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Dec. 6, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:37:19

2549 Evil is a Confession of Inadequacy - Thursday Call In Show December 5th, 2013

Simon the Boxer, the point of abuse is isolation, having moral standards, the universally preferable behavior elevator pitch, leaving the dead behind in your search for happiness, empathy as a weakness in todays society, turning a negative into a positive, the hatred of men, the value of bitcoin, and evil as a confession of inadequacy.

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	Good evening, everybody.
	Stephen Mullen, you're from Free Domain Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	It is the 5th of December 2013.
	I guess that's close to the necessity for the release of the Free Domain Radio Christmas album, which will be entering your spam folder any moment now.
	Hope you're having a great week.
	Hope you're gearing up for some Medium to Happy Holidays, and I know we've got a lot of callers, so let's get straight to the hot brains and balls of the outfit.
	Mike, first caller.
	All right, Alex, you were up first today.
	Go ahead, Alex.
	Hi, Stefan.
	Hello.
	Can you hear me?
	Yep.
	Okay, I'm just gonna dive right in.
	Just tell you I'm really anxious.
	My heart is beating like mad.
	I'm sweating palms and everything.
	Never done this before.
	Well, hopefully the call will be terrifying in reality, and that way you don't feel like you've been randomly betrayed by your body, so we'll work.
	Bah!
	Boo!
	It's like, yeah, my brother said, you know, I'll give you something to scream about.
	All right.
	So, I listened to your real-time relationship.
	It was actually yesterday I got around to a part where you talk about the fighter.
	And him seeking violence just to get control.
	Yeah, so just for those who don't know, very briefly, this is a section of the book called Simon the Boxer.
	The question is repetitive compulsion, repetition compulsion.
	Like, what the hell?
	It doesn't make any sense when you think about it.
	Like, you'd think if you'd had a life of violence, I mean, the last place you'd ever want to be...
	It's around violence again, right?
	Why is there such repetition in people's lives?
	You know, you don't sort of burn yourself on a hot stove and then say, hey, you know what I'm going to do?
	I had to burn myself on more and more hot stoves.
	You're like, well, I'm not doing that again, right?
	But in psychology, or not in the field of psychology, but in human psychology, there does seem to be this repetition compulsion.
	And my basic argument is that a man who grows up being beaten He cannot control his parents.
	He cannot control his environment.
	So the sense of efficacy that he gets, the sense of control that he gets, arises or comes out of him mastering his fear and horror and shame and anger at being beaten.
	And in order to retain any sense of control, he actually has to put himself in Violent or dangerous situation so that he can feel the only sense of control he's ever felt, which is control over the negative feelings associated with violence.
	And so he becomes a boxer because if he's not controlling his feelings around violence, then he doesn't know who he is and he doesn't feel any sense.
	He actually panics when he's not in a violent situation.
	And so that's really a very brief argument.
	There's more of it in the book, but go ahead.
	So I try to analyze this and just apply it to my situation and my history and just trying to see what the hell.
	The original question I was going to ask is in my history, I switched schools a couple of times and I actually came to the U.S. when I was 13 and got involved with a bunch of kids who Right now I can obviously see there were sadists.
	They would just like to pick on me, pick on each other, really not friends.
	And I was just curious, what the hell?
	Why was I sticking around with this crew, calling them my friends, even though I never really felt any kind of connection, friendship.
	All I was experiencing was teasing and bullying, even from them.
	So, but, and I thought it was just loneliness, but it might be just something that you pointed out with this, the fighter.
	So, and then I started to think about even earlier in my childhood, when I was a kid and I have siblings and cousins, and a couple of them were constantly, would pick on me too, so...
	And that kind of struck a point where you said that since the kid cannot control the external situations because it was my siblings and cousins and we were playing in the yard, you know, and I was one of the youngest, so I couldn't really control my situation.
	I had to internalize my emotions.
	I had to suppress them and, you know, deal with my emotions.
	The vulnerability and it also has to do like one of the other terrifying things that happened.
	I don't know.
	Basically, I revealed my crush on a girl when I was nine and my brother found out and he started teasing me and I remember him finding out and That was a terrifying moment because of like, well, you know, it's like you have me by the balls now.
	You can just, you know, kick me around.
	And that kind of teasing, like, you like this girl and we'll, you know, tell her that you like her.
	And, oh, yeah, we called her and, you know, she's going to meet you here and there, you know.
	Right.
	Now, you know that you're not talking about something that's the most important, right?
	I was trying to just get out as much information as possible.
	No, no, no, no.
	And I'm sorry to be annoying, but that's not what you're trying to do at all.
	Because you're telling me about your friends, you're telling me about your cousins, you're telling me about your siblings.
	Who are you not telling me about?
	My parents.
	Yeah.
	Why are you starting with all the kids?
	It's because that's what I remember.
	And I don't remember, well, I didn't go to my parents, I don't even remember myself going to my parents and actually complaining.
	I think what happened was my brother would tease me.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	I'm not talking about you complaining.
	I'm not talking about you complaining.
	Right.
	What is the generally accepted theory as to where children learn their behaviors from?
	I mean, they learn it from their parents.
	Right.
	So when you're talking about problematic childhoods and problematic children, but you're not talking about any of the adults, then I assume that you're asking me to call you out on that because it's such an obvious thing, right?
	Well, I was just trying to get to the point where my revelation was that...
	No, no.
	No, no.
	You're not trying to get to the point.
	Sorry to be annoying, right?
	But...
	You are giving me the effects when you know what the cause is, and the cause would be the parents, right?
	Okay, yeah.
	Right, so this is a lot of not talking about the parents in order for me to point out that you're not talking about the parents, right?
	So tell me about your parents.
	There was a, well...
	Let's see...
	They did hit us, so that was abuse, I guess.
	I guess that was abuse.
	I don't remember the earliest memories of us sitting on the table, and my brother would tease me or whatever, and I would complain, and then they would beat him.
	So that might have You know, even reinforce that.
	Okay, you started...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	You started off by saying hitting, and now you're saying beating?
	Well...
	I'm not sure what...
	How they...
	If they...
	I can't...
	I don't remember.
	They took them to a room.
	I don't know what actually happened.
	So...
	Oh, come on.
	Come on.
	You have ears, right?
	I can't go...
	I honestly can't...
	I couldn't hear.
	I mean, I don't know what kind of hitting happened.
	Wait, you think they mimed their disapproval at him?
	What do you mean you couldn't hear?
	Did you hear any smacks?
	Did you hear any yells?
	I mean, I heard yelling, yes.
	I can't remember, honestly, if there were smacks.
	Probably were.
	Most likely were.
	So now we have hits, smacks, and beats.
	Okay, let me ask you a couple of questions.
	Were you hit or when your parents hit?
	Did they hit open hand or closed fist?
	Open hand.
	Never like a punch.
	And did they hit...
	Did they ever hit with implements?
	Like spoons or rolling pins or whatever?
	No.
	And did they hit on the ass?
	No.
	Yeah, I think so, yes.
	What do you mean you think so?
	Did you not get spanked?
	I just, I don't really remember that.
	It was mostly like on the upside of the head, like, you know.
	What is the upside?
	Is it the back of the head?
	In the back of the head, yes.
	So they would hit in the back of the head.
	Would it be hard or would it more be startling or how did that work?
	It would be more startling just to, you know, I guess try to...
	Okay.
	And when they took your brother into the other room and they hit him, were they hitting him upside the head?
	I mean, how does that work?
	Since they took him out, I did not see.
	And were you never taken out of the room in the same way?
	No.
	Really?
	So it's only your brothers who were ever taken out of the room.
	Never happened to you?
	Well, I was the youngest, so it was, I guess, not...
	I wasn't as...
	I wasn't quite as hard, I guess.
	Okay, so you were hit sort of upside the head in the moment, but you weren't taken out of the room and hit in the way that your brothers were.
	Is that right?
	Yeah.
	And you're sure of that?
	As far as I remember, yes.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	And did your parents use negative terms towards the children?
	stupid, lazy idiots or anything like that?
	It's hard to just recollect it at the moment, but Listen, do you want to call back when you've had some more chance to recollect?
	Because you're asking me to help about your past, and every time I'm asking you stuff, you don't have any idea what to say.
	Okay.
	So maybe if you want to...
	I mean, if you don't remember, then there's not much we can talk about, right?
	Yes.
	I did not expect these questions.
	I was just trying to see what...
	Oh, come on!
	Of course you did.
	Of course you did.
	I mean, have you listened to...
	I'm not being mean.
	I'm just being firm, right?
	I mean, you've listened to this show before, I assume, right?
	Oh, definitely I did.
	Yes.
	Right?
	And you've read Real Time Relationships.
	Have you read On Truth?
	I listened to it.
	Okay, so the fact that I'm bringing up parents cannot possibly come as a surprise to you.
	That's like taking a class in Russian and then being shocked that they're not speaking English.
	I think, yeah, you're right.
	I think I just have so much anger at my siblings and my brother and my so-called friends, the bullies, that I, you know...
	I'm not saying you're wrong about that.
	Listen, I'm not saying you're wrong about that anger.
	I get it.
	I'm not saying that you're wrong about that anger.
	You know, I had a friend now dead in a horrible way, but I had a friend who would take his mother and throw her up against the wall.
	She was a single mom.
	He was a single kid, usually a very toxic combination, a single son.
	And he was quite violent towards his mother and, you know, kind of a psycho, you know, sort of in hindsight.
	But this is the crew I was running with when I was 12 and 13.
	I mean, for reasons that I understand now, but, you know, the death wish was strong in my friend at the time.
	He was extraordinarily careless about his safety and his life to the point where he ended up being decapitated.
	And.
	And so I get it.
	I mean, I get where a dysfunctional...
	I'm not saying we're the same, and I'm not saying that my history was your history, but I do understand how dysfunctional...
	A dysfunctional home environment can lead you to make understandable, though sub-optimal choices...
	In your friends.
	Right?
	Right.
	So I understand it and I'm not saying you're wrong to be angry at your brothers and so on.
	But your parents defined the family emotional landscape.
	Your parents defined the family emotional landscape.
	Right?
	Right.
	And if you complain about a brother and that brother gets beaten, what the fuck do your parents think is going to happen to the sibling relationship?
	Seriously.
	Exactly.
	I mean, what happened after that?
	He's just going to get you, right?
	Yeah, it was exactly...
	It was just...
	It didn't work once.
	Why did you fucking do it again and again and again?
	And you see it's not...
	Well, because it is working, right?
	The point of abuse is isolation, and if siblings get together, they can't isolate.
	The people aren't isolated, right?
	They isolate me, I guess.
	Well, they isolate you, they isolate you.
	They turn the siblings against each other.
	Yeah, that's what happened.
	So that they can't get together, sympathize, empathize, and realize how insane the environment may be, right?
	Right.
	Okay.
	So...
	Go ahead.
	So, to your question, did they actually put us down as far as, like, verbal abuse?
	Uh...
	Well, I didn't use the word abuse, but did they use negative language like lazy, dumb, stupid, jerk?
	Yes.
	They would say lazy, they would say dumb.
	Yeah.
	I mean, it was more, you know, I mean, they would say like, how would you, you know, you're not ready for life or something like that in one of those, you know.
	Oh my God, I'm sorry.
	It's ridiculous.
	That is so insane.
	Seriously, hang on a sec, hang on a sec.
	I mean, for a parent to say you're not ready for life, as if that's your problem.
	When you're a kid, too.
	But you're their kid.
	Exactly.
	It's their fault.
	Yeah, it's their responsibility to get you ready for life.
	Right?
	I mean, that's like me training a dancer really badly and then yelling at her because she's not ready for prime time.
	So I just want to point out that that's that's pretty mental, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, if I go to some dancer and say, the way you do it, honey, is you lash some crutches to your lower back, and you get a cast on one leg, and then you tie a bag of ferrets to the other leg, and then you jump into a giant pool of jello, and that's called dancing.
	And I get her to do that every day, and then I yell at her because she just is not a good dancer.
	It's mad.
	Um, yeah.
	Okay, so they hit, or sometimes you say beat, or sometimes you say smacked.
	They denigrated their children verbally.
	They definitely had bad parenting practices like, if you have a problem with your sibling, I'm going to go hit your sibling.
	I mean, that's just terrible, right?
	I mean, you wouldn't train dogs that way.
	Yeah.
	And what else?
	I don't know.
	I mean...
	They wouldn't ask me, like, a couple of podcasts that you made, like, was it How to Kill a Heart of a Man, I think that's what it's called, that resonated with me because...
	No, sorry, that was How a Man's Heart is Murdered.
	Yes, How a Man's Heart is Murdered, when you were talking about who asked you how you felt, and...
	Just like you, I mean, it was practically zero.
	Right.
	Well, and as you mentioned, there was a time when you were attracted to a girl, and this is a vulnerable moment, right?
	When you share your attraction to a girl with your friends, with your family, it's an exquisitely vulnerable moment, right?
	Yeah.
	And it's kind of a make or break moment.
	So if they say, oh, dream on.
	You haven't got a chance.
	You actually towed or something like that.
	Or, wow, that's really – tell me what you like about her.
	That's very interesting.
	I mean let's try and figure out a way where you can ask her out and get what you want, right?
	Yeah.
	None of that.
	I liked a girl – I guess I was – I don't know, maybe 14 or so.
	I liked a girl who worked in a record store.
	A record store for those under 25 is where you used to buy these big, shiny, flat, crispy discs which had music on them, which you played by scratching them.
	Yes, I know.
	Not that kind of scratching, not vitt, vitt, vitt, vitt, you know, but scratching them with a little needle and it made music.
	And I went up to go and talk to them and my brother snuck up behind me and he sort of came up beside me and he said, he drew his hand across my lower chin and he said, I know she's pretty stiff, try to wipe off the drool.
	I mean, that's a really humiliating thing to do, right?
	Yeah.
	The sexual attraction, sort of like cleavage that they talked about in Seinfeld, it's like the sun.
	You don't stare at it directly.
	You don't sort of name it.
	You don't sort of put it right out there in the front and center.
	And so when you talk about being attracted to someone, that is a very vulnerable moment.
	And since Sexual success is why we're not amoebas or primordial soup anymore since it is why we are humans, why we are, you know, kind of got the run of the planet and so on, why we're top of the food chain.
	It is a very foundational aspect to not only being alive but why we're alive.
	So sexual attraction, romantic attraction, love, lust, whatever you want to call it, is very core and fundamental.
	To being alive and being a human being.
	So when you share your attraction with someone, to someone, with someone else, they can break you up.
	They can break you down or they can build you up.
	And it doesn't sound like you had a whole lot of building up.
	Definitely.
	And I think that's, I guess, that was another question I was going to ask.
	How that affected my relationships.
	Obviously, that did not affect it in a good way.
	Let me ask you this.
	Let me ask you this question.
	Alex, let's say I go to a family dinner with your parents and your brothers, your cousins, aunts, uncles, whatever, right?
	The whole clan.
	And, you know, we're sitting outside afterwards and nobody's around.
	And you say, what do you think?
	What am I going to say?
	Are you asking me what are you going to say about my gland?
	Yeah.
	Dysfunction.
	Alright.
	Let's say that I'm a woman who really loves you and wants the very best for you and wants you to be happy.
	And therefore is not a huge fan of people who treat you badly.
	What am I going to say about your clan?
	She probably won't want to be a part of it.
	Well, look, if you care about someone, you cannot love someone who treats someone you love badly.
	Right.
	I mean, that's almost like emotional physics.
	That is a law that you cannot undo.
	You cannot bypass that law.
	It's like trying to jump And not be susceptible to gravity.
	Right?
	You cannot love someone who harms someone you love.
	And this is really important to get at a very, very deep level.
	If you are around people who harm you, then people cannot love you And the people who are around you at the same time.
	I hate people who harm people that I love.
	I loathe them.
	My skin crawls, you know, I find them disgusting and vile and contemptible and pitiful and wretched and fundamentally impotent, but I don't like anyone Who harms the people I love, Right.
	Right.
	And this is a very, very sort of fundamental.
	So if you have people around you who treat you badly, who put you down, who ignore you, who bore you, who just have this relentlessly shallow or stupid or conflicted or or or ambivalent or or hostile or argumentative or disrespectful.
	If you have all of that, those elements, those people are like a fucking human fiery moat, keeping anyone who might genuinely love you far away.
	Bye.
	Thank you.
	Because anyone who comes in to your life, Alex, and truly loves you is going to see people treating you badly and is going to say, these people need to treat you better, right?
	Because I love you and I don't want to see you treated badly.
	Now, either then you're going to find a way to have these people treat you better or you're not going to have these people in your life or the person who really loves you is going to have to walk away.
	And this is why – I mean other than the Simon the Boxer thing since that's already out, but this is also why – You end up with people around you who don't love you.
	Because if you have people around you who don't love you, you don't have to confront dysfunctional family relationships, right?
	Right.
	And so the friends that you had, I think you called them sadists or something like that.
	I mean the friends that you had were not going to sit there and sit down with you and say, you know, Alex, this – it pains me to see you treated in this way.
	Right.
	It pains me to see you called lazy, to see you disrespected, to see you called stupid, called stupid, for people to laugh at your feelings and whatever, right?
	Like, it hurts me.
	It physically pains me.
	That would not even inquire about that.
	Sorry.
	No, I get it.
	I get it.
	I get it.
	I'm telling you what they wouldn't do, right?
	Does that make sense?
	Right.
	And so, sorry, so the people who've done you harm are not going to want people like that around.
	People who are empathetic and curious and love you and want the best for you, right?
	I would like to think they would, yeah.
	Okay, let's go with that thesis.
	Alright, I'm happy to explore that.
	Never ever want to imagine that I'm always right.
	So, let's say that I'm your dad.
	Why would I want someone really caring and empathetic around you?
	I mean, I would like to think that he wants somebody who loves me.
	Okay, let's not talk about what you like to think.
	This is a philosophy show, right?
	This is not a show about what you would like to think, otherwise we'd all smoke unicorn asses and go join Jesus in a cloud, right?
	So, what is the actual rational self-interest for your father?
	I mean, he wants me to find somebody and, you know, settle down, have kids.
	I mean, he wants me to be happy I mean, I spoke to my parents about this, and I actually spoke after listening to one of your podcasts, it was called About Failure and Success, when you were talking about, you know, pushing back.
	And I spoke to them about, you know, How I was teased and abused, and I couldn't go and talk to them, and where were they?
	And they were saying, we didn't know, and I'm like, why didn't you think I told you about these things?
	I mean, what happened?
	Like, why couldn't I talk to you about this?
	You know, as a kid, I would always run to you and talk to you about it, but, you know...
	I mean...
	This was painful.
	So their defense was that they didn't know, right?
	Exactly.
	So when you tried to remind them of specific instances, did they say they could remember them or not?
	Specific instances of me actually going and telling them?
	Because I don't even remember telling them.
	I just took it.
	I mean, I don't know why I didn't go to them.
	Okay, so, but their fundamental defense was ignorance, right?
	They didn't know.
	Whereas your fundamental defense is, I don't remember.
	I don't know, right?
	They're both fog, right?
	I just want to point out that there's a similarity of defenses, right?
	Yeah.
	I don't remember.
	Okay, so you say that your father wants you to be happy, right?
	Right.
	What is the empirical evidence for that thesis, right?
