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Aug. 26, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:15:17

2463 Freedomain Radio Wednesday Call In Show August 21st, 2013

Stefan Molyneux takes calls from listeners to discuss censorship, the cost/benefit of accepting libertarianism, the terrors of entrepreneurship, failure, self-mutilation, rejecting honesty and people having your back.

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	Good evening!
	My God, we're starting on time.
	The world has stopped in its very tracks to marvel at the within Pluto's orbit of professionalism known as Freedom in Radio.
	Welcome one and all to the very second annual divided by 52 Wednesday evening philosophy chat.
	This is my oasis in the desert of trekking from Sunday to Sunday to speak to you wonderfully kind, generous, brilliant, and dare I say cut listeners.
	So I hope you're doing well.
	Thanks, Mike, of course, for taking time off from his missionary work to join us.
	Do you know, Mike, I must tell you, the UPB caller from last week, I saw a post on Facebook where he's complaining that we are basically censoring opinions critical of UPB.
	So, Mike, I just I need to know why.
	Why are you censoring the poor listeners who call in and give us the very sweat of their intellectual brow?
	Is UPB such a shaky foundation that it can't even take any robust criticism?
	Must we cull the intellectual herd so precisely?
	It's either that or it's horrible technical issues and horrible audio on the caller's end, but we can go with the first one.
	Yeah, you had a weird hum, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, sounded like Amazing Grace sung by a screaming llama.
	Anyway, so I said we'll send him the file if he wants, if he can fix it up.
	We're certainly happy to release it.
	But, you know, it bothers me how people jump towards conspiracy theories, you know?
	Be an adult, send an email and say, hey, how come I didn't hear...
	My conversation in the podcast is, he cut it because he can't stand, you see, he just can't stand the criticism of his theory.
	And for those of you who are watching, I guess, this later, this stuff I'm drinking, don't worry, it's not any kind of soda, you nagging Nancys.
	I don't normally drink soda, just when I was going through chemo, basically it sort of tasted in my mouth like Satan had taken a deep chemical shit on my palate.
	And so soda helped a little bit.
	Unfortunately for my muffin top, chips and dip helped a little bit.
	This is, it's okay.
	It's just absinthe mixed with the blood of statists.
	So I think we're okay.
	And I think also Jeffrey Tucker was going to reinvigorate our Sunday show with the co-guest host.
	I think you mentioned that.
	Yep.
	We're working out a date right now, but that'll be coming up in the near future.
	A date with Jeffrey Tucker.
	I feel like I've won the libertarian lottery.
	All right.
	Well, enough ramble tangents.
	Let's get on with the callers.
	Hopefully, there are no robust criticisms we must censor.
	Those technical problems will crop up again.
	All right, Danny.
	Hit the hum button.
	It's a good criticism.
	I don't know.
	Just email people.
	Ask them what happened.
	I'll jump immediately to this anyway.
	Okay, go ahead.
	How's it going, Stefan?
	It is going swimmingly.
	Thank you.
	I'm so excited to be here.
	I just recently actually got onto these videos on YouTube and I converted probably like less than a year ago to libertarianism.
	I was stuck in the whole mainstream media idea with Bill Maher and being a liberal.
	Hello?
	Yes.
	Sorry, you just stopped there.
	And being a liberal sounded like in the middle of a sentence, so I thought maybe you had more.
	No, no.
	I was caught up in that whole idea of, you know, Obamacare, being for it, it's going to help everybody, everything.
	So, you know, the questions that I just wanted to ask today, there's one that I've been researching a lot about, and it's about the Rothschilds.
	And is their involvement actually, you know, really involved in central banking?
	Is that actually true?
	Because, like, all the research that I've done, you know, like, from Woodrow Wilson, who set it up in 19—and in the 19—I believe it was 1913, who he passed the law for the Federal Reserve Act— And he's basically talking about, you know, that after he signed it, like, a couple years later, that he was guilty that he gave up our economy to the international bankers.
	Is there any evidence that these people are associated with central banking?
	Or is this just, like, all conspiracy?
	Well, I don't think it's a conspiracy theory to believe that rich people act collectively in their own self-interest.
	We're a bunch of gazelles.
	I think those lions might be working together.
	Of course they're working together.
	That's the best way to catch your gazelles.
	Look, I don't look much into things like the Bilderberg stuff and the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rothschilds and the van der Clitorises or whatever the hell they're called.
	I just...
	It doesn't matter, because to me, it's natural.
	I mean, it's like saying, you know, there was this lieutenant of Genghis Khan's who may or may not have done something really terrible.
	Well, I'm sure he did do something really terrible, but it doesn't really matter.
	It doesn't really matter.
	Fundamentally, to oppose all this nonsense is not to reveal all the people who benefit from statism, but simply to point out that statism...
	I'm sure that they may have secret masturbating cabals where they molest satyrs and nymphs.
	I don't know.
	I mean, I think Richard Nixon said about the Bilderberg group, that's...
	It's pretty gay.
	So I don't know.
	They may have this stuff.
	To me, it doesn't fundamentally matter.
	You know, it's sort of like, is there price fixing among the slave driving classes?
	Well, I don't care.
	I do care that slavery is immoral and should be abolished.
	I do care that the state is immoral and we have to outgrow it.
	Who's currently profiting?
	I mean, Woodrow Wilson didn't sell the economy to international bankers.
	Woodrow Wilson realized that he could fund a war without raising taxes, but the only way you can do that is to have a central bank.
	I mean, so he wanted to get into...
	I mean, after, of course, campaigning on the promise to stay out of World War I, what did he do?
	Immediately launched America into World War I, joining, as the Americans do, rather late, and then claiming to have won the whole thing.
	But you rouse up the bloodlust of the people, and then...
	How do you keep that going?
	Well, you keep that going by not sending them any bills for their bloodlust.
	I pointed out in this video on circumcision, when the government stops funding circumcision, rates drop enormously because people suddenly find principles and sympathy for their children's naughty bits or their boys' naughty bits when they have to pay a couple of hundred bucks, and then I guess you end up with a few less circumcision rings, which are then made into facial cosmetics for women.
	I guess that's the kind of facial that nobody likes.
	But yeah, so there are all these bad guys and the government has realized that by getting into debt, it can bribe the economically illiterate population in the here and now and can defer all the costs until they're long out of office and probably long dead.
	And of course, be hailed as miracle workers because they were able to raise people's standards of living Yeah, I mean, I could research it, but I mean, I'm sure it's happening.
	I'm sure it's real.
	And there's no way to oppose it without getting rid of the state.
	So to me, the details don't really matter.
	Yeah, because for example, you have one of the Rothschilds back in the 1700s that says, let me control a nation's money, and I have control, and I care not who makes its laws.
	I'm paraphrasing it, obviously.
	But it's somewhere similar to that.
	When you have things like that, and then you have Lincoln, he says at one point he has two enemies.
	One of them is the South, and the other one is the financial institution.
	I guess in some way I've been looking at it and I guess somehow you could see it connecting in some way.
	Yeah, but I mean...
	Without the state, none of this stuff happens.
	I mean, you don't have to worry about cabals and monopolies and selling off the unborn and national debts and inflation.
	You just don't have to worry about that.
	Strike at the root of evil rather than trim the leaves and obsessively cataloging the leaves when all you have to do is cut at the root.
	I just prefer to go...
	The more efficient route.
	And so, yeah, without the violent monopoly of the state, none of this stuff happens.
	So, you know, if we want light in the world, we cut down that which is blocking the light.
	We don't sort of shine little flashlights around here and there.
	You just bring down whatever's blocking the light, and that is the state.
	And so, yeah, I don't particularly get drawn into this.
	It's hard to say conspiracy stuff, because, you know, conspiracy theory is just a way of Of not having to do research.
	So I don't say it's not true.
	I don't say it is true.
	But I do say that it's immaterial as to what it is that we have to do, which is to teach people to treat their children well, teach people about the evils of the state.
	And whether the Rothschilds or, you know, the McSkullduggery's control it, it doesn't really matter.
	The point is we just shouldn't have this kind of control no matter what.
	Definitely.
	Well, there's another question that I wanted to ask, and it's when I bring people up to the idea of libertarianism, they usually agree with everything about it, but they're reluctant to call themselves libertarians for some reason.
	Well, why were you?
	Well, I guess you made the transition you said pretty easily, right?
	Yeah, because it just made sense to me.
	Morally, it just made sense.
	Everything that, you know, that minimum wage, you raise it, it doesn't help the poor.
	It actually, it's worse for the low-skilled workers.
	That made sense to me.
	Well, sorry, to be precise, it does help a few of the poor, and it does help some of the low-skill workers, because they get more money.
	It's just that the people who don't get jobs, the people who get fired, the people who get stuck in welfare because they can't make the leap to minimum wage, to be precise, it always benefits some people, otherwise it would never happen, but it just happens to harm the majority.
	Sorry to just be annoyingly...
	No, no, no, it's not, Stephan, man, I've...
	I'm only like 25, so I'm trying to learn as much as possible during this time of my life.
	So anything that you can just tell me that's informative, I happily take it in.
	But I just don't understand why people don't...
	When I explain it to them, they're just reluctant against it.
	They like the idea, but they're not able to call themselves libertarians.
	Well, make for them.
	Let's pretend I'm one of these people.
	Tell me the cost-benefit.
	Let's say I don't have any principles.
	I mean, I don't think people really have any principles.
	I think they're just surfing the whim of the moment.
	Of course Matt Damon's going to praise public schools.
	Whoever gets in trouble for praising public schools?
	And of course he's going to put his kids in private schools because he knows what public schools are like.
	He's not dumb.
	That's what people do is they surf whatever gives them the most benefit in the moment and then they call it a principle after the fact.
	So forget, let's pretend I have no principles whatsoever.
	Make for me the case why I should call myself a libertarian just based on a cost-benefit thing.
	Well, because I would say that both Democrat and Republicans are both authoritarians.
	They both believe in a certain way of life that people should live.
	No, you're appealing to principles, right?
	Because you're saying I should be more for freedom and this, that, and the other, right?
	Yeah.
	But that's your, do it to, because remember, people don't have principles.
	I mean, I'm sorry, but it's true.
	I've spent 30 years bringing principles to people's attention, and mostly they shy away like I'm waving a random phaser laser turret at them.
	And so, without appealing to principles.
	Oh, wow, then I would have, I would actually advise you to give me advice on that and how to tell people more likely to be more inclined to become libertarians, to spread it.
	Well, I mean, I don't have an answer from a cost-benefit standpoint.
	What does it gain you to be a libertarian?
	I don't know.
	I just think that, you know, the freedom of people is, like, the most important thing ever.
	I don't know.
	I mean, you become a libertarian.
	That doesn't change that, right?
	I mean, you being a libertarian hasn't added one bit to the political freedoms of the world.
	I'm not saying that it's unimportant to be a libertarian, but it hasn't changed.
	Oh, yes.
	Anything to do with political liberties in the world, right?
	It certainly has made you more aware of your enslavement, right?
	Yes, yes.
	I mean, if you don't get the taxation as theft, then you can believe it's some sort of social contract that, you know, the state is buying you flowers before it bends you over the greasy spoons of the IRS, right?
	But give me a practical reason as to why somebody should embrace philosophy, right?
	I mean, it alienates other people.
	It means you're going to get mocked.
	You're going to get misunderstood.
	You're going to get scorned.
	People are going to roll their eyes.
	People are going to call you crazy.
	People are going to be hostile.
	I mean, tell me why should somebody adopt libertarianism as a political philosophy?
	Well, I mean, wow, you got me there, man.
	You got me there, Stefan.
	I would actually advise you if you could tell me.
	I don't know.
	Well, I wouldn't advise anybody from a cost-benefit standpoint to take on libertarianism merely as a political philosophy because it's not going to change their environment.
	What it does is it's like somebody who's slowly having their legs crushed, you should at least let them have their morphine, right?
	If you can't get them out of whatever horrible machine is crushing their legs, don't take away their drug that numbs the pain.
	So...
	So, Republicanism, being a Republican, being a Democrat, being a Green, or being sort of the Bill Maher liberal camp or whatever, or even the sort of Ann Coulter conservative camp, That gives you the illusion that something you're going to do is going to stop the machine from chewing up your legs.
	And so it gives you a sense that you can get out, and it helps you to numb the pain.
	Libertarianism is just another way of doing that.
	We can do something to change the political reality.
	We can get people voted in.
