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Oct. 27, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:20:10

2517 Overcoming the Fear of Failure - Sunday Call In Show October 27th, 2013

Overcoming the fear of failure, the replication of sadism, the anger antidote, giving away responsibility, sibling cruelty, dont wait for apologies, my girlfriend moved away, putting your all into relationships and stopping yourself from lying.

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	Good morning, philosophy people.
	How are you doing?
	It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Of course, 27th of October, 2013.
	Hope you're doing magnificently.
	So, just before we start, a massive thank you, as always, to everyone who supports the show.
	You know, it really, really means the world to me, at least, that people want to call in and chat about philosophy.
	I think that is just...
	Fantastic.
	I'm so excited.
	I'm so excited.
	You know, my whole life I was looking for people to chat about philosophy with, and now I have found my bloods and my crypts, my crew, my posse, my roundabout station of entertaining questions.
	So I just want to thank you.
	I sort of feel like we could add a two-hour show every day, and there would still be lots and lots of people who want to talk about philosophy.
	So thank you.
	For serving my selfish needs.
	I hope that they are of use to you as well.
	So, Mike, who?
	Oh, who?
	Oh, who?
	Oh, my goodness, I've turned into an owl.
	Who do we have up this morning?
	All right, calling Brian via phone first.
	Via phone?
	Oh, dear.
	Is that because we can't reach him at the Pony Express or smoke signals or tin cups?
	Hello, this is Brian.
	Brian, good morning.
	Good morning, Stefan.
	Good morning.
	Did you order an extra large with pepperoni?
	The driver can't find...
	No, just kidding.
	Go ahead.
	What's on your mind, Fred?
	I wouldn't be surprised, but should I start out by rolling out the red carpet for you of thanks and introductions?
	Whatever pleases you is fine with me.
	Well, I've been following your show now for five years, been very interested in it, and I've been trying to take as much as I could from it, so...
	Putting what I can towards it and here today to call in again to try and get some advice.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	Thank you.
	Thank you so much.
	How can I help you?
	So, I have a problem and I'd like to hear your opinion on it and I'll tell you about some implications like this problem has caused over my life over the last So, my biggest problem I feel like I've been finding is the fact that I have an inability to express myself in social situations to other people.
	And this has been taking place, I think, my whole life and it's really been a largely part of my childhood.
	But because of my inability to express my needs in the moment to people, Ended up hurting myself by...
	I've ended up hurting myself by ruining a lot of my future career prospects.
	I've dropped out of post-secondary school four times now.
	I've quit my job as of recently.
	I've had a lot of disastrous effects because I can't just express my own needs.
	And...
	Just let me understand, is it that you are aware of your own needs and you are aware of a desire to express them but that you don't or can't express them or are you not aware of your needs until later?
	I think I am aware of my needs and I just have never been able to come out and express them when I've been in times of trouble and I've just let myself self-detonate.
	And what does self-definiting mean?
	Well, when I have a problem, instead of trying to communicate with other people, I will usually isolate myself or lock myself away in my thoughts or whatever, and then I'll start beating myself up about the problems are my fault, and then I usually just can't Handle the stress and pressure, and I usually just end up quitting very quickly after that.
	Right.
	Now, if you're comfortable, can you give me a concrete example?
	I mean, I'm happy to deal with the theoreticals, but concretes can help.
	Well, I will tell you one of the most recent examples.
	In fact, I used to be in a laboratory technician program And this was a few years after I left my family.
	And I went into this program mostly just for the peer pressure of wanting to appease my family by showing that I have some kind of title or something like that to show them that, oh, I can do something really quite special.
	And I went into this program quite interested in the actual subject matter.
	And for six months, I was actually top...
	Three or four of my class, I went to a private college, which I built up and saved all the money up for.
	And when I finally got into the lab aspect of the program, one of the procedures that we would learn how to do is to learn how to draw blood, or it's called a venipuncture, from other students.
	We learn how to examine the blood and test it.
	And I was actually the first person in the class to do the procedure absolutely perfectly and without error.
	And that really made me feel great.
	But then the next week came and I made a mistake.
	And ever since I made a mistake, I just couldn't ever succeed again.
	I just kept on shaking, thinking I'd keep messing up just like I did.
	And over the weeks, it just got worse and worse until I went to the teacher and just said I had to stop because I couldn't hold on to the needle any longer.
	I was just shaking and I feel like I'd injure my partner.
	Alright, so let's dip back and I'm incredibly sorry that you had the kind of history that produced these symptoms.
	I mean, that's a huge struggle and I mean, you end up thinking about your life rather than living your life, right?
	Like, how can I find something where I fit?
	You end up self-managing rather than What do you mean by self-managing?
	Well, what I mean is, you end up trying to figure out how you can succeed in life with these challenges, with these personal habits, characteristics, feelings, impulses, and so on.
	You end up saying, how can I possibly find an environment wherein I can succeed, rather than just going out and doing what you want and taking your lumps, right?
	Yes, I would agree with that.
	You end up thinking about life and about your deficiencies as you see them, rather than just going out and trusting that stuff will happen, some stuff will go well, some stuff will go badly, but it'll be alright, right?
	Right.
	So, what happened in Your childhood around failure.
	Because look, I'm telling you, as you know, most of childhood is failure.
	Right?
	I mean, it's not like the first time you decide that you want to roll over or crawl or walk that you get it right.
	There's lots of face-planting, there's lots of spinning, there's lots of dizziness.
	You know, my daughter and I are currently working on reading and it's a challenge.
	You know, how often does she get a word right when she puzzles it out?
	You know, 1 in 10, 1 in 20, right?
	That 10% or 5% success rate.
	And so most of childhood is failure.
	And we know that because we keep moving the bar for children, which is, you know, that's fine, that's right or whatever, right?
	But I don't sort of encourage my daughter to learn how to walk when she can already start to do cartwheels, right?
	So most of childhood...
	Is failure.
	And a lot of dating life when you get older is failure.
	I mean, very few people will marry and stay forever with the first woman or man that they kiss.
	You normally will date a bunch of people.
	It doesn't work out.
	And then, you know, with any luck and with good self-work, you find the right person and you stay forever.
	How many people stay With their first job forever.
	I mean, it's almost unheard of, right?
	So a lot of, as I mentioned this before, like a lot of life is failure, but almost all of childhood is just failing.
	And that's partly because of the child, right?
	The child wants new challenges.
	So every time we get good at something, we move on to the next thing, right?
	Which is why, you know, very few people are still playing Pac-Man as their only game who started, you know, in 1980 or whenever.
	Because we want new challenges.
	We want new opportunities.
	We want to stretch ourselves.
	And that means that we always have to be surfing the edge of failure.
	That's where our attention is as a species.
	It's why we don't live in the caves or the jungles like our ape friends.
	Because we always want something new and something challenging, which means that there always has to be the possibility of failure.
	And so success and progress, I would say, is largely...
	To do with our capacity to process failure, right?
	Like, you don't look at a set of stairs and say, man, I hope I can get to the top, right?
	I mean, I just, man, it's going to be tough, but, you know, if I really concentrate...
	Well, I hope I get to the top if I go for a leap.
	I'm sorry?
	I hope I get to the top if I go for a quick leap.
	It doesn't usually always work out.
	Right, right.
	So, so...
	I'm currently pacing back and forth because I like to walk, I think, better.
	I'm not worried about whether my feet are going to trip up or anything like that.
	I'm concentrating on hopefully providing some value to you.
	And the reason that I'm talking about this, of course, is that your major issue is with failure.
	But, of course, the reality is that your major issue is not with failure.
	The basic logical thing we have to do when we have a personal problem is to ask, is it Universalized, right?
	So if I get some sort of horrible burn on my arm, it's going to be seriously painful.
	Now that's not just my issue.
	Like anyone who got a burn on their arm would find it very painful.
	Now then I'd have to go to get skin grafts or whatever.
	That would also be really painful.
	So that would be a sort of universal experience.
	And the universal experience is that everybody fails.
	Everybody fails.
	I was just thinking about this the other day.
	Everybody releases an album and they all know it's not Dark Side of the Moon.
	They know it's not The Wall.
	They know it's not The White Album or Sgt.
	Peppers.
	They know it's extremely unlikely, if not impossible, for it to be a classic album that will last forever in the minds and hearts.
	Everybody who writes short stories knows that they're probably not penning an Alice Munro classic or The Secret Life of Walter Mitty or whatever short stories have made it to the top of the canon.
	They're not O. Henry.
	Not the bar.
	Not the candy bar with the writer.
	But they release it anyway.
	They release it anyway.
	Like I'm slowly crawling my way up the lists of sort of podcasts and all that.
	But I mean at the beginning I was like nothing.
	Most of my videos get less than 30,000 views.
	But every now and then, I'll pull one off that gets a lot.
	One of those views is usually always mine now.
	Well, good.
	Okay, so you're helping me mask my failure.
	That's kind of interesting.
	That's very helpful, right?
	But, I mean, that's just natural.
	And you just say, okay, well, I was hoping this video would do better, but the video didn't do better, and so I'll just go make another one.
	But I know for sure that it's not going to be even 1% of Lady Gaga's video views, right?
	I mean that's just not the way it's going to be.
	So in terms of success, the majority of what we do is not – people who write songs, they know that they're not writing Bohemian Rhapsody or Stairway to Heaven or whatever is going to be considered to be a sort of classic or Hotel California.
	It's like – They just know.
	This is just a song.
	Some people are going to like it.
	Most people are never going to hear of it.
	And some people are going to buy it.
	So given that failure is part of life and our capacity for success, yeah, first of all, we can't rest our capacity for happiness on our capacity for success because success is a fleeting thing.
	And, you know, there is in...
	In the world of women, it's known as the Oscar curse, right?
	A woman wins an Oscar and she gets a divorce, usually within a year.
	And so even if you get the highest award in acting, I mean, it comes usually at great personal cost.
	I don't know the reasons for that.
	It just seems to be kind of a phenomenon.
	And the reason, sorry for this long speech, but the reason I'm saying all this is because it is in your childhood that your relationship with failure is...
	So, when you failed, as we all did and every human being does as a child, almost perpetually, what happened when you failed as a child?
	Well, when I would fail, let me go explain a little bit of my childhood for a moment.
	I grew up in a family where my mother divorced my father.
	I was the middle child of four other kids.
	So I had a large family and I was in the middle and I was living with a stepfather.
	And whenever I'd end up failing by failing a test in school or I wouldn't succeed in something, I feel that I would get this disappointing, condescending attitude from them that, oh, you're just not applying yourself enough.
	If you actually worked harder, you'd actually use something.
	And I didn't really get a lot of support from them.
	Wait a second.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	And do you get how insane that is, fundamentally?
	Yes.
	Do you know why I know that it's insane even if I knew nothing else about you?
	Go on.
	Well, is it more important to succeed at a test when you're a child, or is it more important to succeed in keeping a family together for the sake of the children?
	It would be much more important to keep a family together.
	Right.
	And so...
	If they are saying to you that, my goodness, you have just failed because you didn't apply yourself enough.
	If you just applied yourself more, then you would be able to succeed.
	But then my question would be, even as a child, well then how come your marriage failed?
	If you know so much...
	About what success is and how you're supposed to apply yourself to succeed.
	If you know so much about how things should work and how to make things happen and how to be successful in life, then what the fuck happened to your marriage?
	Now, I think after I started not doing too well around the fifth grade of my school year.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	I feel like I just threw some words down a well without an echo.
	Do you see what I'm saying?
	Yes, I know the burden is largely on the environment and not so much as me for that.
	Sorry, I don't follow that.
	What would your parents say?
	I know you're talking to them, but what would your parents say if you were to say, well look, if you all know so much about success and how to succeed and it's just a matter of application, then how come the marriage failed?
	Pardon me?
	How come the what?
	The marriage failed.
	My mother told me that she left my stepfather because my stepfather was abusive and he was hitting me.
	I have no memories of this.
	My earliest memories stem from the third grade.