	Because this is, you know, again, this is a philosophy show, so we don't take any statements at face value, mine or yours.
	So if the thesis is that your father wants you to be happy, what is the evidence for that?
	And him saying it doesn't matter, right?
	What is the empirical evidence, right?
	I mean, he would like talk to other people, try to find me dates and yada, yada.
	And like, I like girl numbers, you know, cause like, you know, Hey, you haven't been dating in a while, you know, just, you know, here's a number or something like that.
	Or, um, you know, helping me out, for example, I need a, you know, some errand to be run.
	I mean, and I, you know, out of town, he would actually do it for me, you know?
	So If I asked him to do something, he would do it for me.
	I just don't want to.
	I don't want to be dependent.
	So if you ask him to do a chore or a favor or an errand, he will do it?
	Yes.
	Like, can you drop off something for me?
	Or can you do this for me?
	And the same thing goes, obviously, if he asks me, I'll do it for him.
	Okay, so your definition of somebody who's committed to your happiness is someone who will drop off a parcel for you?
	Someone who, you know, is not going to...
	I don't know.
	I understand where you're getting at.
	That's the thing.
	I brought it up with them.
	I mean, that's all we do.
	It's kind of shallow.
	We just talk about, you know, very, you know...
	We don't really talk about the feelings, our feelings.
	We don't talk about that.
	We just talk about how the weather and all that just and oh, we need to do this and we need to do that.
	There are shallow things that would just take up the conversation.
	We don't talk about how the feeling...
	Let me ask this another way because I don't think I'm making my point clear.
	So if you're Dad wants you to be happy.
	Does he know what makes you happy?
	I mean, you understand, if I go to a shoe store and I say I want to buy my wife a beautiful pair if I go to a shoe store and I say I want And they say, what kind of shoes does she like?
	And I say, well, I don't really know.
	I say, well, what outfits does she wear?
	I don't really know.
	What size shoes does she have?
	Well, I don't really know.
	What are they going to say?
	Right.
	Can't help you, right?
	Because you don't know what your wife likes or wants or even what her shoe size is.
	So my question is, if your parents want to make you happy, do they know what makes you happy and provide it already?
	To the best of their ability, you know, within the limits of their powers and so on, right?
	No.
	Okay, so that's a bit of a blow against the thesis that your parents really want to make you happy, right?
	Yeah.
	And tell me what you're feeling now.
	So, what do they want?
	No, tell me what you're feeling now, if you don't mind.
	I mean, since I've been listening to your podcast the past two months, it's been the feeling of fear, anger, being disoriented, kind of feeling that, you know, what I thought was normal.
	Obviously, it's not normal.
	This is the swallowing of the red pill, as you say.
	Okay, and what did you...
	I'm asking you for the third time, and I'm not trying to be critical, I'm just pointing it out.
	When I said this is a bit of a blow against the thesis that your father only wants you to be happy or wants your happiness if he doesn't even know what your happiness is, what did you feel at that time?
	Or at that moment?
	Void.
	Just not...
	Something's not there.
	Missing.
	That's not a feeling?
	That's not a feeling.
	I mean...
	pain.
	That's...
	I don't know.
	Even more loneliness that...
	and...
	isolation.
	A sadness?
	Yes.
	Right.
	Right.
	And how is that for you?
	Right.
	Having those feelings?
	Scary.
	Sucks.
	Because I know that I'm lonely because I have a romantic relationship, but at least I thought, oh, I have a family.
	You do have a family.
	I would certainly agree with you about that.
	What is it that you would like most in your relationship with your family?
	What is the thing that is missing the most for you?
	Connection.
	What does that mean?
	Like you said, knowing what makes...
	Them knowing what makes me happy and also me knowing what makes them happy because they're just as, you know, I can't get through to them as far as or I probably never even tried hard enough to understand what makes them happy.
	Well, no, that's actually, no, no, sorry.
	That's not your job, right?
	Your job as a child is not to make your parents happy, right?
	Your job as an adult is not to make your parents happy.
	I mean, I want to make them happy.
	I mean, it's not like...
	It's not my job.
	It's just, you know...
	Okay, why do you want to make them happy?
	I'm not saying you shouldn't.
	These are just questions to ask, right?
	Yes, it's all the feelings that...
	Like you said, I guess the confusion I get when you get smacked and then being told that you have to love them.
	So it's still that reminiscence of that.
	Do you know what makes your parents happy?
	No.
	No.
	I mean...
	Their grandkids.
	I think you've been doing it for most of the call, but okay, let's say no.
	No, that's fine.
	Their grandkids, you know, I know that for sure.
	That makes me happy, being with their grandkids.
	Does it make them happy when you bring up the past and problems that you have?
	Oh, no.
	Okay, so you know something that doesn't make them happy.
	Right?
	Yes.
	And so, to some degree, you know that they're happier if you don't bring up this stuff, right?
	I brought it up, and it was just blowback.
	It was not blowback.
	It was just...
	They did not expect it, and I think you mentioned it on Truth, in the book on Truth, about all these reactions that people have.
	It was...
	I mean...
	There was basically no sympathy, I guess.
	I guess I wasn't ready to have that conversation with them, like you said, in one of the other podcasts.
	Just because you have a sword, you don't have to use it.
	So you feel that the fault was yours?
	After that conversation?
	Yeah.
	In some ways, yes.
	And then...
	After some time passed, I was like, no, they were just completely closed again.
	I mean, like you said, if you care about the relationship, you can try again until you give up.
	And that was just, I guess, my first attempt to get through to them.
	Because obviously, I don't want to lose them.
	I mean, I just want to actually...
	Have a, create a relationship that was never there.
	You know you can't do that, right?
	By myself, no.
	No, you, I mean, just, maybe it can happen, I don't know.
	I mean, but you can't do that, right?
	You cannot create a relationship that you want with someone else.
	That's another confusing part that you mentioned a couple of times where you said that you can't Change people, but then how is it different, for example, if I listen to your show and I feel that I've been changed by what you said?
	My words don't have the power to change you at all.
	I mean, the ideas that you bring up...
	They have no power to change you.
	I'm not trying to be tricky or facetious, right?
	But they have no power to change you.
	Look, some people listen to or read my stuff and they hate everything that I'm doing.
	Some people think it's useful.
	Some people think it's okay.
	Some people say, well, I like the economic stuff, but I don't really like the relationship stuff.
	And other people say, well, I like the relationship stuff, but I don't really like the political stuff.
	And other people say, well, I like the truth.
	As if you can slice and dice philosophy.
	As if you can just say, well, truth, the reason, and evidence, they apply here, here, and maybe a little corner of that.
	But everything else, I want to go back to whim-worshipping.
	Because what they don't say is, they might say to me, Steph, you're applying a principle over here in economics, but you're applying the opposite principle over here in relationships.
	That's A fine and fair and helpful and useful criticism.
	And if they make the case effectively, I have learned I will go public with it and I will apologize for any confusion that my previous arguments have made.
	But people don't do that.
	They still imagine.
	How?
	I don't know.
	But they still imagine that philosophy is like a picky, choosy philosophy.
	Where you can just focus on one aspect of life with philosophy and then you don't have to focus on others.
	It's medieval.
	It's ridiculous.
	But I mean, emotionally it makes sense because I understand trauma, blah, blah, blah, right?
	But literally it's saying, well, I'm comfortable with physics applying to Spain or maybe northeast Spain, but not southern Spain and certainly not the ocean, right?
	Or maybe near the shore, but then further out, no physics apply.
	I mean, the whole point of science is it's not a picky-choosy kind of goddamn thing.
	And the whole point of philosophy is it's not a picky-choosy...
	If it's a buffet, it's not philosophy!
	If you can pick and choose it, it's not philosophy.
	And, I mean, religious people understand this, right?
	I like three of the ten commandments, right?
	But the others, they don't really do it for me.
	Well, no, it's not a buffet, right?
	I mean, and the same thing is true with philosophy, right?
	And people say, well, I agree with Steph about some stuff.
	I don't agree with Steph about other stuff.
	Like it's about agreeing or disagreeing.
	I like Steph's taste in singers.
	I don't like his taste in desserts, right?
	Like, you can't just pick and choose stuff that anybody says who's making a universal proposition.
	Right?
	Non-aggression principle, well, I like it in politics.
	I don't like it in spanking.
	Sorry!
	That's not an option!
	That's not an option!
	Too picky-choosy, self-indulgent, buffet-style, what you like and what you don't like.
	I'm not talking about you in particular.
	I'm just...
	People make this mistake a lot, right?
	And there are principles...
	No, let me just finish.
	Then I'll shut up, right?
	So the principles are actually quite simple.
	We can love people who treat us well.
	We cannot love people who treat us badly.
	Because treating someone badly is not a virtue.
	And we can only love virtue.
	So...
	That's, I don't think, controversial, right?
	I mean, there's no marriage therapist that I could imagine in the world who would say to a woman being beaten or humiliated or verbally abused or completely ignored by her husband, you just need to love him more.
	You need to work at making him happier.
	I mean, that would be sadistic in the extreme to say to someone, right?
	And so in the same way, I say, if anyone, I don't care if they're your priest, your God, your father, your mother, your Siamese twin coming out of your elbow or your ass, I don't care.
	If someone is treating you badly, that is not good for you.
	And the solution is not, you be so great that you both become better.
	That's not a realistic solution.
	My words cannot change you.
	You can accept or reject my arguments and Based upon whether they are rationally sound and empirically valid.
	Now, I have worked really damn hard to make my arguments empirical and rational.
	And the case that if you have people who treat you badly in your life, they will be a human shield against people who treat you well is pretty ironclad.
	And if it's not true, see, the way I always look at it is if it's not true, then we should really apply it to marriage, right?
	And we should start saying to women who are being put down by their husbands or beaten or ignored or whatever, right?
	Well, you know, you got to stay with him because he needs you and he's been your husband for 20 years, for heaven's sakes, and you just have to work to love him more and so on.
	I mean, this is the advice they gave to women like 200 fucking years ago.
	And it was abusive advice.
	And I view the parent-child relationship, and this is not just my made-up perspective, it is the least voluntary relationship.
	At least the woman who got married chose to get married.
	We don't choose our parents.
	The highest standards of behavior are required for parents and no one else.
	There is no one else whose standards of behavior need be higher than parents, and so often parents get away with the lowest possible standards of behavior ever.
	I bet you your brave and meritorious father was not out hitting waiters who brought his food late, was not out hitting cops who pulled him over when he didn't think he was speeding or was in a hurry.
	He didn't hit people at the Department of Motor Vehicles who were slow in processing his application and all these kinds of things, right?
	He didn't call up the mayor's office or go to the mayor's office and say you're a stupid lazy bastard when he felt his taxes were too high and the services weren't good enough.
	It was only with his children.
	That he behaved in the worst way.
	I mean, I can virtually guarantee that.
	And that means two things.
	That means that he has the lowest standards where he should have the highest standards.
	It also means that he has the capacity to act better.
	He just chooses not to do so with his children.
	I bet you he didn't hit his employees for having fights or conflicts or disagreements.
	I bet you if a client didn't want to pay a bill, he didn't march over there and key their car or stab their tires or smack them on the ass.
	Right?
	So my...
	The sort of fundamental point is that I get that people want to get away with bad behavior.
	Of course they do.
	I understand that.
	People who rob banks don't want to get caught.
	I mean, of course.
	Absolutely.
	That's why we have detectives and police and clues and fingerprints and eyewitnesses.
	People who do wrong don't want to suffer the consequences.
	Of doing wrong.
	I get that, of course.
	Everybody who forgets about an exam would love to get an A. Everybody who smokes would love to not get sick from smoking.
	Everybody would love cheesecake, which didn't make you fat.
	Right?
	Everybody wants to do bad things and get away with it.
	Of course they do.
	My only argument is, why should we let them?
	I wasn't allowed to get away with anything, quote, bad as a child.
	If I hit another kid, I got a detention.
	I never did, but the kids who hit other kids, they got detention.
	The kids who didn't study for exams got a fucking F. Sometimes they got stuck behind a year, lost a year of their life.
	Sometimes they weren't even allowed to graduate from high school if they were disruptive or problematic.
	And so I was brought up, well, you do bad things, you suffer the consequences.
	And if people are bad parents and hit their children and put their children down and yell at their children and frighten their children and bully their children and ignore their children and provoke fights among siblings and use all of these ridiculous, outdated, terrible and abusive parenting practices, of course they want to get away with it.
	Of course they want all the benefits of having been good parents without actually being good parents.
	Of course they do.
	Like a guy who rapes wants to have the benefit of sex without actually having to be an attractive person who seduces women on a voluntary basis.
	I get it.
	The guy who steals wants to get whatever he's stolen without the hassle of having to work for it.
	I get it.
	I understand it.
	I mean, nobody needs to explain that to me.
	And parents who parent abusively want to get away with it.
	Of course they do.
	They want to not be confronted about it.
	They want to not go back over the past.
	They don't want to admit mistakes.
	They don't want to admit they did things that are wrong.
	I get that.
	I totally understand that.
	I completely understand that.
	It makes perfect sense to me.
	And if you want, if you have these kinds of people in your life, I don't care.
	Let them get away with it.
	I don't think you should expose your children to unrepentant, abusive parents.
	But if you, it's your life.
	I mean, you can let them get away with it if you want.
	Just be conscious of the fact that you're letting them get away with it.
	Don't say, I don't remember, or make up excuses or whatever.
	Just say, well, my parents don't like being confronted about having been bad parents, so I'm going to not confront them because I want to please my parents.
	Well, okay, fine.
	I mean, the guy who arrests the bank robber, the cop who arrests the bank robber, will make the bank robber very happy if he lets him go.
	And gives him some more money and goes over for dinner and becomes his best friend and gives him more money.
	I get it.
	The shoplifter is very happy if the alarm doesn't go off when they leave the store with the tag on the iPad or piece of clothing or whatever.
	I get it.
	People are very happy to not get caught.
	And there's a lot of pressure on adult kids to not bring problems in the family to the attention of the parents.
	I get that too.
	I mean, it's all ridiculously hypocritical because almost all harm towards children is predicated on children being moral agents who are completely responsible for their behavior.
	And then you, as a child, you grow up and then you say to your parents, well, you were moral agents and you were perfectly responsible for your behavior.
	Nope!
	That's disrespectful, right?
	I mean, come on.
	I know it's all nonsense.
	I mean, of course it is, right?
	So my suggestion is, I mean, I think that it sounds like you have some issues with your parents.
	I think that it sounds like your parents did some things that were not great.
	In terms of parenting.
	And I understand that.
	I do some things that are not great in terms of parenting.
	But at least I have the balls to say, you know what, I did something wrong.
	I'm really sorry.
	That was rude of me.
	That was unkind of me.
	I apologize.
	Here's why.
	And then I make a commitment to not do it again.
	You know, basic human decency 101.
	I don't fog.
	I don't turn it around.
	I don't make my daughter feel bad for bringing it up.
	I don't pull all of these fucking two-year-old emotional bag of bullshit tricks out when I've done something wrong.
	I just manfully or adultly stand up and say, well, you know, I'm so sorry.
	That was quite rude.
	I didn't mean to snap at you.
	That was not nice.
	I completely apologize.
	I won't let it happen again.
	And, you know, how are you doing?
	You know, was that surprising for you?
	I mean, you know, you just own up.
	To the stuff that you do.
	And I don't know why it's...
	I mean, I don't really have a bad conscience about much, if anything, in my life.
	I think I've lived a decent and honorable life, and I don't have any big, oh my God, these terrible things.
	I've never hit anyone.
	I've never stolen stuff as an adult.
	I don't call people names.
	I don't put people down.
	I don't...
	I mean, I don't know why it's so hard for people.
	I mean, I can't imagine what it's like to live with a really shitty conscience, like to have treated your kids badly for 20 years.
	I mean, I can't imagine what that would be like.
	And maybe that's why it's just such a house of cards away.
	You know, I don't know.
	I can't even guess, really.
	I'm just going to imagine.
	But it does seem to be ridiculously hard for people to say, you know, that was really bad, what I did.
	And I'm sorry.
	And, you know, let me read some books.
	Let me listen to the shows that you're listening to, like this one or whatever you're listening to that is Bringing you to this realization.
	I'd like to pay for some therapy for you.
	I'd like to take some therapy for myself.
	Let's heal this thing up.
	Let's make it better.
	Let's learn.
	Let's advance.
	Let's grow.
	And let's do what we can to prevent this sort of cycle from recurring.
	I don't know why that's so hard for people.
	I mean, I genuinely...
	I'm not being facetious.
	I genuinely don't know why.
	I could only imagine that they've got such terrible consciences that to admit any kind of fault is to shred...
	The false ego, the shell that has devoured the true self, right?
	We put armor up to protect us, and then we turn into ghosts in the metal.
	And the defenses that grow up to protect the personality overwhelm and destroy the personality, which is why I always get these robots.
	They're supposed to be our servants.
	They rise up and destroy us.
	I mean, this is all a metaphor for, I guess, defenses that overwhelm any original personality, and then there's nothing left but defenses.
	So, I've got to move on to another caller, and I'm sorry if this was unsatisfying to some degree, but my suggestion is, you know, write down your moral rules.
	Write down your standards for yourself.
	Compare them to everyone in your life.
	Compare them to you.
	Compare them to your parents.
	Compare them to your wife, to your kids, to your friends, your cousins, your aunts, your uncles, the guy who delivers pizza, the guy who fixes your car.
	You have some moral rules, right?
	Don't initiate force.
	Don't abuse.
	Don't mistreat.
	Don't whatever, right?
	I mean, except in self-defense or whatever, right?
	But you just – you write up these moral rules and you just create a little – I mean, I did this in therapy.
	Here are my own moral rules.
	Where are people in this?
	Empathy, sensitivity, compassion, concern, love, capacity to negotiate, capacity to find – capacity to pursue and find win-win negotiations and all of that.
	That's what you do.
	And you just see, you know, draw a line.
	This is my moral standards, right?
	I mean, human fallibility, there's no 100% or whatever.
	Where am I? Well, you know, I'm sort of surfing them.
	I'm a little above.
	I dip a little bit below.
	Other people in my life dip a little below and above and so on.
	And then lots of other people who were in my life, I mean, they're just, you know, I had...
	I had to, like, dig a trench halfway to China to roll the paper down far enough, and I had to make my decisions accordingly.
	So I hope that helps.
	I'm sorry for the filibustering, but Mike, if we could move on to the next corner.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	All right, David, you're up next.
	David, go ahead.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	I want to talk about UPB. All right, let's do it, brother.
	Okay, I was sort of hoping to get your elevator pitch for UPB, the quick and dirty, short and sweet version, because I have trouble summarizing it for myself, but I just found something great on page 100 that sort of started, I think is a good starting place.
	It says, the UPB framework validates moral propositions by demanding that they be internally consistent and universal in terms of time, place, and individuals.
	Yeah, I'll give you the elevator pitch.
	So, all moral claims claim universality.
	All moral claims, all moral propositions claim universality.
	Whether it's explicit or implicit, they differ from aesthetics in the universality of the claim.
	And the claim is universally preferable behavior.
	So it distinguishes itself from physics, and physics is universally measurable behavior or universally detectable behavior or something like that.
	Physics theory is universal by nature.
