the show.
	It's my pleasure, Yasen.
	How are you doing?
	I'm great.
	It's kind of hard to believe I'm talking to you.
	First of all, thank you for having me on the show.
	I hope everything is going well with your treatment.
	Thank you for the question.
	Let me give you the quick update.
	A week ago Wednesday I had my last chemo and I found it a little tiring.
	And I'm down to like 20% eyebrow cover.
	But it's not too bad this round.
	I had a bit of vomiting this round and the last round, not too much.
	The nausea meds couldn't quite tackle it.
	But I'm actually Doing the show while walking, which is why occasionally you'll hear me go as a bug flies into my face.
	But yeah, I did some exercising last night, a half hour of cardio, 25 minutes of some fairly heavy weights, and I felt all right.
	So it's...
	It's looking good.
	I have 17 rounds of radiation therapy to go.
	That may affect my voice.
	It sort of basically gives you a sunburn on the back of your throat.
	So we've kept a bunch of material back, which I can sort of release during that time, but I may not be able to do a live show.
	Not sure yet.
	It should last about two weeks.
	Hopefully it won't be too bad, but it's basically going to be like having a strep throat for two weeks.
	And then I'm done.
	I am consciously not going to live with the fear of recurrence.
	There is, of course, a possibility of recurrence, just like there's a possibility of getting hit by a bus, maybe slightly higher odds than that.
	That's great.
	I'm glad it's going well for you.
	Yeah, I mean, what am I going to do is sit there and check myself for lumps, you know, three times a day.
	Well, that's just, then it's back no matter what I do, right?
	So, like, it's back in my head.
	So, I'm going to live with the depth and richness of the experience, but without the paranoia of recurrence.
	That's what I'm going to aim for.
	I'm sure I'll be able to achieve it.
	And in many ways, I'm grateful for For the experience, though, I'm not sure I would have picked it out of a deck of cards as the ace in the hole.
	So thank you for your concern.
	I appreciate that.
	Thank you to everyone who sent their kind wishes.
	And I'm all ears now.
	What's your question?
	Well...
	My question is...
	I've...
	So to say...
	Not even two weeks ago...
	I will have to say...
	I had to...
	Start applying UPB in my life, I guess for the sake of my own sanity.
	Alright.
	Sounds like a voluntary choice.
	UPB cornered me with a machete, so I signed up.
	I certainly don't want it to sound like that, but...
	I know, I know.
	Philosophy is someone that we buy a drink for, and then sometimes it feels like a bit of a date rape anyway.
	But go ahead.
	Well, my problem is...
	I've started feeling very confused.
	On the conscious level, I'm certain that I'm doing the right thing because it has positive effects for me and everything, but emotionally it seems that it's hard to deal with.
	Gosh, I hope so.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, I'm sorry.
	I mean, this is the challenge, right?
	You know, was ending slavery a good idea?
	Yeah, of course it was.
	No question.
	Great idea.
	Was it a relaxing and fun thing to be an abolitionist in Alabama in 1840?
	Well, no, right?
	Yeah, well...
	Doing the right thing...
	It's doing the rational thing, but if you're surrounded by dangerous and irrational people, then we're always pretty ambivalent about doing the right thing.
	Like, it's not hard to be against slavery now, right?
	Then the reason and the emotional experience are one and the same, right?
	But it was pretty freaking hard to be against slavery or against racism 200 years ago.
	Yeah.
	So I would hope that doing the right thing...
	It brings you intellectual satisfaction and emotional terror.
	I'm sorry.
	I mean, I wish it were different.
	I really do.
	And we hope, of course, and we will, make a world wherein doing the right thing is both intellectually satisfying and emotionally rewarding.
	But right now, it's intellectually satisfying and emotionally terrifying.
	I don't want to say terrifying.
	It is sometimes for me.
	But how does that strike you?
	Well, it's...
	Oh, it strikes me.
	I did expect that you said it many times in your books and in your podcasts and everything you said many times.
	So I did expect that.
	It's just like the confusion and all that.
	I guess what I really wanted to...
	I kind of wanted to give some background to how it happened, and I'm really interested to hear your thoughts about it.
	Yep, go ahead.
	So, to keep a long story short, I guess, Well, like, a month ago I broke up with my girlfriend who I thought they loved very, very much.
	We were together for four years and she was my first girlfriend.
	I was very insecure before that.
	I never had a girlfriend before.
	I'm 25 now.
	So I was 21 when we started going out.
	I guess to describe our relationship in a nutshell, it was kind of like Bruce and Sheila from Real Time Relationships book, along those lines.
	It was so accurate that when I was listening to the audiobook, I just started crying because it was just spot on, right on target.
	I couldn't believe that it's possible that you'd be so correct about it.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	That book, of course, is an homage to the colonies.
	I've got Bob and Doug to insult my Canadian listeners with stereotypes, and I have Bruce and Sheila to insult my beloved Australian listeners with stereotypes.
	But I'm very glad that you found that part helpful.
	Sorry, please go on.
	I started listening to your podcasts and your show since October.
	It's not been that long.
	I have a lot of time on my hands.
	I guess since October I've been listening to maybe two, three, sometimes four hours a day.
	Very heavy time investment.
	And I guess I kind of got infected by the UVB virus.
	I don't know how to call it because it felt like My relationship started deteriorating so fast and all that stuff.
	The interesting part is that we broke up about a month ago and And for a while, I didn't feel much.
	The writing was on the wall.
	Sorry, was there a specific incident that you broke up about?
	Was it a series of conversations?
	Did you wake up one morning and feel a different way?
	Or how did that occur?
	Well, it was...
	My girlfriend's always been...
	She's pushing me so much and criticizing me for not being ambitious, for pretty much having no goal in my life.
	She loves me so much and I'm perfect for her, but at the same time she has to find someone who knows what they want from their life.
	I love you, you're perfect, now change!
	Exactly.
	I don't really want to talk about her.
	Something very interesting happened to me.
	So after we broke up the last time, because it was in and out, in and out, in and out, and it was ridiculous.
	I couldn't stand it anymore.
	So after our last breakup a month ago, it wasn't such a big issue for me.
	I kind of accepted it and dealt with it.
	Everyone knew that it was going to happen, everyone around me.
	Me, myself.
	Me included.
	And for a while, I felt fine.
	I was dealing with it.
	I was listening to your podcasts.
	I was getting on with my life, I guess.
	I wasn't that busy, so I had a lot of time to think about it.
	I had this friend of mine, a very good friend.
	We've been friends for eight years.
	We were in boarding school together and all that.
	I thought that he was my friend, but we'll get to that in a little bit.
	So he came to visit me here in Bulgaria and I found out that when he visited All of a sudden, I started feeling progressively more and more depressed.
	I was just sliding back into depression as if...
	Sorry, you said back into depression, so you've experienced that before the depression?
	Oh yes, a lot.
	Because my girlfriend was pressuring me so much.
	I wouldn't even call it criticism.
	Blaming me for really being me.
	I mean, she knew who I was.
	I didn't force her into being with me, but anyway.
	So this friend of mine, he came here.
	We went to the Black Sea, and we were supposed to have a good time.
	I wasn't really having a good time myself, though.
	I didn't tell him, though.
	I didn't want to spoil anything.
	And when we went there, he started drinking heavily.
	I mean, he would get really, really drunk, and then he would sleep for three hours and wake up drunk and drink more.
	And at some point, I really got depressed.
	And to the point that, interestingly enough, I started missing my girlfriend a lot.
	To the point that I tried to call her and I texted her.
	I was like, I want to work all this out.
	And it was just ridiculous because before that I felt just fine.
	Well, not just fine, but I was relatively okay dealing with the situation.
	And my friend, his behavior was just...
	Putting me in this terrible, terrible emotional state and he himself, it became more than obvious to me that he really doesn't care about me because he knew very well how emotional I am about the whole thing.
	He knew that she was my first girlfriend.
	He didn't ask you much about the breakup or how you were doing?
	Not at all.
	Sorry to interrupt, but drinking I mean, I'm not talking about a glass of wine at dinner, but you know, like drinking to the point of getting really drunk and all that.
	It's kind of insulting.
	Because, you know, the person is basically saying, well, I can't stand you sober.
	It's insulting because when you drink, you enter into an altered state of consciousness and so on.
	And if you guys met in boarding school, I assume you weren't drinking a lot back then.
	So basically drinking is a way of putting a different personality on and it's a way of distancing yourself from people.
	It's a way of distancing fundamentally yourself from yourself.
	But, you know, if I had a friend who had to get blind drunk every time he saw me, it would be kind of insulting.
	It's like, well, so what?
	I'm not enjoyable to chat with when you're sober?
	I mean, you have to get drunk to spend time.
	I mean, that's just terrible.
	Anyway, I just wanted to mention that.
	Let me just, like, get this straight.
	I mean, I wasn't the one drinking.
	I mean, he was the one who's...
	No, no, I know.
	But I'm talking about your friend, right?
	With you.
	I mean, that he...
	He can't stand you sober?
	Like what?
	Or, of course, the other thing, you know, what happens with people who drink a lot around you is that you either have the talk, right?
	Where you say, dude, what are you doing?
	I mean, I don't know what you say in Eastern Europe, but here, if I was pretending to be young, I'd say, dude, what are you doing?
	We just punch each other.
	Yeah, like, yeah, yeah.
	Chest thump, let's go invade Russia.
	Anyway, but you have to have to talk, which is why you're drinking so much.
	Like, what's going on?
	Yeah.
	Like, this is unhealthy, this is dangerous, this is destructive to your body, this is harmful to our...
	You have to have, like, the intervention.
	Which usually doesn't go very well.
	Or you have to be silent about the incessant drinking, right?
	And so you're given this horrible fork in the road, right?
	You either have some incredible blowup, which if you're both on vacation is pretty tough, you know?
	I mean, one of the worst places to have a breakup of any kind, whether it's a friendship or a romance, is on vacation.
	I mean, what are you going to do?
	You're already out in the Black Sea.
	You're already stuck there in the hotel.
	I mean, right?
	Excessive drinking is really invasive to other people.
	It either silences them or it puts them in this incredibly awkward position of having to confront you about your drinking.
	I mean it's rude, it's nasty.
	I have a big hate on excessive drinking so I hope that's not coloring too much of my perceptions.
	It just seems to me like a very cowardly way to deal with problems and basically what it does is it transfers all your problems On to other people, which I think is incredibly selfish and unjust.
	If I smoke, I don't get to then teleport my cancers into other people.
	That's not fair, right?
	But if I'm doing a lot of heavy drinking, it becomes everybody else's problem and it's like, well, fuck you.
	Deal with your own goddamn problems.
	And I sit down and have the conversation with people.
	Because at that point, you jump out of the plane if it's about to hit the mountainside and you just hope to hit a snowdrift, right?
	Because you know for sure if you stay in the plane, you're dead meat, right?
	And so at that particular point, when I get angry enough at a person about that, I'll have the talk, simply because I know if I don't have the talk, I've got no relationship anyway, so I might as well give it at least one percentage chance of success.
	So I'll just have the talk and say, because, you know, the only reason we don't have the talk with people we need to be honest about is we imagine that the relationship can continue somehow without that talk.
	And it's usually not the case, at least if you continue down the path of self-knowledge.
	Once you realize that the emptiness of the relationship has been revealed, and, you know, then you're like, well, You don't put the defibrillator on the healthy person, but the person whose heart is stopped, well, you give it a shot because you know if you don't, they're going to die, right?
	So the relationship is going to die unless you shock it back to life for some kind of honesty.
	So I just wanted to mention that's why people have the talk, certainly why I do.
	Well, that was impossible because, as I mentioned, he would just wake up drunk and then continue drinking.
	I would have loved to be able to talk to him and I even tried while he was drunk.
	I told him, dude, go and get some good sleep, sober up and all that.
	And he just told me, how about you deal with your own problems and I deal with mine?
	And in my mind, I thought to myself, you know what?
	Screw you.
	I'm like, okay, I'm dealing with my own problems and I just left.
	Yeah, you would then be one of my problems, which I'm going to deal with by not being here, right?
	Exactly.
	And I'm sorry about that.
	I mean, this is an eight-year friendship.
	It's a lot of investment.
	I'm really sorry that it came to that.
	It was really disappointing.
	Fuck him if he can't be sober.
	You can't have a relationship with a drunk person.
	The only thing you can have a relationship with is with the alcohol.
	You can't have a relationship with a drunk person.
	You can't.
	Like therapists, if you show up drunk to a therapist's office, you know what they'll say?
	I guess they'll ask me to leave.
	Yeah, go home.
	You can't do therapy with you while you're drunk.
	Because this is about truth and honesty and drinking is the avoidance of both.
	And you can't do...
	You can't do therapy while you're drunk.
	It's like showing up for surgery with a full belly, they just send you home.
	Anyway, sorry, go on.
	As I said, I left and immediately when I left, I started feeling better.
	I still miss my girlfriend a lot and I got back to Sofia.
	I live here and I tried to get back in touch with her.
	But I noticed that after a day or two, that feeling that I had started to receive, I guess, it started to go away.
	All of a sudden, I was like, what am I doing?
	I don't miss you.
	I don't want to have anything to do with you.
	I just miraculously when I decided to end that relationship Sorry to interrupt, but you know that was a bit on the selfish side for you too, right?
	I'm unhappy with my friend.
	Hey!
	I'll try and get back together with my old girlfriend!
	Well, yes.
	It's kind of using her, right?
	Exactly.
	I guess I had the same thing going on with my family.
	My parents, especially my mom, would piss me off a lot.
	I would go back to my girlfriend and my girlfriend would piss me off a lot and I would go back to them.
	That is confusing.
	Anybody you've had a four-year relationship with, particularly your first real romantic relationship, They say, let's get back together.
	No one's ever going to be indifferent to that, right?
	So I just want to point out that I hope that you'll apologize to her at some point, because that was kind of using her like a log in a stream to float, right?
	No, that's why I mentioned Bruce and Sheila thing.
	I realized that it's a two-way street, obviously, and I was trying to deal with it.
	Yeah.
	I sympathize.
	Don't get me wrong.
	I'm saying you're a bad guy, right?
	I mean, I sympathize.
	I really do.
	I really do.