	All right, hang on.
	So was your stepfather your mother's second marriage?
	Yes.
	And how many marriages has she had, at least at last count, that you know of?
	Two marriages, two.
	My father and now she's married with the stepfather.
	Oh, she's still married to the stepfather?
	Yes, and I called in previously in the past where I explained another problem I had.
	Alright, so your mother had one marriage that failed and one marriage that has remained.
	Is that right?
	Yes.
	Alright.
	And which of the fathers was abusive?
	I thought you said it was a stepdad, but is that not right?
	Well, my mother told me my original father was abusive, but I know for a fact that my stepfather was abusive for some of the assaults that he had done to me.
	And, sorry, in what way was he abusive?
	My stepfather strangled me about five years ago because I disagreed with him and I would regularly be hit or smacked by him if I caused problems.
	I'm so sorry.
	My God, that's just terrible.
	I mean, yeah, so obviously that's not good parenting.
	Even by shitty contemporary parenting standards, that's bad parenting.
	So then my question would be, of course, you know, if these people know so much about success, then why are they not successful as parents?
	If these people know so much about success, why are they abusive in their relationships?
	If these people know so much about success, how come there's a failed marriage with four children?
	I'm not sure how to answer that one.
	Well, there's no way to answer it because what they're doing is they're using failure as an excuse for sadism, right?
	They don't care about your success or failure.
	In fact, they probably want you to fail so that they can discharge their venom and their evil and their bile upon you.
	Like, my stepfather, when I started entering my fifth grade, when I started not doing too well in school, That's when he started pushing the burden of house chores on me.
	So I would do all the work at the house.
	We had six people in our house.
	So I would mow the lawn, do all the dishes, do all the cleaning.
	And I would ask him, why are you making me do all the cleaning in the household?
	And what he told me was, you better get good at this now because this is what your future is going to be.
	Just cleaning.
	Oh, so he thought you'd be like a maid or something like that, right?
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Right.
	Well, you understand that this is just massive sadism, right?
	It's more than verbal abuse like, oh, you're stupid.
	It's defining an entire torturous future for you that is what Lauren Scheingold would call soul murder, right?
	Which is just a desire to collapse, eviscerate, and erase you as a human being for the pleasures of sadism, right?
	Right.
	So you understand that everything that happened to you as a child is the complete opposite of what success would look like in terms of parenting.
	It is the complete opposite of any standard of success that you might have as an adult.
	I'm not to say you understand that and you just wave it away.
	It just vanishes.
	But these people have no credibility.
	Listen, listen.
	It's just really, really important to understand this, right?
	These people have no credibility to define what success means in your life right now.
	I know that they're in your head, of course, and they're in your neurological system, and they're in your fight-or-flight mechanism.
	They're in your hippocampus and your amygdala, and they get that they're in your head.
	But this has to be seriously and fundamentally challenged, right?
	Like if I was...
	If I was 350 pounds and a chain smoker and I came up in my little portable wheelchair because I couldn't walk and I said to a sports team, make me your coach.
	Do as I do and you'll win everything.
	Do everything that I adopt my lifestyle and you'll win everything.
	What would people say?
	Maybe you should change yourself first.
	Well, I think they'd say you're insane.
	Like, I don't think they'd even make an argument like that.
	Because if I genuinely thought that as a 350-pound chain smoker who couldn't even walk, that if people did what I did, they would win sporting events.
	Like, if they ate like pigs and smoked like chimneys, that they'd start winning sporting events.
	They would recognize that I was – if I genuinely believed that, then I would be beyond the reach of any kind of reason, right?
	Right.
	Now, if I didn't genuinely believe that but was instead saying something so insane, then I would be so bizarrely cruel and distorted that – again, you would have no – there's no possibility of debating with somebody who genuinely believes insane things.
	And if your parents had this attitude towards you, in other words, if they're strangling you and hitting you and saying that you're garbage-only fit for cleaning houses, then that's so fundamentally evil that I hope at least that you understand that they should have no credibility whatsoever In your
	your conscious mind as to how you should live.
	But if you're still so afraid of success, I would argue it is because that they still have some credibility in your mind.
	You still believe that they have authority in your mind.
	You still believe that their judgments are worth a damn.
	That their evaluations of you...
	Go ahead.
	No, I agree with the line of thought that you're saying right now because like a lot of what I... What I've been doing as a recent, I always think about, oh, what would my parents think?
	And I still can't get over that hurdle.
	I'm just like, oh, I'm just, what if I do this?
	They'll wonder all these bad things.
	I don't even talk to my family any longer.
	It's just the idea of, what if they find out that I dropped out of school again?
	They'll just think that I'm a failure and that hurts me because I just think about what they'll think.
	Right, right.
	And look, that is perfectly understandable when you are a child.
	Because when you're a child and you're in the grip of evil parents, you have to appease them, right?
	Nobody stands up to the sadistic prison guard who's got any sense at all, right?
	Because you've got no power in that situation.
	They can do whatever they want.
	As a child, you have to internalize your parents' value systems.
	You have to.
	It's a survival mechanism.
	Because most times in human history and human development and human evolution, those who did not reflect back to the parents, the parents' belief systems, would be killed or abandoned, which is really the same thing.
	Or the torture would increase.
	Like, if you were skeptical of your parents' religious beliefs...
	In the 14th century and you out and out talked about, I don't believe in God, I mean, such unbelievable torments would descend upon you that children who did that just wouldn't last, right?
	Right.
	If you don't believe in the gods or the leaders of the tribe throughout most of human history, I mean, boy, you just...
	Wouldn't be long for this world.
	So the children who survived were the children who successfully internalized their parents' belief systems.
	Now, if your parents have good and healthy and nice belief systems, I think that's great.
	I think that's great.
	But if your parents have toxic, violent, sadistic, and destructive belief systems, then you'll internalize that anyway.
	In fact, you probably have a higher incentive to internalize that because if you...
	If you don't accept the punishment of a sadist, the punishment will escalate until you do, if he has power over you.
	Right?
	I mean, just think of torture, right?
	So if you believe you need information from someone and you believe that torture is the way to get it, it's not true.
	Torture is just a huge waste of time.
	It's just a sadistic playground.
	But if they sort of slap you across the face and you don't tell them, What they want to hear, what happens?
	They slap you across the face again, and then they escalate, right?
	They'll drive a nail through your scrotum, they'll pull out your fingernails, they'll...
	whatever, right?
	Right.
	And so, if you have a sadist around you, then their punishments of you will escalate until you internalize their belief system.
	Their goal, sadism's goal, is to replicate itself in others.
	Like all thought patterns, they...
	They're like – they're called memes, right?
	They're like DNA. They simply struggle to replicate themselves in others and they seek the most efficient means by which they can replicate themselves.
	And sadism attempts to replicate itself as a thought pattern like sociopathy and hopefully like philosophy.
	It attempts to replicate itself as a thought pattern in the minds of others.
	So basically your father had a, quote, illness, which – Well, Richard...
	Now, if...
	If you believe that that process has anything to do with a moral evaluation of you or a just evaluation of reality or a rational evaluation of the criteria of success and failure, then it will – it has successfully replicated itself in you.
	Evil replicates itself in you by calling itself good because we never challenge and oppose the good.
	Right?
	Like if we have a wart – Or something that we want fixed, we don't go to the doctor and say, well, you can put that frozen thing on anywhere except where the ward is, right?
	Like, oh no, the ward is the thing I want removed, the ward is unsightly or whatever, so that's what I'm going to get dealt with, right?
	And so evil replicates itself in us through abuse and then calls itself the good because that is how it hides itself, right?
	This applies in a wide variety of contexts.
	And so if you don't clearly identify the evil that was done to you, that was inflicted upon you as a helpless child as evil...
	As out and out, stone cold, vicious, ugly, destructive and abusive evil, for which you are 0% responsible and for which your parents were 100% responsible, if you don't clearly identify that, then your moral outrage will not work like the immune system does to rid yourself of the virus of evil.
	And this is why...
	The greatest sadists inflict their evil under the umbrella of moral virtue.
	Because the virus that can successfully hide from the immune system is the virus that succeeds the most.
	And so it cloaks itself in virtue so that your moral outrage cannot see it.
	And this is why when I talk to people, I strive as mightily as I can to help them identify and name the evil that was done to them.
	So that their moral outrage can find it and begin to fight those fuckers and get it out of the system.
	So that's why I'm saying or really asking and I think you've confirmed that you do think – what would your parents think?
	Oh, if they find out this thing, oh my goodness, right?
	Well, if you still think that there's some value, some positive value in what was done to you in these areas as a child, then you can't fight them.
	You can't get them out of your system any more than you say I have – any more than you'd go to a doctor and say I can't straighten my arm out too well, so can you please remove my left testicle, right?
	You wouldn't say that.
	So that's why I'm talking about this.
	Have you done therapy by chance?
	I've never been to therapy, but I feel like I really need to go now and I really need to find a way to make the funds to go and afford it now.
	Because, you know, when people say to me, I've been listening to show stuff for five years, I think that's wonderful.
	But how many times have I said to people, you need to see a therapist?
	People, they pick and choose quite a bit, right?
	So that would be my strong suggestion or at least start doing the self-work.
	you know write out conversations that you would have arguments that you would have with your parents pardon me you Write out conversations and arguments.
	Write out conversations and arguments.
	Engage your alter egos.
	The Socratic dialogue starts with the self, not with the world.
	Everybody wants to jump into epistemology, politics, ethics.
	The hell with that.
	The Socratic dialogue starts with the self.
	It starts with history.
	It starts with your parental alter egos within yourself.
	It starts with your – what I call them ecosystem, what Richard Schwartz calls the family systems.
	Engage your stepfather.
	You can do it now.
	I mean you're an adult.
	He's not there.
	But he's in your head.
	So you can engage him in your head without him being able to strangle you.
	Why?
	Because he's in your head and you run the arms, right?
	Not him.
	So confront and engage him.
	I would like to point out that this was the topic of my previous time.
	I'll really quickly go on that.
	But last year in December, I caught about a recurring dream I was having.
	And it was that, the dream was, I would be with my family, my mother and my stepfather, not my real father, and my brothers and sisters, and we'd be in some great, fun, wonderful place, like an amusement park.
	We'd all be having fun.
	And then the moment I would speak to my parents, I would realize, like, how wrong they were and how disgusting they were, and I would argue with them, and then they would just turn into this Disgusting, huge fight.
	And that would happen constantly.
	Almost every other week, I would have this dream where I just...
	I couldn't get to the point of where I would talk to them because the moment I would talk to them, it would just break into a big fight or argument.
	Right.
	And you're bringing this up because?
	Well, it's just...
	When you say practice...
	You can practice speaking or working through the arguments of speaking with your stepfather now.
	It's just that I've subconsciously done that a lot during when I was sleeping or dreaming.
	No, no, no.
	It's got to be a conscious process.
	It's happening in your dreams because it's not happening in your life, right?
	Right?
	So your dreams can't make you better.
	Your dreams are like, here's the things which we're not talking about, which we're not doing in our life that's important.
	That's why they have to be coded.
	That's why they come across as analogous, because there's resistance in your mind.
	So listen, I've got to get to the next caller, but first of all, I really, really want to say, I mean, what a horrendous experience as a child.
	I mean, to be told by the living God in your life that you're You know, basically destined only for cleaning people's houses and all that.
	I mean, that's just unbelievably horrendous and destructive and cold-heartedly vicious.
	You know, in parenting, there's crimes of passion.
	You know, like some, you know, just you had a bad day and you yell at your kids because, you know, whatever, right?
	And that's bad.
	And obviously, you need to apologize and not do that.
	But then there's sort of crimes of intent.
	You know, like cold, calculated dismantling and destruction of a child's soul.
	This is really the greatest evil that there is because it is out of that evil that all other evils spring.
	So I would really highly recommend therapy for these issues.
	And moral outrage is the cure for evil.
	And all that deadens moral outrage serves evil.
