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Sept. 25, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:33:08

2493 Moving Towards Something Real - Wednesday Call In Show September 25th, 2013

Stefan Molyneux takes listener questions and discusses loving a self-destructive person, no external solutions to internal problems, moving towards real connection, respecting your feelings, motivation to be helpful, the fight against verbal propaganda and a plea to parents who still spank their children.

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	Hello, hello everybody.
	It's DeFan Mullen from Free Domain Radio.
	Oh, I hope you're doing well.
	Well, 47, so far, I am one day into it.
	I must say, is not entirely too shabby.
	We, and by this I mean, in general, Joe Rogan with me as a slight little beat of cream cheese, dusty bunny-style icing on the cake.
	We have the number one, number one podcast on iTunes.
	So now I've just, I've cleared out the studio a little bit, and I'm going to try and do a little bit of twerking.
	I actually have been asked to do that.
	And because we're number one, I'm going to use that little foam finger thing that Miley Cyrus used.
	And so please avert your eye.
	No, just kidding.
	So thanks again to Joe Rogan for having me on.
	Thanks to Peter Joseph for a very instructive debate the other night.
	It's funny how many people said, you would have so much benefited from a moderator.
	Like I'm not an anarchist.
	Anyway, but I will say this.
	Some people have transcribed some stuff that Peter said, and I still can't quite follow it.
	And I did take political science in college.
	It was taught by Charles Murray, who's one of the best political scientists in Canada.
	I still don't know what he means.
	And in general, this is not particular to Peter, but in general, if you want to change the world, don't be afraid of small words.
	They are not your enemy.
	They're not like Viruses that will rot your brain.
	I was really struck.
	I can't even remember who told me or where I got it from.
	But it was years and years ago where somebody pointed out that Socrates never used the word epistemology or metaphysics or anything like that.
	That he used, you know, truth, virtue, justice, courage, all of the words of the common person.
	And I think that's really, really important.
	I think that if you want to change the world, you have to meet the world where it is, and you have to challenge people's thinking where that thinking is.
	And if you use a lot of big words, then people aren't really going to follow what you're saying, unless they already have some sort of predilection to your emotional style of delivery.
	And so don't be afraid of small, simple, direct, basic Anglo-Saxon language.
	It's really, really important to get your ideas across if you want to help the world.
	And in almost every situation that I can think of, and I'm constantly reviewing this for myself, in almost every situation that I can think of, a failure of communication always lands at the feet of the person who's communicating.
	This is really, really important to understand.
	If I'm attempting to get an idea across to an individual or a group of people, and I fail to get that idea across, that's my failure.
	Now, I can sit on my high horse and say, well, you know, I'm tired of explaining this stuff and people just don't listen and if only they'd get it and stuff like that.
	But that's sort of immature, right?
	I mean, your job as a communicator is measured by the degree to which people are interested in and understand what it is that you're communicating about.
	And if I am writing some catchy commercial for some cat food and the sales of that cat food plummet, Then I can get angry and say, well, people just didn't get my vision, man.
	They didn't get my goal.
	They didn't understand.
	The idiots!
	Well, I believe that the cat food company will simply move on to another pitch man.
	And I don't mean to denigrate philosophical ideas, put them in the order of cat food, because generally cat food is much more useful than most philosophical ideas.
	At least it feeds a cat, and most philosophical ideas don't even do that.
	But I will remind people who want to change the world, meet the world where it is.
	Your job is to communicate ideas clearly and motivate people into acting upon them.
	So you must first understand and then you must act.
	So you don't see diet books full of a lot of really Latin phrases.
	And so you have to communicate the ideas so that people understand them.
	And then people have to change their behavior.
	We should at least, as thinkers, strive for the level of integrity attained by your average diet book, which aims to educate people about something and then have them change their behavior.
	And if people don't even understand what you're talking about in your diet and don't even know what they're supposed to do other than surrender to your verbal word salad, I would argue that you're not doing a very good job as a communicator.
	We must always bow to The needs of the audience.
	They are the customer.
	And it is my job to formulate engaging, entertaining, and true ways of communicating, I think, very essential and important virtues in society.
	If I fail at that, that is my business.
	That is my failure.
	100% me.
	It's not even 99% me and 1% the listener.
	It is 100% my responsibility and my fault.
	If I fail to convince or communicate with someone.
	Now, you may say, well, what about trolls?
	What about people who are just dead set against your ideas?
	What about haters?
	What about people who are invested In a narrative that runs entirely counter to yours and simply won't change their point of view.
	I am 100% responsible for that.
	I am 100% responsible for that.
	Just as I am 100% responsible for absolutely everything in my life.
	I will not surrender 1% of that responsibility.
	If I'm engaged in a communication with someone, And that person is not listening to reason and evidence or is changing the topic or whatever.
	I am 100% responsible for staying in that conversation.
	And I'm 100% responsible if I choose to re-engage in that conversation.
	When you get trolled, you are 100% responsible for that.
	You chose to engage, you chose to stay engaged.
	You say, well, but it's mostly the troll's fault.
	No!
	No!
	It's not at all the troll's fault.
	It is 100% your responsibility just as everything in your life after about the age of 18 or 19 is 100% your responsibility.
	So I take that with a great deal of humility and with a great deal of pride.
	I'm humble because I know that if there's a failure in my communication, it's 100% me and 0% the other person.
	And pride because...
	Mother of God, we had 500 gigabytes of downloads yesterday.
	We are in fact looking at dropping about 600 bucks a month on a cluster of servers that will serve up the podcasts to a wide variety of people and that's really really It's important because at the moment, it's taking a couple of hours to download an episode, which is really not very good at all.
	So we are looking at spending that if you'd like to help out with those costs.
	We would really appreciate that.
	Unfortunately, we've just maxed out what one server can possibly serve up to the planet.
	If you'd like to help out, of course, fdrurl.com forward slash donate or just go to freedomainradio.com.
	And click.
	We take Litecoins, Bitcoins, and of course PayPal or Visa.
	If you don't even have to have a PayPal account, you can send Visa in that way.
	E-checks and so on.
	That's just something I really, really wanted to point out.
	If you take on the task of changing the world, it is 100% your responsibility.
	Whether the world understands what you're saying, whether the world acts upon it, and retreating to sort of a bitter, high, stony-hearted castle of contempt for mankind for not understanding your precious vision is...
	It's not worthy of the ideals or ideas that are being proposed.
	We must always submit ourselves to the necessity of the goal.
	We must always submit ourselves to the necessity of the goal, or just abandon the goal, right?
	But if you want to change the world, communicate to the world in a way that the world understands, and if you fail, if people don't understand, it's 100% you.
	Because either you fail to communicate to reasonable people, Or you're damn well staying in conversation with unreasonable people.
	Either way, it's 100% your issue, your fault.
	And that means you have the great challenge of adjusting your behavior to meet the needs of the audience, which is really challenging and tricky.
	And sometimes it feels like I'm running back under sniper fire.
	But the great thing is that when things do land correctly and when things are communicated in a way that really hits people in the solar plexus of personal change, Well, you're 100% responsible for making that connection as a communicator, and that's what's worth hanging on to the 100% for.
	So that's it for my introduction.
	Thank you everybody who's joined us.
	Welcome to any of the new listeners who've come by.
	If you're just listening to this on audio, I am shooting this with twin 3D nipple cams.
	Feel free to tune into the YouTube channel at youtube.com forward slash free domain radio.
	If you'd like to see me squinting and frowning and all the verbal gymnastics and facial gymnastics that I'm prone to, as somebody has pointed out, it frees just about any one of my videos and I'm making a face that looks like I'm climaxing into a Twinkie.
	So thank you so much for joining us.
	Mike, who do we have up first?
	All right, Eddie, go ahead.
	You're up next.
	Hello, hello.
	I can be here.
	Hi, Eddie.
	Hello, Mr.
	Fon.
	I just wanted to say that it's really great to be here and talk to you, and I really, really enjoyed the Joe Rogan debate.
	I thought that was really fascinating.
	I also heard Carlos Mencia is starting his own Philosophers podcast, so good for you.
	On the chat room, a couple of days ago, we were discussing The Great Gatsby.
	And the relationship between the characters and everything.
	And something really, really hit me because I realized that I'm kind of like Gatsby in a way.
	I'm trying to improve myself to try to impress a girl that I'm probably never going to get back.
	And I was just trying to wonder how I can either get over that or you can try to help me impress the girl.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	I don't think Great Gatsby is about a guy who's...
	I hope you're not like...
	Jay, I think his name is.
	I hope you're not like Jay Gatsby.
	The Great Gatsby is a complete nightmare of a novel.
	Just my sort of thoughts and very briefly about it.
	It's a complete nightmare of a novel.
	Everybody is a complete monster.
	Everybody, to me, is a complete sociopath.
	They're verbally glib.
	They're very wealthy.
	They stoke envy.
	And they...
	And they're pitifully, horribly, terribly bad at personal relationships.
	There are just three things I'll sort of mention about the book, and maybe I can do a longer review another time.
	The first is the great line about how Daisy, and I can't remember the guy's name, they just smash people up and they keep driving without even noticing.
	That to me is classic sociopathy.
	They use people, they smash people up, they don't even turn around.
	There's also a scene, if I remember rightly, it's been a number of years since I read the novel, but Where they sit down with a guy who's helping, I think it's helping Gatsby manage his money or launder his money.
	I think a lot of the money comes from criminal activity.
	And he's a Jew who's got, I think, cufflinks made of human teeth.
	And that just seems to me just a predatory, cannibalistic kind of imagery.
	And the third, of course, is one of the great closing lines of, when I first read it, I just burst into tears.
	It's such a horrifying statement.
	And you know what?
	Let me look at...
	No, I won't look it up.
	I remember it well enough.
	It may not be letter perfect, but...
	It says, and...
	And so we go on.
	Boats against the tide born ceaselessly back into the past.
	And that idea that you're kind of rowing against the tide of history that's pulling you back forever into the past that you cannot escape...
	It's such a fundamentally terrifying line.
	It's so your early childhood and your history is kind of like a black hole and light and future and hope and possibility and love and friendship and connection and joy and escape cannot get free.
	The gravity well of history is so great.
	That any kind of light is trapped forever in its darkness and cannot ever break free.
	Completely terrifying life.
	And of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald fulfilled this prophecy.
	You know, artists write about themselves.
	They write about their own lives and their novels are almost universal prescriptions for their own futures.
	He married His wife and Zelda Fitzgerald, who was stunningly beautiful, and I actually based a little bit of a character in a novel on her.
	She was scintillating and entertaining, and they were the hot shots, right?
	They were the king and queen of the social scene in the 20s.
	And everybody wanted to be them, and everybody wanted to be around them, and they were just...
	I don't know.
	It's hard to think of people since who've been that magnetic, at least on the literary scene.
	And what a completely awful and vile ending to it all it was.
	I mean, he went out to Hollywood to start working on film scripts.
	He separated from his wife and he became such an incredibly self-destructive alcoholic that he died very young.
	I think it was liver disease or kidney disease, something brought on by his unbelievable level of drinking and just horrible.
	And Zeldowitz, Sherald, it's hard to argue that that was any better.
	I mean, she fell down the rung of social disgrace, banging her vagina on every...
	fell down the ladder of social disgrace, banging her vagina on every rung that stuck out.
	And she ended up being committed to an insane asylum, which of course was no pot of roses back in the 1920s.
	And I think she lived there for about 13 years in this insane asylum.
	On God knows what brain frying electrical horse tranquilizer regimen of medieval barbaric psychiatry that has yet to see its end in the modern day.
	And then there was a fire in the asylum and she was trapped in her room and burnt to death.
	And that was the end of the glamorous couple.
	It's monstrous.
	If you take early childhood trauma, genetic susceptibility, which results in a tendency towards sociopathy, and you put in great talent, a hard work ethic, and good looks, it's almost universally, at least in my opinion, a recipe for disaster.
	Just look at someone like Marilyn Monroe.
	Marilyn Monroe, of course, went through a series of foster homes, and there's strong indications, if not outright allegations, that she was serially raped in these series of government-run and sponsored foster homes.
	And...
	Foster families in foster homes.
	And that's just a terrifying...
	To me, a terrible story.
	I heard this in theater school.
	I think...
	I can't remember who she was talking to.
	One of the Strasburgs, one of the founders of the method acting.
	It was either someone to do with Uta Hagen or Lee Strasburg.
	One of the founders of the method acting school in New York, which really developed around Brando and the need for minimalistic acting in the film medium, but...
	One of these women was looking at Marilyn Monroe and said, oh, I wish I had your looks.
	I mean, she was stunning, flawless, right?
	And Marilyn Monroe turned around and said, but what I wouldn't have given to have your mother and father.
	And this is the hollowness and the horror of the way that we look at the world.
	That we look at someone like Marilyn Monroe and she's gorgeous and she's rich and she's talented and she's successful.
	And we say, gosh, wouldn't I want to be her without knowing the living hell that is inside that perfect exterior.
	And, of course, she then slept with and was used by a wide variety of men, the baseball player whose name I can never remember, Arthur Miller.
	She was a very intelligent woman.
	I'm sorry?
	Joe DiMaggio?
	Joe DiMaggio.
	That's right.
	I can remember the Paul Simon song.
	And then, of course, she ended up, you know, some say killed, but definitely in a pretty wretched, drugged-out, victimized state.
	I just really wanted to point out that The Great Gatsby is a completely horrifying novel.
