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March 17, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:28:11
2640 A Roundtable of Discontented Ghosts - Sunday Call In Show March 16th, 2014

Strong emotional reaction to The Bad Philosophy Show; a table full of discontented ghosts; absent fathers are not fathers; reaching your potential; justifying insignificance; overcoming anger and choosing imaginary friends over your romantic partner.

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Well, good morning everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
It is the 16th of a month which shall remain unnamed, just to make sure that the show doesn't get too dated, but it will be celebrated yet into the future on every 16th as the show, right after the 15th, just before the 17th.
Mike, who do we have first?
All right, up first today is Justin, and Justin doesn't have so much a question, but he actually had a really strong emotional response to the Bad Philosophy show, the call-in show that we did recently that Isabella participated in, and he wanted to tell us about it.
Go ahead, Justin.
Okay, thanks, Mike.
Hey, Steph.
Hi, Justin.
So, if you don't mind, I would like to start just by reading the relevant parts of the email I sent to you and Mike, if you don't mind.
No, please don't.
So I had a strong emotional reaction in hearing how Steph interacted with his daughter.
First and most briefly, I felt annoyed, then sad and disappointed, then angry, furious even.
This had everything to do with my history, or lack thereof, with my absent man-child of a father.
Once this hit home, I wildly fluctuated between sadness, disappointment, and anger.
I felt surprised because I thought I had processed my history with my father because of the conversations I've had with him, but I guess it never really leaves you unmarked.
Just like a broken bone where a cut from a knife leaves its mark, so too does shitty parenting.
I felt such sorrow for the little boy.
Pardon me, sir, I'm going to get choked up a little bit.
You don't have to pardon me for feeling strongly about important things.
That's an important thing, so go ahead.
I felt such sorrow for the little boy, tearfully sitting by the kitchen window, waiting for his father to show up, which he rarely, if ever, did.
I can still feel the disappointment, which later turned into anger as I got older, which later turned into silent, emasculated, unprocessed fury as things started to sink in over the years.
Now, as a man, having all those memories, all that emotive content fled back into consciousness in mere moments, I felt so angry at my father for having dared put the responsibility on me, his son, to repair the relationship and reach out to him.
Even now, as I'm about to leave for Montana, even fucking now, he still tells my mother, the last time she saw him in Walmart, to have him call me, quote unquote.
Bullshit.
I waited for him, reached out to him as a young man, listened to him talk about his past, told him I was open to establishing a connection as a man, and yet, quote, have him call me.
Are you fucking serious, dad?
And then there's a little extra about gratitude for you bringing Isabella on the show and you being such a positive father figure.
That I thought I'd never see in my life.
It's one thing to hear how you talk about Isabella and how you interact with her, but to actually hear it with her and involve in conversation, it was like a whack in the gut.
I'm very sorry about all that, but please go on.
So, yeah, just to finish it, thank you for displaying such a wonderful example of how a father should behave with his child.
I'm sad and disappointed at the loss of a childhood I'll never have and the subsequent disadvantages of my early childhood.
But I'm extremely happy for your daughter, having been born to such wonderful parents.
Oh, the advantages she'll have 10 to 20 years from now after having been raised with such loving and empathetic parents.
I can only imagine what the world could be like if there were more kids with virtuous parents like you guys to guide them from life noob to adulthood.
And that's the end of the ego.
I'm very sorry.
Can you tell me a little bit more about, you said, your man-child of a father and obviously his...
Putting the onus on you of the relationship is pretty rough.
but in what way would you describe him as a man-child? - Literally and figuratively as he grew up, 'cause I was conceived when he was 16 and been born when he was 17.
And yeah, mother was 19.
And so he – they got married and tried to kind of – wanted to force it to work because of me.
Got married for the child because my mother's side of the family is very religious and my father's side of the family is practically nonexistent because he had a wretchedly poor childhood.
He lived in a dirt hovel.
His parents were not there and whatnot.
But as I grew older – It would always turn into this cycle of, Dad's coming to visit, he never shows up.
And Mom would badmouth him, and I'd have to deal with Mother getting angry at him, which made her angry, and that anger spews out into the household.
And in my early 20s, I had reached out to him after pretty much having only seen him maybe once or twice my entire teenage years.
My entire teenage years, I think, yeah.
I had reached out to him in my 20s, and by that time, he was on his third and final child, which is my brother.
And he had grown considerably.
And I reached out to him.
We had a very...
We had a decent rapport, right?
And at the time, I was like, ooh, I'm getting to deal with my father, you know?
Person to person, I have a half-brother, and...
But he was very apologetic to the point where it almost didn't matter what I was saying to him at this point.
He was just, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
But he wouldn't reach out beyond that.
He would always leave it up to me because he didn't want to, I guess, just plop himself into my life after having been absent my entire existence.
Well, also, hang on, I'm sorry that he said, were these interruptions to what you were saying?
He would let me speak.
No, they weren't interruptions.
He would let me speak.
Yeah, yeah.
As people, as adults, we got along fairly well, but as father to son, he would always...
Always leave it up to me to reach out.
And at first, I just kind of wrote it off like, oh, you know, he had a hard life.
I was equivocating for him.
And when I heard Isabella and you interact, I was like, fuck.
And it's – because last time I spoke to him was last May.
And he stopped.
He gave up the rest of his day, stopped what he was doing, put everything down to talk to me.
But it was all about him and his crappy past and his life.
And I understand I opened the door because I wanted to know.
I wanted to know – I always heard it from mom about how your dad's a piece of shit and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I wanted to hear his side honest and truly for once.
But he always had this habit of just not reaching in there to find the courage to just reach out to me because he was afraid I was going to ream into him, right?
I guess.
Right.
Was there anything in particular in my interactions with Izzy that was difficult for you or was it kind of the whole thing?
It was the whole thing, but it was the way you were able to modulate the way you speak to her to compensate for the fact that she's five.
But it was mostly just hearing...
The intelligence in her voice.
Like the way I pictured her is inside that little body is this magnificent woman that's being born and it just needs more time to mature.
It's so close to the surface.
Like even when she was trying to sing, I could hear the singer in her.
I'm like, holy crap.
Steph's going to have a singer in the household.
Yeah.
We'll see.
We'll see.
Well, I appreciate that, and I'm very sorry, but I will make one suggestion, which is to not confuse a verb for a noun.
Because you keep saying, my father, my father, my father, and then you say, but I didn't see him.
I saw him once or twice or three times through my teenage years, right?
Right, right.
So that's not your father.
Right.
Yeah, Bob.
His name is Bob.
We'll call him Bob.
Yeah, his name's Bob.
And he's not your father.
Fathering is not something that you squirt.
Fathering is something you do.
Right.
You know, it takes a cozy five minutes to become a father.
And it takes about 40 years to do it, right?
Right.
And people confuse the five minutes for the 40 years.
When I was a kid, I was in boarding school and we had to write a letter to our parents every week.
So I dutifully sat down after my haircut in boarding school and I wrote, Dear Tom.
And I used to get, people used to get upset with me.
They'd say, no, no, no, he's your dad.
They'd say, dear dad.
I was like, but he's not my dad.
I used to refer to him as my ex-father.
Hmm.
Seriously, this is what we do when we get divorced.
We refer to our ex-wife and our husband as our ex-husband.
Oh yeah, it makes total sense.
I follow.
Well, he was my ex-father.
Absolutely.
And people laugh to me.
Oh, you don't understand.
No, I got it.
I got it.
He's my ex-father.
Yeah, I totally understand that.
Okay.
And so...
I don't feel too comfortable with both my dad, sorry, with both, well, I guess my dad, your dad, and me being in the same category.
Okay, right.
To parent is not, you know, a squirt and a nap, right?
Right.
To parent is to guide and interact and enjoy the company of a child.
And What it has in common with an ejaculation, I don't know.
But it's sort of like there's all these people out there in the world who were conceived from a sperm bank and keep going back to the test tube and giving it Father's Day cards and wondering why the test tube isn't closer and wondering what the test tube thinks and what the test tube would want and then taking the test tube out on Father's Day, propping it up on some pillows and having deep and meaningful chats and trying to understand why the test tube remained.
At the sperm donor clinic rather than coming to visit and why the test tube didn't bring any toys and why, you know, what the test tube's childhood was like in the glass factory.
And it's like, no, it's a test tube.
It's a sperm depository that hits your mom's egg the right way.
And when you get divorced from someone or when someone divorces you, which is really the case with these parents, the idea that you the idea that you I mean, don't get me wrong, I think it's useful to know about your father's history and all that so that you can take any blame off yourself, right?
Sure, yeah.
And so you can also evaluate your mother for who she chose to have children with, right?
Yeah.
So these are all useful things, right?
And...
There is really little more ugly to say to a little boy than your sperm donor was a piece of shit.
Because basically, the mom is saying you were created half out of shit.
Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way.
Anytime a mom puts down the sperm donor or the ex-father, she is saying to the child, to the boy...
That the male part of you was created from shit.
That is such an ugly, ugly thing to do to a boy.
It's the same thing with a dad, an ex-wife, and a girl.
Right.
And I would imagine for a boy to hear that spoken of about the father, that would be...
It's emasculating as expounded upon, extrapolated across all those years of having it hurt.
Oh, absolutely.
It's emasculating and also it basically says, there's a couple of things it says.
The first thing it says is, there's a weird thing that moms do with ex-husbands where they say, this guy was a piece of shit, right?
Right.