	We can elect X, Y, and Z. We can enlighten people about the political process and the virtues and values of libertarianism and free market economics and blah, blah, blah, right?
	It's just another way of numbing the pain of being fed into the woodchipper process.
	So from a political standpoint, I would never make that case, and I never have.
	But what I would say to people is, forget libertarianism as a political philosophy.
	That's interesting, for sure, and it's a good little crossword puzzle for your brain to read up on Austrian economics, and it's great to know more about the world than less.
	I think all that's fine.
	Forget about libertarianism.
	Libertarianism as a political philosophy, the only thing that matters about libertarianism is the non-aggression principle.
	The non-aggression principle.
	Because you can't change a goddamn thing about the world through libertarian politics and economics.
	In fact, you make the world worse, because everything you're doing that doesn't work is all the things you're doing that could work, right?
	Think of the hundreds of billions of dollars have been shut down the useless, bottomless fucking void of political activism.
	Billions of labor hours, hundreds of millions of dollars, hopes, dreams, dedication, rallies, flags, bumper stickers, staying up all night, websites, all people keep throwing themselves into this endless, bottomless furnace, burning themselves up with no change.
	In fact, the government has only grown, what, five times bigger since libertarianism was started?
	Great plan!
	Everybody, wonderfully done!
	Our goal is to shrink the state.
	Oh, shoot, it's five times bigger.
	Well, we couldn't lift the five-pound weight.
	Maybe we can lift the 50-pound weight.
	It's madness, right?
	So I say, forget all of that.
	It doesn't matter.
	It's interesting.
	It doesn't matter.
	The only thing that matters is the non-aggression principle.
	Now, that shit you can do something about.
	That stuff you can do something about.
	Wow.
	And you can not circumcise your children.
	That's something you can do.
	You cannot aggress against your children.
	You cannot hit your children.
	You cannot abandon your children to daycare and to nannies and to government schools.
	You can do something to change your environment.
	You can reject people who support the use of violence against you.
	You can avoid and ostracize people who are in the matrix, who would chant with joy.
	Should you be dragged off to prison for following your peaceful conscience?
	They would cheer and line the streets in approval.
	And so backing away from the general Nazism of the everyday statist is something you can do.
	You can build a community of like-minded, peaceful-minded individuals who are not going to aggress against you, who are going to support your choices to reject the aggression principle.
	You can have the integrity of living as much as possible the non-aggression principle in the realm of your personal lives, and then you get the greatest treasure of all, which is you cannot have love without.
	An addiction to violence.
	You cannot have love if you are addicted to violence.
	And if you don't even know that you're addicted to violence, you get even less love.
	All you get is empty tolerance of your own immorality.
	You get the shipwrecked, clinging proximity of people desperate to maintain the delusions that they are all infected by and repeatedly infect others with.
	But you can have integrity, you can have love, you can have virtue, you can have peace, you can have respect, you can have joy in your life.
	If you forget about the politics and simply look at the non-aggression principle and see how far you can spread it in the world in which you actually live, which is not a legislative body, it's not a congress, it's not a senate, it's not a voting booth, it's none of that shit.
	Where you actually live is your house, your home, your neighborhood, your children's lives, your wife's lives, your husband's lives, your friend's lives.
	And there, the non-aggression principle is like a skyrocket of beautiful joy, connection, closeness, virtue, and a lack of fear for the future, and a lack of fear for the direction that the whole West is currently hurtling its downward path towards.
	And you can live a life of freedom, peace, and virtue by living the principles in your life.
	But if you get dragged off the abyss of politics, then it becomes a complete loss for you, for virtue, for the future, and for the children who will follow us.
	So, I mean, that would be my case.
	And that's a cost-benefit and a moral case, but you just can't make the cost-benefit case with politics because that shit doesn't work.
	Yeah, no, definitely.
	Definitely.
	Thank you so much.
	But also, I guess one question, another question is, it's in regards of, I guess, tyranny, because, you know, you hear so much, you know, of all the things that are going on, you know, such as NDAA and all these things that are going on in politics, and the NSA spying on pretty much every single American.
	Yeah.
	When tyranny happens, and let's say a revolution does happen, how do we prevent someone?
	For example, because my father actually came from Cuba, and he fled the Castro regime.
	How do you prevent a dictator from coming in after a revolution has already ended?
	Well, I don't know.
	How can you?
	That's exactly what I want to know.
	If, let's say, the change were to happen, how would we stop, let's say, someone just as bad or just as evil to take over?
	Wait, wait.
	So, do you mean after we achieve some kind of freedom?
	Yes.
	Basically, because in Cuba, what happened was the revolution.
	Castro ended up taking out Bautista, which was the president at the time, and You know, he preached on change and all this stuff, and then everyone pretty much got on his side, and they ended up defeating Batista.
	And, you know, it's like...
	And they had it worse.
	They had it worse than they did on Batista.
	And they got it even worse.
	That's exactly what I'm saying.
	How is it possible to basically...
	Let's say if we do get a radical revolution or something, how do we make sure that we get the right person there and not have the wrong person?
	Well, because...
	You're asking basically, how can people recognize evil?
	Exactly.
	That's the basic question you're asking.
	Well, we're born with the capacity and the ability to recognize evil.
	Yeah, because the thing is, let's say when Obama came in in 2008, everyone thought that this guy was going to make the complete change.
	Not everyone.
	Sorry.
	Let me tell you something.
	I was playing a game of Candyland with my daughter tonight.
	It's a game with cards.
	And I said, you know, when I was a little boy, I said, a standard deck of cards, she's got one, it's got 52 cards.
	When I was a little boy, a kid came up to me, a boy came up to me and said, hey, Steph, you want to play 52 card pickup?
	And I said, sure, that sounds like fun.
	And he grabbed my cards and he threw them in the air and he walked away and said, now you have to pick up those 52 cards.
	Do you know what my daughter said?
	She said, that's mean.
	Right?
	I haven't explained to her...
	I didn't explain to her that that was mean.
	She just knew that was mean of the boy.
	Yeah.
	I mean, we are...
	We're born with the capacity to...
	With the innate...
	Not even capacity, but the innate drive to extend similarities and note exceptions.
	Right?
	So, in the men's rights movement, there is an argument called NAWALT, which is an acronym for, well, not all women are like that.
	Not all women are like that.
	It's got its own acronym.
	It's so common.
	NAWALT. And this is what idiots do.
	They say, well, Chinese people in general are shorter than Caucasians.
	Well, I know a tall Chinese guy, and it's like, oh, God, I need a helmet on to prevent my head from exploding as the rockets of your idiocy go up my nose.
	And so we all understand patterns and we understand exceptions.
	And if children live virtue, peace, non-aggression, curiosity, friendliness, assertiveness, whatever, all the things that are virtue, courage, then that's what they'll see.
	Then they'll understand that and they will immediately note exceptions.
	You know, our brains are hardwired to look for exceptions to rules because that's how we stay alive.
	Hey, look, there's a whole bunch of grass there.
	There's an exception called a tiger.
	Well, are we kind of interested in the exception?
	Of course we are.
	I mean, that's what keeps us alive.
	And when we're hunting, there's a whole bunch of trees.
	There's one exception called a deer.
	Well, maybe we want to go hunt that, or, you know, for the vegetarians, a fast-moving mushroom or something, right?
	And so we are hardwired and environmentally driven to extend similarities, which is called conceptualization or philosophy or concept development, and to immediately note and see very visibly exceptions.
	You can eat all those berries except for the purple ones.
	Okay, we go eat all the berries, we stay away from the purple ones.
	So, the rule and the exceptions.
	That's all we're about.
	The rules and the exceptions.
	And if children are generally raised with the rule of virtue, they will immediately note exceptions to it.
	And they will see evil like a burning man is coming up to introduce himself to you.
	And you're like, shit, that guy's on fire.
	Shouldn't we do something?
	Are you hot?
	Is there something I can help you with, Mr.
	Lucifer?
	So, it's very easy to have children identify evil.
	Just raise them with virtue.
	My daughter, you know, we're flipping through the TV stations and up comes Telemundo.
	They get some, you know, the usual...
	You know, shrieky, face-slapping, big-titted Spanish soap opera or whatever.
	And she's like, I don't know what they're saying.
	I don't speak that language.
	She never says that about English, even if we're watching something quite complicated, because she knows some of the words.
	She immediately knows a language she doesn't speak.
	Immediately.
	And so, if we teach and embody virtue, consistency, peace, voluntarism, courage, all the good stuff, children will immediately see some Facial-haired sociopath who comes up chanting about the common good and immediately recognizing for the predator that he is, and nobody will ever have a chance of getting into power when children are raised peacefully.
	Who's evil?
	Yeah, definitely.
	Thank you.
	Thank you so much.
	Those are pretty much all the questions.
	You know, I listen to your show all the time, you know, for the past, you know, since I've been, you know, just for like the past year, because I've been learning more and more and, you know, your show has helped me so much.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	I'm going to be annoyingly nitpicking and say you may listen to my show all the time, but I hope you're not listening to it while you're on the show.
	Or I guess you are listening to the show because you're on the show.
	Well, thank you very much.
	I appreciate that.
	Great questions.
	Please feel free to call back in anytime.
	And congratulations.
	25 is a great age.
	I'm glad we slipped in.
	About 25 is the age when the human brain locks down, reaches its final sort of level of physical maturity.
	So I'm glad that we slipped a few shekels under the door before that sealed up.
	So good for you.
	Thank you so much, Stephen.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	Chris, you're next.
	Hello.
	I'm Chris.
	Hi, Stefan Basel Molyneux.
	How are you?
	Oh, look at that.
	He's making a power play.
	I only know his first name, and he's given me all the syllables of mine.
	Go ahead.
	I feel your dominating hand up on my leg.
	Continue.
	No, no, no.
	Just kidding.
	Go on.
	But seriously, how are you?
	Before we get into my question.
	Oh, how am I? I am all right.
	I have 17 radiation treatments.
	I've done eight, so I'm just over half done.
	I experience a little bit of throat tenderness.
	It's basically like a sunburn on the back of your throat, which means slightly less shrieking.
	I'm like Pinkie Pie on helium sometimes, but I feel good.
	I am glad to have it almost all behind me, and I sure as hell prefer radiation to chemo, because I can live with a sore throat, but that other stuff was...
	It was kind of rough.
	So I appreciate you asking.
	I am optimistic.
	I am planning for my old age.
	And I feel good to have this stuff mostly in the past, just a little bit more.
	I know that cancer is a big deal in your life right now, but in a more general sense, how are you?
	Because it's like...
	In a more general sense, from a near-death experience, I'm going to be speaking in Toronto at U of T October 26th, and it's my back from the dead speech because, you know, I had to skip all my – for treatments, I've had to skip all my summer speaking.
	So, you mean outside of cancer?
	How am I? Well, yeah.
	I mean, I guess that's sort of like what they said.
	There's an old joke about – About Lincoln's wife.
	You know, he was shot in a theater, right?
	And somebody's saying, well, other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs.
	Lincoln?
	It's such important.
	So in what way do you mean, how am I? Well, I guess I'm just kind of practicing a little bit of empathy, because...
	No, it's good.
	I appreciate that.
	I mean, not a lot of people ask me how I'm doing.
	Sorry, I appreciate that.
	But I suppose it's a very open-ended question, and you're, I guess, free to answer it however you choose.
	Yes.
	Well, unless you have something more specific that you want to ask me, like, how's my arm, or how's my nutsack?
	Currently a little squished under my ass, so let me just shift a little here.
	Okay, go ahead.
	Okay, well, I guess in that case, moving on to the reason that I'm calling, I have a bit of a mental block, and I was hoping to get some counsel from you, and I suppose I should give some context to I'm a business owner, a recent graduate.
	I started a biotech company, which is kind of scary.
	They have a pretty high failure rate.
	I mean, they have a failure rate that's so high that it makes the majority of my videos look successful.
	Very brave of you.
	Good job.
	Yeah.
	Well, so...
	That's kind of a scary thing.
	No, that is a scary thing.
	And, you know, with fear, you get this fight, flight, or freeze response, and I've definitely gotten a freeze response, and it's difficult for me to see the forest through the trees, if that makes sense.
	Mm-hmm.
	I may be too nervous to really understand it, like why I'm paralyzed, why I'm not able to get work done.
	Right.
	Right.
	No, I get it.
	I mean, and I, for those of who've not been entrepreneur-ed, We've not been entrepreneurs.
	It is literally heart-stoppingly terrifying at times.
