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Oct. 2, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:13:30

2498 Relationship Denial - Wednesday Call In Show October 2nd, 2013

Stefan Molyneux takes listener questions and discusses critiques of capitalism, free market sustainability, pursuing your dreams can be dangerous, settling for a damaged romantic partner, bad behavior is a choice, getting off psych drugs, creating a productive work environment, and liberal hypocrisy.

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Waller from Freedom Main Radio.
	I hope you're doing very well.
	Do I sound angry?
	No, I don't.
	Okay, it's 8.04 on the 2nd of October 2013.
	Should I adjust my chair up or down?
	Down?
	No, too low.
	Alright, Mike, let's go on with the first caller.
	No intro, because we've got lots of callers tonight.
	Alright, Ben, go ahead.
	You're up first.
	Hi, Steph.
	Hi, Ben.
	How are you doing?
	Very well, thank you.
	I wanted to start by thanking you for all the hard work that you do.
	I think your work does a lot of good.
	Obviously, you spread ideas of nonviolence, voluntary cooperation, sound parenting, stuff like that.
	It's all great.
	And I think that it's not easy to condense complicated concepts down into easy to understand models and metaphors, but you do it very well.
	So thanks for that.
	Thank you.
	I hope my work does good for the good and evil to the evil.
	Yeah, evil to evil is something people often forget.
	However, I do feel that some of your assumptions are perhaps going unchallenged.
	There's some of those that are more important to me than others, and I would say that chief among the areas in which I diverge from your particular viewpoint is the presence of industrial civilisation and the capitalist system itself.
	My kind of view is that we should question everything.
	I don't know if you've read the essay, Maximalist Anarchism by John Moore?
	No.
	If I could just briefly quote one paragraph, he says that the totality of power relations and the ensemble of control structures which embody those relations, he calls the control complex.
	He says that it's not located in any single institution such as patriarchy or the state, but it's pervasive in every day.
	And what he then recommends is that basically everything be rigorously questioned so that, you know, no heteronymous force is left if there's going to be some kind of overturning of the current order towards a non-violent Voluntary way of life that everything would be totally questioned.
	So with regards to your own views, I know that you don't like to identify yourself by your conclusions, but it does seem fair to say that your philosophy falls somewhere close to sort of Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism.
	And it's actually anarcho-capitalism that my question relates to.
	Okay, would you like to pose a question?
	Yeah, sure.
	So my question is that, like, I've often wondered...
	How much that you've looked into serious critiques of civilization and capitalism, and if you have, why you...
	Are you kidding me?
	Do you think that you can draw breath in the 20th or 21st century without being subjected to endless and bottomless critiques of capitalism and the free market?
	I mean, I grew up in Canada.
	Well, I grew up in England, and I grew up in Canada.
	I grew up in England in the socialist 70s, and then my mother wanted to leave...
	Canada because she was concerned about, well, her cover story was that she was concerned about an excess of socialism in England, which of course there was, and we left shortly prior to the Thatcherite revolution, which turned out to be a mere blip downwards in the increasing spiral of state power.
	And then we came to Canada, you know, went to, I think, three, yeah, York University, McGill University, and the University of Toronto.
	Spent two years, two years at the first two and one year at the last, getting my master's, All, of course, bastions of endless left-wing thought.
	I took courses taught by explicitly and openly Marxist professors.
	Not a lot of Nazis there, but there were quite a lot of Marxists, as if Nazis are just second-grade Marxists in terms of their death count.
	So I think that to say that I may not be aware of explicit critiques of capitalism when I've taken entire university-level courses, one was called The Rise of Socialism— Taught by a Marxist professor, as is so many, looked almost identical to an Ewok.
	So, you may not know all this, but I think just anybody who's in the modern world has to suffer through endless critiques of capitalism and the free market.
	Yeah, I wasn't referring to, like, you know, those particular...
	Critiques, you know, socialist critiques, Marxist critiques.
	Well, look, instead of...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	It's just in the interest of keeping the show moving along.
	Instead of asking me if I have been exposed to particular criticisms, perhaps you can just level those criticisms and I'll see if I can find a way to respond or incorporate them.
	Well, yeah, I mean, anarcho-capitalism basically is comprised of an anarchism and capitalism.
	It seems to me that on the anarchist side, it's really...
	A voluntarist approach that specifically seeks to find a way for mass society to continue, believing that there is a way that people who share no fundamental values can find a way of living together.
	And on the capitalist side, the anarcho-capitalists suggest that whether or not governments and intervention they bring are involved or not, That a production-based lifestyle to continue is a desirable thing.
	I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't really understand any of that, but what I will say is that the state relies upon the initiation of force and the non-aggression principle which we all accept in our private lives and in our social lives and in our romantic lives and in our business lives we create endless excuses for in our political lives.
	And so the non-aggression principle simply says that the initiation of force is immoral since the government relies upon the initiation of force.
	The government must be an immoral institution in the same way that slavery was.
	I don't know about continuing and flourishing and different values and this and that and the other.
	It is simply those, you know, property rights non-aggression principle results in a stateless society if you're going to hold those values to be true, universal and constant.
	Yes, absolutely.
	But I mean, assuming that both, assuming you got your way, Would you be completely happy for the current extraction of resources and production-based paradigm to continue?
	Or have you looked into more primitivist and other critiques of that?
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Sorry.
	First of all, philosophy is not about me getting my way, right?
	Einstein didn't just get his way.
	Newton didn't just get his way.
	Darwin didn't just get his way.
	The arguments are valid or they're invalid.
	Now, I know for sure that current resource consumption would diminish enormously in a free society because the roads wouldn't be free and you would probably make a good deal of money by not spending money.
	In the same way that the bitcoins are rising in value and so on and gold is rising in value, a rational currency would seek to maintain its value, which means that as capital improvements and productivity improvements and efficiency improvements all drove standard of livings higher.
	In other words, as a worker was able to produce more and more with the same amount of labor because of the accompanying machinery or technology or processes that would be much more efficient.
	That money would be worth more and more over time, which means that people would want to save rather than spend, and that would create the virtuous cycle, right?
	Instead of a vicious cycle, which we currently have now, it would create a virtuous cycle.
	The more people save, the more capital can be invested in improvements, and therefore the more their money is valuable next year, and the more it's valuable the year after, which means they have a greater incentive to save and continue to fund whether they, you know, because they have money in banks or whatever, fund capital improvements in the entrepreneurial sphere.
	So for sure, right now, every incentive is there to consume resources, to send kids to school on fossil fuel burning buses and to have them all enclosed in these particular areas.
	And who knows how it would all look in a free society, but there would be much less incentive to spend and consume resources in the future than there is now.
	So I would assume that that would be the case.
	Now, if I wanted people to live in a primitivist kind of way, if I thought that lovely little speech from a fight club, which was, you know, in the world I live in, we're all hunting animals.
	Deer down the canyons of Wall Street and so on and drying the hides and so on.
	Well, then you can make the case for that.
	Then you can say this is how people should live in the same way that people make the case for the paleo diet or the South Beach diet or the gravel and sunlight diet or whatever the hell people come up with.
	You can make the case for that.
	I mean, you can't initiate force because that's evil, but I'm not saying you would want to, but you can make the case for that.
	So in terms of do I think this or that would happen?
	I don't know and I don't really care.
	All I care about is that we either get upfront with our ethics and say, you know what?
	We do like the initiation of force.
	You know what?
	We do like taxation.
	We do like war.
	We do like governments.
	We do like the war on drugs.
	So let's just make that a universal constant, that everyone can initiate force as much as they want, but instead we have this mealy-mouthed, two-faced, Janus-style set of ethics where, for the citizen, force and counterfeiting and the initiation of violence is wrong, and for the government it's somehow moral.
	So we just got to iron out that inconsistency and either make it a truly Hobbesian war of all against all, which of course would never work and is rationally illogical, Or we simply accept that the government is immoral, we bring our social institutions in conformity with the ethics that we so loudly trumpet from every rooftop and which we constantly drill into the ear of every kindergartner.
	And then we will actually have a rational, free, and benevolent society.
	What happens after that?
	I really can't imagine.
	I don't care.
	It's at least 100 to 200 years away.
	And who knows?
	I mean, it's like saying to somebody in 1800, what's the world going to look like by the year 2000?
	I mean, whatever they guessed would be largely ridiculous.
	And if true, would only be coincidentally true.
	What they needed to do was to focus on the ethics of their time rather than the possible manifestation of freedom in the future.
	And that's really all I'm focused on, too.
	Okay, that's fair enough.
	I kind of just, I wondered, had you got to that point where you're looking about, you know, beyond the changes that you've just spoken about, what kind of, you know, from that point, what kind of ways of living would be more sustainable and better from that point of view?
	But, I mean, if it's your view...
	Well, look, I mean, a free society will be much more sustainable, of course.
	I mean, just a couple of things, right?
	I mean, So a free society will not waste massive amounts of resources keeping children in tiny little sardine-style boxes for 12 years of their youth.
	And that will save a huge amount of resources.
	A free society will not waste enormous amounts of resources creating and heating government buildings, creating and heating IRS buildings, creating and heating NSA, CIA, FBI, whatever the hellish alphabet soup of modern fascism is floating around.
	All of that stuff will be gone by the wayside.
	Pollution will be far lower because all of this crap won't be around polluting all the time.
	There won't be all these prisons because there will be far fewer, in fact, no, manufactured crimes such as drugs, prostitution, gambling, and so on.
	There will only be real crimes and very few of those.
	So we won't have the military-industrial complex.
	There won't be war.
	The American military consumes as much oil on any given day as the entire damn continent of India does with its billion or so people.
	And so resource usage will be far lower, far lower in a free society.
	The booms and busts, which are the massive misallocations of capital and the precious resources of the planet, will not be going on where you've got 10-15% of...
	Housing stock in the United States currently vacant because of the boom or bust created by manipulated currencies.
	So yeah, absolutely, there will be far less waste and pollution and a far simpler and more efficient allocation of our scarce and precious resources.
	And without all the taxation being pulled out of private industry, we can go and mine asteroids, we can set up solar sails around the world to capture the sun's light, we can do lots of things which right now Nobody has the money, time, inclination, or long-term planning capacity given the random nature of generalized blindfolded stabbing of regulations and tax laws and other kinds of laws.
	We can do as many amazing things as we can imagine.
	But right now, we can't have cool stuff, we can't have efficient stuff, we can't have nice stuff because the government has its sword to our throat and we're, you know, kind of barely have the courage to blink these days.
	Okay.
	So, I mean, you talk a lot about parenting and I think that's crucial.
	I completely agree with you on that.
	If we're going to be passing on positive messages to future generations through decent parenting is like the sustainability of our living environments and Wanting to get out of cities and find ways that are actually rational, living day to day, is that not a good idea to pass that on to our children?
	I'm sorry, what's irrational about cities?
	Cities are not sustainable in any way, shape or form.
	Why are cities not sustainable?
	They require the importation of resources from somewhere else.
	And so?
	Well, that cycle only continues.
	The bigger the city grows, the more the city continues, the more things that need to be coming into it have got to be taken from somewhere else, which means more resource extraction, which is not replenished.
	I don't think that makes any sense at all, if you don't mind me saying so.
	I mean, having people in a concentrated area is actually quite good.
	I mean, if everybody was on a 10-acre farm, I mean, getting electricity to all those people would be a nightmare, right?
	I mean, at least if they're all concentrated in a city, sewage systems and electricity systems and so on are all very concentrated and very efficient.
	So I'm not sure.
	Cities grow a little bit artificially.
	There's all the zoning stuff and rent subsidies and so on, but I don't see how cities themselves...
	I mean, the resources have to be used no matter how many people there are, but I don't see how it's possible to say that cities are irrational.
	So, for instance, in Canada here now, it's been calculated that it takes about $650,000, all told, to take a child from birth to the age of 22.
	As more and more people want to go in cities, then it will become more expensive to raise children in cities.
	And I think 40 years ago, the Canadian birth rate was 3.6.
	I think children Per couple, and now it's like 1.6 or some 1.7 or something like that.
	Now part of that is just artificial crap, but part of that is the reality that as housing prices go up, as more people want to live in cities, as the cost of things goes up, people end up having fewer children.
	That's the way that economics works, right?
	I mean, if things get more expensive, you end up with fewer of them.
	And the best contraception is this kind of industrialization.
	So cities can't grow infinitely because the more people want to crowd in there, the more expensive it becomes to raise children, and the more attractive not living there becomes, and a free society will just shift resources elsewhere, telecommuting, or people will just find ways to work distantly and so on.
	So cities have a natural fuse built into them, which is, as they get more expensive, fewer people want to live there or raise children there.
	So I don't see how you Get that they would grow beyond what the economy could sustain.
	That can't happen in a free market.
	It's a soft landing.
	It's always a soft landing, right?