	If it's not universal, it's not physics.
	And for moral propositions, universally preferable behavior is proposed.
	And UPB focuses on that and says, okay, well, if you make a claim of universally preferable behavior, we must test whether it is universally preferable behavior.
	In other words, whether the behavior can be enacted universally by all people at all times who are moral agents, you know, fetuses, blah, blah, blah, some gray areas here and there.
	But basically, if you're going to make a moral claim, Then it has to be universal.
	It has to be preferable universally, and it has to be behavior, not thought, for reasons I sort of go into in the book.
	So if you say thou shalt steal, well, it cannot be validated according to universally preferable behavior.
	It cannot be universally preferable behavior for everyone to steal because stealing is the act of taking someone's property who doesn't want you to take it.
	In other words, it's asymmetric, right?
	Someone has to want your iPad and you have to not want them to take your iPad in order for the theft to have occurred.
	And therefore, universality is broken in that with regards to the iPad, two people have opposite moral desires or opposite preferences.
	One is to keep, one is to steal.
	And the stealing can only be achieved if the person wants to keep.
	If you want to give it away, it's charity or something like that.
	So thou shalt steal cannot be sustained in terms of universality.
	It's logically completely impossible.
	Thou shalt rape.
	Rape is unwanted.
	Therefore it cannot be universalized to all people.
	Thou shalt murder.
	Murder is unwanted.
	Cannot be universalized to all people.
	Thou shalt assault.
	Cannot be universalized.
	Since assault is something definitely not wanted, which is why we don't charge people in a boxing ring with assault, right?
	Because they're there voluntarily and it's not unwanted.
	You may want to win, but you can't charge the person with assault.
	That's implicit, right?
	So, all moral propositions claim universality.
	All moral propositions which fail the test of universality cannot be moral propositions at all.
	The moment your moral proposition fails the test of universality, it is no longer in the realm of ethics.
	It is no longer a moral proposition.
	It's exactly the same in physics.
	If you say the law of gravity is universal, And then something, except for these three rocks, well then it's no longer a physics theory, right?
	Then it's, well, quite madness, right?
	So, yeah, all UPB does is say, okay, well if you're making a moral claim, it has to be universal.
	If it fails the universality test, it's an invalid moral theory.
	Does that help at all?
	Yes, to some extent.
	I think it's also interesting, though, that The realm of property.
	At the high level of abstraction, we can say, okay, stealing is bad, but then the universality breaks down as in, okay, this is my car.
	It's okay for me to drive it.
	Sorry, you can't drive it.
	You don't own it.
	It would be wrong for you to drive the car.
	I'm sorry, I don't.
	First of all, look, no, hang on, hang on.
	You've got to be precise, right?
	I just gave you a whole description here and then you went back into random land when it came to your language.
	Stealing is bad.
	That's not moral language.
	That's like naughty child language, right?
	I mean, that's not moral language.
	It's not philosophical language, right?
	It's like me saying, well, I've refuted Einstein's theory of relativity because relativity is bad.
	You wouldn't get far in a physics paper with that as your sole argument.
	So it's not stealing is bad.
	It's that violations of property rights cannot be universalized.
	And therefore, all moral theories which are predicated on violations of property rights are invalid.
	Okay.
	So the universality is at a different level.
	It's sort of like saying, okay, rocks behave differently on the surface of the Earth than they would out in outer space, but it's still, there's one theory of gravity that explains everything in a universal way.
	Yeah, if I'm going to make a claim in physics that my theory applies to all matter, Then I cannot simultaneously exclude certain matter, right?
	I can't say all mammals are warm-blooded except for these five amphibians.
	They're also mammals.
	Because, you know, the first thing is, well, wait a second, which is it?
	If all mammals are warm-blooded, but these cold-blooded animals are also mammals, your definition makes no sense, and you need to start again, right?
	If I say two and two make four, except in the Andes, where two and two make a starfish, people would say, well, why the arbitrary exception?
	What the hell?
	Is it a different dimension?
	It's like, no.
	No, it's the same material, physical, reality, subject to all the same laws of physics and logic.
	Then they'd say, well, if you believe that two and two make four, except in the Andes, where two and two make a starfish, then you're You don't really understand what thinking is and you don't really know.
	Like you shouldn't be talking about this stuff.
	you should probably be learning how to tie shoelaces together in a supervised facility, right?
	I don't mean you.
	I just mean like somebody who would make that claim about math, right?
	Yes.
	I had another point.
	I should have made notes.
	No, listen, this is horribly difficult stuff.
	I mean, I've had 30 years and it still makes my brain fart fairly regularly, so it is challenging stuff.
	The thing that was always throwing me off was that it wasn't like, okay, here are the assumptions, here's the logic, and here's the conclusion.
	It's more like, oh, this is a process.
	There are moral propositions.
	We apply the process to the moral proposition to say, okay, it fails or it passes, but...
	Is there...
	No, but you see, morality is generally...
	Sorry, hang on a sec.
	Sorry.
	Just sort of explain the challenge, just for those who are less familiar with it.
	I'm sure you're quite familiar with it.
	But morality is owned by religion and consequentialism.
	And both of those are two sides of the same coin.
	So religion says, do this or God throws you in hell.
	And if you do this, God puts you in heaven.
	I mean, that's just fundamentally consequentialism, right?
	It's not a rational argument.
	It's not reason and evidence.
	It's just, you know, Pascal's wager, right?
	Some seriously, eternally bad shit's going to happen to you if you don't do X, right?
	And in the secular world...
	Trust me, I'm God, I'm smart, I know what you should be doing.
	Well, yes, except there's still always...
	Just do what I say, don't think about it.
	Right.
	Right, which is why you get, like, shunning in religious communities.
	You know, that's just a mark of a bad argument, right?
	Like, I'm shunning you for disagreeing with me.
	Right?
	And, you know, so that's one form of consequentialism.
	And consequentialism then also transfers itself to the secular world, where you say, well, I, you know, taxation is the initiation of force.
	Well, if there's no taxation, the poor will starve, the sick will die in the streets, and there will be no roads, right?
	There will just be giant gaping chasms in them.
	Because roads are built by companies hired by governments and nobody else could hire them.
	So this is just consequentialism.
	And consequentialism has no place in philosophy.
	Consequentialism has no place in philosophy and it's really hard for us to get that in terms of ethics because all we ever hear about is consequentialism.
	Do this or I'll spank you.
	Do this or be nice or we're going home.
	You know, kids, stop fighting with each other.
	I'm turning this car around and I'm driving it home, right?
	Do this, finish your homework or you'll get a detention.
	Pass this test or you don't get to the next grade, right?
	Do what the professor says or you don't get your degree.
	It's all just consequentialism.
	A consequentialism has no place in philosophy.
	And to understand that, you just need to understand the argument that says the theory of relativity is incorrect and Because it might lead to an atomic bomb.
	Well, that may or may not be true, but it has no bearing on whether the theory of relativity is correct or incorrect, right?
	It's like saying Newtonian physics is incorrect because it allows people to sail over into the New World where they kill the Incans.
	No.
	The consequentialism has no bearing.
	No bearing whatsoever.
	On the truth or falsehood of a proposition.
	And people, because we're so mired in consequentialism, which is the opposite of philosophy.
	Consequentialism is the opposite of philosophy, which is religion and statism are both the opposites of philosophy because one relies on lies and the other relies on force, both of which are the opposite of philosophy.
	And so it's very hard for us to think of ethics outside of consequentialism.
	It's really hard for philosophy to rise up from its 3,000-year grave and attempt to take back ethics into the realm of reason.
	Because it's all just consequentialism.
	Nightmare scenarios, catastrophe scenarios, massive bribery scenarios.
	You'll go to jail.
	You'll go to heaven.
	You'll burn in hell.
	I mean, it's all...
	It's all just emotional aggression and manipulation that is currently in the realm of ethics.
	So the idea of simply returning it to the realm of reason and evidence is really, really hard for us.
	I just really wanted to sort of point that out.
	Okay, but the theory itself doesn't really generate propositions that are For our candidates for being universally preferable, it's just sort of like there are ideas out there in the culture and it says, yes, this one passes or this one fails.
	Am I correct?
	I'm sorry.
	I don't understand what you just said.
	I'm not saying it doesn't make sense.
	I just don't understand it.
	Okay.
	Stealing is not universally preferred.
	No, again, you have to get used to describing it in the right way.
	Stealing could be universally preferred.
	In other words, everyone in the world could wake up tomorrow and just decide to become a thief.
	I'm not saying it's likelihood, but it's possible, right?
	What I'm saying is that stealing cannot be universally preferable.
	Stealing cannot be universally preferable.
	And it's not consequentialist.
	It's not because, well, if everyone steals, nobody will produce anything and we'll all starve to death.
	I mean, that may be true, but it's irrelevant to the falsehood of the proposition that stealing is universally preferable.
	Stealing cannot be universally preferable because in order for it to be stealing, somebody has to not want to be stolen from.
	Therefore, it breaks the test of universality.
	Stealing cannot be universally preferable, and therefore we should steal or stealing is good or stealing is universally preferable is false.
	It cannot work logically.
	It does not work logically, and it doesn't really take that long to figure that out.
	It's just that, again, we have so much noise from the consequentialists and the fearmongers about ethics.
	Okay, but my question is about where do the universally preferable, the propositions about universally preferable behavior come from?
	And it's not sort of springing from the theory, it's sort of, you find statements sort of lying around in culture, and you apply the method to them, and the method says, oh, this one passes, and that can be true, or no, this one fails, it's false.
	Am I anywhere near?
	Yeah.
	Look, I mean, thou shalt not steal.
	Okay.
	Stealing cannot be universally preferable behavior, right?
	That's the sort of Ten Commandments, right?
	Thou shalt not kill.
	Murder cannot be universally preferable behavior.
	Now, you can universally respect property rights.
	Everyone can do that.
	Because that doesn't require a contradiction like stealing does.
	One person respecting, one person violating for it to occur.
	Therefore, the person who's violating cannot be respecting and the person who's respecting cannot be violating.
	So respect for property rights, for the inviolability of another person's chosen physical boundaries, you know, rape or punching or stabbing or murder or whatever.
	So respect for persons and property can be universally achieved.
	Not in practice.
	But the proposition works logically.
	Respect property.
	Everyone can achieve that.
	Guy in a coma can achieve that.
	He's not stealing from anyone, right?
	And therefore, it passes the first test of logical consistency.
	I'm sorry, go ahead.
	I was just using that as an example.
	And so there are a certain number of these propositions that would pass and be considered true.
	By the method.
	Do we know the complete set of those?
	Well, I don't know for sure, but I know that we have enough of a set for about five generations of hard work, and that's enough for me.
	You know, it's like saying, do we have enough bricks to build ten cities?
	Well, we have enough bricks to build eight cities, so let's get going.
	Right?
	Okay.
	Well, I was just curious.
	No, no, and that's a fine point.
	And, you know, where, you know, if we discover semi-sentient crystals living on Betelgeuse's planets, one of Betelgeuse's planets, maybe, you know, whatever, right?
	But we've got enough to do at the moment with spanking in the Federal Reserve and national debts and taxes and wars and military and police and the war on drugs.
	We've got enough to keep us busy for a couple of generations at least.
	So, I mean, maybe there's more, but I think to keep looking rather than to act is not that responsible.
	And I missed it if it was in your version of the elevator pitch, but I think there needs to be this idea of if you disprove UPB with logic, that's self-detonating because somehow logic presupposes UPB. Well, to disprove is to use universality, right?
	Look, I can't prove that one jazz player is better than another.
	I mean, you know, assuming they're pretty good, right?
	And I can't prove that one song is, quote, better than another.
	You might appeal to popularity and so on, right?
	But you can prove and disprove mathematical and physics theories and rational proofs.
	You can prove and disprove.
	So if somebody uses the word proof, then they're talking about universal absolutes.
	Proof.
	Boom.
	Universal absolutes.
	Not, I like Johnny Coltrane better than Eddie Winter or whatever, right?
	To mix my genres, right?
	I mean, but this is proof.
	Somebody says proof, bang.
	Universality, logic, rigor, absolutes, they're right there.
	They're not talking about pistachio versus Rocky Road ice cream.
	And so when somebody says, I'm disproving UPB, which requires universality, what they're saying is, it is universally preferable behavior to reject universally preferable behavior, which is a complete logic fail, right?
	I mean, it takes a certain level of emotional trauma that's pretty high to not notice that logical failure.
	And I'm not saying that's you, right?
	But people that are pretty traumatized and they should not be, I mean, you should not be in the thinking business until you've resolved some childhood issues because we know for a simple, as close to proven as these things can be, scientific fact in the realm of psychology, is that trauma interferes with clear thinking.
	Childhood trauma, early trauma, interferes with clear thinking and leads people to To ex post facto justify the emotional effects of their trauma.
	That's been well studied for decades.
	It's one of the most foundational things in understanding how people don't think.
	And so this is why I encourage people so strongly to go into therapy.
	Even if you haven't had some big ass traumatic childhood, go into therapy because you want to make sure that you can think clearly.
	Which means that you need to deal with any possible hiccups And the most dangerous hiccup in people's thinking, which usually overthrows the seat of their reason completely, is trauma.
	And even if you had a great family, you might have been exposed to a whole bunch of religion.
	You might have had a crappy public school, or technically, which is just called a public school.
	You might have had to conform to irrational people in university.
	You might have had bad bosses.
	You might have had an illness.
	There's something, usually, for just about everyone, that has been problematic in the world as it is, because we live in a state of violence.
	And so if you want to think clearly, then self-knowledge is the key.
	And there's no better way that I know of to deal with trauma than really good talk therapy.
	So this is why I'm constantly encouraging people to go to therapy, particularly if you want to be really good at thinking.
	I mean, if you just want to be, you know, some average person or whatever, then you don't You can sort of get by without.
	But if you want to get into philosophy, you need to deal with trauma because trauma is what gets in your way of clear thinking.
	Trauma leads you to confirmation bias.
	It leads you to avoid certain things.
	I've demonstrated this countless times in this show.
	When I start pressing people about stuff that's emotionally difficult, what happens?
	They fog out.
	They can't think.
	They can't respond.
	They don't remember.
	Their whole brain shuts down.
	It's like watching a whole city after a media strike on the power grid.
	It all goes down.
	And so, if somebody doesn't notice that when they say, well, UPB is invalid, or I've disproven UPB, Now, this is not to say that there may be, there are arguments in the book that I think are not as good as they could be.
	I'm sort of working on a UPB 2.0 in my eight seconds of spare time a day, but not, this is a weak argument for it, which I, you know, yes, there are some in there which I definitely would revise upwards.
	But if somebody says UPB is invalid, then they're saying it is universally preferable behavior to reject the validity of universally preferable behavior.
	Now, A little bit, then they're just traumatized.
	And this is an emotional defense.
	UPB is very threatening.
	You know, earlier I was talking about, you write down your moral standards and see where people in your life fit.
	Like seriously, I mean, everybody, write down and just do it.
	It takes you 20 minutes, might save your damn life.
	Might save your marriage, might prevent you from a bad marriage, might, you know, prevent decades of misery.
	You write down your moral standards.
	Where do you fit?
	Where do other people fit?
	UPB, by universalizing ethics, throws a lot of people's personal relationships into pretty sharp relief and takes us out of the fog of relativism and consequentialism into the clear sunlit path of reason.
	And when the light goes on, not everything around us that is illuminated is beautiful.
	Some of it is terrifying.
	So, anyway, that's just my thoughts about it.
	So, The universality of the logic is sort of, okay, here's the syllogism, here's the flow of the logic.
	It works the same way for everybody.
	Nobody's going to say, oh, this step doesn't work for me because I have a different logic.
	Yeah, there's no different logic.
	The moment they say different logic, then it's no longer ethical.
	There's no longer a moral thing.
	As soon as somebody says, ethics is relative...
	They're saying science is subjective.
	It's a contradiction.
	Ethics is not subjective.
	Taste is subjective.
	Right?
	I mean, there's this guy on Canadian TV, you know, put on some dark sunglasses and Google the name Don Cherry.
	I mean, you will see suits that leap out of a polyester flaming kaleidoscopic hell and literally rip your eyeballs out with synthetic fingernails.
	And people love this guy's clothing.
	And, I mean, this is the guy who, like, you should not have invented high-definition, let alone color TVs, just for this guy's outfits.
	Don Cherry.
	And, you know, taste is subjective.
	I get it.
	Absolutely.
	My daughter wanted to buy a shirt today that I did not think was exactly pretty.
	Thanks for that.
	Yeah, but she loves it.
	Did you have a look?
	Oh my God.
	I haven't seen him in a while, but I was eating dinner the other day with my family and he came on the TV and I was just like, oh man, they should warn you.
	You know, for those of you with retinas, this man's suits are about to...
	Anyway, so the moment somebody says, I have a different logic or it's subjective or whatever, or it's relativistic or it's cultural, then they just, they don't know what ethics is.
	Ethics is universal.
	Ethics is universal.
	And if you're saying it's subjective or cultural or relative or whatever, right?
	It's just wrong.
	It's just like saying math is a personal preference.
	It's not.
	I mean, once you say math, it's no longer a personal preference.
	And if you're saying personal preference, I like the shape of the number eight, personal preference.
	Eight is two times four, not a personal preference.
	Does that help at all?
	Yes.
	Thank you.
	You're very welcome.
	Thank you for calling in.
	Right, next up is Stefan.
	Stefan to talk to Stefan.
	Hello.
	Good evening, Stefan.
	Sexy, how are you?
	I'm well, how are you doing?
	Oh, yeah.
	I want to thank you and Mike for hosting the show and for putting it out on YouTube where I found it.
	And it has helped me a great deal in acknowledging all these things with the child abuse, what you call abuse, and how serious it is.
	I know I've studied psychology a little bit, and I know how serious it is, but you confirm my thoughts and my ideas about how serious it actually is.
	And I just needed to hear that.
	Someone say it, right?
	Well, I do have to.
	I live in Denmark.
	I born and raised in Denmark, and you know how it works in Scandinavia, right?
	Socialism and feminism and everything.
	And I find it hard to know these things.
	It's like watching the movie Matrix, right?
	You know, The Matrix.
	And all these concepts that apply to it.
	And then suddenly you know that all these things exist in the society and you don't know how to deal with it.
	So I've had this rollercoaster ride up and down with feelings.
	I've been quite depressed lately because I see all these things and I realize all these things.
	And no one else I know accepts these things or anybody else in the society accepts these things, right?
	The truth.
	And they all know that.
	They all think that socialism and the state is needed, and everything is just ideal.
	You just need to tweak it just a little bit, just a little bit, right?
	And when you say these things on your channel, and I watch, for example, Rocking Mr.
	E, and he tells these truths, and I just see, whoa, it makes sense.
	It's logics, right?
	Universals.
	But now I'm quite confused.
	I don't know what to do with it.
	What do you do with these things?
	When you have this knowledge, what do you do?
	That was my first question, right?
	I know it's a big question, but how do you implement it into your life while still living in the broken society, so to say?
	Yeah, I mean, I was just talking about consequentialism.
	There is no There's no answer that's relevant to philosophy, what you do with the truth, right?
	I mean, there's emotional requirements.
	We're social beings, which is one of the reasons why socialism has a kind of temptation for us, right?