	Not always, but you have these euphoric moments and so on.
	One of the great pieces of advice I got from a friend once was that I take work too seriously.
	I thought, hey, I'll become an internet philosopher and try and change the world, because that's relaxing quite a bit.
	But in the business world, it is terrifying.
	That's the kind of fear you're talking about, that things might not work, that things might crash out, that terrible things might occur.
	Is that what you mean?
	Yeah, I think it probably goes a little deeper than that in some regards.
	But, yeah, that is a pretty big fear.
	I know I probably won't starve to death or anything if it fails, because...
	I'm a fairly resourceful fellow and I can, you know, bounce back.
	But, like, I've got that kind of as a horror or, like, scary movie scenario in the back of my head.
	Like, I go bankrupt, I become destitute, I live on the streets, I die poor and starving or something.
	Right.
	No, and as I've mentioned before, like, I remember signing...
	We couldn't get loans after a while.
	I mean, sorry, we couldn't get investment after a while.
	We just needed loans to cover payroll, to sign these big documents that if the company failed, I would be personally liable for what were, at the time, and I guess even now, pretty monstrous sums of money that would have taken me years to pay off.
	It's scary stuff.
	You can't pay that stuff back.
	Bad things can happen to your life.
	It's not irrational to get what you're feeling.
	I've often envied sociopaths because they make pretty good entrepreneurs in the short run because they don't feel any fear.
	The problem is they lack empathy so they can't sustain a business in the long run.
	That's sort of the Enron thing.
	They get greedy and forget about the customers and chase the money and all that kind of stuff.
	It would be nice to have a fear switch.
	I'd like to have a fear switch.
	I'd like to have a sleep switch so I could switch and go to sleep.
	Are we in the right realm?
	I want to make sure that I'm not projecting my experiences onto you.
	Is this the right realm?
	I'd say that's the right realm.
	Yeah, there was something that I was going to say, but then I forgot.
	Okay, well, let me tell you what, I mean, before I tell you what sort of helped me, which may or may not help you, what does failure mean?
	I mean, there are practical consequences to failure.
	You don't have a job, you might be in debt, it's difficult and complex to unwind a business and all that.
	And there's disappointment, right?
	I mean, you want to succeed.
	I mean, you want to make money, you want to help people, all this kind of stuff, right?
	Right.
	So what does failure mean?
	What does it mean to you, sort of fundamentally?
	If you fail, what?
	What does that mean?
	So in thinking of an answer to that, I remembered what it was that I was going to say, which was that it is irrational also...
	To be so afraid that I'm paralyzed because if I don't do anything, I'm dead in the water.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	No, no, no.
	Don't call yourself irrational.
	I'm sorry to interrupt.
	I don't know how long you've been listening to the show.
	Don't call your feelings irrational.
	That is a judgment and you don't know that it's true.
	Well, okay, then I might correct that and say that it's not advantageous.
	Okay, maybe it is advantageous, but it doesn't seem very advantageous to me to not do anything.
	Yeah, what you could say is that my fear response was appropriate in the past, but maybe inappropriate now.
	And I haven't done the work to uncouple the past from the present.
	Right, yeah.
	I hate to be annoying, but the moment you say it's irrational, you've automatically said it's wrong, it's bad, it needs to be expunged, and it doesn't need to be explored.
	You know, if you see some crazy guy in the street corner, you know, attempting to bring the pigeons to Krishna, you don't have a debate with him, right?
	Because he's crazy.
	He's irrational.
	So you can't be curious.
	You can't help him.
	You can't engage with him because he's just irrational.
	Irrational is one of these really explosive words that you rarely will lob outside of yourself and never ever lob it inside, if that makes any sense.
	Yes.
	Rarely lob it inside?
	I mean, into yourself.
	It's rare.
	I don't know if I've ever said, well, someone's just irrational.
	I may say that's an irrational argument or a rational perspective.
	But to say someone is irrational, I mean, they have to be seriously, seriously crazy, right?
	I mean, like wearing a duck on their head and two rubber boots on their arms kind of crazy, right?
	Right.
	So, it's rare that you'll use irrational as a descriptor for someone else, but I would never put it internal, like say, this part of me is irrational.
	Hmm.
	Because how do you know?
	It may be perfectly rational.
	Like somebody's been in a car accident who's afraid of cars.
	That's not irrational.
	Ironic that you said that, but yeah.
	Why is it ironic?
	I had a bad experience, let's say.
	But that's a call in for another time perhaps.
	Geez, I was in a car crash where the car flipped and went about 150 yards on its roof.
	So yeah, I definitely know cars can be a little scary.
	Okay, so my question is, to catch the heart of the matter...
	When you were a child, what was your relationship to failure?
	Because childhood is an enormous steaming pile of fail, right?
	Because, you know, you can't do anything.
	I was going to say you can't do shit, but you can shit.
	You come out of the womb with that ability.
	First it's green, and then it hits the wall.
	But childhood is almost all failure.
	You don't know how to read.
	You don't know how to walk.
	You don't know how to roll over.
	You don't know how to...
	You usually sleep by yourself and all that.
	So, what was your relationship as a child in your familial environment to failure?
	Well, going back to how it goes kind of deeper, I would say my mother...
	She nagged and yelled and she was more the disciplinarian.
	There was spanking and other things as well.
	But my father, he was a little bit more patient.
	So the business is actually...
	I won't name myself or the business, but it is a nod to my father in some regards.
	So what do you mean when you say she was a disciplinarian?
	Very loud.
	She was the one that I guess really wanted a very clean house and it didn't matter how it got done.
	Okay, so she was very loud.
	Does that mean she screamed or yelled or raised her voice?
	Yeah, she was screaming.
	Name calling?
	No, I don't remember any name calling except for the full name, like Mr.
	Yeah, and then...
	Oh, like you started with me, right?
	Yeah.
	Oh, God, I'm so sorry.
	That was not what I meant.
	No, that's fine.
	That's why I recognize it as a power play.
	I mean, like, you know, on the internet, when somebody doesn't use your first name, they're just about to become a complete asshole.
	Well, Molyneux's arguments are, you know, anyway, it's just, in boarding school, when I was six, I was referred to as Mr.
	Molyneux, and you know, nothing good comes after that.
	Anyway.
	Well, to me, it was...
	A show of respect.
	I do have quite a bit of respect for you, so...
	Okay, no, I just wanted to point that out.
	Okay, so when you say she spanked you, open hand, buttocks, face, implements, how often?
	Belt.
	How did it occur?
	Belt!
	Yeah, belt whenever I was a problem, and that was pretty often.
	So how often were you hit with a belt?
	I... I really don't know.
	And it was fairly...
	I'm not asking for time codes.
	I mean, just roughly.
	I mean, once a year, once a month, once a week?
	Maybe once a month, I suppose.
	But it, again, was variable.
	Was it against bare skin?
	Sometimes, I think.
	Was it against your buttocks or your hand or your back or what?
	Buttocks.
	So she would actually pull down your trousers, your pants, your underwear, and would she like put you across her knee and then hit you hard with the belt?
	Yeah, but it wasn't that often...
	Don't even try.
	Don't you dare bring this up and then start to minimize it.
	Sometimes it was over the clothes.
	Yeah, no, I got it.
	I'm talking about sometimes she would do this.
	Did she hit you with the buckle end or the tail end?
	Mostly the tail end.
	But sometimes the buckle end.
	I can't really recall...
	I don't think so.
	And did it leave marks?
	I have stretch marks on my back, but I don't think they're related to that.
	No, no, no.
	I mean, when she hit you, did it leave like a red welt?
	Of course.
	I mean, that's spanking.
	Well, that's not spanking.
	That's beating.
	Spanking is open-handed on the buttocks.
	That's beating.
	I don't know where you live, but I can tell you this.
	Here in Canada, she would go to jail for that.
	That's criminal behavior.
	It is absolutely illegal to hit a child with an implement.
	Now, in Canada, you can hit a child from the knee up or something and the neck down.
	You can't hit the face, but you cannot use an implement.
	And, again, I don't know what the laws are where you are, but that's criminal behavior.
	I mean, that's illegal.
	I don't think it's illegal where I'm from, and I suppose her rationale might be that she is a fairly slight woman and requires some kind of implement.
	Of course there's a justification for beating your children with a belt.
	Yeah, of course there are justifications for it.
	And if you're small, absolutely, yeah, for sure.
	I mean, then if you really want to inflict mind-bending pain and humiliation on your children, then yes, a belt is better than your hand if you're small or if you're big.
	And I can assume that your father knew about this.
	Yeah, and even Even though he wasn't as much of a disciplinarian, occasionally...
	Oh, you're using that word again.
	Uh...
	I mean, I give you a word that I think is more accurate.
	Okay.
	You know what it is.
	Um...
	No.
	Like, he did and then just say...
	No, sorry.
	You keep saying your mom was a disciplinarian, your dad was a bit less of a disciplinarian, but you are relabeling childbeating as discipline, right?
	It's not.
	Right.
	Call things by their true name, I suppose.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, what is hitting a child on the bare buttocks with a belt?
	That's abuse.
	That's abuse.
	Yeah.
	It's interesting that you use the word humiliation, too, because there's an interesting mix of fear as well.
	Sorry, an interesting mix of what?
	Fear and shame.
	Oh, absolutely.
	It is a terrorizing dominance of a child's personal and sexual space to hit on the bare buttocks.
	Buttocks are sexual.
	I'm not saying they are for little boys and little girls.
	But they are an erogenous zone.
	They are things that you can't go to school with no pants on, even if you're wearing a cup, because your ass is hanging out, right?
	And, I mean, in the gay community, chaps, you know, the pants with no ass, are highly sexualized.
	And when I lived in the gay district for a while, these guys would be walking all over the streets.
	And some of them had fantastic asses.
	Like I met this guy at Libertopia named Starchild.
	Yeah, he wore this kind of stuff all the time.
	I can understand it.
	I had a great ass.
	If I had an ass like that, I'd never wear pants.
	But the ass is an erogenous zone.
	It is a sexual zone.
	And there is sexual...
	As well as physical violation when it comes to particularly bare-ass spanking.
	And there are studies that show that there are correlations between bare-ass spanking And sexual problems, let's say, or fetishes as an adult.
	And again, I'm not trying to put you in that category.
	I'm just pointing it out, that this is not discipline.
	And the humiliation is somebody completely owning your body.
	They're owning your physical space.
	They are dominating you.
	and they are in control of your nervous system completely dominating your existence in that moment.
	That's pretty heavy.
	It also, I think, connects a lot of thoughts, disparate thoughts.
	I'm happy to listen.
	I don't want you to talk about stuff that's really embarrassing to you.
	That's my job.
	But if you want to tell me your thoughts, I mean, I'm happy to hear them or you're welcome to keep them to yourself if you feel it would be helpful.
	I mean, the more you talk, the more we can usually connect.
	It's in the interest of that.
	I do respect you, and I respect your opinion a lot.
	Strangely, I'm almost glib about it sometimes.
	Not almost.
	You are glib about it, of course.
	It is some scar tissue to protect myself, I guess.
	Sure.
	But it doesn't.
	I mean, it protects you when you are still in that abusive environment, but it's no longer protecting you now.
	In fact, as you point out, it's counterproductive, right?
	Right.
	Well, so the disparate fonts was...
	It relates a little bit to the circumcision video and the...
	Other things.
	I used to be suicidal as a child and it's not uncommon for people with suicidal ideations to also mutilate themselves.
	I used to do that to myself in a private area.
	It's like a little death to stave off a big one, right?
	Sorry?
	It's like a little death to stave off a big one.
	Self-cutting.
	Yeah, I suppose.
	It does make the dopamine kind of just flow.
	Sorry, it's exercising a violent control over your own nervous system, which is what you associate with having power.
	And suicidality, I think, comes out of a kind of powerlessness or a belief that the world is inhabited by I mean, we kill ourselves not to escape the world, but all the people in it, and the lack of exceptions to the rule of how we were raised.
	So I really sympathize, and I'm really sorry about that.
	It is not...
	Of course, how we should exercise self-control through self-mutilation, but I can certainly understand why it also might be your sex organs that would draw you, not just because of the sensitivity of the nerves, but also because if your ass was used to attack you, to control you and to humiliate you, I mean, that's a sort of semi-sexual act already, if that makes sense.
	Yeah.
	The word control is also interesting because when I was a cutter, I had a strange sense of self-discipline.
	And in this case, I am using the word discipline correctly, I think.