	And this is why this stuff which says, oh, well, your parents had difficult childhoods and therefore you need to empathize with your parents.
	It's like, no, no, no.
	It is moral outrage that cures evil.
	We have a fight-and-flight mechanism for good and evil just as we do for tigers and lightning.
	And we need to engage all of the energies of our soul to combat evil, which is the greatest infection in the world.
	And we don't do that through this pseudo-forgiveness and understanding.
	That is basically taking the sword and turning it into a piece of overcooked spaghetti.
	That just allows evil to trample over the world.
	No.
	Moral outrage, anger, horror, disgust.
	These are the anti-venoms to the poison of evil.
	Get angry.
	Push back.
	Be outraged.
	Don't for a moment say that we need to empathize with our abusers.
	I mean, in what other context other than childhood is that bullshit put forward?
	How often do we see feminists lecturing rape victims that they need to find a way to empathize with the bad childhood of their rapist?
	No.
	Put the fucker in jail.
	That's what they say.
	Patriarchy.
	In what other context Do we ever say to the victims of evil that their primary job and healing mechanism is to empathize with the evildoers?
	In what section of the IRS code does it say Well, if the man doesn't pay his taxes, then you need to sort of understand his childhood and understand where he was coming from and really try and figure out who he is as a person.
	And don't judge him negatively and certainly don't report him.
	Don't send him to jail.
	That would be insane.
	Just really seek and struggle and just try to understand why he's not paying his taxes and engage him in a fruitful conversation but forgive him up front.
	There's nothing like that in the rulers.
	If this man doesn't show up for the draft, I mean, let there be no negative consequences for him not wanting to go and fight in some rice paddy in the ass end of nowhere.
	Seek to understand him.
	Maybe he's got a problem with authority.
	Maybe he had a bad childhood.
	Maybe his parents had a bad childhood and he just doesn't really understand his social obligations because he grew up in such a chaotic household.
	Seek to understand him.
	Pay for him to go to therapy.
	Don't throw him in jail.
	I could go on and on.
	But you understand that it is only with regards to parents that the commandment to forgive and to understand and to avoid moral outrage, it is only with regards to parents that this commandment remains virtually absolute.
	And the reasons for that, I hope, have been clear in this conversation.
	So thank you for calling in.
	You can overcome it.
	You can get success.
	But you must clearly identify and refuse to accept as legitimate the evil that was done unto you.
	And I think then you will recognize the voices as, you know, the voices of devils rather than angels with your interest at heart.
	So thank you for your call.
	I appreciate that.
	And who's up next, Mike?
	All right, Cornelius, you're up next.
	Cornelius, go ahead.
	Hello.
	Hello, how are you doing?
	Hello.
	I'm doing pretty good.
	Well, this might be pretty similar to the last call, except for nerve-wracking and anxiety.
	And what's your anxiety to do with?
	I don't know.
	Talking on air like this, and you probably know what it is.
	Anyway, yes.
	Well, I think it's worth it.
	I think it's worth facing because of the quality of the show.
	I really appreciate your rigour.
	I think that's what makes it what it is.
	Anyway, I'd like to address where we're picking up from because I called before.
	I think four months ago, I slapped my father in the face.
	Do you remember me?
	Was it that you talked about it or it happened four months ago?
	I talked about it two months ago, I think.
	I'd just like to address...
	I'd just like to say what's been going on with this, there's something that has come up in my mind.
	I think I'm getting more pleasure out of being honest with myself about it than with trying to appear immaculate by making up excuses for it.
	I mean, I've been thinking my action was insignificant compared to what happened all around it.
	Other people had done to me around that time, but I think there's a real pleasure in making absolutely no excuses and in admitting to myself even the slightest mistakes, because it's all about consistency.
	I'm sorry, I'm going to have to ask you to focus on a question, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just want to make sure we actually get the time to deal with what's most pressing to you.
	Yeah, well, I'm doing my best, but anyway.
	My problem is with, I think, the inertia of history.
	My family situation has been, well...
	Terrible and a defu has ensued, which is pretty much...
	Well, it's done.
	I'm pretty much defu'd with all my family.
	So there's no help from them.
	I've been seeing a therapist for quite a long time, a psychiatrist, but I just think they're useless.
	I just don't think they're really able to help anyone.
	They're from the public sector, for one thing.
	It shows.
	It really shows.
	I just need someone to tell me the unconscious things I can't see myself, and there's really nobody to help me do that, and there's no family to comfort me or anything.
	My problem is with dissociation.
	I have lots of problems with growth anxiety.
	Maybe I can elaborate a little bit.
	I'm not going to try.
	I'm really trying not to make this too complicated for you.
	Well, yeah, if you can give me a specific concrete problem, that's usually helpful.
	Well, it's like I'm not really doing what I should do, what I think I should do.
	You know, there's the maw of depression.
	I think that's a nice metaphor.
	I'm not like looking at it in the distance.
	I'm in the maw of depression, barely like reaching out into life.
	It's not a distant reality.
	It's my reality and life is like a distant thing that's hard to grab onto.
	I don't get a lot of things done, you know?
	And why do you think that is?
	Well, I've mentioned growth, anxiety.
	I think that's...
	That's a label, right?
	That's a fine label, but I don't know that it has any real emotional resonance.
	So is there a bunch of stuff you want to get done in your life, but you keep procrastinating?
	Yeah, well...
	Okay, so why...
	So when you have that choice, right?
	Yeah.
	When you have that choice to do something or procrastinate, then...
	What do you say to yourself about doing it versus not doing it?
	Well, I try to see the long-term advantages, but like you said, there's no emotional resonance to it.
	I try to foresee the future.
	Yeah, I don't know what any of that means.
	So, let me start asking more concretely.
	Right, so...
	give me something that you're procrastinating on like a task well finding a job for one for one Okay, okay.
	And why do you want to find a job?
	Well, I've been...
	I've left home.
	I've been living in an apartment for about a year now, and that's it.
	I have to pay the bills.
	I've been on welfare, actually.
	Yeah, so your life is kind of slipping away.
	You're not getting skills, you're not getting experience, you're not getting contacts.
	Yeah, it doesn't sound like that.
	Hang on.
	Can you continue to live on the income that you have right now?
	Yeah, I can.
	For a while.
	Yeah.
	Now, if the welfare checks stopped tomorrow, what would you do?
	Well, I think there would be like the urge to act on it and find a job.
	What do you mean do you think there'd be the urge to act on it?
	What would you do?
	So you got a call from the say, listen, your welfare checks are stopping tomorrow.
	You're not getting another penny for us and you can't appeal it.
	What would you do?
	Well, I'd find a job or something.
	Okay, so you would then say, shit, I gotta find a job, right?
	You'd say, shit, I gotta find a job, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Well, that's how I got through high school, every part of it.
	That's how I got through college and it didn't work out.
	Okay, so you understand that you're allowing the government to dictate your day.
	The government.
	So if the government changed its mind about your welfare, you would change your behavior, right?
	Yeah, I guess that's right.
	Don't guess.
	You already told me that's true.
	This is not a guessing game, right?
	You said that if they stopped giving you welfare, you'd go get a job, right?
	Yeah, well, that's true.
	I hope it's true because that's what you told me.
	Yeah, it's just the way you said it.
	No, but it's true.
	You are allowing government bureaucrats to dictate your decisions.
	Because as long as they keep giving you money, you can postpone getting a job, right?
	So basically, you're this sort of half-indifferent slave to statism.
	You're not making your own decisions.
	You're like, well, they're giving me money.
	You know the money is obtained unjustly.
	You know the money is blood money.
	You know the money is...
	Ripped off the back of the poor through inflation or stolen from the unborn through debt or printed or whatever, right?
	Or stolen from people through taxation.
	So you are the willing recipient of immoral money and you are letting that dictate your day.
	And if they change their mind, then you might change your mind.
	You probably will, right?
	You're going to starve to death, right?
	What that means is that you don't have what's called a locus of control.
	You don't have any hand on the rudder of your life.
	If the wind blows this way and I get welfare, then I'll hang around.
	And if the wind changes, then I'll go the other way.
	But you have all the willpower of a sailboat.
	I'm not criticizing.
	I'm not.
	I'm not.
	I'm really not.
	I'm just pointing out where you are in a hopefully fairly blunt and useful fashion.
	Yeah.
	Do I remind you of a zeitgeister in some ways?
	You do not remind me of a zeitgeister.
	And I don't want to get distracted by that.
	Because we are...
	I mean, do you agree with the general assessment?
	Again, no criticism, but just an evaluation of where you are.
	You are letting other people, people who I assume, if you're a skeptic of the government, you would say are pretty immoral.
	You are letting immoral people decide for you how you're going to spend your day.
	Because if they give you money, you do one thing.
	If they don't, you don't, right?
	Yes.
	Well, it's a loss of responsibility, isn't it?
	It's not a loss.
	No, no, no, no.
	It's not a loss.
	It's not a loss.
	Look, if I lose my wallet, that's a loss.
	If I give my wallet away to someone, I can't say I lost it, right?
	Yeah.
	You didn't lose your responsibility.
	You gave away your responsibility.
	And you continue to give it away every day.
	Again, not from a criticism standpoint at all.
	I'm not down on you.
	I'm not begging on you for this.
	It's just a reality, right?
	Well, it starts to resonate because I've had thoughts in the past of...
	I've had...
	Like...
	Images playing out in my head of living in a totalitarian country like North Korea and letting other people decide when I can't get food anymore.
	Well, this is what it is, right?
	You've had those thoughts because this is what you is, right?
	Yeah, like thinking the hell with it.
	Yeah.
	Well, and this tells me everything I need to know about your childhood, right?
	These habits don't just come out of nowhere, right?
	No, they don't.
	Okay.
	So, what was your willpower muscle like as a child?
	Because I think all children are born with a strong will.
	They have to be.
	And they're born non-compliant.
	Because if they were compliant, they'd let their parents sleep through the night.
	It wouldn't cry so much, right?
	So we are born with strong wills to get our needs met, even if it means discomforting others.
	That is babyhood, right?
	Yeah.
	Right.
	That's human nature.
	Well, that's certainly how we're born.
	Yeah.
	And then what happens is...
	Somebody asked me the other day, well, what was Isabella like in the terrible twos?
	What was your wife like in that terrible second year of marriage when you stop indulging her and have to get her to start obeying you?
	When you really have to break her will because she's disobedient to what you command, what was it like that second year of marriage when you had to break her?
	I mean, like, what the fuck are you freaks talking about?
	I mean, you have to There's no terrible twos.
	There were no terrible twos.
	And there won't be terrible teens.
	Guaranteed.
	Guaranteed.
	And people say, oh, you wait till...
	No.
	I know for a fact.
	I am never getting divorced and I am never going to have massive conflicts with my daughter.
	Never.
	So you were born with a strong will and your will got smashed up and broken through aggression.
	So when did that happen and how did it happen?
	Well, I think the person who really broke my will, who's really responsible for it, I think is my sister.
	Yeah.
	I know the parents are usually more important in our development, but I think my sister was Like, employed by my parents to be the abusive element, the explicit abusive element.
	I think that's...
	She really...
	For as long as I can remember, she just kept deriding me.
	Viciously.
	How so?
	She was two years older than me and already in an early age.
	She really had a blast out of pointing out how much better she is at everything because she's two years older than me.
	So, you know, that's something she did early on.
	So I was always like the second one in every category.
	She always had like all the friends, all the good grades.
	But I know it's my parents who encouraged it, this family dynamic.
	Yeah, I mean my daughter is going through And I hope, I mean, probably will never end, but she's going through, like, competitive.
	She wants to be better than others.
	She was in a running race with a girl who was about a year and a bit younger, and she's like, I won!
	I said, well, yeah, you did, but she's like a year younger, or more than a year younger, you know, and that's a big difference at this age.
	So, you can sort of say that you won and feel proud about that, but the reality is, like, you're You're measuring yourself against somebody who's not that great.
	Now, what you could do is you could help her to run faster.