	Because prices just increase until people's behavior modifies itself slowly so that supply and demand meet at a rational point.
	I think it's not about future growth.
	They're necessarily now already unsustainable.
	A lot of the research I've done over the last couple of years is specific into this question.
	For example, you can't grow food for everyone to eat within the city.
	You have to take it from elsewhere.
	Sure.
	Which means that you've got resources going in that direction.
	No, but that's good because you get the division of labor.
	No, you get the division of labor, right?
	So then the farmers are focused on farming and the people in the city are focused on the value-added production of stuff Part of which goes to the farmer, right?
	So the people in Hollywood are making the TV shows that the farmer wants to watch at night.
	And in return, the farmer is giving them food.
	It's a division of labor.
	It seems entirely rational.
	Anyway, I don't think I've agreed with anything that you've said.
	So with all due respect, I think I'll move on to the next caller.
	It doesn't mean you're wrong.
	It just means that I think we're kind of going round and round in circles.
	So Mike, if we could bring up the next caller, please.
	All right, Redwood, you're up next.
	It is hard to say.
	How are you doing, Steph?
	I am doing well.
	I'm doing well.
	How are you doing?
	I'm very well, very well.
	So I want to bring up somewhat of a complex situation.
	I feel like there are a bunch of semi-psychopaths and emotionally incontinent people around me within my immediate family right now.
	I am a musician.
	I am constantly driving around in the nighttime and whenever I get home I Crash and I wake up and my daytime job, as I would call it, is taking care of my grandmother, who is at like Six strokes now.
	It's getting up there.
	She's 72.
	She never smoked at all in her life.
	Everybody else around here did, including me, my grandfather, my parents.
	It's all of us.
	Nobody else has really put this together in my family.
	It's something called a pseudo-bullbar affect, and it's just uncontrollable laughter.
	Complete and total vanishing of any kind of sadness that she may have.
	I'm sorry, I didn't understand that.
	What is that?
	Is that a condition that she has?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Pseudo-bulbar affect.
	It comes from people who have brain, not disorders, but...
	Trauma to the brain or oxygen deprivation from multiple strokes.
	And she just laughs at everything, especially inappropriate things.
	So we don't take her anywhere.
	She sits there and watches TV all day.
	Used to chain smoke like crazy.
	About three months ago, my grandfather...
	Wait, wait, wait, wait.
	You said she didn't smoke.
	Now you're saying she's chain smoking.
	Oh, she was.
	She was.
	Past two years, I'd say.
	It got completely out of hand.
	Did she start smoking after she had the strokes?
	Yeah, yeah.
	It was just a decision she made.
	Not a lot of grandmothers pick up the weed later on in life.
	Anyway, 18 to 24 I think is the target demographic for this kind of stuff.
	Yeah, but the cigarettes in general, cigarettes specifically.
	So there would be like a whole pack for her left in the morning and it would be gone within two hours, just chain smoke, forget that she had one.
	And the people who ought to be...
	How is that...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	How is that possible or allowed?
	I mean, somebody with dementia shouldn't be smoking, right?
	Right, right.
	So where's she getting them from?
	Well, not anymore, since I have a linear line for this story.
	Okay, now listen, I've got to make sure you get to a question here.
	Certainly, though, this is interesting, but what's your question?
	Exactly how...
	My question really comes down to when I am fulfilling this biological deal that my parents and or aunts and uncles ought to be fulfilling, but all of them ended up being addicts because of the terrible parenting of my grandparents.
	Oh, so she was a nasty mom?
	A terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible mother.
	How terrible?
	Like what?
	We're talking these stories I get over and over from my father about horrid spanking stories like with a bucket of hot water and just...
	Repeated Bible verses being taught that way.
	I mean, just horrid stories.
	Emotionally, physically, verbally abusive?
	Emotionally, physically, verbally, all of that.
	On so many levels, it doesn't make sense.
	It didn't compute in my mind when I was younger because she was the sweetest old lady as a grandmother.
	And when all of my father turned out to be an addict, my aunt's an addict, and my uncle is an alcoholic, and all of them definitely pass for semi-psychopaths.
	They don't care, they're not really present, they're taking money constantly, because my grandfather is done well for himself.
	So at what point does it become...
	at what point do I have to Either break away or stop fulfilling this biological deal that I know isn't mine, because I was doing really well before I came here.
	It's just...
	Why are you doing this in the first place?
	I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, I'm just curious why you're doing it in the first place.
	It's stability, I suppose.
	Right now I'm able to do what I love music-wise and come home and wake up and basically I feel like a housemaid.
	Do you mean she's paying for your room and board?
	My grandfather has always taken care of the money stuff.
	So your grandfather has always paid for you?
	In a sense, I have a parasitic trait in that way.
	How long have you been doing your music for?
	I started playing when I was eight years old, so it's been pretty serious.
	I didn't go to college or anything.
	I focused all my time on playing.
	I've earned the majority of my, what would be, living that way.
	Never paid taxes for doing music, but when I was in DC... And why can't you make a living at your music?
	Well, I was making a living as a general manager at a sandwich shop in DC when I got a call saying she had another stroke, didn't know how things were going to go.
	Came down to North Carolina, boss basically told me I kind of had to choose because we were getting swamped and I ended up staying.
	You didn't answer my question.
	Okay, well...
	Why can't you make a living at your music?
	I hate marketing.
	I've always been terrible at it.
	I've always written songs for me.
	And...
	I don't know.
	The idea of...
	I mean, Justin Bieber was like on a YouTube channel.
	He just had his little YouTube channel where he sang.
	I don't think he marketed himself at all, right?
	And so, again, you can talk about quantity versus quality, but I don't think you have to be a marketing genius if you have great songs and put yourself out there or whatever.
	it seems that that would just sort of happen.
	Yeah.
	I mean, what would you do if you didn't have this free room and board?
	What would you be doing?
	Oh, I'd probably be back in DC or Pennsylvania right now, or any Jimmy Johns, really.
	I probably wouldn't be pursuing music at all.
	It's just as the availability of...
	Yeah, because I mean, look, I mean, there's nothing wrong with pursuing music as a hobby, right?
	I mean, my accountant's in a band and he's pretty good.
	He's a drummer.
	But he's an accountant and he does that sort of stuff nights and weekends.
	And I'm a big one for dumping on people's dreams.
	I think dreams can be extremely dangerous.
	Because you always hear these, oh, follow your dream.
	Your dream is the best.
	You know, you got to stay true to your dream.
	But you hear this from people who made it.
	So, of course, they're going to say that because, you know, it's like Brad Pitt telling you, you just got to be confident with women.
	Well, if you're Brad Pitt, I guess you don't really need to be confident with women because you're Brad Pitt.
	But I think it's important to recognize what the market is telling you about what you're doing.
	And not to put stopgap measures in.
	I mean, I tried for years to be a novelist and all that kind of stuff and I got fantastic reviews of the books and my writing teachers loved what I was doing, just couldn't ever sell the damn stuff for reasons that are completely obvious to me now but weren't obvious to me at the time around the philosophical appropriateness of my novels to the general audience.
	But it seems to me that you could easily get stuck in a kind of limbo here, right?
	You're taking free room and board, you're pursuing your music stuff, and what the hell is happening with your life?
	And what is your cutoff point?
	Like, what is your cutoff point?
	At what point do you say, well, I give myself another six months, I'm going to get everything I've got, and then if I don't have a steady income or some sort of reasonable income, then I'm going to...
	I'm going to pack it in, at least as a sort of focus on my main career, and then I have freedom to pursue something that is, in the market, more valuable to the world as a whole, right?
	The price that you're getting is the measure of your value to the world.
	The price that you're getting is the measure of your value to the world.
	That doesn't mean that the world always has the best values and so on, but it is a measure of your value to the world.
	The world, when I quit, the world valued me about four times As a software guy than it did as an internet philosophy guy.
	So I sort of made up the difference with my mad enthusiasm.
	So what is your plan?
	I mean, what is going to happen over time with this music stuff?
	Do you have a cut-off point?
	Do you have a plan for measuring your income?
	Are you getting any income from it at all now?
	I'd say twice a month I play weekends.
	In the past, I haven't relied on it.
	I haven't held on to it as a dream.
	Okay, you're not answering my question.
	Are you getting paid any money for your music at the moment?
	Yes, yes.
	And how much are you making a month on your music?
	I'd say $180 every weekend that I play.
	$180 and what are your expenses?
	Very low, very low.
	I'm in a North Carolina small house.
	No, I mean, but you've got to drive there and you've got to keep your instruments up to date and all that kind of stuff, right?
	Yeah, right.
	So you're probably betting about $200 a month, $250?
	Something like that.
	Yeah, so the market is telling you that you have a fine hobby.
	Right, right, right.
	And, you know, people can dream about their hobby paying them $200 to $250 a month, right?
	Unless your hobby is collecting diamonds or something.
	Or bitcoins.
	So I just sort of want to point that out, that the market gives you a lot of information which we as free market people should really take note of.
	How much does the world value my contributions?
	Of course, your passion and your preferences and all that.
	I'm not saying don't pursue your dreams.
	I'm just saying pursue your dreams, but have a bailout plan, right?
	You know, like if you jump out of a plane or parachute at some point, you say, well, I'll go to a thousand feet, then I've got to open it up, right?
	Then I've got to do something.
	If I'm going to hit there, I leave a splat on the ground.
	So I would say, you know, if you're getting this free room and board, and in return, you have to take care of this nasty, I guess, ex-nasty, now nice and chain-smoking grandma, Well, that's a deal you can make, of course, right?
	I mean, but the problem is that you really can lose quite a little bit of time if you're only playing, what is it, you said two weekends a month you play?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, that's barely even a hobby, right?
	Because what are you playing, like three or four hours a set?
	Maybe two, three?
	Six.
	You play six hours in a row?
	Well, you know, what would be smoking breaks?
	Okay, so you play five hours twice a month.
	Yeah, we could say that.
	Okay, that's like a work day.
	One work day a month.
	So what are you doing with your time?
	It seems like it...
	I can't really tell tomorrow.
	Maybe it would be a different call that I could...
	People's homework online.
	You're doing people's homework online?
	What does that mean?
	I help people who have what is it?
	Extra income and have basic things that they do like this photovoltaic stuff right now and that pays much better than music does and that feels like a hobby.
	It's not Something I would consider immoral.
	I feel like I reallocate the knowledge that somebody ought to be getting for a degree that's not going to mean anything, and if they have the means to pay me, why shouldn't we be able to make that trade?
	Okay, fine.
	Okay, so you have a sort of part-time, something like tutoring or something like that, and you play 10 hours a month in music.
	So, I mean, the reality is, I mean, Philosophically, at least my argument would be you're under no obligation to take care of your parents, your grandparents, your aunts, your uncles, or anything like that.
	You are under no moral obligation to take care of it, to take care of them.
	In other words, you are not initiating the use of force by not taking care of someone.
	Now, if you're a parent and you have a baby, then you are initiating the use of force by not taking care of someone because you are actively starving someone who has no other options for food, right?
	So, if I lock someone in my basement, I'm obligated to give them food and water otherwise, and hopefully set them free, but then I, otherwise I'm murdering them, right?
	Whereas if a guy down, you know, two cities over needs some food and water, I don't provide it to him, I'm not initiating the use of force against him because he's got a wide variety of other options.
	I may not even know about his situation.
	You are not initiating the use of force, you are not initiating fraud if you don't want to take care of people in your family, other than your children or children that you adopt, your native or adopted children.
	So it's not immoral for you to not take care of your, now, of these people.
	If you don't want to do it and you find it morally repugnant and the woman was an abuser and so on, then clearly you can make a choice to not do it.
	And I, for one, you reap what you sow.
	At the end of every movie with a bad guy, the bad guy usually gets blown up or eaten by a shark or hit with a laser or squished like the Terminator under these big giant industrial presses.
	Bad guys in movies come to really, really bad ends.
	And the audience, what do they do?
	Do they go, oh, wow, well, that's really terrible.
	Maybe that bad guy had a really bad childhood and maybe he's really in need and maybe he just wanted a hug.
	No, they say, yeah, got him!
	And in life, I don't think that we should do these terrible things to abusers.
	We shouldn't crush them in industrial presses.
	We shouldn't hit them with lasers or anything like that.
	But neither do I think if we don't want to, we should be obligated.
	To take care of people who've been abusive to us or to people we really care about.
	I mean, we don't ask the woman who's the victim of a rapist to go and change his catheter should he get into an automobile accident.
	And if you are the victim of abuse, I think that feeling the obligation to go and take care of your abuser is to me kind of gross.
	It's kind of a pretty horrible thing to expect.
	If a woman was beaten by her husband for 30 years and then he gets sick, and if that woman then goes and moves in with him and takes care of him, I think we would recognize that that's a pretty sad-ass surrender to the past and is not based upon her own happiness but based on her own codependence.