	I would not argue that.
	It is self-abuse to cut yourself, right?
	Yes, but in other realms of my life I exhibited a lot more control over myself.
	So while I did abuse myself by cutting myself, I had more discipline to work out, to study, and do other things.
	Right.
	Right.
	And the control, I think that's an interesting word to use because it did make me feel as though I had more control.
	Sure.
	And I feel as though I... Hello, are you still there?
	I can hear you, Steph.
	Did we lose him?
	He's still showing up as on the call, but...
	Yeah, his audio dropped.
	Well, I mean, I'll talk for a moment.
	You know, when we have to adapt to an abusive environment, we adapt to that as if it's never going to change, because when you're two or three or four or five, you can't conceive of it ever changing.
	My daughter thinks she's going to live with us forever.
	She doesn't get that she grows up and is going to move out or whatever.
	And so when you're a child adapting to an abusive environment, there is an eternal future.
	You do not adapt to saying, well, I better not adapt all the way because I'm going to need to undo this later.
	There is no later when you're four or five or six and being assaulted.
	In this kind of way, there is a permanence, an eternity to it.
	Now, of course, we do grow up, and most of us do move out and sort of start our own lives, and then we have much more choice over our environment.
	And anybody who tries to pull the kind of shit that some parents pull on us as adults, well, that's assault.
	And somebody pulls down your pants and hits you with a belt, buckle side or no, I mean, they're guilty of assault.
	And You know, they're going to jail.
	And so we have a kind of protection.
	I remember I worked at a Swiss chalet.
	And at the Swiss chalet was a bar.
	And the bartender was serving some guy who was getting abusive.
	And it escalated and The guy threatened to beat up the bartender.
	And the bartender said, fine, I'll just call the cops and have you thrown in jail.
	And I remember that.
	I was young.
	I was still a teenager at this point.
	I've been on my own.
	I think I was 17 or so.
	I've been on my own for about two years or been without parents for about two years.
	And I just remember thinking, like, well, I guess that's true.
	You could just call the cops and have...
	And I remember that being a real turning point for me, just thinking, well, yes, he's an adult, so if somebody threatens to beat him up, he can call the cops and have that person thrown in jail.
	Now, that wasn't the case for me when I was a kid.
	My mom threatened to beat me up.
	I mean, he just...
	Submit it.
	I mean, what else are you going to do?
	And I think it's hard to adapt, but it is necessary to adapt.
	We definitely don't want to spend our whole lives as if we're under the control of abusive people and we're five or six years old.
	That is a tragic way to live, and that is a way, of course, of keeping our standards lower, which, as I've argued before, is how the abusers win.
	It gets you to lower your standards, and they rule your life, or your lack thereof.
	So, it is in these early, deep experiences that we need to look, and there is self-protective mechanisms that are put in place, the minimization, the relabeling of things, the changing of definitions, the whatever.
	And, you know, usually the promotion of one parent...
	Too bad, and other parents are not so bad, which is all nonsense.
	I mean, there's no...
	In that situation, right, I mean, there's somebody maybe more abusive, but the other person's letting them get away with it.
	Married that person, and it's exposing the children to that person, people, and so on, right?
	You know, it's like if I have a dog that bites my daughter, and I say, well, it's not my fault, it's the dog's fault.
	Well, the dog bit me, not my dad, so my dad's okay.
	It's like, no, no, I brought the dog into your life.
	All that kind of stuff, right?
	So...
	Are you back?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Sorry, I dropped off there for a second.
	Oh, no, no problem at all.
	I think you dropped off.
	I nodded off.
	I hit my sleep switch, you know.
	Well, that's the ultimate fence, is to get sleepy, right?
	No, no.
	Anyway, so at the level...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	The internet got sleepy, I think.
	Right.
	So, when it comes to anxiety...
	I mean, again, it feels weird to have to say this stuff in the 21st century, but people should not be hitting their children with belts.
	And if I hit my wife with a belt on her bare ass, leaving welts and marks, leaving it hard for her to walk and maybe even impossible for her to sit down, and she said, well, you know, my husband is quite a disciplinarian.
	I mean, we all know what other people would say to her, right?
	Get out.
	Run.
	Well, they may, but they certainly wouldn't agree.
	Oh yes, he's quite a disciplinarian.
	Quite strict.
	You know, my husband really likes the house clean.
	And if I don't do it the way he wants me to do it, then I get my bare ass beaten with the belt.
	Well, he's disciplined.
	He must really care about that clean house, right?
	But that's not what people would say.
	This guy's an abuser.
	And you're not in a safe environment.
	Now, of course, you can't say to kids, get out, because they're biologically stuck there, right?
	No independence and all that.
	But I think it is important to really, you know, face this trauma.
	I mean, this is...
	Again, I'm no psychologist, I'm no expert, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say, well, that which is illegal in a civilized country to do to children and which is illegal in every country in the world to do to an adult does constitute abuse.
	And a particularly egregious form of abuse.
	Because there's something calculated about it.
	You know, like, in my household, there were these eruptions, and my mom would just sort of lash out or whatever, right?
	But...
	It was never cold and patient and calculated.
	And that's why I sort of asked about the mechanics of the spanking, because it's kind of cold and calculated.
	I'm going to spank you.
	I'm going to go and get the belt.
	I'm going to pull your pants down.
	I'm going to put you across my knee.
	It's cold.
	It's methodical.
	It's sadistic.
	It's not just an eruption.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	I should add, the countdown from 10 was probably the worst.
	Yeah.
	What is that?
	What fresh hell is this, to quote a Shakespeare line?
	My mom would count down from ten.
	By the time she reached one, there was not compliance.
	It was going to lead to some welts.
	Yeah, I see parents doing this too.
	I'm going to count to three.
	I mean, that's not reasoning.
	That's not negotiation.
	I mean, that's just threat.
	Right, and it has an added little sadistic anxiety-inducing mechanism.
	Yeah, and the kid is like, is she bluffing?
	Is it real?
	I mean, I can't imagine.
	Let's say it's taken a while for the lady at Starbucks to get my latte.
	I mean, do I get to say to her, I'm going to count to three.
	If I don't have my latte by three, I'm leaping over the counter and I'm going to hit you in the ass.
	I mean, I'd be a fucking lunatic.
	Yeah.
	I wouldn't even have to do it.
	Even threatening it would get me arrested, right?
	But we can't really – we're still so primitive as a species that we really, really have trouble seeing children as people.
	We have trouble seeing children as equal to independent adults.
	When you reframe or rephrase your or most people's childhood experiences as do it at Starbucks, do it with a police officer, do it with a judge, do it with a security guard, do it with the guy at the juice store, do it with a salesman, do it with a car salesman.
	I'm going to count to three.
	If you don't come down to the offer I want, I'm going to pull my belt out, I'm going to hit you on your bare ass with my belt.
	Or, you know, you go to some employee's office and his desk is a mess.
	Hey, we have a clean desk policy.
	Pull your pants down and bend over.
	I'm going to hit you in the ass with my belt.
	I mean, you get that...
	That's insane.
	And these are independent adults.
	I mean, they can get you arrested, they can leave, they can quit, they can walk out of the building, they can tell you to go fuck yourself and leave at any moment.
	Children don't have any of those freedoms, any of those options.
	So we should have the highest goddamn standards for children, but instead we have lower standards for children.
	Imagine if you went to a goddamn zoo.
	You went to a zoo, and...
	The monkey threw something at the zookeeper.
	And the zookeeper took off his belt, grabbed the monkey, and hid it on the ass with the belt.
	And that was filmed and put on YouTube.
	What do you think would happen?
	He'd get fired.
	People would go insane.
	I got a video called The Story of Your Enslaved One.
	It's my most successful video.
	And in it, there's a video of a guy kicking a dog.
	We're not talking about war and death and murder and death.
	Everybody goes insane over the guy kicking a dog.
	But then you bring up spanking and people are like, no, that's discipline.
	What else are you going to do?
	They're kids.
	They don't listen.
	Because you're not talking to them because you're hitting them.
	Of course they don't listen.
	But when you reframe what we do to children to anybody else or even other species, people go insane.
	Like the number of people who wrote to me and said...
	I can't believe that circumcision video.
	I mean, just look at the comments.
	People are like, I couldn't watch that video.
	You know, I had this done to my son, and I can't watch this video.
	It's like, you cut the end of your son's penis off.
	It's the most sensitive part of his entire body.
	When he was a day or two old, he's screaming out for his protectors, who are the ones actually inflicting this mutilation on him.
	What did you think was happening when they took a scalpel to your son's genitals?
	What did you think was happening?
	And say, here's a video of it.
	And people are just, I don't know what it is.
	What the hell is wrong with people?
	They can't connect these basic things.
	Yeah, it's complete.
	I don't even know what to call it.
	It is a kind of dissociative madness that we as a species have to really fight hard to overcome.
	I mean, I'm doing my best to try and help people with it, but viewed with any compassionate, empathetic eyes.
	I mean, the human species is...
	It's astonishingly and abominably cruel, still even now.
	And I just wanted to sort of point that out.
	And so I'm sorry that you went through all of this.
	This is not how you should have been dealt with as a child.
	And what it's done, of course, is it is an internalized...
	I mean, I see this process with my daughter all the time.
	You know, she drops a glass, it breaks on the floor.
	What do we say?
	It's okay.
	It's just a glass.
	What the hell do I care about a glass?
	It's my daughter, you know?
	Glass isn't going to be holding my hand when I slip off into the great beyond, hopefully in 50 or 60 years or 600.
	And when she drops things now, do you know what she says?
	That's okay.
	It's okay.
	With exactly the same intonation.
	It's okay.
	Because she has internalized what happens when you make a mistake.
	It's okay.
	I mean, it's a glass.
	What do they cost?
	A buck?
	Five bucks?
	I mean, who cares?
	Who cares?
	And a clean house.
	Jesus Christ.
	A clean house.
	I mean, hitting your children over dust, over...
	I mean, what kind of insane priorities are those?
	This is your flesh and blood.
	Over disobedience?
	Who the fuck are parents that the children have to obey them?
	My daughter doesn't have to obey me.
	She doesn't have to listen to me.
	She doesn't have to respect me.
	She doesn't have to love me.
	She didn't choose me as a dad.
	She owes me nothing.
	I owe her everything.
	I made the choice to be a father.
	But what does she owe me?
	She owes me nothing.
	And the idea that she owes me something, if she fails to provide it, obedience, tidiness, cleanliness, politeness, niceness, what the fuck?
	To hit a helpless, defenseless, fundamentally biologically enslaved child?
	I cannot conceive of even raising my voice at my daughter, let alone hitting her.
	It's inconceivable.
	I mean, I just can't imagine it.
	Any more than you could imagine cold cocking someone at Starbucks for getting your latte order wrong.
	Anyway, I just wanted to mention that.
	It's...
	That's a lot of self-knowledge.
	I've got a lot to process, I think.
	I'm very thankful for the counseling, I suppose.
	I don't exactly know what to do next, but there's a lot to think about.
	Well, I'll tell you what I tell everyone.
	A, sit down and talk to your parents.
	And B, get a good therapist.
	You know, if you said, I want to become...
	It's not going to be possible.
	Oh, one of those isn't going to be possible?
	I assume it's the first one then, right?
	Uh, father.
	Yeah, he died.
	Okay, well...
	I'm ambivalent about that, so I'm going to say, sorry, but I'm not.
	But, okay, sit down with your mom.
	Sit down and talk about this stuff.
	This is important stuff to talk about.
	I've mostly gone through the defooing process already, and I don't think that I would.
	I don't know what I would gain from talking to her about it.
	Well, that's...
	I mean, obviously, these are my suggestions.
	I certainly have no answer, and I have no authority, as you know, in telling anybody what to do.
	That's my suggestion.
	If you're already through that process, again, I hope you're talking to a councillor or will...
	I'll bring a competent therapist into the mix as far as this goes.
	The therapeutic profession does seem to be starting to understand some of the parent-child issues that we've talked about in this show for years and years, and they do seem to be more open to voluntary relationships between adult children and parents with a history of abuse, like maybe not seeing them or whatever, they're at least starting to apply a tiny fraction of the level of protection extended to women in particular in abusive relationships with a spouse.
	They're starting to extend a tiny bit of protection of that towards adult children with a history of being abused.
	So that would be, you know, find somebody who's got that competence or skill set or at least that perspective.
	And, you know, family separations are big, difficult, complicated topics.
	I would really strongly suggest that you talk to a counselor.