	But it's confusing.
	It doesn't help her get on with her life if you occasionally bungee back in and say, I'm lonely.
	Let's get back together.
	Oh, no, wait.
	I'm feeling better.
	Let's not.
	I'm not trying to characterize what you did as exactly that, but I think you can understand that that would be...
	You know, if we care about people that we've broken up with, and I think that's fine to do so.
	I mean, incompatibility doesn't mean immorality.
	We obviously want them to get on with their lives as much as possible and not be the sort of black hole that pulls them.
	Anyway, I just want to mention that.
	Just to mention, to clear that out, it was never me who ended the relationship, actually.
	I was always the one who wanted to work things out.
	It was always her who would break it off and then, like, try to get back in, I guess.
	And now things really deteriorated and ended for good because I actually tried being honest with her and that didn't work out.
	Oh, well, that will usually give you closure one way or the other.
	Honesty is the great doubter ender.
	Have doubts, be honest!
	You know, people say honesty.
	Ruined my relationship.
	Well, honesty doesn't ruin relationships because if you're not honest, you don't have a relationship to begin with.
	I used this metaphor years ago in the show.
	People say, oh, Steph, you know, this show, it breaks up people's relationships and so on.
	I mean, that's complete nonsense.
	I mean, I tell people, it is not that shocking an idea to say to people, be honest in your relationship.
	I don't think, I don't claim, I have some originality, but I don't claim to have invented honesty as a virtue.
	I mean, I would be insane to Thou shalt not bear false witness against those around you.
	Don't lie.
	Yahweh got this down 5,000 years ago or whatever, right?
	So be honest in your relationships.
	This is not anything that...
	And people say, well, when I was honest, my relationship busted.
	Therefore, honesty busted the relationship.
	It's like, no.
	If you say that you have a bridge over a river, and that bridge is super strong...
	And you really say, I want to get to the other side of the river.
	I say, okay, well, you tell me your bridge is super strong, and you want to get across the river, then the logical result of that is to go use the bridge to get across the river, right?
	And people take one foot on the bridge and the whole thing collapses.
	And then they say, Steph broke my bridge!
	Anyway, it's understandable defensiveness, but it's got nothing to do with reality.
	And And after all this happened, after I broke out the relationship with that friend, I find out that I don't think that many of my relationships are sustainable.
	I find it like another friendship.
	But that wasn't really what I was trying to get.
	Sorry for the long premise, but I really don't I'm trying to understand why this happened.
	Why was it that...
	Why was it that the introduction of...
	Not the introduction, but my friend's visit would bring back my feelings towards my girlfriend somehow.
	Hello?
	Yeah, no, I mean, let me start off with a short little rant about history and relationships.
	If you are not honest in your relationships, and by that I don't mean that you lie, you didn't train in it, you didn't know about it, you weren't raised that way, it's not part of the culture, then let's say you become philosophical at the age of 30.
	Well, if you haven't been honest in your relationships, Let's say you've had a friend for 10 years, from 20 to 30, and then you go at the age of 30, hey, shit, think I'm going to be honest, right?
	Well, you are attempting to reverse a relationship, right?
	Reverse a relationship?
	That's hard.
	It's very hard.
	It's very hard.
	So, if you only choose a woman because she's physically attractive, And then for some reason she gains weight, she has some horrible skin disease or whatever, she becomes unattractive, then that's called a relationship reversal, right?
	If you marry some guy for his money and then he wakes up one day broke, well, that's a challenge to the relationship, right?
	Hypogamy thwarted, right?
	And so if you have a relationship that for 10 years has been dishonest, Then that relationship is defined by that very dishonesty and the person chose you because you're not honest.
	And again, when I say you're not honest, I don't mean this like you're outwardly lying or trying to defraud the guy.
	It's just there's not honesty in the relationship.
	Right?
	And so if you then say, well, I'm now going to apply honesty to a relationship that is entirely defined by and founded on dishonesty, then you're attempting to reverse the relationship.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	Which is like, you know, having huge tits wearing tiny tops and then saying, I want people to only look at my personality.
	I believe that would be in the plural, right?
	To reverse a relationship is really, really hard.
	This is why so many people have such difficulty if there's not a history of honesty and openness and intimacy and vulnerability and truth in the relationships with their parents.
	So if you're 30 and you say, well, I'm not going to be honest in my relationships.
	Well, your parents defined the relationship, if it's not an honest one, as avoiding the truth.
	And you say, well, now I'm going to bring the truth to a relationship that was defined by people who want nothing to do with the truth.
	Well, how do we think that's going to go?
	It may work.
	It may work.
	But we all understand that the odds are not great, right?
	I guess if that person was hoping for the same thing, maybe...
	Now, as to why you...
	As to why you wanted a relationship back with your girlfriend, well, you say you always wanted that, but why did it show up so strongly?
	Well, this is my guess, right?
	So I don't know much about your history, so this is all, as it is generally on this show, wild-ass guess, with hopefully only minimal amounts of prejudice and projection.
	Well, we can hope.
	But if you have attachment problems, right?
	I mean, we're supposed to attach to our parents and in particular to our moms.
	I mean we are physically attached to them through an umbilical cord for nine months hopefully and then we are hanging off their boobs for you know a year and a half two years or whatever so you know we got a couple years of We have virtually permanent physical attachment to a mom, which is supposed to be all kinds of cooing and caring and stroking and caressing and cuddling and tickling and playing and chatting and singing and all this kind of stuff.
	We're supposed to be enveloped and surrounded.
	And then we have attachment satisfaction, like a full meal.
	Oh, that was a great meal.
	I'm full.
	I don't want to eat anymore.
	I'm good.
	So when we have attachment satisfaction with a primary caregiver, with, say, a mom, Then that's great.
	Oh, yum.
	Tasty, tasty, tasty, right?
	Now, if we don't have attachment satisfaction, if our mom is emotionally unavailable or physically distant or doesn't breastfeed, jams us in a bottle, sticks us in a crib and turns on the Lion King, or whatever.
	I mean, I don't know.
	There's so many things that can go wrong with attachments.
	It seems sometimes it's like sinking a hoop-no-net from the parking lot when the dome is closed.
	But anyway...
	So if you have an attachment problem, then what we end up with is with like a tentacle coming out of our chest.
	A big suction tentacle that it's always, until we deal with it, it's going to continually be trying to attach to other people.
	This big vacuum tentacle of need.
	Must connect!
	Must connect!
	Must attach!
	And all the hucksters and fraudsters and exploiters and abusers in the world can see these tentacles with their third eye of evil.
	It's just the way they see it.
	They see this need and they exploit it.
	They exploit it through cults.
	They exploit it through the military.
	They exploit it through churches.
	They exploit it through nationalism.
	They exploit it through what is so often the cult of the family.
	They exploit it through culture.
	They exploit it through any kind of group identity.
	Right?
	I mean, anybody who wants to merge with a collective is fundamentally saying, I have an attachment disorder.
	I was not close enough to my mom.
	I was not loved.
	I did not attach with my mother.
	And therefore, I have this big vacuum-swaying proboscis tentacle of need that needs to attach to someone and drain them.
	You know, like a vampire or like a zombie or whatever.
	I'm not saying this is you, right?
	And to a nutshell, I'm just saying this is my thoughts about the general principle.
	So...
	You go to the Black Sea with your friend and your friend is emotionally unavailable and my guess is that as a child you did not exactly have satisfying attachments with your mom and therefore you can't attach to your friend and you feel terrible anxiety, you feel terrible depression and therefore you need to go and jam your tentacle onto your girlfriend.
	Worst porn film ever.
	But you need to deal with that anxiety by attaching to someone else.
	I have to be attached to someone Because my attachment did not occur the way it should have and did not get satisfied, and therefore I'm always hungry, and therefore I'm always on the lookout for a meal, and therefore if one meal doesn't come through, I've got to go grab something else.
	And so when your attachment to your friend was revealed as non-existent, you then wanted to attach to someone else to avoid the anxiety of the fact that you didn't get what you wanted and deserved and needed and should have had, of course, as a baby.
	Anyway, that's my sort of general idea or theory.
	Tell me what you think.
	Well...
	I think it's pretty accurate because I never...
	I think I never really had any relationship with my parents.
	I mean, I know English from watching TV and movies.
	That's how I learned English.
	And that tells you...
	I guess will tell you a lot about how much time I spent with my parents.
	And my dad was never there.
	He was always working, always meeting with somebody.
	And my mom would be...
	Just a nervous, depressed wreck.
	And they'll fight all the time.
	For years and years I've been fighting and screaming and yelling and shouting.
	It's just terrible.
	To the point where I've heard things being thrown.
	Violence going on, for sure.
	Not all the time, but occasionally, I guess.
	It doesn't have to be all the time, right?
	Obviously.
	It doesn't have to be all the time, you know?
	I mean, we don't say, well, it's not wife-beating if you only beat her four times a year.
	I mean, that's only once every three months, for God's sakes.
	It's not every day.
	No, no.
	Still, right?
	Still that.
	Right.
	And I just wanted to...
	Sorry, I wanted to sympathize, of course, but I also wanted to point out that...
	This is part of a bigger issue, right?
	And I don't mean to diminish your own personal experience, but unsatisfied infant attachments are the foundation of what we call society.
	So all hierarchies, particularly political hierarchies and military hierarchies and other exploitive forms of hierarchy, all hierarchies require unsatisfied attachments on the part of infants.
	I mean, you couldn't have a Hitler without some unbelievably shitty parenting.
	On the part of, you know, German moms in the war, and none of it was, you know, all because of the bad moms.
	I mean, the moms had to deal with their husbands being ripped off and blown up at the front of the First World War.
	This is going to make them emotionally unavailable to their children.
	It's not all because of bad moms, but bad parenting doesn't always mean that the parents are bad, right?
	It can happen sometimes, you know, a parent gets sick, right?
	I mean, it can happen not to the parent's fault, but it's still bad parenting because it doesn't meet the child's needs.
	It may not be the fault of the parent, but it's still bad parenting.
	But if you look at society with any level of depth and criticism, you will very quickly see that the most successful hierarchies are those that place the greatest barriers between parents and children, and functioning particularly during infancy.
	And that is a very important thing.
	To consider.
	So, I mean, empathy is transmitted through the father, scientifically, right?
	The father is the one most responsible for teaching empathy.
	And I was trying to explain this to my daughter yesterday.
	And what I did was I said, I put my two hands together, you know, fingers up with thumb out, like I was just a very slow motion clap, and then I stopped when the fingers touched.
	And I said, this is you and daddy.
	And then I clasped my fingers together, fingers intertwined.
	I said, this is you and mommy.
	Because mommy grew you, mommy breastfed you.
	You guys are really intimately entwined.
	And that's wonderful.
	That's great.
	And that's beautiful.
	I envy that sometimes.
	But that's not going to teach you much about empathy.
	Because you're too close together.
	You know, empathy is an opera.
	You have to have some distance.
	And so it's largely the dad's job to teach empathy.
	And this is why we have such a dearth of empathy.
	The rise of fatherlessness is the destruction of empathy.
	And the destruction of empathy is the destruction of everything.
	Fatherhood is the great natural resource.
	Empathy is its great product.
	And the loss of fatherhood, the crashing of fatherhood, has resulted in incomplete attachments.
	So you get rid of the father, usually the mom has to go...
	Out to work, which means incomplete attachments.
	You destroy the nuclear family or you encourage women to go to work rather than spend time with their babies.
	Well, you end up with a whole bunch of kids growing up with attachment disorders and then they then run around with these tentacles and suck up the power and then hierarchies will take them.
	This is why fatherlessness leads to gangs, right?
	Gangs are a kind of cult and they require fatherless children.
	They require children with incomplete attachments in order to get them to adhere.
	To the cult.
	So, churches need it, which is why they teach parents to tell these horrifying fairy tales to their children about hell and demons and burning forever and sin and punishment.
	That separates the parents and the children.
	I mean, that's horrifying.
	And it results in incomplete attachments within the church exploits.
	So, this thing that occurred for you, which is terrible at a personal level, I don't want to Wave that away.
	But incomplete attachments is the foundation of the state, is the foundation of the church, is the foundation of the military, is the foundation of All hierarchies that blend the individual with the collective.
	The collective is always the mom, and the individual is always the infant.
	And somebody who yearns to abandon identity and merge with the collective is somebody who basically says, as Freud used to call it, this oceanic feeling, somebody who wants the good mom they didn't have.
	And will never have.
	You can't fix childhood later.
	You can only acknowledge that it was broken.
	And then...
	You can't fix a house that's built on an ocean.
	It's just a bunch of bricks at the bottom of the sea.
	You've got to go build somewhere else.
	You can't just keep pretending to re-erect these bricks.
	It's built in the wrong place.
	So I just wanted to point that out, that if there is this Attachment.
	It's called an attachment disorder.
	And I'm not, you understand, I'm not describing this in any clinical sense whatsoever.
	Right?
	I mean, I want to be clear about that.
	This is just my way, my, you know, a little idiot way of using the phrase.
	But, you know, I'm sure that psychologists have got really useful stuff about it.
	But a lack of attachment is really essential.
	Right?
	To the brutality of hierarchies.
	And this is why, you know, when I say we have a multi-generational solution to the problem of evil hierarchies, it's because it's really, you're an exception and, you know, wow, good for you, man.
	It's fantastic.
	But it's really hard to reason with people who are seeking to fulfill, irrationally, seeking to fulfill or resolve attachment disorders.
	In the same way that it's really difficult to reason with someone who's drowning, and you're saying to them, don't grab that piece of wood, right?
	I mean, you can't reason with them, and most people are in such a panic of personality disintegration, are in such a panic, annihilation panic, of attachment disorder.
	Attachment disorders are fundamentally death panics, because if you can't attach to your mom, you have no security as a child.
	You're not going to get any resources.
	This is why we have such a hunger for attachment.
	And this is why I think biologically these urges have developed, that if we don't attach to our mothers, we must attach to some other collective, because it means we live in a pretty brutal tribe, in a pretty violent situation, and therefore we need to attach to the strongest gang around, you know, whether it's as an alpha or a beta, it doesn't really matter, but we need to attach to To the strongest gang around, because that's society.
	This is why these needs, I think, have developed.