	I remember when I first read it, just getting the creepy crawlies, even imagining living in that kind of world with those kinds of people where you have to be cool, you have to be hip, you have to be successful, you have to be of practical utility to all the manipulators and soul eaters that surround you.
	And the moment you're not.
	You're just dumped and left behind.
	And the glamour of that kind of existence is like this, it's like a gravity well, again, just drawing people in to smash and self-destruct.
	There's a great, this last thing I'll say, I'm going to go on a whole thing about F. Scott Fitzgerald, but there's a great bit in an okay novel called Tender is the Night.
	Right at the end, I think he has a doctor, he has all these great parties, or so the guy, I'm sorry for, I can't remember the details, the main character has all these great parties.
	And then right at the end of the novel, I mean, his life's going to hell, he meets someone who came to one of his parties like years ago.
	And the guy's like, oh man, that was like the greatest night of my life.
	That was the most amazing party.
	Nothing has ever compared with it ever since.
	And the guy's kind of depressed because he's got this one night to look back on of this amazing, fabulous party.
	And then nothing is really...
	Kept up with that fantasy, with that illusion.
	I remember thinking, man, that's really heartbreaking, that you rely on somebody else one night to create something that is magical and wonderful.
	My God, why not have that every night with someone you love?
	So I just wanted to mention a couple of thoughts about it, since we do, I think, have a bit of a theme tonight.
	Sorry, if you can just go on with your question.
	No, I mean, I completely agree.
	My...
	My relationship to the Great Gatsby has always been that I came from that kind of thing where Gatsby came from, which is really dirt poor and really, really, you know, what have you.
	Maybe not rural, but in urban hellhole, I mean, being poor is really, really tough.
	And I went out of my way to educate myself and to make myself a better person.
	I got into media and things like that, and I made my money and all.
	And I found a girl when I was young, and she was everything to me.
	I mean, I didn't meet her at a party like Gatsby, but...
	I came across her.
	If there was somebody that was absolutely perfect for me, it was her.
	Why?
	Why was she perfect for you and why was she everything to you?
	Because these are all just adjectives and I don't obviously fault you for making them.
	It's just they don't tell me anything.
	Because she would...
	I had a large distrust for women growing up.
	Sorry, can you repeat that sentence?
	I mostly had a distrust of women when I was growing up, mostly from my mother and things like that, my grandmother and everything.
	So I found a girl that would actually listen to me and would actually pay attention to things that I'd say and pay attention to my feelings, which, I mean, when you're Basically, you're left alone or traded in by your parents or from your parents.
	You just kind of...
	I don't know.
	You try to find somebody, I guess, to at least relate to.
	And she had the same kind of problem.
	Her parents kind of ignored her and everything.
	So you had a lot of pent-up need that connected to her.
	Right.
	And we, I mean, we hit it off and everything.
	I mean, it was perfect.
	And I would, I don't know if it's really perfect because it's young love, and I don't know how perfect young love can be.
	But it was certainly something that, you know, to this day, I'm trying to find, I'm still trying to find a girl that can at least...
	What happened was she had a very, very controlling mother, and the mother was convinced that I had abused her, I had tried to keep her away from the mother, I had raped her, I was 18, she was 17, oh my god, I'm a pedophile!
	So, I mean, there was so much that her mother went out of her way, I mean, her mother almost threw me in jail for these allegations and these ideas.
	Eventually, she had to break off the girl from talking to me.
	She had to put her in an asylum.
	She put her in an asylum for about seven to eight months, just so that she would have no communication with me whatsoever.
	And the girl, because she was with a bunch of other crazy people and she's a little crazy herself, She took the cue from everyone else and tried to injure herself.
	Now, did she try to injure herself before or after she was institutionalized?
	Oh no, she was a cutter.
	She was a cutter from a young age.
	From how old?
	When I started knowing about it, she was about 14, 13, 14.
	So she had that self-inflicted need to at least feel something, if not pain.
	To me, for someone that actually loves her, to me, putting her in a sane asylum, surrounded by a bunch of crazy people, constantly, what have you, and then always telling her that she's wrong.
	I remember going out of my way, telling I mean, this is probably the stupidest thing I've ever done in my life, you know?
	Oh, your mother really does love you.
	Your mother really cares about you.
	You should pay attention to your mother and everything else.
	Why did you tell her that?
	Because I thought that if I can show the mother at least that I'm not trying to control her.
	I'm not trying to take her away from her.
	I just want her in my life.
	You know, maybe she might give me a little leeway.
	So you were lying to manipulate the situation.
	And I don't mean this in any condemning way.
	I'm just trying to identify it, right?
	You sided with the abuser in the hopes of appeasing the abuser.
	I was lying, yeah.
	I'll go with that, yeah.
	That's about right.
	And it's the most ridiculous, stupid thing I've ever done in my life.
	I still kick myself in the butt every single time I think about it.
	I wish I would have told her, just run away with me.
	I wish I would have told her, just let's go, let's leave this popsicle stand and go find a life for us someplace else.
	Because financially at the time, I was ready for it.
	I was young and I had job opportunities.
	Oh man, come on, come on.
	Listen, listen, listen.
	Listen, I got to interrupt you, Eddie.
	I mean, I don't mean to burst your bubble here, but that would have been a disaster.
	No, that would have been a disaster.
	She grew up in the situation she grew up in, this woman.
	She had the mom that she had.
	She had, I would imagine, been viciously abused.
	I mean, to the point where a guy is being threatened with rape and jail and she's being institutionalized, I assume drugged.
	She was a self cutter from, you said, from the age of 13 to 14.
	Do you really think that at the age of 18, you would have been able to take on somebody with that kind of unbelievably disastrous, abusive, and destroyed history and made it work?
	You know, 10, 10, looking back on it from 10 years, 12 years, I can certainly say no now, but...
	I mean, when I was 18, I had my whole life ahead of me and I wanted her to be with me for it.
	No, but you were living in a fantasy land, which is the idea that love, or whatever you would call it, that that kind of attachment can cure somebody of years of being abused, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, I have no reason to disbelieve anything you're saying, but she might as well have grown up in a concentration camp, right?
	You don't take a kid who grows up in a concentration camp, who sees all kinds of unbelievably horrible stuff, and then say, I can erase all of that with the power of my attachment.
	That's like taking somebody from Cambodia who speaks no English whatsoever and saying, don't worry, I'm going to love you so much that you will wake up speaking English tomorrow.
	You can't transition.
	She can learn English and this woman could probably learn to become healthy, maybe even healthier than the norm.
	But she ain't gonna end up with that because somebody is attached to her, right?
	Because what happens in these kinds of situations, and I've not been immune to them, please, I'm not talking from any kind of, oh, I've read about this kind of human behavior and I find it curious.
	No, I've had these same kind of attachment issues when I was very young.
	And what it is, is you have this giant vacuum cleaner where your heart should be.
	And it's just sucking everything up.
	Why?
	Because you didn't have love, you didn't have curiosity, you didn't have connection.
	When you were a little kid, right?
	So you've got this need, you've got this black hole, this vacuum, this vampire for a heart.
	It's genuine and it's in a way kind of healthy because it's, you know, you want to know that you're hungry so you go and get something to eat, right?
	And you need connection, you need attachment, you have not had it.
	And then the first time you get a taste of it, somebody listens to you, somebody is concerned about you, someone is curious about you, somebody wants to know what you think and feel.
	Bam!
	You know?
	It hits you like a fucking asteroid.
	And all of that repressed need for attachment, for connection, for curiosity, for belonging, for love, comes screaming out of you.
	Like a ghoul-soaked whirlwind tornado of emotional lust.
	And it attaches.
	This is why people are stalkers.
	I'm not putting you in this category, but this is why people are stalkers.
	This is why people become obsessed with others.
	This is why celebrities get their trail-alongs.
	And this is why people just do all this crazy stuff because they have these attachment disorders.
	They have a huge need for connection that has been denied and denied and denied.
	And they're so hungry That they can't reason with their appetite when they hit their first buffet.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yes.
	Yeah, I get it.
	And the idea, and the goal, of course, is...
	There's a theory in psychology which says that all unhappiness, all dysfunction within the mind is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.
	All dysfunction within the mind results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering.
	And I would argue, and look, I don't know if I'm right, and this is just idiot amateur hour as usual on the internet, so I'm just telling you my thoughts.
	I'm not out to prove anything, but what I will say is that the fantasy is that through someone else, Through the mechanism of someone else, someone, anyone sometimes, anyone who shows an interest, anyone who can do something that's different from what happened in the past.
	That someone else, the actions of someone else, the acceptance of someone else, the approval of someone else, the sex from someone else, the job from someone else, the money, the desire from someone else.
	Can somehow vault us over the Grand Canyon of our own history and have us run away towards our future without having to deal with our past.
	Right?
	Sounds like you had it pretty bad, my friend, and I'm really sorry for that.
	You were ignored.
	You didn't get that emotional connection.
	You didn't get that curiosity.
	People didn't take pleasure in your existence.
	They didn't want to know what you thought and felt.
	Creates a huge void of need.
	Creates a huge void, a huge hunger for any kind of connection.
	Now, We all have two choices, right?
	We can either say, I had this kind of history.
	I better slow the F down and deal with it and really stop in my tracks, turn back, face the past, get the help, right?
	So I always tell people with these kinds of histories, get yourself into a great therapist.
	It's probably, without a doubt, it'd be the best money you've ever spent.
	I dropped over 20 grand on therapy for years and it was the best money I ever spent.
	And So we can do that hard work of dealing with those losses, dealing with that grieving, dealing with that agony.
	Or we can believe that love and passion and sex and ambition and money and looks and being a pickup artist or being a con man or being a stalker, that somehow that is going to solve our problems.
	And I would imagine That you have this idealized view of this as like, here was a gateway that I could have solved all my life problems with by just running away with this concentration camp victim.
	But it's not true.
	It's a great fantasy.
	And it's something that keeps us stuck in not dealing with our own issues.
	Because we have this fantasy that there's some external...
	Solution to the problem of inner pain.
	There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.
	There is no external solution to the problem of a lack of love.
	There is no external solution to attachment disorders.
	There's no external solution.
	To these dysfunctions and brokenness that so many of us have experienced in our lives.
	Nobody else can come and save you.
	There is no way to bypass that suffering.
	You have to bite down and deal with it.
	But if you have a fantasy that somehow, if you'd done something different, if you hadn't said this to the woman about her mom or the girl, if they hadn't done this, then you'd have been able to bypass all of that suffering and be, ah, you know, I'm free and I don't have to, right?
	It is a fantasy.
	There is no way That I know of that has ever been established to deal with these issues that you had as a child, these dysfunctions, these problems, these abandonments, these avoidances of your parents.
	There's no way to deal with them that involves anyone else other than you and, you know, the guidance of a therapist and so on.
	But you can't love your way into healing.
	Love is what happens after you heal.
	Well, that would certainly make sense, especially after what happened to that.
	Are you still in touch with her?
	Actually, I tried to get in touch with her about a year ago.
	I Facebooked her just randomly.
	We had maybe about three or four months worth of conversations where we tried to just sort everything out.
	She told me what had happened to her.
	I mean, what's worse is, like, I feel so terrible.
	Because now, I mean, hearing all this is just...
	You know, it's...
	It gets in the way of me wanting to help her even more, because it's worse than it was 10 years ago now with her.
	And...
	It literally is the only person that I really feel anything for.
	And to know that...
	Wait, the only person...
	Hang on.
	I got my first bit of emotion in your voice there.
	The only person that you feel anything for.
	More or less, yeah.
	Tell me more about that.
	I just...
	I don't know.
	I don't...
	It's hard for me to connect to people.
	I have literally maybe about two or three friends and even there, I mean, I don't trust them either.
	I don't have any real connection to people.
	I try to smile and I try to be a good jolly guy and crack wise and everything.
	Why do you get the same pattern?
	Why are you continuing to falsify your existence?
	Why are you continuing to falsify your history?
	Why are you playing a role for other people?
	I don't understand that.
	What happens if you don't do that?
	I think people wouldn't pay attention to me.
	But they're not paying attention to you if you're putting on an act.
	They're paying attention to your act, which is not you, right?
	You haven't solved the problem, right?
	Right.
	You mean you wouldn't have the illusion of a solution?
	Yeah, I guess it's more like I want people to look at me and maybe not hear what I say, but at least look and see the dancing monkey, you know?
	And do they know that you're putting on an act?
	I think I come off obviously as an act.
	I really think I'm pretty obvious as an act.
	So why are they satisfied with that?
	I mean, if you were my friend, I wouldn't let you put on the act.
	That would be my greatest act of friendship, would be to say, wait, wait, wait, wait.
	Too noisy, too loud, too up, too on, too whatever, right?
	Right.
	Um...
	I don't know.
	I never really learned to be myself, I guess.
	To be what I actually am.
	Hang on a sec.
	Hang on a sec.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	But Eddie, you're doing the same thing that you did when you were 18, right?
	Right.
	You're using other people to avoid your own history.
	And now you're using your friends instead of using this girl.
	And please, I mean this with all sympathy.
	I'm not blaming.
	I'm not criticizing.
	I'm not attacking.
	I mean this with all genuine humanity and sympathy.
	But you will go to your fucking grave, a social shell zombie, with no internal connection to anyone, if you don't drop the act, right?
	Because the only people who are satisfied with an act are as empty as you are, and you will never connect with those people.
	Right?
	You have to let go of the sinking lifeboat in order to swim to shore, right?
	And keep hanging on to the lifeboat, you don't get any further, right?