	Because when you know something more than someone else, you can either say, well, I'm better because I know something more.
	And this older sibling thing, I mean, it's certainly a special thorn in the side of my brain, right?
	The accidents of birth order produce so many false vanities and insecurities, which are sort of two sides of the same coin.
	That is just ridiculous.
	So people genuinely – like older brothers or older sisters genuinely feel that they're superior because they were born first.
	It's a patriotism within the family.
	Like people feel I'm superior because I'm American because you just happen to be born in America, right?
	Islam is the best.
	Well, you just happen to be born to Islamic parents because it's an accident.
	People do this shit all the time.
	I'm better because I have great hair.
	Well, it's just an accident of genetics.
	I mean, what a ridiculous thing to be proud of, right?
	And then siblings feel like, I am better because I'm bigger.
	I'm better because I'm faster.
	I'm better because I'm smarter.
	It's like, well, you just happened to be born earlier.
	What a pathetic thing to hang your self-esteem on.
	But of course, I mean, she's...
	Struggling to survive in a highly destructive environment and if those tendencies showed up, which they wouldn't if the parents weren't that way inclined or indifferent, then the parents would oppose those and seek to understand what was happening and empathize with your experience as a younger sibling who was being put down and so on, right?
	But your parents obviously didn't do that or didn't do that enough to stop it, right?
	Yeah.
	Indeed.
	I don't know if it's just a lack of pride.
	I don't know if it's a lack of pride that allows people to feel better by accident.
	Like to feel superior by accident at birth or whatever.
	I mean, I don't strut around a group of people in wheelchairs feeling like I'm King Kong.
	Of all that is great because I can walk and they can't, right?
	I mean that's no good.
	I mean like if somebody said that, that would just be ridiculous.
	And we understand that that would be pretty cruel, right?
	Look at me.
	I can dance.
	You're stuck in a wheelchair.
	But we do this with – sort of siblings do this a lot.
	More than 50 percent of sibling relationships are classified even under existing metrics as abusive.
	So I just wanted to point out that while your sister at some point would have had some moral responsibility – I mean it doesn't go from zero to 100 the moment you turn 18 or something or 16.
	It scales up.
	Moral responsibility scales up.
	So I'm really sorry that you had that experience with a sibling.
	It is – I mean it's terrible and it's tragic.
	I mean the people who are more experienced than you, they should be working as hard as they can to bring you up to their level, right?
	I mean I don't try and score points off you guys like off my listeners because I'm more experienced and more learned in certain areas, right?
	I don't say, well, you know, you haven't learned X, Y, or Z, or what do you mean?
	You don't know much about Schopenhauer, how stupid can you be, or whatever, right?
	But I try to use my knowledge and my abilities to encourage the pursuit of knowledge and virtue in others, right?
	Not to make myself feel more knowledgeable and virtuous by putting other people down.
	That would be...
	I'd be embarrassed to do that.
	Like, if I would be embarrassed...
	To say that I outran a ten-year-old.
	Well, I think my sister...
	Take pride in that.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Well, I think the place my sister held and the place I held kind of determined what our lives would be afterwards.
	You know, it's like the image of...
	The sister standing on top of her brother.
	My sister has always been so successful.
	I've always felt that everything, I've always been very isolated.
	I think I've never snapped out of that.
	That's what I was looking for, calling on this show, because I'm looking for something to just snap out of this limbo I'm in.
	This historical...
	Yeah, but for that, you need to get angry, right?
	Right.
	So, how old was your sister at the peak of her teasing or put-downs of you?
	Well, around about...
	When we were both in high school, she spoke behind my back with her friends, like they...
	Okay, so like 15 years old, right?
	Okay.
	Do you plan for the rest of your life to let a 15-year-old girl run your run?
	Of course not.
	Well, you say, of course not.
	But how do I know that?
	I mean, yes, up till today, but tomorrow, no, right?
	At what point do you plan on not letting a 15-year-old girl run your life?
	As soon as possible.
	Because let me tell you...
	See, I know you're a young man, right?
	Yeah, I'm 19.
	Okay, so you're 19.
	So I'm like 47 or something like that.
	So, you know, 28 years or whatever.
	Let me tell you something.
	Your sister...
	Will not succeed.
	Your sister will not succeed in life.
	But by the time you realize that your sister will not succeed in life, so much of your life will have gone by in inertia and resentment that now you will not have succeeded in life.
	One of the great things about being older is It's realizing the degree to which bad people fail in life.
	Now, you may say, well, bad people can become politicians and bad people can become soldiers and bad people, bad people.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And in certain circles, they may appear to be great successes.
	But bad people only succeed because of the silence of good people.
	The capacity to harm a younger sibling is Particularly through verbal abuse.
	It's the final nail in the coffin of a dying heart.
	Now, there's lots of people who can succeed without empathy.
	You know, cheats, liars, politicians, unethical salespeople, unethical business people, sports coaches who abuse the victims of prior abuse and so on.
	By the way, moms and dads, don't let your children grow up to be football players.
	Watch this concussion documentary.
	It's very important.
	God's sake, keep them away from this Roman gladiator brain-mashing pseudo-sport.
	Anyway, so your sister has done significant wrong in your life.
	Great, great immorality, right?
	She has harmed grievously a child.
	Now, she was a child, but by 15.
	Fuck.
	Come on.
	You know better.
	And before then, too.
	Now, if you think that someone can succeed after having egregiously harmed a child, then you have the wrong definition of success.
	Your sister may make a lot of money.
	She may get and stay married.
	She might have a flashy car.
	She might have all that sort of shit.
	And she can keep her evil at bay or the immorality that she's done at bay only by associating with equally immoral people.
	Right?
	And so one of the things that we do when we speak out against evil, against immorality, is we shine a bright light on immoral people.
	And we – of course we raise the discomfort of immoral people.
	That's really the purpose of philosophy in many ways.
	Or it's at least something you measure the success of philosophy by, right?
	I mean if you want to eradicate polio from the world, you obviously have to make the polio virus very uncomfortable, right?
	Of course.
	And it's going to try and mutate and adapt but you want to keep boxing it in until it's eliminated, right?
	And so the only way that your sister can feel comfortable is if she's surrounded by people who never name the immorality of what she's done because they have their own immoralities under their belt and so on, right?
	Because if she was around me and she told me the ha-ha story of her childhood, you know what I would say?
	Are you kidding me?
	You did what to your brother?
	What?
	Are you kidding me?
	How wretched.
	I'm sorry?
	She'd love to cover it up.
	I wouldn't let that happen.
	Because I don't, you know, call me crazy, call me a sourpuss with no rational sense of humor.
	I don't find the mental destruction of children funny.
	I don't find abuse funny.
	I just don't.
	And people who laugh about it, I find that disturbed and disturbing, which is why...
	I'm constantly saying to people, don't laugh about the evils that befell you, right?
	And your sister then must surround herself with people who are not going to tell her the truth, who are only going to support the coldness that she has and the effects on others, right?
	And good people will be repulsed by her if she doesn't acknowledge and apologize and change, right?
	So, no matter what success your sister may have materially or whatever, I mean, it's still all she can become as queen of the undead.
	It still fucking smells.
	So, don't let bad people dictate your life.
	You choose for yourself what you want to do.
	You run it through the virtue matrix and...
	You just go and do it and you deal with the discomfort that comes up.
	Your sister's personality is significantly based upon your failure.
	And if you succeed, that's your fuck you, right?
	Come on, don't tell me you don't want to fuck you to your sister, right?
	So dismantle her personality.
	Succeed.
	If your success causes her to fall apart, well, sorry, there's a price for doing wrong.
	I'm not even that sorry.
	As I have succeeded, it has seriously destabilized people from my youth.
	Good.
	That's one way I know that I'm really succeeding.
	So you're telling me I have to know my enemy better?
	I think you have to know that she's an enemy.
	Yeah.
	Until she apologizes, and I don't know if there's restitution that's possible.
	I don't know if restitution is possible.
	And where restitution is impossible, never ever wait for apologies.
	And I don't wait for apologies for more than 24 hours because I'm old enough now to know that if you don't get an apology for someone within 24 hours, it's never coming.
	And if restitution is impossible or very hard, then you will never get an apology.
	Waiting for apologies is like waiting in a desert for a bus to come.
	I mean it's just a huge waste of time.
	There's tons of people in my life who've wronged me or done harm to me.
	I'm not hard to find.
	I'm not hiding out in a bunker in the Arctic.
	I mean, I'm available to everyone anytime.
	Anybody can apologize anytime that they want.
	But I will wait for nothing because I know they're not coming.
	Because I know when people fail to apologize to you, like say you bring up something that someone did, right?
	They fail to apologize to you.
	Quickly.
	I know for a fact that all they're doing now is, and I know this because I've studied how the brain works, right?
	I just know that they have now justified to themselves not apologizing.
	And once someone has justified something to themselves, forget it.
	Forget it.
	They now have a magic spell to wave away all the discomfort that might prompt better action.
	So I would really encourage you to stop waiting and to get your life going.
	Don't let a 15-year-old run your life for even one more day.
	Go succeed.
	Have a giant and titanic fuck you.
	How was I raised?
	I was raised to be insignificant.
	I was raised to have no effect on those around me.
	And I was raised anti-thought.
	Right?
	Every time I would receive confusing or complicated or ridiculous instructions from those around me, I would attempt to get clarification and they'd say, oh, don't overthink it.
	Just do it.
	And then maybe I'd try and do it.
	Maybe I'd get it wrong.
	And I'd say, well, I thought that you said.
	and they'd say, well, don't think.
	And my success and my positive and benevolent effect on the world makes the people who said I was nothing and shouldn't think uncomfortable.
	Screws them up.
	Good.
	Good.
	There is a price to be paid for immorality.
	And if we good people don't charge bad people for what they do...
	There's no God who'll back us up, right?
	You understand?
	There's no hell they're going to go to otherwise.
	It's up to us to enforce the discomfort of evil.
	There's nothing in physics, no deities, no ghosts, no goblins that will do it for us.
	It is up to us to enforce the discomfort of evil.
	And as long as we hide out and break ourselves and pretend that somehow the lies that evil people told us are true, then they get to sail on.
	Perfectly comfortable with what they've done.
	And I just couldn't spend another day serving the narcissistic needs of evil people.
	So I became good.
	I became powerful.
	I became thoughtful.
	I became a positive force for reason and virtue in the world.
	It makes people very uncomfortable.
	Good.
	Any other questions?
	No, I think I'm done.
	but there's something I'd like to mention.
	What this call has done to me is...
	It's really making me look at myself in the mirror.
	Because when I think, it's not the same thing as when I'm talking with someone who's not brain-dead like most people.
	I'm engulfed in a sadness, a great sadness, but I think it's very healthy.
	It's a really weird feeling, but...
	No, I understand.
	I mean, you want to have meaningful conversations with people, but there are very few people who are willing to talk about anything meaningful, right?
	Look, I want you to end this call really missing having an important conversation, right?
	Exactly.
	So that you will go and have more important conversations, right?
	What?
	Sorry?
	So you will go and have more important conversations and you will miss that in your life.
	Right.
	So anyway, I hope that you can bring all this up with your therapist.
	I think that's really, really important.
	And thank you so much for calling in.
	Very, very good call.
	I'm tearing up.
	But I'm going to donate pretty soon because I just found out I could add my bank account to PayPal.
	So that's handy.
	I really, really appreciate that.
	But I'll tell you what would make me happier.
	Go get a job.
	Go get a job and then donate to me, if you like, at least six months afterwards.
	I would rather not have money now from you because you need to save your money for going for job interviews and getting yourself all dolled up to look pretty.
	So I would say I appreciate that's a very, very kind offer and I don't want to say, no, you can do whatever you want.
	I'm just telling you I would prefer, I would feel better with the donation after you had a job and be working for some time.
	Otherwise, you're just sending me welfare money, right?
	I don't want that.
	I just turned up.
	Yeah?
	Okay, good, good.
	Because I don't...
	Yeah, not for me.