And they somehow think that they're victims of that.
That does not reflect on their choices.
And that, I've never quite, I mean, even as a kid, when my mom would be bad-mouthing my dad, I couldn't understand how this was supposed to make anyone but her look bad.
Hmm, right.
Let's say my dad was all the things that my mom said.
Well, she was a beautiful woman.
She could have chosen, I mean, it wasn't like she was in an iron lung, and he was the only sucker to fall for her metallic charms, right?
Right.
I mean, it's like she could have had just any number of guys, right?
I mean, she was gorgeous when she was younger.
And so she would rail against this guy she chose.
Every time she would attack him, she'd raise this Female verbal abuse sniper rifle to her shoulder, and she'd take aim at a target, pull the trigger, and the gun would just go off in her face, scarring her even more.
And she'd keep doing this, thinking she was hitting some kind of target when she was just melting her own head, pockmarking her own head with cordite-laced backlash.
I never understood why this made her better and him worse.
And that was, again, something that was, you know, well, aren't you a fucking idiot for having a kid with such a douchebag, right?
Right.
Oh, yeah.
And...
That's something that, I mean, we're still a long way from sort of getting that consciousness down, right?
Right.
And look, I mean, if your dad was 16, your mom was 19, and obviously that was just a complete mess waiting to happen.
That doesn't mean like in the future, I don't know, in the future maybe a 16-year-old...
Young man can be an effective parent, but right now, you know, the forced and extended childhood of public schools just keeps everyone so retarded that pretty much it's a complete disaster, but it didn't happen.
But to then say, well, he was a piece of shit, it's like, well, he was kind of close to still being a child, right?
And not only that, she would...
She would aim at his head, as you say, and fire the weapon.
And she would also throw in things like, you remind me of your father, you're so much like your father.
So, unconsciously, throughout the childhood hearing that, no wonder I had some problems later.
Well, and of course, and by saying that, Your father is a piece of shit.
You're so much like your father, it means you're so much like a piece of shit, obviously, right?
And the second is that I don't know who initiated the separation, but basically I'm gonna pour tsunamis of feral, feminine, feline hatred at your father, who you are just like.
So you better not fuck around with me, young man, or I'm gonna crack that bond the way I cracked the bond with your dad, right?
Yeah, that's what it felt like sometimes.
Kind of shaky ground, right?
Yeah.
Right, there was a cartoon that sort of struck me when the Iraq war was starting, when I think Uncle Sam, like an American icon, was going to talk to Gaddafi and a couple of other dictatorships, and there was like a smoking crater where the Saddam Hussein chair was, and Uncle Sam was saying, well, now that I have your attention...
And that's what struck me as, you know, when there's a smoking crater where the father was, the mother turning to the son and saying, well, now that I have your attention, right?
And that's kind of true.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I even – when you were talking, it just reminded me of something that's – it's not at all funny, but I remember many years ago, it was kind of like a family joke, kind of in an uncomfortable ha-ha-ha type of way where she would often – as she was doing her hair up for work and stuff in the mornings, as she was having a particularly – Rough time of it emotionally or what I could hear kind of grumbling to herself a little bit in the mirror.
And I would be like, you know, oh, what's wrong?
And I don't know how old I was, but it happened enough.
And she'd be like, you!
That's not funny, right?
No.
I mean, I understand the laughter as a defense.
Yeah, I'm so accustomed to being like this family joke and it's just not...
Looking back upon it, and I even had a serious discussion with her more than once about it.
I was like, Mom, you just don't...
Yeah, that's a family joke, like whipping someone's back as a massage, right?
Right.
It's kind of the opposite.
Right.
And, of course, there does seem to be, and whether this is gender-based or not, I don't know, but there does seem to be a kind of habit on the part of women to act...
And then for the rest of their lives, somehow imagine they were acted upon.
Hmm.
Okay.
Right?
I mean, it's sort of like me going around, drunk in bars, throwing punches at people and insulting people, and then claiming that I just get beaten up for no reason.
Right.
Yeah.
Like the idea of self-ownership for choices and acceptance of consequence for choices...
Seems to be a little further away from the female mind than it is from the men.
Like men will roll their eyes and say, oh man, I really screwed up, or oh man, what a mistake I made, or whatever.
Yeah, it's true.
Okay, yeah.
But for women, it's like, well, you chose to screw the 16-year-old.
You were 19.
I mean, you could drive, you could serve in the armed forces, in many places in the...
America, you could drink.
You could vote.
You were a legal adult and you chose to bang the 16-year-old.
And I'm sorry that he had a bad family situation and so on.
But you were 19 and you knew that unprotected sex could lead to pregnancy.
Right.
Right?
I mean, a 12-year-old knows that.
And so it was not a lack of knowledge.
And then somehow, it's like there's just two women.
You know, there's one woman...
Who goes and does stuff, and then there's another woman who has to accept all the consequences, who doesn't even know that the first woman exists, you know?
Yeah, split personality almost.
Yeah, it's like, I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, it must have been some sort of immaculate conception from a 16-year-old demon.
I don't know how the hell I got knocked up.
It wasn't me.
It wasn't me.
I don't have that vagina.
I am shaped like a Barbie doll with no orifices.
I can't poop, I don't sweat, I can't ever get a runny nose, and I can't hear a goddamn thing because my ear holes are closed.
So I don't know how I got a baby in me, and I don't know how he came out through that dimpled, tiny little pink crater called the belly button that I have.
But somehow, with no orifices, I ended up pregnant.
Right.
And it wasn't even the Son of God who can do cool stuff.
I got immaculate conception, victimhood of that, and I didn't even get a kid who could turn water into wine, because mommy likes to drink.
I didn't even get a kid who could walk on water, and we couldn't have those funny things where I say, get in the bath, and he's walking on top of the bath.
I say, get in the bath, he's walking on top of the bath.
Ha ha ha, right?
I mean, it's such a rip-off to have this immaculate conception.
Without even a kid who's his own grocery store, who can just take a little bit of loaves and fishes and just make more loaves and fishes.
Because for some reason people like to eat loaves and fishes.
Right?
I mean, it's sad.
You know, he can't go beat up people at the bank and all these...
He doesn't give great sermons on the mound in the backyard where people come and give donations.
Like I had this immaculate conception and just ended up with this completely normal, average, human, mortal kid.
Who does no cool miracles, makes me no money, gives me no wine, no food, no followers, nothing!
And so this weird, I was a Barbie doll, somehow I got a kid, and I'm cursed by this weird happenstance.
It's just the way that a lot of women are, and of course they are to some degree that way because they can get away with it, right?
Oh yeah, yeah.
Because the poor, noble, heroic, single mom is just one of these archetypes, right?
They stay, and they sacrifice, and they work hard.
And it's like, well...
Let me just sort of give you an example of the anti-child prejudice and the pro-women prejudice that we have in society.
So there was this woman recently who was abused by her parents, and I think this is fairly well established.
And she's now suing her parents for the cost of her private school.
She doesn't live with them anymore.
She's taken refuge at a friend's house.
And I think it's well established, legally has been established, in a court of law has been established, if I remember rightly, that she was abused by her parents.
I don't really go into much detail.
So she's suing her parents for the cost of her education.
And so I don't think she's a legal adult yet.
And you wouldn't believe, I mean, I guess you would believe, once you know the amount of anti-child prejudice in the world, She's an entitled brat.
What right does she have?
Her parents have already supported her.
She's just selfish.
This amazing amounts of verbal abuse poured on this poor child's head.
And the rational thing to compare it to is alimony.
You know, do we say to women who have separated from an abusive, wealthy husband when they haven't worked, if that woman then wants to be kept in the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed, what a selfish brat.
What an entitled, narcissistic bitch.
Yeah.
We don't say any of that.
No doubt.
Well, she was dependent upon a man, and she then fled from his abuse, and then he's supposed to pay her for the rest of his life.
And everybody assumes that that's normal and natural, and if he tries to shirk that, he's a bad guy.
But when a child flees abusive parents and then asked to be kept in the lifestyle to which she's become accustomed, she's an entitled, selfish, narcissistic bitch.
A brat.
Because we are literally that far from still seeing children as human beings.
Of course, children don't vote and they don't have the money to buy stuff except through their parents and all that.
It's tragic.
It's tragic.
So I just want to point out that in my view, you have a test tube, right?
You have ejaculate.
Yeah, you have a gray stain on a blue dress, right?
Yeah.
And I'm sorry about that.
The fertility of your father's sperm has nothing to do with the virtue of his character.
Fertility does not equal ability.
No.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
Everyone can make life.
Almost everyone can make life.
But being able to raise virtue?
Wow.
I mean, that's hugely different.
Right.
You know, like a 10-year-old can get into a car and make it go.
Right?
That's a long way from winning the Indy 500, right?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
In fact, my brother, when he was a kid, disengaged the parking brake once, and when he was playing around in a car, started rolling down a hill into traffic.
This was the kind of...
And let me just say one other thing too, if you don't mind, just the degree to which...
When I was a kid, my mother dealt with my brother as if my brother were my father.
And they do, you know, to be fair, they do have a lot in common.
My brother is a better man than my father, in my opinion.
But they do have a lot in common.
They're both pretty funny.
My brother is wickedly funny.
And my father had a pretty dry sense of humor as well.
When he was younger, he smoked a pipe, and then he got this super long Gandalf-style pipe.
And my mom said, why do you have such a long pipe?
And my father said, well, my doctor told me to stay away from tobacco, further away in the pipe.