	Again, you're obviously the final person who's got the hand on the steering wheel of your life, but those are just my suggestions.
	It's good suggestions.
	I unfortunately really don't have access to therapy.
	I've sunk a lot into my business, and I don't really have means to do very much else.
	You don't have any insurance or health insurance that might cover this stuff?
	No.
	No.
	All right.
	Well, then the last thing that I would suggest is John Bradshaw, Nathaniel Brandon, and so on have these workbooks.
	And again, I know as an entrepreneur you probably don't have a lot of time, but I would definitely look into that kind of stuff.
	At least that will start to open – write down your dreams, be open and receptive and – You get that you call your feelings irrational because you as a child were called irrational, right?
	And I would not reproduce that within myself.
	Right.
	That is a conditioning or imprinting kind of, I don't know the exact word for it.
	In the internalization, I think is the term.
	We internalize that.
	Everybody around us, particularly those who are, they are infectious.
	Personalities, for better or for worse, are infectious.
	And everyone who's around us has imprints and impressions on us.
	And this is why, you know, I would rather have somebody with a hacking cough around me than somebody with a mean streak.
	Because the hacking cough I can get some medicine for, but somebody with a mean streak, they're going to embed themselves in my brain.
	Everybody leaves footprints, and those footprints harden into concrete very quickly.
	So that would be something, again, that is important.
	I just don't have people who are mean in your life, particularly during a transitional time.
	It's those darn mirror neurons.
	Yeah, well, you know, they are very important things to protect, you know.
	The mirror neurons, for those who don't know, and they can see them not just in humans but in other species as well, the mirror neurons are...
	They fire.
	When you see somebody else get kicked in the nuts, they fire as if you were kicked in the nuts.
	They really allow you to empathize at a very visceral level with others.
	And yeah, they are very, very important to protect.
	They are that which gives you the capacity for empathy, for love, and I would say fundamentally for virtue in a visceral way or in a visceral sense.
	I'm incredibly sorry.
	From the very bottom of my heart, I'm incredibly sorry that you had this experience growing up.
	That is wrong.
	Beating kids with belts, that's just stone evil.
	I'm not trying to say your mom is evil from top to bottom and back to front, but those actions are astonishingly immoral.
	Particularly because you're kind of a young guy.
	I mean, if you were like 90...
	You know, and your childhood was like before the Second World War, or I don't know what, halfway to the First World War.
	But, I mean, you're a young guy, and your childhood won that long ago.
	And the information is readily available for alternatives.
	Parental effectiveness training has been out forever.
	And even Benjamin Spock's post-war book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, I mean, I mean, this is not new stuff.
	This stuff has been around for at least two and maybe three generations.
	We're not asking people to be heavily cutting edge here when we ask parents to look into alternatives to corporal punishment.
	The science is very clear and has been since at least the late 80s, early 90s is when the first flurry of studies showing the negative effects of spanking and corporal punishment.
	It's not hard to find this stuff.
	The Academy of Pediatrics is against corporal punishment.
	It is...
	It is not hard to find, so this is not imposing unrealistic standards on information available to parents.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	You cut out for a second.
	I was just seeing if you were there.
	There's a lot to add, and I know I've taken up my 30 minutes' worth of time.
	So I don't want to use up anyone else's time.
	that's No, if you've got something real important to say, I don't mind going over.
	I mean, where the hell have I got to go?
	So this is more important than anything else in my world at the moment.
	So if you have something else you wanted to add, I mean, please don't be conscious of time.
	If this is the first real conversation you've had about this stuff, time is not the issue.
	It's the first conversation that really was, I guess, meaningful on this topic.
	And the spanking, that was just one thing.
	There were actual fists thrown, and my dad, he was, you know, I use the words less disciplinarian or less abusive, but he's He had some emotional problems.
	Again, I'm no clinician.
	I can't diagnose the man, and he's dead, so there's nothing really I can do other than speculate.
	But I think I had talked to someone, and it was something like schizoaffective disorder, where he would say inappropriate things and not have the appropriate emotional response a lot of times.
	And that didn't actually get a lot of discussion when I was in counseling, when I was still in college, because I did take advantage of some counseling, although it was not helpful at all.
	It definitely was not empathetic or voluntaristic or any of that.
	It was more of the, you could reconcile, you should reconcile, your parents, and a lot of other things.
	So, I mean, the spankings, that's...
	And that's just the most easy, the most conventional thing to talk about.
	But, I mean, what does it say about...
	It would be...
	I mean, sorry, but spanking is...
	It's not even a lack of empathy, it's anti-empathy.
	Right.
	Because it's using the emotions and the nerves of the child against the child.
	It's not just a lack of empathy, it's...
	Yeah, sorry.
	Yeah, so if this anti-empathy was a characteristic of your parents, then I'm sure...
	it would show up in infinite other areas.
	So yes, this is the most dramatic of the things to talk about, but I'm sure at every level from top to bottom, from beginning to end, this cruelty, this indifference, this hostility, this control, this dominance, this abusive tendencies, they're going to show up everywhere. this abusive tendencies, they're going to show up everywhere.
	Like parents aren't nice and then just wind up hitting their kids and then they're nice again.
	I mean, it's part of a general...
	I think the technical term is character logic, like embedded.
	It's not just a little part of the personality, like a quirk.
	It is the personality.
	There's another thing that I wanted to talk about, but it's rather taboo, and you'll have to excuse me if I'm somewhat glib or if I put up...
	Wait, sorry.
	So from penis cutting to belt hitting to...
	I know, I know.
	Now we're starting to think about talking about something taboo.
	Okay, I am...
	Wait, hang on.
	Let me put on my straps here.
	I'm clipping in.
	I've got my hand ready, and let's roll.
	What have we got that's now more taboo than what we've been talking about before?
	So, the disparate thoughts.
	Another one of those was the breakup that I had recently.
	It...
	There was this woman who, for lack of a better word, was submissive.
	She was, I guess, to use the parlance, she was very much into the BDSM culture and pain play.
	Oh, you mean submissive like...
	In sort of bondage and domination scenarios rather than she just didn't, you know, she would let me choose the restaurants kind of thing, right?
	Right, right.
	So what ended up Driving the nail in the coffin for that was...
	I had been listening to your show for a while now, and I've donated $40.
	I think I owe you about another $100 if we're going to deal with the $0.50 podcast thing.
	So if I get the business off the ground...
	You know what?
	Grow your business.
	Don't worry about paying me.
	Just grow your business.
	I would feel more happy with that than getting another $100 from you.
	But go ahead.
	Well, she...
	I had a really hard time being a dominant, and in the past, I didn't have as big of a problem with it.
	Bondage and BDSM play, it was not something that I ever shied away from before, and this woman was expecting it, and it was...
	Does it show up a lot in your dating life?
	I mean, I don't want to sound all kinds of square and old.
	I went out with lots of women when I was younger, and I don't think it ever came up once.
	You know, like, here's a cat and nine tails to beat me, eat me, licorice whip, or whatever.
	But does it show up a lot in your dating relationship?
	Yeah, and what does that really say about me?
	Yeah.
	Well, it confirms the theory that bare-ass banking with implements in particular is going to give rise to sexual dysfunction.
	Oh, I'm just looking forward to this tsunami of emails saying, you're saying that BDSM is sexual dysfunction, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	Well, you know, it's not necessary for fertility, so...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Correlation is not causation, but it is linked to...
	And it bothers me.
	It still bothers me.
	And there was this part of myself.
	There's an incredibly angry part of myself.
	I mean...
	So, I'm starting a biotech, and forces of good.
	I want to improve quality of living.
	There was a time where I was looking at all the evil scientist stuff, and I was a very unhappy person.
	And I did not mind, in the past...
	Cutting someone during sex, if they were okay with it, if they had asked for it.
	It wasn't like...
	I have a surprise for you!
	Right, right.
	God, no.
	Amal nitrate and a scalpel!
	Let's go!
	Oh, God.
	And bondage.
	It was...
	I think it was just part of what I presented to the world kind of...
	People see certain traits, whether consciously or subconsciously, they'll latch on.
	And if that's what they're attracted to, then it made perfect sense that that happened a lot in my sex life.
	And what were the women's childhoods?
	Most of them had been raped, and there were daddy issues across the board.
	I guess there was a side of me that was nurturing, and I'd like to think that that's part of my core personality, and that hasn't changed.
	But the...
	Oh, God.
	Come here, Daddy wants to discipline you.
	It makes me cringe now.
	No, I get it.
	And now when you say they were raped, were they raped...
	Outside of the family or inside of the family?
	Most of them outside of the family, to my knowledge.
	Well, look, you don't need me to tell you this because you know, but this is not helpful stuff, right?
	I mean, it's helpful for you to talk about it, and I appreciate it.
	My God, I mean, I appreciate your honesty.
	I mean, this is...
	Courageous frankness.
	No, it's not glibness.
	I mean, you're being very frank.
	You didn't want to bring this stuff up to some degree.
	I understand it's taboo.
	Right.
	And to me, I mean, this is all, for want of a better phrase, this is all voluntary.
	It doesn't violate the non-aggression principle.
	I mean, bondage discipline, I mean, you know, dropping hot wax on people's nipples, peeing in their ear.
	I mean, it's all voluntary, right?
	I mean, so it may be dysfunctional as all get up, but it's not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	It may not appeal to my sense of sexual aesthetics, but it certainly is not immoral in any way.
	But I would argue that it is a product of evil in the history.
	And to continue it is to maintain the effects of evil in the history.
	Right.
	If that makes any sense.
	For a lot of the women, they viewed it somewhat therapeutically, that – There's this thing called aftercare.
	I mean, you don't typically just have a scene where you beat someone or you tie them up, you spank them, you humiliate them or whatever, and then just leave them.
	That's fairly uncommon, at least as far as I'm aware and in my experience.
	Usually there's a kind of...
	breaking and then rebuilding that occurs and I can understand the therapy or like maybe they're using it to deal in the moment or that there's like the I don't exactly know what kind of substance No, again, look, I'm no expert, and this is all just my bullshit amateur opinion as usual, but I don't think it's therapeutic.
	I think it's about as therapeutic as heroin or self-cutting.
	It provides you relief in the moment.
	Right.
	And what happens, of course, is that we have this intense desire to protect our parents that's biological.
	Right.
	And to forgive our parents and to excuse our parents, because...
	If our parents abandon us or turn on us from our children, we're dead.
	We're dead.
	I mean, you know, you leave an abusive husband, you can go to a shelter, you can get a job, you can get police protection, restraining orders.
	I mean, you're at risk, of course, for the first 24 to 36 hours, but you're not going to immediately die.
	If your parents say, you know what, this kid's too much of an inconvenience, I mean, leave you in the woods, leave you in the jungle, leave you in the water, leave you on an ice floe, I mean, you're dead.
	So we bond, and we try not to be too much trouble, or if we are trouble, we try to be trouble in a way that is weirdly gratifying for them.
	Like a parent who hits you, there's an old line, I mentioned this in a podcast recently, the Tropic of Cancer, Norman, I can't remember his last name, The guy, he's a famous American novelist, and he stabbed his wife, like, I don't know, 15 times or something like that.
	And he said, as long as you're using a knife, there's still some love left.
	You know, in other words, I'm not just shooting her in the head, right?
	Norman Mailer is the guy, right?
	And so, if your parent is beating you, at least you're providing an outlet for their anger.
	At least you have value to them as an object of sadism.
	Complete indifference is something no kid ever wants.
	So, if your parents had sadistic streaks, you may very well have provoked the beatings in order to have value for them as a receptacle for their sadism.
	No, I definitely provoked the beatings for my father.
	That was...
	Everyone thought that I was kind of weird for that, but he didn't really show emotions.
	So you knew he cared when he hit, right?
	At least he cared something about you.
	At least you had some value to him, even as an object of cruelty, as a poison container, as Lloyd DeMoss talks about.
	And the sick thing was that his baseline emotional state was he was a kidder.
	He joked.
	He was outwardly very happy in usually the wrong circumstance.
	I mean, like his wife nagging him constantly, him hating his job, all of that.
	And he was like this...
	It's weird that he...
	Is it like this sort of Rodney Dangerfield, sad sack kind of stuff?
	Yeah, that was one of his favorite comedians, actually.
	Yeah, well, sometimes these things are not too complicated.
	So with regards to the sort of reenactment, our desire is to normalize the abuse, because when we denormalize the abuse, the anger comes out.