	Take that money for you and use it to get out of your situation, alright?
	That was a perfect call.
	Oh, good.
	I'm very glad.
	I'm very glad.
	See if you can talk.
	There's people in the chat room.
	Maybe people would like to chat with you after this.
	Try and stay in the conversation.
	I think that would be great.
	Alright?
	Thank you, Steph.
	You're very welcome.
	Great call.
	Good job.
	Welcome.
	All right, Justin, you're up next today.
	Go ahead, Justin.
	Hey, Steph.
	Can you hear me okay?
	I can.
	Okay, cool.
	So I will start by, I guess, by saying I have two questions, sort of.
	Well, not sort of.
	They are questions.
	The first one is...
	I think I'm getting somewhere with this, but I'm kind of – an outside perspective would be helpful.
	So I'm wondering – I'm dealing with this long-term relationship, and we're working things out, and it's coming to a point where I'm wondering if I'm perceiving – well, the question would be how does one perceive a relationship in the context of attachment based upon longstanding history and actual – You know,
	real deep love that you want to take forward into something new and wonderful relative to— What?
	What?
	Sorry.
	No, no.
	Don't apologize.
	I might just be not understanding, but I have to say again.
	That might be a poorly worded question, but I'll give you more detail.
	I've been with this girl for the past eight years, and— We both sort of had a nihilistic worldview for a long time.
	And of course that affects our relationship.
	Communication really wasn't happening to a significant emotional degree that I felt.
	And she agreed.
	And she has a tendency to kind of let people – I won't say let, but – Sort of let things happen rather than assert herself.
	So she recently moved out to Montana to kind of start over.
	And we've been talking the last few months.
	I don't know what that means, start over.
	Well, for her, start over like...
	Quit the job where she was here and started by moving out to Montana.
	Some people feel like when they move to a different state, it's like a fresh start for them.
	But what about you?
	Did she move away from you?
	Yes, she did.
	And that's what we're talking about now.
	And we're still at a point where...
	We both think very similarly, so I'm wondering if we're making this more complex than necessary.
	Like, we ought to do this, or should not ought to do that, or something like that.
	And we're still, I feel we're still very much in love with each other, and the communication we've had over the last several months has gotten much better, especially on the emotional level.
	And When we think about – when I think about going out there or her coming back here, there's like this trepidation almost.
	I don't want to say it's like outright fear, but there's definitely some trepidation.
	All right.
	I still don't know what we're talking about, and I'm sorry if I'm missing something.
	Go on.
	I guess for me, there's a part of me that wants to just go out there, pick up my life, go out there, live with her, or have her come back here and live with me.
	We never really committed to the relationship.
	We were together for eight years.
	We never moved in with each other.
	And I'm wondering if a lot of the effort we're putting in to To trying to work things out is based more on attachment and less on – like other than love.
	Do you know what I'm saying?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So tell me the virtues of the woman that make her one of a kind, irreplaceable for you.
	Okay.
	Well, she's always been extremely kind to me and respectful and very, I want to say protective, but defensive in a healthy way.
	She always has my back and we think so similarly that I could always just turn to her for support or something like that and vice versa.
	And I think she's funny.
	I really like her company.
	And I've always been able to trust her explicitly with anything.
	And the one thing that we've both not been able to trust the other one on as well as we could in other areas is the emotional stuff.
	We never really opened up through all those eight years emotionally like we did these last several months.
	And so we're – I miss her still a great deal.
	We talk a lot.
	We text a lot.
	And when I think about an existence without – regardless of what form it takes at this point, but when I think about her without – when I live without her around, I definitely will start to get teary-eyed and you can feel the tears building up, and she feels the same way.
	Just right alongside that.
	No, no, sorry.
	She doesn't feel the same way if she's moving to another state, right?
	At least not completely.
	Right, yeah.
	That's where I'm getting hung up on.
	Right.
	So why don't you move with her?
	I've been selling my stuff.
	In the past 30 days or so, I've been selling off a lot of my stuff in preparation for that.
	I think she would rather come back here, though.
	So we're talking about those particular logistics while we're talking about...
	Sorry, I find this very confusing.
	What do you mean you think she would rather come back?
	Well, I think because a lot of her friends are here.
	Because when she left, she left me, the friends.
	She left the good stuff behind along with the bad stuff.
	The bad stuff being she hates the state, she hates the job, etc.
	Okay.
	So, can you get to your question?
	What's that?
	I need to know what your question is because I don't have enough meat to put a hook in yet.
	Okay, got it.
	Well, I think – I'm wondering if I'm purposely making this more difficult as a form of self-sabotage.
	Like why don't I just – like my friend said to me, if you really wanted to move, you could do so within 60 or 90 days and that would be it.
	If she really wanted to move back, she could do so the same way.
	So why aren't you?
	Okay.
	And that's why I'm having trouble understanding.
	Despite how much I miss her and how much I love her, why am I getting almost frozen when I actually go to commit to an action of moving out there or allowing her to move back here and live with me?
	Why aren't you married?
	Why aren't we married?
	Yeah.
	I… That's just not the way the relationship went.
	We never even lived together.
	No, no, no, no.
	Come on, come on, come on.
	Come on.
	You've kind of just been listening to the show where I'm talking about willpower and say there's no such thing as the relationship, right?
	Like that's just not the way the relationship went, right?
	These are choices that you make.
	Correct.
	Okay, so why aren't you married?
	I'm not saying you should be married.
	I'm just curious.
	You've been together eight years.
	I mean if you were married, these decisions would be easier, right?
	Because if you're married, then you make decisions jointly and you don't decide to move apart.
	Correct.
	You're right.
	Okay.
	The marriage thing, we didn't marry because we didn't really feel it was necessary.
	We both sort of had a similar view about the government stuff.
	We just didn't really feel it was necessary to get in a contract in that way to express ourselves.
	But we never really moved in together.
	Do you understand why it's necessary now?
	As a form of solid commitment, I feel that would be a good thing.
	Well, because now, if you're married and she wants to move to another state, then you either stay together here or wherever.
	You move to some other state or you move together, but you don't move apart, right?
	Right, right, yeah.
	So you're kind of in a bind because you didn't get married, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	And marriage, you understand, marriage has nothing to do with the state.
	Okay.
	Marriage is simply a public declaration to each other in front of everyone that that's it for you.
	The rest of your life, you're aiming at this person.
	Okay.
	And the reason for that is so that if you ever say, I want to break up with this person, people will say, no, no, you made a vow.
	You got to stick it out as best you can.
	Now, it doesn't mean you have to.
	You know, if she gets a brain injury, becomes a homicidal maniac, then things change, right?
	But it is...
	Sure.
	It answers the question...
	What is my level of commitment to this relationship?
	It certainly does.
	And if you don't...
	And also, it's an acid test, right?
	Which means that if you don't...
	The concept of marriage is also supposed to help you save time.
	To not get stuck in limbo.
	Like, I proposed to a woman that it wasn't right, and then we broke up pretty quickly afterwards, thank God.
	I proposed, right?
	Right.
	Otherwise, I'd still be orbiting this dead sun, so to speak, right?
	Right.
	So it's just a way of saying, look, I mean, life is finite, and there's lots about life that's really inconvenient for other people, like having babies, like getting sick, like getting old, like losing a job, like running out of money, like being unable to sleep.
	There's lots about life that's really fucking inconvenient to other people.
	And the marriage commitment is, yeah, I'm there.
	There's a reason why it says, in sickness, in health, in good times and in bad.
	Right.
	Because if we don't have the level of commitment to be there with people, you know, like I got sick this summer.
	I want to go to chemo, radiation.
	How convenient is that for my wife?
	Not convenient at all.
	Right.
	Right?
	If we were just dating, what would have happened?
	Yeah, there's definitely that level of emotional commitment to us, but we – Aside from our views of the state and just in general, I have to really sit down and talk really about why we really didn't get married or even live together.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Do you want to have kids?
	No.
	Neither of us wants kids.
	I'm just out of curiosity.
	Not that it's a good or bad decision.
	I'm just – why?
	I would ask you if you said you did want to have kids too.
	I might ask that same question, but I'm just curious.
	Sure, sure, yeah.
	I never felt – I mean I feel better about it now, but I never felt throughout my adult life – I'm 34 now – that I was quite right in the head to have the responsibility of a child.
	And I'm a little trepidatious about – I want to say bring a child into the world because at that point I would be the shield and the guide to the child and everything and a parent should be.
	But we just don't – I mean the idea of having children is not appealing to me personally nor to her.
	Yeah, you know that's a synonym, right?
	Why don't you want to have a child because it's not appealing?
	That's just a synonym, right?
	Okay, got it.
	Why do you want to go north?
	Because it's the opposite of south.
	Well, that doesn't really actually – It's not appealing because – Right.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It just – it was something that we never felt we wanted the responsibility of or were ready for at the time.
	Again, that's not really very descriptive, right?
	So let me ask you another question.
	Did you have an impulse to have children and then you found reasons as to why not or have you just never even had an impulse to have children?
	I never had an impulse for children to have a child.
	Oh, so then it's not a matter of not quite right in the head and avoiding the responsibility and so on, right?
	That's just your desire for children.
	Yeah, that would be the real reason.
	The desire is not there.
	It's nothing I have to wrestle with.
	It's just not an issue.
	And your own childhood and her childhoods, what were they like?
	Well, I talked to you a little bit about mine last year, last December, which I don't expect you to remember.
	Just as a brief summary of that, I think I was born when my mother was 19, father was 16, and the early childhood was chaotic.
	Right.
	Yeah, I mean, no, no, no solid fallen figure whatsoever.
	None at all.
	Well, 16, my God.
	She could have gone to jail, right?
	I mean, that's statutory rape, isn't it?
	It might have been.
	I'm not sure.
	Well, I think 16 and 19 is a big enough gap that – anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
	Yeah, especially at that age.
	I mean, that's huge at that age.
	I think so.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, and when—so, of course, they got married because my mother was born in a religious family.
	And they got married because of me, because they wanted to do the quote right thing.
	But neither of them—and I've talked with both of them quite extensively these past two years about our history and whatnot.
	And— And so he left being a child.
	I think he left – I couldn't have been more than 18 months old when they finally separated for good.
	And some people say memory doesn't stick from when you were a baby, but I can still remember when he left.
	That was a big deal.
	Yeah, I remember.
	As long ago as that was, I'm 34 now and I was only 18 months then, I think.
	That's my guesstimation.
	I remember very fucking clearly that night.
	I bet.
	I absolutely bet.
	It's terrifying.
	Your girlfriend?
	Go ahead.
	Hers was much better.
	Hers was much more stable.
	Her parents are...
	They're good people.
	I like spending time with them.
	They share similar perspectives that I do.
	And they've always...
	As a parenting team, they've been there for their children.
	They both had stable jobs.
	They have a stable household.
	But...
	They have this strange way of sort of stoically expressing their affection for one another.
	I'm trying to find a better way to describe it to you with a descriptive analogy that would make more sense.
	It's – they're affectionate, but it's not like the type of affection that I would want from somebody.
	And my girlfriend, she is – she's more affectionate than they are.
	But like for her – for example, her mother is kind of the silent passive one and she kind of takes after her mother a bit.
	And her father is also silent but more in that manly, stoic type way.
	But there's never been any abuse as far as hitting or anything like that as far as she's aware and as far as I'm aware.
	Or any of her siblings are aware.
	Right.
	So why do you think she became a nihilist?
	That was – we both were kind of skirting around that for a while.
	Like for me, what happened was I was – oh, sorry.
	For her, she – I don't know exactly when it started for her, but I know that it kind of picked up.
	Momentum when a couple years into our relationship where we sort of kind of got into a sink.
	But where it started for her, I'm not sure.
	I'd have to ask her where that sort of nihilistic worldview came from.
	Do you think you might be missing something in terms of intimacy if you don't know where your girlfriend's beliefs came from?
	Well, I think it might have come from… No, no, no.