It's pretty funny, I thought.
But, yeah, my brother has some physical characteristics similar to my father's, and he has some personality characteristics that are not dissimilar, I guess.
And my mom basically just was, oh, you're so much like your dad.
I, on the other hand...
Was considered to be like my mom's dad.
And so, you know, my brother would always be resentful because I was the golden boy.
Like my mom really worshipped her dad and all that.
And he was a fairly impressive guy in some ways, an intellectual, a poet, a writer and all that kind of stuff.
And I would often think when I was a kid, we'd sit around the dinner table Sniping and bitching and, you know, all the, you know, it wasn't always outright abuse.
There was just a lot of low-rent, exhausted bullshit nagging going on.
Yeah, tedious.
Yeah, just tedious, spiky bullshit, nothing negativity going on.
And I just, I remember thinking, like, there's nobody here.
There's nobody here because when my mom is interacting with my brother, it's like she's still married and To her husband.
But she's not married to her husband, and that was like 10 years ago or 15 years ago.
So like 30-year-old mom is here when she's 45, but 30-year-old mom isn't here, so she's not really here.
And she's interacting with my 10-year-old brother as if he is a 35-year-old man.
My brother was born in Africa, my father was born in Ireland, and he's not here either.
And I am like an 80-year-old German man here, but I'm in fact an 8-year-old Irish-born kid.
And then my brother is down on me for a variety of reasons, but partly because I get better treatment from my mom because she mistakes me for an 80-year-old man.
Right.
And your mom perceived you as nothing like your father, I presume, right?
No, no, nothing like my father.
Okay, all right.
Which kind of made you the golden boy relative to your brother.
Yeah, now that didn't mean I still didn't get beaten up and screamed at and all of that.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, like, because let's just put it this way.
My grandfather was the dad who raised my mom.
So let's just say she did not have a simplistic relationship with him.
Mm-hmm.
And so it was a table full of discontented ghosts.
That's what I really felt.
There's an Henri Ibsen play called Ghosts.
It's worth reading.
Just because there was nobody there.
I wasn't allowed to be who I was because I was an 80-year-old man.
My brother wasn't allowed to be who he was because he was a 35-year-old husband.
My mother couldn't be who she was because she was alternating between being a 10-year-old girl and a 30-year-old woman.
But there was nobody there who was actually the right age and the correct fucking person in the room.
There was nobody there.
I don't know if this makes any sense to you, but when your mom is bitching at your dad, it's like, he's not here.
He was 16.
He's gone.
Who the hell are you talking to?
Me?
I'm the only human in the house.
And I would have no idea who she was talking to.
Yeah.
Like, she'd switch on a light, the light would break, and she'd burst into tears sobbing, nothing works, everything's broken, and she'd have these long monologues, and it's like, who the fuck are you talking to?
She's like Aragorn going into the mountains and coming back with an army of ghosts, except nobody else can see them, and they don't exist.
I mean...
It's just weird.
The ghost families are just everywhere, where nobody can be who they are, because everybody's this broken, stuck, bitching record of history.
Yeah, that's an excellent way of putting it.
That's exactly what I was thinking when you were describing it, ghosts at a table, being surrounded by almost like having dinner with yourself, but not quite.
Well, having dinner with yourself, you're at least your own age having dinner with yourself.
It's when all these other archetypes slide into your brain, and you You get these different alter egos of my mom, right?
Wife and kid and all that, interacting with projected alter egos onto my brother and myself.
And it's like, there's nobody here.
And that's what I mean to say, like when I sort of, people say, well, you don't spend time with your mom anymore.
It's like, well, I can't.
Because I can never be who I am.
Because if I'm not the archetype my mom wants to project into, then she gets really angry.
Because she needs to unburden herself of these horrors, originally of her own childhood and later on that which she has created through her abuses.
But I cannot be with my mom because she needs for me to be an archetype.
She cannot have me be who I am because she can't project into who I am.
Right?
So, you know, if you have a tablet that doesn't work, you get frustrated, right?
Right.
If they're slow or the fingertips, finger touches take too long or everything's really slow, you get frustrated, right?
I mean, we all do, right?
Yes.
Because it's not working.
It's not not working.
Like if it was just cold bricked, you know, if it just didn't start up at all, it'd be like, oh, well, it's broken, right?
But it's when things kind of half work that it just gets really annoying, right?
Oh, my God.
And it's the same thing.
So, like for my mom, I'm a projection receptacle.
And if I'm not allowing her to project onto me, in other words, if I have opinions that aren't passively responding to who she's pretending I am, then she just gets angry and yells at me and threatens me and used to hit me because it's like, well, this tablet's not working.
This poison container is not working, so I need to thump it until it does work.
My passive receptacle of historical bullshit It's not working.
And I have, of course, every right to use my child as a poison container.
In fact, that's what a child is to this kind of person.
So if the child is not allowing me to do that, then the child clearly does not understand his or her role in my life to be a poison container, and therefore I must scream out and hit the child until the child resumes the role as the poison container and I can dump my shit down that child's throat again.
That's awful.
And it's like, well, you know, there's no choice for me in my relationship.
I can't be anyone else.
I've tried.
I've tried repeatedly.
And if my mom can't dump her crap into me, she has to start owning it herself, right?
And we talked about sort of female self-ownership.
It's like, well, she chose to marry the sperm donor.
She chose to marry the test tube in some bizarre ceramic ceremony.
And then she chose to stay with him.
She chose to have children with him.
She chose to have me when the marriage was disintegrating.
She chose to leave him.
And then she chose all the men that paraded through the house afterwards.
And somehow she's a victim.
She could have given up my brother and I at any time.
You leave us at a hospital, you leave us at a police station, you leave us at a fire station, and they will find a home for us.
She could have walked away from this at any time with no legal repercussions.
It takes you $50,000 in years to get divorced, at least in the States, but you can divorce your kids.
You just drop them off.
The system will find a place for them.
It's no worries.
So all moms remain moms by distinct choice.
And all they do, a lot of them, is just play this weird victim game.
Like they had no vaginas and no brains.
And no choice or nothing.
Oh, it just happened.
I don't know how.
Yeah, you know, it's like we used to play these games when we were kids.
When we were on bridges, there's a river underneath, right?
You get a stick.
This is because there were no tablets, right?
Our tablet was nature.
But you'd get these steps, you'd throw them up, and then you'd see which stick would race down the river first, right?
And no one broke the stick in two because it didn't swim hard enough.
Because we understood that the stick is passively going down the water, right?
My brother and I get bored in the backseat of cars.
We'd actually choose raindrops if it was raining.
And it was England, so it usually was.
We choose these raindrops.
And, oh, that's my raindrop.
That's your raindrop.
And then, you know, they'd go down.
And which one would get to the bottom first, right?
This was our Angry Birds, I guess, right?
But nobody like went out like rolled down the window and yelled at the raindrops because the raindrops were truly passive.
Right.
But and so women just like I am a stick in the river.
I am a raindrop on the window.
I am a mere victim.
And it's like, wow, how do people I mean, and this still occurs.
Right?
This still occurs.
Absolutely.
And, you know, feminism, which is to me, feminism, at least modern feminism, political feminism, is the most retrograde thing that's happened to women in centuries.
Because it has to portray women as victims, and it also then has to engage men to go and get resources and give them to women, like some ridiculous old medieval knight.
Right.
Right.
You know, these poor women, these single moms are victims, and therefore we need the male police with all the male-invented weapons to go and get money from other people and give it to women.
Like, you couldn't picture something more retro in the known universe.
That's a female role that has literally not been part of contemporary society for hundreds of years in many ways.
And to tap onto your analogy about the raindrops, raindrops kind of take the path of least resistance rather consistently.
Yeah.
When they're trundling down their windshield and all that stuff.
And that's what victimhood does.
It teaches you how to take the path of least resistance relative to self-reflection.
And if these women really were victims, then they wouldn't be trying to get alimony and child support.
Because they're not victims then.
Then they're very proactive.
They're very active.
If there truly were victims, they would never, like, oh, I'm a victim, so I can't go and get any money from anyone because I truly am a victim and can't initiate anything to help myself, right?
But what they have is this, I guess it's not too peculiar, combination of rank victimhood with regards to their own choices combined with harpy, bitch-laced, venom counterattack when it comes to going to get resources from men.
Right.
It's like, well, which is it?
You know, I mean, if you are proactively trying to get resources, then you're not a victim.
Right?
I mean, if you're hounding the guy for child support and alimony and trying to get money from the government and voting for political candidates who give you more money and resources and food stamps and free, you know, and if you're voting for Obamacare so that you can get your kids' dental treatments paid for by, you know, 70-year-old people with no kids.
Trying to affect the outcome.
Yeah, then you're not a victim, right?
It's just that when it comes to your own personal choices, then you're a victim.
But when it comes to grabbing resources, using the gun of the state from every other known sentient being in the universe, then suddenly you're not a victim at all.
You're extremely proactive.
And this is just the tragedy of how things work, right?
To me, this is just like, because I know great women.
I'm in fact married to a great woman.
I was just going to say.
Yeah, and look, I mean, one of the things that my wife said when we were dating was she said, look, if we get married, if we ever get divorced, I don't want anything.
Like, I don't want anything.
And she would tell stories of, you know, couples who would break up and They'd fight over, oh, there's this chair or this table.
And she'd be like, I just walk away from the whole thing.
Like, I wouldn't want anything.