	And that's different.
	I mean, the spousal relationship is chosen, right?
	You get to meet, to date, to test drive, to get engaged to, to get married to.
	You can leave at any time, whereas the Parent-child relationship is nothing of the kind.
	You're born into a family.
	You can't leave.
	You can't get a job.
	You can't move out.
	You have no choice.
	In the family, you don't get to test drive them first.
	Nobody says, hey, here's the family you're going to get born into.
	What do you think?
	Do you want to wait for behind what's curtain number two?
	Or are you going to just go with...
	You don't get any of that.
	So the least voluntary relationship in the whole world is the relationship between a child and his or her parents.
	And this accrues no obligation On the part of a child.
	I think we would recognize that if a woman was abused for, say, 20 years or 30 years, if her abuser, and she left, she got out, she went to a woman's shelter, she sort of got out, rebuilt her life, and then her husband said, I'm sick, come take care of me.
	And if she said, what?
	I'm going to drop my life, I'm going to go back and move in with my abuser and take care of him.
	I think we would view that like, really?
	There's something not quite right about that.
	And so if your parents have been good to you, if they loved you and you want to do it because you care about them and you want to make them happy and you want to spend their last months or years together, well, of course, I think that's wonderful.
	That's great.
	But I don't think that children are under any obligation whatsoever because they did not choose their relationship with their parents and it is not the initiation of force to not take care of someone.
	Well, I'm going to let this show get on the road.
	Thanks, Steph.
	Good time.
	All right.
	Thanks.
	All right, Lucas, go ahead.
	Hello, hello.
	Hello.
	Go for it.
	Can you hear me?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So I have some stuff written down here, some background.
	I will read it to you, and then you can get going.
	Is it long?
	I'll make it as fast as I can.
	Would you like me to send it to you, and then you can read it?
	No, I can hear you fine.
	Go ahead.
	Okay.
	My girlfriend is 18 years old.
	She has an extreme fear of being chased.
	If I so much as walk fast towards her, she freaks out and runs away.
	She also has a fear of the deep end of the pool and fear of the dark.
	She has some history of abuse, including being spanked with a belt and punched by her older brothers.
	She has described to me that just hearing her mother's voice makes her incredibly angry.
	She has never had her own room or much privacy.
	Her parents are Christian and she was raised a Christian.
	Whenever her father gets angry at her, he says that God is angry at her for disobeying her parents.
	When I question her about her religions, he can sometimes become upset.
	Okay, I think I've heard enough.
	Okay, let's call her Sally.
	So the question at the end of this was just if there's anything she can do to improve her situation.
	No, I'm not going to talk about her situation at all.
	I'm going to talk about your situation and your choices.
	Alright.
	What am I going to ask?
	You're going to ask about my childhood.
	Well, that's going to be my second question.
	My first question is why are you with this woman?
	Well, We were together starting from high school, and we've been together for about three years.
	That doesn't answer the question.
	It doesn't even begin to answer the question.
	Why are you with this woman?
	Because I was with this woman.
	No, no, no.
	That's not turtles all the way down.
	This is not infinite regression time.
	I mean, I'm with her because we became friends.
	Why are you with this woman?
	She's traumatized, right?
	She's phobic.
	She's had a history of being hit with a belt.
	Her father is dictatorial and somewhat delusional.
	God is angry at you, right?
	So she's been raised in a pretty insane and violent environment, and she's pretty severely traumatized, it sounds like, right?
	I mean, that's kind of why I'm calling, because I want to figure that out.
	No, I get that's why you're calling, but my question is, what is it in you that wants to be with someone who's so obviously traumatized?
	Either she's a bad person, she's a victim and all that, but why would you not want to be with somebody who isn't afraid of being chased and the deep end of the pool and the dark and who doesn't have a history of religious torture and physical abuse and violence and delusionally grandiose father rage?
	Why can't you go with somebody who's healthier?
	What is it in you that needs or wants someone like this?
	I don't think that it's so much that I... Like, can just choose and be like, okay, I want to be with someone who's healthier or whatever.
	I think that I don't really think you choose the people that you love.
	Of course you do.
	Come on, come on, come on.
	Of course you choose the people that you're attracted to.
	And water finds its own level.
	Self-esteem attracts self-esteem.
	You think you're describing her, you're actually describing you.
	Do you know that at all?
	No, not at all.
	Now we get to question number two.
	What is it in your history that makes this fit with your personality?
	This level of trauma fits with you like a jigsaw puzzle together.
	What is it in your history that makes trauma this compatible with you?
	I don't mean to sound aggressive.
	I mean, I'm genuinely curious, but I don't know if you've listened to the show at all before, but this is 101 stuff, so go ahead.
	I understand that.
	I think that there's some level of that in my own family history, but it's like there's a huge difference between, I'd say, my family and her family.
	Okay, so how were you disciplined as a child?
	Well, that's the thing.
	There was, from what I can remember, only a few instances of me being hit or spanked.
	But other than that, I had like...
	Pretty good childhood.
	Very good, actually.
	Well, okay.
	Let me put forward a second theory.
	Since you are taking care of a traumatized woman, do you have any history in your childhood of having to take care of a dysfunctional woman?
	No.
	I mean, I had not had I hadn't had any other women in my life, really.
	No, I'm talking about a mother, an aunt, a grandmother, or somebody in your life that you felt you had to cater to because they had some level of dysfunction.
	I don't know.
	I don't think so.
	Not my mom.
	She's fine.
	So your mom is mentally healthy?
	Yeah.
	And what does she say about this relationship with Sally that you have?
	She doesn't particularly like it.
	And why doesn't she like it?
	I don't know exactly.
	What do you mean you don't know?
	Do you not talk about it?
	This is important.
	This is your relationship, right?
	Right.
	But, I mean, my relationship with her, I've kind of...
	Kept separate from my family, I guess.
	Not that they don't know about it, it's just that I don't really talk to my family about it.
	Why don't you talk to your family about your love?
	Well, my dad is mostly always gone working, so I don't really talk to him about it.
	I'm sorry, I got distracted by something in the chat window.
	Could you just repeat that again?
	My apologies.
	I don't talk to my dad about it because he's working most of the time.
	What?
	He doesn't have weekends off?
	He does, but I spend the weekends with my girlfriend because that's the only time I have off as well.
	So you choose not to...
	I mean, just don't give me this mealy-mouthed stuff.
	Like, I don't talk to my dad because he's working.
	There's another reason you don't talk to your dad.
	Look, if you broke your leg and you only had a phone that called your dad, you wouldn't say, oh my god, he's working, so I can't talk to him, right?
	Right, but that's an emergency.
	This is an emergency!
	Anyway, because you're young, maybe you don't see.
	This is an emergency because you are getting involved with a woman who's severely traumatized Who's severely dysfunctional.
	And this is how you're patterning your romantic expectations.
	This is what your heart is conforming to.
	Right?
	If I have a beaker that's in the shape of a Nazi swastika and then I pour the water into the Nazi swastika and then I freeze it and then I break the beaker, I've got a Nazi...
	Ice sculpture.
	This is what happens to your heart.
	Your romantic relationship is the container and time is the cold, and your heart will freeze in conformity to your relationships.
	This is an emergency.
	Because you're getting better at dealing with dysfunctional people, which means you're not getting better at dealing with functional people.
	You're getting worse at that.
	So it is an emergency.
	Okay.
	Every muscle we work gets stronger.
	Every muscle we don't work gets weaker.
	You are getting really good at dealing with someone's baddy dysfunction, and that means you're not developing the skills to deal with somebody who's healthy and mature.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, it does, but I'm not just going to, you know, abandon my girlfriend just because of that, so.
	Well, I didn't say anything about abandoning your girlfriend.
	I did ask, if you say your mom is mentally healthy, why is she not talking to you about this relationship?
	Why is she not helping you to understand this is a challenge or a problem to be solved?
	I don't know how to solve the problem yet.
	We're just having the conversation.
	But I would not let my daughter date such a basket case for three years without really sitting down and trying to figure out what was going on and why my daughter was in that relationship.
	Right.
	Okay, are you an atheist?
	I am agnostic.
	Okay, so you're an agnostic, and you're getting involved with a woman whose family is very, very Christian, right?
	Right, but she's also going through the...
	But you started dating her when she was a Christian, right?
	I mean, not really.
	She kind of has just conformed to her Christian family for the sake of conforming.
	And when we've talked about it, she says, you know, I don't really know any of these things.
	Like, if there is a God and all these things.
	She might be just conforming to you, right?
	Who knows?
	I mean, does she read a lot of atheist material?
	Is she interested in philosophy?
	Or is she just like, well, you're an agnostic, so I'll be kind of agnostic-y with you, and my parents are fundy, so I'll be fundy with them.
	I mean, she may have no particular identity because she's been so abused.
	No, it's because I actually started out as, like, okay, I thought I was a Christian, and then I'm like, maybe I'm not.
	So she thought, when we were in a relationship before, she considered me a Christian, and I considered her a Christian, and then we kind of changed our minds, basically.
	Okay.
	So why are your parents letting you...
	I assume you're not that distant from 18, right?
	20.
	Oh, you're 20.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	And you've been seeing her for three years?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Wasn't there kind of like a not-legal overlap at that time?
	Not legal?
	No, because we were two years apart, but there was nothing illegal going on, so...
	Oh, so when you were 19, you could sleep with a 17-year-old legally?
	No, we never slept together.
	We've never slept together.
	You've never slept together.
	Okay, okay.
	All right.
	So, why is this relationship not part...
	Of your family's...
	I mean, let me tell you what I would say if I were your dad.
	I could be.
	I'm old enough.
	I don't mean to pull out the D card, but let me tell you what I would say.
	This woman is severely traumatized and can't make an objective or clear decision about what her values are because she's still under such intense and crazy parental pressure to conform.
	She's had a history of violence.
	I don't know if she's gone through a lot of therapy or not, but she has a history of violence.
	She's developed...
	I'm sorry?
	No therapy.
	No therapy.
	Okay, so she is an un...
	A processed victim of severe mental, physical, and emotional abuse from severely dysfunctional, downright batshit crazy parents.
	And what is the plan?
	Are you going to marry into this family?
	Are you going to have kids with this family?
	Are you going to break bread and have Christmas dinners and Thanksgiving dinners with her dad, given your values and all that?
	Is she going to break from her family?
	Well, she doesn't show any particular inclination to do that because she's kind of defending her family, right?
	So this relationship Can't go anywhere in particular.
	And I would also try and figure out...
	I mean, let me ask you this.
	Are you very overweight?
	No, not at all.
	Are you ugly?
	No.
	Are you very shy?
	I am pretty shy, yeah.
	Do you lack confidence around women?
	Not really.
	Waiter, come on.
	Are you going to be honest with me or not?
	You can't tell me that you're shy, but you don't like confidence around women.
	I am shy more with making guy friends than girlfriends.
	So you can go up and chat with women and you don't feel shy about that?
	Not really, not.
	So why, if you're reasonably good looking and you're not overweight and you're confident with women, why are you interested in this currently a wreck of a woman?
	I mean, I guess I would say because I love her.
	No, no, come on, that's circular.
	Of course, you say you love her, but what do you love about her?
	I love that she's the only person that's honest with me about her family, and I'm the only person who's honest with her.
	I thought she said she was defending her abusive parents.
	I said she was defending her parents?
	Maybe I missed that, but I thought you said that she was minimizing some of what had happened with her parents in the past.
	Well, I think that she...
	Would be minimizing what has happened because she doesn't necessarily understand that those things that happened were way more extreme than most people consider them to be.
	So she has some delusionary aspects to her processing of her history.
	I'm not saying this in a critical way towards her, but she's not accurate.
	Because either she's dishonest or she's delusional, right, if she's defending this kind of behavior.
	I mean, either she knows it's really bad, but she's lying about it, or she genuinely doesn't really know how bad it is, in which case she's delusional, right?
	I wouldn't say delusional.
	How would you phrase it?
	I mean, I think she doesn't necessarily know...
	I mean, maybe she does know how bad it is, but...
	Okay, so the idea that she's honest about her family, since you don't even know what she really thinks about it or why she thinks it, this idea that she's really honest about her family is not accurate.
	So let's find another reason why you love her.
	What else do you love her about?
	Because that one doesn't work.
	I mean, she's basically my best friend.
	No, that's just another way of saying that you love her.
	What specifically do you love about her?
	She makes me laugh.
	She's always there for me to comfort me and stuff and she's...
	So these are things that she does for you.
	What is it about her that you love?
	She makes you laugh and she's there to comfort you.
	These are things that she does for you.
	What is it about her specifically that you love?
	Could you be more specific?
	Because I think I'm answering the question wrong every time you ask.
	No, no, it's not wrong.