	So you're still, like this woman was going to save you from the lack of connection in your past, and now you're avoiding the lack of connection in your past by putting on the social face with the empty-headed friends, right?
	Right.
	Is that your plan for the rest of your life?
	Do you have a fork in the road you want to take towards something more genuine and real?
	Yeah, I want to try to find something.
	I want to try to find something that I can attach myself to.
	Or not maybe attach, but at least...
	I don't know.
	I really don't want to be fake anymore.
	Because being fake ruined my life after her.
	And I've been trying really, really hard to keep an act going.
	I think the reason why I wanted to talk to you is because I... I'm trying to figure out a way to stop being an actor.
	But what happens, what's the disaster scenario of not faking it?
	What happens that makes you keep faking it?
	I become a lonely shell of a man that's completely alone, as opposed to having some fake friends that are willing to at least laugh at me.
	Right, so if I don't have heroin, I'll never be happy, right?
	Right.
	And what do you think happens to you?
	I think you, so you're in your late 20s, is that right?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So you've got another 50 years, right, to go.
	Maybe more if they, you know, maybe by the time you're older, 60 or 70 years, I don't know, right?
	Right.
	What do you think is going to happen to you, Eddie, if you continue to do what you're doing?
	I'll probably still end up being alone.
	Everything we do, we get better at.
	Everything we don't do, we get worse at, right?
	Every muscle we strain strengthens.
	Every muscle we relax weakens, right?
	Every time you fake, you get better at faking.
	And the possibility of ever becoming real diminishes.
	And at one point, at one point, at one day, you will wake up, and I don't even know if you'll know, but it will be gone.
	And the last brick in the wall will be in place, and you will just be in socially congregated darkness for the rest of your life, right?
	You're old enough to now know that all of our habits become who we are.
	I'm not any longer a guy with a hobby called philosophy.
	I'm a philosopher, right?
	When I was a programmer, I wasn't a guy who had a hobby called programming.
	I was a programmer.
	And so if you become, if you're a faker, and I mean this again, I don't mean this, it sounds critical, I don't mean that at all, but if you fake, you get better at faking every time you do it, and you get less good at any possibility of being real.
	Right?
	Every step you take in this direction is a cave-in right behind you that makes it almost impossible to turn back, and eventually it will be impossible to turn back.
	Because a plant left out of the light long enough, it just dies, right?
	True.
	No, I get that.
	So when you said that she was the only person you ever cared about, is that what you said?
	Yeah.
	I'm asking you to reorient that caring to you, to your future self, to the Eddie to be, right?
	Care about the Eddie to be enough to change your course now so that he doesn't end up spiritually dead, right?
	And then the murder that I would argue began in the crib for you does not have to be consummated.
	The knife doesn't have to go in all the way.
	It doesn't have to be fatal.
	It doesn't have to be mortal.
	It doesn't have to be permanent.
	But you have to make a choice and that choice is to will yourself to tell the truth.
	And if people don't like the truth of what you have to say, care about yourself enough to escape the zombie horde, right?
	Almost everyone in life that you meet, this is not a secret, you know this well, almost everyone in your life who you meet will be enormously relieved if you bullshit them with entertaining trivia, right?
	Oh good, nothing real.
	Woohoo!
	I'm so relieved.
	I'm so relaxed.
	Let's talk about politics.
	Let's talk about philosophy.
	Let's talk about whatever, right?
	Let's talk about the weather.
	Let's talk about sports.
	Let's talk about granddad's bunion.
	Let's talk about what color we'd like to paint the kitchen.
	Let's talk about whether we should pave the driveway.
	Let's talk about where frogs come from.
	Anything other than this is my true experience of life in the moment.
	This is my real self.
	This is who I am when I'm not trying to control anyone or anything.
	And you will never find any shortage of people who will agree to self-evaporate into the fine mist of irrelevant social trivia.
	And so, if you wanna find the people to actually connect with, to actually have a conversation with, then you gotta shoot up some flares, and those flares are called honest statements.
	Honest statements, you know how they have this belief that silver wards off werewolves and crosses and light ward off vampires, right?
	Well, silver is value.
	Silver is the self, the soul.
	Crosses are telling the truth.
	And light is honesty and self-revelation.
	And it drives away the undead.
	It drives away the creatures of the night.
	It drives away the zombies.
	It drives away the empty-headed who will feast on your brains until they burp from the dust.
	And you will never find any shortage of people like that in society.
	What you do need to find We are a like-minded tribe of the self-loving and self-committed to truth, honesty, and connection.
	But as long as you're hanging around these people, you're indistinguishable.
	You're like Frodo and Samwise among the orcs.
	You are indistinguishable from the air.
	And I would suggest, if you don't want the future to be more and more of the same until there's no escape from it, to stop being honest with the people around you.
	You can start with your friends, start with your family.
	And don't imagine that there's anything out there that is going to make that connection for you.
	You have to make that yourself, with people.
	Because if you're in your late 20s, you haven't got a lot of time, Eddie, before there is no turning back.
	You know, if you quit smoking eight minutes before you get lung cancer, It hasn't done you a whole lot of good, right?
	There's one cigarette too many, and who knows where it is in your life?
	There's one cigarette too many that pushes you over that tipping point to a largely fatal disease.
	You don't know when that cigarette is, but you know that each one you pick it up gets you one closer.
	And every time you avoid and joke and entertain and make fun of yourself just for the amusement and empty chattering giggles of others, it's just one more inhalation of the necessary smoke of social lubrication to the it's just one more inhalation of the necessary smoke of social lubrication to the
	I got a lot of thinking to do.
	Thank you.
	I'm sorry?
	I have a lot of thinking to do.
	I don't know.
	If you were to be very honest about your life right now with me, let's do a little practice.
	If you were to be very honest with your life about me, or with me now, what would you say?
	Super honest.
	Like the kind of honesty that maybe you're only going to do once in your lifetime, I would recommend doing it more than once.
	But if you were to be very honest about your life with me, what would you say?
	I would say I'm not where I want to be.
	And I'm working as hard as I possibly can to try to get out of it.
	And these fake friends of mine are just anchors.
	Just to keep the boat from...
	There's a hole in the boat and the anchors are trying to keep the boat from sinking.
	You're trying to use the anchors to keep the boat from sinking.
	I just don't want to be alone.
	That was not bad, but that was a bunch of self descriptions.
	I'm doing the best that I possibly can, the most that I possibly can, and some analogies, and I'm no stranger to analogies, but that's a description of the self.
	Rather than a connection with others?
	How do you feel about your life at the moment?
	Really shitty.
	Thank you.
	Come on.
	That's better.
	There's a potential that I need to try to live...
	I don't know.
	Self description again.
	Yeah.
	Tell me what you feel about your life.
	Don't describe it.
	It needs to...
	God.
	I don't know.
	I wasted all my...
	I wasted so much time.
	And...
	Go on.
	I just wish, maybe not wish, but I hope that at some point this feeling of complete and utter worthlessness gets over me.
	Now you're describing again.
	You're hoping and you're wishing and to go back to the worthlessness and the time-wasting and the shittiness.
	I'm not trying to make you wallow in it, but if that's where you are, just talk about that.
	Just don't start describing it and abstracting it.
	I mean, yeah, I'm just wallowing in a life that doesn't really go anywhere, and I have nowhere to paddle to.
	I have nowhere to get to.
	Descriptions.
	I'm sorry to be annoying.
	This is 101, right?
	Tell me more about your feelings.
	What do you feel in your body right now?
	What's your heart doing?
	What are your lungs doing?
	What is your skin doing?
	I don't know.
	I don't think I can answer that right now.
	Sorry?
	I don't think I can answer that right now.
	Because you don't know or because you don't want to?
	I really don't know.
	Is your heart beating faster?
	Yeah.
	A little bit.
	Do you feel any tension or stress or excitement in your body?
	I feel a lot of anger.
	Okay.
	Tell me about the anger.
	It's mostly against myself.
	Okay.
	Tell me what your anger would say.
	Give the mic to your anger.
	What would your anger say?
	What is your anger saying?
	That I've wasted so much time wallowing in a sadness for something that'll never happen.
	And I've come to the conclusion it'll never happen, but for some reason, I keep on repeating it in my head that, oh, she's going to come back, she's going to come back, she's going to come back, and she never will.
	And it makes me feel just absolutely heartbroken every single day I wake up.
	And I just want that sadness really to just end.
	I'd rather not feel anything now.
	I'd rather be numb than having to wake up knowing she's ruined.
	And the fact that everyone is willing to...
	The fact that I'm willing to just ignore everything and just...
	Delve into my...
	Delve into my self-hatred kind of...
	I don't know.
	And what do you hate yourself for?
	I hate myself because I'm not like everyone else.
	I don't...
	I don't have that feeling to go out and...
	I don't know.
	I don't have that feeling to just...
	be like everyone else.
	Well, come on, you've got to stop giving me these pat answers if you want to have a real conversation.
	I mean, Einstein wasn't like everyone else, right?
	Freddie Mercury wasn't like everyone else.
	That's no reason to hate yourself, right?
	In fact, that's usually the first point of pride, right?
	So why do you hate yourself?
	If you're a judge reading your own sentence, reading your conviction, you are convicted for and why?
	I hate myself because I wish I could trust more people, because I want to have more trust in people, but I can't put myself to do it.
	I want to have more than just a hello and a goodbye, and how's the weather?
	I want to have more than just that and I can't bring myself to that because if I bring myself to that I have this overwhelming anxiety that these people aren't going to want anything to do with me that's why I hate myself Thank you.
	That's a terrible reason to hate yourself.
	Right?
	I mean, come on.
	Why wouldn't you blame other people?
	Why are other people letting you get away with this non-existence?
	With this non-connection?
	With this dishonesty?
	With this manipulation?
	Because everyone's always told me it's my problem.
	Everyone's always told me it's my fault.
	What's your fault?
	That I'm weird, that I'm closeted, that he doesn't really pay attention to what's going on.
	All this.
	I'm unique, but I'm unique in that sense that nobody wants to bother with.
	Like, I'm a smart individual and I can bring myself to tell myself how great of a person I am, but by the end of it all, I'm...
	I know it's all fake.
	You know it's all fake?
	That you're not a great person?
	Yeah.
	I wish that I can be real and at least admit to myself that I'm not that great of a person.
	Damn.
	And the worst part is I can admit it to myself.
	I can admit to myself I'm a horrible person.
	But I can't admit...
	But what's horrible?
	Help me understand.
	Eddie, what is horrible about you?
	I'm not disagreeing with you.
	Maybe you are.
	Maybe you're currently strangling a hobo right now.
	I don't know.
	But what is so horrible about you?
	I don't know.
	Sorry?
	I don't know.
	I tried to be like everyone else, and I guess it's a bad thing.
	Do you like other people?
	Not particularly.
	So why do you want to be like them?
	It's like, I hate those racist KKK bastards.
	Now give me that bedsheet.
	I'm going to go join up.
	I don't know.
	I'm sorry.
	Okay, well...
	I'm sorry.
	So, this is good.
	I mean...
	Sorry, you want to say something?
	No, no, I'm sorry.
	No, don't apologize.
	If you had something to say, it's more important that you talk than I talk.
	No.
	You can talk.
	I'm sorry.
	That's another thing.
	I'm sorry.
	I apologize for every single thing.
	I get in the way of things.
	I stop things from being good...
	I get in the way of people, I get in the way of...
	of...
	just a bother, a burden.
	Right.
	And now...
	I really don't...
	I don't want to be a burden to people.
	Go on.
	I don't want to be someone that...
	people have to look at and...
	They have to look at the monkey.
	They have to look at the dancing monkey.
	I want people to look at me for me, and I don't think they would want it.
	Right.
	So you're around people who don't want the truth, and you think that's everyone in the world, right?
	Yeah.
	Because who in the world would probably want to be with me?
	Right.
	How were you ignored when you were very little, as you mentioned?
	Excuse me.
	When I was younger, and this is just me, again, I swear, I think this is just me projecting.
	My mother came home with a girl, a little girl, a three-year-old girl.
	She was homeless, and she had decided to adopt this girl.
	And ever since that day, I've always felt that My mom has completely just rejected me.
	Just pushed me to the side because I guess she really, really wanted a girl.
	How old were you then?
	Eight.
	Oh, come on.
	Are you telling me that the first time you felt rejected by your mother was when you were eight?
	I didn't get to see much of my mother during growing up either because she was working all the time.
	That's why it seems so strange that she would come home with a...
	Literally, she found this girl while she was working.
	She went to a cafe and she found this girl on the floor and she just brought it home.
	She just found a child and brought her home?
	Yeah.
	And she...
	We kept the child for about three months and we finally found the father of the child who was messed up.
	I mean, he was just a piece of garbage.
	And...
	I mean...
	It just, wow, you'd rather just have that than me.
	And that just really got to me.
	And then when I was 10, my dad died, so it was just like, oh my god, now what do I do?
	I got a mother who was willing to trade me in for a girl, and now the only male role model in my life is gone.
	Was your father around when you were growing up?
	Yes.
	He passed away when I was 10, and it's another reason why I have trust issues with my mother, and probably with all women.
	Why?
	Because she had hidden his death from me.
	She hid his death from you?
	He had died on a Tuesday, and she made me stay over with my aunt for the rest of the week so she could plan the funeral.
	And then she told me on Friday...
	At school in front of my classmates.
	Oh, no.
	And then the next day is when we buried him.
	Was he ill?
	No, I mean, he just...
	He came home one day and just died of a heart attack.
	He was 55.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	And I just...
	I don't know.
	I don't fucking know.
	Wow.