Why would I want a table to remind me of a marriage that broke up or a chair or something?
I don't want anything from this history.
And we were just talking about this the other day.
And she said, not that it ever would happen.
But, you know, I mean, yeah, I still stand by that.
I would want nothing.
Nothing from you.
And that is, you know, so there are fantastic goddess-like creatures who levitate above the world and are great this way.
But there are these weird caricatures of femininity that come across like that spiky frog-hipped woman from Pink Floyd's animated movie The Wall who are just, like, they're just caricatures of black widow spiders.
You know, just intensely manipulative, no ownership for mistakes, but endless invocations of the patriarchy while complaining about the patriarchy, like just completely bizarre caricatures of femininity that have no value except six inches of tubing.
Yeah, and that was reflected in the Shitty men that she brought into the household, strung through the household thereafter, after the sperm donor left, Bob.
Who she would then doubtless complain about.
Yeah, when she wasn't busy getting her face macked around by them, yeah.
Oh, they would hit her.
So she brought men into your life who would hit her.
Oh, yeah.
The first time I called into the show, you and I had discussed that.
The one in particular was really, really awful, and she nearly died from it.
He would kick her in the neck with steel-toed boots, and little eight-year-old me was standing there shaking because I wanted to do something, but it was impossible.
I mean, the man was like six foot tall.
Drunken rage, big bulking muscles, holy hell.
Oh no, you could have killed.
Oh my god, yeah.
I'd just shimmy my butt out of the window and go get grandma and grandpa.
Yeah.
What really nailed this in is my friend recently told me of an event that happened several months ago.
I don't want to give any names or anything, but Basically, the brother of this friend is emasculated.
He drinks a lot.
And he went after their youngest sister, got his hands around her neck and in a rage and was going to choke her.
And I know all these people, and I'm fairly close to my friend and her sister.
And nobody told me.
Not a goddamn person told me.
And it was dropped into the conversation...
Like out of the blue, like a boulder just hit the table.
Bam!
You know?
And all I remember thinking, all I remember feeling is it immediately triggered that rage.
And I remember feeling, I wouldn't have done it, but I remember feeling that if the brother were at the table, I just would have cold cracked him across the head.
Because all those times...
Having to see my mother hear the screaming and then hear this story of yet another angry drunk man hurting someone that I cared about, right?
I'm just like, you son of a bitch.
And the fact that what was worse than that was how nonchalant it was brought up in conversation.
Right.
Right.
And these people knew my history, and we were kind of brushing up against that, and she and I was asking all these questions, and she didn't know the answers.
Like, you didn't ask if he apologized?
You didn't ask what happened?
I'm like, well, did they kick him out?
No, he still lives there.
I'm like, what the fuck?
Who would have kicked him out?
Well, he lives with – he still lives with his parents, and he's nearly 40 years old.
And the youngest sister is 25, 26, and they all share a domicile.
They live in the same house.
I guess he was kicked out a little bit the next day after he sobered up, but then the father, well, yeah, their father allowed him to come back in on the condition that he never touches a drop of alcohol in the house, but he still goes out and drinks.
And I asked the youngest sister, my friend, I was like, well, did the bastard at least apologize and make amends?
Did he stop drinking?
And she's like, I don't feel like it's resolved.
He gave me a half-hearted apology.
I'm taking steps to leave, and I'm just like, I just said to her, I'm very sorry that you don't have the support that you need to have, because I just felt like it was like being brushed under the family rug, in a way, and I'm like, y'all are crazy.
Yeah, and now you need to do that, though, without the laughter, right?
Because the laughter is the hook.
Yeah, absolutely, you're right.
You're right.
Yeah, I was just...
And more than just crazy, right?
Because people can be crazy and not have any...
There's no moral dimension to that craziness, right?
Right.
I mean, they can just be crazy, right?
But this is evil, right?
Yeah.
If you say, you people are doing evil and don't laugh, then you have different choices, right?
And I just found this out two days ago when we were hanging out at the local pub.
And I had just interacted with that guy a week prior.
And I said to them, look, whatever party we're going to be having for my going away party when I go out to Montana or whatnot, I don't want that motherfucker anywhere near it.
Wait, wait, wait.
See, this is what I'm having trouble understanding.
Sorry, go ahead.
Why are these people throwing you a going-away party?
I don't know if they are.
I just said to them...
Why might these people be throwing you a going-away party?
The people I was having dinner with are my two closest friends, I guess.
Oh, sorry, sorry.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Okay, but they would be inviting people who've done some evil to children, but not everyone, right?
Right.
That's why I flat out said to them, I don't want anything to do with him anymore.
If I ever see him again, there's going to be problems.
I just don't want to keep him away from me.
I'm going to stay away.
Don't invite him anywhere.
It was a very difficult conversation and I was pointing out some inconsistencies and they were definitely getting angry about it.
Because they were thrown around the family story about, oh, you've got to love them anyhow and blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, no, you really don't got to do anything.
There's a great piece that can come over you when it comes to relationships.
And the great piece is you wait and see what your heart says.
Right?
Right.
And so, you know, if, I don't know, someone from my past were to call me up and say, I'd like to get together, and, you know, rather than me thinking I can will something or I should Follow some abstract standard.
I'll just say, I don't know.
Let me see what my heart says.
Let me take a day or two and see what my heart says.
You know, we have this gut, right?
We have this gut sense, which is very strong and very powerful.
And it processes moral stuff in a very fundamental way.
We can intellectually talk ourselves in and out of anything we want to.
But our gut is solid.
Our gut is right down there.
I don't know if you get some anxiety or whatever.
It's like this cold fist in your lower gut.
It shows up in the gut.
And there is a lot.
Again, biologically, it's like a second brain.
It does really process a lot.
And it processes a lot down at the animal level.
And that's really important.
When I first came to Canada, I lived with a relative in Whitby.
A relative had a dog, a collie, and I picked up a rake to do some rakes and leaves, and the collie whined and ran away.
And, you know, my relative seemed quite embarrassed and said, oh, well, you know, we got this dog from someone else who used to hit it with rakes, right?
At the time, I was like, okay.
Now, I'm obviously pretty sure that it was my relative who hit the dog with a rake.
Now, you couldn't explain to the dog that the dog had been disobedient and the dog hadn't done its prayers and therefore this punishment was justified.
You couldn't get the dog to self-attack.
The dog was like, well, there's a rake, so I'm running away, right?
You couldn't get the dog to go and pick its own rake and submit to being hit because it had been bad or wrong, right?
It was just like, oh, fuck, there's a rake, I'm out of here, right?
Because the dog is operating on the gut.
The dog can't talk itself in and out of a whole bunch of convoluted intellectual bullshit so that it's willing to submit to more abuse voluntarily, willingly, because of sentimentality and social standards about the virtue of the people who hit you with a fucking rake, right?
Mm-hmm.
So I learned a lot from that dog that day, which is, oh, there's something that hurts me.
I'm going to run away.
Get away!
Right.
That's the gut.
The dog doesn't have a neofrontal cortex with which to talk itself into voluntarily choosing the right and submitting to abuse.
And so for me, it's like, oh, I'd like to do something.
No.
I get pings from people from my past.
Oh, I miss you.
I haven't seen each other.
I haven't seen you in years.
And I say to myself, well, I'll see if I want to.
I'll see if I don't.
Oh, I should.
Or I should call this person back.
I don't do should.
You know, I had 20 years of shoulds.
I don't do should anymore.
I'm out of that prison, right?
You get your get out of jail free card, you stay the hell out of jail.
I don't do should anymore.
I do, do I want to?
What does my gut say?
And that's great because the gut is empirical, not intellectual, right?
The gut is empirical, which is how have I experienced this person throughout my life?
And the reason why abuse continues is because we don't listen to our gut.
This is very fundamental.
The reason why abuse continues is because we don't listen to our gut.
The reason that abuse continues is we allow ourselves to be talked into continuing to submit to abuse.
That's true.
That's why abuse continues.
If we all listen to our gut, abuse would be done in 20 years.
It would never ever recur.
I mean that not facetiously, this is not a hyperbole, in all dead seriousness.
If we listen to our gut, abuse as a human condition would vanish in about 20 years.
The reason that abuse continues is that abusers Can hit you with rakes and then religion and pseudo-philosophy and sentimentality and art and culture and all other forms of institutionalized and institutionalizing bullshit convince us that it was our fault, that it wasn't really a rake, that they weren't really hitting us, that they did the best they could with the rakes they had at the time.
And we lose the simple dog sense to get away from being hit by a goddamn rake.
Yeah.
Too true.
Right?
So if we just listen to our gut, I mean, people, parents abuse children.
Why?
Because it satisfies their needs in the moment.
And because what long-term consequences do they suffer?
Society still hurts the adult children back.
Says they gotta stay there, gotta get Mother's Day cards and go over for family dinners.
So, I mean, why would you stop?
It's pleasurable in the moment.
It allows you to avoid dealing with your issues.
And so, whatever we subsidize increases, whatever we tax decreases.
We know that from economics.
Right.
And continuing to hang around with, and pal around with, and support, and sanction with your presence, abusers, is the greatest subsidy for abuse that could possibly be imagined.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
And the tax is in the gut.
The brain, the neofrontal cortex, which is basically the giant bullshit machine of mankind.
I swear to God, it is the giant bullshit machine of mankind.
It's this neofrontal cortex that doesn't listen to the gut and molds itself according to prevailing ideologies at the expense of the body, at the expense of peace and freedom and intimacy and virtue.