	And the anger against parents is, for children, life-threatening.
	Because it threatens even the sadistic or cruel or weird or twisted or fucked up bond that you have with your parents.
	If that is, I mean, it could be a wonderful bond.
	I hope that my daughter's bond with me is wonderful.
	But we have to do everything we can to contain the anger that we experience at these kinds of violations, sexual, physical, emotional, neglect, verbal, whatever it is, right?
	And so the way that we tamp down our anger is to normalize what's happened.
	It's discipline.
	It's discipline.
	They were angry.
	They were drunk.
	They were upset.
	I did this.
	I did that.
	I didn't listen to them about this.
	I didn't do that.
	I forgot to take out the garbage.
	We normalize it, which means that we take all the responsibility for the abuse ourselves, and we provide all the get-out-of-jail-free cards.
	We throw them at our parents by the bucket load.
	And the problem with that, of course, is that if that is not a problem, in other words, if the abuse that we receive is to be normalized, then it must be continued.
	And that's the trap that happens, and this is why people continue to put themselves voluntarily into abusive situations as an adult.
	We've normalized it.
	This is what people do.
	Like, I've normalized the word tree to mean tree, so when I refer to a tree, I call it a treat.
	I make up my own language.
	And so, this repetition compulsion, I don't believe it's therapeutic.
	I think it's part of a way of saying, this is life.
	People who've got cruel parents, people are just cruel.
	That's just human nature.
	We dominate.
	We are cruel.
	We're mean.
	What they say is it's human nature and therefore my parents aren't to blame.
	They're not an exception to the rule.
	People are cruel like people aren't 19 feet tall.
	I don't say that my parents are short because they weren't 19 feet tall because they're in the normal range of human height.
	So we normalize and then with the normality, we gain the relief from rage and Which means that we can continue in our relationship with our parents, which is so necessary for our survival as children, but the price of that release from rage is the repetition compulsion, which is not therapeutic, but a continuation.
	Again, my opinion, I could be entirely full of immense mounds of kangaroo caca, but that's just my thoughts.
	And I've got a whole book, a section in my book, Real-Time Relationships, called Time of the Boxer that goes into this from a slightly different angle, but that's...
	You know, if I were you, interested in a woman, ask about her childhood.
	Ask about her childhood.
	And what you want is, you know, some combination of Emil and the detectives and the sound of music.
	What you don't want is, you know, I was raped by a satyr in the shape of a gardener.
	You know, here's some hot wax and a cattle prod.
	Let's go to town.
	I think that you don't – you just ask them about their childhoods and if they've got a messed up childhood and they're not – like they haven't worked through it, they're not like in therapy or have been in therapy for a long time or self-work or whatever it is that people have found as an effective methodology for dealing with this stuff and I promote therapy because – I believe in science, and the scientific evidence is that therapy is the most effective way of ensuring long-term happiness from a history of dysfunction.
	And I've got an interview with Dr.
	Gabriel Dichter, D-I-C-H-T-E-R, on this very channel, which people can look at, which goes into all of the science as to why talk therapy is the most effective way of maintaining long-term happiness.
	I don't want to make this stuff up, or my wife's a therapist, or I went to therapy.
	It works.
	And it's the most effective thing that has been found to work.
	And philosophy won't do it for you.
	I mean, that's why I'm not a therapist or a psychologist or any of these things.
	But if somebody has unprocessed trauma and have a repetition compulsion...
	If they're still cutting, if they're drinking to excess, if they abuse drugs or, of course, alcohol, if they're promiscuous, if they are acting out, you cannot be with this person no matter what.
	I mean, if you're healthy, they're going to make you not healthy, and if you're not healthy, they're going to keep you not healthy.
	Shy away, run away, fly away.
	Grab yourself an armful of Greyhound, as the old Sam Cooke song used to say.
	Grab yourself an armful of Greyhound and get the hell away.
	It's okay to have...
	This is not right.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	It's okay to have a few Freudian slips during this conversation.
	Well, he was a very handsome man, and died a very...
	Because, of course, he died a very tragic end.
	I mean, he was...
	Got into a disagreement with a prostitute and ended up getting shot.
	I mean, what a monstrous end to an incredible talent and one of the most amazing vocalists outside of Freddie Mercury's.
	Ah, these guys all have these terrible ends.
	Anyway, so ask about these women's histories.
	And, I mean, if there's a lot of trauma, man, just don't do it.
	This is just walking straight back into five-year-old's skin and repeating all of the stuff that you need to get away from.
	I think I've been realizing that more and more.
	I try to help a lot of these women, and it's just not possible.
	Wait, is your theory of trying to help them recreating rape scenarios?
	In a sick way, that's what it used to be.
	Yeah, okay.
	Well, I don't have to talk you out of that then, but, I mean, come on.
	Yeah.
	I'll Be Your Rapist Tonight is no UB40 song that I know of.
	No, Robert Palmer.
	Robert Palmer, anyway.
	It's uncomfortable.
	This is a very uncomfortable conversation.
	Well, look, but this is what you live.
	This is where you are, and I... I mean, I respect you for talking about this stuff.
	This is important stuff.
	This is the stuff which we as human beings should be talking about.
	This is important stuff.
	Just think, you could have gone through your whole life.
	You could have gone through your whole life and never talked about this in any kind of clear way.
	Non-romantic, non-sexualized kind of way.
	I mean, assuming you're not, you know, spanking the monkey as we speak.
	I know I'm not, only because I'm on camera, of course.
	But, you know, you could have gone through your whole life without a meaningful conversation about this stuff.
	And that's just incredibly tragic.
	And the cycle would have repeated itself as it had in the past, yeah.
	I'm glad that I... Yeah, I mean, your dad and your mom obviously had some screwed up shit when they were kids and didn't do the work and didn't talk about it honestly.
	Ended up acting out behind closed doors in this horrible way.
	Right.
	So, good for you.
	Best disinfectant of sunlight.
	Roaches can't hide from the light.
	Well, I... On the one hand, I think I'd love to talk more, but I think I've taken up a lot of your time, sir, and I appreciate it.
	Well, look, I mean, if you want to talk privately, this is important stuff, and I care about you as a human being.
	I know we just met, but you know my middle name, and now I know your secrets.
	So if you want to talk, even if it's just privately, just send an email to Mike.
	We'll try and set something up.
	I mean, I don't do therapy, and it's not even close to what I talk about.
	If there's any kind of clarity that philosophy can bring to these situations, I'm certainly happy to help if I can.
	And so, you know, thank you for calling up and thank you for your honesty.
	And again, I'm so sorry that you have to dig yourself out of this hole.
	I mean, it does make your arms stronger, it does make your back stronger, and there's good things that can come out of it, but it's not something that you watch, you know?
	Right.
	Well, I... Good luck to the other callers on the line.
	Yeah.
	All the best.
	All right.
	Thanks, man.
	Okay.
	Andrew, you're up next.
	Hello, Stefan.
	Can you hear me?
	I can.
	How's it going, Andy?
	Great.
	Great to finally talk to you.
	Yes, sorry about that delay, but it seemed important.
	Oh, no, no.
	I totally understand.
	You can't cut those things short.
	Wait, are we back on circumcision again?
	No.
	I have two things I'd like to talk about today, and they might be linked, I guess, or find out, or you may.
	One thing that's kind of more medium to long-term with me, and has existed as far as I, as long as I can remember, is that difficulty in emotionally connecting with other people.
	Um...
	And this is something I've had for, yeah, as far back as I can remember.
	And it's, you know, starting to cause me, well, it has caused me difficulties already, but it's causing me more difficulties as I get, you know, now that I'm out as a young adult and, you know, looking to establish relationships and friendships and I mean, you're a post-teenager.
	Are you in college?
	Are you bypassing college, your early, mid-20s kind of thing?
	No, I'm actually in my early 30s.
	Oh, so wait, is early 30s now still a young adult?
	I mean, what, are you people going to live forever?
	Yeah, I guess I'm not a young adult.
	Well, yeah, I think, you know, early middle age would be where I'd put it.
	Not to make you panic, but anyway.
	All right.
	So...
	I can give you my history if that's helpful.
	Let me ask you first.
	When you say you can't emotionally connect with people, how do you know?
	What are the signs?
	How would I know if I just saw you?
	Maybe if I saw you in a silent, no-words interaction with someone else, how would I know?
	How do you know?
	What does that even mean?
	I just want to make sure I understand what it means when you say that you don't connect with other people.
	Well, I've never...
	I never sought out other people.
	In childhood, I never sought out other children for friendship.
	Never spontaneously played with them.
	And that pattern continued basically until my undergraduate years where I learned a lot of things.
	I learned a lot of social skills consciously from 18 onward that I think a lot of people learned earlier.
	And...
	I think that's still causing me difficulties, although I've gotten a lot better with at least the surface level social interactions.
	Okay.
	So it's not that you're with people that you can't emotionally connect with.
	You don't even have the illusion that you could or would find value in other people so you don't even seek them out.
	Is that right?
	I think I can partly.
	I mean, but...
	Yeah, it feels like there's something missing.
	It feels like...
	Social interactions usually always feel like an act, and I realize that's common to a certain extent with, you know, with the average person in the screwed up world.
	But I think it feels like, to a greater degree, with me.
	I mean, I didn't have a girlfriend until graduate school.
	And I met her online, as with all my past girlfriends.
	And I don't know, I'm just starting to look at my family now, looking back, and I'm just starting to wonder just whether our interactions are a lot more superficial than I thought they were.
	All right.
	We're in the land of euphemisms, which means we're infertile grant.
	All right.
	Not quite as deep as I thought we were.
	Okay, so what would it mean for you to be connected?
	So if you've got a goal called getting connected with people, how are you going to know if you've achieved that goal?
	To some reasonable degree.
	Perfect.
	Who knows?
	We can't do a Vulcan mind meld.
	But how would you know?
	What would you look for to know you've achieved that?
	I guess, you know, be able to have fulfilling friendships, be able to, you know, have fulfilling...
	Sorry, to have what kind of friendships?
	Fulfilling relationships and friendships.
	Okay, but what is that?
	Fulfilling is just another way of describing connected.
	It's an adjective rather than something really clear.
	So what's missing from your relationships that you could do that would affect...
	I mean, I can give you a word that I'm looking for because that's an annoying way of leading the witness, but I think to me, connection is nothing more or less than honesty, right?
	Yeah, and I have difficulty trusting people.
	So you have difficulty being honest with people?
	Yeah.
	I'm always holding part of myself back, and I have, I don't know, as long as I can remember.
	Right.
	And you've internalized this like it's your problem, right?
	Yes.
	I think so.
	And why have you done that?
	How do you know that it's your problem?
	Well, I think it is a pattern with my family.
	Sorry, the reason I'm saying that is that...
	Sorry, the reason that I'm saying that, when somebody says, I have a great life difficulty...
	And it's my problem, I know immediately that it's not their problem.
	I mean, I just know that for a fact, because anybody who's done any self-work knows that major life issues almost always originate in early childhood.
	You don't have to be a dermatologist to say that too much sun is probably not great for your skin, and you don't have to be a psychologist to say that major life problems usually show up as a result of early childhood.
	So if my parents had taught me the opposite word for everything, You know, he's down, black is white, love is hate, north is south, or whatever.
	And then I found other people found me confusing and offensive.
	You know, if I meant to say I like blacks, but my parents taught me to say I hate niggers.
	Yeah.
	And then I wondered why, you know, everyone thought I was a troll or something like that.
	But I hate niggers.
	I mean, they're the worst.
	Why is everyone getting upset?
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	Would I then say, I have a problem with language?
	No, you were taught poorly.
	Yeah, I was taught the opposite, right?
	I mean, I was taught the opposite, I was taught the wrong, and I have to struggle.
	Like, I have a problem now I've got to fix, but it wasn't my problem.
	You know, if someone stabs me, I have a problem like I've got to go to the hospital.
	But that's not my stab wound.
	That's owned by the other guy.
	That's why he would go to jail for it, right?
	Sure, yeah.
	Your legs are broken.
	You have to deal with that, but you didn't break your legs.
	Right.
	So when you say you have difficulty...
	And I was listening to this, as I always do.
	I mean, I'm listening to what you're saying, but I'm also listening to what you're not saying.
	And you did talk about your family, but very mutedly, very euphemistically, very...
	Minimalistically, you know, as in, well, we may not be quite as close as I thought I was, this, that, and the other, right?
	Yeah.
	So, in your family, as a child, what was your family's relationship to honesty from you?