	I mean, it's not wrong.
	I mean, so she makes you laugh.
	Okay, well, comedians make me laugh.
	That doesn't mean that I enter into a platonic romantic relationship with no sex or whatever.
	So, you know, I can pay a therapist to comfort me or whatever.
	So my question is, when you love someone, my argument is that love is our involuntary emotional response to virtue if we are virtuous.
	My wife is very forthright, she's very courageous, she's very affectionate, she's a very hard worker, she's a great listener.
	These are things that she has as virtues.
	She's very confident, she speaks her mind, and she does have a great sense of humor.
	But these are virtues that she would have independent of me.
	Because in order to get into a relationship with someone, you have to admire something about them.
	Not just things you find out to be valuable after you're in a relationship.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	Okay, so what virtues does she possess and express?
	And what virtues did she express and possess when she was 16 or 15 or however old she was when you first started dating her?
	I mean, the same virtues that she expresses now.
	She's honest and hardworking.
	No, no.
	Honesty, we just went over that one.
	You can't use that one unless you come up with another example, because you said she was honest about her family, and then you admitted, and I'm not trying to corner you, I'm just trying to be precise.
	This is what philosophy does.
	It's Socratic questioning, right?
	So, you said that you didn't know exactly what she thought about things with her family and that was one example you quoted of her honesty.
	So, you can't do honesty.
	So, hardworking.
	Okay, so she's hard...
	I'm gonna make a list of this.
	She's hardworking.
	What else?
	Okay, hold on.
	First, I want to address, you said that love was your involuntary response to your wife's virtues?
	Was that what you said?
	Yes.
	If you're virtuous.
	Now, if you're evil, then you feel hatred towards a virtuous person.
	And if you are virtuous, you feel love towards a virtuous person.
	But it's their virtues that evoke that feeling in you.
	Okay, right.
	But I also, I mean, what I was trying to express was, I said, like, I don't choose the people that I love.
	You do!
	You choose your people that you love when you choose your values.
	But is it not an involuntary response to their values?
	If we are virtuous, right?
	So if you choose to be virtuous yourself, then you will respond with affection and positive feelings and maybe even love to someone who is also virtuous.
	So when you choose virtue for yourself, then you choose who you're going to fall in love with.
	Okay, and I think I have chosen that as...
	I think I've chosen to be virtuous and to kind of have those same...
	What virtues...
	Sorry to interrupt, because I think that you're just telling me something I want to hear, with all due respect.
	What virtues did she have and possess at the age of 15 that you found compelling enough to fall in love with her?
	Okay, um...
	She...
	I can't say honest, I guess.
	She was hardworking...
	I'm not sure exactly what a virtue is, but she's heartbreaking.
	She's funny.
	Funny is something she does for you.
	Okay, well, I don't know exactly how to explain it, but you know how you feel when you fall in love with someone.
	No, no, no.
	Falling in love doesn't mean anything.
	Falling in love, people say that when they're codependent, right?
	They say that when they can't live without being in a relationship because they have no identity and so they need to conform to other people.
	People say that who are sexual addicts.
	People say that who are relationship addicts, who love that first six-month endorphin rush of being in a romantic relationship.
	People say that who are stalking someone.
	They say that they love people, right?
	People say they love their country, you know, which taxes them, throws them in jail, and sends them to wars and enslaves their children.
	People say the most crazy things.
	There's the Stockholm Syndrome where people say that they love people who kidnapped and imprisoned them.
	I mean, look up Patty Hearst sometime on the internet.
	You'll find some really shocking information about how people can attach to significantly evil or dysfunctional people.
	I'm not saying that's you.
	I'm not saying that's true in this case.
	But what I am saying is saying, well, I fell in love It doesn't mean anything.
	It doesn't answer anything because it could come from any number of dysfunctional reasons.
	This is who you think is the best that you can get, right?
	Because if you thought you could get better, then you would get better.
	Like if you were selling your heart on eBay for a million dollars and somebody came along and said two million dollars, you'd take the two million dollars, right?
	Yeah.
	Right.
	So, if you could do better, then you would do better.
	In other words, if you could have the stuff that you have in your girlfriend that you consider good, all we've got so far is hardworking.
	Which, you know, I guess means that you must fall in love with kids who make Nike shoes in Singapore or wherever.
	But...
	But if you could have that without the crazy abusive family, without the fear of being chased, or fear of the deep section of the pool, or fear of the dark, or all of the other cluster of significant dysfunctions that is occurring within her mind and soul, for which I have enormous sympathy.
	But if you could have a woman without those things, wouldn't you prefer that?
	No, I would prefer for her not to have them.
	No, because she has them.
	Right?
	That's like saying, I would prefer to her to be two foot taller.
	Right?
	She has these things.
	And so, wouldn't you prefer to have the pluses that you find in her without all these dysfunctions?
	Basically, I'm asking, do you want a dented Maserati or do you want a non-dented Maserati?
	Now, of course you want a non-dented Maserati.
	Is that fair to say?
	Right.
	Definitely.
	So you clearly think that the best that you can do is a woman who is this damaged.
	And my question is, why?
	Do you think you're going to fix her?
	Do you think you're going to save her?
	You're not.
	I couldn't.
	I mean, you're not a professional therapist.
	I'm not a professional.
	I'm not even an amateur therapist, right?
	You can't save her.
	I mean, if she was choking to death on a fishbone, you wouldn't grab a butter knife and try and do a tracheotomy on you, right?
	Because you maybe saw a few episodes of Grey's Anatomy.
	These are significant mental health issues.
	You can't fix her.
	You cannot save her.
	You can't make her better.
	Now, if she wants to get better, and I hope that she does, if she wants to get better, she can go into therapy, she can begin the process of really identifying how evil and dysfunctional her history was, how being hit by belts is so abominable, how the religious, hate-filled, rage-filled, destructive propaganda got inside her head, and how she was just ruined as a child by these dysfunctional parents.
	She can do that and it will take years for her to deal with that stuff.
	Years of at least a part-time effort.
	Like when I was in therapy, I was going for three hours a week and I did at least 10 to 12 to 15 hours of work outside of therapy just to support the therapeutic process.
	I kept journals, I did sentence completion exercises, I wrote essays, I wrote you name it, right?
	Okay, so if...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Could I interrupt you?
	What I was going to say is, at the end, was that there's no way she can afford a therapist.
	So that's kind of why I've been trying to help her, and she wants to...
	You can't help her!
	You are not trained!
	You are not.
	You can't help her.
	You know, there's a reason why therapists aren't supposed to get romantically involved with their patients.
	You are romantically involved with this woman.
	You cannot fix her.
	You are too self-interested.
	You are too invested.
	You are too close.
	And it is not a professional relationship.
	And by the way, she's not invested in the change.
	This is why it's good to go and pay for therapy.
	I didn't have insurance.
	I had to pay for therapy out of pocket.
	And tens and tens of thousands of dollars it was too.
	Some of the best money.
	In fact, not the best money that I've ever spent in my life.
	But you cannot make her better.
	You cannot fix her.
	Any more than you could do open heart surgery on her if you found out one of her arteries were clogged.
	That takes professional, skilled expertise.
	And long term.
	And she has to be hugely invested in the process.
	And that's why it's important to pay for therapy because then you want to get your money's worth and you're really invested in it.
	But you cannot fix it.
	That was, I guess that was the reason for my calling was There's no way she can afford therapy personally.
	She wants to get help with these things.
	But obviously, there's only so much I can do.
	So, you know, where do we go from here?
	I'm not sure what you're asking.
	I'm asking...
	Are you asking me how can you facilitate this becoming a great relationship?
	No, I'm asking what can she do If she can't afford a therapist, is there anything she can do?
	Why can't she afford a therapist?
	She doesn't have money.
	I mean, you're talking to a guy who worked three jobs to get through college and who's been on his own since he was 15 and got his first job when he was 9 or 10 years old.
	So this idea that you just can't afford something, I don't quite understand that.
	I mean, I got a job at a bookstore when I was 11.
	I got a paper route when I was 12.
	I was working three jobs when I was 14.
	The idea that you just can't afford things, what does that mean?
	It means that she lives in a household where she has no money.
	Her parents have very, very little money.
	Does she not have a job?
	No one will hire her.
	She's applied for jobs.
	No one will hire her.
	It's almost impossible.
	Is she going to go to school?
	If she tried to move out, you know, her parents would never let that happen.
	What, her parents won't let her move out?
	What do you mean?
	She's 18.
	She's an adult, right?
	Yeah, I mean, if she wanted to move out, I don't think that would happen.
	Is she going to go to school?
	She is going to school.
	Oh, she's going to college?
	Yes, she's...
	Well, Christ almighty, then why would you say that?
	Then she can get free counseling through the student union, usually.
	I'm not sure about that, but that's a possibility.
	Well, I'm pretty sure about that.
	I mean, you can get counseling through your student union.
	She just has to say she's depressed or she has to say whatever, and she'll go and start getting counseling.
	Right, okay.
	That's...
	I mean, this is all covered when you go to school.
	It's all covered in your orientation.
	It's all covered in your student hand.
	She pays nothing for school.
	I don't understand what that means.
	She's on scholarship?
	No, she gets financial aid to go to school because she can't afford it.
	And so does that mean that she's in a separate area?
	She's only allowed to use the sewage system to go between the buildings, so she has to use the ductwork to get from class to class.
	She's a regular student like everyone else, right?
	So she gets all access to everything that every other student gets.
	There's no difference between her and any other student, so I have no idea why.
	But it's interesting to me that you're starting to throw out barriers towards her getting therapy.
	No, I would want her to.
	I just don't know if she can actually get it for free.
	Alright.
	Yeah.
	In my opinion, this is not going to be a healthy relationship.
	She should not be in a romantic relationship when she is this disturbed.
	Her emotional development has been so stymied, so stopped, so interfered with, so stalled by the amount of abuse that she's received that she probably doesn't have the emotional age of an 18-year-old.
	She probably has an emotional age that is much younger.
	Because she hasn't had.
	The love and the support and the care and the concern and so on, right?
	What I would be concerned about if I were you, my friend, is why does a woman who is this disturbed want me?
	I think the case is not as extreme as you picture it to be.
	She's a good person and she is doing well in the environment that she's been given.
	She's doing well, but I think it's more like, is this an instance where she has to kind of break free of her family to get away from the verbal abuse or...
	Look, if she gets up and walks away from her family tomorrow, it will not solve her problems.
	Right.
	You understand that?
	Her family is going to go with her in her head.
	Right.
	And you did tell me that she was spanked with a belt repeatedly, that she received terrifying...
	Sorry?
	She was spanked with a belt once, but...
	Sorry, she was spanked repeatedly, but spanked with a belt once.
	She was spanked with a belt once, and then the other abuse, I would say, was like once her brother had punched her a few times, and then...
	Mostly verbal abuse, I would say.
	Because, like, if she comes home or something, her parents and her brothers will kind of make comments about her weight and say, oh, you're fat or whatever.
	And, you know, if she tries to confront them about it and say, don't say that, you're hurting my feelings, you know, they laugh it off, right?
	And they don't take it seriously.
	You also said, if I remember rightly, that her father would yell at her, get angry at her, and say that it was God who was angry with her, not him?
	Yeah, a few times.
	You also laughed when you said that her brother punched her?
	That's not why I was laughing, but her brother did punch her.
	I believe that.
	So, look, I get that you're not going to listen to me today, which is completely fine.
	Nobody has to listen to me at all.
	This is just my amateur idiot opinion time.
	No, I get it.
	You're going to continue with this relationship, and you're going to continue.
	And I don't think you're going to examine why you're in this relationship.
	I don't think you're going to examine...
	Why you can't talk about this with your family or why your family lets you get away with not talking about things.
	I mean there's times when my daughter wants more to talk about things that are important to talk about and we just sit down and talk about them anyway because I have more experience and more knowledge in these areas than my daughter does.
	So I get that you're not going to To listen to me.
	And that's fine.
	But I will tell you that at some point you will, let me finish, at some point you will understand what it is that I'm saying.
	I hope that it's before you get married to this woman.
	I hope that it's before you have children with this woman.
	And this is not to say she's a bad woman.
	My heart goes out to her.
	What a terrible, terrible situation.
	But the important thing is that there's something in you That feels this is the best that you can do.
	That this is appropriate to your level of maturity, to your level of virtue, to your level of integrity, to your level of maturity.
	You feel this is appropriate.
	That is not a good sign for you.
	There's also something where she grew up with very abusive people and is in an unprocessed state of dealing with that abuse and she finds you highly compatible.
	I have a couple of guesses as to why she finds you highly compatible, which I won't really get into here, but this is not based on health, particularly since you got involved with her when she was 15 and you were 17 or whatever.
	This is not a healthy situation, and I don't think you're going to listen to me now.
	I hope that you will mull it over.