It's the giant machine of Morpheus, Mobius strip, kaleidoscopic confusion that dazzles us into thinking virtue is vice and vice is virtue.
And to reject the giant bullshit machine of the species and go with the gut is how we are virtuous.
I mean, it's not knowledge that we need to be virtuous.
I get this more as a parent now than I ever did before.
It's my daughter.
Met her first mean kid the other day.
I won't get into the details.
She wants to tell the story in the future, but on the show.
And, you know, people have always said to me, well, if you raise her in this nice environment, she'll be very susceptible to bad people.
And I said, no, she won't.
And it turns out she's not.
She met a mean kid and she was like, whoa, that kid's mean.
She tried talking to the kid.
Then she brought her mom over.
Her mom tried talking to the kid.
And then she's like, whoa, I am not going to be her friend.
I didn't teach her anything about any of that stuff.
She got it.
Good for her.
Great.
And then we spent a couple of days talking about it.
I was like, wow, your first mean kid.
Let's talk about it.
She got it right away.
It's that opportunity that Isabella has to talk with her father about stuff like that for a couple of days.
You know, anything.
Just having a father figure to talk about stuff like that with.
Yeah.
And the other question, if you don't mind.
I do mind.
I'm so sorry.
That's okay.
We've been over an hour, so you're right.
I do have a bunch of other callers.
Okay.
And at this rate, we ain't going to be done until sundown.
So I really appreciate your call, and I'm very, very sorry.
But I will tell you this.
I'm happy that you're sad.
I hate to say it, but I am.
Look, you getting exposed, which throughout history we tend to stay with whatever tribe we're born into, and if you're born into a shitty tribe, you tend to stay with a shitty tribe.
And the fact that you've got exposure to something else is really cool.
The fact that you get exposure to a higher standard of being, which most of your little asshole tribe is designed to keep you from ever experiencing or seeing, is really great.
So I'm sorry that you're sad, but I'm glad that you're getting exposure to stuff that changes your standards.
Oh no, I know exactly what you mean.
I appreciate the time and the feedback.
All right.
Well, Mike, who do we have next?
All right.
Up next is Tim.
And Tim wrote in and said, Do you have any suggestions as to how someone can really stay focused on reaching their highest potential and make the best decisions in the moment so as to reach it?
Go ahead, Tim.
Hey, good afternoon, Steph.
How are you?
Will, how are you doing?
Doing great.
I just had a slight preamble to that question, actually, if that's okay.
I wanted to say it's an honor and a privilege.
I think I'm one of the Legion who first heard you on the Rogan podcast back in September, and I've listened and watched every show ever since.
Thank you.
But it's been hugely influential, transformative.
It's been helping me make a wealth of changes in myself for the better.
So I just wanted to mention that.
When I emailed about a month ago to call in, I wanted to talk about my troubles getting employment.
But since then, I've actually started earning more steady income from some freelance web development work and related work.
So I'm finding myself to be in a successful line of work that I actually enjoy.
So it's quite gratifying after many years trying various paths and pursuits.
I'm still not quite where I want to be, but it's much improved, and I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel monetarily, so that's a good feeling.
Sorry, can you hear me okay?
I'm a little nervous.
Oh, no, you're doing great.
You're doing great, and I appreciate that.
I'm glad the show is helpful, and again, thanks to Joe for allowing me to expose myself to his giant audience.
I appreciate that.
It's good to flash a crowd, is what I'm saying.
Good.
And then just also, I'm diversifying now and dollar-cost averaging into Bitcoin, of which I donated a bit to the show.
Hope to do some more in the future.
Thank you.
And just before I get to that question Mike mentioned, I echo some of the sentiments of The Last Caller.
I also was impressed with the Bad Philosophy show with Izzy, and I think it just...
showed an ideal example of a father-daughter relationship and it's amazing to me how many of our generation are seemingly having living amalgams of the same experience with you know the absent bio dad and I also reached out to connect with mine in my early twenties and that's a long story but fortunately in my case my mom was less of the dysfunctional type I think she was more of like the goddess archetype that you mentioned Yeah,
you know, there comes a time in life when you just stop looking for better people and just stop becoming a better person.
You know, like, I'm not going to try and get a better relationship with my dad, I'm just going to be a better dad.
If that makes sense, you just look for that.
But anyway, so full potential, that's your question.
Where do you feel your potential is not fulfilled?
I would think, you know, basically in the area of work and doing something worthwhile to contribute to, you know, the, I mean...
I mean, it's kind of lofty.
I think I get grandiose visions, but I think you've done that, and I'm very inspired by it.
I couldn't believe when I found your show.
You have thousands of these talks, and it's just incredible.
In some way, if I could get toward a path or a lifestyle or a line of work that would be in that realm, that's where I'm trying to drive towards.
Of course, there's all kinds of obstacles.
That's kind of what I wanted to get towards.
I think being comfortable with grand ambitions is really important.
You know, it's funny how I always wanted to do something great with my life.
At least since I first encountered Ayn Rand.
I get it.
I really wanted to do something important with my life.
You know, I was reading a biography of Ayn Rand and there was a picture of her at some point in the 1950s with an older couple.
And the caption underneath it said, you know, here's Ayn Rand in California in 1953.
The couple on the right remains unidentified.
And I was like, ooh, I don't want to be that.
I don't want to be that.
I don't want to be the person in the photograph who nobody knows who they are like 40 years later.
Like nobody can remember who the hell they are.
They've completely vanished.
And even if there's a photograph that's been printed in millions of books, Nobody knows who they are.
That is not how I wanted to exit the world.
You can say, oh yes, but we leave impressions in the people that we love and that has an effect and ah, bullshit.
Ah, bullshit.
First of all, most people don't leave any impressions of any substance, at least any positive, long-lasting impressions.
And if you have the capacity to leave lasting, positive impressions on those you love, then spread the love.
Certainly the internet has made that a lot easier.
So I really wanted to really aim as high as humanly possible.
And I used to get mocked for this, of course, right?
Naturally.
And, you know, this, you know, like Jennifer Hudson with Simon Cowell when she got her Oscar and, you know, Simon Cowell thought she was never going to amount to anything.
It was like, I gotcha.
It's like, I don't care about the gotcha because that's just everybody.
The moment you try to do anything.
That is more important than cutting your toenails.
Everyone gets anxious because they know that they're wasting fundamentally the precious gift of existence and they start to get anxious and they want to clamp you up and put you down.
The moment you have any lofty ambitions, people want to clamp you up and put you down.
And the funny thing is, so I was in philosophy class and the teacher, the professor...
Was talking about Descartes' demon, right?
The idea that sort of a brain and a tank could be manipulated by a demon and all that.
And so I started picking at the argument and everyone got annoyed.
You know, like I was saying, well, the fact that you're talking to us means that you are acting on the premise that we're not a brain and a tank, right?
And all that kind of what evidence, what's the null hypothesis for the brain and the tank argument and so on, right?
Right.
And he was like, well, it's a mental exercise.
It's like, well, what the hell does that mean?
An argument is valid or invalid.
It's true.
It's what the hell is a mental exercise?
I never got to pull that shit when I was in junior high school.
I never got to get things wrong and say, well, I still want an A because it's just a mental exercise, right?
Two and two make five.
No, it doesn't.
No, no, no, no.
It's just a mental exercise.
Fuck that.
What a load of bullshit.
Right?
Mental exercise, my ass.
Mental exercise is a thought experiment.
It's a hypothesis.
It's like, well, then it's not true until you prove it.
I'm not paying you thousands of dollars to give me your mental fucking exercises, but to teach me some shit that's true.
That's kind of what I'm here for, right?
You don't go to medical school and they say, well, what if human beings have nine hearts in their armpits?
It's like, do they?
Well, it's a mental exercise.
It's like, actually, I'm not here to imagine human beings have nine hearts in their armpits.
I'm here to learn how human beings' bodies work so I can make some money making them better.
Give me your goddamn mental exercises.
Anyway...
But everyone was like annoyed that I was arguing with the professor.
Because they were basically, they were, come on man, I mean he's going to teach you some stuff, we're going to regurgitate it on the exam, and then we're going to get our marks and we're going to get on with our lives.
Like what are you arguing with the philosophy professor for?
Which is kind of weird.
It's like I'm paying to learn tennis and then they get upset when I hit the ball back.
It's like, what?
Yeah.
I'm supposed to hit the ball back.
I'm supposed to learn how to play tennis, not watch you play tennis.
I can get that from Wimbledon while sacrificing a couple of minutes to advertisements.
Interject there.
Like in my college experience as well, a lot of my classes, I think, you know, I tended to do well towards the top of the class, but I was hardly ever a participant in the conversations because of the same thinking right there that you're, you know, just take in the information that the professor is giving and do your homework and then...
There's a time and a place, I guess, is the point there for a certain...
Yeah, and that time and the place is when I'm paying to go to school and not earning an income to go to school, I am going to participate because that's what you do, right?
I mean, that's how you get your money's worth.
I'm kind of glad that lots of people didn't want to participate, so I got to participate more.
I argued ferociously with my Marxist professor and my philosophy professor and my psychology professor and my economics people, and they said, yeah, I'm all over it.
And I said at one point to, I guess, my classmates who were getting pissed off at me, and I said, you know that there's only a philosophy class because People disagreed with those in authority in the past, right?