	I'm sorry, say again?
	I don't know what the...
	I don't know what the...
	Excuse me.
	Don't...
	No, no.
	Don't excuse me for feeling.
	This is a human experience.
	There's no apologies for connecting.
	I mean...
	Go ahead.
	From then, she...
	I mean, she tried to take care of us.
	I mean, I... I understood why she had to go to work and she had to pay bills.
	Oh, no, no, no.
	We're going into description mode.
	No, no, no.
	I'm not going to let you do that.
	Sorry.
	No, no, no.
	No justifications.
	No subtitles.
	No descriptions.
	Your father died and your mother was at work all the time.
	Is that right?
	Both your parents worked, right?
	Right.
	Yes.
	And why did they both work?
	Did your father not make much money or your mom?
	No, they both made decent money.
	They just felt that they needed to work.
	My grandmother was the household person, and she mostly raised me when I was a child.
	Oh, so you didn't go to daycare or something?
	You stayed with your grandma?
	No.
	I had daycare, but my grandmother was my parents from 3 o'clock to 8 o'clock when my parents would come home.
	Your mom would come home at 8 o'clock?
	Why so late?
	She had to commute 30 miles.
	Same thing with my father.
	They worked in San Francisco and we lived in the suburb.
	So it was commuting every day and I never really got to see my father except for the weekends or when he came home at four o'clock and went to sleep because he was exhausted.
	And what was your relationship like with your grandmother?
	My grandmother?
	We had a Good relationship.
	I mean, she was old country, so she was not really an advocate, really, for the non-aggression principle.
	Well, that's not a story.
	So she was a spanker.
	Yeah.
	A pretty hard one.
	Now, let me tell you though, because I've got to readjust your perception of what is a good relationship.
	A good relationship with your grandmother, my friend, is when you tell your grandmother that you miss your mother desperately and your grandmother sits down with your mother and says, you had a child, so spend time with your child.
	Get a job that's closer or quit.
	That's, to me, called having a good relationship with your grandmother.
	Well, my grandmother would tell my mother to spend more time with me and everything.
	I mean, she was really into that.
	She was really into the family dynamic and everything.
	But I think she understood that, you know, my mother couldn't really get a job anywhere else.
	And my mother was working.
	Oh, will you stop giving your mother excuses?
	Apologizing, I know.
	Well, no, no, no.
	Just don't tell me your mother couldn't get a job anywhere else in California, or you couldn't move, or there was no possibility of downsizing so that she could be home with you.
	I mean, having a child and working all day is like getting married and then moving separately to some other country.
	I mean, why bother?
	If you don't want to get married, don't get married.
	It's fine, but don't get married and then go move to some other country.
	And if you don't want to have kids, don't have kids.
	Nobody makes you have children.
	But if you have children, being gone from the time they get up till 8 o'clock at night when they're just about to go to bed, it's ridiculous and destructive.
	And selfish.
	I mean, I haven't written a book in more than half a decade because I chose to have a child.
	I used to write like two books a year.
	And I'm not doing that.
	Because I made the choice to have a child.
	My daughter doesn't have any choice about being here.
	Doesn't have any choice about me as a dad.
	So I gave up writing.
	And nobody, it's not a sacrifice.
	I mean, it's just what you do.
	I gave up writing and the income from that and So don't tell me your mom could not have got another job anywhere else or couldn't have made any other choices but was somehow condemned by some ancient Egyptian curse that she had to go out and work no matter what.
	Or your father for that matter.
	People make choices and they're responsible for those choices.
	And the more you make excuses for people who've harmed you, the more that harm heaps on you, right?
	I never really thought of going out and working to consider harm, but I guess you're right.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Do you know that babies who are put in daycare for more than 20 hours a week experience the same symptoms as babies who are abandoned by their mothers?
	I didn't know that.
	A baby doesn't know, or a toddler doesn't know about 8 o'clock.
	I mean, you've got to think of it from a toddler's point of view.
	A toddler, how long can they survive in the jungle without their parents being around?
	Very long.
	Well, it might only be minutes, it might be half a day, I don't know, right?
	But the toddler knows that if the parents aren't around, then death hovers everywhere, right?
	They might eat the wrong berry, they might fall down a cliff, they might get eaten by something.
	They might just get a really wicked sunburn.
	They might get bitten by a poisonous spider or a snake or some of one of nature's lovely little additions to the ark, right?
	So if your parents go for significant periods of time, as a kid, you panic.
	You freak out.
	We're not designed to be separated from our primary caregivers for like 10 or 12 hours a day.
	If you're away from your parents for a couple of hours when you're a baby, your basic thought and feeling is, well, fuck, they ain't coming back.
	I'm dead.
	Because it would be unthinkable to do that in our evolution as a species.
	Unless you simply weren't coming back, right?
	I mean, there's this modern freakiness about all this shit, where it's just like, well, you know, I'll put them in a daycare, and I'll...
	Whatever, right?
	And, okay, so you had your grandmother.
	That's good.
	Obviously, that was better than nothing, but it's a very clear message to the kids, right?
	Which is, you know, mommy has a hell of a lot more important things to do than spend time with you.
	Right.
	And you can only interpret that as a kid as being about you.
	Kids make everything about themselves.
	They have to.
	So, I just wanted to point out that it didn't start at 8.
	Now, it may have manifested itself to your consciousness by eight, but it started eight, I would imagine.
	But the wrongness that occurs in any foundational relationship, particularly the parent-child relationship, there is a wrongness.
	That you experience.
	Thanks.
	Thank you.
	A deep, devilish, fucked-up-edness.
	And that's your parents' responsibility because they're the adults and you're the child.
	You were no more responsible for defining your relationship with your parents than you were for paying the goddamn mortgage.
	I did that for a while, too.
	You paid their mortgage for a while, too?
	I was working when I was 15, and I would contribute to the mortgage, yeah.
	Well, that shouldn't have happened either.
	And so, my suggestion...
	Again, I don't know.
	Obviously, I think talking to a therapist would be great.
	I would advocate that in almost all situations.
	And the wrongness is not environmental.
	It's not structural.
	It's not societal.
	The wrongness is the result of specific decisions that very specific people make entirely voluntarily.
	Right?
	Whenever we diffuse things into society or she couldn't have got a job elsewhere or this happened or that happened or whatever, then the wrongness just sits inside of us.
	The wrongness is a devil that if we don't put it in the right place, it comes and haunts us.
	We become like a haunted house of misplaced responsibility.
	Your mother made particular choices to have children and then not spend time with them.
	I think that's a terrible decision.
	I think it's a terrible decision.
	And I'm not alone in this.
	The science backs me up very considerably that it is a pretty terrible decision to do that to children.
	And your mother was 100% responsible for making that decision and you had no choice in the matter.
	And you have zero responsibility as a baby, as a toddler, as a child for the choices that your mother made.
	And she has 100% responsibility for the choices that she made.
	And if the choices that she made We're hurtful, upsetting, frustrating, scary.
	Then the degree to which you blame circumstances or yourself or society or structure or whatever, right?
	Or where she could get a job is the degree to which all that wrongness sits right on you.
	And you can't get angry.
	You can't get outraged.
	You can't mourn or grieve or wail.
	For what was missing, for what was lost, for what was never provided or little provided.
	Which means you can't grieve, which means you can't move on.
	And even if, let's say that it is the most emotionally Zen-like, Buddhist, Confucian, wonderful Zen thing to do, to forgive everyone who harmed you when you were young, or everyone who...
	Didn't provide you what you needed as a baby.
	Let's say that's a completely wonderful, great thing to do.
	I don't agree with that, but so what?
	Let's just put that hat on because that's what a lot of people believe.
	The problem is, of course, Eddie, that that was not your experience as a toddler.
	Your experience as a toddler was you wanted your mom.
	When I was put in boarding school at the age of six, I would cry myself to sleep to the point where I couldn't even say the word mummy.
	I would just say, bubby.
	I miss my bubby.
	Now, my parents, 100% responsible for making the choice to take a six-year-old boy and put him, I think I was the youngest kid in that whole school, to take a six-year-old boy, stick him on a train for a couple of hours, and send him to a pretty fucking Dickensian boarding school.
	They made the choice to do that.
	They were 100% responsible for making that choice.
	When I was a little boy...
	A toddler.
	I couldn't even walk.
	My father was playing.
	He was in care of me.
	Taking care of me.
	And he was playing tennis.
	And I only have very hazy memories of this.
	But I was crawling around somewhere outside the tennis courts.
	I found my way into a garden shed and I drank weed killer and I almost died.
	I had to be rushed to the hospital.
	I think this is one of the reasons why.
	My parents' marriage did not exactly work out.
	Now, my father is 100% responsible for not taking care of me as a baby and for playing his tennis game.
	I just hope it was a really great tennis game because, I mean, the choice that he made, 100% his choice, 0% mine.
	And we have the right to be outraged about the wrongs that were done to us as children and as toddlers.
	And even if the end result, the end goal, was complete forgiveness and a zen blah-de-blah-de-blah, we still have to pass through the toddler phase of outrage and anger.
	Otherwise, it's just bullshit.
	It's just putting a body in the ground as if it were dead when it's actually, in fact, somebody who's still alive.
	Oh, don't ignore the thumping on that coffin, the sound of scratching!
	Just heap the dirt on.
	Let's get the ceremony over with.
	They're dead!
	Right?
	Even if you want to get to the Zen thing, you've got to earn it.
	And you've got to earn it by going through the toddler thing, which is the actual reality of the emotions that you had as a child.
	Because if you were outraged and hurt and lonely and frustrated and brutalized or abused as a child, and you don't experience that, what you're saying to yourself is my emotions.
	Are not helpful to me.
	My emotions are negative.
	My emotions are not useful to me.
	My emotions serve no purpose.
	My emotions are inconvenient.
	My emotions are useless.
	My emotions are problematic.
	My emotions are inconvenient.
	My emotions are like taking a deep shit in the punch bowl at a cocktail party.
	It's what monkeys do.
	It's what crazy people do is have emotions and get outraged over things that are outrageous.
	Not me.
	I'm Zen.
	I'm funny.
	I'm okay.
	I'm together.
	So then we drive a fucking stake through the heart of all of our feelings, and then we wonder why we're depressed and rudderless as we get older.
	No.
	Your feelings are essential to your humanity.
	They really are your humanity.
	Robots can process.
	Robots can kind of reason.
	Computers can count way better than we do.
	What they can't do is feel.
	And there is great wisdom, great power.
	The deepest philosophy is in the feelings.
	Because if you philosophize without feelings, you are vocalizing in a vacuum.
	And so I would argue, or make the case, to have respect for the emotions that you had.
	To embrace what happened to you as a child.
	To accept it.
	To give people 100% responsibility and yourself 0% responsibility.
	They were moral actors.
	They made moral choices.
	And they are responsible.
	Because otherwise, the shit all slides down to you.
	And that's not fair or right, would you say?
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Alright.
	I really, really try to keep my emotions from even being known.
	No, but you're...
	Let me just give my last little thing here.
	You think, you're making all these choices.
	You're saying, well, I tried to keep my emotions this, and I was closeted, and people, and I know you're saying, but the reality is, Eddie, that your emotions were inconvenient to other people.
	That's just the basic reality.
	Your emotions were inconvenient to other people.
	If you had cried and hung onto your mother's leg when she was going, and if you'd have bawled and you'd have said, mommy, don't go, mommy, don't go, mommy, don't go, what would have happened?
	She probably would have gone.
	Yeah.
	But she would have been pissed off, right?
	If it's communicated to us that our emotions are inconvenient to other people, if you feel, that's not good for me.
	I think it was the first year that I was at boarding school, I was left there over Christmas.
	Me and I think one other boy and one really depressed teacher, And one cook.
	I mean, when I was in boarding school, there were like meat shortages, water shortages.
	We got like one cup of water for dinner.
	It was like a fucking gulag.
	And these horrible substitute meat.
	The plants, they use plants for meat and not in the kind of cool Kelsey's veggie burger way they do now.
	And I was there for Christmas.
	I stuck there for Christmas.
	I remember eating a little Christmas pudding as the...
	Sun was setting in this big giant auditorium where we all ate like a bunch of cattle.
	And it was just me, one other kid.
	I wasn't even sad at this point.
	I was just so lost and so bewildered.
	But of course, in hindsight, what a ridiculous thing to do to your child is to leave him at a boarding school with one other kid over Christmas because you're doing what?
	Whatever you were doing obviously is more important.
	That's all I know.
	But there's outrageous, outrageous behavior on the part of my parents.
	And that's entirely their fuck-up.
	I couldn't do anything about it, couldn't change it.
	I'd already gotten the point that if I complained about it, that the best I could conceivably hope for would be for a very angry mother to descend upon my boarding school, drag me by the ear into some cab, and take me home and not talk to me for a week because she was so angry that whatever plans she had got interrupted, right?
	So, yes, my emotions were inconvenient to those around me because it interfered with their narcissistic pursuit of their own self-pleasure.
	And that's why I don't have anybody in my life like that anymore.
	Because you can't be bigger than the people around you let you be.
	You can't be deeper.
	You can't be more honest.
	You can't be more in love.
	You can't be richer.
	You can't be wiser than the people around you let you be.
	We are bumping up constantly against The tininess of those around us.
	They seek to atomize us, to turn us into tiny bubbles and evaporate into nothing.
	Anyway, I've got another caller.
	I just wanted to hope that was somewhat helpful.
	I'm sorry for the long rants.
	No, I completely accept it.
	And I'd like to say that at least I'm making some advancement in my life.