	It's easy to project the family onto the state, or it's easy to project charity onto the state and so on, right?
	So I don't have any particular...
	Answer.
	Other than to ask you if you could go back in time and not consume any of the material that you find vital but troubling, would you?
	I don't get it.
	Can you repeat it in an old way?
	Well, if you could go back and take the blue pill, would you?
	Well, that's the big question, right?
	I've always, like they say, they say this like a splinter in your mind.
	I've always had this knowledge or this feeling that something was wrong.
	I just didn't know what because no one has ever brought it to my attention that it could be wrong.
	Everyone is just one way track, right?
	So it's a bit strange to now know these things and try to implement them in my everyday life.
	Because as I am now, I was studying last month and I dropped out now and it feels a little bit...
	What do you call it?
	I feel a little bit distressed.
	I want to start my own company, but it's all these rules, right?
	The state makes rules.
	And it's hard to keep track on taxes and all of these things.
	And it just seems all of these things that I have to deal with, it's quite hard, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	And it's not going to get easier for a while, for sure.
	No.
	That's the big problem, right?
	So, of course, I can deal with my life.
	I just need to get over it.
	I just need to...
	If you...
	I know it's hard to put it in a sentence or something, but if you could get me some kind of...
	Yeah.
	Just what to do.
	Just take it seriously.
	Like, should I start...
	Implementing in my life or, you know, as I said, it's living in a completely another world than what we're talking about here, right?
	Everyone is acting in the opposite way.
	And it feels quite conflicting in my head, right?
	So I need to be living in a world that's not functioning or is not the way that I would think it should be or...
	Any logic way.
	So when I think about things, I think logics.
	But every time I have to do anything in the society, there are these rules and these barriers.
	I need to overcome all of these barriers by thinking in a completely different way.
	You've gone through this yourself, right?
	Yes, yes.
	Okay, but I'll give you...
	I'll give you the message in a bottle that I'd throw backwards in time to myself if I could, and hopefully it will be of some help to you.
	And the first is, if you're going to do it, then do it.
	If you're going to go for the truth, go for the truth.
	Don't go halfway.
	Don't try and live in both worlds.
	Don't be half matrix, half static, half binary, half illusion, half reality, half Morpheus, half Satan.
	If you're going to do it, then do it.
	What I mean by that is, if you're going to live in the truth, find people who encourage the truth in you.
	If you're going to hold reason and evidence in As your standards, find people who will support you and who you can support in the pursuit of reason and evidence.
	There's a great line.
	I'm going to look it up.
	There's a great line that always struck me from a character I've never found, oh, I guess I could say, particularly sympathetic.
	And the line is, don't hang back with the brutes.
	And let me just get the speech.
	There we go.
	This is from, I mean, a great...
	And industry kind of desire, Blanche Dubois, who's a complete hysteric.
	She is, I mean, her sister is a sexual addiction, basically, to a complete brute of a man named Stanley Kowalski, who was actually modeled after a guy that Tennessee Williams knew.
	In the army, and she has...
	I don't know if I can actually find...
	I'm just going to see if I can find the speech here.
	He said he was Bronson Dubois, which is not true.
	My mother was Blanche Dubois, but anyway...
	Anyway, so basically, I don't know.
	I'm not going to badly quote the speech, but she's basically saying that there's something higher, something greater, something more beautiful in humanity that we're striving towards.
	And in this great grand march to whatever noble future we're trying to carve out for humanity, don't hang back with the brutes.
	Don't hang back with the brutes.
	And I wasted years of my life hanging back with the brutes, trying to civilize apes, trying to reason and With the broken-brained robots.
	And it was truly casting my pearls before swine.
	And it was a massive waste of time.
	You know what they say.
	Don't try and pretty up a pig.
	The pig doesn't end up any prettier.
	You've just wasted your time.
	Also known as don't wrestle in shit with the pig.
	You get covered in shit and the pig likes it.
	So I... Was not a triage-based life form.
	I am now a triage-based life form, right?
	So my day-to-day, I was in Toronto, and I was chatting with a guy who helped out with some FDR work.
	Never met him before.
	My daughter overheard us chatting on Skype, and she invited him to To come for a coffee, because she's four going on 23.
	She invited him to come for a coffee, and she really liked him, and so we ended up all going to the Science Center.
	I mean, I never met the guy.
	He's a really, really nice guy.
	I had a great chat.
	But he's a real thinker and a sensitive guy, and he's going to be a dad soon, so we talked a lot about parents and all of that.
	And yeah, really nice guy.
	Happy to continue what may be a budding friendship.
	Fantastic.
	I'm very much keen on triage.
	Do you have self-knowledge?
	Can you think?
	Are you curious?
	Do you have empathy?
	We know this stuff within a few minutes of meeting someone.
	We know this stuff within a few minutes of meeting someone.
	And if I could have told myself in the past all the things that took so much time, energy, and money, my God, the money I wasted on this shit, I would just say...
	Be a triage-based life form.
	TBLF. Triage-based life form.
	Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate.
	Life is short.
	Find the people you can grow with.
	I don't care if they're in China.
	I don't care if they're on the moon unit station on its way to Mars.
	I don't care where they are.
	Find people.
	Be with those people.
	Grow with those people.
	It doesn't have anything to do with your past.
	Hopefully it will.
	It may be great if the people who raised you were this way inclined too.
	Not at all.
	I used to go every Sunday to my mother's for brunch.
	She used to come.
	I mean, the amount of time that I wasted in a relationship that never could be a relationship.
	In pretense, in habit, in culture, in propaganda, in bromides, in saccharine sweet, empty, flat, tasteless, Hallmark cards of rank sentimentality.
	But she's my mother.
	Well, frankly, screw that.
	Philosophy waits for no man.
	The truth doesn't care about blood and be a triage-based life form.
	Find the people.
	If you can make the people in your life think, if you can encourage them to think, if you can inspire them to think, fantastic.
	But don't wait forever.
	And don't even wait that long.
	How people react to philosophy in the first five minutes, they're genuinely exposed to it.
	It's pretty much how they're going to react to philosophy for the next hundred fucking years.
	When I first started reading philosophy, when I was like 16, I mean, I got my way halfway through crime and punishment when I was about 13 or 14.
	But when I first started really reading philosophy, I was like, oh my fucking God, this thunderclap of supernova sunburst cutting through the fog and the dark and the dismal, empty zombie...
	You know, I was in this matriarchal manner stuffed to the gills with these neurotic and hateful single mothers.
	And it was all just like being surrounded by these lava, by these pre-humans, you know, like, I mean, without even the organic self-respect of an ape.
	And it was just like a beam of light came down a well to a pit of the undead and I got to climb it out.
	And then, oh, I couldn't leave.
	I've got to go save these people.
	I've got to go back in.
	I've got to save them!
	Because they don't know how terrible their lives are going to be if they can't think.
	And I've got to help them.
	And I had a whole world.
	I had a whole world to explore and a whole great group of people to find.
	But no.
	No, no, no.
	I had to keep going back into the pit.
	I had to keep going back.
	I couldn't leave people behind because I thought they were still alive.
	Oops.
	You know, it's like the Marines.
	I mean, if the guy's dead, leave the fucking body behind.
	Go back for a life, guy.
	Yeah, don't go back for a body.
	That's all I was doing.
	Going back and doing CPR on the dead.
	That was my 20s.
	My early 30s.
	Years and years and years, I wasted going back into the pit, going back into the dungeon, giving CPR to skeletons.
	Bringing down defibrillators to urns filled with human dust.
	And I would say...
	Decide quickly.
	Trust your instincts and be with the living.
	Yeah.
	That's what I'm doing.
	I'm trying to follow...
	Follow your heart, people say.
	Do what you think is right and what is right for you, not what people dictate or what people think is right.
	Just do what makes sense for you.
	But it's still extremely hard.
	Extremely.
	Well, look, but it's the same thing that makes you strong for the future, makes you weak to the past.
	I know that sounds like a deepity.
	Sorry, Peter.
	But it is – I know your name is not Peter.
	I'm Peter Pagosi and he gives this great word called Debedee, something that sounds deep but really isn't.
	But no, what I mean is that the reason that you are willing to go through the sacrifices of truth and reason and philosophy is because you have empathy with your future self.
	You have empathy with your future self.
	Now, it's that very empathy, though, that makes you so susceptible by manipulation from the dead.
	It makes you so susceptible to manipulation from the dead.
	So, that which draws you into philosophy is a deep understanding of how your life can improve with reason and evidence.
	It's an ability to see over the literal Mount Everest, the Mount Doom, the fiery promontory...
	Of challenge and strife and insecurity and difficulty that pursuing truth in a world of lies will run you up against.
	It's that very empathy.
	I know what I can have in the future, deep in the future, long from now, far from now.
	To the point where that guy you had to cut off his own arm trapped under a rock.
	Easy.
	It feels like sometimes relative too, right?
	But that very empathy that draws you to go through the hardships and build a life that is supernaturally great, or supernaturally great, it's that same empathy that lends you to be susceptible to the manipulations of the dead.
	And by the dead, I simply mean those Who cannot interact without manipulation.
	Who cannot interact without seeking advantage.
	Who cannot interact without attempting to control others.
	Who have no honest and genuine selfhood to bring to a conversation.
	But everything is a plot.
	Everything is a plan.
	Everything is a snare.
	Everything is a bear trap.
	Oh, actually, not that.
	Bear trap would be much more obvious.
	Some sort of faint, noxious gas that comes into the room.
	People who promise change but don't.
	People who pretend to listen but don't change.
	People who accept what you say and then when they way back to their prior agreement.
	People you have the same debate with again and again.
	Taxation is forced.
	You corner them for three hours.
	Finally, they admit it.
	And the next day, they're reading something about the virtues of taxation as if nothing had happened.
	These are the dead.
	All right.
	This is a mausoleum of the now.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, I see your point.
	I get it.
	Yeah, it's hard, right?
	You say you got all these feelings, you got empathy for your parents, even though you know that these people are never going to listen to you, never going to understand what you're saying, right?
	Because they just don't get it.
	I know what you mean.
	I just need to hear it, right?
	I just need someone to tell me.
	Yeah, look, we need to change the world.
	Right now, empathy is a weakness for the most part.
	Empathy is a weakness for the most part.
	And we need to change the world so that lack of empathy is a weakness.
	Right now, of course, the people who lack empathy, they rule the world.
	Politically, emotionally, in terms of the family.
	And...
	I mean, this is why the idea of sending my daughter to some sort of daycare or something like that...
	I mean, the reality is, as we all know, most of the other kids in that daycare or that school...
	Have been spanked many, many, many times.
	And I'm going to put my daughter in that environment?
	Right now, sensitivity and empathy and curiosity are like having 12,000 laser sniper guides on your forehead.
	It's rubbing marinate on you and jumping into a shark tank.
	Right now, we have to be very careful with our empathy because our empathy is blood in the water for sharks.
	It is something to be tracked by predators.
	It is the scent of a fresh, tasty human meal.
	So we have to be very cautious where, of course, empathy is open-hearted and curious and tends not to be paranoid.
	But right now, empathy is a challenge.
	Empathy can be dangerous.
	Because we care about other people.
	And people who, you know, the sort of solo sociopaths that are in the world, they know that you care.
	Now, they don't care about you, but they know that you care about them.
	And they can make you dance to whatever tune they want if you are not cautious with your empathy.
	If you do not view empathy as a gun, right?
	Right?
	I know that sounds like a contradiction, but a gun is a great tool, but not something you mess around with, not something you play with.
	It's not a toy.
	And empathy can be a great tool for getting you into a great life.
	But it is not a toy, and it is something that needs to be taken very seriously and needs to be guarded from predators, most assiduously.
	And so I think it is really, really important to surround yourself with people who have empathy, otherwise...
	You really are, you know, just carving yourself up and, you know, there's a guy in Germany.
	It's going to be painful.
	Sorry, there's a guy in Germany.
	It's a terrible story.
	He just, there's a cannibalism fetish site.
	And this guy was like, hey, come meet me in my remote cabin because I'm also into cannibalism fetish.
	I wish I could get out of my head the story that comes after that, and I won't even tell you now.
	Look it up if you don't mind being horrified for a day or two.
	But that is what sensitivity and empathy can be like.
	And the only fundamental thing, the last thing I'll say, and I'm sorry for the rant, but the last thing I'll say is you need to know when you are yourself and when you are not yourself.
	You need to know when you are bringing your authentic experience and thoughts and emotions and dreams and passions into a relationship.
	And you also have to know when you are pouring like empty, useless water into the complex containers of other people's irrational expectations.
	You understand?
	You have to know when you are yourself and when you are only meeting irrational expectations.
	You need to know the difference.
	That is your greatest warning sign of imminent exploitation.
	You need to know when you are not being yourself, when you're biting your tongue, when you are withholding your opinions, when you are in an insecure – which means not secure – It doesn't mean nervous.
	It means you are in a non-secure environment.
	You are in a dangerous environment.
	You need to know the difference between those two states of relaxed companionship and cautious conformity.
	That is an absolutely essential difference to know if you are to build a healthy set of relationships in your life.
	I think that's a great way to put it.
	When you talk about your daughter, I get this feeling that she has this kind of relationship with you, but I've never had this kind of relationship with my parents or just rarely anyone, right?
	It never occurs naturally.
	Very few people you can have this be-yourself kind of attitude with.
	It seems strained.
	No, but that's the prize, right?
	Yeah.
	That's what we do it for.
	Right?
	I have people in my life I absolutely love to death.
	One of them actually hosts this show.
	And I can be entirely myself with these people and I hope that they feel they can be entirely themselves with me.
	And that's the prize.
	I wish I could show people what it looks like and then you would recoil from false relationships like I handed you a hot poker.
	But I can only...
	I can show it in my conversations with people.
	I can describe it in anecdotes.
	But I can't tell you what it's like to live in a world where I can be fully myself at almost all times.
	Where I don't have anything to hide.
	I don't have anything to fear.
	I don't have anything, oh, if they find this out or if they know this about me or they find out that I'm an atheist or an anarchist or whatever.
	Like, I just, I don't have those relationships where I have boring, repetitive, empty conflicts where people won't confront me intellectually but just make fun of me on the sidelines.
	Oh, Steph with his crazy beliefs or anything like that.
	I just, I don't.
	I don't.
	And after having...
	A medical near-death experience the whole damn summer.
	I'm really fucking glad that I don't.
	And there is no amount.
	I would rather go live in a van down by the river on a steady diet of government cheese or in a box under a bridge than go back in the greatest palace of Californication.
	Kind of alienation.
	I simply would never.
	I never would go back.
	And if you get a sense of this and if you have the resolution to remain yourself and see who stays, remain yourself and see who stays.
	Or as Sting says, be yourself no matter what they say.
	That is really essential.
	Be yourself.
	Be honest.
	Be open.
	Be connected.
	Be clear.
	Be passionate.
	Be Advocate for the right, advocate for the rational, advocate for the empirical, and see who's left standing.
	And then everybody who's left standing is your future.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	You also answered my second question by doing that, because I spoke to my parents.
	Like you say, you have to deal with these people who raised you, and if you think they didn't do it right, or you felt some kind of need that wasn't given to you, some things, right?
	And I took the chat with my father, who is an alcoholic, and he spent all his life almost, so I've...
	And he just gave me the speech that, well, I had a hard life when I was a child, so blah, blah, blah.
	And I said, well, didn't you plan to have a child, right?
	And he said, well, it just happened.
	And then you just take care of it, and then you just do this and that.
	And I just felt...
	I just felt betrayed in some way, right?
	Like, you didn't think about having a child.
	You didn't think about it was another person.
	It was a person.
	It was a human being, right?
	You have to plan things.
	You don't just do things with human beings and just expect it to work.
	Yeah, and listen, I'm incredibly sorry.
	I'm incredibly sorry that your father's defenses made you feel like an accident.
	It just happened.
	Like, you weren't yearned for and awaited for and all that.
	I mean, that is a terrible thing to do to a child, to basically say, well, you just happened and I didn't plan for it.
	You were an accident, my God.
	I mean, if it was true even, I've got to keep that from a child because it can condition who they are.
	And the other question I would have is, if your father was a bad father...
	Because it just happened.
	Was that ever an excuse that was okay for you when you were a child?
	Did you make a really bad mistake or set fire to something or scratch the car and say, well, it just happened?
	Well, that's okay then.
	Of course not.
	I confronted him with him.
	Of course not.
	It's not okay.
	You're a grown-up man, right?
	You have to take responsibility of what you've done.
	And I kept bugging him with it.
	I kept nagging him just to see what happened.
	He just...
	Just kept this excuse right.
	I was...
	But you have to understand.
	He just stood there and said it like this.
	You have to understand.
	My childhood was not easy.
	So, well, what does that have to do with me?
	So the reality is...
	Hang on.
	So the reality is that he knew his childhood was not easy, right?
	So what steps did he take to counter that?
	Apparently done.
	I mean, my dad was not a great dad, not even a good dad.
	He wasn't even a dad.
	He wasn't even there.
	So I was aware of that before I became a father.
	I was aware that I didn't even have much of a bad impression or a bad template.
	So I had to figure out what kind of father I was going to be because I knew that.
	So when parents say, well, I had a bad child, it's like, okay.
	But that's like me saying, well, I got sick because I ate the chocolate cake when I had diabetes.
	I knew I had diabetes, right?
	So then the question is, if you knew you had diabetes, what the hell are you doing eating a chocolate cake?
	If you knew you had a bad childhood, then why the hell did you get help?
	Why didn't you see a therapist?
	Why didn't you read lots of parenting books?
	You knew you had a bad childhood.
	You can't use it as an excuse later because then you just admit that you knew you had a bad childhood.
	Right?
	Which is like someone saying, I am not responsible for the chocolate cake I ate when I knew I had diabetes and I knew that eating a chocolate cake would damn near kill me.
	Yeah.
	I think it helps a lot what you said.
	It's like these people are just lost.
	You can't do anything, right?
	It's not worth having in your life if they make you sad.
	So...
	Well, it doesn't sound like you're going to get – and look, sorry, just to be clear, people might say stuff in the heat of the moment and then like a day or two later they might be like, oh my god, I can't believe what I said.
	So we can all make mistakes, right?
	But what I found was that this was not – there was never any reality check.
	There was never any bounce back from this kind of behavior.
	It was just, well, that's it.
	I've made my excuses.
	I've made my case.
	There's nothing else to say.
	And wow, I mean, good heavens.
	Not even I'm sorry, right?
	Yeah, or if it's an I'm sorry, it's basically, well, I'm sorry that you're still upset about it.
	In other words, I'm sorry that you're such an immature idiot and such a spineless weakling that you can't get over a few bad things as a child.
	I'm sorry that you're such a sap and such a jellyfish.
	It's all 99% of apologies I ever received in my life are just thinly veiled insults.
	It's just the way it is, right?
	This is the species we have.
	But I'm very sorry.
	I mean, I'm genuinely incredibly sorry, of course, that alcoholism was part of your upbringing.
	That is an incredibly toxic mess, and I think all commercials for alcohol should have the frightened face of a child somewhere in the corner.
	And I'm incredibly sorry that was part of your upbringing, and I'm incredibly sorry that your father did not find it within himself.
	To have the choice, to have the strength of character to deal in a mature and manful way with the criticism that you brought up.