I said, so right now, we'd studied Socrates, we'd studied Aristotle, and I said, well, we're only studying Socrates and Aristotle because they disagreed with the authorities in the present and disagreed with the teachers of their time.
So it's kind of weird to me that there only is a philosophy course because people disagree with authority, but in that philosophy course, I'm not supposed to disagree with authority?
Like, that's weird, right?
I mean, it's just bizarre.
And the other thing, too, is that my professors would get annoyed when I would argue with them while teaching all the thoughts of people who disagreed with their teachers in the past.
And that is one of the shitty things about academia and professors.
That they basically are people who don't like to be disagreed with, who teach and venerate lots of people who disagreed with everyone around them in the past.
Right?
I mean, Spinoza...
The Jewish philosopher, and he was an atheist, and this was so offensive to his Jewish contemporaries.
I mean, they banished, they ostracized the guy completely.
Nobody was allowed to have anything to do with him or to have anything to do with anyone he had anything to do with, to interact with him, to trade with him, to talk with him, to any of that stuff, right?
Right.
And he's held up as a shining example of Jewish intellectualism.
And then, as I have done, try arguing with Jews about some of the fundamentalist tenets of their philosophy, and they get really angry and upset.
And it's like, but you're holding up Spinoza as an example of Jewish intellectualism, but when someone around you acts like Spinoza, you get all angry.
Well, which is it?
Do you venerate the free thinkers?
Basically, academics are parasites of free thinkers, and they praise as noteworthy and hold up as examples people who they would fucking fail if they were in their class.
Right.
It's just a lot of hypocrisy there, it sounds like.
Sophists would give Socrates an F. Guaranteed.
And these professors, all the professors, I went to three different Ivy League schools in Canada.
York, McGill, the University of Toronto, and it was always and everywhere the same thing.
These fucking parasite academics will teach you all of the thoughts of people as great that they themselves would fail if they ran into them.
They are wretched, wretched examples.
A more wretched hive of scum and villainy could not be conceived of.
But anyway, so don't be afraid of great potential.
In fact, if nobody is trying to talk you out of what you're doing, what you're doing is almost certainly worthless.
Right?
Like if nobody is rolling their eyes at what you're doing, Then what you're doing is almost certain to have no impact on the species.
If I say I'm going to the store and get some milk, who has any problems with me?
Nobody.
If I say, well, I've decided to watch, I don't know, CSI Tucson or whatever the hell they're doing now, right?
Well, nobody has any real problems with me.
They may raise an eyebrow.
No, not really.
Oh, okay.
Everybody wants you to be boring.
So they never have to be interesting.
And so the first thing, yeah, set your heights as high as humanly possible.
I mean, why not?
I mean, nobody tunes in to watch mediocre sports people, right?
There's no, here's five-year-olds playing mini-golf channel, right?
There's like the PGA Tour.
Everybody wants and worships the best of the best.
Everybody wants Brad Pitt to be in their movie because I think he's a fine actor and I think he is obviously somebody who can open a movie, right?
He's very good at all that, right?
And so we all...
I mean, the TV is supposed to show us the best, right?
They don't say, well, this guy's a really good comedy writer, but let's hire a guy who's not really good, whose jokes are never really that funny.
Everybody wants the best of the best.
We want the best surgeon.
When we need surgery.
In the Olympics we want to see the very best of the best competing with each other.
But it's like there's this weird force field where we always and forever have to be in the audience seats and never on the stage.
Right?
So we all want to tune in and watch the Olympics because this is the best athletes in the world competing.
But then the moment you say to people, I want to be the best at something, they're like freaking out.
It's like, what do you think we were just watching?
This isn't a different goddamn species out there.
Okay, so to that point, Steph, I would pose the question.
I think a lot of folks who maybe came from my background or a similar scenario, we may have initially gone towards a certain best that we perceived this was the highest, and for me it was music.
I moved from my hometown to a I was in a different state and went to music school.
And I was like, oh, okay, I'm going to be the next Buddy Rich.
I was a drummer and pursued that for a while.
And then it's like you go a few years and some people may stay with that and they may thrive and do well.
But then for myself, I realized that wasn't the right pursuit for me.
Then I got into business and real estate.
I think we had Skyped a little bit about the real estate, some technical definitions on that.
And then that didn't work out because there was a terrible market through 2008.
It was when I got into sales.
Okay, you need to get to the point of why you're telling me all of this, if you don't mind me saying so.
The point would be...
Now I'm hearing you say these philosophy courses and I could go that route.
I guess I haven't come fully to that point of making the decision that that's what I want to do.
I mean, at the moment I'm doing IT and web design.
Wait, I'm sorry.
I'm still confused.
I'm still confused.
What is it that you're talking about?
Are you talking about maybe going to do philosophy courses?
Right.
That has been kind of in my mind of a potential path.
I'm just trying to make a decision for what's going to be the most worthwhile decision.
I'm trying to set my compass, I guess.
You know, but this is...
Having a relationship with knowledge rather than structure is really fundamental, right?
Because the funny thing is, and it is genuinely funny, and you'll get it when you get it, right?
So you've been listening to this show, you said, since September, right?
Yes.
So that's what, seven months?
It's been a while now, yeah.
And then you say, I'd really like to take a philosophy course.
Do you get why that's funny?
No.
Yeah, absolutely.
Why?
Well, it seems like I've just kind of gone right past that.
I mean, I could have done that a while back, and I just sort of kept plowing ahead.
That's not why it's funny.
What do you think you are doing?
Oh, well, in a sense, yes, I'm doing a philosophy course.
No, not in a sense.
Okay.
Philosophy started in conversations about life and attempting to bring consistent principles to conversations about life.
Right?
Sure, yes.
I mean, you could either take a course on Socrates or you could live like Socrates.
I think living like Socrates is better than taking a course on Socrates, right?
Oh, exactly.
Yeah, he's like the pinnacle of my, you know, the archetypes or the examples that I'm trying to follow in my life.
But I, you know, again, I just feel like I've fallen short somehow when I look back.
I mean, I'm 32 and...
I don't feel there's anything substantive that I've...
Sorry, I didn't mean to take you off track of what you were saying just now, but that's kind of my dilemma that I was calling in about.
But you're right, I am pursuing that Socratic...
No, you're still seeking a structure that will validate your value.
And I'm going to harp on this philosophy course thing, not because you should or shouldn't take a philosophy course.
But if you're listening to this show, you're taking a philosophy course.
And I would argue, you're taking the best philosophy course in the world.
Right?
Because I have experts on, who talk a lot about great ideas.
Because I have listeners on, and we talk about very great and important and deep ideas.
And you get to listen to, to participate in the message board, to participate in the call-in show.
Right?
Sure.
So then thinking, well, this isn't a philosophy course.
It is.
And it's actually a very livable philosophy course.
Let's say you go and study Plato.
Then what?
Right.
It's sort of a dead...
In many courses there, they're just sort of not a living experience.
They're just sort of reiterating the text.
How is that going to help you with the moral decisions?
That you need to make in your life.
Not much.
Not really.
And there's nothing wrong with studying Plato.
I've done it myself.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's fine.
And there's nothing wrong with watching old footage of successful athletes.
Nothing wrong with it.
Might even be sort of helpful.
But compared to actually going out and training yourself...
Doesn't matter, right?
It may be of some limited value if you do all the training, but if you ain't doing the training...
A lot of people listen to this show and think that they're doing philosophy.
And to me, it's kind of shocking and sometimes dispiriting.
And I don't mean you, but I mean people who've listened to the show for years and don't seem to have grasped anything foundational about it with regards to their own lives.
Listening to this show is like watching...
A great athlete.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, if it's not inspiring you to get off the couch and go do some athletics, then you're not getting the point of the show.
The point of this show is not to listen to me dazzle you with my metaphors and insights and thoughts, but to inspire you to do those things yourself.
I mean, I guess it's like if you're watching The Biggest Loser at this show where people try and lose weight, If you're watching The Biggest Loser just sitting on the couch eating onion rings, if you're overweight, you know, I hope that the point of the show, I don't know, I haven't watched it, but I hope that the point of the show to some degree is to get people to be inspired about losing weight and getting healthy.
The purpose of this show is to inspire you to act and live philosophically in your own life, not to watch me do it.
So, if you want to do great things with your life, all greatness begins in conversation.
All greatness begins in conversation.
And you can never be greater or deeper than your most shallow relationship.
This is really, really important.
If you want to be a great person, start having great conversations.
If you want to be a deep person, start having deep conversations.
If you want to be a meaningful person, start having meaningful conversations.
I go back to the philosophical touchstone of the band Queen, as I so often do because that well so rarely runs dry.
So Queen was a cover band, and then Freddie Mercury, who actually didn't even start out as their singer, but just somebody who basically was a roadie.
And he basically said, look, if we want to get anywhere in this business, we have to start writing our own material.
Because you can always get some sort of existence.
You know this, right?
If you're a cover band, you'll always get gigs, right?
You'll just never get anywhere, right?
Yeah, I had my share of that.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of parasitical.
But people prefer doing cover music for a couple of reasons.
And I think that there's two that are very important relative to what you might want to do with your life.
The first is that it's a guaranteed audience, right?
It may not be the most captivated audience, but they'll be there.
No, I mean, it's guaranteed gigs, guaranteed audience, right?
That's the first thing.
And the second thing is that learning how to play Mustang Sally is not that contentious.
However, learning how, like writing your own stuff...
And then getting your bandmates to go with it and learn to play it well.
And in Queen, they were constantly battling over royalties.