	I gave up drinking and drugs.
	About a month and a half ago and it's really come to opening my perspective and that's why I wanted to call because I wanted someone at least with the same political ideology and the mental ideology to at least give me some feedback.
	Good.
	Well, congratulations on that.
	I think that's great.
	That really is good.
	And just the basic principle is don't describe, don't explain, don't have a narrative to describe your life.
	Just talk about what your actual experience was and is.
	Don't provide excuses, don't provide subtitles, don't do any kind of stuff.
	So, Tim, I think we have you next.
	Thank you so much, Eddie, and keep me posted if you can about how things are going.
	Thank you very much.
	You're welcome.
	Hey, Steph, it's Tim.
	Do you hear me good?
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Alright, first I'd like to say thanks to Ed for that.
	That was a really great conversation between you two.
	I'm sorry it went so long.
	Thank you for your patience.
	I really appreciate that.
	Oh, no problem at all.
	It was great for me to listen to that, I think.
	So, what I... What I kind of want to talk about is...
	It's really freaky because a lot of the same things that Eddie has been having problems with, I think I've also been having problems with, so it's...
	What I've sort of come to...
	What I accept about my life situation is that I am, right now, not able to put into practice as much as I'd like to.
	I'm sorry, I'm not saying this correctly.
	I'm afraid you're going to have to, in the interest of time, and it's mostly my fault for going so long with Eddie, but you're going to have to boil it down a bit.
	Yeah, alright.
	So, I guess my question is...
	Okay, so I'm 19 years old and I... You know, want to be a virtuous person, right?
	I've sort of made that decision, but I am having trouble doing that because I continuously fall into, you know, my old habits.
	And what are your old habits?
	Well, I tend to resort to playing video games a lot and, like, staying subbooted and If I'm not doing that when I'm with people, I tend to give them, you know, not have any presence in the situation.
	Sorry, you said playing video games and something I didn't quite catch.
	Oh, or sort of stay isolated and away from people.
	I'm sorry, can you say that again, but slower?
	I couldn't catch that either.
	Um...
	Playing video games and then staying isolated and away from people.
	When I do go and talk with my friends or my family, I tend to just let their desires and what they want to do greater than what I want to do and not have any sense of self in the situation.
	And if you put that in a moral category, I'm not sure I would, but if you put that in a moral category, how would you consider that immoral?
	Not speaking up among friends and family about your preferences and playing video games and staying isolated, how does that fit into an ethical category for you?
	you and what's unethical about it?
	I don't see anything really unethical about it, but...
	No, no, no.
	You do, or you misstated earlier, because you said you want to be an ethical person, but I find myself falling on my old habits, as if that's an opposition to you being an ethical person, right?
	Right.
	You're virtuous, sorry, you're virtuous, not ethical.
	So...
	Okay, so I think that if I'm not able to...
	Be honest with the people around me.
	It would be unethical because if they don't know what I'm feeling, we can't negotiate, you know?
	If that makes sense?
	Sure it does.
	Let's just talk about your parents.
	Because, you know, friends are usually an effect of what happens with our parents.
	They define the template for adult relationships, and that's usually what we fall into.
	So if we just talk about your parents, are they honest with you?
	No.
	Do they notice when you're not honest with them and ask you to correct?
	What they do is they either see me...
	They don't really see me at all, if that makes any sense.
	I live with my mother at the moment, and our interactions sort of come down to her telling me to do chores.
	Right, and you negate or postpone or that kind of stuff.
	You foot drag?
	Oh, what do you mean by that?
	Well, you say, I'll get to it, or I don't want to.
	Do you sort of passively, aggressively not do the chores, or do you sort of jump up and do them?
	Oh, yeah.
	I'll say I do what I want to do, and I eventually do do them, but just not as well as I could do them.
	Yeah, because you resent the chores, and you don't want to do them, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Why don't you want to do them, do you think?
	Well, um, it...
	Okay, I don't want to do the chores because that would be me sort of falling into my, um, again, the old habits, and it would be me submitting myself to just be used by my mother to achieve her own ends.
	Yeah, so if you don't feel connected to your mother, if you don't feel loved, if you don't feel love, then it's hard to want to do stuff for somebody else, right?
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, the chores and the housework and all the crap that people fight about, to me, it all just comes down to a deficiency of love and connection.
	If you have love and connection, then...
	You kind of just want to do stuff.
	For each other, and it's not a big problem.
	I mean, of course, I hated doing chores when I was a teenager, because, I mean, just for me, I'm not saying this is the case with you on your mind.
	I hated doing chores as a teenager, because I didn't like anyone around me.
	I didn't like them.
	I didn't respect them.
	I didn't feel respected by them.
	It just felt like a dominance thing.
	I can remember my brother and I used to do this thing where I'd do the dishes one week, and then he'd do the dishes next week, because, you know, we were broken.
	We didn't have any dishwasher.
	I didn't even know if there was.
	Oh, yeah, there were dishwashers back then, but...
	Anyway, and I just, you know, I just didn't want to do it.
	I dragged my feet and I just didn't want to do it.
	Now I'm, you know, my wife and I are chatting and I'm happy, perfectly happy to do the dishes.
	We'll chat and I'll make the bed in the morning and all that.
	That's fine because nobody's telling me to do it.
	It's not a bullying thing.
	I'm not going to get punished if I don't.
	And I hugely love and respect.
	Those around me now, so I'm happy to do things for them.
	They're happy to do things for me.
	There's an unbelievable inefficiency that comes out of not feeling love and respect for the people around you, especially if you're living with them.
	I mean, everything just turns into a battle.
	Everything turns into a chore.
	Everything turns into resentment and passive aggression and delays and escalation and conflict and so on.
	And the missing ingredient, of course, you know, my mom thought, well, if you just did the chores, everything would be fine.
	And my feeling was, well, if everything was fine, you wouldn't even have to ask me to do the chores.
	I'd just do them.
	And that's like her putting all the responsibility in the situation on you, right?
	Yeah, it's like, the only problem is that you didn't do X, right?
	And, you know, like, so, you know, the exciting day of my life, I mean, this morning, When some friends came to visit recently, they were very kind and helped us clear out the garage.
	You know, it's just one of these joyful things you do as a homeowner from time to time.
	And we had a bunch of garbage that we couldn't put by the side of the road, so had to go to the garbage dump.
	I got up.
	I'm like, hey, you know what?
	Take the stuff to the garbage dump.
	Took easy.
	We went.
	We went to a play center.
	We had lunch.
	We went and had scones and jam.
	It was lovely afterwards.
	And nobody's like, oh my God, Steph, why haven't you taken the garbage to the garbage dump yet?
	I mean, we drove.
	I chatted with my daughter.
	We had great fun.
	She's always asking me about my show, so I told her all about the Peter Joseph debate that I had and got her thoughts on it and all that.
	But it was fine.
	It wasn't like, oh my God, I can't believe I've got to do this.
	I want to do X, Y, or Z, right?
	And so, conflict is solved by connection.
	It is not solved by rules.
	Conflict not being solved by authority, by imposition, by aggression is a foundational tenet of anarchism.
	We don't need a central authority.
	You shouldn't do things because you're being bullied.
	You should do things because you feel connected, because you feel loved, because you feel like you want to make people happy who make you happy, because you want to participate in a productive and happy home environment.
	But there is this kind of thing.
	My mom used to...
	It's all about Steph's history now.
	But my mom used to have this thing where we would go and stay with my aunt in England.
	And we would also go and visit other aunts in Ireland over the summer.
	We would go and stay with my aunt in England.
	And they had a pretty good family.
	A pretty nice house.
	And it was nice to be there.
	And...
	My brother, one morning, left the toothpaste cap off the toothpaste tube.
	And my uncle said, you know, you left the cap off the toothpaste tube, and I wasn't there, but according to my mom, he ran up the stairs to put the toothpaste...
	And this drove my mom insane, because she would continually nag us to do stuff, and we just wouldn't want to do it.
	And she would say, well, when so-and-so told you to go and put the toothpaste cap on the tube, you just ran up the stairs to do it.
	As if we owed her the same thing, but it's like, but he never hit us.
	He never screamed at us.
	Right, and he actually put you, like, it was so much better environment there, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it was like, that place was like I, we were there.
	They were helpful.
	We played board games.
	This is where I learned how to play Monopoly and chess and checkers.
	They had a nice garden.
	We would go hunting frogs.
	I mean, it was a fun place to be.
	It was a great place to be.
	And so because they didn't yell at us, and because they didn't hit us, and because it was not a crazy-ass, unstable, shrieking, batshit crazy environment, they ask her to do something.
	It's like, yeah, I just ate you out of house and home, and I played in your garden, and all that.
	I mean, yes, I'm happy to go, yeah, you know, good.
	And so with my mom, it's like she wanted all the fruits for people who didn't yell and scream and hit us and all that.
	But she yelled and screamed and hit.
	So, again, I'm not saying your mom's like my mom or anything like that, but I'm just sort of pointing out that if you want to get people to participate in what it is that you want them to do, the best thing to do is to connect with them and stay connected with them.
	And then most times you won't even need to ask them, or if you do, they're like, oh yeah, absolutely, right?
	Because you're happy, you're loved, you're connected, you're, I mean, why not?
	Right, and when it seems like the connection isn't just, it's not connecting, right?
	Where would I go from there?
	Well, I mean, the first thing to do is to recognize what's not present, right?
	Before you try and fix things, if you want to fix a bridge, you have to know the part that's not there, right?
	Right.
	I'm trying to think.
	My daughter, I think, is too young.
	She doesn't really have chores.
	You know, I just ask her to keep stuff off the stairs and pick up, tidy up after she's, you know, and for the most part, she's all right with that.
	But so when she gets older, if I find I have to keep nagging her to do something, well, first of all, I won't.
	Because, you know, I'll ask her once or twice.
	But then what I need to do is sit down and figure out what the problem is.
	You know, what is the problem?
	Because nagging is just one of these stupid, broken, repetitive, dumbass things that people do that makes them think like they're getting something done when they're not.
	You know what it's like?
	This is what nagging is.
	You ever have it where you leave the door open to the outside and you're in some inner room and then the wind blows the door shut?
	And it kind of bangs you.
	It's like, whoa, what the hell was that?
	And oh, you know.
	So if the door to the outside is open and the inside door blows shut, what do you do to fix it?
	You close the outside door.
	You close the outside door!
	Hey, you should listen to a philosophy show.
	You are a smart cookie.
	You are a smart cookie, Batman.
	So you close the outside door, right?
	But you know what nagging is?
	Nagging is like...
	Oh man, that inside door closed.
	And you go and you open the inside door.
	And then bang!
	It closes again.
	You're like, man!
	And you go and close the inside door.
	Now you open the inside door.
	Bang!
	And you go open the inside door.
	Bang!
	Open the inside door.
	And you just get more and more angry every single time.
	Because you're dealing with the wrong door.
	You're dealing with the wrong door.
	Now it's the closer door.
	It's the one that's making the noise.
	It's the one that startled you.
	It's the one that's inflicting itself on your consciousness.
	But it's the wrong door!
	The door you need to close is the outside door, which is actually the root of the problem, which is the wind that's blowing shut the inside door.
	And nagging is just keep opening that inside door and you get more angry, more angry, more frustrated, more frustrated.
	It's retarded.
	Again, I'm not saying your mom is retarded.
	I'm just saying that particular action is retarded.
	Because what you do when you have a problem in a relationship is you sit down and you say, why are we having this problem?
	I don't know.
	I don't know the answer.
	Why do we keep having this problem?
	And you keep asking and you keep exploring and you keep asking and you keep exploring until you get to the root of the issue.
	Now, a lot of parents don't want to do that.
	Why do you think?
	Well, that would...
	because the contrast of them...
	Doing that would be so great to what they, you know, haven't done, that they would automatically expose themselves to be really bad people.
	Yeah, certainly you're open to criticism, right?
	I mean, you're not going to feel that smart if someone points out that it's actually the outside door that's causing the wind, that's causing the...
	You'd feel kind of stupid, right?
	So yes, if you've gotten into this repetitive thing, and this doesn't come out of nowhere, this is usually...
	Like from really early on.
	I heard a parent recently who had two little boys and they were, you know, doing the rambunctious little boy thing, climbing on stuff and all that.
	And she was just like, don't do this, don't do that, climb down here, we're going to leave right now.
	Just a constant stream of correction, of criticism, of nagging.
	And I did have a chat with her about it.
	And I did say...
	You know, you're going to spend the rest of your life trying to control these kids.
	And it's going to be a constant stream of...
	She was not too bad.
	I'm getting a little better at that stuff.
	You know, of course, my testosterone level has dropped about 40% since I became a dad just to make sure I don't eat my young.
	And I'm becoming, you know, better at that.
	And she was okay with it a little bit.
	She was certainly surprised because she thought that her job was just to control her boys.
	And...
	You know, the best control is connection.
	I mean, I challenge any parent out there, you tell me a child who's misbehaving while you're actually having a great conversation with them, which they're really interested in, which they really want to know about, but you're explaining fascinating things in appropriate levels of detail.
	You tell me any child who is misbehaving while you're having a great conversation with that child.
	Never gonna happen.
	Yeah, I can't imagine that.
	Yeah, children, quote, misbehave when they're disconnected from themselves, from their parents, when they are out of touch, uncentered.
	Then they're just like pinballs rolling around, bouncing off things.
	But when they're connected with you, they don't, quote, misbehave because they're connected.
	So getting to the root of the problem is, of course, the great challenge.