	But, you know, how do we solve the state?
	Well, cuddles and caresses in the crib.
	Again, I know it sounds kind of crazy, but that's where the science leads.
	So, sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to put that in some kind of context.
	Again, I would say, because I was really into the state, and I wanted to go to the army and those things.
	I guess then you got a point there.
	Now, listen, I'm so sorry.
	Again, talking about attachment disorders, so now I'm going to abandon you.
	Oh, sorry.
	It's terrible.
	But listen, we've got other callers.
	And listen, hopefully you'll call back in at some point because I do have a question sort of about what it is you're going to do with your life.
	And I don't get a strong sense that I don't want to be like your girlfriend nagging you about it.
	But I'm just kind of curious about it.
	So hopefully you'll call back in at some point.
	Or maybe we'll just do a listener convo and talk about that some more because, I mean, obviously you're a blindingly smart fellow.
	And I think that you have, you know, staggering potential.
	I mean, dude, what you're able to have done with the knowledge you've got so far is incredible.
	So if you want to chat further about your life, I'd certainly be happy to, but right now I think I must move on, much so I'd like to stay.
	Thank you, thank you.
	You're very welcome.
	Thank you for calling in.
	Bye.
	All right, next up is Charles.
	Go ahead, Charles.
	Hello, Charles.
	Hello, Charles.
	Hello, hello.
	Alright, somebody's had his latte.
	Go for it.
	Okay.
	Well, I'm really excited to actually be on the show.
	My first question, my actual question is what is the road I should take from being a broken person actually to Becoming an entrepreneur like you have been.
	I know your history is a little different because you have been an entrepreneur and then you went into philosophy.
	I obviously do not want to become a philosopher.
	I think that's your job.
	But I need to get from being broken to being able to get into life and All the same time maintain high moral standards in a system in crisis, of course.
	And can you give me some details?
	It doesn't have to be anything specific, whatever you're comfortable with, about how you were broken and in what circumstances and under what conditions?
	Yeah, of course.
	Well, I'm from Holland.
	I'm from A family which was completely militarized.
	My mother was one of the first of the female sailors in the Navy.
	My father was a professional military.
	My grandparents worked for the royal house.
	They were accountant and telephoner.
	Okay, so not hyper-military.
	Well, my other grandfather has fought in three wars.
	So, yeah, pretty militaristic.
	And, of course, I didn't want to stream in that career, so I tried art, which did not work out for me because my dad kicked me out of the house Because he was sick and tired of me, actually.
	So I tried psychology, which didn't work out for me.
	So I tried biology, but at that time I was so broken and unable to function through...
	No, sorry, you're giving me the geography, but not the history, right?
	So what do you feel you didn't get as a child that you should have, or what do you feel you did get that you shouldn't have?
	Well, my father was a ranking officer.
	He wasn't my father.
	And my mother was my friend.
	Wait, wait.
	Sorry.
	Philosophical paradox 101.
	My father was not my father.
	Sorry, what now?
	Yeah, he was like the sergeant in the house, so you had to follow his...
	Oh, so he wasn't your father, like he didn't act like a nurturing father, he acted like a drill sergeant at home?
	Yes.
	Okay, okay.
	Alright, go ahead.
	I obviously was, well, not obviously, but I was a mother's child, my sister is a real father's child, so there was a Great divide in the family politics.
	My parents divorced when I was 10.
	And it was like going from the Cold War into World War III. That was just all hell broke loose.
	You mean after the divorce or before and during the divorce?
	After the divorce.
	Wait, they started fighting after the divorce?
	Isn't that the whole point of getting divorced?
	Well, that was my thought, too.
	I was completely...
	Perhaps I'm missing something.
	My parents were...
	I was almost happy when they were going to be...
	They announced they were divorcing.
	I was like, well, maybe this will...
	Make the situation a little less tense and maybe we can get on with life and because my parents really they got the worst out of each other.
	They got under each other's nails and it was terrible and I thought well with the divorce this could be better but it just got worse and worse.
	My mother got new friends which were also horrible and My dad actually manipulated me to move back to him, so he could have a bigger house, which I didn't know.
	It's all manipulation and backdoor games.
	That's also a bit of my question, because you focus so hard on spanking.
	The Netherlands, everybody's going to say to you, well, of course you don't spank your kids.
	It's not going to happen.
	Yeah, you guys were one of the first countries to outlaw.
	Yeah, but still, a lot of abuse is going on.
	It's just verbal.
	Oh, I have no doubt.
	I mean, look, I have no doubt because people use the state as a family substitute, which means that they did not get...
	Their emotional needs met within the family and therefore they try to use nationalism and socialism to recreate the family in the hopes that they can get their needs met through some fantasy.
	But anyway, go on.
	Yeah, the bottom line.
	You're very right there.
	So I started listening to you.
	I was already burnt out because I just...
	I didn't...
	I didn't get into positive environments because of my history, of course.
	So the abuse kept repeating itself.
	It gradually became less and less.
	And now it's non-existent because I just don't see any people.
	Ekeno, do you mind if I just say something before you continue?
	Yeah, of course.
	Because remember, this show is all about me!
	You know, it always amazes me.
	I constantly chastise myself for being surprised by the perfectly predictable.
	I'm like some infant, it feels like sometimes, because I'm shocked that the sun is coming up again.
	It's embarrassing, the degree to which.
	And this has been my greatest lesson of being a public figure, is that there's so much stuff that's perfectly predictable that I still retain the idiot capacity to be surprised by.
	But one of those things is this.
	Now, your dad, obviously, you know, I shouldn't say obviously, confirm if it's true.
	Authoritarian tells you what to do, how to live, how to be, you know, how to make your bed and all kinds of instructions, right?
	And, of course, also always with the phrase, don't do as I do, do as I say.
	I've heard you say that before, but it's pissed me off.
	I'm a hypocrite.
	That's why I should have moral authority over you.
	Yeah.
	But it always amazes me that...
	I mean, we just talk about dads.
	It doesn't matter whether it's dads or moms.
	Usually both.
	So dads who tell their children what to do, you know, because they're so wise and so smart and so on, and then have a shitty marriage.
	Yeah.
	I mean, that is so...
	I mean, it's like, do you listen to yourself, Dad?
	I mean, you're telling me all about how to live...
	But mom kind of hates you.
	Which means either you married a woman who hates you, which doesn't really raise your wisdom and knowledge and virtue in my eyes too much, or you married a woman who loved you and now she hates you.
	I mean, that's not good.
	If you can't even get mom's love, Then you're either an idiot or you somehow turned a loving woman against you, both of which, I don't know which one makes you worse.
	It's hard to say, right?
	But it's like, if you can't get mom's love, who the hell are you to tell me how to live?
	I mean, the woman that you married doesn't even like you, fights with you, divorces you, yells at you, throws things at you.
	So the woman that you said was, you know, who you promised to love and who promised to love you, you all couldn't even keep that word.
	So, excuse me if I take your moral commandments with a certain amount of skepticism, but maybe first, you could get mom to like you a little bit, and then you could tell me how to live.
	Anyway, it's just amazing to me that people can do that kind of stuff with a straight face, but, you know, we live in a widely various species.
	But anyway, go on.
	Yeah, so, let me think.
	That was kind of why I started listening to you, of course, because...
	I was missing the eloquence to say those things, especially to my parents because I was so young.
	But I was still searching because I ran in the same conflicts with bosses and with teachers.
	So two years ago I decided to go into therapy.
	I said, oh, good for you.
	I mean, assuming you're a therapist.
	Yeah, it's a whole team of people, actually.
	Oh, good.
	Yeah, I think Holland is making great improvements towards self-knowledge and also self-responsibility.
	I think Holland could be a great place for volunteerism and freedom to grow from.
	So that's kind of Why I'm drawn between your speeches because you're most of the time talking about America and a lot of people want to see America as an example and think it's about time we really stopped.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Don't follow America as an example.
	And listen, remember, I'm a money whore.
	So if you all want me to talk more about your country, just send me the shekels.
	I am a cash slut.
	That's the important thing to remember.
	Americans are very generous, so they get some attention.
	Anyway, to some degree.
	Anyway, go on.
	I'm jobless at the moment.
	Oh no, not you!
	You pay for your therapy, and I say this to any listener.
	Do not donate to me if it's a choice between this show and therapy.
	Pay for your therapy and don't worry about me.
	So I'm glad that you're doing what you're doing.
	I know it's Holland's, you probably don't pay, but don't worry about that.
	I wasn't trying to nag you, I was just pointing it out to people.
	Well, because every time you ask for a donation, I feel kind of guilty.
	You're a great help to me.
	Listen, if you can't pay, then use and enjoy.
	That's kind of key.
	If you can't pay right now, just use and enjoy.
	That's what I want.
	I don't want people who can't pay to also feel bad about not paying.
	Because then it's like, well, you can't pay, and therefore, don't pay.
	But continue to use the resource.
	I don't want you to feel bad about it, too.
	Okay, I won't.
	But I will buy your books.
	Once I get some money, I will actually buy your books for retail price.
	I think that's...
	I appreciate that, but I just want to point out that buying my books is not a donation.
	I just want to point that out.
	Buying my books is buying my books.
	That's not the same as donating for podcasts and all that.
	I just want to point out that it's kind of separate, but go ahead.
	So, let's continue.
	Yeah, I'm currently volunteering at the animal shelter.
	I'm getting my therapy.
	I just got my driver's license.
	I just got a car.
	I'm looking for work now.
	But the problem is...
	Are you a very heavy smoker?
	Yes.
	Okay, good.
	How old are you?
	27.
	Oh, okay.
	It's going to say, because you sound like you're in your 40s.
	Dude, stop smoking.
	Anyway, go on.
	I'm trying.
	I'm still trying.
	Wait a minute.
	You can't afford to donate to FDR, but you're a very heavy smoker.
	Hmm...
	Yeah, of course.
	I'm not perfect.
	I'm not perfect.
	Oh dear!
	I must withdraw a tiny shred of sympathy.
	But anyway, go on.
	Where was I? So yeah, I'm really starting up life actually.
	I'm getting past not being able to do anything and being crippled by trauma and yeah, really getting active again.
	But the problem is I'm Really forced to apply to jobs like the military-industrial complex or oil drilling or all kinds...
	How do you say it?
	Wait, wait.
	You live in the EU, right?
	Yeah.
	What, 27 countries?
	Yeah.
	You speak two languages at least, right?
	I speak three.
	Three?
	I actually am...
	Some of them like non-smoking countries, they're off the list.
	I'm just curious.
	I am thinking about maybe looking in Germany because the laws are way easier for getting a job and getting education inside the workplace.
	But here in Holland it's like the catch-22, they call it.
	You have to have Experience to get a job, but you can't get a job if you don't have the experience.
	And you have to get an education, but that costs money, so you need a job to get an education.
	But, yeah.
	So, it's really...
	Listen, are you saying that you don't have much of a work history, right?
	All over the place.
	All over the place.
	That's a bit of a problem.
	I've moved 17 times.
	I've lived in three different countries.
	I've been kicked around from my mother's to my father's, kicked out of the house, had to move to different cities.
	So I've been totally uprooted and I've got nothing left to put it like that.
	What do you mean nothing left?
	Of a circle of people that I can...
	Communicate with or...
	Well, my parents died the last two years, so I don't have them anymore.
	I'm really all alone and it's all down to me making sure that this gets to a point where I can say, yeah, well, we're reasonably happy now.
	And I'm doing good.
	I'm not depressed anymore, especially because you said, well, first of all, check if you're not just surrounded by assholes, and I did.
	Yeah, that's right.
	I have a problem.
	It turns out that it's carbon-based, weighs between 150 and 250 pounds, and surrounds me like the plague.
	Anyway.
	Yeah.
	So I'm really working on that, but it's really tough to keep your back straight in this really bent Society, especially the workplace, is just not healthy anymore.
	No, I know.
	No, I know.
	No, and I'm aware that one of the things that gave me the impetus for what I'm doing now is that as it became sort of morally sensitive and had integrity and courage and wished to speak up, it became a bit of a challenge in the business world, right?
	Anyway, for reasons I don't have to explain to you.
	Okay, okay.
	So the question is, how do you do the entrepreneurial thing?
	Well, you're doing the therapy thing.
	You're doing the self-knowledge thing.
	Good for you.
	Fantastic.
	That's all kinds of good stuff.
	And that's, of course, what you should be working on.
	So good for you.
	Yeah, I really ended up watching your show because you had reason and evidence.
	And that's why I continued following the process.
	I think it was the right...
	I really want to keep it up and I'm really getting the hang of pointing out the gun in the room to the people here in Holland and I'm starting to get a bit more eloquent with things.
	It's really difficult and I'm just trying to keep practicing but I think I really need to start something of my own because there's no other way of Yeah, I think that's right.
	I think once you pass a certain threshold in your skepticism of society, fitting into any existing hierarchy becomes more and more challenging, right?
	So, you know, I think you're right for what it's worth.
	If you can start something on your own, I think so much the better.
	And so your question is sort of how do you do that?
	Yeah.
	If you can give me some pointers.
	Right.
	Is there anyone that is in your life, I know you say that you are alone to a large degree, but is there anyone in your life who you would consider going into business with?
	No.
	At the moment, no.
	Well, just want to check.
	Yeah.
	Are there any particular fields of interest for you that could be economically viable, right?
	So, you know, all men like...
	But that doesn't mean that you can necessarily make a living at it.
	Of course, many have tried.
	Many are calling.
	Well, I've been thinking.
	Because I've had this large variety of studies, which I didn't complete, but still the knowledge is there.
	I'm really interested in just starting to grow food and make your own little...
	Human resources reactor to provide and to help grow in a community.
	An integrated, organized system of being independent.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	Okay, give me a sense.
	You may have heard this sort of elevator pitch, right?
	It's the idea that you have like 30 seconds to describe your business.
	Yeah.
	Okay, so I'm really trying...
	This is all new for me.
	This is a particularly new idea.
	But think of an old apartment block or an office building, like a big building and just on every bottom floor you make a shop.
	You sell food.
	You sell pots and fertilizer for the plants you need to grow the food.
	We sell the pumps and the electronics and all the things you need for the produce.
	We sell for you to do that yourself.