	I understand that you think, but you had eight years, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, that's one of the conversations I wanted to have with her this week actually was where she got to that point.
	Yeah, I mean I think that that would be my suggestion.
	Look, I just want to be clear.
	I think that life is short.
	And I think that we want to make sure we're with the right people.
	And so when I'm in a relationship, I give it everything I've got.
	I open my heart.
	I express my feelings and my thoughts.
	I ask endless questions about the other person.
	And I just keep going.
	The advice I've always given, just keep going.
	You keep going until you break through, you break out.
	That's what I always say to people who have problems with your parents.
	Sit down, talk with them, keep talking with them until you get a connection or you're just done.
	And So sit down.
	Figure out the etymology of where she came from, who she is as a person.
	How did she – like how did you guys, if you have such different backgrounds, end up – nihilism is a very dangerous mental state, right?
	I mean it's a very – and so you basically – it's like I'm a doctor and you've got two people in my office and they both have broken arms and they say, well, we did the opposite thing to our arms.
	And I say, well, I don't think you can have done the opposite things to your arms because they're both broken.
	Right.
	So nihilism is a very pathological – not like mentally ill or anything, but it's a very destructive and dangerous mindset.
	It was incredibly destructive.
	Yeah, and if you both ended up there with your chaotic and destructive background and you say, well, hers was much nicer and so on, well, it could be that she just didn't have any connection with her parents and virtue and integrity and so many good things in life.
	Flow out of connection with parents, right?
	And so if she was a dandelion in the wind of parental indifference, then she would have no particular values because she herself was not valued.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, we definitely have – we've been having a lot of conversations about what we value in each other and just in general.
	Yeah.
	Oftentimes what I would ask her, like, what are you feeling right now about what I just said or what happened?
	She – it's as if the emotional side and the intellectual side don't kind of talk to one another.
	So she said to me one time out of exaggeration, she's like, it's literally like you're talking to me in another language and I don't know how to respond when it comes to their emotional stuff.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	And I said to her, oh, that's a big deal.
	At least for me, because I'm an emotional guy, very open.
	At least I am now.
	And she's coming to that point, because when I first started listening to FDR, it completely erased the nihilism over the course of a year.
	And then the following year, I got even better.
	And she was picking up on that, listening to the podcast herself.
	But she still has a lot of work to do to get in touch, but to assert her emotional state in a way that is in line with whatever values she feels is pertinent for her.
	Right.
	Well, then I would strongly suggest having those conversations with her, trying to figure out where she came from, trying to get a map of how her brain developed and how her emotions developed and all that kind of stuff.
	That is really, really important.
	I mean, I think that's really the essence of intimacy.
	So I would focus on that and try and figure out why you haven't… Made a real commitment to each other and you're still kind of in limbo after eight years.
	So that would be my thought.
	I think that would be useful stuff to do.
	Yeah.
	And do you think it would have been – I hate to use the word better, but do you think it would have made more sense or make more sense if we were to work on this person-to-person rather than from – because she's like two hours through 3,000 miles away in Montana now.
	So it kind of slows down the process.
	Yet still gives her the time to think and percolate because she doesn't process emotional stuff quite the rapidity that I do.
	Those are her words.
	Well, I mean I would – no, I mean if I were in your shoes, I mean this is very important stuff.
	I would go down to Montana and I would plan to stay for a week or two at least.
	That's what I'm doing.
	December.
	Yeah, every night.
	Every night just keep talking about it.
	I mean that's – this is your life.
	I mean if she's the one for you, then make it real.
	And if she's not the one for you, then make it unreal.
	But this limbo is not really good.
	It's killing me.
	Yeah, no, it's not.
	It's not the way you want to be, right?
	Yeah.
	Because I guarantee you, part of what she did was move away from you.
	Yeah, I told her that.
	I hate to be blunt, right?
	Yeah, I mean, look, if she was willing to move away from you, then you were part of what she was moving away from.
	Yes, exactly.
	So you need to figure that out, right?
	Because of my temper back during our relationship.
	Yeah, it was frightful for her.
	Oh, okay, okay.
	Right, right.
	I never got angry at her.
	That's one thing why I've always felt safe around her.
	And our perception of the relationship was very, very different.
	Like when we would go to a party and a guy would hit on her or do something like that, you know how guys are, right?
	No, I don't.
	Honestly, sorry, just to be clear.
	If you're in a stable, committed, and loving relationship, people don't hit on you.
	Okay.
	True.
	Because they sense it, right?
	Anyway, go ahead.
	Yeah, I got it.
	He did sense something.
	You're right.
	You're absolutely right.
	But I always felt more stable and assertive than she did in the relationship.
	She always felt as if she could be replaced at a whim at the next best thing that comes along or the next better thing.
	And that's what lack of commitment does, right?
	Yes.
	When I was younger, if there was a woman I was interested in, if she was married, I'd never go anywhere near her.
	If she just had a boyfriend, I'd be like, eh.
	I'll keep my float in the lake.
	I'll keep my lure in the lake.
	I wouldn't pursue her quite as assiduously as if she was single, but marriage is off limits.
	I remember some woman wanted to have – I picked her up at the gym and we went for a coffee and she wanted to have basically an affair as she was married.
	I said, well, that's no good.
	I mean, my word.
	How could that work?
	Because either I don't like you that much, in which case the affair isn't really going to be much fun, or I really like you a lot, or maybe fall in love with you, in which case you're married and I'm screwed, right?
	There's just no way that this could work out well for me.
	So she put out signals.
	I thought she was completely single, wasn't wearing a ring or anything.
	Then she just told me she was married, just like, excuse me?
	And I said to her, I was like, what?
	You realize I picked you up and you're saying that you're married, right?
	Like, what's up with that?
	She's like, yeah, you know, sorry, I guess, but here's what's going on in my marriage and blah, blah, blah.
	I said, well...
	I wish you the best of luck with that, but, you know, I'm not just going to have sex.
	So, yeah, I mean, if you're committed, then you just, you don't, I mean, people don't try and pick you up.
	You know how guys are.
	It doesn't put any responsibility on you or your girlfriend, but anyway.
	Yeah, they were definitely picking up on a lack of commitment from both of us, I think.
	I think you're right, yeah.
	All right, man.
	Well, listen, best of luck.
	Drop me a line if you can.
	Let me know how it goes.
	But, you know, we must get to the truth about everything because life is short and lies don't make us live longer.
	It just make us live worse.
	I hear that, brother.
	All right.
	Thanks, man.
	Yep.
	Bye-bye.
	All right.
	Joseph, you're up next today.
	Go ahead, Joseph.
	Great.
	Hi.
	Thanks.
	Hi, Steph.
	How are you doing today?
	I'm very well.
	How are you doing, Joseph?
	I'm doing fine.
	Well, I actually have a couple questions and it's related to my seeming inability to not be vulnerable in front of other people.
	Wait, wait.
	Sorry.
	Too many negatives there.
	Your seeming inability to not be vulnerable?
	I don't know.
	Just run me through that and take a few of the negatives out and make sure I understand it.
	Because you've got seeming inability not vulnerable.
	So what does that mean?
	Does that mean you can or cannot be vulnerable with people?
	I cannot be vulnerable.
	Sorry about that.
	I find it tough to open up and I also find it difficult particularly to explore any issues that might embarrass me or make me feel ashamed.
	In fact, I either minimize things or outright lie in some cases.
	Can you give me an example of an outright lie?
	I'll share one with you if you share one with me.
	Okay, sure.
	Well, I'm just sort of going through a transitional period career-wise.
	I'm just working part-time at a bank and doing some trading and enrolled in a securities course.
	I tell some people I'm taking university.
	I tell other people I'm finishing this thing up or I actually have a better job or something like that.
	So it's not being honest.
	You exaggerate to some degree, right?
	It's not like you're not doing education.
	You want to sound like you're doing more or better education than you are?
	Yeah, exactly.
	And it's not just to any casual acquaintance either.
	It's to some of my closer family and friends constructing these lies around.
	Right.
	Right.
	Okay.
	And what are the consequences you feel of not having these lies?
	I don't know.
	I guess I would feel like a little bit diminished or feel a bit ashamed.
	And those are particular things that I've always had a really difficult time with.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	And where did you get this habit from?
	Did you see it ever before or did you come up with it on your own?
	Well, if I'm being honest, I probably...
	That's funny.
	So, if you don't put that before what you're saying, do I just assume that you're lying about everything else?
	I like that.
	To be honest, I was like, people say that, to be honest.
	It's like, wait, wait, wait.
	This is the first time you've said that, and we've known each other for a year.
	So, what does that mean?
	Anyway, I think that's a funny phrase, but...
	Because I know you're being honest, right?
	And I appreciate that.
	It's just that when you appreciate something by saying, you know, it's like me doing a business deal with someone and said, okay, to not rip you off this time, I'm going to do this, right?
	It's like people are like, wait a minute.
	People think that that's comforting, but it's actually quite disconcerting.
	But anyway, go ahead.
	Yeah, it's funny.
	But yeah, I'd probably say that my father was someone who did that a lot and probably to an even greater extent.
	He would often be bragging about some position that he's held at a company or he'd be talking about how he just spent a bunch of money on a renovation to the home when it was in fact my mother who did that.
	Your mother who spent the money?
	Yeah, right.
	What does that mean?
	So, like, my mom would spend money on an addition and then he'd be bragging to the neighbor next door that, oh, I put this in, blah, blah, blah, you know?
	Wait, wait, sorry.
	Did he say that?
	I don't understand.
	Are your mother and father's finances separate?
	No, they're not.
	Well, now they are.
	They're divorced currently, but when they were together… I'm sorry.
	This looks like an important detail.
	So what does it mean when you say your mom would spend the money?
	I mean if it was your mom and dad's money, why does it matter who spent it?
	Well, it wouldn't matter, but if he made it sound like he was the one who spent it himself, essentially.
	Sorry, I'm really trying to understand that.
	So, if he said, we spent money.
	Okay, who was the primary breadwinner?
	They were relatively equal in terms of money, but my mom put more money towards the house and he spent more money on the day-to-day bills.
	Okay, so I mean because I'm just like trying to – so I'm just imagining – so a neighbor of mine comes over.
	They're putting in a pool or something, right?
	And I know that they together as a couple can afford a pool, right?
	Yeah.
	Or maybe they're going into debt.
	I don't know.
	But they feel that they can afford a pool.
	And then the guy comes over and says, I'm paying for this pool.
	Is that right?
	Something like that as opposed to we're paying for this pool.
	Right.
	That to me would be like – I would be like, well, what do you mean you're paying for it?
	Do you have money separate from your wife?
	Like I don't understand.
	Right.
	I mean, you're both working, so why aren't you both paying for it?
	Well, I pay more of the bills, and therefore she has more money.
	But she only has more money because you're paying more of the bills.
	He's still contributing, right?
	I would genuinely not understand what...
	And I would actually...
	That would look weird to me.
	If he thought that would elevate his status in my mind, quite the opposite would be true.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I'm sorry to pause on this.
	It just seems like it's kind of important because you didn't notice it.
	That's a weird thing to say when you're married.
	I'm paying for this.
	What does that mean?
	I mean the money is pooled.
	What does that mean?
	No, you're right.
	That is actually quite strange when I think about it.
	But herein we probably see the seeds of your parents' disintegration as a couple, right?
	Yeah, and that was certainly probably one of the less volatile aspects of the relationship.
	And also, your father doesn't know how sane people hear him?
	Yeah.
	I mean, it's sad enough when someone is trying to impress others.
	It's even sadder when the opposite happens as a result.
	Definitely.
	So...
	All right.
	Well, I'm sorry that you got that modeled for you.
	I think that's pretty tragic.
	I mean, that is pretty tragic.
	Well, I mean, I can tell you mine, but who cares, right?
	So I think we've all done it.
	So let's keep moving on.
	So you have that same impulse.
	Now, are the people that you say these things to, are they important to you?
	Yes.
	Okay, so give me an example of when you embellished the education thing.
	Who were you talking to?