	And, of course, we want to deal with symptoms, especially when we're guilty of having created the symptoms, right?
	So...
	If you have to get nagged a lot, it's probably because you're not connected with your mom.
	Now, who's responsible for you not being connected with your mom?
	Your mom is responsible for you not being connected with your mom because she's the mom and she defined the relationship, right?
	And so she may not want to change gears and so on.
	Now, you can, of course, change gears and you can say, listen, mom, lord above, lord above, we gotta have a chat because it's really repetitive, this nagging.
	I don't respect the way I'm reacting to the nagging because I'm just getting snarly or making promises I'm not going to keep.
	I'm annoyed, you're annoyed, and the problem is not getting solved.
	I'd like to start off just by saying why I think I'm not doing this stuff.
	I want you to hear your thoughts, but let's really try and dig in no matter where it takes us and try and solve this problem so we don't spend the next Say, 50 years or 40 years having the same conversations.
	That does not seem like a good plan.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
	I think that's something I'm going to be trying very soon.
	I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to do that.
	And I'm not sure what will happen if I do that.
	Well, I mean, if you think it's gonna be volatile, certainly engage, you know, talk to a therapist.
	If you can find one through school or through somewhere like that, you could do that.
	Or you could say to your mom, I'd like to take some therapy to figure out why I'm not doing my chores.
	Maybe she'll kick in for that.
	I think it's also important, you know, everybody should read books on parenting, good books on parenting, like Parent Effectiveness Training, or of course, I've got a book on parenting coming out.
	I think the first couple of chapters are already available to gold donators, just to get some feedback.
	But you need to read good books on parenting.
	Everybody should read these good books on parenting.
	I mean, if you're a good parent, great.
	It reinforces.
	If you're not a good parent, it will help you improve.
	And if you're never going to be a parent, still read great books on parenting because then you can evaluate how you were parented according to best standards or best practices or whatever.
	Reading great books on parenting is really, really, really important, no matter where you are, no matter what you do.
	If you're a grandparent or going to be a grandparent, read great current books on parenting to see what's changed since you were a kid or since you were a parent the first time around.
	So I would really read, and I think parent effectiveness training is one of the best that I've read, but read great books on parenting before you sit down and talk to the parents so you can figure out what may have been missing from the interactions in the past.
	Does that make any sense?
	Makes a lot of sense.
	Thank you.
	Very welcome.
	I think you can move on to the next caller.
	Thanks for taking time.
	Oh, my pleasure, and best of luck with it.
	I hope it works out.
	All right, Miles, you're up.
	Hi, Steph.
	Hi, how are you doing?
	I'm great.
	How are you doing?
	Well, thank you.
	Yeah, so first I just want to tell you that I really, really enjoyed the podcast with Rogan.
	That was fantastic.
	I've been a long-time listener of Rogan, a couple years now.
	He's probably the first podcast that I really got into.
	So, I've got to say, Rogan has had a pretty significant experience.
	Impact on my life as far as exposing me to new ideas, different crowds and whatnot.
	I probably even found Adam Kokesh and you somehow down the chain of originally finding Rogan.
	So I just want to let you know that everyone loves that podcast with you and Rogan.
	I just want to let you really know that.
	Well, thank you.
	And I mean, obviously, thanks to Mike.
	He was the one who pursued it and set it up.
	Thanks to Joe, of course.
	We're on a first syllable basis.
	And he calls me Doof for something I can't remember.
	I call him Pastor Rogan.
	Pastor Rogan, yeah.
	No, and thanks to Joe.
	I mean, it was gracious.
	He was a great guy to chat with.
	And it was very...
	Very engaging.
	And it was a real pleasure.
	You know, I mean, he's a big guy.
	I mean, he's a big famous guy.
	And I'm not.
	And so I thought it was very gracious, very enjoyable.
	And I really had a good time chatting with him.
	I obviously hope we can do it again sometime.
	And the feedback seems to be almost uniformly very positive.
	And so I would like to...
	Yeah, so thanks to him and thanks to you of course for your for your kind words about it.
	I'm glad you enjoyed it.
	Yeah, and also of course I also enjoyed your debate with Peter Joseph One thing is a video with Peter Joseph.
	That's a Anyone who wants to learn a little bit about reading body language watch that debate on mute and try to see who won It's fantastic seeing your guys's body language in that and So, finally for my question, what I want to talk about a little bit is...
	I have a question about a hypothetical future with no violence.
	I've noticed that...
	I came up with this theory a few weeks ago, and I've been bouncing it around in my head, and I'd like your opinion on it, that I'm obviously a man, and...
	I interact with a lot of people in just day-to-day life, and what I've realized is that I believe that there is a subconscious primal fear, so to speak, when dealing with another man.
	If me and you are talking, There's this underlying fear that if I say the wrong thing to this guy, he's another man, he's strong, he's big, he could just, you know, I could get my ass beat.
	If maybe, like, if we were living in an earlier time when violence was a lot more prevalent, I have to watch what I say to another man.
	Now, if there is a Women, on the other hand, as you know, violence is continually going down as we progress into the future.
	Right now we live in a time where a lot of women don't ever experience violence in their life, along with men in certain affluent neighborhoods and whatnot.
	What I've noticed is I recently moved to a different city that's a lot more affluent and a lot less violent than where I came from.
	And what I've noticed is that people are a lot more rude.
	People are less polite.
	People are more narcissistic, sociopathic.
	Self-centered, all that.
	And basically my theory is that that exists because there's no violence where I live.
	Where I'm from, there's more people are exposed to violence.
	So there's a little bit more respect.
	Do you know what I mean?
	Yeah, I think I know what you mean.
	I'm happy to give you a few thoughts or if you want to keep going.
	I don't want to interrupt your thought.
	Well, that's basically it.
	I believe that women can sometimes reach a level of disrespect certain women if they so choose to because they don't have to fear violence.
	You know what I mean?
	Where men, like I'm a big, just me myself, I'm a big guy and People don't really disrespect me very much.
	I very rarely run into disrespect.
	No, just judging from your picture, I mean, if I ran into you in an alley, I'd just give you my lunch money.
	Oh, you can see me?
	I can't see your video, but I can see your picture.
	Okay.
	I mean, you don't look mean, but you definitely look like you would be more deserving of my lunch money than I would be.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	Okay, so you understand what I'm saying.
	I don't experience disrespect very much.
	And I think it's mainly because of my looks.
	Mainly because I'm a physically imposing figure.
	Now, if I do ever experience serious disrespect, it would seem mainly to come from females.
	And I think that's because men Would fear violence.
	So, hypothetical situation, we all adopt the non-aggression principle and we begin to live in a society with no violence.
	My question is, is that society a lot more rude?
	Well, I don't think it would be because rudeness comes out of a desire for domination.
	And coming out of a desire for domination comes because you have experienced a hierarchical dominant relationship as a child, right?
	The style of relationships that we experience as children is the language of relationships we inflict as adults.
	So if you have a relationship where you're negotiated with, where you're treated with respect, where nobody tries to dominate you as a child, Then why would you try to dominate people as an adult?
	It would be kind of incomprehensible.
	It would be like going to a Chinese woman these days and saying, you know, foot binding is the way to go.
	So I'm going to grab your feet and start to try and mash the toes into your heel and grind them up that way or something.
	It would just be like, what?
	Because they weren't raised that way.
	So there's nothing that wouldn't make any sense to them, would make no sense at all.
	So...
	You know, rudeness is the coward's fist fight, right?
	And it is a way of dominating without inflicting merely physical harm.
	And people always say, well, you know, use your words, not your fists.
	Dear God in heaven, there's times where I wish people had used their fists rather than their words, because fists is an honest fight.
	Words is a, you know, a bitchy, catty, vicious, slanderous, bullshit, non-fight.
	You know, a fistfight, like I'd rather have a duel than somebody poison my tea.
	And so, yeah, rudeness is a coward's fistfight.
	It's not even a bitch slap, because a bitch slap out of nowhere, at least you can turn and have a fight.
	But, you know, so...
	Women are not necessarily experiencing less violence in relationships now because statistically the safest place for a woman historically has been in a marriage, a long-term marriage.
	A man commits, settles down, and the woman is by far the safest statistically.
	And so children are by far the safest statistically.
	So people all say, well, why, Steph?
	Why do you care about marriage?
	I care about marriage because I care about the safety and security of people.
	And no institution, not government, not shacking up, not joining the Mile High Club on a Cessna, no relationship provides greater security and safety for women and children I think we're good
	discontented.
	But for women and children, there's no safer place to be.
	Children are many times, dozens of times more likely to be abused when there's a man around who's not the biological father.
	And they're more likely to be abused if the father is simply absent than the father.
	The safest and most secure place for a woman to be and for a child to be is in a marriage.
	And because marriage has declined enormously over the past few decades, women are facing and children are facing more and more instances of abuse, which is probably why my oft-quoted statistic that sociopathy has doubled in the last 15 years is probably increasing.
	You know, you shatter the family, you shatter marriage, and marriage, of course, was portrayed as this exploitive and destructive and violent and patriarchal hell-hold of slavery, as Hillary Clinton described it, slavery, marriage, and other exploitive as Hillary Clinton described it, slavery, marriage, and other exploitive institutions.
	The facts and the statistics are very clear, though, that it's the most safe and secure place for women and children to be, and formally for men to be as well.
	So I wouldn't say that women are experiencing less violence now.
	I think that women and children are experiencing a lot more violence because of the breakdown in marriage.
	But I will agree with you certainly that verbal violence is on the up.
	And indirect violence is on the up.
	Violence hasn't vanished at all.
	You know, oh, society's becoming less violent.
	There's a big study.
	Now, in terms of, like, cutting people's heads off and sticking it on a goddamn pike, yes, that has diminished, as has throwing children into shark-infested waters as a sacrifice to some god who sounds like a cross between...
	Some Mexican deity and a Welsh crossroads sign.
	But has violence really gone away?
	No, I would argue it's just been abstracted.
	I mean, what is inflation but theft in a very convenient way?
	Easy to implement, abstract way.
	If you can steal from people's bank accounts with a stroke of a keyboard, it's a hell of a lot easier than going out and trying to stick people up who might be armed.
	I mean, the thieves have just gotten much more efficient and much better.
	What is national debt?
	But theft.
	What are public sector pensions?
	But theft.
	What is Social Security?
	But theft.
	I mean, we have become an entire society of politics-addled kleptomaniacs who can't reach a finger up to scratch our nose without dipping it into the pockets of the unborn or the poor or the next generation or whatever.
	So, we have become greater thieves through language than we ever could have through knives and guns.
	And so violence has begun progressively more and more verbal.
	There's a great book by Ben Shapiro on the viciousness of people on the left.
	And people on the right have their own viciousness, but people on the left in particular.
	You can look at Demonic by Ann Coulter for endless descriptions of the degree to which verbal abuse is simply heaped upon people who step out of line.
	Now, it's good, I guess, that we're not getting hit with clubs, those of us who step out of line.
	But the verbal abuse can be extremely intense.
	And we're not kind of hardwired to deal with a huge amount of verbal abuse, right?
	Because that's why I don't have anyone around me who's mean.
	Because we're just, you know, we're hardwired to kind of be conformist.
	And if people really start trash talking us in a tribe, you know, we basically want, we're going to both pick up a rock and only one of us is going to survive.
	So it brings out your fight or flight mechanism.
	So, I don't think that in the future a society will be rude because there won't be this seething predatory anger that comes from hierarchical parenting that people are going to need to inflict or feel the need to inflict on others.
	Does that make any sense?
	So you kind of think that we've been very physically violent in the past, and maybe right now we're in a transitionary period where our society is becoming more affluent, getting away from physical violence, and the violence is transforming into a more subtle, coy type of way.
	And then maybe in the future, Because through peaceful parenting and whatnot, even subliminal violence or verbal violence will go down as well.
	Yeah, because a philosopher can fight verbal violence.
	A philosopher cannot fight physical violence.
	Words don't stop swords.
	But words stop verbal violence.
	Words can stop verbal theft.
	If somebody throws a rock at you, throwing the words UPB at it isn't going to do anything, right?
	But the great time for philosophy has arrived.
	Because the predation of the old upon the young, of the political class upon everyone else, of the banksters upon the poor, the predation is verbal.
	It's not the Mongol hordes shooting arrows from underneath horses at full cantor, which philosophy can't do anything about.
	But the predation that is occurring in the world, the violence, the destruction, the theft, the brutality, is unsupportable without Language.
	Now philosophy is a language-based discipline and therefore it is the only thing that can fight against language-based predation.
	It is the only weapon.
	And this is the fortuitous time that the internet and this community has all come along at the time when this is most desperately needed.
	The clarity of philosophy, the universalization of rules that are claimed to be universal, all the stuff that we talk about here.
	Philosophy's time is now.
	Because the ruling class has realized that by far the most efficient and effective theft is based upon verbal propaganda.
	The only thing that can fight against verbal propaganda is philosophy, is rigor, is integrity, is a rational and empirical analysis of fog reveals That a cloud is nothing.
	You can actually just walk through it.
	It's not a brick wall.
	And so I would argue that this is one of the reasons why this show is taking off and why this conversation is so important.
	It's the only defense we have against verbal abuse is philosophy.
	Okay, so maybe verbal abuse and rudeness and whatnot will actually incline as we get more and more away from physical violence But then afterwards, as we have more philosophy to combat that, then it will Well, it will escalate.
	It will escalate over the next couple of decades, for sure, as philosophy and shows like this begin to gain some headway in popular consciousness.