	I hope you'll re-listen to this, and I would really, really, really strongly suggest that you talk to a therapist, too, And that you sit down and talk about things with your family and unpack everything that is going on in this relationship.
	This relationship has a heavy impact on you as a child.
	If it is toxic, then it's important for your parents to know.
	If it's not toxic, then it's also important for your parents to know.
	But they need to know everything about your girlfriend.
	Don't live this separate life.
	That is dysfunctional.
	If my daughter was secretly drinking some drink that was making her sick, I would really want to know about that.
	And if you are in a dysfunctional relationship, your parents really have the right to know.
	They have the right to ask those questions.
	They have the right to pursue what is going on for you.
	If you want to be in a relationship and love them, then be open with them.
	Don't say you're in a relationship with people who are healthy and you love them, and then just keep these secrets from them.
	That's not fair.
	People need to know everything that is going on in your mind and your heart when you're in a relationship with them.
	So I would definitely talk with a therapist, but even more importantly, and since that may take a little while to set up, Even more importantly, I would sit down and talk with my parents and say, I've kind of lived this double life.
	I've kind of kept this relationship from you.
	Here's everything that's going on and don't leave anything out and just really Open up to your parents and get their feedback.
	You know, they've stayed together.
	They've stayed married.
	They probably have a few things that they understand about what a good relationship is.
	Share with them.
	Understand the wisdom because you don't want to be in the position where you end up romantically exploiting someone who is emotionally still a child as the result of significant dysfunction within the family.
	So that's just the last thing I'd have to say.
	I do appreciate your call in and I hope that you will mull over what you said.
	And Mike, if we can get on to the next call.
	Thank you.
	Alright, Francisco, you're up next.
	Hi, Jeff.
	I'm really glad to know that everything is going great with you and your family.
	And I have a kind of a complicated question.
	Would you like me to go a little bit into my background so that you can answer me in a better way?
	Start with the question, then I'll ask you about the background, if that's alright with you.
	Okay, great.
	I found myself in the...
	Kind of like in the end of the road when I had to make a decision on whether I changed the fundamental principles of my relationship with my parents or I decided to stop seeing them.
	And my relationship with my mother is quite different from the relationship with my father, but I really don't know how to go about talking directly with them about it.
	What are your complaints about your relationship with your parents?
	Okay, first of all, I was brought up in quite a religious Catholic home.
	I'm from Ecuador, so the society, the culture here, it's quite more backwards and a little bit more strict and religious and mystical, if you want to call it like that.
	And so I was spanked, not very much, but I was spanked a little.
	I was verbally abused, mostly by my mother.
	And what form did that verbal abuse take?
	Just screaming when she didn't get her way, mostly.
	And what would she scream?
	Just complaining, like screaming to get me to do things she wanted, mostly.
	But can you give me a sense of what she sounded like?
	She was angry.
	She was angry because...
	If you can imitate her for me, just so I can get a sense of what she sounded like.
	I can't really remember right now because it was mostly years ago, but she was very angry because...
	No, no insults, but she would be angry.
	Something bothered her.
	I left, I did not make my bed or something not really that significant and she would get really, really angry about it.
	Mostly that.
	Okay, and what else?
	To go directly to the question, I'm at the point where I'm starting to move on with my life.
	And listening to your podcasts and your videos which have helped me more than anything else, I understood that what was holding me back was I was still stuck in this relationship with my parents which was, by the current terms, it was not healthy at all.
	So I either changed the basic relationship between me and my parents or I have to decide to stop seeing them.
	Sorry, what happened prior to you deciding to not see your parents?
	A lot of things.
	Maybe two years ago, I was in a really, really low place in my life.
	I was really depressed, and I decided to take action and start examining my life.
	Eventually, that brought me into reading Ayn Rand, which absolutely changed my life.
	And maybe five months ago I stumbled upon your podcast and it took it a whole step further.
	I changed absolutely my values, my view of reality.
	I basically did a remake of everything I was taught in my childhood.
	I was taught basically Catholic morality, very focused towards what we may call family values, traditional family values.
	And it certainly was not working for me.
	And so I've changed all of that.
	Yeah, it's something that I... I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's something that I thought about.
	You know, they say that blood is thicker than water, right?
	Yeah.
	Blood is thicker.
	I don't know if that's a...
	Is that a saying in Ecuador?
	Is there anything equivalent?
	Not really, but yeah, I get it.
	Yeah, you do for family.
	In other words, your family bonds with your family of origin.
	They are the strongest, right?
	Blood is thicker than water.
	Your family bonds are the strongest.
	And what that has always meant to me is that you should have the highest standards when dealing with your family.
	You should have the very highest standards when dealing with your family.
	And I never understood then why parents hit their children but not strangers.
	Like, if blood is thicker than water, Then you should hit strangers before you hit your children.
	And so it never made sense to me when they say, well, blood is thicker than water and family is everything.
	Okay, well then, shouldn't parents be the kindest and nicest towards their children because blood is thicker than water?
	And if they're going to take out their frustrations and anger, then they should do that on a waiter or a homeless guy or a policeman or whatever.
	But this blood is thicker than water thing just never made sense.
	It didn't seem to coincide.
	It's like saying, my wife is the most important woman in my whole life.
	My wife is everything to me and that's why I beat her.
	It's like, no, no, wait, wait.
	That doesn't make any sense.
	If your wife is everything to you and you love her so much and she's the greatest and best thing, then you should treat her with the greatest tenderness and gentleness and respect.
	But anyway, I just want to mention that.
	So go ahead.
	Yeah, I totally agree with that.
	And the thing is, I've talked with both of my parents.
	My dad has been really open towards everything I've said.
	He's apologized.
	I recently started going to therapy and my dad wanted to go to therapy too.
	He actually reacted in a very pleasant way.
	He wants to understand me and to know what's behind my new way of thinking.
	Sorry, in Ecuador, do men kiss each other on the cheek?
	Yes.
	Okay, can you do me a favor?
	Sure.
	Give your father a kiss on both cheeks from me.
	I do a medium pucker.
	You can watch the video.
	I do a medium pucker.
	Sort of like this.
	I don't moisten.
	Hang on.
	Let me just put a little bit of chapstick on, just so you know.
	It's going to be soft and gentle, but very, very straight.
	And just give him a kiss on both.
	That's, my God, I mean, what an incredible response.
	That he's going to go to therapy, that he's curious, that he wants to know what you're thinking.
	More power to him.
	Kiss on both cheeks.
	So I just wanted to mention that.
	Yes, it brings a lot.
	And with my mom, I haven't been so lucky, really.
	And it's really hard to deal with it.
	I'm not sure how to move on.
	Are they still together?
	Yeah, they get along pretty well.
	They almost never fight.
	But at the same time, I usually ask myself, why are they together?
	Because they're quite different.
	Well, you said you were raised Catholic, right?
	Yeah, sure.
	So that's why they're together, right?
	Because that which God has put together, like, no man takes asunder, right?
	Until death do you part.
	That's a very serious vow in the Catholic tradition, right?
	Yeah, sure.
	And what happens when you try and talk with your mom?
	She gets angry whenever I talk about something regarding religion.
	And I'm not accusing her of anything.
	I just ask a simple question.
	She made me a Catholic and I obviously have the right to ask her about it.
	You know those are not simple questions, right?
	Yeah, I know.
	Don't assemble with me, my friend.
	We've been having such a great conversation, so don't start telling me that questioning your mother about her religious beliefs and religious indoctrination is not a simple question, right?
	Yes, you're right.
	Okay, go on.
	So every time I try to get through to her, she dismisses me.
	She says like, oh, in a really bad way.
	She thinks that I'm just whining with a get-over-it attitude.
	Hang on.
	Do you have these conversations with you and your father and your mother?
	Sometimes.
	Whenever I'm with both of them, he doesn't do much.
	He still has been brought up in this culture.
	You're not supposed to question your parents and...
	No, no, no.
	Look, I'm sorry to interrupt.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but if you're asking me for my advice, what I would suggest is you sit down with your dad and you tell him how difficult it is to talk to your...
	And that it's really harming the relationship.
	And you don't want it to harm the relationship.
	You want her to be as curious and as open and as mature as your father is.
	You need to get him to help you with this, right?
	You need to get him to stand up.
	He's got to say, no, no, no, no.
	Don't respond like that.
	That's rude.
	Right?
	Don't dismiss him.
	Don't put him down.
	Don't insult him.
	He's got questions.
	You know, we raised an intelligent boy who can ask questions as a man.
	We want him.
	When he was a kid, we said, think for yourself.
	Don't follow the herd.
	If everybody was jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge or whatever the Ecuadorian equivalent is, would you jump?
	So, no, you think for yourself.
	You go against the herd.
	We told him not to fall in with a bad crowd, to have his own ethics, to have his own integrity.
	So we taught him to do all of this stuff and to follow his conscience, and this is where his conscience is.
	Now, if he's following our instructions, we don't get to insult him for following our instructions.
	That's like telling him to go to the mall and then calling him stupid for going to the mall.
	Right?
	So we taught him to think for himself.
	We wanted him to reason.
	We wanted him to follow his own conscience.
	And this is where his conscience is taking him.
	So we respect that as the fruit of the tree that we ourselves planted as parents, or whatever speech he would come up with to help support you in that moment.
	But he needs to take a stand with your mom.
	That's the restitution, right?
	Because, you know, if he did bad things or let bad things happen to you as a kid, it's all well and good, and I think it's very admirable, still, kiss on both cheeks for him to say, I'll go to therapy.
	But the restitution is, you know, you've got to stand up for me with mom.
	This is how you can work to actually make things better rather than just say that you're sorry.
	This is how you can actually do something.
	You've got to stand up and you've got to help me turn mom around because our relationship is being chipped away at every time she gets angry at me or puts me down for speaking my mind.
	Yeah, you're absolutely right.
	Thank you very much.
	That's really what I needed to hear.
	Okay, and if you get a chance, let me know how it goes.
	I wish you the best.
	And you said I'm not having as much luck with my mom.
	You know it's fundamentally not going to come down to luck.
	It's going to come down to the choices that your mom makes.
	In the moment, in the crisis moment, where something new, something original, something deep, something powerful, something true, something philosophical, something moral, comes in like an unwanted elephant in a Martha Stewart dinner party, comes barging into the room, there's a moment of crisis, and people have a fork in the road, right?
	They have a fork in the road.
	And it's not going to be luck, although there's certainly things that you can do to affect it.
	It's going to fundamentally come down to the choice that your mother makes in that moment.
	And it's not maybe just one moment, maybe it's a couple of moments.
	But after a couple of moments, it's going to be really tough to backtrack and find your way back.
	So there's things that you can do to improve the chances of success in that conversation, but fundamentally that success It's going to hinge on the choices that your mother makes when confronted with something true and unexpected.
	And so don't take ownership of it all yourself, but also don't let your mom off the hook and say it's luck or good luck or bad luck.
	She's making a choice.
	Okay, thank you very much.
	You're very welcome.
	It's been really helpful.
	I'll let you know how it goes.
	Thank you.
	Please do.
	All right, Becca, go ahead.
	You're up next.
	Hey, Steph.
	Hello, hello.
	How are you doing?
	I'm good.
	I don't have a question, but I wanted to share an experience with the listeners and also as a way of thanking you for research and information that you've put out.
	It's my pleasure.
	The show is all yours.
	Thanks.
	So, a little more than five years ago, I had a seizure from Antidepressants.
	I had like a tonic-clonic, or they used to be called grand mal seizures, in a very public place.
	And the people that I was with didn't know anything about seizures because I don't have epilepsy.
	No one in my family has epilepsy or has had seizures.
	And it was awful.
	And they found out it was because I was on ridiculously high doses of Welbutrin, which is known to lower the seizure threshold, supposedly only in people who are, like, susceptible to seizures, like people with a history of epilepsy or seizures in their family.
	I have none of that, so they were basically like, we don't know why that happened to you.
	But...
	The information that you put out about antidepressants, I think maybe like a couple years ago, was like really amazing and opening my eyes to all the crazy shit that happened.
	Helped me.
	I was still on antidepressants after that for, like, years.
	So I am now medication-free.
	And I don't know, I was hoping maybe if people listen to this now or in the future, somebody's on the fence, maybe they'll hear that and be like, oh, I'm not going to do that.
	Maybe they'll save their brain cells.
	Wow, that's an incredible story and obviously I'm hugely happy to hear that you're off that stuff.
	You know, I'm certainly no doctor but Robert Whittaker and other people have been on the show who've done the research and have some significant Questions, I guess is the nicest way of putting it, about the efficacy of these kinds of drugs and their capacity to cause significant neurological damage.
	So I'm incredibly happy to hear that you found a non-medicinal way.
	And what was it like coming off these things?
	I don't really...
	My experience with being on meds was that I had bad side effects, but other than that, it was a relief to get off them.