	Well, I was talking to my mother and I said that I enrolled for a course.
	Holy shit.
	You mean you did this with your mom?
	Yeah, it's pretty bad.
	So she divorced the guy who had this habit before, but you feel this is going to be somehow a long-term relationship?
	Yeah, I know.
	Does your mother call you on it?
	Does she know it's not true?
	No, she hasn't.
	Does she know it's not true?
	No.
	At what point will she know it's not true?
	Because that's always the problem with lying.
	If you lie to people in passing, then what's the point?
	If you lie to people who are sticking around, then you're screwed, right?
	Because they're going to find out.
	Probably no more than a couple months, I would imagine.
	Right, right, right.
	Okay, so you understand that it's pretty disastrous, right?
	Yeah, to say the least.
	You can be whoever you want to someone on a plane, right?
	I mean, I can say I'm a neurosurgeon if I want, you know.
	But if I'm only sitting next to them for an hour or two, then who cares?
	Never going to see them again, what the hell does it buy me?
	Right?
	Never see them again, they're never going to find out if it's true or false, right?
	But if I say to the woman I'm interested in marrying, I'm a neurosurgeon, I'm completely fucked, right?
	Who's going to find out about it?
	So under no circumstances is there really a benefit.
	Because either, who cares?
	In which case, you're compromising your integrity for the sake of strangers you'll never meet again.
	What's the point of that?
	Right?
	That's like...
	Or, on the other hand, you are selling your integrity to look better in a relationship wherein, for sure, you're going to end up looking infinitely worse, right?
	Yeah.
	Now, the Pick Up Artist community and the Tom Likers listeners will probably have...
	Some different opinions about the value of lying, right?
	Because I think, like, it's just like, yeah, lie, say what you want.
	Women lie all the time.
	They push up bras and makeup and, you know, whatever you need to justify.
	But it doesn't work in a sort of rational context, right?
	No, of course not.
	And yet, even having known this, I still had the impulse to carry it out.
	No, and it means that...
	It means, I don't know if you've read Real-Time Relationships, it's free and all that, freedomandradio.com forward slash free, but it means that you are probably addicted to managing the anxiety of lying.
	Because, you know, it causes problems, makes you feel anxious, right?
	Yeah.
	Because you know it's coming out, right?
	And when a lie comes out in a relationship, some very difficult things happen.
	Let's say your mom finds out that you've lied and a couple of things are going to happen.
	The worst thing that can happen is she doesn't call you on it.
	That's by far the worst thing that can happen.
	Why do you think?
	Because no progress happens.
	The underlying reasons for me having that impulse for lying will just continue on.
	Well, that's your sort of selfish response, but what does it mean?
	What else does it mean from your mom's perspective?
	That she didn't really care about...
	She doesn't care if you tell the truth or not.
	She's fine with you lying to her.
	And what that means is that she either doesn't know that lying is bad in a relationship, in which case she can't be trusted, or it means that she knows that lying is bad in a relationship, but she doesn't want to save you from that habit, which means she can't be trusted.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	Feeling a little more uncomfortable now?
	Yeah, I couldn't say that again.
	No, good, because we want to make lying more uncomfortable than not lying, right?
	That's the point, right?
	That's why you show smokers graphic depictions of people dying of lung cancer.
	So you make smoking more uncomfortable than not smoking, right?
	Because not smoking, if you're a smoker, is uncomfortable, right?
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, that's why kids study for tests, because it's uncomfortable to fail.
	So that's why parents have to sign report cards and shit like that.
	I mean, this is how.
	I'm not saying it's always the best way, but I think in this case, it's something worth pondering.
	So if she doesn't say anything about it, then that's really, really, really, really bad, right?
	Because now she's lying to you because she's lying by omission, but she knows something that's very important to you and she's not talking to you about it.
	And she would only not talk about it because she knows that as a parent she's contributed to the development of the habit, right?
	Parents can never fundamentally criticize their children, right?
	As I said before, you're a painter, and you make a painting, and you can't say the painting sucks independent of your painting of it, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, the guy stands back from finishing a sculpture and says, what a goddamn ugly sculpture.
	I cannot believe somebody would make something that ugly.
	Get that thing out of my house.
	That would be insane, right?
	But this is what parents do.
	It doesn't stop them from doing it all the time, too.
	No, I understand that, but it reveals them as deranged, right?
	I mean, you cannot criticize your children if you're a parent because you're the parent and you are responsible for a significant portion of who they are, either through a mission or a commission, right?
	Yeah.
	And so...
	So if she says nothing, that's pretty catastrophic.
	Now, if she says, you lied to me, and she gets angry, then she's a painter railing against the ugliness of the painting, right?
	Because parents who get angry at the bad habits of their children, it's deranged, right?
	I mean, I know we don't see that yet, for most of us in society, but that's just because it seems like 95% of moral reasoning is designed to excuse parents and deliver children to the state, which is really two sides of the same coin.
	But...
	If she rails against you like, I can't believe you lied to me and that's so terrible and so on, then that's insane, right?
	I think that's the most likely thing to happen, yeah.
	At which point you can say, well, mom, you were my moral instructor for 20 years.
	I'm not saying I have no responsibility.
	I'm an adult now.
	But for you to be upset at what you created is to say that you had no responsibility in the creation of who I am.
	Now, if you had no responsibility in the creation of who I am, then why am I here?
	Why am I sitting at your table?
	Because you had no effect on me despite the fact I was exposed to you in my most formative years for 20 years.
	If you had no effect on me, then we have no – why am I here?
	If you had an effect on me, then it makes sense as to why I'm here, but then you lose the right to criticize me, right?
	Right.
	I mean, you can criticize me, but it's only after we've spent a month or two talking about your parenting, right?
	Hmm.
	Now, she may then also say, you lied, and she may then blame your father, right?
	Well, your father was a liar and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	In which case, you can then say, well, you...
	Chose him.
	You dated him.
	You married him.
	You got engaged.
	Then you married him.
	You kept him in your life for many years.
	You exposed me to him.
	So you still have responsibility in the matter, right?
	You know, people often do this.
	They get involved in someone and then they just get upset with that person like they just never chose them, right?
	Yeah.
	Like they were inflicted on you, on them or something, you know?
	Yeah.
	The other thing, too, is now what we hope, of course, is that she says, you know, you told me a falsehood.
	I'm sorry that happened.
	Let's talk about why you felt that was important.
	I'm not going to criticize you because if I've been in control of your piano playing for 20 years and you made a mistake with your piano playing, I, as a teacher, must figure out what happened.
	Either I didn't teach it right or I didn't know that you didn't understand it, right?
	It's a teacher's job to make sure that someone learns something, right?
	Yeah, of course.
	And so if there's something you didn't learn about ethics and your parents are your moral instructors, then they have to look within themselves to say, well, why?
	And it wouldn't be hard to find.
	It's like because I continually exposed you to a male role model who lied.
	Not that hard to figure out, right?
	At which point she would say, I hope, I'm sorry that I did not intervene when your father was lying to you or you saw your father lying to other people.
	I'm sorry that I didn't intervene and set that right sooner.
	It probably would have been a whole lot better for our marriage, might have saved it, and it certainly would have been a whole lot better for you being exposed to a role model as a young boy, right?
	Yeah.
	How old were you when you realized your father told these lies?
	Not very old, like six or seven, because when we were younger, he would always make these promises.
	Well, I'm going to take you out here, I'm going to buy you this, and then he never followed through on them.
	Right.
	So sorry.
	That's such a shitty thing to do to a kid.
	I mean, the kid has no power, right?
	It wasn't like you could drive yourself to the zoo or the ice cream store or whatever, right?
	And you make these promises and for a kid, that's physics.
	This is reality.
	This is the only way that it can work.
	And then if you can't make the promise and then you just welch out completely even on talking about why or what happened and so on, that's so unbelievably shitty and I'm really, really sorry.
	Because it's so manipulative, right?
	And it's such a buying a moment's pleasure at the cost of a long-term relationship, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah.
	I'm going to buy you ice cream.
	Yay!
	Daddy, that's great!
	I'm so happy!
	Hey, where's my ice cream?
	What?
	I never said that.
	Oh, man.
	You know, plus one happiness, minus infinity, right?
	Yeah.
	Sorry about that.
	And you know why you're lying to your mother, right?
	I'm not sure, actually.
	Well, because you want to know what's going to happen when you lie to your mother and you're conscious of lying to your mother, right?
	Because that's why we're talking now, is I'm laying out to you the logical consequences of this lie.
	And you want to know if somebody loves you enough to stop you from lying.
	In a non-aggressive, like a non-judgmental, I haven't said anything bad about you lying, right?
	Yeah, that's true.
	Because I have great sympathy for the environment that produced these habits, right?
	So you want to know if somebody cares about you enough to help you with this problem.
	You're young enough, that's like a cry for help, right?
	Somebody save me, somebody stop me.
	I want to see if somebody cares enough, right?
	Yeah, I'm probably right about that.
	I think that it's also one of the barriers I put up for myself in not getting involved in any relationships.
	If you have a habit of misrepresenting yourself, then intimacy becomes your enemy, right?
	Yeah.
	Of course, right?
	Because if you say things about yourself that aren't true, then nobody can get close to you.
	Because they'll find out that, right?
	You understand, right?
	Exactly.
	And that's the discomfort and the cost of this, right?
	You can't have love if you misrepresent.
	That's the price.
	You can't have vulnerability.
	You can't have intimacy.
	You can't have knowledge of the other person and they can't have knowledge of you.
	So definitely it is a...
	An alienation of virtue position, right?
	And it is a way of making sure that no good person can get close to you.
	I mean, unless they're really good and they're interested in you, then they can, you know, help, I guess, do sort of the sort of thing that I'm doing here and sort of talk to you about it in a way that hopefully is productive without being shaming, right?
	But those people are pretty rare, right?
	Yeah.
	What do you think will happen in the long run in your life if you don't find a way to overcome the bad habit?
	I think that probably my personal and professional life will just implode.
	I'll either end up being some sort of I'll just keep everyone at a distance to the point where I don't have any real relationships.
	Right.
	And what are you studying to be again?
	I'm studying to be a financial trader.
	Right.
	Do you see the problem?
	Hmm.
	You should buy these stocks.
	They're great.
	Yeah, that doesn't exactly work.
	Well, unfortunately, it works incredibly well, right?
	Because whatever is based on violence will profit liars.
	And the reason for that is that a system that's based on violence, first thing you have to do is cover up the violence, right?
	And liars are really good at that.
	So every system that's based on violence requires liars and rewards liars.
	Politicians, stockbrokers, at least in the current system and so on, right?
	Yeah.
	So unfortunately you are heading into some very dark and dangerous territory, right?
	Which is that you are heading into an environment where the capacity to dissemble is going to be richly rewarded.
	So you're heading into a reinforcement Of your most dangerous habits, right?
	Yeah.
	Actually, I had an internship relatively recently and I can see that that was going on all around me where people were just sort of misrepresenting and they didn't have a problem.
	It was like, well, it's a buyer beware pretty much.
	That was the attitude.
	Right.
	And listen, I mean, I'm not trying to say you can't be an honest stockbroker.
	I mean, I'm I'm sure...
	Actually, I've had one or two on the show.
	But it is not the norm, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	So...
	Yeah, like you had Peter Shippa on the show.
	He's a pretty big admirer of him.
	I don't consider him, to be honest.
	Yeah.
	Doug Casey, Woody O'Brien, Jeff Berwick, all of these people have market information and market interest.
	Mark Faber.
	I mean, I think they're all honest, good people.
	But...
	I would not say that is the norm at all in the industry.
	Yeah.
	And they're not stockbrokers who work for people, right?
	Who work for companies or whatever, right?
	So I'm going to point that out.
	So I would – I can tell you what I'd do if I were in your shoes.
	I mean you can do obviously as I don't need to tell you.
	You can do whatever you want.
	But I sit down with my mom and say, Mom, I've got to have it.
	I think it comes out of the family, but I'm a man now.