	Yeah.
	But then again, I'm happy that I found someone on the internet, right?
	That's the great technology about it.
	Love it.
	Right.
	Right.
	Self-help.
	But, yeah.
	Surround yourself with people who you can be yourself around, who you can...
	Of course.
	Yeah, you don't get any extra life for betraying yourself.
	You don't get, like, there's no bonus life for self-betrayal.
	It's just shaved off your clock no matter what, right?
	Every day.
	I mean, every day that you spend where you go into some party with people you don't really care about to talk about stuff that doesn't really matter, to try and impress people whose opinions don't concern you at all in any fundamental way.
	Every time you bow to conformity and to history and to the momentum of biology and all of that and spend time with family members you don't like or whatever without attempting to improve the relationship or find some freedom in the context, I mean, nothing gets added.
	It's just, it's all, everything is a subtraction.
	There is no addition in life.
	And this idea that we have forever to be who we are is an illusion.
	I mean, if you're a chain smoker, you don't have forever to quit.
	Because if you don't quit, you're not going to have much of a forever at all.
	And if you want to be a great guitarist, there's not a lot of points starting when you're 80.
	And so, this is my advice.
	Whatever you're going to do, do it.
	Do not think that you can meet truth halfway and survive the encounter.
	Do not think that you can meet truth halfway and survive the encounter.
	She is a jealous bitch, and she doesn't appreciate being messed around on.
	So, I hope that helps, and if we can move on to the next caller, thank you so much, and let us know how it goes if you can.
	Thank you.
	All right, Josh is up next.
	Go ahead, Josh.
	Hi, Stefan.
	Hello.
	Okay, so I'll just get right to it because I know you're pressed for time and it's already been two hours on the air.
	So I have two questions basically tonight and they're only related insofar as they both affect me directly and personally.
	I'll understand if you only want to address one of them.
	The first question is with regard to immigration.
	I have an ongoing struggle with Canada immigration, so almost that's 17 years.
	And I found myself in a position where I've tried almost everything that's been suggested to me with no success.
	I have a humanitarian application that I've mailed and paid for, and it's going to take at least four years to process.
	I'm turning 21 next month, and I just can't really come to terms with that as my reality.
	So if you have any suggestions, either radical or...
	I'm sorry, you said four years to process, but I just missed what was being processed.
	My application.
	I have an application for permanent residency in Canada.
	I'm not from Canada.
	Sorry, is the reality, you haven't been rejected yet, have you?
	It's still being processed?
	It is being processed, but that's going to take at least four years to process.
	And I've already lived in Canada for nearly 17 years.
	And this is all basically a result of neglect from my mother and bureaucracy, you know, the Canadian government.
	In what way, neglect from your mother?
	Okay, well I guess I'll just start explaining it.
	Basically my mother kidnapped my little brother and I in Trinidad, which is where we're from.
	I don't know if you know where Trinidad is.
	But she kidnapped us and forged my father's signatures and Manipulated officials in Trinidad and absconded and came to Canada as a refugee.
	And after a couple years of court proceedings, it was granted something called convention refugee status.
	And my father was basically denied access to us.
	And as he wanted to remain in Trinidad, basically just was denied, just like being a father.
	And we were in turn denied having a father.
	So after that being said...
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but what was the grounds for your mother's kidnapping?
	She claimed he was an abuser.
	And that he was abusing her and raping her and raping me.
	And these were all things that she accused him of in court.
	Wow.
	So basically she painted him as...
	You know, the epitome of the male rapist and the abusive husband and father and justified kidnapping us with that.
	And then the courts were so sympathetic to her that even though they determined the kidnapping was illegal and repugnant, that since, you know, we were here already and we had already spent more of our natural lives in Canada, my brother and I, that we would stay here.
	So they completely overlooked the fact that she had lied and kidnapped and whatnot and just granted her refugee status and granted her full custody of us.
	So that was around the year 2000.
	We entered the country in 1997.
	So from that point on, her health started to decline greatly, more so mental than physical.
	She's never been diagnosed with any kind of mental illness, but she's a very sick woman.
	And then eventually in 2009, our case with Canada immigration was closed because there were still divorce proceedings going on overseas.
	Very complicated to follow through the divorce from Canada to Trinidad.
	And the Canadian government, they were refusing to grant us permanent residency until that was resolved.
	So it never got resolved.
	The file got closed.
	I turned 18, wanted to go to university.
	And then was told that I couldn't because I was neither a citizen or a permanent resident.
	And at this point, the relationship with my mother was very, very bad.
	I mean, over the years, she just became more and more so abusive, either physically, mentally, psychologically.
	You know, I don't need to get into it.
	But it was just very bad to begin with.
	And then when I realized that my life was being defined by her neglect, That I wouldn't be able to go to school or travel.
	Things escalated, and I moved out and tried to figure things out for myself.
	But because she has access to, or rather, I don't have access to all my paperwork, because it's subsumed by her file, I'm basically at a loss.
	So I filed the only application I could, which is a humanitarian and compassionate permanent residency from within Canada.
	And they quote 45 months to process this.
	And I'm having trouble coming to terms with the fact that I may have to wait an additional four years at least to become a permanent resident and have health care and go to school and travel.
	And the Trinidad Embassy is also no help to me as they say that because it's been so long, they can't They can't grant me new papers.
	They can't give me a passport from Trinidad and they can't help me.
	So my question was if you have any suggestions, they could either help me have success or cope with this or if I just need to, you know, go to Ottawa and just kind of sit on Parliament Hill or whatever and, you know, hunger strike or something radical, you know, like what do you think?
	What do you what do you think about immigration in general?
	Oh, I mean, it's horrible.
	I mean, the technical word for it is moving.
	But you have to create a separate word, like taxation instead of theft, to bring the state into it.
	And I'm incredibly sorry.
	I mean, you know, the Caribbean family situation just seems to be a complete mess.
	Like, you know, a bunch of Jamaican kids.
	Not to sort of lump it all together, right?
	But, I mean, they grew up without dads, and it's very matriarchal, and just a big mess raised by grandmothers and so on.
	The Caribbean family situation just seems to be this big...
	Giant mess as a whole.
	And, you know, it's hard to know exactly who to blame or whatever, but I'm sorry that you caught up in that whole culture of family dysfunction.
	Again, am I way off base in this?
	This has sort of been my experience and observation, but what do you think?
	Well, I know next to nothing about Caribbean families or culture just because I only lived there for four years, right?
	Yeah.
	I have maybe two or three memories of Trinidad and you know that leads me to believe I may have lots of blocked out memories and I'm beginning to speak to my father over the internet and actually he came up to Edmonton and he spent a week here last year and he's starting to tell me just you know things about his experience with me which was very short But he said I spent a lot of time crying and witnessing abuse between the both of
	them.
	He hasn't admitted to any abuse on his part, but he has told me about instances in which my mother attacked him with a hammer or a knife or slit her wrists.
	I'm hearing all these ridiculous stories that I just find so hard to believe that I witnessed and just blocked out.
	But it makes sense, you know, to an extent.
	Right.
	Yeah, I mean, I'm not a big one for, I don't know how to magically turn bureaucrats into helpmates.
	I mean, we all have these fantasies, right?
	Like you're stuck in some calf guest bureaucratic hell, and you just, like you say, hunger strike, or you have this fantasy that there's something you can do.
	I've tried a variety of things.
	I've never had any luck breaking through.
	Bureaucracies.
	I mean, I've certainly tried a variety of things.
	So, I mean, you know, I never want to say never, but in my experience, the system is too entrenched to really help any individuals, right?
	So, I don't know that there's much...
	Yeah, but if you think you can, then it's going to be even more frustrating because you're going to be trying to do all these things and it's going to end up being even worse.
	I accept that I can't change the system.
	You know, I'm going to have terrible experiences with the Canadian healthcare system.
	What am I going to do?
	Sue?
	I'm not going to change the system.
	The system, I mean, you know, there are lots of people who really, you know, think of the people in Russia, you know, under Stalin, right?
	They had to line for two hours a day just to get bread.
	And I'm sure some of them wanted to have hunger strikes, but the system just had to collapse, right?
	There was nothing that any individual could do from a practical standpoint to reform the system or gain attention from within.
	So I'm incredibly sorry that you're caught in this situation again through no fault of your own, but can you work?
	I mean, is there anything you can do?
	I mean, I don't know what your status is at the moment.
	Yeah, so my status is very ambiguous because...
	They don't even grant me the temporary worker status.
	I'm basically as close as possible to being indefinable.
	I have a work permit that's going to expire May 14th of this coming year.
	So, you know, five, six months away.
	And when that work permit expires, that's when things could get even more sticky for me because I'll have to rely on something called LMO. Lots of people get that.
	People hire foreign workers.
	Your options become lesser and lesser.
	You have to rely on employers being willing to hire you on as a foreign worker.
	If the job is hazardous or you want to quit, it's a whole big process.
	You're restricted to one employer.
	You're basically just subject to the will of the people around you, and you can't make decisions for yourself.
	That's something that I can't accept.
	I've lived in Canada since I was four.
	I've grown up Canadian.
	I obviously have my problems with the system, otherwise I wouldn't be listening to Freedom and Radio, right?
	But I want to be Canadian.
	I've earned I've earned that, and I've earned the right to go to school, and that's being denied to me.
	It's interesting that you compared it to Kafka's stories, because I don't know how vividly you remember the castle or the trial, but there's a scene in the castle, it's in the first chapter, where K, he picks up the telephone and he tries to call the castle.
	And all he gets is indecipherable blabber from the other end, laughing and mocking and whatnot.
	I've actually lived that scene.
	In Canada Place, there's no longer an immigration office open to the public.
	There's just one black telephone on the wall in which you just line up and you spend hours there waiting to use the one telephone to speak to an immigration officer.
	And they're totally indifferent and not sympathetic.
	I mean, you would expect...
	If you're an immigration officer and somebody picks up the phone and tells you, I've lived here nearly 20 years, I'm not Canadian, I need your help, you'd probably try and do something for them, but just no sympathy, no help whatsoever.
	And it's all in the name of the Privacy Act.
	I'm being denied access to my mother's file, even though I'm an independent adult with a right to see his documents.
	Basically, I can go on and on and on and talk about how unjust it is, but I'm looking for a solution.
	I have the option to wait four or five years, just watch more time of my life just get pissed away through no fault of my own.
	Take drastic measures and You know, go for a hunger strike or whatever, try and get attention from the media.
	But I mean, I've written countless, you know, newspapers and I've written CBC and this and that.
	And, you know, I've gotten no replies from anyone.
	I've started a blog trying to build a network of support and I have nearly 1200 views on it in just two weeks.
	But no replies, you know, just everyone reads it, accepts it as a reality that is not their own.
	Something they feel they can't affect or change which I mean they can't I mean if I can't do anything no one else can But it's just I just feel like I'm stuck I'm totally stuck And I used to I used to victimize myself for it, you know I used to just totally accept my role as a victim But I've recently just just I've left that behind I'm trying to figure out how I can logically cope and deal with and you know overcome this But there's there's really no way to do that Right Right.
	Right.
	Now, I mean, I can't, obviously, I don't, I mean, I'm no lawyer, so I can't sort of give you any legal advice, and I'm sure you've got advice on sort of, well, you have to wait four years for God knows what, right?
	I mean, they can't ship you to Trinidad, because Trinidad isn't going to give you a passport, and what are they going to do, just have you live here in grey market limbo from here to eternity, right?
	That doesn't...
	So...
	I'm trying to think what this gives you opportunity for.
	Could it not give you some opportunity to, I mean, I mean this with all due respect to perfect legality and so on, but I mean, could this not give you some opportunity to do something entrepreneurial and be your own boss and work for people, whether it's over the internet or whether it's for bitcoins and again, you know, talk to an accountant or whatever, but If you're not able to go to school, you know, well, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs didn't really go to school either, right?
	It could be that there's an opportunity in here for you to carve your own path while being denied a standard passage in society for you to carve your own path in a way that you can look back and say, I'm really glad I didn't get to go to school.
	I know that sounds insane, but it is going to push you into kind of a creative place where That I think is probably going to bring some great power out of you that might not otherwise be there if you had more of a beaten path.
	Absolutely.
	You're definitely correct when you say that it's almost beaten creativity into me because when I was growing up under the rule of my mother and the life she wanted me to live, you know, I loved math and I was going to be an accountant and I didn't read books.
	I didn't have an interest in philosophy or art.
	And, you know, with no surprise to you, I'm sure, as soon as I find out that my life is a complete and utter ruin and that everything I've known is a lie, books are all that make sense.
	And I definitely have developed creative outlets.
	But you'd be surprised how much you can't do without permanent residency.
	I can't even submit short stories to contests without being a permanent resident.
	That's pretty amazing.
	You have to be a permanent resident to submit a short story to a contest.
	So the creative outlets are one thing, and the creativity and the perspective of Gained is tremendous.
	I mean, I definitely feel...
	I'm tempted to feel grateful for it, you know, but I never want to say I'm grateful for the way my life has been, although I'm aware I've gained a lot from it.
	But, I mean, opportunities for, you know, being an entrepreneur or starting my own business, like, those aren't really options to me because I'm not recognized as a person.
	You know, in the state of the world, You have to have an identity given to you by the government, and I don't have one of those.
	I mean, just to sum up my existence, I have...
	Yeah, I mean, again, I can't obviously give you any advice on how to navigate the legalities, but I would not rule out the possibility that there are creative and entrepreneurial opportunities that...
	You would never have considered like whatever you consider in the absence of the path well-traveled is obviously by definition something you never would have considered without that and I would try to keep looking and you can you can go online you can look for you know how the the alternate economy legal economy the alternate economy is working and see if there isn't something that you can do that is going to give you some really valuable life skills That
	you simply wouldn't get by going to school and taking more of a traditional path.
	You know, I hate to be this, you know, if I hands you lemons, make lemonade kind of thing, because I think that's kind of cheesy.
	But generally, where you get blocked in a particular avenue, you can find alternates.
	And I'm not going to give you Any advice that's of any value for my own life, but just an example that is not directly analogous, is that I was originally thinking of academics or academia and so on, but I just found it such a slog, such an uphill slog, even with all my talents against this sort of socialist bureaucratic indifference of Canadian higher education, that I'm like, ah, fuck it, I'm going into the business world.
	You know, like, forget it.
	You know, if I can't make much headway, at least I can go make money.
	And I mean, I got an A on my master's thesis, which was a very radical thesis and so on.
	So I could do it.
	I could do it.
	It was just, it was kind of exhausting.
	And if I was in academics, I never would have done this show.
	Like, never in a million years.
	And I much prefer this show to being in academics.
	So...
	Where you are blocked, and please understand, I'm not trying to compare our situations.
	You're blocked in a much more fundamental way than I ever was.
	So I'm not trying to diminish what you're saying.
	I really do understand the desperate gravity and confinement where your best option is semi-serfdom based upon these worker visas and so on.
	So I'm not trying to say, well, you know, I couldn't get it.
	I didn't want to do academics more and so blah, blah, blah, right?
	Yeah.
	And I think I threw in one indifferent application to a PhD, which was – I don't think I even got a reply back.
	Oh, no, I did.
	I got a reply back and they said, well, your master's work is very good, but in your third year of university, your marks weren't that stellar.
	So blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Anyway, so that opportunity closed down.
	I went into the business world, which was fantastic.
	I was much happier there.
	And then I – Got kind of tired of a lot of aspects of the business world, which we don't have to get into here, and then this opportunity opened up, and there's no upgrade from here for me.
	I couldn't possibly have a better or more meaningful way to spend my time and energies.
	So if you are blocked, if you stare at the wall that's blocking you, and again, your wall is huge, and mine was like a curb, and yours is like fucking Berlin Wall plus...
	Grand Canyon plus mortar fire.
	Like, I get that.
	But if you stare at the wall, you lose hope.
	You keep roaming around to find the crack.
	Keep roaming around to find the crack.
	There's something that you can do somehow, somewhere, that is going to be satisfying for you, and for which you may thank the wall.
	Not in the moment, but at some time.
	Yeah, what you're saying, it makes sense.
	And, uh, It's totally aligned with the way of thinking I realized I have to stay vigilant with.
	I mean, staring at the wall, that's a really eloquent way of putting it.
	And that's what I've been doing for the last three years, is just staring at the wall.
	And they're inviting you.
	Hey, you want to spend another four years staring at the wall, or you can have a hunger strike.
	I don't think either of those is going to build the life that you want or need or deserve.
	Yeah, I mean, absolutely not.
	And also recognize that, you know, when you have a beaten down childhood, sometimes all you feel are your weaknesses.
	What you don't understand is the incredible iron strength that you have, having survived everything that you've gone through.
	You know, mom kidnapping, father raping, stories of abuse, mom going mentally disintegrating and abusive.
	I mean, you have, I mean, we feel the frayed edges of ourselves when we go up against this gritty sandpaper.
	Of bad experiences.
	But we get polished, man.
	We get fucking polished, too.
	I mean, we get sanded down, but we really get polished.
	And there is a lot of strength in there for you.
	You might want to pick up Malcolm Gladwell's new book.
	I guess you can't even get a fucking library card.
	Read it in the library.
	I have that privilege.
	I have a library card.
	Oh, good.
	Okay.
	Okay, good.
	David and Goliath.
	He talks about The hidden strengths and so many of the people who have achieved great things in this world come from, like, unbelievably shitty backgrounds.
	I mean, it just is.
	Because, you know, I'm like, once I've survived my mom, I mean, Jesus.
	I mean, what the hell else could be really that scary?
	Yeah, nothing really surprises you anymore after you get over a mother.
	Yeah, but, you know, I think if you, you know, they're inviting you into their Dysfunction dance, right?
	Hey!
	Fiddler, strike up the bow, right?
	And, you know, come.
	Come and stare at the wall.
	Come beat your head against the wall.
	Come starve yourself to death in front of the wall.
	Come try and change this mountain.
	Come change this monolith of ghosts.
	You can't even touch them, let alone change them.
	You can never talk to anyone who can ever make a decision.
	And you can never rouse a complacent and entitled population of citizens to really care and act for non-citizens.
	That's the whole way it works.
	I mean, this system has been adapting itself with the fucking in-group and out-group for about 100,000 years.
	And I just, you know, the us versus them, the in-group, the out-group, the tribe and the outsiders.
	I mean, this whole thing has been going on since we were apes.
	It's a very refined system and it's developed really quite beautifully.
	And so I would not necessarily take that on as something you can...
	Overturn from your position, right?
	Without influence, without money, without power, and without a moral argument that will land on people who aren't anarchists, right?
	Because an anarchist gets that you're just being cornered into a serf-like position, and the state has no right to tell you where you can live or who you can work for or not, or what wages you can take, or what benefits you want, or what working conditions you're willing to accept, and so on.
	So, the vast majority of the muggles are not going to I don't understand your moral issue at all or they'll say, well, you know, we need a system because some people do try to take advantage and we need a system to make sure blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	All the assholes who came over here without immigration from Europe and now, you know, they get in and they raise the drawbridge.
	It's always the way it works, right?
	I mean, I'm sure the Indians were saying the same thing.
	The mighties came over, right?
	So I would, you know, just you got to turn away from the wall.
	It's hypnotic.
	It's looking at the barriers, right?