This is back in the days of 45s.
Freddie Mercury writes, Bohemian Rhapsody.
Roger Taylor writes, I'm in love with my car.
We're some of the worst and most entertaining rhymes in rock history.
Told my girl I'd have to forget her.
Rather get me a new carburettor.
Terrible.
But fun.
It's a fun song.
But it's never been one of my favorites at all.
So how much does Freddie Mercury get from a sale...
Of Bohemian Rhapsody and how much does Roger Taylor get from a sale of the flip side of Bohemian Rhapsody, which is I'm In Love With My Car.
Well, there ain't a lot of people buying I'm In Love With My Car, flipping it over and saying, oh, this song is interesting, right?
Yeah, there's a disparity.
Yeah, so they had constant fights over royalties, which is why in the later albums they just all shared credit.
They just said, Queen wrote the songs, you know, we're not like, God.
I mean, they're one of the few bands where all four members...
Penned their top ten hits.
That's a very rare grouping of very able songwriters.
All four bands, all four band members contributed top ten hits.
And a lot of them contributed a lot of top ten hits.
And it's not like the Beatles where it's basically Lennon and McCartney and then...
The other two, right?
Who also wrote some great songs, right?
I mean, Octopus's Garden by Ringo Starr and While My Guitar Gently Weeps by George Harrison.
Some good songs.
But, you know, it was a Lennon and McCartney show and the other guys were there and pitched in a bit.
But in Queen it was...
So they fought a lot over new songs, right?
If you're learning Mustang Sally, you're getting it right or you're getting it right.
It's not a lot to fight over, right?
But if you're all writing new stuff, then you have to have really good negotiation.
And bands are not known for their excess of negotiation skills, right?
Or sometimes intelligence or maturity.
A queen happened to be a band populated by very intelligent guys, right?
I mean, one was...
Ryan May was an astrophysics major who was working on his PhD, who actually, I think, completed it recently.
Roger Taylor was, I think, in dentistry, and so on.
So they're a bunch of intelligent, well-educated guys, and they had the capacity to negotiate, which is why they were able to do such great work.
So Freddie Mercury was like, listen, man, if we want to get anywhere, we've got to stop being a cover band, we've got to start writing our own material.
And that was very difficult for them.
And then they lost their audience because they were playing all their new material.
And they took that risk, but they started having more important and deeper conversations, which is about, do we want to survive or do we want to flourish, right?
Exactly, yeah.
Now, you have a question in your life, which is, what kind of conversations are you having with people?
And if you say to people, I want to do great things with my life, but I don't even know what they are, you'll find out pretty quickly about whether your relationships can support greater things in your life, right?
Sure.
The relationships are the challenge, I think.
I've wanted to always, of course, to have deep conversations and meaningful interactions, but I think that I've Come through a tough time and that was sort of a Pandora's box that I didn't know if we were going to get into relating to my childhood and things of that nature.
Well, I would imagine if you're struggling with these issues, it's because you are a man surrounded by microbes.
Right?
So if you want to do things that are important with your life, that are great with your life, then you have to be surrounded by people who believe in you.
Or you won't be able to do it.
So Aerosmith's band members described Steven Tyler as the greatest singer in the world.
Now, I mean, he's a fine singer.
He's a fine singer.
Not a huge amount of Different kind of ranges, but you know, I mean, Don't Want to Miss a Thing was originally written for Celine Dion and Steve Tyler took it over, kind of different vocal habits, let's say, and did a great job of singing it.
And, I mean, if you just look at the range of what it takes, it's quite something.
Yeah, he's a remarkable singer.
I agree.
Yeah, quite a singer.
But, and the band, you know, Freddie Mercury said Brian May was the best guitarist, and Brian May said that Freddie Mercury was the best frontman.
Now, Freddie Mercury was certainly the best frontman.
I mean, just watch Live Aid and you'll get it, right?
But, if they didn't believe that, Right?
I mean, if they made fun of Freddie Mercury for his prancing on the stage, right?
And if they said, you, Mick Jagger and Bono, for Christ's sake, you stand in front of people with rhythmic drum beats, take a dance lesson or two.
I don't know what the hell you people are doing.
It's like you're being randomly hit by tasers on stage.
But I mean, if they had just rolled their eyes, right, and mocked him and scorned him and undermined him, he would not have been able to do it.
We are inhabited by the voices around us.
And most people wish you to stay small so you will not offend their inconsequentiality.
Everybody likes to think that who they are is not a choice.
And this is true.
Fundamentally, I believe.
Sorry when I say it's true, I believe.
Those two things are not right.
But let me make a very brief case.
People who have bad relationships...
They like to say things like, well, relationships are hard.
Marriage is tough.
It's not, actually.
If it's tough, you're doing it wrong or you're with the wrong person.
Marriage is not hard.
My wife and I have disagreements maybe once every two or three months.
And those disagreements are no raised voices talking it out for maybe half an hour to an hour.
It's not hard to be married to my wife and she will tell you it's not hard to be married to me.
She says I'm the most easy going, easy to get along with person that she's ever known.
And so people will try to universalize stuff and say, oh well marriage is really tough and that's why my marriage failed.
No!
They're trying to normalize their lives like this is just life.
Everybody likes to think that their life is just life.
But no, their life is their choices.
And the moment that you come along and say, either explicitly or implicitly, your life is your choice because I am doing something different.
Well, they resent you for that.
And they can either take that as an opportunity to grow or they will react immaturely and reflectively and attempt to pull you down.
Nobody can do good math with people shouting random numbers into their ear.
And nobody can succeed with other people undermining what it is that they're doing.
And so if you want to achieve your full potential, start talking about the power and passion of what you want to do with the people around you.
And if they don't get behind you...
Then you have a choice.
You can stay small and satisfy their smug and inconsequential non-existence or you can find people who damn well will stand behind you when you want to achieve something great because they are enthusiastic about leaving a virtuous footprint on the world as well.
That makes sense.
I think that you hit on basically a major part of the reason why I moved from, I mentioned, kind of grew up in a small town in South Carolina, and then I had to get out of there.
Relationships, the people weren't going anywhere that were around me.
I mean, I don't mean to I can't speak too broadly, but at the time I was just frustrated with that and I had to get into an environment that I felt would be more conducive, more supportive people around me.
I've gotten that at a large extent in place, but I just always feel like I need to move up to another, like I'm on a plateau.
That's where I'm at now.
I think I have good friends around me that are open to me passionately presenting ideas and trying to strive for something great.
Hopefully.
But then again, at times, it's just like I feel a dearth of contact with my family.
For one, there's no one.
My mother is quite far away.
There's just a whole backstory there, Steph, so I don't know if it's really a way to go into those deeper issues.
Well, let me give you an example.
You know John Cougar, Melonhead, right?
I mean, the singer, songwriter?
Yeah, Melonkamp.
Yeah, okay, so one of his big...
I was born in a small town, and I can breathe in a small town, right?
Gonna die in a small town, yeah, that's probably where they'll bury me.
Right, so he's all about small-town living, right?
And that's his audience, right?
His genre, right?
Yeah.
There's a young man with a t-shirt, listens to a rock and roll station.
He got greasy hair, greasy smile.
He says, Lord, this must be my destination.
And he's all about this sort of small town living, right?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
And he says, when I was younger, I said, boy, you're going to be president.
But just like everything else, those old crazy dreams just kind of came and went.
Right?
So don't strive.
Don't be ambitious.
Don't, right, live in a small town.
That's what he sings about, right?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
John Cougar, Mellencamp, lives on an estate five miles outside of Bloomington on the shores of Lake Monroe.
He also has vacation homes in Dow Fuskie Island, South Carolina, and Tybee Island, Georgia.
He married former model Elaine Irwin, and then they get recently separated.
He's had three marriages, mostly to models, and he also dated Meg Ryan, the actress.
Why am I not surprised?
Small-town living guy?
No.
I mean, he's living the high life, got vacation homes all over the world, gets married to actresses and models and A-list celebrities, right?
Having come from that world myself, I think some people maybe in that case tried to glamorize it, but I honestly don't feel that anyone would choose that given the option.
There are higher goods that we have.
Developed as a culture that we would prefer.
I think the niceties of modern living and just a wealth of other positive things that can be acquired and support a better life.
Yeah, so that's why I'm here.
Yeah, so all the people who live in small towns who want to justify, right, they sing the songs of a guy who would have nothing to do with a small town working in a gas station ever, right?
Right, it's like, can you ever see Bruce Springsteen's wife?
He all sings about small towns and all that kind of stuff, right?
Drinking beer, sitting on the back of Chevys, and, you know, he just crams more American folklore into it.
Any song is like watching a Zeppelin be inserted into a condom.
And you know, he marries these supermodels and jets all over the world, right?
His audience is helping people justify their insignificance.
And this is a drug that people hunger for and yearn for.
Tell me about how my cowardice and failure is rootedness and depth, right?
And there is such a demand in the world for justify my smallness, excuse my cowardice, that this is where so much of people's talent goes, right?
Even Queen did it.
Now I know your folks are telling you, be a superstar, but I'm telling you, be satisfied and stay right where you are.
Come on, guys, that's not what you did.
Did Freddie Mercury stay in Zanzibar and go by the name Farouk Bulsara?
No!
Do you think you're better every day?
No, I think I'm just one step closer to my grave.
Well, no, they strive to improve.
But there's a market for staying small as a virtue that is...