	I'm an adult.
	I take responsibility for my life.
	I think you and dad taught me some bad habits.
	I think dad was kind of a liar.
	And I don't mean like that's all he ever did, right?
	But you only have to rape once to be a rapist, right?
	And so, yeah, I mean, dad had a habit of lying.
	And I saw this very early on and you let this continue.
	You exposed me to this role model and that's bad.
	Now I want to take responsibility for it and find a way around it.
	But here's an example of a lie I told you and I'm not comfortable with that.
	I'd like to change that because I don't want to have.
	I saw what my dad ended up with which was a divorce, right?
	That's not what I want in my life.
	All habits that lead you to the chasm of divorce are like a gun to your head because if you get divorced and if it's a contentious divorce, right, 70% of the divorces are initiated by women for no particular reason other than dissatisfaction is the number one reason.
	And they then, if they turn on you, right, I mean if they really don't like you, I mean they will take your balls and wear them around their neck like a pair of Bobo ball castanets for the rest of your life because the family court will just shred you.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah, so either you stay single and literally take your condom and flush it and make sure you don't get sperm jacked or you get married and you've dealt with all the habits that will lead to divorce and you damn well make sure you get married to the right woman.
	I mean I'm a big fan of marriage if you have the right person.
	If you don't have the right person, your metaphor just saw your nuts off and mailed them to Gloria Steinem right now.
	Yeah.
	And you know where that's going to lead, right?
	Because if you end up getting married to a woman and you're still lying this way, then you're either going to get married to a woman who has no problem with you lying, in which case you're doomed, right?
	Or she has a problem with you lying and doesn't like it but isn't saying anything, in which case you're doomed because the resentments will build up and blow up.
	Yeah, exactly.
	There is no third.
	Only those two, right?
	And it will generally repel most good people.
	And there may be a few who will really sit down and talk to you about it.
	But of course, if good people spent their whole lives helping other people with self-knowledge, that means they'll never get anything done.
	So you have to let a lot of people go by, right?
	Very true.
	So it's your job now, right?
	I mean, you're the adult.
	Yeah.
	You have to take responsibility.
	Yeah, I'm incredibly sorry that this was your template.
	I mean, it's wretched.
	It's absolutely terrible.
	But in order to blame your parents, which I think is important, you have to change, right?
	Because if you say, well, this is my template, and therefore I can't do anything about it, then you can't get upset with your parents, which doesn't arouse the morals...
	The moral rage which I think drives the stuff from your soul.
	So taking responsibility gives you the wonderful capacity to blame others for not taking responsibility.
	That's one of the delicious side dishes of responsibility is you get to blame people.
	In other words, to hold other people responsible.
	So I have become an infinitely better parent than the way I was parented.
	What I get out of that is the wonderful capacity to say I was parented really badly and it didn't have to be that way.
	Because it wasn't that way for me.
	I changed.
	It's a wonderful thing.
	A wonderful thing about growth is that you then get to condemn people who don't grow.
	And that's important.
	I don't sort of sit up every day and say, ah, I'm better than...
	Right?
	But it is really important.
	You take responsibility.
	You get to turn the whip on those who didn't.
	And that's important.
	People think that makes you an angry person.
	No, no, no.
	What makes an angry person is...
	Displacement, right?
	It's when you have somebody who's done you great wrong, but you won't admit it.
	You still serve their needs by forgiving them or pretending it didn't happen or excusing them or whatever.
	But the anger still exists and therefore it gets turned on the innocent.
	That's somebody who remains perpetually angry.
	You know, the itch that you can't scratch just remains an itch, right?
	If you're scratching the wrong place, the itch just gets worse, right?
	You ever try scratching around an itch?
	I mean, it just drives you crazy, right?
	And so if you can't connect your anger to its proper target, it's just like a fiery hose whipping around the house, right?
	Just spraying fire on everyone.
	The really angry people are the people who have genuine cause for Rage and who can never connect it to the right people.
	They end up blaming like it's the Jews or it's the proletariat or it's whatever, right?
	I mean it's the bourgeoisie.
	It's the blacks.
	It's the women.
	It's like wherever you can connect your anger to its proper target, it doesn't go away.
	It simply diffuses and continues to escalate because it's not connecting to where it needs to connect.
	So it just continues to up and amperage until it blows your heart out.
	And so far, it's mostly been directed internally.
	Sure.
	I mean, that's how you're raised.
	When you're raised by problematic people, then they want you to blame yourself.
	And then if you stop blaming yourself, then they want you to forgive them.
	Right?
	But that's not true.
	I mean, the way to peace is to connect your anger to its proper target.
	And this is not my advice.
	This is very old, old advice.
	But it really is around the truth.
	It's that if you are harmed by specific people, then it results in anger.
	Anger is very healthy.
	And so if the anger was generated by specific people, Uncle Bob, if Uncle Bob did stuff that made you – that hurt you, then you're angry at Uncle Bob.
	That's just a simple truth.
	And since philosophy is after the truth, then yes, your anger was generated by Uncle Bob.
	And in that case, you need to get angry at Uncle Bob because getting angry at anybody else is unjust.
	It's rewarding Uncle Bob and punishing the innocent, which is unjust, right?
	It's like, you know, some guy stole my wallet, so I'm going to go beat up some random guy.
	It's like, well, now suddenly you're the asshole.
	You're the aggressive, right?
	And so you connect with – it's what Aristotle said.
	Getting angry is easy.
	Getting angry at the right person in the right way for the right reasons, that's not easy.
	And I actually think it is pretty easy.
	It's just that we're told not to get angry, right?
	Obviously, right?
	Especially at our parents or especially at people who harmed us as children.
	But no, the way to peace is to discharge your just anger at the correct targets and then it will trouble you very little.
	I mean, I'm not an angry person.
	I've got a lot to be angry about, but I've had my anger out at the right people, and it then is done.
	Once you get the tiger out of your house, you stop fighting the tiger in your house.
	But if you have a tiger in your house and you attack the curtains, well, you never stop fighting the tiger because he's not going away, right?
	You just get angry at the proper target and you will be released from your anger because it has achieved its purpose.
	What it's there for, right?
	You scratch the itch and the itch goes away, at least for a while.
	So anyway, that's what I would recommend.
	Just sit down and talk with your mom and say, look, this is where I'm at.
	I don't want to be this way.
	But you guys had a lot.
	You were the primary causes as to why I'm this way.
	Hmm.
	She might say, well, I didn't know your dad was such a liar.
	It's like, well, it's your job as a mother who is exposing your children to people to find out.
	And if you had so bad a marriage that you didn't even know that dad was a liar, then that's even worse.
	Because now I have a model of one parent who's a liar and the other parent who's so oblivious and alienated from her husband that she doesn't even know he's a liar.
	And I don't believe you anyway, right?
	So don't lie to me now, right?
	People will always claim ignorance, right, when confronted.
	Well, I didn't know.
	I don't recall.
	I don't remember.
	I don't know.
	I don't remember.
	First of all, it's not true, of course, right?
	People who say I don't remember the moment they're confronted, it's a lie because they should be exploring it, right?
	It doesn't jump to my mind, but give me some more things that might help jog my memory, right?
	When did this happen?
	Where were we?
	What was going on?
	Try and jog my mind.
	That's what people who aren't guilty do when they can't remember something that's important to someone else is they will do whatever they can to try and remember.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	But if they say, well, I just don't remember and then that's it.
	That's just a defense.
	And, of course, then what you have to do, what you can do, of course, is you can say, well, when I was a kid, was that an excuse for me?
	And if it wasn't an excuse for you, then it's not an excuse for the parents.
	And if someone says, well, I don't remember your father lying throughout your entire childhood.
	I mean, that's such an obvious lie.
	I mean, unless they're truly, like, mentally deranged, there's just no possibility that they didn't know that.
	You know, that he never, ever lied around your mother.
	And...
	And she saw no effect of his lying habits in any way, shape, or form.
	This is simply not possible.
	It's like what people say about child molestation, not to put your father in that category, but, well, I didn't know it was happening.
	That is such a lie.
	That is such a lie.
	It's a completely understandable lie, of course, right?
	I mean, in the same way that someone doesn't want to be caught as a pickpocket, although this is infinitely worse.
	But it's such a transparent lie because child molestation has such catastrophic effects on the personality that the moment it starts, if somebody doesn't know, they're denying the reality, right?
	Because the personality changes when somebody gets molested.
	And if you don't even know enough about your kids to know when their personality changes, then that's just a lie.
	That's just willful ignorance, right?
	Yeah.
	So I would not accept that I didn't know, I don't remember, I don't recall.
	I also wouldn't accept the it's worse for me.
	It was worse for me.
	I had such a tough time with it.
	Don't make it about her.
	Because she was there by choice and you weren't, right?
	Yeah, I don't think she was...
	If you're a prisoner in some camp and the guard starts crying because it was so hard for him, well, he could have left at any time.
	You were there by force.
	So, you know, you don't get to focus on his suffering.
	He's got to focus on yours, right?
	Yeah.
	So I would really focus on that and hopefully you can have some kind of breakthrough and get some kind of clear communication.
	And with that kind of...
	See, if you have that kind of breakthrough...
	You will not be tempted by lying again, right?
	Because once you get that real connection and you get how sweet and wonderful and beautiful it is to connect to people at that level, you will no longer be tempted by lying because it would be like trying to get happiness by lying.
	It's like trying to sunbathe and get a tan from the stars at night.
	You know, once you actually are in the Florida sunshine for 20 minutes, you're like, oh, that's what tanning is.
	I'm not going back to lying out in the tarmac at night, right?
	So, once you really connect, it won't be...
	I mean, it just won't be tempting, right?
	If you want people to stop eating something bad, hand them something good that tastes better, right?
	Yeah.
	I hope so.
	Sorry, I've been doing a lot of talking, but that's sort of it for my speechifying.
	If you wanted to sort of finish up, let me know what you think.
	I really appreciate the advice.
	I think it's worth exploring.
	It's funny because this is not even originally the topic I thought I was going to be going into.
	I was probably going to make it more abstract and vague, but this is really where I need to go.
	I try to listen between the words.
	And the first thing you told me was discombobulating, and you didn't know it was, so that's what I figured the topic was going to be, so hopefully it was helpful.
	Yeah, thank you.
	You are very, very welcome.
	All right.
	Mike, do we have for anyone else?
	That's it, Steph.
	All right.
	Well, thank you, everybody.
	Now, Mike, when am I not doing shows again?
	Alright, let me pull that up real quick.
	November the 3rd?
	November the 6th?
	Yeah, so Wednesday 30th I am, right?
	Wednesday 30th?
	November 3rd I'm not.
	November 6th I'm not.
	November 10th I am again, right?
	Yep.
	Okay, so yeah, sorry.
	I've got a couple other projects on the burner, which I've got to get finished, so I'm taking a week off from the Sunday shows.
	I'm very sorry, and I will miss you guys terribly, but I think it's important, but I will be back.
	So just to mention that and to apologize for that.
	And FDRURL.com forward slash donate.
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	Spend 20 minutes a week.
	Seriously.
	Spend 20 minutes a week.
	Share your favorite shows on social media.
	Share your favorite shows on message boards.
	Or Reddit or wherever.
	Just share.
	Philosophy is really important to share with everyone and it's so easy to do now.
	I'm not saying you have to go and get a PhD in philosophy.
	Just 20 minutes a week.
	20 minutes a week while you're watching TV, whatever.
	Just go and share your favorite free-domain radio shows with other people.
	What a great thing to do.
	You share something about spanking or you share any show which gets people into the show.
	And they then, you know, they go to therapy.
	They live more honestly.
	They stop hitting their kids.
	If you could spend 20 minutes a week on your couch while watching TV helping people not hit their children, I can't understand why you wouldn't.
	So hopefully you will do that.
	Just keep sharing, keep sharing.
	And that's how we make the world a better place.
	Thanks, everyone.
	Thanks again to Mike.
	Have a wonderful week.

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