	Makes you immobile.
	To stare at a wall, you've got to stand in front of a wall.
	You're not getting anything done.
	Look away from the wall.
	Keep feeling around.
	Keep finding something.
	Keep making connections.
	Keep making contacts.
	Overseas if necessary.
	Find something in some way that you can pursue a passion and get some coin.
	But keep looking.
	Just don't stare at that wall.
	It will become your gravestone.
	Yeah, I'm hearing you loud and clear in a I definitely didn't have any unrealistic expectations for what your answer might have been.
	Of course, there's a little part of my brain that's like, Stefan, he'll have some solution I didn't think of, and then tomorrow I'll be Canadian.
	Your answer, it makes sense.
	I've thought it all through before, but somehow it sounds different hearing you say it.
	So thank you for that.
	And if you have time for my second question, I'd like to ask that as well.
	Mike, who have we got left?
	We've got five people waiting.
	I'll make it quick, okay?
	You really better make it quick, but it sounds like you've got nothing but time, so...
	Yeah, that's definitely something I have lots of.
	So, I heard your podcast with Joe Rogan a while back about...
	Well, I heard part of it briefly about, I think it was modern masculinity, and it's something that I've been kind of swimming in lately and kind of enraged and impassioned about, is just...
	How there's just this onslaught that's increasing every day of misandric feminism and more and more men are becoming male negativists and society seems just really, really confused about what it even means to be a man.
	And I was just wondering if you could offer some quick commentary on how you can effectively cope or overcome the, you know, the tidal wave of just hate And the lack of communication and empathy, if I can echo the other Stefan's conclusion, everyone just seems to have less and less empathy and less and less will to talk about these human relationships, and they're all just hell-bent on power.
	So what are your thoughts on that?
	Well, I mean, so this is if you've been sort of listening to the Bombard and the Stardusts and the MGTOW stuff, is that what you've been listening to?
	No, I actually don't know what you're talking about.
	Oh, those are just some people who've got YouTube channels that I find challenging and stimulating and interesting, I think.
	I think that would probably be a good solo topic because I've got a lot of thoughts about it.
	All who dominate through power...
	All who dominate through power...
	Suffer, eventually.
	This is the way of the mind.
	This is the way of the conscience.
	This is the way of the world.
	All to dominate through power suffer eventually and terribly.
	And there is going to be a big problem coming up in the world for women married to the state, right?
	And I think that more and more men are going to opt out of this stuff.
	Because it only takes, you know, there's this stuff that feminists talk about in the 60s.
	They had sort of a click moment where they're like, oh, yeah, you know, I am being taken advantage of or I could be doing more with my life or whatever, whatever, whatever, right?
	And they had this sort of click moment.
	And after that, they said, you know, the thoughts kind of came fast and furious and this, that and the other.
	And...
	For most of the men that I've talked to over the years, it just takes a little bit, just a nudge, a little bit for them to say, whoa, I guess I don't have to get married.
	I guess I don't have to be a father.
	I guess I don't have to enter into this incredibly risky three-way with me, a woman, and the state.
	Now, I am married and wouldn't want it any other way.
	But there are a lot of men who just are kind of going on automatic.
	But I think it's all right there, right beneath the surface.
	And just reminding men that there are choices.
	They don't have to be there for the good of society.
	They don't have to serve women.
	They don't have to be a provider.
	They don't have to buy presents.
	They don't have to Provide income.
	They don't have to get married.
	I think that is just an important thing.
	You keep reminding people of choice, eventually they'll get it.
	And I think that men are very close to it.
	I think one more generation of men grows up without any effective fathering.
	And There is, like, no social loyalty left.
	I mean, social loyalty, hierarchical loyalty is diminishing extremely rapidly among the young.
	Studies have shown this fairly consistently, that the young people are peer-bonded, not parent-bonded, because they're put in daycares and kindergartens and preschools and schools.
	Children are attached to whatever is closest, right?
	They're like those ducks that can bond with an orange balloon if it happens to be around when they come out of the egg.
	And children are peer bonding, not parent bonding.
	And there's a lot of studies.
	I've posted one on my Facebook page, and you can sort of look for it, but there's a lot of studies that are showing just the degree to which there are enormous problems in society because kids are peer bonding, not parent bonding.
	And if you look at the shows, right, for the shows, the kids are all talking to each other.
	So there used to be shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver and so on where the kids would have some challenges and they'd go to the parents for advice.
	You think of things like either the old or new Beverly Hills 90210 or the OC or whatever.
	And the kids, they barely ever turn to their parents.
	They're all just turning to each other for support and solace and comfort and questions and working things out.
	The idea of going to parents, parents of this is ridiculous, vaguely anachronistic fuddy-duddies who, you know, still refer to the CD player as a gramophone and completely out of touch and so on.
	I think that all currencies must be gold-backed.
	Yeah, it's very similar to how men are portrayed as idiots most of the time, too.
	You know, the parents are just kind of Portray it as people who are incapable of helping or offering support.
	Right.
	And even in modern family, right?
	So the sort of, quote, traditional family, right?
	The three kids.
	I mean, the parents don't ever provide useful advice to their children.
	The children just have nothing but contempt for their parents' views.
	And the reason for that is that there's this belief in the media that...
	The sort of youth demographic is the thing, right?
	I mean, they've just been convinced of that.
	It's generally not true.
	I mean, youth these days are pretty damn poor.
	In places in America, it's 25% youth unemployment.
	I mean, if you want to make money, you focus on the older people.
	But there's this idea that you have to appeal to the youth.
	And to appeal to the youth, you have to show them peer bonding, not parent bonding.
	Parent bonding is too painful to show to peer bonded people because it shows them everything that they've missed out on.
	Because when children are children, they cannot be friends to each other.
	They can't be.
	I'm sorry.
	It's just a fact.
	They cannot be friends to each other.
	They lack perspective, maturity, wisdom, the capacity to productively explore pain and disagreement and hurt, the capacity to understand somebody else's perspective in terms of their own childhood, the other person's childhood and so on.
	They simply cannot be really good friends to each other.
	They can be playmates.
	They can have lots of fun.
	They can, you know...
	Whatever, right?
	But they're not going to say, hey, you seem upset.
	Did anything happen today?
	And if somebody gets sort of snappy at them, they don't say, well, okay, so you're upset, but maybe it's something.
	I mean, they're kids.
	They don't have that capacity for embodied and embedded friendship.
	And so it is.
	It's about looks and sex and status and all that kind of rebellion and stimulation and sports and music and all the shallow, enjoyable, useless shit of the teenage years.
	And so if you want to have a show that aims at the youth, you must show them peer bonding.
	You cannot show Wise, helpful, involved, engaged, incredibly useful parents.
	Because it literally is like ripping half of their heart off without anesthetic to show them how valuable, helpful, and useful parents can be.
	You can show them Hank Moody in Californication.
	You can show them Homer Simpson.
	But the women don't generally come off much better.
	You can show them Gary Unmarried, but the wife barely comes off any better in that.
	So it's not just men who are slacked, it's parents as a whole.
	Because the kids are peer-bonded, they just can't look at the idea of practical and useful parents, wise and helpful parents.
	It's so agonizing because it's what they really wanted and it's what they really needed and it's what they can now never, ever, ever get.
	It is just agony.
	And so there is this self-reinforcing thing because parents are considered to be useless.
	useless who wants to become a parent because parents are considered useless.
	Even if you become a parent, you may not strive for the kind of positive authority that healthy parenting I think engenders.
	And so, but I think one more generation of men growing up without fathers, I mean, we're either going back to the stone age or forward to an age of freedom, but the existing system simply can't sustain.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	So yeah, you think one more generation of people growing up without fathers, what do you see the positive, like where do you see the next step?
	The positive is nobody has any respect for authority anymore.
	That's both a positive and a negative.
	So, I mean, I was at breakfast out with my daughter this morning, and she's really interested in the story of Rob Ford.
	She's completely fascinated by the story of Rob Ford, and it is this Toronto's crack mayor, right, who now is hanging around with thugs and murderers, and the funny thing is, who would expect a mayor to hang around with criminals?
	Oh, I know!
	I would!
	Because, you know, who would expect criminals to hang out with criminals?
	But she's fascinated by it, and I was talking about it with another couple who were getting me up to speed on it, and I was just saying, like, all this says to young people is the laws don't matter.
	But the police are saying, well, we don't have enough evidence to prosecute.
	It's like, well, you have a confession.
	You have them on tape, like on videotape, committing illegal acts.
	I mean, oh, we don't have...
	Everybody gets.
	It's all just nonsense, right?
	In the past, all the crap that people in power did was largely hid from the masses by a compliant media, particularly if they were Democrats in the States, right?
	I mean, the fact that JFK was a complete sexual addict who hired prostitutes on a regular basis, had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, had an affair with the girlfriend of a mob boss with whom he shared important judicial secrets, that he was addicted to a fistful of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical drugs.
	And he was just a complete mess of a human being.
	A sexual addict addicted to a wide variety of medications and incredibly indiscreet.
	The fact that the Cuban Missile Crisis that Khrushchev in his memoirs clearly stated that they never ever were going to go to war over some country 6,000 miles away from Moscow, that all they wanted was to get the U.S. missiles out of Turkey.
	And the fact that he pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war for the sake of something that was never going to happen anyway, his massive miscalculations in all of his dealings with Khrushchev.
	Khrushchev just browbeat him down to the point where he virtually wet himself.
	All of this stuff, I mean, it was hidden in the past.
	And, I mean, all the affairs that LBJ had and all this kind of stuff, right?
	So...
	Now, people get, oh, well, so if you're in power, you can just do whatever you want.
	And the moment people get that, they get that there's no such thing as morality, that the lie of morality is punctured irretrievably.
	And that means either no morality or real morality, right?
	When you end the illusion, you either end up with insanity or sanity, right?
	So, to go back to Blanche Dubois, at the end of the play...
	Her illusions are pierced and you get one or the other.
	I won't be a spoiler.
	You've just got to watch the play.
	It's an incredible play.
	And so is A Glass Menagerie, by the way, if you get a chance to see that.
	The Paul Newman directed one with John Malkovich and his wife.
	Really, really great.
	Anyway, but we are at the end of a moral era.
	I mean, nobody believes in any of these ethics anymore.
	I mean, the whole Obamacare thing, nobody really believes in the socialism of it all.
	They know now.
	Now they can't even pay the insurers what they're supposed to.
	They're saying to the insurers, Bill us what you think is fair and we'll sort it out later.
	I mean, this is the degree to which the entire status system has completely broken down.
	They're arbitrarily delaying laws.
	They're handing out thousands of exemptions for political friends.
	The congresspeople who champion the law are begging for exemptions for their own staff for fear of brain drain.
	American Airlines is estimating it's going to cost them $100 million a year.
	I mean, nobody is...
	And the young who are the sort of young invincibles who are supposed to sign up to pay for all of the creaky old people, they're not signing up.
	I mean, the whole thing is a complete catastrophe.
	And nobody's really fundamentally talking about it in terms of ethics.
	It's all just about practicality and this and that and the other.
	And so this government takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy is just going according to, you know, everything that you would expect when you have government without anesthesia, government without debt and money printing.
	So I think that we are very much at the end of Of a paradigm, and this is why I'm working so damn hard to try and put ethics and rationality and philosophy front and center so that we can say, yeah, this was a whole bunch of rotten old historical shit that all piled up.
	Let's clean the decks and start again, knowing what the hell we're doing this time.
	Yeah, I definitely admire you.
	If not for the first time knowing what we're doing.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I was going to say I admire you for doing that because it's something that if more people are just trying to put into practice in their personal lives...
	Of just being sincere and empathic and communicating, then the shift, which will probably be really, really bumpy and rough, would be a lot smoother, right?
	And the whole arbitrariness of morality that you're talking about.
	I think it was Nietzsche that talked about that, how he said that's the greatest danger that ever hovered over humanity, was taking joy in unreason and a general arbitrariness in feeling And I think that pretty accurately describes our generation, my generation, I guess.
	Yes, I think that's a very good way of putting it.
	And my argument has always been, why am I so convincing to people?
	I'm so convincing to people because I'm convinced.
	And we are only fundamentally convinced by empiricism.
	We don't learn math except by looking at shit and counting it.
	We fundamentally learn everything through empiricism.
	And if you don't live your values, you cannot convince other people of your values.
	In other words, if you say, well, okay, I think we should run society according to the non-aggression people, but you let people verbally abuse you in your life, you will never convince anyone.
	You just won't.
	Because particularly in families, verbal abuse is a violation of the non-aggression principle, particularly from parents, because we know it does objective damage to children's brains and self-esteem, confidence, whatever you want to call it.
	And so if you're into the non-aggression principle, you simply cannot allow yourself to be verbally abused by people around you or put down or ignored or minimized or sidelined.
	I mean, you just can't.
	I mean, you can, but that just means you don't really believe in the non-aggression principle or you believe it somehow applies to the Fed, but not you.
	And nobody's...
	I mean, people pick up on integrity in an unconscious way and you cannot fake it.
	You either live your damn values Or stop talking and let those of us who are finish the goddamn job.
	But most people want to just talk and talk and talk about their values and read up on economics and read up on the Fed and read up on foreign policy and read up on this, that, and the other.
	And damn well won't put their values into practice.
	And everybody there just scans them and says, oh, bullshit artist.
	Oh, doesn't really believe it.
	Oh, won't really live it.
	Oh, doesn't really matter.
	And then you just move on.
	But the problem is then those of us who come afterwards who are actually living our values I find it a hell of a lot harder to convince people after other people's hypocrisy has weakened the case.
	So that's why I say, you know, if you want to change the world, live your values, end your life first, and then, I swear, I swear to whatever is still wholly out there in the universe, nothing can stop you.
	Does that help?
	I think that's as good a note as any to let the next caller in, but I want to thank you for your time very much.
	You're welcome.
	Thank you for calling.
	Good night.
	Go ahead, ST. Yes.
	Hi, how are you doing?
	I was going to talk about bitcoins because I have some concerns about them, rather substantial actually.
	Sure.
	I was wondering if we could go over my concerns and why I have them.
	Sure.
	So, first of all, I think that Austrian monetary theory, if properly applied, predicts that forms of currency that have no intrinsic value will, in the long term, reach that intrinsic value, which is zero.
	Well, no, sorry to interrupt.
	If you're going to bring up the Austrian economic theory, the Austrian economic theory is very clear that there's no such thing as intrinsic value.
	You can't use intrinsic value and Austrian theory together, right?
	You know that, right?
	Okay, so maybe I have to define what I mean by intrinsic value.
	So, what I mean by intrinsic value is value that is derived from consumption demand, so that is demand from people wanting to consume.
	The good or the service that we're talking about.
	Or production demand, which is producers willing to pay to use that item in the production of something that somebody else wants to consume.
	Right.
	So that's what I mean by intrinsic value.
	And so I have a question for you just to sort of relate it more concretely.
	So what is the intrinsic value of one of my podcasts?
	Right.
	So it's not necessarily that I can quantify the intrinsic value, but I can say that it does have intrinsic value because people want to consume them.
	But they're not backed by anything, right?
	Well, when they turn back, this is sort of confusing, but what I mean is people find the value in consuming your podcasts, right?
	But they don't find the value in consuming, say, US dollars, right?
	I'm sorry, people don't find value in consuming US dollars.
	You mean they don't burn them for fuel kind of thing?
	Well, like the term consume can mean different things in economics, right?
	So if I want to consume a Picasso painting, that can just mean that I have it and I hold it in my living room and I look at it and just the fact of having it brings value to me, right?
	So that would be a way of consuming it, even if the item is not destroyed in this way.
	But for the time period that I'm holding it, nobody else gets to have it, right?
	So in that time, I'm driving up the value of the Picasso because I'm holding it because I want to look at it, right?
	Sorry, how do you know that you're driving up the value of something because you hold it?
	It may go down in value, right, like gold has.
	Well, yeah, but all the things being equal, the fact that I'm demanding it in order to hold it will drive the value up because other people who will also demand it for the same reason are not able to.
	To the extent that I'm demanding these things to hold them, then other people will have less of them available for them, right?
	So if I'm demanding a lot of gold to hold it for a short value or whatever, then...
	Well, yeah, but I mean, I'm concerned when people say all other things being equal in the realm of economics, because they never are, right?
	Right, of course they never are.
	I mean, you might find out that there was an incredibly great Picasso forger.
	So, I guess my question is...
	Like, if we understand that fiat currencies will, at some point in the future, lose all of their value because nobody wants to use them for anything, then how is it not the same case with Bitcoin?
	So I guess my question would be...
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	It seems you're just slipping that argument in, but that's the core, right?
	Okay, go ahead.
	So, instead of saying nobody wants to use them for anything, I think you could say that people do not find value in them is probably a better way of putting it, right?
	Now, it certainly is true that paper currency has, like unbacked paper currency, has no more intrinsic value than you could maybe burn it for a little bit of heat, right?
	But it's paper.
	And it has no value other than it being paper and, of course, the force that is required to make people use it, right?
	It has to be legal tender and all other currencies generally have to be eliminated through force, right?
	So it's rent-seeking toilet paper is what it basically is.
	So it has no value to people other than they're forced to use it.
	But Bitcoin has value to people in many ways that I've explained sort of in a recent video.
	It has value to people that gold simply cannot have value.
	So its production is strictly limited.
	It is publicly auditable and the audit is verified by I think what it is 500 times the processing power, five times the processing power of the 500 most powerful computers, because of course it's shared, right?
	It has within it all the capacities of a scripting language, which gold of course does not.
	It has all the capacities of built-in arbitration dispute mechanisms, which gold does not.
	It does not require...
	A safe.
	It's not expensive to get out of the ground.
	The production of gold is currently at around $1,500 an ounce, which is far above what it's actually worth in the market, which is why so many gold mines are shutting down.
	Whereas, excluding the cost of hardware, the electrical cost to produce a Bitcoin is about $10.
	So it's much cheaper.
	It's free to transport, which...
	It's not the case either with gold or with fiat currency.
	And you can actually run a stock exchange for free over Bitcoin.
	You can mint your own currency through Bitcoin.
	You can't do that with gold.
	And your own currency will be limited in the same way if you want.
	And so as an entire architecture...
	There is great value in it.
	Now, it certainly is true that if nobody wants to use it, then nobody will use it.
	But the same is true of sewage.
	If everybody wants to take a shit on their lawn rather than flush the toilet, then the sewage system has no value.
	It's just that people in general want to take a crap in the toilet rather than on their lawn.
	If everybody but you decide to stop using email tomorrow, then you will only be able to send yourself a penis enlargement spam, right?
	I understand all of that, but the more people who hook into an existing system, in particular something like Bitcoin, the more valuable it becomes.
	And certainly the demand and the expansion of it does seem to be the case.
	There are 20,000 odd stores.
	This is not even counting people who are doing business one-on-one.
	There are 20,000 or more stores that will take Bitcoins.
	So that is vastly expanding.
	And the other thing too, of course, is that Bitcoin is only four years old, right?
	I mean, I saw...
	A movie a long time ago, I think it was called Bonsoon Wedding, where somebody was talking about how chaotic India was.
	And they said, yes, but this is only 50 years after we won independence.
	I mean, what was America like in the early 1900s, you know, 50 years after it emancipated from England?