	Besides that, I was anxious to stop taking them, and I was like, am I going to be plunged into this horrible depression?
	But that I mean, it was the same.
	I was depressed.
	I had ups and downs when I was on medications, and I had ups and downs when I was off.
	Except that when I was on medication, I had all these awful side effects.
	And the seizure was just one thing.
	That was the worst.
	But on another one, I was hypomanic.
	So hyper is over and hypo is under, so a little bit manic.
	And that was horrible.
	I thought I was going crazy.
	I was, like, staying up till four in the morning feverishly cleaning my room.
	I was, like, in hysterics all the time.
	And on another one, I was allergic, and I, like, went to a couple different hospitals, and they couldn't figure out what it was.
	I had, like, hives all over my legs, and I still have, like, scarring on my legs from that.
	So I've had pretty shitty experiences with meds, and so getting off them was, like...
	Besides, I felt like maybe it was an emotional crutch.
	I was kind of scared emotionally to get off them.
	But other than that, I didn't have any sort of withdrawal that I know of.
	Well, that's fantastic.
	Do you have any insight now, I'm sure you have probably had at the time, do you have any insight now as to what was the ideology or the cause of your depression that you were originally medicated for?
	Yeah, my family is awful and abusive and they of course were The people who were encouraging me and my sisters to be medicated, they were very happy for that to happen.
	And actually, earlier this year, I've cut off contact with my family.
	And I, oh my god, I've never felt so, like...
	Myself and my life, I feel like I'm living my life for the first time, and it's super scary.
	There's all sorts of scary things, like new experiences this year that I've been going through, but it's incredible.
	I'm actually healing my depression, and when I feel depressed sometimes, it's for a shorter period of time, and it's less deep as it was in the past.
	Have you tried any talk therapy?
	Yeah, I've been in therapy since I was 18.
	I'm 26.
	I've had also lots of bad therapists.
	Oh, yeah.
	I've had like three or four who I told that I didn't want to be in contact with.
	No, not even the first one.
	I just told her, I was like, well, my mom's kind of abusive.
	Why should I put up with that?
	And she was like, well, everyone wants a mother.
	Why wouldn't you not want your mother?
	And I was like...
	Yeah, don't you know, Rebecca, that everyone wants a husband.
	And if your husband is abusive, well, you have to stay with him.
	Isn't that what they say to women?
	Oh no, that's right.
	They say exactly the opposite to women.
	No, it is a tragic prejudice that still exists.
	If we could take 10% of the outrage and exhortations to freedom that we give to victims of spousal abuse and hand a little bit of that to victims of parental abuse, this is the biggest and best and most powerful way to change parenting.
	I mean, nobody can reach into this black obsidian biosphere of the family and change things.
	It's not possible any more than you can reach into the government-run post office and make it efficient, but you can introduce voluntarism into the relationship and there's no other way to improve quality that I know of.
	So I'm very sorry to hear what happened, but, you know, if it's any consolation, you know, Dr.
	Phil is, you know, has a whole advisory board and on his website it says sort of very clearly You know, if your parents are abusive, then you can stop seeing them.
	And it's weird that this even needs to be said.
	I mean, this is not said to women who are being abused or men who are being abused or whatever.
	If you're being abused at work, people say, well, you can always quit.
	But with the parents, it's the last of the Ten Commandments that still has to be examined from a moral standpoint.
	So I'm sorry that you got that advice.
	But it is, it's very common and it's very out of date with best practices in the realm of psychology and psychiatry.
	Yeah, thank you.
	I've managed to find a therapist now who, like, doesn't judge me in that way, and she's been really supportive through this year, and she's an internal family systems therapist, so she's really awesome.
	I wish I could see her more.
	I can't afford to see her every week, but I'm like, every other week, I gotta hold on to this.
	It's so great.
	That's fantastic.
	That really is great, and congratulations, and I'm very, very sorry about your history as a child.
	There is If it's true, I think that there's good reasons to believe that it's true.
	I believe that it's true, but this is not proven to me beyond a shadow of a doubt.
	It's my sort of contingent thesis.
	But if it's true that the majority of dysfunction in people comes from being abused as a child, then we can see why abusive parents would be so desperate to grab for the medical explanation.
	Because it's like, well, it's not that I was a shitty parent.
	It wasn't that I yelled.
	It wasn't that I hit.
	It wasn't that I neglected.
	It wasn't like I dumped them in daycare.
	It wasn't like I was never there.
	It wasn't like I had them raised by a succession of underpaid nannies.
	Nothing like that.
	The problem is they just miss a certain chemical in their brain which a pill can help them take.
	So it's not even like my diet gave them diabetes.
	It's just kind of built into their genes and it was nothing to do with me.
	There's a huge market.
	For the self-excusing of immoral people that tragically the government and the pharmaceutical companies and the psychiatric industry seems more than happy to serve, much to the detriment of kids, I would say.
	Yeah, my parents were super open about calling me sick to my face.
	They would be like, you're sick, you don't know what's best for you, you can't think straight.
	And they were so supportive of me being on medications.
	I was on the dose I was on that I... Sorry?
	Yeah, no, I can imagine why.
	Yeah, and the dose I was on when I had the seizure was like, it was like almost 500 milligrams of Welbutrin.
	Like, I'm 5'2".
	I have like a really, I have a small body frame that's something for like, well, I was going to say it's something that like a six foot man would take, but I don't think anyone should take this shit.
	But yeah, and like, I mean, the People, like the nurse practitioners prescribing this stuff were just happy to, or not happy, but they were very quick to ask those questions that are like, oh, have either of your parents been depressed?
	And it was sort of like, well, yeah, like my mom has anxiety and my dad said he was depressed once when he was 30.
	And it was sort of like, oh, okay, like, yeah, that's proof that it's genetic or something.
	And like, oh, all my sisters are medicated, so...
	That's proof that it runs in the family.
	The one thing in common was the family environment.
	And the other thing too is that parents who are abusive or people who are abusive as a whole are probably a lot more of a handful for psychiatrists and psychologists than kids who can be drugged.
	So if you say to the parents, actually you have severely dysfunctional parenting, the environment I would classify as abusive, and this is why Your kid is the way the kid is and I've told that to the kid.
	Can you imagine what kind of mushroom cloud would open up on that office?
	Right.
	Yeah.
	It's just so much easier to drug the kids who are the least powerful and least dangerous members of that interaction or participants in that interaction and it is tragic and it is cowardly but I mean it's just the way the system is at the moment.
	Yeah, it's gross.
	I hope that, I don't know, yeah, I hope people might hear this and it might mean something to people.
	Because I realized I have this, like, crazy experience with antidepressants that, I don't know, might as well share it.
	No, I appreciate that.
	And I just looked it up.
	The book I recommend, there's a whole bunch of books that I've read on this subject, and I think the one that's really important is called Anatomy of an Epidemic, Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.
	It's a book by Robert Whittaker.
	Who's actually been on this show.
	You can look for my interview with him.
	His basic question is, since we have these drugs that are supposed to cure mental dysfunction or mental illness, why have the number of Americans who receive government disability for mental illness doubled since 1987?
	If this stuff is supposed to cure this, or at least manage symptoms, then why are so many more people sick?
	And his argument is that the drugs are making them sick.
	That's a very quick summary of it, but you can pick that up from Amazon.
	I don't know if it's available on Audible, but I would definitely recommend that.
	And thank you so much, Becca.
	It's incredible to hear what you've been able to do.
	I'm very sorry about what happened originally and what happened more recently with your family.
	But, you know, if there's a toxin in the air, you've got to move.
	What are you going to do?
	Yeah.
	Thanks so much, Steph.
	You're welcome.
	Thanks for sharing.
	All right, Alex, you're up next.
	Hello, Stefan.
	Can you hear me?
	I can.
	Go ahead, my friend.
	First, I would like to say that I recently discovered your podcast.
	And your site through YouTube, actually.
	And it's really helping me.
	I'm also listening to your book, Practical Anarchy.
	And I'm a fellow programmer from Brazil.
	And since I'm about to start a business, I would like to ask two questions related to that.
	Sure.
	The first one is I would like to know how do you see the connection with the way one runs a business with anarchism and I also would like to ask you if you mind sharing your experiences because I know you mentioned it in a podcast that You were a programmer and you led a software company for quite some time,
	so I would like to know about some of your experiences, if you don't mind.
	Sure.
	Just for those who don't know, and very, very briefly, I bought my first computer with money I inherited from my grandmother and money that I got working in a hardware store.
	An Atari 800 with 16k of RAM at the time, which was more than you could imagine filling up.
	I learned how to program when I was 11 or 12.
	I used to spend my Saturdays in the computer lab at school programming pets and other kinds of computers.
	I didn't do much with that stuff until later, after I was in theater school and after I got my master's, I ended up working as a COBOL programmer because I knew how to program and I was getting back into programming at that time.
	And then I ended up co-founding a company.
	I was chief technical officer of that company for, I think, eight or nine years.
	And then I was director of marketing, director of technology at two other companies.
	So yeah, I did R&D. I did my own coding, managed a group of about 20 coders and R&D people and testers and documenters.
	And I did a lot of sales and travel and presentations and all that kind of stuff throughout China and France mostly and all throughout the United States.
	And it was really quite a fun ride.
	And so I have some experience in that area.
	With anarchy...
	I mean, there's no rulers, so there's nothing in a company which says you can't be autocratic or you can't be bossy or whatever, right?
	There's just no initiation of force or fraud rulers.
	So management styles can cover a wide variety of ways of doing things.
	So you can be autocratic, you can be dictatorial, you can be skeptical, you can be hard-nosed, you can be all these kinds of things.
	And they may be effective in a particular industry.
	They may be effective with a particular type of team.
	It was never my approach.
	My approach was always I felt that I was a resource for my employees.
	You know, in the same way that we paid for their electricity, we paid for the office, we paid for their chairs, and this allowed them to do what they do, and they give up a certain amount of salary in order to have the lights on and in order to have air conditioning and in order to have electricity.
	But they recognize that they make more money by giving up a certain portion of their income for the electricity and the rent and the plane tickets for me to go and sell the software that we all make together.
	But they recognize that because if the software wasn't being sold, they'd have no income at all.
	So they are willing to give a certain amount of income up to sales and marketing so that they get more income for programming.
	And so I was always trying to make that clear to people.
	And what I would tell them, both when I hired them and would remind them periodically, was that a certain portion of their salary is going to pay my salary.
	In other words, if the company could be run exactly the same but without me there, then they'd probably make a little bit more.
	Right?
	So I was making in the six figures back in the software days.
	And so each programmer was giving up, you know, $2,000 or $3,000 or whatever for me to be the chief technical officer to be the executive and so on and so what I would remind them is saying well you you're paying for me yeah I mean you can think of the company paying you and that's true I guess to a degree but equally you're paying me with a reduction in salary and what that means is if I'm not providing to you
	at least three or four thousand dollars worth of value a year Then I'm not doing my job.
	And so if there's some customer you really hate and I'll go and deal with them and I'll fly out and I'll listen to them bitch about this, that and the other and I'll work out some resolution with them, is that worth it to you?
	If through my experience I come up with ways that save you a lot of time and help you enjoy your programming more, is that worth it to you?
	If I create an environment which is fun to come to work at and creative and so on, I remember being on a conference call with a client, fortunately this is before video and Skype, And the programmers ran past my door and I got hit with a suction top nerf gun that actually left a mark on my forehead for a day or two, which I thought was actually pretty funny.
	So is it enjoyable to come to work?
	What's that worth to you?
	Am I dealing with difficult problems?
	What's that worth to you?
	If you come to me for help, for answers, do I give you stuff that is useful to you?
	So that to me has always been very important to communicate that I think in anarchy, Or in No Rulers, everyone has to provide value in the interaction.
	Everyone has to provide value in the interaction.
	Now, that doesn't mean necessarily economic value.
	I mean, if I'm homeless and some guy gives me 20 bucks and I say, oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, I'm so grateful.
	Well, that person feels good, right?
	So I'm providing value in terms of being grateful.
	Whereas if I snarl and spit on him and say, you know, capitalist lapdog of the ruling class, where's my robot Marxist mommy computer to give me everything I want for free?
	Well, then I may not be providing a lot of value in the interaction to him.
	So the economics are very clear that they were paying my salary through a reduction in their salary and I constantly needed to be able to provide value to them in the same way that they needed to be able to provide value to me.
	So I would ask them every couple of weeks or every month, sit down and say, was I worth a couple of hundred bucks to you this month?
	Because if I wasn't, That's important.
	We need to figure out a way that I can, or at least make it clear.
	Like if I was off doing a bunch of sales calls, I need to justify how that adds to their salary.
	So I think that that to me was an important aspect of voluntarism.