	For you to set up your own little farm.
	Also in the second floor you can have an animal shop.
	Third floor you can have aquaponics farms so you can farm fish, you can farm All kinds of produce.
	The next floor you can have a server room which you can maintain the webshop, you can maintain administration and you can develop your own software platform.
	You can have above that an atelier for art and design.
	Sorry, these are all things that you're offering to people but why should they invest?
	What is the average cost per person and why should they invest?
	Because it's a community project.
	People don't make decisions.
	I'm going to be an annoying investor guy.
	Community project is not why people do things.
	Let's say it's going to cost me $5,000 to buy into your system.
	Why should I do it?
	Because you'll end up independent of me, of the system.
	You'll be able to do it yourself.
	But independent, what does that mean?
	You mean I'll be able to grow my own food?
	Why would I want to do that?
	Well, if you don't want to do that, you can come to our store and you can buy our naturally grown organic food.
	But if you want to produce your own food… Is it going to be cheaper?
	The quality is going to be very good.
	So it's going to be more expensive, but the quality is going to be better?
	Yeah, but there's no logistics required because it's all in the building.
	So there's a lot of costs to be cut in the process of just making a really efficient building that can just be...
	Yeah, like a reactor of human resource.
	Okay, so, sorry, you have to, listen, sorry, the first thing about entrepreneurship, in my opinion, is that adjectives don't count.
	I'm sorry.
	This is the part where you listen.
	You have to start to narrow down what it is that you're selling and how it's different from what everyone else is selling.
	And then you have to figure out what the market size is.
	So what's the market for organic produce or self-sufficiency as a goal or whatever.
	In Holland or in your neighborhood, right?
	I'm listening.
	No, go ahead.
	It's growing.
	I think it's more...
	Growing is an adjective, so this doesn't count, right?
	You need numbers, right?
	So the market size is, you know, 25 million euros a year.
	That's the current market size.
	It's been growing by this amount over the past five years.
	So in five years, it's going to be 50 million and so on.
	So first of all, how many people are even going to be willing historically to pot money for what it is that you're doing?
	And then you have to provide a value proposition.
	Right?
	Which is, people should choose you because...
	So, like, way back in the day, we sold, my brother and I, when we started a company, we sold software that helped people audit environmental issues on their land, right?
	Now, companies that used our software offered a 40% discount On these environmental audits, which ran like $2,500 or $3,000 or whatever.
	So they offered a 40% discount if they bought the software.
	So we could show, you know, if you buy our software, by the time you've done 5 or 10 audits, you've saved all the money of buying our software and after that it's all profit.
	Yeah.
	And we knew my brother was in the industry.
	We knew the size.
	Anyway, it doesn't matter, right?
	So the point is that you have to figure out the size of the market.
	You have to figure out what it is you're bringing to bear on the market, why people should choose you, what's your differentiation, what's your value proposition and so on.
	And then that's to even think about starting a business in a particular area.
	And then what you need to do is you need to figure out how much money you need.
	Cash flow is key.
	Cash flow is everything in business because you could be making a million dollars six weeks from now, but if you've got no money to live on for six weeks and you can't make it, it doesn't matter, right?
	So figure out how much money you need to start and then if you need other people's skills to help you start, who you're going to work with, all that kind of...
	These are all very boring, mundane, practical things to do.
	So now that's one way of doing it.
	It's a real challenge, right?
	And you might want to take a little course on business or startups or whatever.
	I'm sure that would be very helpful.
	Now, the other thing you can do, because I didn't do all of that when I was starting FDR.
	I did all of that before, but I didn't do that when I was starting FDR.
	So what I did when I started FDR was I had another job, and this was my hobby.
	And I tried to grow my hobby into something that could be more than a hobby.
	So by the time, I think in 07, I can't remember, 07 I think it was, that I quit my career to work on this full-time, I had some data about whether I could make it more than a hobby because I had some donation.
	I could look at the trends.
	I could figure out how many people.
	I said, okay, well, let's say there are this many libertarians in the world.
	Let's say there are this many people who would also be interested in the other aspects of philosophy I bring to bear.
	Let's say that 5%...
	of those people donate.
	Let's say that the average donation is X amount of dollars.
	Like I could do a spreadsheet and somewhere I've still got it where I say, okay, well, these are my costs going to be my server costs, my hardware costs and so on.
	Here's the tax advantages I'll have by switching from being a career software guy to an entrepreneur working out of the home, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So, you know, you could either do all of that work ahead of time or you can start it as a hobby if that's at all possible and get some numbers which you can then work To project how the business is going to grow in the future.
	Those are the only two things that I've ever done.
	There may be some other way of doing it, but that would be my suggestion.
	Also, you might want to visit a website called Voluntary Life.
	Mike, if you can just double-check the website.
	It's a friend of mine who's been a successful entrepreneur, very successful.
	I think he's writing a book about entrepreneurship at the moment that's worth looking at, worth reading.
	But he runs a blog, and I don't know if they still do calls about entrepreneurship.
	But those kinds of things, you know, you've just got to start talking to entrepreneurs and sharing ideas, sharing experiences, you know, obviously be mostly listening to begin with, but that would be, those would be sort of my suggestions.
	Yeah, thanks.
	And that's thevoluntarylife.com for those that are interested.
	Thevoluntarylife.com.
	And I would, yeah, just start to get into the conversation and I think that would be great.
	Yeah, I will.
	I will.
	Investigate.
	It started as a hobby, so that's very true.
	And I'm still looking for an alternative job to make sure that this dream can come true in some way.
	And I'm still looking for it.
	All right.
	Well, listen, best of luck with it.
	I hope it works out for you.
	And please post on the Free Domain Radio Message Board.
	This is a good resource.
	I say this to people all the time.
	But I would, you know, you free to write a message for a lot of really smart and great people who are looking, meet up with people, get a community, find people in your neighborhood.
	I just got a car.
	So my life is really changing at the moment.
	I think there will be a lot of good things ahead.
	Okay, good.
	Well, listen, best of luck to you, and I'm very sorry for this Sgt.
	Major self-improvement scenario that you had as a child.
	That's just wretched.
	I'm so sorry about that.
	Yeah, it was a lot to deal with, and the fact that now they're gone, it's like I didn't have any closure or something, so that's a bit weird.
	I'm sorry about that too, but again, I'm sure your therapist will help with that.
	You don't need people to be alive to get closure.
	You just have to, in fact, if they're dead, closure can be easier to get because at least there's no hope for change.
	It's not like they're going to come back to life and be better parents.
	So you can get closure even more quickly if they're dead, which is tragic but one of the few fortunate consequences that can come out of that kind of situation.
	Yeah, that's true.
	All right.
	Well, thank you very much.
	And keep me posted if you can.
	I will.
	I will.
	Use the message board if you can to see if you can find people close to you.
	At least people you can chat with about entrepreneurship.
	I've heard about a group in Holland, so I will certainly check it out.
	Do it.
	Maybe they're in Christiana.
	Anyway, thanks so much.
	Do we have another caller, Jane?
	Sorry, Mike.
	You white people.
	I'll look this up.
	We actually have a couple callers on the line depending on how far into overtime you want to go.
	Overtime!
	It's the closest I get to athleticism these days.
	Alright, sorry to keep it a little brief.
	I'm happy to go over if people are happy to stay.
	I love you guys so much.
	You are the reason that I do it and the reason I'm able to do it, so let's go.
	Can you hear me?
	Yes, go for it.
	Alright, well, first quick thing on the response to the pollution thing.
	Man, you went into a lot of detail on that.
	It seems a little bit overboard.
	My response to it is basically, yeah, you can sue somebody for polluting.
	And the judgment that you're going to get is basically something along the lines of, well, you're polluting all these other things, so...
	Your compensation is about $2.
	And so let's move on.
	Yeah.
	The reason I went into such detail is I literally got thousands of responses of people saying, oh, you're saying that you have to accept pollution to live in society.
	Well, that's just like saying you have to accept taxation to live in society.
	And it's like, no, no, no, no.
	It's not the same at all.
	So that's sorry.
	I know I went into annoying detail, but trust me, the amount of responses I got was kind of annoying.
	But go on.
	Well, I'm with them on that.
	I mean, but the response is basically...
	Sorry, you agree with that perspective?
	Yeah, but they have a claim for damages that are minimal that are almost non-existent.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Are you saying that to accept...
	So you listen to the podcast, and are you saying that you accept the argument that pollution is the same as taxation?
	Yeah.
	Pollution without compensation, if one demands compensation, is somewhat yes.
	Why should pollution always involve compensation?
	Well, you are introducing an unwanted chemical, air or whatever.
	Why is pollution unwanted always?
	So for instance, let's say I move into a new house and there's no driveway.
	It's just gravel, right?
	I get the driveway paved and it's really smelly around my house for a few days.
	That is not unwanted pollution, right?
	Right, but you don't get to choose the argument.
	I'll choose the argument.
	Sorry, wait, wait.
	Why don't I get to choose the argument?
	Because I'm the one that's making the claim, so I have to defend myself.
	I'm the one that is making the proposition, so I should be able to make the...
	No, no, you can say I would prefer to use one of my own scenarios, but there's no rule that says I can't and you might.
	But the burden of proof is on me, right?
	No, I put a scenario forward and you can say I would prefer to use one of my own scenarios, but you don't get to say to me, you don't get to use a scenario.
	Of course I can, whatever you're having a conversation.
	I can say that the moon is made of cheese.
	Yeah, yeah, sorry.
	Be nice about it, that's all I'm saying, but go ahead.
	If you want to use your scenario rather than mine, that's fine.
	Alright, so I'm going to make the claim that, well, I'm living in my own perfectly happy hunky-dory house and land and doing my thing and you're going to put up a pig farm near me and, well, the air blows over my area and I've got a wafting sense of pig dung.
	Well, it's It's certainly annoying that I've got pig smells coming over my area, but the fact is that I did not beforehand set up an insurance agency that would try to prevent that from happening to me, or I did not try to make liens on land that was needed to prevent that from happening.
	The amount of acclaim that I have against it is of some sort, but the damage is...
	The claim of damages, as far as the net result, is minimal.
	Okay, well, I've got a slightly uncomfortable sense of smell.
	Alright, so what?
	I am still driving on the roads that the new Pig factory has put up.
	Each one of them has trades and costs, and so each one of us are making trades and costs.
	Sure, I can make a claim of loss, but the claim of loss is pretty much negligible.
	Of course, there are lots of other options, right?
	If somebody's putting a pig farm or whatever, you can get everyone to boycott him.
	Oh, sure.
	Absolutely.
	Don't talk to this guy.
	Don't sell him groceries.
	He's putting in this stinky pig farm.
	You're not the only person affected.
	There are probably hundreds or thousands of homeowners who are going to be upset.
	And so you can all go and say, listen, give me $150, you 2,000 people.
	We'll buy up all this land.
	We'll have a wonderful place to take our kids.
	We'll build a park.
	And we won't have this...
	This stinky smell.
	It's going to be much cheaper.
	Or if the guy builds it in the middle of the night stealthy or whatever, then you can all go and say, you know, we're not going to pay our electricity bills if you deliver electricity to this guy.
	I mean, you can come up with six million different ways of dealing with it that don't involve the stage or even force.
	But go on.
	And lo and behold, guess what?
	The price system kicks into gear and what people consider a value is a level of pollution that they're willing to accept or adopt is represented by the price system, by the price system regarding land use, by the price system regarding air use, all the price system, you know, the price system will automatically dictate what it is that people are willing to accept.
	And if you're one of the few that says, well, I want a higher standard, well, guess what?
	You're going to have to pay a little bit more to move into an area where those Problems don't exist.
	You pay a premium for being in a non-polluted environment, so to speak.
	People don't want animal smells coming across their property.
	It's kind of gross, right?
	I think society as a whole would rather buy animal products that didn't inconvenience or stink up the lives of thousands of people and their children.
	And so there could be a third party agency that verifies, you know, this animal product was produced without neighborhood horror, you know, without stinking up the playgrounds of children, you know, non-stink fest labels or something like that.
	And people would then just only buy from those farms that didn't stink up.
	People's childhoods and schools and playgrounds and this and that and the other, right?
	So the logo could be a child fainting into a cow shit or something, right?
	So there's lots of ways in which this could be dealt with, but go ahead.
	So the point I was making is that basically you didn't use the understanding that we have of People's desires in the price system as to how it will affect pollution and instead you basically said well it is this assumption that We get all these good things out of it.
	But that's your placing your value system upon the other thing.
	But we all know that the values of...
	You keep dropping these things in.
	You understand.
	It's kind of annoying.
	You keep dropping these bombs in and then running away like you didn't do anything.
	You're imposing your value system on others.
	But to continue, it's like, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait.
	That's not fair, right?
	How am I opposing my value?
	Let's go back to my example.
	Let me give you an example of what you're talking about.
	Let me finish.
	I can't pave my driveway and then sue the driveway paving company for making a smell around my house, right?
	Obviously.
	Obviously, because I'm choosing that pollution to have the benefit of a paved driveway, right?
	Correct.
	But if I'm the next-door neighbor and you're paving your driveway over there...
	Now I've got all this asphalt smell that I didn't necessarily agree to, but that's not addressing the point.
	The point that was made...
	Well, okay, that's assuming that the Nabus driveway is not paved as well, right?
	Sure, let's assume it's not.
	Because if it is, then he's got no right to complain about driveway smell if he's already paved his own driveway, right?
	Let me impose my smell on you, but if you impose your smell on me, that's terrible, right?
	But of course, it is a reasonable expectation that if you move into a house in the suburbs, it's a reasonable expectation that the majority of people are going to pave their driveways.
	Because if you drive around in the suburbs, you almost never see a driveway that's not paved, right?
	Look, I totally get that.
	And the only thing that I wanted to add to it...
	I'll finish my point.
	You are in a big hurry.
	So you can't move into a neighborhood where everyone's going to pave their driveway and then be shocked that people are paving their driveway, right?
	Totally concur.
	Okay, so this is a pollution that everybody voluntarily chooses in return for...
	And I would argue it's in return for less pollution.
	If you pave your driveway, you track less grit and dirt and crap into your house, which means you have to vacuum less, which means you use less electricity, which means your house, the air is cleaner.