	Well, it was, you know, slavery, civil war was still to come.
	It was still a mess, right?
	You know, the fourth year after gold was adopted in some locale as A standard currency replacing whatever came before, it probably was going through some growing pains, to say the least, right?
	So you can't really compare a very mature system, which gold was.
	It hasn't been used as currency in any real sense for quite a long time.
	But it had a lot of time to mature and to grow.
	Bitcoin, of course, is new.
	It's unknown.
	It's only four years old, so it's not a hugely great comparison.
	But it has so much built-in utility and value.
	And, you know, possibilities as a scripted environment, it really does rival the internet in many ways.
	And so you could say, well, all ISPs will lose value if everyone stops using the internet tomorrow.
	And that's true, but it's sort of irrelevant because we know that's not going to happen.
	And so I think that there's a case to be made that there is enough value.
	There's no such thing as intrinsic value.
	There's value that people can get out of something, right?
	I mean, as you know, oil was considered to be a pollution, right?
	Like something that was just terrible to find on your land because, you know, it was messy and goopy and killed crops and stuff like that.
	So oil had no value and then oil is suddenly hugely valuable.
	And so there's no intrinsic value.
	There's just utility people have for it.
	And I think there's a good argument to say...
	I'm almost done.
	There's a good argument to say that Bitcoin has enough utility value for people that it is a very compelling case for a potential currency.
	Okay.
	So...
	Like, again, for intrinsic value, I don't mean, like, the value in the item that is always fixed.
	So, yeah.
	So, obviously, intrinsic value is something that can change by my definition.
	Now, when you're saying, like, when you're talking about all the benefits that Bitcoin has over gold, you're talking about how it's easier to produce or how the supply is more...
	No, no, I didn't say easier.
	I said cheaper.
	Okay, cheaper.
	Okay.
	Cheaper usually means easier, but that's not the case in this, because it's limited by technology.
	Go ahead.
	Okay.
	So, I'm not sure how the fact that it's cheaper to produce is necessarily a good point, but it doesn't really matter.
	I'm sorry, you're not sure how cheaper to produce is a good point?
	I'm not sure what you mean.
	Yeah, because...
	If I can produce an iPad for half the price, is that not a business advantage?
	Well, for the maker of the iPad, but not necessarily...
	Like, for the...
	Like, for the person who wants the iPad, it means that the iPad will be cheaper, but when you're talking about money, that just means that the value will go down.
	So I'm not sure what...
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Cheaper to produce, but limited by technology.
	That's the paradox, right?
	Cheaper to produce, but limited by technology.
	As you know, it becomes progressively harder to produce each Bitcoin because of the complexity of the algorithms that need to be resolved in order to produce it.
	So it's very cheap to produce, but it is limited by technology.
	Because normally cheap to produce means, you know, sales loss, supply creates its own demand.
	So cheaper to produce usually means that there's more of it.
	But in this case, cheaper to produce, it does not correspond to that.
	In fact, the limiting algorithm means cheaper to produce...
	Plus, less of it, but it's not linear, right?
	So as time goes along, I mean, that last Bitcoin is going to take forever to produce and cost billions of dollars in electricity.
	So it's cheaper to produce right now, but it will be more expensive to produce in the future?
	Yes, that's correct.
	Okay, and are you going by unit of, so it's like one Bitcoin to one ounce of gold, is that the comparison or...
	Yeah, so it's $1,500 to produce an ounce of gold, and it's about $10 to produce a Bitcoin.
	Okay, I'm not so sure that it's just $10, because if the price is $1,200, why aren't people mass producing them until the price...
	Mass producing what?
	Bitcoins.
	I'm sorry, do you know about the architecture of Bitcoins?
	Yeah, I know how it works, but first...
	Yeah, but if the price is only...
	This isn't a main point, but just to clarify, if the price is only $10 to produce, then why aren't the miners investing a lot more money in order to produce a lot more Bitcoin until the price to produce is closer to the price to sell them?
	Well, because there's time, right?
	It takes time.
	And you also have to buy the hardware to produce them.
	And of course, if you have a lot of computing power, there are other things that you can use those computers for other than just producing bitcoins, right?
	Universities use them and you can use them for weather modeling and stuff like that.
	So lots of things like that.
	Okay.
	So besides that, you were saying that bitcoins have a lot of advantages because they are cheaper to transfer and to store and all of those things.
	So, that's all good.
	But the thing is, that's only good even insofar as bitcoins continue to be valuable in the future.
	No, no, no, no.
	Come on, come on.
	No, no.
	You can't say that.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	So, that is why they are going to continue to be of value.
	So, I'm saying...
	A car is really good because it gets you from A to B in comfort.
	And you'll say, well, yes, that's true, but only if people still want cars.
	It's like, but that's why they want cars, right?
	I mean, I'm sort of giving you, you can't say, like I'm saying, here's why it's valuable.
	You can say, well, that's only if people find it valuable.
	Well, that's why they'll find it valuable, right?
	Yeah, but I mean, in the case of cars, they actually want to use the car.
	In the case of bitcoins, they just want to transfer the bitcoins.
	But if the bitcoins have no value, then the fact that they can transfer them for free doesn't mean much.
	No, no, no.
	You're reversing the argument.
	The fact that you can transfer them for free means they have value.
	It doesn't mean like they only have value if you transfer them for free, right?
	So if I want to send you $5 million worth of gold, it's going to cost me a lot of money if I've got to ship you the gold, right?
	Yes.
	Right?
	I don't know.
	Hundreds of thousands of dollars at least, right?
	But I can send you $5 million worth of bitcoins for nothing.
	Right.
	But that's because the market cap of Bitcoin is $12 billion or whatever.
	No, it doesn't matter what the market cap is.
	I can send you that money for free.
	That doesn't mean that it's innately advantageous to gold.
	It just means that that's one of the advantages.
	It doesn't mean gold has no place in an economy.
	It doesn't mean gold becomes valueless or anything like that.
	It just – if you're going to have reservations about Bitcoin, then it's important that you understand the pluses of – and some people have said you should say cryptocurrency, which is fair, but we'll just talk about Bitcoin for now.
	The fact that you can transfer it for free and you can't transfer any other form of cash for free means that it has value because you're saving money, right?
	Yeah, I mean, I understand all of the advantages of Bitcoin and we can say cryptocurrencies.
	I want to say that I'm not against Bitcoin.
	I really like the idea of being able to transfer value in this way without at least too much government interference.
	And I do think that there are possible ways in which this could be improved so that it doesn't suffer from the problem that I think Bitcoins and other current cryptocurrencies suffer from.
	But yeah, I still think this is a very important problem because I don't see how something that has no intrinsic value, and intrinsic value can be a store of value for the Yeah, but you see, I'm going to have to move on because we're right back to where we started.
	We had this whole discussion about intrinsic value and now you're right back to just repeating this mantra and people just repeat this mantra.
	Bitcoin has no intrinsic value.
	Gold has intrinsic value.
	If we're not having a conversation where we're moving forward, then we're just a broken record, right?
	So I made a whole case that there's no such thing as intrinsic value.
	And the second thing, which is that stuff people find value in, there's lots to talk about in Bitcoin.
	And if we're right back to Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, then we haven't moved at all from where we started.
	I think you...
	I'm not sure you're using my definition for intrinsic value.
	But if we're going to start using your definitions for stuff, then I don't know how we're going to have any conversations at all.
	If I say, well, my definition of Bitcoin is a farting cow, then if you're going to have your own definition of intrinsic value, then I don't know how we're going to have a conversation unless you clarified that at the beginning, right?
	But it is clarified.
	Okay, so perhaps you can tell me what your definition is of intrinsic value?
	Okay.
	So my definition of intrinsic value is value that is derived either from consumption or from production.
	So people want to consume the item or the good or the service, so the demand is for that.
	Or people who want to use it to produce something others want to consume.
	So those would be intrinsic value, right?
	Right.
	And so people want to consume Bitcoin because...
	It's cheaper than everything else.
	It's the cheapest possible way to transfer value that is known at the moment, so there's intrinsic value in Bitcoin.
	But how do people want to consume Bitcoins?
	Because it seems to me that all they want to do is try them for things, but that's not a consumption.
	I'm sorry, all they want to do is what?
	They want to try them for something else.
	They want to give them to somebody else for things.
	You mean use them as currency?
	Yeah.
	That's what they are, they're currency.
	It's one of the things they could do as currency.
	So you're saying that the currency doesn't have intrinsic value because people want to use it as currency?
	No, no.
	What I'm saying is, like, if you want to hold a form of currency in order to transfer it to somebody else so that you can get something else that you want, that in itself is not consuming the currency.
	It's like it's monetary demand, it's not consumption demand.
	So, I'm sorry, I'm really having trouble following this.
	It doesn't mean that you're wrong or don't make any sense.
	It just means I may be lacking the horsepower to follow it.
	But if somebody gives me a Bitcoin, I hold on to it for three days, and then I use it to buy something else, you're saying that is not good?
	No, I'm not saying that's not good.
	I'm saying...
	When you buy the Bitcoin and you hold it and then you spend it, you're not consuming the Bitcoin at any point in that process.
	Yeah, I would argue that you are because you're using it to transfer value without overhead.
	You're using it to buy something without paying an extra 3%, right?
	So if you go into a computer store sometimes, they say, well, if you pay cash, I'll take 3% off the price.
	Or ultimately, they say, if you use a credit card, I have to add 3% to the price, right?
	And so people pay cash even though they lose out on getting refunds or dispute resolution or all that kind of stuff that comes with having a credit card, right?
	Because it's cheaper.
	Right?
	But that's sort of the Bitcoin argument.
	It's like, well, if it's going to cost you 3% or 4% less to buy something with Bitcoin, then that's intrinsic value called plus 3% or 4%.
	In Bitcoin, that's why people would have an incentive to use it.
	Because you don't have to pay a credit card company.
	You don't have to pay a bank.
	You don't have to pay somebody who's holding gold and guarding it and registering it.
	You don't have to pay for government regulations.
	You don't have to pay for oversight.
	You don't have to pay for third parties, right?
	So it's just a massive saving, right?
	Like you send an email, you don't have to pay for the bailman running away from the dog, right?
	So the value is just it will be cheaper, right?
	Yeah, I mean, all of these things are great.
	I still don't think that's consuming the con, but...
	But does it, sorry, whether we call it consumption, do you at least admit that there is value in not involving third parties in the transfer of wealth?
	In the same way there's value in eliminating farm workers and replacing them with machinery?
	Definitely, yeah.
	Okay, so then it has value...
	Now, I mean, intrinsic value doesn't exist, so it's just value to consumers.
	And if you can offer people things for a couple of percentage points cheaper if they use bitcoins, then there will be value in that, right?
	Now, whether it's enough to overtake gold or the fiat currency, I don't know.
	I mean, I just don't know.
	But the idea that bitcoin doesn't have any intrinsic value is not economically sound because it's saying that things that are cheaper for the same price are not more valuable.
	And I just don't think that's the case.
	I mean, that's why we're talking over Skype rather than meeting in person.
	Yeah, just one quick thing.
	When I say consumption demand, I don't mean value to consumers.
	I mean, the value that comes from consumers demanding the item in order to consume it.
	So that's a slight difference.
	Maybe this is another way to put it.
	So let's say you're using gold as money, right?
	So there's a monetary demand for gold, which...
	Now, wait, wait, sorry.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Do you mean gold like gold coins?
	Any form of gold.
	Well, no, no, that's not...
	Because are you talking like currency representing gold or do you mean gold itself?
	You could be using physical gold.
	You could be using gold certificates.
	Can't really use physical gold for currency very well.
	I mean, how am I going to buy a cup of coffee with an ounce of gold, right?
	Yeah, I mean, currency is the certificates, you know, to redeem the money, which in this case would be gold.
	Okay, so, sorry, hang on a sec.
	Hang on a sec.
	So, right away, I have an overhead that Bitcoin doesn't have.
	Yeah, okay.
	And I have to trust that people are going to be honest with my gold.
	They're not going to lend out too much.
	They're not going to invest.
	They're not going to invest too much.
	They're not going to leverage it.
	Right?
	So I have risk and I have cost, which I don't have with Bitcoin already.
	Right?
	Do we agree on that?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Go ahead.
	Okay.
	So let's say that everybody is using gold.
	Or not everybody, but a lot of people are using gold as money.
	So...
	At some point, for whatever reason, the monetary demand goes down.
	So people suddenly want to hold less gold in order to conduct their daily activities, right?
	Now, that will make the value of gold go down, right?
	But because gold is used in other things, so there's consumers who want to...
	I'm sorry, sorry.
	I'm just trying to follow this example.
	So there's a lot of people using gold.
	Is this an environment where there is Bitcoin or is not Bitcoin?
	It doesn't really matter.
	No, it kind of does.
	Because if you're saying that people want to use gold instead of bitcoins, then you have to explain how gold is worth the 3 or 4 or 5% friction on every transaction that you need to have a gold-backed currency.
	So you have to explain why people are willing.
	It's like saying, okay, I have a credit card that has zero fees and zero overhead and never charges interest.
	And then I have another credit card that charges 3% on every transaction, costs $120 a year, and charges 3% of points a month on interest.
	But let's assume that everyone is using the second credit card with all the fees.
	Right?
	That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
	If there's Bitcoin in the equation, you have to explain why people are using all this gold if it's much more expensive.
	Well, it's more expensive, but there's a much lower chance that the price will go down, that the value will go down.
	And with Bitcoin, you don't know how low it will go.
	I would argue that...
	It will eventually go to nothing, but we don't need to go into that.
	No, you're not arguing anything.
	You're just stating that.
	That's not an argument, right?
	Okay, so I'm getting to that.
	So with gold, when the monetary demand goes down, the value goes down.
	But because the value goes down, that means that it's cheaper for people who want to consume gold to consume it.
	is cheaper for people who use gold to produce things, to produce them.
	And so...
	I'm sorry, how do people consume gold?
	Well...
	If they use it as currency...
	I'm sorry to interrupt, and I'm not trying to be difficult.
	So when people use Bitcoin as currency, they weren't consuming it.
	But you're saying people who are using gold as currency are consuming it?
	No, no, no.
	Other people are consuming gold for other purposes.
	Like when they buy a computer that has gold in it, they would be consuming the item that has gold.
	And when they buy like jewelry that has gold and they derive value from holding the currency or wearing it.
	Sorry, the jewelry or wearing it.
	So if people don't want to use it as currency as much, then the price of it will drop, which means the price of jewelry will drop, which means that people will buy more jewelry.
	Is that what you mean?
	Exactly.
	So there's like a balancing effect.
	So as the monetary demand goes down, the consumption and the production demand will go up.
	And so there's also a backstop to how low it will go.
	Well, unless, right?
	Sorry to interrupt, but if we're going to put in pure hypotheticals, right?
	Then we could say, well, if people suddenly don't want gold as currency and they also don't want gold as jewelry...
	then it's going to fall to the value of an industrial product, right, which is very low.
	Or you could say if people find some equally good conductor that's as malleable as gold for use in semiconductors, then they mine it from an asteroid or whatever, or they just manufacture it in a lab, then the price of gold will go down too, right?
	So you're saying, well, if demand falls in one area but remains – it's going to be higher in another area, but demand could fall – if you're going to have demand fall in one area, it could equally fall in both areas too, right?
	Sure, sure.
	It could fall in other areas.
	I'll accept the argument that if the value of gold declines as currency, then it will stimulate demand in jewelry.
	Yeah, I'm fine with that.
	Right.
	So there's a balancing effect to the value going down.
	So because there's a balancing effect and there's also the backstop, people know that gold is very unlikely to drop a lot in value and it's pretty much impossible for it to drop to nothing, right?
	I agree.
	Consumed and wanted for consumption and production for 5,000 years or something.
	So with Bitcoin, there's never been any consumption or production demand.
	There's never going to be any.
	So there is no balancing effect in that sense.
	So as the monetary demand goes down, the value goes down.
	And so that could cause other people to panic and sell their Bitcoins because they see that the value is going down and they know that there's no backstop, no balancing effect.
	Well, sorry.
	Sorry.
	Hang on a sec.
	Hang on a sec.
	Why is there no balancing effect?
	So let's say that the value of Bitcoin is going down because there's some feature missing from Bitcoin, right?
	I don't know what it is.
	I mean, if I knew, I'd probably be a Bitcoin entrepreneur.
	Actually, I would definitely be a Bitcoin entrepreneur if I wasn't a podcaster right now.
	But let's say that the value of Bitcoin is going down.
	Then you have millions of people around the world, significant portions of whom are very capable technically, whose value of their Bitcoins are threatened.
	And so...
	You've got to get hundreds of thousands of highly technical entrepreneurs trying to solve the problem of making Bitcoin more valuable again.
	Are they going to make it faster?
	Are they going to prune the size of the blockchain?
	Are they going to make it wearable?
	You can get a little Bitcoin thing implanted in your arm that is how you pay for things that can't be stolen.
	Are they going to make it a biometric reading identity?
	Whatever is missing from Bitcoin.
	There's going to be huge numbers of people who are going to rush in to try and shore up that value to make whatever is causing the decline reverse itself.
	So it's already cheaper and there is a countervailing effect to a value loss in Bitcoin which is people really don't want their holdings to go down in value and they're not going to sit idly by when it's open source.
	If Microsoft comes out with a shitty version of Windows There's not much you can do about it, right?
	I mean, it's not open source.
	It's proprietary.
	But there's no such thing really as a shitty version of Linux, right?
	Because it's open source.
	I mean, people would just fix it or add something if people desperately want something, right?
	That's why there's a browser for Linux, right?
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah.
	I don't think that you can incorporate anything that includes intrinsic value into the Bitcoin system as it works right now.
	I think you could do it if you...
	Like, started from scratch.
	It would be very hard, but it could be done.
	And what about the people...
	Sorry, the other thing too.
	What about the people, say, in the third world who really don't have the money to pay for the overhead of a gold-backed system?
	Like some guy who wants to start a restaurant and, you know, can't raise the money and there's maybe no bank around or maybe he hasn't got good credit or something.
	Then he has...
	You know, he can start his thing on Bitcoin and he can sell shares in his restaurant, raise the money that way without the need for lawyers or accountants or IPO specialists or a seat on the stock exchange or something like that.
	Like, you know, for people who don't have a lot of money, the overhead of gold is a significant portion of the price of doing business.
	And so there is some advantages there for smaller economies.
	You know, I mean, really rich people, you know, the overhead of gold doesn't really matter.
	For poorer people, I think that the sort of friction-free element of Bitcoin is pretty significant and helpful to them, I think.
	It would be great to be able to set up your own stock IPO without having to go through anyone.
	I mean, it costs $3.6 or $3.7 million plus 5%, I think, of the value of your stock just to go public.
	I mean, if you can eliminate that cost, that's a significantly better environment.
	Yeah, I mean, sure.
	Although, if the value of the Currency that you're using drops by a lot, or if it drops by 100%, then the fact that you saved a lot of money in the transaction costs may not matter a lot at that point.
	But so, I think that there could be some ways to develop a new form of cryptocurrency, which does include intrinsic value.
	It would be very hard to do.
	I have some ideas about how it could be done, but I don't think they could be incorporated into the Bitcoin system because it's already underway.
	Well, no, I'm sorry.