	I don't know.
	I mean, I kind of kept to myself, as long as I can remember.
	You know, I was always that quiet kid reading books, or, you know, I played far too many video games growing up.
	That's another judgment, but okay.
	What's that?
	Okay, so what you're really saying is that you found books and video games more enjoyable than the people in your house?
	Yes.
	Why?
	I don't know.
	I had no pleasure from interacting with them.
	Which is another way of saying you didn't enjoy it.
	Why did you have no pleasure in interacting with them?
	What was missing?
	Or what was missing that you wanted or what was present that you didn't?
	I guess now I realize that I did try and speak a little honestly.
	I did try and speak honestly about my childhood with my mother recently and she got extremely defensive and she was pretty adept at dancing around it, but she did dance around it.
	So yeah, I'm pretty sure I could not be honest with them.
	It's just this goes so far back that I'm only realizing this.
	You're pretty sure you could not be honest with them.
	Yeah, again, I mean...
	So there was no...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	There was no...
	Like, I'm an empiricist, right?
	You know that, right?
	And so if you did not express honesty with them as a child, and I'm telling you, we're born honest.
	We are born honest.
	My daughter is a very honest person.
	I, you know, occasionally she'll bend the truth or stretch the truth or say she's hungry when she, in fact, just doesn't want to go to bed.
	Um...
	But I know that.
	I mean, I know well enough to know that.
	It's one of the benefits of being home all the time is your kids can't really fool you.
	But unfortunately, you can't fool your kids either.
	I tried, I mentioned this before, I tried to sneak a piece of chocolate.
	It was a tiny piece.
	It was like under my tongue.
	And I walk into the room.
	She says, what's in your mouth?
	Like, how do you know?
	Get the cameras out of my teeth.
	But, so I'm an empiricist.
	So when you say, well, I wasn't honest as a kid and I avoided their company.
	And then when I tried to Talked to my mom as an adult.
	She got defensive, wouldn't listen, whatever.
	I couldn't be honest with her.
	Yeah.
	So if you don't have an example of successful honesty with your parents, then this is not a relativistic or shades of gray situation.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it does.
	Like, if I have a neighbor who dresses up in KKK uniforms and just hates minorities and so on, he doesn't have a racist bit.
	He's not kind of racist.
	He's not on the racist side.
	He's racist.
	Yeah, like you said.
	So if you can't think, you know, if you're in your early 30s and you've known your mom or your parents for 30, 31 years and you can't think of a time where you've been successfully or have honesty positively received with them, then the relationship isn't kind of like not quite as deep as you thought, right?
	Yeah, we discuss superficial topics.
	Why do you discuss superficial topics?
	What happens when you don't?
	They get nervous and divert or show signs of irritation.
	You know, I haven't tried being that honest with them growing up just because I guess this pattern was established so early that I just took it for granted pretty quickly.
	Sure, sure.
	And I'm very sorry for that.
	I mean, to be trained out of honesty is to be trained out of intimacy.
	To be trained out of honesty, to have honesty punished, attacked, is to be trained out of connection, is to be trained out of love, is to be trained out of happiness, I would argue.
	I mean, how can we really be happy if we can't be honest with the people around us?
	Because then all we're doing is avoiding, evading, hiding, minimizing, talking about trivia we don't care about, we're bored, we're not connected, we can't have a bond.
	You know, the parent-child bond is considered to be foundational to adult personalities, right?
	And what's called an insecure bond.
	It causes big psychological problems later on.
	An insecure bond, of course, is when the child must conform to the mother's preferences.
	And I use mothers, could be the father too, but mother's usually the primary caregiver if there is a parent at home.
	when the child must conform to the parent's preferences rather than be honest about his or her emotional and intellectual experiences and be honest about what's going on.
	Right?
	If I'm singing the My Little Pony song and I do a bad job, what does my daughter say?
	You need to work on your song.
	Thank you.
	Not good singing, Daddy.
	That's not good singing.
	And she's right.
	Whereas if I was really obsessed with being a great singer and I'd be like, oh, what are you talking about?
	I can't believe you would say that to me.
	That's so rude.
	Here I am just having a happy time.
	I'm singing a song and you've got to jump on me and criticize me.
	What the hell is wrong with you?
	Well, how long is her honesty and her openness going to be surviving that environment?
	Right.
	If I'm honest, I'm attacked.
	If I'm honest, I'm rejected.
	Yeah.
	Well, that is the parent saying, you better conform or else.
	And there's no kid who wants to explore the or else, because we've got no independence.
	We've got to conform, right?
	To whatever the preferences are of our environment that way.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	And so, you're going to...
	Dive into non-relational activities, books and video games, of course.
	You're going to dive into non-relational activities because relationships are empty and superficial and boring because they're all about conforming with selfish needs of other people for shallowness and non-confrontation and dishonesty.
	Yeah.
	What the hell, you know?
	Want to get together and talk about sports and lie?
	Want to get together and talk about the weather and avoid?
	No, I think I'll get more out of a book or out of a video game, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And then you say, "I have a hard time trusting people." That's just another way of internalizing.
	What would be a more accurate way of saying that?
	I've been trained to not trust people or conditioned to not trust people.
	Yes, or another way of putting it, which is not dissimilar, is to say, I was surrounded by untrustworthy people.
	Because anybody who rejects your honesty, anybody who attacks you for your honest opinion, is not trustworthy.
	Because they prefer their own illusions to your reality, and you can't connect with people like that.
	Yeah, I don't trust my family.
	And I'm sorry.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	I'm sorry about that.
	I'm sorry about that.
	I mean, dealing with an insecure bond, I mean, that was my issue, too.
	I mean, dealing with an insecure bond, I couldn't see anything my mom didn't like.
	You know, I just mentioned this in a podcast, but I mentioned it here too.
	I don't want to make this about me, but, you know, one night I had a test the next morning, some sort of science test, and one night I'm lying in bed and my mom's sitting in my room smoking like a chimney and she's typing something.
	Some obsessive letter to someone about something.
	And this is back in the days before computers.
	It was an electric typewriter.
	It was very loud, right?
	And she would type in these fast bursts.
	She used to be a secretary, so she'd type in this.
	She was a very fast typist.
	She used to type in these fast bursts.
	And then she'd sit and smoke and ponder and think, and then she'd type another sentence five or ten minutes later.
	And so I couldn't sleep.
	She was doing this in my room.
	Like, why the hell?
	We didn't have a one-room, a three-bedroom apartment.
	What the hell was she doing in my room?
	But I couldn't say, listen, Mom, I'm trying to sleep.
	Could you take your typewriter out?
	Because she'd get upset, get angry, blow up, could throw the typewriter at me.
	I don't know the hell, right?
	And I couldn't get up and go to another room because then she'd get angry at me for making her feel bad, for trying to save us from whatever the letter was supposed to be doing, right?
	So I just lie there, hour after hour, the moment I start to fall asleep, and more typing.
	I mean, that is such a ferocious level of dishonesty.
	Like, I can't even be honest about the fact that I want to get some goddamn sleep, that I got a test in the morning.
	This is keeping me up.
	Like, I can't...
	I can't even be honest about the obvious...
	And so, yeah, developing honesty and openness was a challenge, to say the least, right?
	I couldn't be honest about anything in my family.
	I think it was more subtle in mine, at least in some ways.
	I mean, there was never any physical abuse or not even any voices raised, you know, which I guess makes it harder to see.
	I think you mentioned last week a fellow with a narcissistic personality disorder who had been diagnosed with that and had worked on that for years to undo that damage.
	That did resonate with me to a certain extent.
	Well, and of course, libertarians, I mean, anarchists, atheists, I mean, face this problem.
	Sorry, what was that?
	Well, we face this problem.
	Thinkers face this problem.
	Sorry, government doesn't exist.
	There's no God.
	Taxation is theft.
	Bloody, bloody, blah.
	War is murder.
	I mean, my God, try being honest in society and see what happens, right?
	It's not just families.
	I mean, it's a fucking planet.
	Society is...
	You know, it's like being a woman with magic powers in Salem in the 19th century.
	I mean, they're already witch hunting and they're going to find you with a black cat and levitating and you're toast.
	I mean, the world is hysterical about truth.
	The world stands on these stilts of delusions that a merest breath of reason can shatter and crumble.
	Everybody's hanging by a thread and everybody's hysterical.
	The slightest energy of reason and evidence pulsing through The gossamer house of cards known as culture, I mean, God!
	Borders crumble, governments crumble, religions crumble, abuse crumbles, wars crumble, predations crumble, corporatism crumbles, fiat money crumbles.
	I mean, the amount of falsehood that society rests on It's so extensive and reaches so far up, so far wide, and so far down that anybody who brings reason along...
	I'm sorry?
	You get anger or evasiveness or...
	Yeah, I mean, you get enraged.
	People get enraged.
	You bring any kind of truth.
	So, you know, we are...
	I just want to say, not just your mom and dad, but, I mean, that obviously was your direct experience as a kid, but...
	It's a challenge.
	How much truth is my daughter going to speak?
	I don't know.
	Tough call.
	I fucking hate the world for making this choice, but that's the way it is.
	So besides doing some therapy, do you have any suggestions in terms of how I could undo this?
	Well...
	I wouldn't let my mom get away with one conversation.
	I'd go for another.
	Myself, again, what you do is up to you.
	But I think that the people in your life you don't have deep conversations with, just say, I don't think we have any real conversations.
	I don't feel like we have any real connection or honesty.
	I mean, what's your experience?
	Oh, I love it.
	It's great.
	Well, what was the last important thing that we talked about?
	Yeah, she worked as a mental health professional, so she knows a lot of tricks, which will make it quite a challenge, but I'll give it another shot.
	But just stick with the honesty, right?
	Because what that does, of course, is if you haven't tried it since you were three, this is going back and started the rewiring process, right?
	And just, you know, you've got to grit your teeth and be honest with people, I think.
	I mean, honesty is just something that...
	I mean, you don't want to be honest with people who are dangerous, right?
	obviously people who are, you know, risky people or dangerous people to be around.
	But where there's a possibility of connection, I would say honesty is important.
	And if you get blasted for being honest, you can stay in the conversation and say, this is really painful for me.
	Like, I'm trying to be honest.
	And, you know, my emotional, just RTR stuff, my real-time relationships theory, just be honest in the moment about your emotional experience.
	I'm really scared to have this conversation.
	I feel like I'm really putting our relationship at risk.
	But at the same time, I feel like our relationship is not blah, blah, blah, whatever, right?
	Just be honest and see what the response is.
	You can wake some people up and shock some people out of the zombie status that is most of human relationships or non-relationships.
	Therapy would be great.
	Self-knowledge is great.
	Talking with your parents is always important and other people you have these shallow non-relationships with.
	But I think just willing The honesty and mapping the results, I think, would be important.
	And I wouldn't give you the willpower prescription, except that you're not 22.
	So you don't have all the time in the world.
	Not that somebody's 22 does, but if you're in your early 30s, you've got to...
	Right?
	You got to move quick.
	I mean, if you want to be a dad, if you want, if you want, I don't know if you do or don't, but if you want to have that kind of connection that comes in from marriage and love and maybe kids or whatever.
	You know, you've got some time to work on this stuff, and you've got to find the right person, and you've got to find if they want to get married, and then you've got to get engaged, you've got to get married, and it's going to take, you know, a couple of years maybe of marriage before you have kids.
	You're already looking at getting into your late 30s or 40s.
	So I would say, you know, you've got to will this mother a little.
	I'm sorry, will this process a bit.
	All right.
	I guess I have another issue, if we have time to talk about it.
	I don't want to diss you.
	Mike, we've got one more person, right?
	Yep, one more person's waiting.
	Okay.
	All right.
	And does that person want to keep waiting?
	Mohamed, do you want to keep waiting?
	Well, thanks.
	Good.
	A man of few words.
	That might help.
	Because I won't be one of those.
	All right.
	So, what's the other thing you wanted to talk about?
	This actually seems a bit harder to talk about, but I learned last week that I flunked out at medical school, mainly due to apathy and, at least some of the time, depression.
	So you kind of resigned from medical school.
	I mean, you didn't flunk out like you tried your damnedest but couldn't make it, right?
	No, I just flunk out.
	I just...
	The thing is, I went into medical school, and this is going to be a little funny, but I wanted to be a psychiatrist.
	And that became harder and harder.
	It's pretty hard to succeed in medical school when you don't care about learning about the human body, or the rest of the human body.