	I wasn't an anarchist back in those days, but I was like a 1% of government's current size minarchist, objectivist really.
	But I still understood that basic economics of that.
	So I think that Whatever you do that is going to provide value to your employees, and that's going to be different per employee and per culture of the employees that you're in and so on, whatever you're going to do to provide value, it needs to cover your salary.
	And in fact, I was being paid, I think, 120 plus bonuses in the 90s.
	And yes, my actual cost was probably twice that, you know, just in terms of wide variety of overhead and office and so on, right?
	And so I needed to provide a quarter million dollars worth of value to the company and I needed to provide that to my employees and to my customers and blah-de-blah.
	Everyone's paying your salary in little slices and you need to make sure you're providing value to those people.
	Because if you think that you're the boss and they're just the employees and you're handing down value and you're determining their value, you're missing the fact that everything in economics is reciprocal.
	Everything in economics is reciprocal and that's the one thing that I got that was really great from free market economics and I think that's the most humbling and valuable lesson to remember when you're quote in charge you are still even though you're the boss you're an employee of your employees even though you're the boss you are a customer to your employees and of your employees and to remember that everything everything is always 360 it keeps you from getting lazy it keeps you from getting autocratic and it makes sure That
	you continue to provide clear value to your employees and our turnover rate was so low.
	It was ridiculous.
	I mean, people just loved working there and it was great.
	We kept meeting for years and years afterwards just because we all were good friends that way.
	I hope that helps a little.
	Is that useful?
	Yes, very useful.
	Can I make another question really briefly?
	Do you have any specific recommendations on how to stimulate employees in terms of promotions and bonuses?
	Mike, are you online?
	Thank you.
	Yeah, I'm here.
	I mean, we're friends, but technically I guess we're employer-employee, would that be?
	A contractor or whatever it is, right?
	So Alex has a question about how to motivate people, and you seem very motivated to the point where I say, Mike, for God's sake, get some sleep.
	So how would you answer the question as to how an employee is motivated?
	I think it has to be there to begin with.
	I don't think it's something you can foster if it's not there, but I do believe that giving your employees a lot of freedom to pursue things that they're interested in that they feel would add value to the company is a really positive idea.
	Steph has given me just Complete freedom to do what it is I want to do and what I think is going to provide value to the show.
	And I've really enjoyed it.
	I can focus on the things I'm passionate about.
	Sure, there's the long days where I'm editing a podcast where the audio is pretty terrible and it's a little tedious and not too fun.
	There's going to be some of that, of course.
	But I have so much time to focus on things that I find exciting and that I'm passionate about that are really self-motivated.
	I just have that extra vigor or extra enthusiasm when I get to work on them, because it's something that, from the very start, I've not only come up with the idea, but I'm just enthused about its implementation.
	Yeah, like I'd actually never heard of Joe Rogan.
	Honestly, I had no idea who Joe Rogan was.
	And so, because I didn't think he was anyone that I knew of, and what do I know about the world that I don't watch reality TV or mixed martial arts?
	I guess once I did, but when he gave me some tickets.
	But Mike was like, this is one of the biggest bumps we've ever had.
	And if I'd given Mike a list of things that I wanted done and said, don't deviate from this list, you know, half the things that have happened that have been great this year would never have happened.
	And, you know, so Mike came in as a listener and as a friend.
	I'd been running this thing for, I don't know, we just re-released a...
	One of my first videos, if not my very first video, which was nine years ago, I think, or eight years ago, and I was 39.
	Yeah, yeah, eight years ago.
	So, I mean, I've been running this thing for eight years off and on, and Mike's sort of new to the running side of it, and yet, at least, if not more than half of the value that has been added, I would say, since Mike started in February, has been a direct result of Mike's suggestions and Mike's ideas and, you know, Mike's, dare I say it, scintillating and sultry youth and knowledge of things that I don't know much about because I'm old.
	Does that make sense?
	Yes, a lot.
	Thank you very much.
	And I would like to say, just to finish off, that I'm really enjoying FreeDomain.
	All the podcasts, the books are really helping me to see the world in a totally different way.
	So thank you very much for that.
	You're very welcome.
	My daughter still loves Brazil.
	There's two places she wants to go back to.
	Belize and Brazil.
	And Brazil in particular, because she loved the movie Rio and that we went to, one day we went I think the day before my debate, we went to a zoo in Brazil where they had all the birds from Rio in cages right next to each other, which she just went completely mental about.
	And so she still wants to go back there.
	So if you need any on-site consultations, I'm your man.
	And also remember that if you have a business, this is true for all my listeners, like if you have a business and you want to help publicize it, I am heavily invested in your economic success.
	I mean, A, I want you to be successful because you're a listener, and B, if you're very successful.
	It's more donations for me, huh?
	So if you have a business, you want to help promote it, you know, send Mike operations at freedomainradio.com.
	I think other than, you know, penguin and goat porn, we're pretty happy to promote just about anything.
	Now, if you have penguin and goat porn together, obviously we're completely behind that in more ways than one.
	But send operations at freedomainradio.com.
	You know, I got Facebook, I got...
	YouTube, we've got a message board.
	You know, use me as a resource.
	I want people who are philosophers.
	I want people who are anarchists and atheists and voluntarists and thinkers.
	I want you guys to do well.
	I want you to get rich if you want.
	I want you to have resources.
	I want you to make enough money to stay home with your kids.
	For the first couple of years.
	So if there's anything I can do or Mike and I can do to help drive visibility for your projects, please, please, you know, open arms, open harbor, send them in and we will try and do our best to help get the word out.
	So just wanted to mention that.
	Thank you very much.
	You're welcome.
	Let's get to the last caller who I believe is attached from a submarine yogurt cups and string.
	Is that correct?
	Or a phone.
	What is that noise?
	Did you have to dial that with a rotary dial phone?
	Hello?
	Hello, hello.
	It's someone else from the internet willing to talk to someone like you.
	Oh, excellent.
	I've been waiting for this.
	Well, good.
	I feel I haven't, yet I have.
	So, what I have called in about, I was going to just talk about how statist my business classes at BGSU are, but then I went to New York City this weekend, and there was a big concert out on Central Park in the Big Long.
	There was like 80,000 people there, and Global Citizen Music Festival.
	It was pretty awesome.
	Stevie Wonder, John Mayer, they were all there.
	And I thought it was just going to be something like, we need to help the poor.
	Basically, they would say stuff that you can't disagree with without sounding like an asshole.
	But then they would only present government solutions.
	So...
	It was just like the most frustrating, but the most enjoyable experience of my life because all of these great musicians and stuff, but it was so frustrating listening to 80,000 people cheer the leader of the UN. He's like the second general of the UN was there.
	And Stevie Wonder just praised this guy.
	He's like, this guy's a rock star, this guy.
	I love this guy.
	I know rock stars in this guy.
	He's a rock star.
	And Stevie Wonder was just hilarious.
	So you can't be upset with Stevie about that.
	But yeah, it was just crazy.
	Yeah, it's tragic, of course, that the blind guy is praising the state.
	And it's tragic, of course.
	One of my favorite Stevie Wonder songs is...
	Oh, yeah!
	And he's got the superstition folk statism that he doesn't even see.
	Go ahead.
	He was playing that song, and he's singing, you know, superstition gets in the way.
	And then he's going...
	We are global citizens.
	We're going to change the world.
	He made the guy do the stupid, like, we are part at the beginning.
	And then the girls would be like, we are global citizens.
	We're going to change the world.
	And then by the UN, the warmongering people of Destructionville, like, I mean, it's so frustrating.
	I know.
	I love that line.
	When you believe in things that you don't understand, you will suffer superstitions and the way.
	It's like, yes, that's right.
	Statism and religion.
	But anyway, so what can I tell you?
	I mean, this is so standard.
	I mean, the media, the entertainment industry is incredibly leftist.
	It is relentlessly leftist.
	They never met a government program they didn't like.
	They never met a tax increase they didn't like, except as so far as it applies to them.
	Michael Moore, of course, rails against capitalism and people who don't pay their taxes and then applies for every conceivable tax break that he can find and employs a lot of non-union people.
	I mean, it's a standard thing.
	It's just what you have to say.
	And I don't know if this is all the influence of Judaism, which tends to be a little bit more on the left, you know, with some notable examples like Hein RAND, who didn't go that particular way.
	I don't know if it's because people who manipulate symbols are easy to manipulate through symbols, and leftism is just lower order thinking.
	As Bastiat mentioned 200 plus years ago, The socialists, the people on the left, make a fundamental confusion.
	They don't understand the difference between government and society.
	Government and society.
	These are two different things completely.
	And when you say the government shouldn't do something, because they don't understand the difference between government and society, when you say the government shouldn't do something, idiots on the left genuinely believe that you were saying That that thing should not be done.
	Government should not provide healthcare.
	Oh my God, he doesn't want healthcare provided to people.
	Government should not be in the business of trying to save poor people.
	Oh my God, he doesn't want poor people to be saved, right?
	They don't understand.
	That government is in distinct opposition to society, not just philosophically, not just morally, but logically.
	Government uses force, and force is exactly what people don't want.
	How do we know people don't want what the government does?
	Because it has to do it by force.
	You weren't there at this concert by force, right?
	You were there to hear Stevie Wonder sing great songs and make bad politics.
	Well, you weren't there for the bad politics, but unfortunately, whenever...
	People open their mouths in the entertainment industry.
	It's just this full-on gale-force jet engine to the face, fuel-tipped laceration of leftist ideological crap.
	You just can't help it.
	You have to hold your nose.
	You just have to hold your nose completely.
	It's like making love to a beautiful woman with really bad breath.
	You just have to hold your nose and get your business done.
	I just want to point out that it is tragic.
	I think people who are artists, they have a lot of emotional investment and they have a lot of emotional attunement.
	So they're very susceptible to propaganda.
	People who are emotional, people who quote, reason or make decisions emotionally, are incredibly susceptible to propaganda.
	This is why philosophy has been so traditionally anti-emotion.
	You know, the sort of cold-blooded Spock, Vulcan, uncaring, Socrates-style, above-it-all, Zen-based philosopher.
	It's because people who are emotional are so susceptible to propaganda that they're very dangerous to people who reason.
	Whereas I believe that the emotions are incredibly important and fundamental to the act of reasoning because they're just so damn efficient.
	You can read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink for more on that.
	Emotions are incredibly efficient.
	The unconscious is thousands of times faster at processing disparate but related information than the conscious mind is.
	So people who are artists, they tend to be emotionally driven and this is why they're able to connect with people emotionally.
	It's why they're able to sing so passionately.
	It's why they're able to do all these great things in terms of connecting with people at that level.
	But they're incredibly dangerous when it comes to propaganda.
	This is why you've got all these leftist people like, you know, Harrison Ford and Leonardo DiCaprio and James Cameron and Sheryl Crow.
	They're all great artists and they're all so lefty when it comes to the environment and yet the amount of environmental destruction they have in their own lives is staggering.
	I've done a whole video on this on YouTube which you can look up if you want.
	Oh, I've seen all of them.
	Yeah, it's truly tragic and ridiculous and I aim to not have a hostility towards the emotions despite the fact that propagandists are very good at manipulating emotions and bypassing people's rational centrists.
	That's simply because people's rational centrists are atrophied and dusty and in fact reactive to the propaganda personalities or pseudo-personalities that they inhabit.
	So it is tragic, and I, you know, said at the beginning I tried to be a novelist for many years.
	I get it now that I had a synthesis of reason and emotion in my novels, and you can get my novels from freedomainradio.com if you're so inclined.
	No, I've actually read a few of them.
	I'm sorry?
	I've actually gone through a few of them.
	Gone through.
	Is that what you people are calling reading these days, or does that just mean you were hoping it was a pop-up book and were sadly disappointed?
	Yeah, exactly.
	No, I was working, you know, just a desk job, so I would go through the audiobooks, and sometimes I would get really busy and I would realize I didn't pay attention for the last half hour, so, you know, try to go back and, yeah, On Truth was really amazing.
	And I'm trying to think what it...
	Well, those are sort of, at least I hope, nonfiction, right?
	But the novels like Just Poor, I'm still reading, is an audiobook.
	I've got one in the gold section called Almost.
	There is The God of Atheists, which is available through Lulu, Revolutions, and so on.
	So the novels that I've written, and I've written about six or seven of them, and a whole bunch of screenplays, I've written like 30 screenplays and theater plays and so on.
	But it just was not right.
	I mean, I'm just reading a book by Ben Shapiro on how the left took over television, and it's so funny how people on the left get all hysterical.
	About the McCarthy hearings, right?
	They're just constantly drumming out this McCarthy hearings where nobody went to jail and some people got blackballed and so on because they were affiliated with the communists who were evil Nazi-style thugs and brutal and sold all of Eastern Europe into jackbooted fascistic totalitarian thuggery for a couple of generations.