	So in general, it's less pollution to pave your driveway than it is to not pave your driveway.
	So you'll take a smell for a couple of days in return for the convenience and the lower electricity bills and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	So this is all I'm saying, is that people voluntarily choose...
	The lesser of pollution, but choosing the lesser of pollution still involves choosing pollution.
	But that's not the same as choosing taxes.
	Taxes is not something people choose.
	It's something that's violent.
	You can't opt out of taxes.
	I think that the thing that I really was kind of frustrated is that you didn't specifically bring up the price system as far as how prices determine.
	I've done that millions of times before and that was a specific response to it.
	Anyway.
	I agree with you in a lot of ways, but I just wanted one more point just to hammer it home.
	Look, you're going to be able to buy properties that exist in this world where you don't have any of this crap that you don't want.
	Bringing in Alfonso and his 16 brothers to make your landscape the way it is instead of having a backhoe, well, it has its costs.
	You know, if you don't want to have any gas-burning vehicles in your area, well, then solar-powered hovercrafts are going to be kind of expensive, so you're going to have to pay those costs.
	Well, yeah.
	Let's say you don't want any gas-powered vehicles in your area, then clearly you wouldn't want to go to a grocery store, right?
	And clearly you would never want to call an ambulance, right?
	And clearly you wouldn't want people to visit you using cars, and clearly you wouldn't want any roads around you, right?
	And people can do that if they want.
	Of course.
	I assume you can go by.
	I don't know how you'd get there.
	I guess you'd walk.
	I don't know.
	You wouldn't want any materials delivered to you.
	You wouldn't want any internet because internet is supported by people driving roads to fix ISPs and all that kind of stuff.
	But they could have that environment if they wanted only solar-powered hovercrafts without roads delivering all of the groceries and all of the internet and all of the other things, which is obviously ludicrous because it's so incredibly expensive.
	Theoretically, yes.
	Unless the chain of delivery systems was all solar-powered hovercraft, and no gasoline was used to get the gasoline or oil or whatever it is out of the ground, and no machines were used to produce...
	Like, if you say, I don't want machinery, then don't buy groceries.
	Because, I mean, it's all factory farming these days, right?
	That's why so many of us are not dead.
	Anyway, I'm going to move on to the next caller, if you don't mind, unless there's anything else that you really wanted to...
	Thank you again for all of your insights, and thanks.
	All right, let's move on to the next.
	All right, Clay, you're up next.
	Go ahead.
	Hi.
	Hello.
	What's up?
	So, primarily, first of all, you're probably going to have to excuse me if I... Just, like, don't be...
	Wait up.
	For me, because I stutter occasionally, so I'm going to occasionally, when I'm talking, say that.
	So if you could just wait for me to finish what I'm saying.
	Oh, listen, no problem.
	If it's any consolation, Mike was up while I was recording my video about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin.
	And I realized I made a mistake in one of the slides.
	I think it took me eight takes to record a 45-second slide.
	I mean, it was ridiculous.
	It was embarrassing.
	Anyway, so I get it.
	You know, I mean, so...
	Go ahead.
	Very nice video, by the way, on George Zimmerman.
	I'm not sure nice is the right word, but it's one of these things.
	I'm sorry it had to be...
	I thought it had to be made, but I'm glad it seems to be useful for some people.
	Yeah, so, some background, I'm working this summer, not only working, it's more of a volunteer service at this Department of Commerce station,
	which deals with I'm very interested in science,
	and that was the only semi-biological volunteer place.
	So, I mean, I almost fell into it, really.
	So I'm working there, and obviously it's science and government-run, basically.
	So there's plenty of statists and liberals, and it's, you know, I'm listening to presentations of people who think that port authorities are Private institutions and things like that, and it's very frustrating at times.
	And I was basically curious on how you make the case for liberty to scientists, really.
	Yeah, I mean, it's tough, right?
	Because, I mean, science has a methodology that is voluntary.
	And at the same time, science is fundamentally anarchy.
	But scientists are paid usually by the state.
	And so it's a real contradiction.
	And I have learned from long and bitter experience that it is almost useless, almost always useless to argue against somebody's economic self-interest.
	Because you get all this ex post facto justifications for blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
	So people who are making money off the state funding of science...
	It's just like, who cares?
	They're easier people to talk with than people whose income and prestige and education and all that come from, validated, paid for, supported by the state, right?
	So I don't bother arguing against people's economic self-interest.
	I don't go down to the unemployment office and attempt to convince people of anarchy and the evils of the welfare state.
	I don't go to military-industrial conferences and say the military-industrial conference.
	Who cares?
	People just follow their economic interest and their philosophical justifications, their moral justifications, they just follow after them like a tail follows a kite.
	Why bother?
	What's driving them is the economic justifications.
	I mean, it's the global warming argument, right?
	Billions of dollars being pumped into global warming and that buys a lot of guys with pocket protectors because that's the way it goes.
	And then they will talk all this shit because they want the money and blah, blah, blah.
	So I don't bother arguing against people's economic self-interest.
	It's an insult to philosophy because it's pretending that somehow their ideas came first and that's bullshit.
	People's economic interest almost always comes first and the ideas follow obediently behind them like a bunch of mutilated little ducklings after an evil goose.
	So ducklings, goose, duck.
	Goslings, goose.
	Please assemble your own metaphor.
	I'm afraid this metaphor has been delivered to you in an Ikea box.
	Good luck.
	So, but if I were to talk to a scientist who was actually interested in reason, then I would say, why don't you all submit your scientific hypotheses or theories or findings to a government agency which then will tell you whether it's true or false?
	They'd say, well, because that would be corrupting, right?
	Because the whole point is this is a voluntary peer-reviewed, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	We all follow the same methodology, but there's no central authority which validates science.
	There is only an agreed-upon methodology, right?
	Say, ah, you're an anarchist.
	No central authority, only an agreed-upon methodology.
	And you can choose not to follow this methodology.
	You can say, my findings are validated by, you know, my tarot card reading and how my cat coughed up a hairball on a picture of Richard Dawkins this morning.
	In which case, fine, you're doing something, but it sure ain't science, right?
	So, I mean, I would just point out that science can't possibly work with a coercive authority at its center and say, ah, you see, well, neither can society fundamentally in the long run.
	So that would be my approach.
	Okay.
	So, for example, I'm I come from a long line of scientists, really.
	My grandpa and dad are both scientists.
	Is it, sorry to interrupt you, is it completely morally wrong of me to ask you for a William Shatner imitation?
	Probably, probably cold-hearted and mean, but that's just what popped into my mind.
	But please, go ahead.
	So you come from a long line of scientists?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So, I talk about a long line of scientists and for someone like my father to support, you know, the state funding of science and the state and by association violence against me, how do I deal with living with that?
	Because I'm like 17, I don't really have a choice to leave, so how do I live with that, really?
	Well, I mean, it's a majority position driven by economic interest.
	I mean, it's virtually impenetrable, right?
	I mean, the majority of people think, you know, science funding, certainly the majority of scientists and the majority of science advocates, what are they all?
	Ah, funding, increase science, R&D, the future of civilization, internet, give us money, you bastards!
	I mean, that's the way it works.
	And if your dad has economic self-interest combined with a majority position and what is considered to be a virtuous position, then mere reason is almost completely helpless in the face of that.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	So I shouldn't...
	Take it as a reflection as how he feels about me solely because it's his own self-interest.
	Well, if I were in your situation, I would avoid that knowledge for the time.
	Because, I mean, you're in an independent position, right?
	And so, look, you don't have to pursue the truth at all costs.
	The truth is not a sword to be drawn no matter what, right?
	Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.
	Now, if you wanted to, you could sit him down for an afternoon when you were going to be uninterrupted.
	You could put up a whiteboard and you could lead him through the whole argument about how by supporting...
	Science funding, he's supporting violence against you, in particular debt against you, right?
	I mean, scientists ain't paid out of real money.
	Nobody in the government has paid out of real money.
	It's all paid out of debt and fiat and indebting and enslaving your poor generation, right?
	Yeah.
	So you wouldn't run up a credit card in my name, right?
	I mean, that would be immoral.
	And yet you're willing to take all this money, which doesn't exist.
	Yeah.
	Throwing the debt through inflation and treasury bonds and shit onto me, right?
	Now, you could step all the way through that, right?
	And you could be really rigorous and you could be really focused and so on, right?
	And that's rolling some significant dice with your dad, right?
	Yeah.
	Now, if you come up double sixes, woohoo!
	Now, that doesn't mean he's got to quit his job or anything.
	I don't care what people do with the truth.
	I only care that they get the truth.
	Because people always say, well, now that I know this, what do I do?
	I don't care.
	Two and two make four.
	Go be an engineer or go play with blocks or go get a suntan.
	At least know that two and two make four.
	I really don't care particularly what people do with knowledge.
	I just care that they have knowledge.
	Because if I care what people do with knowledge, then I'm dictating results, not methodology.
	I only care about the methodology, right?
	So, he might then, I mean, and it's not that tough an argument, right?
	So then he'd say, wow, you know, I haven't thought about it this way, but I can't find an argument against you.
	I don't know what I'm going to do.
	But, you know, thank you for bringing this, right?
	Because scientists are all about, you know, can you believe that the Pope tortured the age of Galilean?
	You know, can you believe how religious people react?
	To the truth, how they get upset and offended, right?
	Okay, well, you know, bring anarchism to a scientist and see how quickly they look like the Pope, right?
	It's a human condition.
	It's not peculiar to religious people, for heaven's sakes, right?
	I mean, scientists are religious when it comes to the state, right?
	They're statheists, right?
	I mean, they've taken their religious irrationality and stuffed it into a social collective called the state.
	And they will look like religious fundamentalists when you bring rational arguments about voluntarism and the state to them.
	And that's hard for their self-esteem, right?
	Because they've looked down upon superstitious people their whole life But, you know, 99 times out of 100, when you bring arguments to do with anarchism to a scientist or an atheist, I mean, and I've had this happen repeatedly, and you can see some pretty brutal and gruesome shows on my channel about all of this, where I debate atheists about the state.
	And, you know, they short circuit as surely as all other fundamentalists do.
	I mean, so, you know, Christians say that atheists are fundamentalists.
	It's like, well, they are for the most part.
	They're just fundamentalists about the state, not about atheism.
	You know, crazy until you have a full personality workover, until you really pursue self-knowledge, you know, you're crazy.
	You switch on the light.
	It's like the cockroaches aren't gone.
	They've just gone where you can't see them, right?
	And so if you've got an area in your life where you've got a fair amount of rational clarity, it doesn't mean your crazy is gone, it just means it's gone where you can't see it, which means usually into the state, right?
	Ah, no gods!
	Excellent!
	Ah, look how rational I am!
	It's like, you know, taxation is the institution of force.
	What?!
	Heathen!
	Heathen!
	Burn him!
	You get all kinds of medieval life, right?
	Social contract, uh...
	I personally – I mean if you have this conversation and it goes well, that's fantastic.
	If you have this conversation and it goes badly, I just want to point out you're not in an independent position as yet.
	You can have the conversation or not.
	I can't – nobody can tell you and anybody who tells you is an idiot.
	Nobody can tell you whether you should or shouldn't have that conversation.
	But it's pretty tough.
	Because, you know, if I were your dad, and I'm not saying this is what your dad would say, but if I was your dad and I wasn't feeling particularly integrity-bound during that conversation, I'd say, so you believe that my income is immoral.
	Well, then you should stop taking it.
	And if you're not willing to act on that, I'm not saying you should, right?
	I understand this.
	But if you're not willing to act on that, it's kind of hard to say to your dad, well...
	Well, just work for a little longer because I need your income, but your income is immoral and you should stop taking it.
	I mean, do you understand?
	We're all bound up in this stupid act system.
	So I personally would wait for some independence if you want.
	You never have to have that conversation if you don't want to.
	But if you do want to, really make sure you slowly, gently, positively, patiently recognize that it might take him weeks or maybe even a few months to accept the truth and make it funny.
	Like, point out he's reacting like a fundamentalist, right?
	When he reacts to this information.
	But I would wait for some independence myself.
	But obviously it's up to you.
	Thank you.
	You're welcome.
	That is basically all my questions.
	So I'll leave you to the next caller.
	Thank you.
	Thanks.
	And listen, great talking, dude.
	It was really well done.
	Good job.
	Thank you.
	Listen, that's hard as hell to do, right?
	I mean, isn't this like a stutterer's worst nightmare?
	Hey, would you like to be broadcast to hundreds of thousands of people live?
	Oh, my God.
	Good for you, man.
	Good for you.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I try to participate in class and everything.
	So I'm used to like...
	Great job.
	Well done.
	Thank you for having me.
	All right, Mohammed, you're up.
	Thank you.
	My brother, what's up?
	Hi, how are you?
	I'm well, how are you doing?
	Do you hear me?
	Oh, thank you.
	I'm fine, thank you.
	I don't believe I'm talking to you, so I have a lot of fear right now.
	If you want me to say something to be freaky so you imagine you're dreaming, I can certainly come up with that.
	Look out, the pelican retrieved my gonad from the other pelican and now it's flying into the sun south.
	Anyway, go on.
	Okay, I know I'm not dreaming, but I kind of have a lot of fear.
	So I've been listening to your podcast for some time.
	I found your website through Alice Miller.
	One of her emails, somebody quoted your book, and I found that she really liked it since I trust her.
	So I went to your website.
	So the past two years have been very, very difficult for me.
	Actually, I live in Montreal, Canada.
	I'm French-speaking, so sometimes my English doesn't really...
	Well, Mohammed, of course.
	Yeah, naturally.
	Yeah, I come from an old colony of France, North Africa.
	I immigrated to Canada some time ago, about 13 years ago, since after my brother died.
	My brother was very close to me, unlike my other members of my family.
	When he died, I felt everything empty.
	There was nothing to stay about, so I conversed with my parents to pay my studies and everything.
	I'm sorry, it's obviously a painful subject.
	I'm sorry to hear about it.
	How did he die?
	He died with a car accident.
	He drank a lot.
	We have a farm away from the capital.
	So he...
	Apparently he has a mistress, so maybe it didn't work well with her.
	So while driving back to home, he smashed a tree.