	I mean, the rulers don't give up without a fight, right?
	I mean, so, but they also know that merely arresting people and so on for mere verbal clarity doesn't really go over, particularly with the internet able to reveal it and so on.
	And so it will escalate, right?
	The verbal abuse will escalate.
	But, you know, reason will out in the long run.
	And everyone's going to be better off.
	The children of the rulers will be better off when they're no longer rulers.
	And that, I mean, that bloodline, of course, has to go through a productive transition as well.
	I mean, imagine being the child of the ruling classes these days.
	It would just be monstrous how hideous you'd become.
	Yeah.
	Just look at Gossip Girl, which is where I get my facts about the ruling classes.
	But yeah, it is productive and you just have to grit your teeth and endure the tornado of slander and verbal abuse and knowing that you're there for the benefit of humanity and it's still a lot easier than being strapped to a stake and set on fire.
	Yeah, it's just...
	I seem, a lot of times, I seem to feel like I'm more comfortable in places where they're in less, like, what's the word, like gated community type neighborhoods, in less of those, because Like you said,
	you'd probably rather just be slapped than, you know, subliminally insulted and, you know, playing these weird verbal games and whatnot.
	Yeah, I mean, certainly for me, like if somebody has some big problem with me, I mean, I'm one of the most available public figures around.
	I do like four or five hours of call-in shows a week.
	So, anybody who's got a big problem with me, just call in.
	We'll hash it out.
	I could be right, I could be wrong.
	But, you know, most people, not so keen on that, right?
	Because they'd rather, you know, put in bitchy little asides from wherever on the sidelines.
	But nobody kind of wants to, not many people want to step up and take me on.
	But yeah, so I think you're right in that.
	Where there's a lot of wealth, if that wealth is not coming from an honest place, then it's probably coming from verbal manipulation and a kind of verbal abuse.
	And that is a little, it's a lot less honest than somebody just sticking a knife in your ribs.
	But more profitable, that's the problem, right, for the people who have that.
	Does that help?
	I've got another caller to get to.
	We're already 23 minutes over, so if I can get to the next caller, I'd appreciate that.
	Yeah, all right.
	And thank you.
	Listen, just, you know, try getting a preppy haircut and dressing up in your Brooks Brothers suits.
	I'm sure you'll be fine.
	I'm totally working on it.
	All right.
	Thanks, man.
	Thank you.
	Bye.
	All right, Richard, go ahead.
	Okay.
	Hi, Steph.
	Can you hear me?
	Hi.
	There's one dick in every show.
	Go ahead.
	Yeah, there's one of us everywhere.
	Well, you know, a lot of people have complimented you on your talk with Joe Rogan and Peter Joseph and You know, I didn't realize before I wanted to call in that you were talking to them.
	And I tried listening to as much as I can.
	And I would agree that your interview with Joe Rogan went really well.
	And, you know, Peter Joseph, I guess he can be a handful.
	I don't know.
	Would you agree with that description?
	Depends what you mean by handful.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I mean, was he kind of, you know, he just seems very pompous to me.
	And, you know, it's very...
	Forward in my description.
	His video, Zeitgeist, actually was the video that really, I think, was the one that kind of woke me up, as people say.
	Before that, I had gotten a bachelor's degree in sociology and a master's in sociology.
	And I thought I was really critical with my Marxist analysis.
	And I watched that and I was like, I was like, what?
	Maybe Jesus isn't real?
	And what?
	Building 7?
	And what?
	Banking systems?
	So I would say he's probably helped untold thousands to really start investigating the world.
	And I think you have done a spectacular job.
	And I really have to praise you a lot for helping me come a long, long way in my thinking about the world.
	Thank you.
	And the reason I called in was because I had just gotten in a little online spat with my sister last week, and I tried calling in last week.
	Like I said, this is before Rogan and Joseph, and it's about spanking.
	So on Facebook, she posted one of these memes that says, You know, my parent whipped my butt and I learned the switch dance.
	I didn't hate them.
	I didn't have trust issues with them because of it.
	I trusted I was in big trouble when I screwed up and did things my way.
	I didn't fear them.
	I feared getting caught doing wrong and it goes on like that.
	So, essentially, she posted this on Facebook for the world to see and I posted two of your videos.
	The first one was the facts about spanking and the second one was spanking aggression and ethics.
	And, you know, I've kind of been, I don't know, on the fritz with her for some other reasons.
	And, you know, she responds back.
	She says, we were spanked, and I spanked my kids when needed.
	However, the videos...
	Info are way more inappropriate than what we experienced and what I do.
	And she goes on.
	And I mean, you know, we could pick that apart and parse it piece by piece.
	But essentially, the idea is that, you know, she's kind of one of these people who passes these memes around and is kind of proud of the fact that, well, we were spanked when we were kids.
	And don't you know, I turned out right.
	and I spank my kids but I do it the right way yeah so well so I guess you know I don't really know what what my specific question is because I I've been listening to the calls and I've been thinking about a lot of stuff you know Were the prior calls useful and interesting to you?
	Oh my gosh, yes.
	A few calls back You know, the guy that was really having trouble expressing his emotions.
	I just want to commend him because that's something that, you know, was probably very, very difficult to do, especially in a public format.
	And I think that you're a really big help with these people, you know.
	Yeah, he was great.
	I'm sorry if I didn't mention that at the time, but that was very brave, very courageous.
	I dare say manly, but of course women can do it too, but I think that was really great what he did.
	Very generous of spirit and helpful, so thank you.
	Can I ask a couple of questions about your sister?
	Yeah.
	If the average IQ was 100, what would you rate her IQ at?
	Probably 105, 107.
	All right.
	So she could maybe struggle through a bachelor's, but not much further, right?
	Yeah, if she applied herself, she could get through a four-year, sure.
	Right, okay.
	And her husband, what would you rate his intelligence?
	Probably higher, about 115.
	Okay, so he could get an undergrad and maybe struggle hard to get through a master's, right?
	Yeah, he's in the process of completing, I think, a radiology degree, something like that.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	And how many children do they have?
	Two boys.
	And how old are they?
	Just roughly?
	Yeah.
	The oldest one is nine.
	The youngest one is four or five.
	Okay.
	All right.
	And why do you think she posted that?
	Is she religious?
	No.
	Okay.
	So why do you think she posted that meme?
	Well, you know, it's tough to say.
	I think on the one hand, as an individual that I know intimately, she is a very strong-willed and truthful to almost an abrasive point, kind of like I am.
	And then on the other hand, kind of culturally, I think that there's this ethos of being proud of I don't know what any of that means.
	This sounds like just a giant bag of euphemisms, so I apologize if I'm being blunt, but I don't know what strong-willed means.
	I don't know what being proud of being on the right side of things means.
	I really don't have any clue what you said there.
	I'm sorry if it's late and I'm retarded, but I don't know anything that you said.
	Okay.
	So what does strong-willed mean?
	Okay, so when I say strong-willed in reference to how I know my sister...
	You also said honest to the point of being abrasive, like you.
	Right.
	I don't even know what any of that means.
	Sorry.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Well, which one would you like to tackle first?
	Okay, so what does strong-willed mean?
	So I'd say strong-willed is that she will make decisions on her own and carry out the decisions that she makes.
	And for instance, I think her friends realize this about her too because she has, I'd say, a small group of friends, maybe about five, who call her frequently to talk about their problems.
	And so she manages her own personal life, some of her friends' issues, and then she's a stay-at-home mom and deals with domestic duties at the same time.
	Okay, so strong-willed, I have no problem with strong-willed people.
	I would consider myself a strong-willed person.
	Strong-willed is fine if you surround yourself with strong-willed people, right?
	If you're strong-willed and you surround yourself with not strong-willed people, then aren't you just a bully?
	You know, and it's interesting that you say that because that's one thing that I think she's been accused of.
	And, you know, I think it was kind of an ordeal with her and one of her close friends a few years back.
	You know, it's like saying, I'm really great at basketball.
	Well, okay, if you're on the NBA, I assume you're really great at basketball.
	But if you only play with four-year-olds, you're not really that great at basketball, right?
	Right, yeah.
	So is she strong-willed or is she just kind of on a bully side?
	Hmm.
	No, you know, and earlier you were saying that, you know, it's important to, say, control or surround yourself with, you know, I'm trying to say it's the right type of people or people that are beneficial.
	I think that she does a good job at surrounding herself with, you know, other people who, you You know, in this term that we're using, strong-willed, you know, they manage to run their lives.
	I would say that maybe they're not ambitious in the traditional sense, running their own business.
	Oh my god, you ramble.
	My god, you make me sound concise.
	I gotta interrupt you.
	What are you saying?
	I'm sorry.
	This is like, I don't know what you're saying.
	Does she surround herself with people that she respects as being equally strong-willed as herself?
	Oh, I would have to ask her that.
	I'm sorry.
	Oh, come on.
	She's your sister.
	You know.
	Well, I... No, I... You know, if I... Okay, so if I had to say, I would say that she thinks of herself as the kind of strong center...
	The center post of the tent.
	Oh, my God.
	Why will you not answer this question?
	I'm not asking you what she thinks of herself as.
	Everybody thinks of themselves as a nice person or a good person, right?
	Hitler thought of himself as a savior of Germany.
	Are the people around her as strong-willed as she is?
	Oh, no.
	Okay.
	Why was that hard?
	Why was that hard?
	Why are we filibustering this?
	Are you just trying to make me, like, pee my own pants because I haven't been to the washroom in two and a half hours?
	Oh, I'm not, and I realize it's late, and, you know, I apologize for the...
	That's fine.
	We just have to be a little more efficient, that's all.
	Okay.
	Okay, so she may be...
	A bit on the bullying side, if she claims to be strong-willed, but surrounds herself with less strong-willed people.
	Sure.
	So what would...
	See, a strong-willed person should respect you being equally strong in your perspectives, right?
	So she put out this thing about how great it is to hit your children.
	And if you were equally strong-willed, then she should really relish engaging with you in this particular issue, right?
	Because you're both strong-willed and she respects strong-willed people, right?
	That's a great point.
	That's kind of what I was expecting, but yeah.
	I think I did not get that response back from her.
	Right.
	Mike, are you on the line?
	Yeah, I was muted, but I'm on the line.
	So, Mike, would you consider yourself, as far as FDR goes, kind of a strong-willed person?
	I'd say so.
	Do you go off the reservation of explicit feudal orders when it comes to the direction of FDR? I get orders.
	Okay, so the fact that he doesn't even know that he gets orders should tell you something about that.
	Do you think it's possible in the future at some point you might disagree with me?
	I think that happens on a daily basis, pretty much.
	I think that happens on a daily basis.
	Do you hold strong in your convictions about what is best for the show?
	Yeah, because I believe in what I, you know, the thoughts that I have.
	I think they're right, and we have a good conversation about it and figure out what the best approach actually is.
	Do we have strong disagreements sometimes?
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Do we listen to each other?
	Do we generally benefit from those strong disagreements?
	I'd say so, absolutely.
	So, my bullying plan is not working, is what you're telling me.
	No.
	It's never too late to rule by fear.
	Actually, it really is.
	No, I've listened to this podcast.
	It's made me impervious to bullying.
	I'm sorry?
	I've listened to this podcast for years that has made me pretty impervious to bullying, which is interesting.
	Good, good.
	Yeah, I mean, Mike and I will disagree, and we have back and forth a lot about what's best for the show, what we should do, what we shouldn't do, what shows we should get involved with, what we should avoid, topics and all that.
	And I think it's very productive.
	I certainly, Mike has great opinions and it really is like, I mean, it's not like it is chatting with an equal in terms of his commitment and interest and instincts.
	Mike has done things that I, I mean, never would have heard about and even know who Joe Rogan was and had one of the, I think, best shows we've ever had.
	And so, and I was like, why do I want to go talk to some guy who narrates martial arts fights?
	Like, I mean, but he was, you know, he pushed for it and he was right, completely right.
	And I was wrong.
	And so I just wanted to sort of point out that, I mean, I like to surround myself with strong-willed people so that we can get, you know, the sparks come from the friction and that we get the best results out of having people who will openly speak their minds.
	So if your sister is a strong-willed person and not a bully, then she will really respect you and listen to you digging in for your convictions about the spanking matter.
	Is that happening or not?
	No, no.
	So don't refer to her as a strong-willed person.
	That is not fair.
	That's like calling somebody who regularly wins basketball matches with four-year-olds a really great basketball player.
	Yeah.
	And the reason that strong-willed people want other strong-willed people around them, and the reason I know she's not a strong-willed person, is what?
	Without even asking you about what her friends are like, how do I know she's not a strong-willed person?
	She engages in bullying?
	She hits her children!
	Right.
	I was going with a more general description, but I think at the base of it, the spanking is a sign that she's She's not, yeah, she's not ready to engage in that reasoned discourse with her children, and I think...
	Oh my god!
	You're gonna give me an aneurysm.
	I'm sorry.
	Oh my god.
	Oh, I know she's your sister, but you gotta have a slightly clearer view of things of that, right?
	She hits her children, she hits a four-year-old, I assume, and your description of that is she's not quite ready to engage in a reasoned discourse with Hamina, Hamina, Hamina.
	Do you get that that's not really an accurate description?
	Can you just explain it real quick or at length?
	Sure.
	Sure.
	I like strong-willed people and therefore I'm doing my best to foster and inculcate a strong will on the part of my daughter, right?
	Because being strong-willed is a value, particularly if I'm going to raise her to think for herself.
	The last thing I can give her is critical thinking and no strong will.