	I don't mean to laugh, because I get this is a painful topic, but as far as obvious statements of the evening, I believe that one is going to get the Nobel.
	Yes, it is, I'm sure, quite hard to succeed in medical school.
	I also hear law school sucks if you're not interested in the law, and art school sucks if you don't like painting or making pictures and so on.
	But did you go in with more of a desire to learn about the human body and that diminished, or was it never...
	Well, I was open to it when I went in.
	I mean, psychiatry is what more.
	We didn't need to apply, and I enjoy teaching in grad school, but I didn't want to.
	And what did you want to be?
	Why did you want to be a psychiatrist?
	I wanted to help people help themselves, really.
	Could you not get a job as a drug dealer on the black market?
	No, I'm just kidding.
	Well, I wasn't a libertarian when I was.
	I really only came to this world.
	So from your perspective, the SSRIs and psychotropics and all that was like insulin for diabetes, right?
	Yeah, at the time, that was the case.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Did you change your opinion on that through the process of going through medical school?
	I became more and more skeptical.
	Yes, now I'm more skeptical.
	I realize it's a completely corrupt institution.
	So that made it even harder in a way to, you know, when you're in this environment and, you know, makes honesty even more difficult with your colleagues and your main social outlet.
	Because they, I guess, were all pro-medication.
	I mean, I don't assume a lot of them were studying it because they wanted to talk to people about their dreams and childhoods and mothers for 55 minutes an hour, right?
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, most want to be surgeons or general practitioners or, you know, cardiologists or whatever, right?
	I mean, the odd person in a class wants to be a psychiatrist or has an interest in psychiatry.
	But yeah, most would be pro-medication.
	I mean, it's just...
	How long did you spend in medical school?
	I did three years.
	I had to repeat my second year, and...
	I learned that I failed a clinical test that I had to redo this summer, so I did.
	When did you learn that?
	Last Monday.
	I'm sorry, man.
	I'm sorry.
	I really am.
	Yeah, I mean, I can't say that I'm sorry you didn't get a chance to be a psychiatrist, but I'm very sorry that you had this goal and it kind of blew up, right?
	Yeah, and I'm just trying to pick up the pieces now and wonder what next.
	What's your debt like?
	My deadline?
	No, sorry, what is your debt like?
	Oh, I am lucky enough that I inherited some bank stock from my grandparents, so I can use that to wipe it out.
	So that's One source of stress that's eliminated, a major one.
	I am worried about the big hole in my CV and just, you know, is this going to be a massive red flag that's going to frighten me in looking for work or in looking at any other kind of training programs?
	But, I don't know, this might be a topic for another day.
	But I'm just wondering...
	You said you had to repeat your second year.
	At what point did you suspect that you didn't want to do this?
	Halfway through first year.
	It became dull.
	But I mean, a large part of my life has been kind of slogging through things.
	I get that.
	I mean, I get that from your relationships, right?
	Well, I also have always had kind of trouble paying attention and But why, sorry, I mean, I get that there's a shallow relationship, so so on.
	Was there nobody who said, you're not happy, this is not what you want to do, what are you doing?
	Well, I mean, one of the You mean my peers, or you mean just anybody?
	Anyone!
	I mean, a goddamn janitor.
	I mean, anyone.
	Was there friends, family, extended family, colleagues, classmates, dentists?
	I mean, anyone.
	It was just always, any feedback I got was always, you know, just push on until the next stage, until the clinical years, you know, third and fourth year in residency, when, you know, it will be better.
	Yeah.
	But, I mean, if you're not interested in the human body, I mean, getting through the next year or two years, let's say you succeed and you become a doctor, or let's say you succeed and become a psychiatrist.
	You're skeptical about psychiatry, you don't like learning about the human body.
	I mean, to succeed would be to fail even more, right?
	Yeah, I mean, my short-term goal is just to finish the degree and then, you know, decide from there whether I wanted to Do a residency and training for practice.
	Yeah, that's sort of fallacy of sunk costs, right?
	I've waited for the bus this long.
	I ain't going to walk now, right?
	Yeah, and I mean, at first I thought it was just, you know, oh, it's just a bad unit.
	You know, I don't like, you know, obstetrics and gynecology, but, you know, I'll just get through to the end of this and then, you know, the next unit will be better.
	And before you know it, two years have passed since You know, you're repeating a year and you're looking at either dropping...
	Well, you know, this next thing you know, two years have passed.
	I mean, this is the price you pay for not being connected to people.
	You know, friends tell you when you're going in the wrong direction.
	Real friends, right?
	Everyone thinks support is like helping people move forward.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Sometimes support is dragging people off the bus to go in the wrong direction, right?
	Yeah.
	A friend who supported you would say, look, man, I mean...
	You're miserable.
	You talk about not being interested in the human body.
	You're skeptical about psychiatry.
	What are you doing?
	It's not what you want to do.
	This is not going to take you in the right direction.
	Catch your losses because it's better to have a six-month or a one-year hold in your resume than a three-year hold in your resume.
	It's better to be $10,000 in debt than $30,000 in debt.
	Everywhere you go, In the wrong direction is like three times as bad, right?
	Because you turn right when you mean to turn left.
	You go two miles right.
	You've got to go two miles back.
	And then, right, you're four miles out of your way.
	And then you've still got to go the two miles you wanted to go the other way.
	So instead of two, it's like six.
	It's three times worse.
	And friends and people who care about you, who are passionate about your happiness...
	We'll dig in.
	We'll stop you.
	We'll take you out for that all-important two-hour coffee that changes your life, that gives you perspective.
	You know, I was engaged to be married to, oh, dear God, the wrong woman.
	Oh, man alive, did I ever dodge a bullet.
	A friend of mine sat me down.
	Oh, no, he didn't even sat me down.
	A friend of mine, his...
	I can't remember if she was his fiancée or his wife at the time, she said, just in passing, she said, you know, people who, after I proposed to the woman before we got married, she said, you know, people who are engaged, they usually seem a lot happier.
	Now, this wasn't sitting me down and making me see the truth and all that, but man, it's like that song, Someone Saved My Life Tonight, you know, and I make you think about that, you know, Jesus, I'm not even that happy about being engaged.
	And from then I began to dig myself out of the mess.
	But if it wasn't for that couple of words, my God, my life might have been a complete disaster.
	Married the wrong person, might have kids with the wrong person, alimony, child support, divorce, brokenness, messiness, courts, law.
	Ugh!
	Wouldn't have met my current wife.
	Ooh, I don't even like to think about it.
	I'd be so hungry.
	But, um...
	I mean, this is part of the, you know, books and video games are a reasonable substitute when you really can't.
	Because, you know, when you're in a family and you're a kid, if there's no connection with your parents, what's going to happen if you bring a real honest and curious friend over?
	Cut out there.
	Oh, yeah.
	They'll chase him out faster than a mosquito in a car, right?
	You still there, Steph?
	So you didn't have that choice then.
	You have that choice now, but I'm just trying to give you the cost-benefit, right?
	You're flying blind here.
	You don't have that feedback mechanism of people who care about you.
	I had a friend when I was younger.
	He said, I want to write a book.
	Now I've written like, I don't know, eight or ten books over the years.
	And I'm not saying I'm some great writer.
	I mean...
	You know, my publishing stats are, you know, like one page of one book of Stephen King's, but I actually did write the books.
	That's the key thing, right?
	Right.
	And I just remember saying to him at one point, I said, listen, you're never going to write these books.
	You've been talking about it for years.
	It's never going to happen.
	It's never going to happen.
	So stop it.
	Because what you're doing is you're kind of keeping things on hold because you're going to write these books.
	It's an excuse.
	You're not going to write these books.
	If somebody says, I'm going to do something, and within a month or two they're not heavily underway, never going to happen.
	Never going to happen.
	And you've got to pry them away from that delusion so they can find something that's really going to work for them.
	But people get stuck at these, I'm going to, and it's going to happen, and something's going to happen, right?
	And friends will pry the demons of delusion off your back and spin you around in the right direction.
	And you need that kind of connection in your life.
	If you are breaking out of the matrix, sounds like you are.
	If you're breaking out of the matrix, you need friends in your life.
	Real friends.
	Friends who are really committed to your happiness, even at the expense of immediate discomfort.
	You need friends who will help you see what you can't see yourself.
	I mean, imagine if you'd called this show two or three years ago and you told me, you know, Steph, I'm studying medicine, I'm interested in being a psychiatrist, I don't really believe in psychiatry, and I'm not interested in the human body.
	What do you think I would have said?
	Well, to be fair, at the time I did believe in psychiatry.
	Okay, what would I have said about psychiatry, right?
	Well, you would have done your best thing to take a load of bunk and, you know, it's, there's, you know, the mass drugging of school-age boys with Ritalin and, you know, the, yeah, just the criminal corruption and, yeah, so all that stuff.
	Well, and even if you didn't believe me on any of that, you still would have had for years to study the human body.
	And as a psychiatrist, you still have to study the human body, because all these medicines, or pseudo-medicines, or whatever you want to call them, have a huge effect on the human body.
	But people...
	You know, it's like if you've got a friend and you're on a bus heading the wrong direction, you want to go to some concert.
	You know, Freddie Mercury's back from the dead and Kareem is reunited with the ghost of Jimi Hendrix on guitar and you're like, Jesus, the best thing ever.
	Janis Joplin's incredible and she's not even good enough to be anything other than a backup singer in this band, right?
	And you're on the bus and your friend knows you're going in the wrong direction and lets you go for an hour in the wrong direction, just chatting away.
	And you're like, oh my god, I've just went an hour in the wrong direction.
	I'm never going to make this concert now.
	What would you say to your friend?
	Why didn't you tell me?
	The fuck?
	The fuck, dude!
	Why didn't you tell me?
	I didn't know.
	You knew.
	Why the hell didn't you tell me?
	And when you have made a mistake in your life, and people around you Are more responsible in some ways than even you are.
	Because we can't see ourselves.
	The people around you who claim to love you, who let you continue to make a mistake day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, they are in many ways more responsible than you are.
	Because they can see what you can't.
	Now, if they can't see, then they don't care about you.
	They don't love you.
	It's bullshit.
	They're just proximity idiots, right?
	But if they can see and they don't see anything, well, that's really bad.
	That's a complete failure of care for someone.
	People gotta tell you those tough truths.
	They gotta tell you those tough truths.
	I mean, the only reason I have this show is the world told me some tough truths about my abilities as an actor, as a playwright, as an academic, as a As a businessman, I was much better, but I'm told the business world I didn't want that part of it.
	But as a poet, as a...
	I mean, God!
	That's what got me to here, which is where I'm doing the greatest good and having the best time.
	People got to tell you the essential no's that keep you from wasting your precious years and your precious resources And that's my urging for you to try and pursue intimacy, friendship, closeness, love.
	because those people would never have let this happen to you.
	I mean, I'm a damn stranger to you.
	I would never have let this happen to you if I had anything to say about it in the past.
	But you need people.
	Well, I'm...
	To help you see.
	Just like I do.
	I need people too.
	Half the shit I can't see either.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I don't know.
	Trying to work on it, yeah.
	So, yeah, I mean, commit to honesty, try and get into therapy, and don't kick yourself.
	We all fly in the fog, my friend.
	We all fly in the fog, and that's why we need the radar of other people's perception and honesty with us, and then that's what we provide to other people as well.
	But the universal no to sometimes our greatest desires, when the evidence shows otherwise, is something we all need to hear.
	So I hope that that will be enough of an incentive for you to try and really pursue honesty with the people in your life, or the people who could be in your life.
	Okay.
	All right?
	All right.
	Thank you.
	So don't kick yourself.
	Don't kick yourself.
	You don't know what great shit is going to come out of this.
	You don't know what great shit...
	But I tell you this, at least you won't spend a life doing something you hate.
	Yes, there is a bright side there.
	You know, it's better to have a two or three-year hole in your resume than it is to have a 60-year hole in your happiness.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Keep me posted if you can, my friend.
	All right.
	Best of luck.
	And thank you for calling in.
	Thank you, everyone, for calling in.
	Thank you for those who waited for the long show.
	Thank you to those of you who've made it through to the end.
	Thank you to my voice, my irradiated voice, for holding up.
	And thanks to Mike, of course, for holding the calls and for running the show.
	If you find this stuff to be of use and you tell me anywhere else you can find this kind of philosophy, fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
	Help a brother out.
	We need better lights in here.
	Thanks, everyone.
	Have a wonderful week.

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