	A huge, like, eucalyptus tree that he moved that tree with a car.
	That means, like, he was running pretty much 180 kilometers an hour or something like that.
	Anyway, so...
	And was he drunk at the time?
	He was drunk, yeah.
	And he was ejected from the car.
	And, um...
	It is extremely, extremely painful.
	Obviously, no.
	In that area of the country, like people, they, you know, in farms, the people, like, they don't really wear, like taxi drivers, you know, they don't really wear seat belts and stuff like that.
	Anyway, so it was extremely painful for me.
	I felt a lot of emptiness.
	I remember that day.
	Obviously, my mom and my dad, nobody comforted me.
	I had to comfort them.
	And it gives you a little bit, a picture about my childhood, because kind of I was the caretaker for everyone.
	And nobody really cared for my feelings.
	Okay, so let me...
	I don't know where to go from here.
	I actually sent you an email not long ago.
	I don't know if you got it.
	It's to host at FreeBomainRadio.
	You still here?
	Yes, go ahead.
	Okay, thank you.
	Okay, so...
	Okay, let me speak a little bit about my childhood.
	I don't want to really take a lot of time from you because you've been talking a lot and I guess you're tired.
	So my childhood was extremely empty, but I was very an affectionate boy.
	Very, very affectionate.
	My dad is an alcoholic.
	My mom is extremely codependent and very, very...
	Wow.
	Sorry, I really am trembling here.
	My mom was very, very sadistic.
	Oh, gosh.
	Yes.
	I've really listened to a lot of podcasts, which really resonates a lot, a lot in my heart, a lot.
	Because I know exactly what you're talking about.
	And my mom, which I cut up all my relationship with her, I told her not to call me again.
	She's apparently suicidal because she kind of was like her surrogate husband for many years.
	Because my dad is kind of like a baby right now.
	He pisses on himself.
	He's 80 years old.
	He's a very old guy.
	And I don't really care because I don't really have any affection towards my dad.
	That was obvious since I was a teen.
	I was always in fight with him and I never really complied.
	Pretty much all my family said, how dare you do that?
	I said, I have to do that.
	With my mom, I had a lot of fights with her when I was a teen.
	I once jumped from the stairs just to show her how much I'm in pain and she told me I'm crazy, I'm crazy.
	That gives you the big picture.
	I had a very, very interesting dream not long ago and I really wanted to talk to you about because you love dreams and I love them too.
	It's kind of like sometimes I have nightmares which I really write down because they talk a lot and some other times.
	So my dream was It's a blue sky with a lot of lightning, in a blue sky.
	I go out, I see, it's kind of like amazing.
	I take pictures of that and then I look out of the, there's a TV set and in the TV set there's a dictator.
	You know, I come from a country where there's a dictator before.
	He was ousted in the Arabic revolution.
	And this dictator was talking to the crowd and I'm like, see, and I said, oh my God, this crowd, I don't belong to them.
	These are, like, all listening, but actually they are like sheeps, you know?
	They listen to crap.
	And I'm looking at all the crowd as if, like, I'm seeing everyone.
	I'm seeing this dictatorship, and I'm saying, oh, my God.
	And then after, I'm in a supermarket, and I'm, like, packing up things and taking things with me, and I have to leave.
	There was two people, an old guy and a woman, which appeared to be my cousin.
	I was crying, crying, crying, crying, and saying, listen, I have to leave.
	Because I see everybody's leaving.
	I'm happy for everybody who's leaving.
	Now it's time for me to leave.
	Because I've been reading a lot of Alice Miller websites with all the emails she sent.
	She answers the readers.
	And it's kind of, for me, like, I'm happy for them that they got freedom, emotional freedom.
	They got finally away from that trauma.
	They resolved the trauma.
	They resolved their anger and everything.
	That was like about three weeks ago, and then the old pattern comes back.
	Do you need to ask me any questions, Stéphane, or do you want me to continue?
	No, go ahead.
	Okay, good.
	Thank you.
	Okay, so I'm a gay guy.
	I've been in a relationship with a guy for approximately about seven years.
	This person has strong narcissistic traits.
	Doesn't feel much.
	And very codependent person.
	And I felt like I have to save him.
	You know, all the...
	Excuse me, I'm going to say it that way.
	All the bullshit.
	I have to save people.
	I have to make them good so they can love me.
	They can take care of me.
	Actually, they don't need to take care of me.
	Just a smile, that would be fine.
	You understand how much I really don't ask...
	Yeah, because to be in a relationship, it can't just be you.
	It has to be you plus salvation, right?
	That is right.
	I'm sorry about that.
	I can understand how that would...
	Oh my God, it's really painful.
	I understand.
	When you say sorry, I really feel it.
	Because I am sorry for myself.
	I am really sorry for the child I was that has to go through all this.
	I honestly don't...
	I mean, I can tell you with a lot of honesty, I really don't...
	I don't deserve all of this because I was kind of like a flower in a garden.
	Sorry, what did you just say?
	I don't deserve having been treated that way as a child.
	I was really extremely beaten by my mom and I've been always doing things that really go against her will because I'm in therapy.
	And there was one day, I told my therapist, one day I was about 12, and my dad and my mom didn't really understand anything.
	I went to my room, closed the door, and I had a huge mirror standing on the wall.
	There's no frame, there's nothing.
	Just like a piece of glass.
	A mirror standing on the wall.
	I take that piece of glass and I would smash it.
	Obviously, I closed the door with the key, and I would smash it.
	I would smash the pieces, and they were going crazy.
	They would, open the door, open the door, open the door, you're hurting yourself, open the door.
	Then my psychologist told me, well, if you didn't do that, you would have gone crazy if you didn't do that.
	I said, yes!
	I said, yes!
	I would have gone crazy.
	I don't disagree, obviously.
	I'm not competent to disagree with your psychologist's interpretation, but there's something else that struck me as well, which is that if we have parents who hurt us, There's part of us that thinks, well, if my parents really understand that they're hurting me, then of course they'll stop.
	If I show my distress to them, then they'll stop.
	Once they get that they're hurting me, then of course they'll stop.
	And this is why, you know, this is why I think people, you know, they act out.
	Because they really want to communicate to their parents that they're being hurt.
	They drink, smoke, get drugs, tattoos, promiscuity, you know, crime.
	You name it, right?
	They're acting out their pain in the hopes that somebody will see and say, oh my god, I didn't realize I was hurting you that much.
	I have to stop.
	Yeah, well, that didn't happen, by the way.
	No, and the tragedy is that we assume that they don't want to hurt us.
	I mean, that's a great tragedy, and I understand why kids assume that.
	You describe your mom as a sadist, and there are people who, they've done studies, right?
	They show them intentional cruelty, and their happy, joy, joy, pleasure endorphin centers light up.
	It gives them pleasure to see pain.
	So the idea is to say, well, I'm going to break this mirror to show my parents how much I'm suffering.
	I'm going to get tattoos to show my parents how much I'm suffering.
	It's like you're feeding them.
	You're not changing them, you're reinforcing them.
	I'm feeding them for something.
	It's like yelling when a torturer inflicts pain on you in the hopes that he's going to stop inflicting pain on you.
	It's like, no, he's a torturer.
	That's his job.
	He wants to inflict pain on you.
	And when you yell, you're actually giving him happiness and satisfaction.
	Okay.
	No, I mean, I understand.
	I thought also about like maybe because my mom is kind of like, she's cold.
	She's very, very cold and she's very affectionate at the same time.
	By the way, maybe it's something really very important to tell you that she is a school teacher.
	And I don't know why this is important because I don't know.
	I've seen so many emails from people.
	Well, because she's obviously infected needs too, right?
	Excuse me?
	Sorry?
	Well, you know, hundreds or thousands of kids have passed through a classroom as well, right?
	She's an infectious agent.
	Crazy, right?
	Well, she is, but you know what?
	It's amazing.
	She gives them what she never gave me.
	And if she comes home from school, I would want to talk to her.
	She'd tell me, no, my head is like huge now.
	Like, I have a big headache.
	I can't talk to you.
	And I see her because she always put me in the same school, but she never was my teacher ever.
	But I was in the same school.
	And I see her talking to kids and everything.
	For me, I felt like I was always happy for them.
	I was happy for them.
	She gives them a lot.
	As if I take the joy from them, but not from her taking care of me.
	But I have an issue right now which I thought maybe it is important for me to talk about.
	So I've been in my therapy with feeling a lot of pain, feeling a lot of body pain, emotional pain, a lot of sadness, a lot of fear, panic attacks.
	But also what happens is I'm going to talk about a subject that I rarely heard or maybe never did a podcast on this is idealization.
	You still here, Steph?
	Yes, I'm sorry.
	I just missed that last part.
	It furs out for a second.
	If you could repeat?
	Yes, I can repeat that.
	No problem.
	So I want to talk about idealization.
	You know when you idealize somebody not to feel the pain?
	This mechanism helped me.
	I read the drama of the gifted child, but there's a lot of info about this.
	But I really respect a lot The path you took in your therapy.
	You always say, well, I'm not a specialist.
	I'm not this.
	But you have the experience.
	And that's probably why I love your podcast because you have the experience of this.
	You experienced it.
	So, I mean, I don't care about somebody who's a psychologist.
	He has like, I don't know, like diplomas and things like, you know, on the wall.
	I really don't care.
	I care about the experience, you know.
	And in my experience right now is the more I go into the pain, sometimes I have to idealize my ex.
	So I have a real problem right now with, not with my ex because he's a symptom, I've got to stop you at the beginning because I think you're formulating it incorrectly.
	Idealization is not something that we push out.
	It is something that is pulled out by the needs of others.
	You said that your ex had narcissistic tendencies.
	Yes.
	Right.
	Now, people who have narcissistic tendencies or who are in fact narcissists, they demand idealization from those around them.
	And if that idealization is not provided, then they punish, right?
	Which is why they're immune to criticism, why they react to criticism, particularly legitimate criticism with infantile rage, right?
	And punishment.
	Right.
	So you didn't sort of wake up one day and say, hey, I think I'm just going to idealize this person.
	Idealization was an emotionally abused, enforced demand to be in the relationship.
	You had to idealize, and any pullback from idealization, any questioning, any criticism would be met with childish and petulant anger and punishment.
	Am I anywhere close?
	Yes, I understand you, what you say.
	And I want to kind of a little bit relate to the experience because I experience these things inside my soul, inside my mind.
	So I experience them.
	And whenever I think about him, what happens is...
	I just see dark.
	I see like a hospital.
	I see like I'm going to be in a mental institution.
	So it's kind of like, kind of, it's really very negative.
	So I have to pull out myself from there.
	And whenever I don't speak to him or sometimes he ignores me, he doesn't really give me any call.
	And obviously I want to really like, I'm distancing myself and I'm really, really like physically distancing.
	So maybe we talk once a week, like sometimes with a message or something like that.
	I'm sorry to miss this obvious thing if you said it.
	Are you broken up?
	Yes.
	So why are you still in conversation?
	Yeah.
	Oh, you're broken up, right?
	I mean, if you're broken up, it's like you quit a job.
	I mean, you quit a job, you don't just go back and hang out, right?
	It's very painful, what you're asking.
	Extremely, extremely painful.
	I get it.
	No, I'm not saying it's not.
	Oh my god, I mean, it's a lot of pain.
	You know, people have different ideas about this, and I don't claim to have any monopoly on the right or truth thing, but, you know, if you break up, you break up.
	This sort of hanging out together, it just prevents you from moving on, doesn't it?
	Of course.
	It's kind of like keeping the illusion of maybe one day I'm going to be accepted.
	But yesterday I was listening to a podcast, which is a very, very important podcast for me, which is called Don't Take Out Your Childhood on Others or something like that.
	I don't know if you remember you did that.
	I think it's an old podcast.
	And it's extremely, extremely important to me, that podcast, because it shows how much my self-esteem, it shows a lot about my self-esteem.
	It shows a lot about me being unworthy.
	I mean, I get all of that, and I don't think you need any help to look at the low self-esteem elements that came out of your childhood.
	But I would argue that to idealize a narcissist comes out of hatred, not out of low self-esteem.
	If you idealize a narcissist, you're handing drugs to an addict, right?
	You understand that's an incredibly destructive thing to do to someone.
	Someone who's a narcissist, if you idealize them, which is feeding their narcissism, I mean, you are giving them a destructive drug, which is to keep reality away from a narcissist is incredibly destructive.
	This wasn't love, right?
	You idealize a narcissist out of hatred and contempt, not out of love, right?
	Yeah, it's not love.
	It's not love.
	No, no, no.
	I know that.
	No, I'm not in the illusion of love.
	Oh, I love him so much, so I have to go back to him.
	No, but you were talking about the insecurity that drove it, and I would argue that it's unconscious hatred that would drive feeding a narcissist with idealization.
	Yeah, but do you mean like hatred towards this guy or hatred towards his mom?
	No, fundamentally it would be hatred towards your mom, right?
	Because you would be forced to lie to your mother continuously, right?
	Being around a narcissist that you can't escape, which is, you know, would you say that your mother, I assume sadism comes with narcissism.
	Again, I'm no expert, but would you say that your mother also had- My mom kind of like borderline and narcissistic, you know, she needs like- Yeah, it's the homeless.
	She needs a lot of tension.
	It's the homeless, yeah, exactly.
	She needs a lot of propping up.
	So when you're around people who are deluded, they will punish you for the truth.
	So children, we all have an instinctive desire for truth and honesty and self-expression and so on.
	And so you are punished.
	For being honest around somebody who's narcissistic or deluded or vain or, I mean, you name it, right?
	Anybody who's addicted to any kind of delusion will punish you.
	And yet at the same time, they will demand truth from you and they will punish you for obvious dishonesty.
	So you have to be dishonest about your dishonesty, right?
	So if you say to your mom, well, mom, I'm now going to praise you because I'm frightened of you attacking me if I don't.
	In other words, if you're honest about your dishonesty, you get attacked too, right?
	Well, because the feeling is the fear of death, by the way.
	The feeling that drives all this is the fear of death.
	Sorry, which?
	I said, like, all the feeling that drives all this is the feeling of death.
	Sorry, which drives all what?
	Who are you talking about?