	And yet, if you try being a right-winger Or a conservative in Hollywood, unless you're huge and totally bankable like Arnold Schwarzenegger and so on, you're toast.
	You simply won't get hired.
	Ben Shapiro, who's going to come on the show actually, He wrote a couple of scripts on spec for The Good Wife, I think.
	And it was all going well and people loved his work and you get paid ridiculous amounts of money for one of these scripts.
	And he was like, yay, this is fantastic.
	And then they said, oh, you know what?
	Actually, sorry, Ben.
	We went to your website.
	We didn't realize you were a conservative.
	So we're not going to be able to do business together.
	Sorry, right?
	Because they consider conservatives to be like evil scum, right?
	And it's incredibly bigoted.
	I mean, if they said that about gays or they said that about blacks or...
	I'm sorry?
	It's totally bigotry.
	It really is.
	Just judging.
	You know, I hate the left, the right, the whole, the two, the separation, because it's just a way to distract yourself and say, you know, it's these people that are the problem.
	And I agree, like, totally with, you know, the left is crazy, and the right has their Bill O'Reilly's, you know, God has to be there because the moon is there, and I mean, obviously, the moon is there, so God's there.
	I mean, duh, you're an idiot if you don't think that, you know?
	Yeah, no, the only thing that is keeping America from a complete leftist takeover is talk radio, because talk radio...
	is something that since the repeal of the fairness doctrine, I think it was in the 90s, before the 90s in America, every time you put a political opinion on the air, you had to give equal time to the opposite political opinion.
	And who knew what the hell that was and who would let idiot amateurs on the radio or whatever, right?
	So people just didn't talk politics on the radio because it was just opening yourself up to lawsuits from crazy, embittered, lonely people.
	And so when that was repealed, I think Was it under Reagan?
	I think it was under Reagan, in which case it would be the 80s.
	That's when Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Michael Savage and all these people, I guess Tom Lyk is more of a libertarian, but That's when they began to really have a resurgence, and they had a very powerful resurgence, and that paved the way for conservative books and so on, and this is where you get the and cultures and so on that come out of that tradition.
	And I mean, it's kind of an essential thing at the moment, just to sort of balance this endless fetishistic leftist propaganda that is just absolutely nonstop, some of which I agree with, even though it's propaganda, it's still kind of dangerous and And easy to become susceptible to.
	And just in the same way I agree with some of the stuff on the right.
	Did you support the war in Iraq at first?
	I did.
	Before I did this show I was a supporter of the war in Iraq.
	I just finished reading a Noam Chomsky book and now I'm going to try Glenn Beck.
	Because I'm always curious about what's going on on these sides of the political fences.
	And it's hard to get offended by good writing.
	And actually, Glenn Beck is a bit of a better writer than Noam Chomsky, who's a bit of a plotting, pedantic octogenarian.
	I like Noam Chomsky's videos.
	I like him.
	He seems like he would be a nice guy to hang out with.
	Yeah, he murmurs some great truths in that cracked up, broken up Clint Eastwood voice of his.
	So, I think that...
	The reason why the left is winning is because they're just better at art.
	They're just better artists.
	They're really committed to their art.
	They're really committed to excellence within their art.
	And they don't have the self-doubt or requirement for balance That people on the right have.
	So people on the right say, well, Fox has to be fair and balanced, which means that they'll present left and right arguments.
	People on the left, I didn't bother with that at all.
	Like, I just read a review, an independent review of the major networks, 22 major networks, and their review of the current government shutdown, or as Fox News more accurately calls it, a slim down, because nothing's shutting down.
	Wouldn't that be great?
	Yeah.
	What's happened is, of the 22 networks, zero of them have blamed the Democrats for this.
	Zero of them have blamed the Democrats.
	I mean, that's just amazing.
	And Bernie Goldberg's got a couple of books on this that are well worth reading.
	And his one called The Slobbering Love Affair the Media Has with Barack Obama is quite instructive, as is Michelle Malkin's book on the corruption of Obama before, like in the politics of Chicago and so on.
	But it's just completely wretched.
	It's so ridiculously...
	I'm sorry?
	They really have good reason to fear him.
	I mean, he's just destruction on whistleblowers.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, he's the hand puppet that distracts everyone from the last days of the Roman Empire pillaging of the middle class.
	So, yeah, it is.
	But he's the perfect guy to do that, right?
	Because they have the ultimate racism bomb to throw in the room of anyone who criticizes him who's not black.
	And even the black guy, they'll just call him an Oreo, right?
	Black on the outside, white on the inside.
	So, yeah, I mean, he's the perfect guy for the final pillaging, right?
	Yes.
	It's Bush's fault and you're a racist.
	So keep the questions to a dull roar.
	It's not what the people want.
	No, but what is great about Barack Obama is he reveals the hypocrisy of the left.
	I mean, that's the wonderful thing about him is that nobody can ever claim that the left has any ideological consistency whatsoever because he's doing stuff way worse than Bush ever did.
	And you don't hear anything.
	Oh, yeah.
	So the wonderful thing is that anybody with any objectivity, the left has discredited itself for at least a generation.
	Anybody who wishes to defend the left on principle, you just gotta whip out a couple of things that Obama has done and watch them go all kinds of silent and slink back in the shadows and the right has been hammering on them for that and good thing too.
	I mean the degree of hypocrisy about the anti-war movement, the degree of hypocrisy About the bailouts, the degree of hypocrisy about civil rights and whistleblowers and the war on drugs is just astonishing.
	The degree of hypocrisy about detainees at Gitmo and the degree of hypocrisy about not pulling out of the war until the Iraq government threatened to hold the US soldiers criminally liable for criminal actions.
	Oh, I mean, the list just goes on and on.
	I mean, the man is obviously a complete monster, just as they all are, but it's wonderful to see all of the hypocrites who have suddenly gone silent now that the spell of Obama has gone across the land.
	They just have lost their larynxes completely.
	You know, and it's so funny, all those things you listed, they're all political action movements.
	The opposite happens when you try to do anything through politics.
	Whenever you try to steal money from someone to do something else, you're always going to get the opposite effect, I feel like.
	Sure, violence always produces the opposite.
	Violence produces the opposite in general, but it achieves what you want in particular.
	So the guy who gets a million dollar subsidy It makes everyone poorer in general, even him by a small degree, but he's still up like $975,000.
	So for him, it achieves his goal, but it's always stated as a general goal.
	Like nobody ever gives a subsidy by saying, well, we're going to subsidize these green industries because they gave a lot of money to our campaign and screw the taxpayer and other people and all the jobs we're going to destroy.
	We just got to pay off our donors.
	They say, well, this is good for the economy as a whole, and blah, blah, blah.
	So violence achieves the opposite of its stated goals, but it always achieves exactly what...
	If it always achieves the opposite, nobody would do it, nobody would use violence.
	It achieves the opposite of the goals it claims, but it very much achieves the reality of what it wants, which is to get things for nothing, right?
	Yeah, and you know, sometimes with people who already agree on the morality argument, I like to use this argument from a fact about how, you know, energy is neither created or destroyed, it's just lost through, you know, it's just transferred, and some is always lost to friction or sound or whatever.
	It's the same as government.
	Well, sorry, the energy is not lost.
	To be particular, the energy is neither created nor destroyed.
	It's transformed from one form to another.
	Energy that's lost through friction is not lost.
	It just goes into warming up the air.
	No, no, no, and that's not what I meant.
	I just meant it's It doesn't go to the ultimate efficiency of what you're trying to do.
	You can never get the full energy because it's going to go to some other form.
	There's always some form of entropy or dissipation or something like that.
	Yes.
	I don't want to make people think I think that.
	That's why I'm clarifying it so I don't get 6 million emails from people into physics saying, well, you know, it's not lost.
	That's true.
	He goes to BGSU, a bunch of idiots.
	I don't want that.
	But I think it's the same in politics, but it's way more because the politicians are taking so much off the top.
	The contracts that they're making, there's going to be so much loss in the political process to get to that end.
	If you look at the total for welfare and then divide it by welfare recipients, it's a lot of money.
	It's more than I make, and I do pretty well for a college kid at least.
	Yeah, but look, the welfare state is just easily understood as a farm for poor people, right?
	The farmer doesn't have a farm so that his cows get rich or so that they go free.
	It's because each cow is profitable to him, so he gives them the bare minimum that they need to survive, and the rest of it goes into his own bank account.
	This is the only way to understand almost every government program, but particularly the welfare state and particularly the educational system.
	If you look at it, the statistics are very clear.
	More and more money keeps going into the educational system, but the educational The standards of the children are completely flat, no matter how much money gets poured into the American educational system.
	And people say, well, that's weird.
	It's not weird at all.
	It's like if the farmer wins the lottery, he doesn't sit there and say, oh, well, I'm going to make my cow's pens much bigger.
	No, he's like, woo, lots of extra money for me.
	So when you pour more money into an educational system, the idea that it goes to...
	Improve the quality of the children's experience.
	It's ridiculous.
	It literally is like giving a million dollars to a farmer and hoping he's just not going to use it for a jacuzzi and he's not going to use it for vacations and a big screen TV and, I don't know, what do you do with a million bucks?
	Who knows, right?
	But thinking he's going to use that to get nice down comforters for his cows.
	No!
	Nothing's going to change for the cows.
	He's going to give them the bare minimum that they need to survive.
	So that they continue to give him milk and meat.
	And so with the welfare state, you pour more money at it, they're not going to improve the situation of the poor.
	They're going to give the poor the bare minimum that they need to survive and stay dependent on them in the same way that the farmer just gives the cows a bare minimum of food and space so they don't go completely insane and beat their heads against the pen walls and die.
	They're going to give them the bare minimum to survive and take the remaining profits for themselves.
	It's a farm.
	It is not a charity.
	It's a farm and people still don't understand that.
	Wow, yeah.
	Anyway.
	It's like a reverse farm.
	It's like a farm museum where they...
	No, go ahead.
	Make your last point.
	It's like, you know, they take money from people to just keep these people with the incentives and just a small amount of money where they have to stay where they're at.
	You know, you can't get married.
	You have your girlfriend farms where all the guys just go because they can't get married, you know, or else they lose their money.
	And it's like you're paying to keep them there.
	Because they can't leave once they're there.
	It's so hard to leave.
	And I mean, how are you going to pay to move your stuff?
	You know, you're trapped.
	So it's like, you know, a normal farm, you raise them to get rid of them.
	This one, you lure them and you keep them.
	It's kind of weird.
	Yeah.
	No, but it's not weird.
	I mean, it's only weird if you believe the stated goals of the people in power.
	Yeah.
	I mean, because people listen to the surface of what people say.
	They just content themselves with that, and then they find themselves endlessly frustrated that reality isn't matching the propaganda.
	But that's the whole point of propaganda, is that if reality was there, you wouldn't need the propaganda.
	So anyway, I hope that that helps.
	I'm afraid we're going to have to call it a night for tonight.
	Wednesdays, and I look forward to Wednesday evenings.
	I wake up Sunday mornings.
	I look forward to Sundays.
	You are the greatest listenership that I've ever heard.
	I've listened to a lot of radio.
	I listened to a lot of other hosts trying to figure out how to do things better or how to make it more interesting and more vital, more alive, more passionate, more powerful, more honest.
	And I keep thinking it has something to do with me, but the reality is, and I'm not just blowing smoke up your ass, I genuinely, genuinely believe this, that the quality of listeners in this show, Is second to none.
	It's second to none.
	We have the best callers, the smartest callers, sometimes the most frustrating callers.
	That makes for an interesting show, too, because frustration can be motivated for other people, even if it doesn't budge some of the people in the show.
	But you guys are fantastic.
	Thank you.
	Thank you so much.
	So much.
	For your attention, for your consumption, we just moved to a new podcast thing and we're getting like a quarter million shows pinged over five days.
	And that's just from the new servers, let alone the old servers.
	So it's just fantastic.
	I think we're going to break two million shows a month very soon.
	And that's all to do with you guys.
	It's all to do with your questions, the quality of what you bring up, the quality of the topics, the personal and philosophical nature of what we talk about at this show, I think is unprecedented in the realm of human communication.
	And that's so much to do with you guys that it's a hat tip to you as well.
	I'm not going to donate to you because I'm going to ask for donations for me.
	Because we actually just paid, we're probably going to look at, I don't know, $8,000 of server farm costs this year, but it's necessary.
	We're just getting too many shows for one server to serve up.
	People were saying it was taking them six hours to two days to get a podcast, which now they can get in a couple of minutes because we've got a distributed server mechanism for sending out the shows.
	It's expensive, but, you know, these are the kinds of problems that you want to have.
	If you want to help out, fdurl.com forward slash donate.
	Greatly, greatly appreciated.
	Thank you, Mike.
	Thank you, everyone.
	Have yourselves a wonderful night.

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