	Because she sure as hell is going to need a strong will if she's going to think for herself in this world, right?
	Yeah, that's a good point.
	So, if you are not a bully, but you want...
	You have a strong will and you recognize the value of a strong will, then you will do nothing whatsoever to diminish the strength of will of your children, right?
	In fact, you will encourage and inculcate a strength of will in your children, right?
	Yeah.
	What does hitting your children do to their strength of will?
	No, you're right.
	And that's one of the, I think, paradoxes of that meme that she shared.
	It destroys it.
	No, it doesn't diminish it.
	It destroys it.
	You cannot have a strength of will in the face of overwhelming aggression from a caregiver.
	I mean, maybe it'll come out when they're teenagers, I don't know.
	But certainly where your kids are, the youngest one going into the latency period, the older one in the latency period, I mean, she's just completely dominating them and crushing their wills with hitting, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	And you say she's not quite ready for a rational discourse.
	Not quite ready for a rational discourse is, can we postpone our debate till tomorrow because I'm still gathering some facts.
	Not, I'm hitting the helpless.
	She is actively crushing in her children the capacity for rational discourse.
	She is actively opposing and destroying the capacity for rational discourse on the part of her children by hitting them.
	And as an uncle, it's devastating for me to watch this, and I try to inform her and pass along your videos.
	And then she takes these tactics with me, trying to shut me down, saying, well, we were spanked when we were kids, and I do it the right way.
	And it's very tough for me to watch her go through this and watch her kids go through this.
	Okay.
	Can I give you what I would tell her?
	Hello?
	Hello?
	I'm sorry?
	Yeah, can I tell you what I would tell her?
	Oh, yes.
	Yes.
	Okay, what's her name?
	Sarah?
	Sarah.
	All right.
	I'm shooting video for this.
	So, fast forward to this part.
	And this is what I would tell her, if she were my sister.
	Sarah, thank you for even remotely looking at this and accepting this as a possibility.
	There are significant negative effects to spanking that are well-documented, scientific.
	I know that you were spanked.
	I was spanked too.
	I was actually hit with a cane.
	I'm sure that you wouldn't advocate that for your children.
	Some kids are bored up in really bad-thinking households, like racist, I'm not saying yours, but in racist households and so on, and they'd say, well, my parents hated blacks, and so it's fine for me to do that too.
	We have to move forward.
	We have to grow with the times.
	There were a lot of women, when domestic abuse against women began to first see the light in like the 1940s and the 1950s, there were a lot of women who said, well, no, it's good to be hit by your husband.
	It helps keep you in line.
	It helps keep you obedient.
	It helps keep you submissive.
	Just as you're supposed to submit to, your husband is supposed to submit to God, you're supposed to submit to your husband.
	So, just because it was done to you doesn't mean that it's right.
	Society changes.
	You know, I bet you didn't have a cell phone when you were a kid.
	Now you have a cell phone.
	Which means that society progresses and we take the newest and the best stuff.
	Right?
	If you had some illness, some real bad disease, and there was some medicine, some new medicine came out that cured you.
	Would you say to that doctor, well, we didn't have that medicine when I was a kid, so no thank you.
	I think I'll just die.
	You wouldn't do that.
	You'd say, great.
	There's new technology, there's new knowledge, there's new information.
	I'm going to embrace and absorb that in the same way I upgrade my cell phone and buy a new car every couple of years.
	I'm going to take the new medicine.
	I'm going to take the new facts.
	Just because it wasn't there or something else was there when you were a kid doesn't mean that there's not something better now.
	And the science is really clear.
	It's tragically clear.
	Every time you hit your kids, you're not teaching them how to negotiate but only how to submit.
	Every time you teach your kids, you're teaching them that authority can use force and be good.
	Every time you teach your kids, you're teaching them that if you have enough power You can be hypocritical in your moral instructions because they're not allowed to hit, but you're supposed to hit.
	And all that's going to teach them is that if they want to use aggression, they just have to gather enough power to themselves.
	And how well is that working out in society as a whole these days?
	Not very well at all.
	There are alternatives.
	That have been well-proven, well-established.
	You know, I don't mean to toot my own horn here.
	I mean, I'm a stay-at-home dad with a highly energetic and occasionally exasperating young lady.
	She's four.
	Never had to hit her.
	Never had to raise my voice.
	Never had to confine her.
	We don't do timeouts.
	You negotiate.
	It takes a little bit longer in the moment, but boy, it saves you time in the long run.
	Because, you know, spanking never ends.
	You know, 40% of high school students...
	Are still being spanked by their parents.
	It's crazy.
	If it works, it's supposed to end, right?
	If you have a medicine that's supposed to cure something, you're supposed to stop taking it after a while, right?
	You don't keep chowing down aspirins when your headache has stopped.
	You stop that, right?
	And spanking never ends because it fundamentally doesn't work.
	It just goes round and round and round.
	And the other thing that I would say about this is you might be wrong.
	And it's a pretty important thing to be wrong about.
	Like this, you can find these memes on the internet of guys who were interviewed about hitting their wives in the 1950s.
	And they're all like, oh yeah, of course you've got to hit your wife, keep her in line, they get disobedient, they talk back, they don't listen.
	All the same stuff was said about wives that is now being said about kids and hitting or spanking.
	But those guys kind of look like jerks now, right?
	They kind of look like close-minded, ignorant, Petty little patriarchs.
	And if those guys were still on the dating scene and this stuff was available to them, not really a lot of women would be like, ooh, I gotta hack me off a slice of that man meat to take home because he's just a hunkasaurus of female delight, right?
	They'd say, wow, like this guy wants to hit his kids.
	That's pretty gross.
	It may have made a lot of sense at the time in the 1950s or whatever, but now it doesn't look so good.
	And you got a parent For how society is gonna look like in 20 years or in 50 years, right?
	So like in 50 years, you're gonna need some elder care, right?
	I mean, yay, let's hope so, right?
	So you're gonna want your kids to be around.
	You're gonna want them to love you and take care of you and all that.
	But think back 50 years ago, what men and women thought about how to interact.
	That was pretty crappy.
	Look at how blacks and whites thought they should interact.
	In 1960, it's pretty crappy, right?
	So what is your yay to hit your kids, yay to spank your kids, how is that gonna look in 20 years to your children?
	They're gonna come across this post of yours where you posted about how important and good and beneficial it is to hit your children.
	And they're gonna look at that post of yours.
	And they are going to compare that To what society says about spanking or hitting of kids in 20 years from now and 30 years and 40 and 50 years from now.
	Do you really want to take the chance that this ancient practice condoned in the Bible, how many moral rules condoned in the Bible are still respected today?
	This moral rule that was, and I'm not saying you're religious, I know you're not, but this ancient practice of hitting your children Do you really feel comfortable and secure Taking the chance that it's still going to be viewed the same way in 20 or 30 or 40 years when the amount of data that's coming out about how destructive it is to children's IQ, to children's social skills.
	Your children probably aren't as smart as they could have been or could be if you stop hitting and start negotiating.
	Your children are going to have more oppositional defiant disorders.
	They're going to be more disobedient.
	When they get teenagers, they're going to act out more because they're going to start to gain power and you've taught them what you do with power.
	Which is you use it in an aggressive fashion.
	How is that going to happen?
	How is that going to occur within your family in a couple of years when your nine-year-old hits his teens?
	It does not work out well.
	And when he's 30, right, in 21 years from now, the march of knowledge, the march of science, our capacity to peer into the brains of children and see how they're affected by being hit is going to be blindingly clear.
	And there's not going to be any doubt about what a destructive practice it is in 20 years.
	I guarantee you that.
	With the internet, with the science that's currently being researched at the moment, it is absolutely going to spread and it's going to grow.
	The knowledge of how destructive it is to hit your children.
	And that knowledge is already out there now.
	So you can't claim, when your children confront you on it when they become adults, you can't claim that you didn't know.
	I mean, your brother sent you my videos, The Truth About Spanking, and other videos that Go into great detail and great scientific facts about what this does to children.
	So you can't claim that you didn't know, but you will claim to continue this practice which is going to be revealed as deeply immoral and destructive down the road.
	It is already in most areas of certain sectors of society.
	Do you really want to take the chance?
	Even if I can't appeal to just not doing it based on science.
	How's it going to look for your kids in 20 years when this is commonly accepted that it is abusive?
	And you had access to that knowledge.
	You had a brother who cared enough to send you the facts about it and you continue doing it anyway.
	I guarantee you that is going to drive a huge and destructive spike between you and your adult children.
	Don't do it.
	It's not worth it.
	There are so many other options I hope you will explore.
	Thank you for your time.
	So that's what I would say to her.
	Does that help?
	Oh, wow, yeah.
	I will pass that along to her, and I really hope that she takes the time to seriously consider what you said.
	And if she doesn't, if she doesn't, I think it's your job as an uncle to make it clear how what she's doing is just so wrong.
	Well, you know, I get on Xbox Live with my oldest nephew, And I've wondered whether it's my job duty or right to talk with him about this.
	And I don't know if I would start to talk to him about what they do in their house and then he goes and tells her and then it disrupts our family or if it's more beneficial to him that I just do it anyway.
	Yeah.
	I would talk about it with your sister first, and more so.
	Keep talking to her about it.
	Don't let it go.
	It took me 20 years to let go of the state.
	Obviously, 20 years will be a little too late, but don't let it go.
	There's a four-year-old in the mix.
	His personality is not yet set in stone.
	And so just keep having those conversations.
	Keep bringing up the facts.
	Bring more articles.
	Bring more evidence.
	You know, water wears away the stone.
	And then if she doesn't change, then talk about the facts with the children and with her together.
	And then if that doesn't work, talk about it just with the kids alone.
	I mean, you just have to keep pushing.
	You are the moral force in this family.
	You just have to keep pushing.
	This is too important to cross your fingers on or to withdraw on this topic.
	No, I think you're right.
	I honestly had not considered, I guess, the lifelong implications for my nephews.
	And I think I've been too fearful of experiencing a little social disruption now, I guess, at the expense of their betterment for the future.
	I mean, come on, if she was drinking during pregnancy, what would you do?
	Oh, my gosh.
	I and everybody else would have gotten on to her.
	Yeah.
	It's the same thing.
	There are lifelong neurological and biological disorders that arise from this.
	Permanent reductions in IQ points, it is in the same moral category as drinking while you're pregnant or smoking while you're pregnant.
	With the caveat that it's even more Guaranteed of harm for spanking than it is for smoking or drinking.
	So yes, it is that important and it is that essential.
	And if you brush past it, then, or if you, I'm not saying you're brushing past it, you're having this call and I hugely appreciate what you're doing for that, but they deserve the most commitment that they can get in this particular issue and you don't want to end up in the same moral category You know, 10 years from now, when the kid's 19, I mean, he's going to know.
	It's going to be real clear, and it's going to be completely obvious.
	I can see this.
	I mean, my job as a philosopher is to look decades down the road.
	I can see this as clear as day, that the spankers of today are the clear abusers of 10 or 15 or 20 years from now.
	And if you didn't do everything you could, then they're going to have some significantly tough questions for you that you're not going to be able to answer, and that's going to be harmful to your relationship with them as well.
	Yeah, I would agree with you.
	And I think that, you know, I've been helping raise my girlfriend's daughter since she was one and a half.
	And it's very hard for me to look back and think of the two or three times that, you know, I swatted her on the bottom once and on her hand once.
	Wait, what are you euphemizing with me here?
	Swatted?
	Well, okay, I hit her on her butt.
	She really did not deserve that, and I think back, and I try to talk to her about it, and she doesn't even remember it.
	She said she doesn't remember it.
	She was, I think, two and a half.
	And I just think of how wretched it was of me to be in that position and to do that.
	And if literally I had not watched your videos, I might still be like that.
	I don't know if I could have come to that realization on my own.
	Well, that's beautiful.
	I mean, that's A, congratulations on stopping.
	That's fantastic.
	And I didn't say don't euphemize, not because I don't want you to punish yourself, but you even said, it's funny how we think, right?
	So you said she didn't really deserve it, as if any child could.
	Right, right.
	As if any child could deserve at the age of one and a half or two being hit.
	You know what I mean?
	My wife didn't really deserve to be hit.
	It's like, no, no.
	No one does.
	But I really do appreciate you sharing that, that the videos may have had some, or that the show here may have had some effect.
	And I get a lot of emails to that effect, but it's great to hear it in person.
	It makes it all worthwhile.
	That's the most important thing that I do.
	So I really appreciate you sharing me with that.
	And you're...
	Your daughter, I'm not even going to call her your stepdaughter, but your daughter is very lucky to have you in her life, I would argue.
	Well, thanks, Steph.
	And we're all lucky to have you in ours.
	I appreciate that.
	All right.
	Well, let me know how it goes, if you don't mind.
	And look, if your sister gets really punchy and it's just, I mean, I'm happy to have a chat with her.
	It doesn't have to be a show.
	It doesn't have to be published.
	I'm happy to have a chat and she can set me straight about everything that I'm wrong about.
	That would be fine with me, too.
	So let me know if that would be of use.
	Will do.
	I will do.
	Thank you, everyone, so much.
	I appreciate it so much.
	I mean, we got a bunch of server costs coming up, a bunch of show expansion costs.
	These are great problems to have, but there are problems that do involve money.
	If you'd like to help out, FDRURL.com forward slash donate.
	Thank you to magnificent listeners, as always, tonight.
	Thank you, as always, to Mike for being the non-Jergens right-hand man.
	And I will see you guys Sunday.
	For the Sunday show, 10 a.m.

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