	I'm talking about all this feeling of being neglected, being abandoned, you know, going after a narcissistic person, you know.
	Are you talking about the victim of the narcissist or the narcissist?
	I'm talking about me.
	I'm talking about myself.
	Yeah, of course.
	I mean, if you don't please a narcissistic mother, then you fear death.
	Because if the narcissistic mother turns on you or abandons you, you're dead, right?
	I mean, you're a baby.
	You're an infant.
	You're a toddler.
	You're a child.
	You're dependent.
	But it's not really the fear of death.
	It's the fear of murder.
	We all fear death because death happens to everyone, but murder doesn't happen to everyone.
	Okay, let me talk about that.
	Okay, if you don't mind, I want to talk about that.
	I want to talk about the anger, about the rage.
	I really want to talk about that because it's kind of like I'm trying to get information from people who went through this process of living their strongest emotions and I pretty much don't get a clear view as if somebody was withholding info.
	It's kind of like I feel a lot of anger.
	And this in the body, I mean like I really trust my body, you know, kind of body expressions.
	So how I feel, I feel like I'm trembling inside.
	And I feel like trembling pretty much all over my body, you know.
	And the troubled people, they cannot see it, but I feel it inside.
	It's like very small, but trembles like very fast.
	And I feel it in my jaws.
	I feel it in my legs and everywhere.
	And I feel like I have a lot of anger when that comes.
	I feel like a huge anger.
	And then the fear of that anger would come and cripples me.
	What I would do, I'd just go dissociate right away.
	I would do anything.
	I would go smoke.
	I don't drink, but I would go smoke.
	Or I would sometimes hibernate inside my home.
	I don't go out because I'm afraid.
	So there is a guilt for feeling that feeling.
	I don't know if you get...
	I am sure you get what I'm saying.
	I completely understand.
	I mean, I really get it.
	So if there's more you want to say about it, I'm certainly happy to hear.
	Well, you see, because there is an answer of Miller, she said once to a reader, she said, You have very good reasons to be outraged,
	but there is no doubt that rage will leave you once fully understood its reasons.
	I want to understand that.
	I don't know if you heard what I just said.
	I hope the microphone didn't.
	Did you hear what I just read to you?
	I did.
	I did.
	And that I think this thing talks to me so much because I've been in pain in my therapy and my therapist is helping me a lot to get close to my anger and my rage.
	And I feel like I kind of like I feel there's something that wants to click in my mind, wants like a crack in my brain, you know, something that is going to give me the answer, going to give me what is exactly.
	And I fear it so much.
	I have panic attacks.
	I don't take public transportation most of the time because I feel like people would see me and would see me angry because I have a lot of anger.
	And it's not like kind of like...
	My anger is not...
	Sometimes it is a very reactive anger, but no.
	So most of the time it comes from my belly.
	It comes like my belly would like harden and tighten so much that I feel I'm, you know, and my feet will tighten so much.
	I feel like I'm going to be disabled or something so much.
	There's so much something wants to be released.
	If you can give me something about this, something that is with this body that wants to express something and the fear of expressing something, do you think I'm going to die if I go and rage and feel this rage and how to understand the reasons?
	Because she says, like, feel the rage and then it will only leave you when you understand the reasons, which comes to the podcast I've heard last night of you when you said it's like a cake.
	There's anger and there's another layer of Am I really that defective or something?
	And then there's the layer just beneath it which is I am not defective.
	I'm a normal and I'm okay human being.
	Your boyfriend knew about your history, right?
	He knows.
	He read Miller and he read a lot of books.
	I just need short answers here.
	Your boyfriend knew that you had a narcissistic mom, right?
	He has the same too.
	He knows and he has the same...
	No, no, I just need short answers here.
	Sorry to be annoying.
	Oh, okay, okay.
	So he knew...
	This is not essay questions, right?
	So he knew that you had a narcissistic mother.
	Well, yes.
	I mean, I don't know if he knows...
	Okay, no, no, that's all I need.
	Did he know?
	Does he know himself that he has narcissistic tendencies?
	Yeah, he talks about it sometimes.
	Okay.
	So, he knows that you're vulnerable to exploitation by narcissists, but as a narcissist, he thought it would be great to exploit you.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Isn't this what we call a fucking asshole?
	Yeah.
	I mean, am I mistaken here?
	No, you're not mistaken, but...
	Like, if I know a woman has a history of sexual abuse...
	And then I intimidate her into giving me sex.
	Am I not using my knowledge of her history in order to more profitably exploit her?
	Well, Steph, I have a lot of anger right now.
	Yes, yes, yeah, yeah.
	Okay, so what am I missing here?
	He knew you had a narcissistic, exploitive mom, and as a narcissist, he thought, hey, fucking great.
	I can milk this guy's childhood to feed my own narcissism because I know his history.
	Why would he leave for so long sometimes?
	Like he would leave for so long.
	No, no, no, no.
	Stop it.
	Stay with your feelings.
	Okay.
	Don't start wondering why he did shit that he did.
	Who cares about that?
	Okay, no, no.
	I'm sorry, but it's actually coming from my feeling, this question, because I feel like I've been replaced.
	No, no.
	This is coming.
	You said that you avoid your feelings.
	This is what you're doing.
	You're now trying to puzzle him out rather than stay with your own anger.
	When I talked about exploiting a victim of sexual abuse, you felt anger, right?
	Well, I've been sexually abused, by the way.
	I don't deny that.
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	I didn't know that that was a factor as well, so I apologize for not knowing that.
	Okay, but you understand that somebody...
	So the anger you felt in that moment, when I was talking about somebody who exploits their knowledge of somebody's history of sexual abuse to get sex, maybe that occurred as well.
	I don't know.
	But you felt anger in that moment, right?
	Yeah, well, he takes a lot of my articles I read on the internet, Bradshaw, all the books I read and everything, and he takes them and he gives them to somebody he wants to go out with.
	So he would help people just to gain their trust.
	And I found that.
	Each time I give him something, he would give them to somebody else.
	He never uses it.
	So I told him to get out.
	I tried to help him, kind of, because I'm kind of separating myself right now.
	Why are you trying to help this guy who exploited you and exploits others?
	Well, there's a lot of fear.
	There's anger and fear.
	Of what?
	Yeah.
	Well, really, Steph, honestly, I really need...
	I don't know what to tell you.
	I need to fix a lot of stuff.
	I need to feel my feelings.
	No, you see, you're becoming very abstract.
	I'm not trying to get you to get angry.
	I'm just pointing out that you had a moment of anger and then the first thing you did was try and puzzle, oh, why does he leave for so long?
	Well, I've got a lot of things I need to deal with.
	It's all very abstract, right?
	You're obviously very verbal, very intelligent, and so on.
	So this would be one of your primary, I would guess, as an amateur, I would guess this is one of your primary emotional defenses, is that when a feeling comes, you try to puzzle something out as a way of avoiding the feeling.
	I will give myself an intellectual challenge in order to avoid my feelings, right?
	I do.
	I do that by journaling.
	Let me try and figure out other people.
	Let me try and talk about my own emotions in the abstract.
	Let me distance myself from myself using concepts rather than experience the primal ape animal violation.
	I do that.
	I'm a very intelligent person, very talented photographer, videographer, you name it.
	I have a lot of qualities in me.
	You know you're doing it again right now, right?
	Excuse me?
	You're doing it again right now.
	You're describing yourself to me in abstract terms rather than have the experience of anger at having been exploited.
	Your mother exploits you and then your mother exploits you, your father exploits you, your boyfriend comes along and says, oh great, this guy's had a really damaged childhood, I can exploit that too.
	He should have been there to help you, he should have been there to support you.
	He certainly shouldn't have been...
	No, he goes away.
	Whenever I feel like strong emotions, I feel him like he has to go.
	And he goes.
	Of course, and he goes because strong emotions will reveal his nature.
	Strong emotions are like garlic to a vampire.
	Yeah.
	Well, actually, you know what?
	Correct.
	Identify exploitation.
	Yeah, it's like my mom.
	I've been sick a lot in my childhood, and...
	She would take care of me and stuff like that.
	Oh, my God.
	Dude, do you want to talk abstract?
	No, no, no.
	Or do you want to actually get in touch with your feelings?
	My God, you understand that this is like trying to push two magnets together.
	Stop talking so much about things that aren't emotional.
	No, I understand that.
	But I know that she took care of me because I was very weak.
	But whenever I took a stand, she would crush me.
	I understand that.
	I'm not on her side at all.
	I don't want to talk to her.
	I don't want to deal with her anymore.
	And I hate her.
	I have a lot of anger.
	And I know that.
	But I don't know what to tell you.
	Okay, well, my suggestion would be that meditation, I think, would be very important.
	If I were to give you sort of my amateur RX, right?
	So meditation is important because you have a very active top-of-the-brain, neofrontal cortex, hyper-abstract.
	This is your defense, right?
	You give yourself puzzles and you give yourself abstractions in order to avoid feeling.
	That would be my guess, right?
	Now, my guess also is that when you go into abstract mode, your physicality becomes quite tense.
	Your neck gets tense, your shoulders get tense, and after you've been defensive like this for a while, you probably have cramps.
	Is that fair to say?
	Okay, you get headaches, you get...
	I do.
	Whatever.
	So, get massages.
	Aromatherapy is really good.
	Do yoga, meditation, anything to physically relax the body.
	Now, when you feel anger, your natural response because of the trauma, my guess, would be to physically tense up.
	Well, don't do that.
	What you want to do, get relaxation tapes and so on, and when you start to feel angry, go lie down on the couch.
	You can get the eye patches that people wear.
	Put eye patches on and work to physically relax your body.
	Relax your jaw, relax your neck, relax your back, relax your thighs.
	Don't focus on the emotions because when you start to focus on the emotions, you bounce off them and go into interstellar abstraction mode.
	Focus not on the emotions.
	Focus on keeping your body physically relaxed as much as you can.
	So be in a position where you need no strength Don't sit up.
	Don't walk.
	Just lie down.
	And don't focus on the emotion.
	Just focus on physically relaxing your body.
	And that will tell your emotions that it's safe to come out.
	Because when your body tenses up, it invokes the fight-or-flight mechanism which suppresses deep emotion.
	So that would be my...
	When the emotion comes out, when I am like very relaxed...
	Don't worry about the emotion.
	I said don't focus on the emotion.
	You must listen.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Don't focus on the emotion.
	If you try and chase the emotion, you'll end up analyzing and abstracting and it will not come out.
	You need to physically relax your body, which tells your body that you're in a safe place for emotions to come out, and then the emotions will come out.
	Now, the moment the emotions start to come out, you're going to start to tense up, and then the emotions will go away.
	So you only focus on relaxing the body, don't focus on the emotions.
	Only focus on whatever body work you can do to relax.
	This is why, you know, yoga, lots of stretching, maybe even Pilates, I've done that as well, aromatherapy or deep massage or whatever it is.
	I mean, I used to do an hour and a half of yoga on a Sunday and then have a two-hour aromatherapy massage.
	And then I was ready to deal with some anger, right?
	But only focus on what you can control, which is the relaxation of your body.
	Don't focus on the emotions, which you can't.
	That would be my suggestion.
	And my last question, actually, or my last thing, it's about work.
	I work from home, and sometimes I have a lot of procrastinates.
	I'm so sorry.
	I have to be responsible.
	Mike, do we have one more caller?
	No, we're Mohamed.
	I'm going to have to keep it brief, though, because I'm pretty hungry.
	Yeah, no problem.
	Okay, my other question is I work from home, so I'm self-employed, and sometimes I have a lot of procrastination.
	I dissociate very quickly, and sometimes I can't do much, so I cannot, like, you know, Give the project back to the clients and stuff like that.
	And I would feel like a lot of self-attack.
	So it's kind of like I said to myself, oh, there's a big emotion to be felt right now.
	That's probably why I am procrastinating.
	It's kind of like I analyze a lot and I kind of intellectualize a lot of my emotions.
	So am I answering my question, by the way?
	I'm not sure what the question is.
	Well, the question, how to get out of procrastination when I'm in the middle of all this turmoil with my history, with my therapy, with my readings and stuff like that, how to get myself to work, how to get public, to go into public transportation, to go into the public without having anxiety and panic attacks, how to, what is the best way, in a way, to get to work on the therapy but also have a normal life?
	To feel a lot of big emotions.
	No, I get it.
	I get it.
	It's like saying, how do I have a normal weekend when I have to move?
	Well, you can't.
	I mean, if you're on digging up childhood and ending pathology and ending codependency and not supporting narcissists with passive-aggressive idealization and so on, that's a huge project, right?
	Yes.
	That's a huge project, and I'm telling you.
	It's going to save you years off your life.
	I mean, I don't just mean like you'll live longer.
	You probably will.
	But you just had a seven-year relationship, right?
	I mean, how many tens of thousands of hours did you spend in that relationship, which is basically added up to resentment, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	I'm not saying it was all bad or whatever, but...
	Obesity, because I self-attack.
	I would attack myself.
	The anger is towards me.
	I direct my anger towards myself.
	Yeah, so lots of negative experiences.
	And you sure as hell didn't fix your boyfriend, right?
	Oh, no.
	And he will not be fixed in 24 hours.
	Just the illusion that I'm going to fix him.
	No, I mean, the odds that he will be fixed is as close to nil as...
	It's like saying, I don't need to save for my retirement because I could win the lottery.
	Yeah, well, because when he's not here, I feel like, okay, he's fixed, he has a happy life.
	And this comes from my childhood because I have to discover this.
	Why do I idealize people when they go away from me?
	I feel like they left me because they have a joyful life right now.
	And, you know, sometimes it gets into my brain so...
	Well, you already told me the answer to that, which is that your mom was great with the other kids and would come home and be shitty with you, right?
	It's the same pattern, right?
	This is the pattern you learned from your mom.
	But anyway, so now that you're working, let's say...
	I'm sorry?
	Yeah, about the question I asked you, how to go into therapy, how to go into heavy stuff, but at the same time...
	No, no, I'm answering that question.
	Let me finish the answer before you interrupt me again with more actions.
	I'm sorry.
	If you spend 6 to 12 months of reduced labor at home, let's say you cut yourself down to part-time and you say, well, I can't do everything.