	Again, I'm no Bitcoin expert, but I would assume that you could absolutely buy up a whole bunch of Bitcoins, right?
	And then you could say to people, if you have these Bitcoins, I will redeem them for gold.
	Sure.
	But you have to pay me 5% on your transactions or 3% or whatever it's going to be.
	And you have to trust me that I'm going to be there with your gold.
	Because you can track Bitcoins.
	If I give you a Bitcoin, that can be tracked forever.
	And so if you and I engage in a gold-backed Bitcoin environment, you can set that up very easily.
	I mean, you're going to need some gold, but that's all right.
	You can...
	Yeah.
	You can have an IPO on Bitcoin to raise money to buy gold to back Bitcoins if you want.
	So you would say these Bitcoins, these colored coins are backed by gold.
	They will never go to zero because I will sign a contract on these Bitcoins forever to redeem them in gold.
	But that's not a valid contract if you don't tack on 3% of the value and send it to me in Bitcoins or fiat or whatever it is, right?
	So you can completely back Bitcoin with gold if you want, but you then have to make the value proposition to say, you have to pay me a couple of points on every transaction using these Bitcoins because I have to buy all this gold and I have to store this gold and you have to trust me that I'm going to have the gold and so on.
	So you can...
	And then you also have to have the government never come and take your gold, which they have a pretty regular habit of doing, as I'm sure you know from economic history.
	But you can have a gold-backed Bitcoin currency anytime you want.
	And if you can make that value proposition to people, you can say, look, your Bitcoins are never going to go to zero because they're backed by gold.
	And that is a...
	A perfectly valid thing to do.
	You don't need to invent a whole new currency.
	You can use that within the Bitcoin environment.
	You can put your colored coins in there and say, these are gold bitcoins.
	Yeah, I'm not entirely sure how the colored coins work, although I watched your video on that.
	But I don't see why you would be using bitcoins instead of just making up your own certificates, which is essentially what you would be using.
	Well, then, you know, you can make that case, and you can say, well, I'm going to go purely paper currency, and then I have all the border issues, the transfer issues, the regulation issues, the government issues, and so on.
	The moment you start – I mean, you know this from e-golds, right, and gold money.
	The moment you start fighting around with gold back anything, the government is all over you.
	Yeah, I agree.
	So this is just more overhead and risk that you're going to take, that you're going to – people are going to pay all this money to you for gold, and then the government comes and takes it all like they did with the Liberty dollar.
	So again, these are just risks that gold has that Bitcoin doesn't, right?
	I mean, in some ways.
	But the thing is, if the government does come in and steal the gold from e-gold or whatever, like in most cases, they're not stealing the actual digital currency.
	They're just stealing the gold.
	So after they steal the gold, you still have the digital currency, it's just that it's not backed by gold anymore.
	So you can't redeem it for gold anymore.
	So because you can't redeem it for gold, the value will probably go to zero.
	The thing is, with bitcoins, you're in the same situation before the government steals your gold, because there's no gold there in the first place.
	So there's nothing there to be stolen.
	Well, no, but there's nothing to steal.
	I mean, the government cannot go and steal bitcoins.
	Right, but the fact that there's nothing to steal doesn't make it any better, because it just means that you're in the same situation as you would be in the gold-backed currency after they stole your gold.
	Because there's nothing there in the Bitcoin in the first place.
	Just because they didn't steal doesn't mean that you're… No, no, no.
	I'm going to have to end it here because you're still not grasping the Bitcoin thing.
	So if you have a gold-backed currency, the government steals your gold.
	They've stolen the entire value of everything.
	All you have is paper.
	So first of all, that's not – I mean there's huge amounts of value to the Bitcoin architecture and environment and ecosystem that the government can't steal.
	The government can't steal Bitcoins and the government can't shut down the network because it's decentralized, it's open source, it's all of that, right?
	The government can't shut that down anymore that it can shut down Usenet.
	And so you're not in the same position if the currency is gone because you still have all of the value of the Bitcoin infrastructure network, programming environment, user adoption, acceptance by thousands of merchants, no overhead, all of that kind of stuff.
	You have nothing of that when the government takes the gold.
	You still have all of that with the Bitcoin environment.
	So anyway, let's just move on to one final caller if we can.
	Thank you for your questions and comments.
	I certainly appreciate bringing in the Bitcoin stuff.
	So...
	Who have we got next, Mike?
	Or who have we got last?
	Alright, Nick.
	Go ahead, Nick.
	Nick, we were just talking about you and what you do to gold.
	Hello!
	Oh, are we talking about me?
	Hello?
	Yes, go ahead, Nick.
	Can you hear me?
	Yes, it's late.
	So, yeah, yeah, I'll try to be quick.
	It's my first time doing this, so I'm really excited.
	So I was calling about a problem of mine.
	Taking a couple of notes about the other college questions.
	But my problem comes a bit over my motivation about what I'm trying to do right now.
	I've heard about your show from a friend of mine about a couple of months ago.
	And since then, I haven't stopped watching your books, listening to your podcasts.
	Oh, good.
	I'm glad to sell.
	And I'm really trying to use all of what I've learned since then.
	And when it comes to understanding it, it comes naturally.
	I can get in my head, no problem.
	I can't remember it, no problem.
	But when it comes time to use it and change how I act, really use what I've learned, I'm really not able to do it.
	I freeze.
	There's some kind of...
	Do you mean when you're sort of debating or arguing the points?
	No, just really trying to understand how to really...
	You get to do the things I have understood.
	Like, talk about my motivation problem.
	I get really prepped up for doing something.
	Like, yeah, I'm gonna change this, I'm gonna change that.
	I'm gonna stop doing those bad habits I have.
	I'm gonna start talking about the things that really matter to me.
	Then I get scared.
	I get unable to do it.
	I don't want to be confusing how I put it, but Hmm...
	Slightly cut some kind of difficulty on focusing on my problems.
	Like if I get really close to the point, I forget where I was going, and then I try to remember what I was thinking at the start.
	And then I get completely lost.
	I just don't remember what I was thinking in the first place.
	Can you hear me okay?
	I just sat on my mic cord.
	Can you hear me all right?
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, okay, good.
	Okay.
	So is it the case that you sort of get it within your own head intellectually, but when you try and sort of bring it into the world, it gets confusing and difficult?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, I think I know why that is.
	All right.
	It's because the world does not want you to explain philosophy to it.
	Okay, what do you mean by this?
	Well, I mean, most people in the world, what benefit are they going to get from clear and effective moral reasoning?
	I mean, 80% of parents hit their children.
	What benefit are they going to get from a clear understanding of the non-aggression principle?
	I mean, how many people want to voluntarily enter into a conversation where they get defined as immoral?
	Right?
	That's like saying to somebody who's a stockbroker, hey, would you like to help me pass a law that makes stockbroking illegal?
	Yeah, I see.
	How would you like to join me in a conversation that turns you into a criminal?
	What do you think?
	Well...
	It's like going to a drinker, like going to an alcoholic and saying, you want to join me in helping...
	Make alcohol illegal?
	Yeah, okay.
	They don't want...
	I mean, how many people benefit from government money?
	How many people take government benefits or work for the government or know people who do?
	I mean, how many people are going to...
	How many teachers are going to want to participate in a conversation where it's like, hey, you know how everyone thinks you're just a great person who does it for the kids?
	You want to join me in a conversation?
	That helps you to understand that you're propagandizing children to engineer their own political and economic destruction while at the same time taking money that is taken from people at gunpoint?
	I mean how many teachers are going to want to participate in that conversation, right?
	Thank you.
	I don't know any.
	Hey, you thought you made love to that woman.
	How would you like to be charged with rape?
	No.
	No, thank you.
	I don't want what I thought was voluntary transmogrified into a crime.
	Why would anyone want that?
	Thank you.
	So the vast majority of the world, they start to hear any kind of coherent moral reasoning.
	I mean, holy shit!
	Not only will they screw up your head and try to do anything to get you to stop talking about it, but they won't even be honest about that because they can't be direct about their hostility.
	I mean, nobody even wants to say, I sure hate...
	I sure hate when...
	We talk about ethics, clearly.
	Because that reveals that they're on the dark side of the Force, right?
	Nobody wants to think they're fighting for the Alliance and wake up half-choked in a stormtrooper outfit, right?
	Yeah.
	Put that away, it makes a bit more sense.
	But...
	It still confuses me as to some part...
	Similar troubles with using the knowledge I gained.
	For example, when I was still in middle school, and still now I think, I've always had a big problem with using mathematics.
	The five years I was in secondary school, All those five years, I had to go to summer school to pass again my mathematics.
	I thought I was getting better, but the day after, I still had problems with it.
	Third year, I had to double my mathematics class.
	It didn't stop.
	We always had troubles with it.
	My parents, Didn't really talk about it, but it was my mother well, and it was really more of my father that was pushing on me to get better at mathematics.
	I don't know which color it was when you talked about this with him.
	But he said something like, oh, you're not ready for life.
	Well, it's your job to make me ready for life.
	And my father got some kind of argument similar to this one.
	And I never really knew what to tell.
	When he talked to me, I really kept myself silent.
	Because I didn't know what to say and I knew my father had some kind of violent outbursts.
	Just the other day I had a talk with a friend of mine.
	Well, the same friend that introduced me to your shows and the forums.
	And what we were talking about was a bit about him, but it was more about My ability to feel anger.
	The experience I had of anger with my father really fucked up my vision of it.
	What I thought was to be angry, how anger was, really wasn't it.
	And I found out just after that discussion, just days ago.
	My father never really was angry.
	He maybe was a bit irritated at things I would do, and then he jumped straight to being enraged.
	And I saw that in myself.
	I was irritated at something my brother would do, or anything that would irritate me in my surroundings.
	And I would keep quiet about it for some time, and then I would not talk about it.
	Maybe show some signs of irritation, but I was never angry.
	And then if I had enough, well, I just unleashed the fury.
	And then I punched holes in the door.
	I punched my brother.
	Yeah, it was really an asshole to my brother's job, all my youth.
	Right.
	Well, do you know what?
	I mean, rage is a confession, right?
	Almost all emotions that you see are a confession.
	Of inadequacy.
	Inadequacy to what?
	A confession of inadequacy.
	So somebody who is a bully is confessing that they do not know how two people can win in a conflict.
	They are inadequate to win-win negotiations.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	Almost all evil is a confession of inadequacy.
	So somebody who steals is confessing that he cannot earn, either through generosity or trade, what he wants.
	Or he doesn't want to.
	A man who rapes is confessing that he cannot be loved.
	A parent who hits or yells is confessing That they cannot earn respect.
	A politician is confessing that he cannot convince people, therefore he must use force.
	All who lobby the state are confessing that they cannot convince people, therefore they use the power of the state to enforce their will.
	All brutality, all aggression, All violence, all abuse, all force is a confession of inadequacy.
	I cannot earn love.
	I cannot earn respect.
	I cannot earn goodwill.
	I cannot earn sexual favors.
	I cannot earn influence.
	Force is failure.
	Force is failure.
	It is a confession of failure.
	It is a confession of inadequacy.
	You screamed at your brother and hit your brother because you could not imagine a world in which you and your brother could both get what you want.
	Either he gets what he wants and you're fucked, or you get what you want and he's fucked.
	And that tells me that you simply were never taught.
	How to find mutually satisfying, win-win, happy, happy, joy, joy, big hug solutions to problems, right?
	Yes.
	So it is a confession of inadequacy, right?
	From my part?
	Sure.
	Sure.
	Of course.
	Okay.
	Look, if you could have reasoned with your brother, and the silence was a confession of inadequacy earlier, right?
	Because you said you just sat on it and you bottled it up, right?
	Yeah.
	Why?
	Because you could not reason with him and find a win-win solution, right?
	Yeah.
	Well, I remember trying to do that, but it never really worked.
	Yeah, listen, I'm not saying that you are a failure or you are inadequate in any fundamental way.
	What I'm saying is that if I scream incoherently, pretending to make sounds like Chinese, I am confessing that I cannot speak Chinese, right?
	So a Chinese person is like, I mean, those aren't even words, right?
	And if I use aggression and intimidation and brutality, I am confessing that I do not know how to create win-win situations.
	I do not know how to be empathetic with the person I am with, either because of my failing or their failing.
	It is a massive failure confession.
	confession.
	It's a big flare saying, I'm inadequate.
	I don't know how to do something important.
	I'm panicked, and I'm failing fundamentally at everything that I think could be worthwhile in life.
	There's always desperation There's always desperation in aggression and self-hatred.
	I mean, you weren't proud of what happened with your brother, right?
	You didn't think that makes me a great person.
	No, not at all.
	No, you didn't think, hey, you know, if I play back my wedding day in slow motion, it brings me to tears.
	It's such a beautiful day.
	Right?
	If you saw yourself screaming at and assaulting Your brother, if you saw that in slow motion, with that feral face and the impact of your fist on him, wouldn't it kind of make you sick to your stomach?
	More than death.
	Yeah.
	It's horrible.
	It is such a confession of inhuman impotence, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, the snow motion replay is a pretty good mental trick.
	You know, if I see this back in slow motion, how is it going to look?
	Right?
	Picking my nose in traffic.
	Ooh, not good, right?
	If I play this back in slow motion with no sound, what's it going to look like?
	I mean, I'm sitting there playing with my daughter on the carpet.
	You know, I'm being a horsey or whatever.
	I mean, I see that back in slow motion.
	It's pretty cute, right?
	It's fun.
	It's nice.
	But if I'm snarling at someone, I mean, that ugliness, that, you know, can you look back at what you're doing with no sound in slow motion?
	How does it look, right?
	That's without the emotional intensity and the self-excusing, right?
	Looks ugly.
	Yeah.
	Disgusting.
	Yeah, so, I mean, it's worth avoiding the slow motion horror movie, right?
	You want the slow motion hallmark moment, right?
	When you can add your own piano and burst into tears, right?
	Not with shame, but with happiness, right?
	And so, I mean, I've done some podcasts recently on negotiations.
	I think it's a three-part series.
	You might want to check those out.
	But my daughter never needs to aggress because she can always negotiate.
	You know, I'm always curious to find something we can both be happy with.
	She just never needs to escalate.
	Doesn't mean she doesn't get pretty intense in her negotiations, of course.
	But she never needs to be aggressive because she knows I have her best interests at heart.
	She knows that I care enough about our relationship not to erase my own needs.
	Right?
	I mean, you don't want someone having sex with you out of duty, right?
	I mean, you want them to have sex with you out of Desire, love, lust, whatever, right?
	And you don't want people to self-erase around you, because that's just sowing the seeds of the end of the relationship, right?
	Right.
	And my daughter knows that I will not self-erase, but I will not erase her.
	We'll find something that works for both of us.
	And, I mean, I can't think of a time when we haven't.
	So she doesn't need to get enraged, because she knows...
	That we're going to find something.
	Now, she's not born knowing that, understand?
	She's not born knowing that.
	She's born scanning her environment, looking to see how conflicts are resolved, right?
	And that's something that I've taught her, and she's also taught me about it too.
	She comes up with very creative solutions to conflicts.
	But she's learning that, and I'm learning from her as well.
	But I taught her that initially, as did her mother, as has her friends, right?
	And if you weren't taught that, I'm incredibly sorry.
	I mean, you are, by far, tragically in the majority, I'm so sorry that you weren't taught that.
	I'm damn sorry that I wasn't taught that.
	In my family, it was the same damn thing.
	Either you grind them to powder or they grind you to powder.
	And when you're the younger sibling, you know which way the powder is heading, right?
	So, I'm sorry that we didn't learn that as kids, but it's not too late.
	Yeah, I know.
	I mean, you didn't say, when I said the slow motion thing, you didn't say, yeah, it's pretty funny.
	You said, that's pretty horrible, right?
	So, it's not too late.
	Yeah.
	I remember sometimes, in my youth, where I used to try and negotiate with others.
	But I was always turned the other way.
	I was really confused as to what to do if that wasn't the way to do it.
	I wouldn't possibly imagine another way to do it.
	The others were so hostile to me and didn't really want to be hostile to anyone.
	But that's all I knew.
	Right.
	Yeah, of course.
	I mean, I wasn't raised in Mandarin.
	I don't speak Mandarin, right?
	So I would really try working on, trying to figure out how to negotiate in a way that you can trying to figure out how to negotiate in a way that And, you know, if there are people around you who don't really know much about that, then maybe you can teach them that or invite them to learn about all that kind of stuff.
	But I think it's really important.
	I mean, you can't have sustainable win-lose relationships.
	I mean, you just can't any more than...
	You can serve shitty food at a restaurant and expect to stay in business.
	You know, there just aren't that enough masochists in the world.
	Right?
	The very nature of that relationship will bring it down.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Yeah, and sustainability is good, you know?
	It's good for the environment, but it's even better for human relationships.
	So that means finding win-win.
	So that...
	Yeah, that's the way nature works.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Oh.
	Does that help?
	Yeah, it helps a lot.
	I thought I would...
	Go down maybe a little bit longer, but I don't know.
	No, I'm afraid it's pushing three hours for me and I've got to take it.
	Yeah, that's what I thought too.
	Maybe I'll call it another time.
	Yeah, no, call it another time, sure.
	Could you just tell me the name of the podcast about negotiation?
	Yeah, I think, I don't know if anybody knows the numbers in the chat room, but there's just a negotiation part one, two, and three.
	You can find them on YouTube.com forward slash FreeDomainRadio or FreeDomainRadio.com.
	You can search for them.
	But they're pretty recent.
	I think they're quite useful.
	But I think they'll be quite helpful.
	I've got a lot of positive feedback from those.
	All right.
	All right.
	Well, I didn't talk too much, but I think I'm going to comment some other time.
	Give you a bit of feedback.
	Thank you very much.
	Thanks, Mike, of course, for staying up.
	And thanks, everyone.
	One second, Steph.
	It's 2398 through 2400.
	That's a negotiation.
	2398 through 2400.
	Yeah.
	Three of the best podcasts I think you've ever done stuff.
	I absolutely love those.
	No, no.
	That's 70.
	Oh, I'm still bitter.
	I'm still bitter about a conversation that everyone was talking about.
	Oh, it could be 30 years from now.
	It will still be as fresh.
	I just want to thank you for this.
	Oh, you're welcome.
	You're welcome.
	Just for those who don't know, there was a conversation up at my house where everyone...
	Oh, no, it was in the chat room.
	Everyone was talking about their favorite podcast, and they were all from six years ago.
	So...
	That's where that shallowness is coming from.
	So thank you for throwing a few scraps my way, Mike.
	It helps me get through another day.
	And do we have any – I mean we're doing Peter Schiff next week, right?
	Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday?
	Yeah.
	On Monday, you're debating Walter Block on is spanking a violation of the non-aggression principle?
	Then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you're doing Peter Schiff from 10 to noon, I believe.
	Yeah.
	And then on Friday, you are on Alex Jones, I believe, at 2 p.m.
	Eastern.
	So it's going to be a busy week.
	We're not doing a Wednesday show next week because of all the aforementioned stuff, but we'll be back on for next Sunday.
	Fantastic.
	Well, thanks very much.
	Have yourself a great week, everyone, and fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
	Throw a few shekels to an old ex-lepper.
	I'd really appreciate that, to keep the show humming and growing, as it is wont to do with your support.

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