	So let's say I accept a drop in my living standard or I go into debt or whatever it is and I take on half the work.
	Instead of working 10 hours a day, I work 5 or 6 hours a day.
	Why?
	Because I've got to journal.
	Because I've got to fix things.
	Because I've got to, you know, therapy.
	I've got, you know, whatever.
	I've got to analyze my dreams.
	I've got to read books.
	I've got to listen to podcasts or whatever it is that you're doing to make yourself better.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's a part-time job, right?
	Oh, my God.
	And nobody expects to have a full-time job, take on a part-time job, and have a normal life, right?
	That's not going to happen.
	Now, the stuff I'm saying to you is going to be even more freaking time consuming.
	Oh, great.
	Now I've got to meditate.
	Oh, great.
	Now I've got to do yoga.
	Oh, great.
	Now I've got to do massage.
	Oh, great.
	Now I've got to physically learn how to relax.
	That's even more time out of my schedule.
	Damn it!
	Right?
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	So the reality is what you're doing is you are spending a lot of time now on self-improvement so that you don't waste another seven years in an exploitive relationship.
	That's right.
	So if you spent 6 to 12 months now working part-time heavily, I mean, when I was doing my therapy, I was doing 3 hours a week and at least 10 to 12 hours more of...
	That's what I do.
	I do two to half an hour a week.
	God, I mean, it was a part-time job.
	It was like 15 to 20 hours a week.
	My therapy journal typed up goes to like 800 pages.
	It's crazy.
	So...
	It's an investment now.
	You're not going to have a normal life, but what you're doing is you're going to have a normal life.
	And you're going to have a life without wasting so much time on destructive relationships.
	So I would cut back on, if you find it overwhelming, which I can completely understand, cut back on your hours.
	Yeah.
	Cut back on your hours at work, take on fewer obligations, and recognize that this is a huge investment in your future, where you can end up with a stable, happy, and loving relationship that hopefully can last your whole life long, where you have security, where you're not enabling, where you've got all this screwed up shit that's going on, where you can genuinely respect and admire your lover, and not have this endless photocopying of early trauma be called the future flags of your distant days.
	I mean, that's not what you want.
	You don't want to live your childhood over and over and over again.
	You don't want to be a slave to narcissists until they throw you in a six-foot hole in the ground and throw dirt in your face.
	You don't want that.
	I mean, you don't want your mom to win that much, right?
	I mean, that's terrible.
	So you're changing your path.
	That's a lot of work.
	And if it means that, you know, you got to buy a few less lattes every week because you're cutting back on your work hours, that's a great investment.
	But tell me what you're feeling.
	I don't know.
	It is when I was talking about your mom winning.
	Is that when it hit you?
	No, actually, I feel like kind of like I imagine myself having a great life and it's kind of like tears, but there is like kind of happiness because I've been always a hopeful person.
	I almost like committed suicide about like maybe eight months ago and I ended up in a hospital and since then it changed me because I promised myself like to be always on my side and try my best to never, never do something like that, never jeopardize my life, never give them reason, never like kill myself by proxy for them, never like You know, because they killed pretty much everything in me, you know?
	They killed a lot of stuff.
	And I'm trying to kind of improve myself.
	Kind of my crying is like I completely understand.
	It touches me, what you said, and I completely understand what you say, maybe at the emotional level.
	Good.
	Anyway.
	Go on.
	I don't know what to say.
	This work is overwhelming.
	Sometimes I feel like I'm going to die if I do this work and facing my childhood traumas and the truth and everything.
	And I know I have to live with the truth.
	I have to see it, experience it.
	And I have to live with what I see.
	I have to.
	Yeah.
	And I would, the last piece of advice I'll give you is, and I appreciate your emotional vulnerability and openness, I really do and I really respect what you're doing.
	I mean, this is how we save the world.
	This is how we make the world a better place.
	This is how, in the long run, we end tyranny and superstition and hierarchy.
	I mean, this is the work that is necessary.
	And massive, massive medals, congratulations, flights of doves, fireworks, and the 21-gun salute for what it is that you're doing.
	I mean, this is how the world crawls up the ladder to a higher place.
	Good for you.
	Thank you.
	But the other thing that I've noticed in our conversation, my friend, is that you tend to blur all of your emotions as if they're just yours.
	And unfortunately, when you grow up with narcissists, the majority of your emotional life is dedicated to serving the needs of the narcissistic.
	They're not your emotions.
	They're emotions, they're pretend emotions demanded by the narcissist in return for survival.
	Like how to differentiate if it's my emotion or if it's somebody else's emotions.
	Right, right.
	So, this is something I've done a number of times.
	Do you have a podcast that I can listen to?
	This paper lying down the middle on the left, emotions which served me, emotions which served others, is on the right.
	Okay.
	So, on the left, I would say, emotions which served me, or states, or whatever, things that served me.
	Well, one was honesty.
	Honesty served me.
	I liked to be honest.
	Oh.
	Honesty did not serve the narcissist.
	To serve the narcissist, I had to lie, and I had to lie about lying.
	I had to pretend...
	Something was true when it wasn't and then I had to erase even the pretense.
	Right?
	So independence served me and dependence served the narcissist.
	Happiness generally served me.
	Happiness generally annoyed the narcissist.
	My happiness.
	Right?
	Courage served me.
	Courage brought attack from the narcissists.
	So courage served me.
	Enslavement and obedience served the narcissist.
	Having my own needs was great for me.
	Having my own needs was bad for the narcissist.
	So only serving the narcissist's needs was great for the narcissist, but terrible for me.
	That's right.
	Love was something I wanted, but love was something that threatened the pseudo-bond with the narcissist, because genuine love reveals the narcissism, right?
	Right.
	He said you were very affectionate.
	I'm a very affectionate person.
	Excuse me, just very fast, because my ex, once I told him, I really have love for you.
	He told me, no, that I cannot accept.
	It turns me off.
	It was in the sexual, we were kind of in the sexual, trying to get sexual and stuff like that.
	And I don't know why I said I love you.
	It was like many months ago.
	And he said, oh, that turns me off.
	I guess we can at least give him points for honesty.
	I mean, not a lot, but of you, right?
	He's pretty much telling you everything you need to know, right?
	Love is a sexual turn-off for me.
	Well, affection is a sexual turn-off for me.
	It's like, what kind of freaky-ass, cold, iceberg-hearted monster are you?
	Yeah, he's very much afraid of my affection.
	Very, very much afraid.
	He doesn't take it.
	He doesn't want to take it.
	That would be great.
	And this gimp suit.
	Anyway, so just emotional experience.
	Affection.
	To be affectionate with a narcissist generally provokes irritation on the part of a narcissist.
	Unless it's particularly convenient for them at the moment or whatever, right?
	Because affection creates implicit obligation.
	And if there's one thing narcissists hate, it's obligation, right?
	Because obligation is something they have to do that interferes with the momentary pleasure, right?
	With the pleasure of the moment.
	But you put all of your feelings like they're just yours.
	Like you didn't have to adapt To a narcissist's needs at your own expense.
	And the feelings that were demanded by the narcissist are wrapped up in the genuine and authentic feelings that you had as a child.
	And I guarantee you the truth.
	We're almost invariably in opposition.
	So, you say, I'm codependent, or I idealize people, and I bugged you about this at the beginning.
	He says, no, you don't idealize people.
	You were punished for not idealizing people in the past.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	It's like saying I'm locked in a cage 10 by 10.
	It's like, I had a habit of walking in circles as a child.
	I don't know why.
	No, because your cage was 10 by 10, so you walked in a small circle because there was a cage, right?
	Yeah.
	And if you don't see the cage, then you just say, well, I had this weird habit of walking in circles.
	I don't know what that was all about.
	Yes, yes.
	And when I was a child, I always felt being happy by myself.
	I would go in front of the sea.
	Do you like the moon?
	Do you think?
	I mean, no, you were in a cage.
	This is a very simple explanation for it, right?
	So don't confuse that which was inflicted upon you and that which was demanded upon you with threat of infinite punishment.
	Don't confuse all of the stuff you had to fake with who you really are.
	You're so right when you say that.
	You're so right when you say maybe I've been punished for not idealizing because I always stood up to this bitch.
	Excuse me, my mom.
	I always stood up to her.
	Always stood up.
	I always tried to destroy it.
	Oh, you don't have to excuse that.
	That's fine with me.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I always stood up.
	I always, always, always stood up.
	And the only way that I really got myself in peace is being alone.
	I was born next to that.
	Okay.
	You're not telling me the truth.
	I'm not saying you're lying to me.
	It is impossible to stand up to a parent.
	Always.
	Always.
	Because it is not an equal relationship.
	It is not an equal relationship.
	Let's say that in some fantasy world it was possible for you to completely and totally stand up to and reject your mother's ideology or your mother's needs or your mother's craziness or whatever, your mother's narcissism.
	If that were true, there's no way you would ever have gotten involved in a seven-year relationship with a narcissist as an adult.
	How come I would destroy things that belong to her just to make her...
	Look, I'm not saying you didn't trade with her.
	Of course you did.
	But you can't win with a parent.
	Of course, yeah, you destroyed things.
	I got angry at my mom, absolutely.
	I yelled and screamed at her and so on.
	I get that.
	But you can't win.
	But you can't win with a parent.
	Because they have full legal and economic control over you.
	You can fight, you can kick, you can scream, but you can't escape.
	And the imprinting occurs inevitably.
	Because if you fight crazy, it's not like you've escaped crazy, right?
	It's not like you're free of crazy if you've got to go smash up someone's possessions who's crazy.
	So, give yourself the respect of the vulnerability that you actually had, of the imprinting that you inevitably received that there was no way to avoid.
	Yeah, give yourself some points for fighting, but don't imagine you won.
	You can't win as a child.
	No, I didn't win.
	But if you think that you somehow won or you always stood up to her or you fought her off, then that leaves you vulnerable to future exploitation because it means you can't see the areas in which you were imprinted that other people can see and exploit you for.
	Like, you know, you have this habit.
	If somebody demands idealization from you, you'll provide it because that's what you were trained and bullied to do as a child.
	And there was no way to avoid that.
	There was no way to not do that.
	So again, I don't want to go into all the details, but you have to separate your flesh from your scar tissue.
	Do you understand?
	Like if somebody stabs you in the side and you end up with a big-ass scar under your ribs, you say, well, these are my ribs, this is my side, this is my skin, and this is the scar.
	You can say it's my scar, I guess, right?
	But it's not a scar that you created.
	It's a scar that was inflicted upon you.
	It's because something alien was plunged into your body.
	The scar belongs to the person who injured you.
	It's like a brand.
	It's like when sometimes I want to throw up.
	Sometimes when I think about my mom, I want to throw up.
	It's just kind of this scar that I want to get out of my body.
	Yeah, because there was an infection, right?
	And the narcissism and the demands and they distorted your personality to serve the needs of the narcissistic person.
	It's like an infection.
	I get that.
	I get that.
	But you have to differentiate your true self Which was, you know, a grave danger to you.
	Being honest around narcissists is like, you know, man, painting a target on your forehead, right?
	I mean, it's like, come hit me here, yell at me here, scream at me here, abandon me here, destroy me here.
	You have to hide who you are around narcissists because they can't stand anything independent of their own needs, anything which has needs independent of what they want in the moment.
	They will viciously attack and destroy anything which is inconvenient to them.
	Yes.
	And so really, and this is the last point, I've got to get some lunch, but really work to differentiate who you are and who you were forced to comply with and what you became because you were forced to comply with.
	Okay.
	And that doesn't mean that the feelings that you have that you were forced to comply with are somehow outside your body or not part of yourself.
	I mean, they are.
	But it's really important to distinguish those because otherwise what you'll end up doing is you'll mistake personal moral choices for survival techniques in times of crisis.
	And you'll say, well, I have this habit of idealizing narcissists.
	It's like, don't make that your habit.
	Oh, I understand.
	I get it even more now.
	These are adaptation demands to dangerous situations.
	This is not something you just have a habit of or decided to do or woke up one morning and said, this would be great.
	It's not something I should dig into it.
	That means when I feel like I idealized, should I dig into it?
	That's what I had.
	That's what you said.
	You can say, I have a habit of idealizing people which was inflicted upon me when I was younger.
	I was forced to idealize people on pain of death, rejection, terror, abuse.
	I was forced to idealize people, and therefore when I'm around narcissists, I have a tendency to fall back into an abusive pattern that was inflicted upon me when I was a kid.
	Not just, well, I just have a habit of idealizing people.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Anyway, so that's sort of my last suggestion.
	Really work to differentiate that which is true and honest and natural to you and that which was an adaptation to a dangerous environment.
	Okay.
	Because then you'll be able to see that dangerous environment and avoid it much more clearly as an adult going forward.
	And once you can trust yourself to see and avoid abusive situations going forward, then...
	You get the Arkenstone.
	You get the true prize.
	You get love and security, passion, joy, happiness.
	It's like doing the hard work.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	I understand.
	All right.
	All right.
	Thank you very much, Stefan.
	Very, very...
	Great work, Mohamed.
	It's a real pleasure chatting with you.
	And congratulations on all the work that you're doing.
	And I'm incredibly sorry about all the circumstances that brought about the need for this work.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Lots of love, brother.
	All right?
	Take care.
	Lots of love.
	Take care.
	Bye.
	And have yourself a wonderful week, everyone.
	If you support the show, as you know, this is the kind of work that the show is doing.
	And I hope you get what a great listenership we have.
	How incredibly courageous, noble, honorable, and resolute people are in their pursuit of self-knowledge, in their desire to embrace virtue, to shun evil, to change cycles of abuse that have occurred for centuries.
	What a revolution.
	We are participating in together as a community.
	Never been done before.
	To my knowledge and my belief, this is unique.
	And thank you everybody who calls in and is incredibly honest.
	And I really respect And take very seriously the trust that you put in me.
	I hope that I equip myself with some degree of rigor and consistency.
	And thank you everybody for your support.
	If you want to help out the show, fdurl.com forward slash donate.
	All gratefully accepted and have yourselves a wonderful week.
	Thank you James for fixing the feed issues.
	Thank you Mike so much for your friendship, love and support and for your technical competence in the Sunday show and for running the show of course.

▲