Almost universally put out by people who rejected that entire ethic, which is why they're able to tell other people to stay small.
The tall poppy syndrome, exactly.
Right.
Right.
Anyway, so yeah, I mean, it comes into conversation.
It comes into your conversations with people.
That's where you need to start.
Because if you want to cross a bridge, you put one foot on it, right?
Hey!
How's that?
Can that hold my weight?
Okay, a little more, a little more.
Okay, ooh, I'm going to grab a handrail.
Let's try another.
Ooh, I'm standing on it.
Let's try up and down a little bit.
Can I make it?
Can I make it?
Ooh, okay, it's creaking, but I think it's going to hold.
There we go.
One more step.
Right, that's how you get across the bridge when you're not sure, right?
Mm-hmm, exactly.
Right, you don't just jump out into the middle of the bridge in a full suit of armor.
Right, because it might collapse, right?
And so if you want to start doing great things...
You don't test your own capacity for greatness.
I don't even know what that would mean.
But you start testing your relationships around you and their capacity for your greatness.
And then you just have to be ruthless.
Greatness is ruthlessness pure and simple.
If you want to be great, you have to be ruthless in your relationships.
Everybody knows that, except those who aren't great, right?
Yeah, it seems spot on, actually.
I'll re-listen to this and sort of take notes and think of how this can apply for me.
I do appreciate it.
Again, I wanted to say that as far as the work you and Mike do and everyone who contributes to make the conversation possible, I do agree with you that this is one of the most important discussions the world can be having at this time.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
No question.
And again, you know, it's not false humility.
I mean, I view myself as a relatively, hopefully, insignificant portion of it in the long run, right?
I just hope to provoke, you know, other...
I hope to provoke.
Deep and important conversation.
I don't fundamentally care fundamentally.
Fundamentally, I fund fundamentally.
If people come to conclusions or whatever, I mean, I don't really care about conclusions.
I care about the process.
So Francis Bacon described the scientific method.
He wasn't necessarily the first, but he was the first one to really codify it.
I mean, even Aristotle talked about the need for empiricism over theory.
But Francis Bacon really codified the scientific method, and he didn't really care what conclusions people came to, because that wasn't his job.
His job was to codify the methodology that allowed conclusions to be reached in a valid or invalid way.
I just hope to provoke deep and important conversations among people.
I don't really care.
Like all the people who say, well, I don't agree with Steph about this, that, and the other.
It's like, you're missing the point.
You are completely missing the point.
The point is not to give me checks or crosses on some...
I've got so many shows that, of course, I mean, having so many shows hopefully adds to credibility.
Because if I was full of bullshit in half of them, there'd be like 1,500 shows full of bullshit, right?
But people think that somehow scoring me about my correctness or incorrectness is important.
And it's not.
It's not.
What matters is, are you engaging in these conversations with the people in your life?
That's all that matters.
That's all that I ever want people to do.
And people get stuck circling the drain of these conversations rather than bringing these conversations to those around you.
What am I always telling people?
Go talk to the people in your life.
Go talk to your parents.
Go talk to your children.
Go talk to your friends.
Go bring your passion to those around you.
Never hide who you are.
Reveal the depth and glory and fear and anxiety and joy and burden and excitement of everything that you are as a human being to those around you.
Run some fucking currents through these wires and see if they hold or if they blow.
And people just sit there giving me scorecards.
Oh, he said this wrong.
It's not the Ukraine, it's Ukraine.
Well, not a couple of decades ago it was the Ukraine.
And we say the United States.
It doesn't matter.
And the degree to which people will short-circuit the necessity of deep conversations to have a deep life in order to scorecard me is pathetic.
Understandable, because it's a lot easier to give me I hope to talk to you again, Stefan.
Thanks, man.
Alright, up next is Alexander.
He writes in and says, I am a hard-working guy and have plenty of confidence, but this anger has existed for as long as I can remember, and I'd like to get it out of my life.
Do you have any advice?
Go ahead, Alexander.
Hey, Steph.
How's it going?
All right.
Let me see if I can probe this powder keg and get you to demonstrate what we're talking about.
Well, thanks.
I appreciate you calling in, and that's a difficult topic to talk about, so I really, really appreciate it.
Thank you.
By the way, I just wanted to mention that I met you back in December at the Palm Desert meetup.
I'm the curly-haired guy.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, I remember.
Nice to meet you again.
Nice to talk to you again.
Yeah.
Now, your rage didn't just come out since the Palm Springs meetup, right?
No.
Okay, good.
Good.
I want to check on that.
Otherwise, we might have a different conversation.
Alright.
Okay.
So, have you listened to the show for a while?
I guess if you've come to a meet-up then, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've been listening for about a year and a half now.
Okay.
So, where should we start?
Well, I'm assuming you'll probably want to start in my childhood.
Like it's just my choice, right?
Like it's just my preference.
All right.
I feel the passive aggression.
Let's wait for the aggression to come.
All right.
Okay.
So let's pretend that it's just my irrational preference to start with your childhood.
And what was your exposure to anger when you were a child?
Well, you mean where did I... Like, see people being angry, or where did I... Yeah, how was anger shown to you?
How was it modeled for you?
What kinds of anger did you see?
Well, I guess as long as I can remember my...
Like, when I was a child, my mom would yell at me a lot.
And, you know, if I didn't obey her, or if I did something that upset her, she would yell at me quite a lot.
Right.
And yell at you how?
Like, I mean, would it be verbal abuse?
Would it be intimidation?
What was the yelling, and what was it for?
Like, if I didn't clean my room or something, she would...
No, that's the cause.
But what was the manifestation, right?
Because yelling can be a variety of things.
It could be, like, full-on, Klingon, Vein Poppins shrieking, or it can be, like, a raised voice.
It can include verbal abuse or not, or what?
Um...
It was like, yeah, a raised voice.
She would yell at me and tell me...
It was just basically yelling arguments, yelling matches back and forth at each other.
She would provoke me to yell at her, sort of, if that makes sense.
No, I get it.
I get it.
Yeah, so just keep picking at the scab until you just lose it, right?
Right.
And then would she be shocked and appalled?
Yeah.
That you had raised your voice to your loving mother?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, so you get bullshit manipulation as well, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, my mom would yell at me.
Of course, the moment I'd raise my voice at my mom, she'd call the cops, right?
It's shocking, appalling, terrifying.
Oh my God.
How could you?
All right.
Okay.
Okay.
I mean, all people are doing is communicating that reason will never touch their feathers.
But anyway.
Okay.
How often would this happen?
Um, I mean, I haven't really thought about it specifically, but at least probably every other week or so.
And for how long would it happen?
Um, I mean, I can, in my child's, it's a little blurry in points, but, um, So you're saying every 14 days it would happen.
Now if it happens for 10 minutes as opposed to 13 days, right, that's a different situation, right?
Right.
Wait, I'm sorry, can you repeat that?
Sure.
So how often, you said it would happen every 14 days you'd get into a conflict with your mother, which I personally don't believe, but let's go with that, it could be true.
Every 14 days you'd get into a conflict with your mother, and how long would these conflicts last?
Uh, it could last, I mean, they would last days sometimes.
And are you going to stick by, and let me just, I'm not trying to get you to dislodge from where you are, but are you saying that for 10 days or so, or 12 days, you would not have conflicts with your mom when you were child?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
No, you're right.
I mean, there was a lot of fighting.
I mean...
I bet there was.
It's probably a fixed way of being, which is called, right?
Which is just, it's the default position.
It is the grooves that are worn in the brain through repetition, right?
Every time you nag, you're more likely to nag next time, right?
Every cigarette you smoke makes you more likely to smoke the next one and all that stuff, right?
Yeah, right.
Right.
And people usually only have one fixed way of being when it comes to conflicts, right?
Right.
Yeah.
If raising your voice is how you handle conflict, then for sure you are more likely to have more conflicts in the future and you're more likely to raise your voice in those conflicts.
It becomes a self-feeding, self-escalating mechanism, right?
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Do you have Netflix?
I do.
You should watch some of the 9911 shows.
Okay.
No, you should.
I mean, I know it sounds kind of funny, right?
You're a young guy.
I don't imagine you have kids yet, right?
No, not yet.
No, you should watch those.
I mean, they're a long way from where I would want to be philosophically.
Right.
Right, like there was this one 11-year-old little girl who ran away from home because she hated her mom so much.
And, you know, the nanny talked to the little girl and said, well, you've got to tell your mama how you feel and you've got to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And it's not terrible advice.
It's just that, oh my God, I mean, talk about blame the victim, right?
But, you know, they're just trying to patch up bleeding wounds.
But in it, you will see upper-middle-class families, a lot of whom have given up spanking, trying to figure out how to parent without violence and having to substitute verbal aggression for physical aggression because they simply can't fathom how you could not have aggression in the parent-child relationship.
Right.
And, you know, the nannies are like, well, you know, children thrive on discipline and consequences and so on.
And it's like, oh, God.
Yeah.
But nonetheless, right?
They do...
I think they have some good ideas.
And you also see the number of parents who run through their lives as if parenting is like, oh my God, what living hell is this?
Why did I do all of this?
And, you know, parents openly say, why on earth did I sign myself up for this?
Or why did I have so many kids?
And all that kind of stuff, right?
I remember...
Like, it's a chore.
Like, oh my God, if I could be released from the burdens of parenting, it would be like getting out of prison.
Yeah, I remember my mom saying things to me like...
She would tell me that I was terrible to her, that I was abusive to her, and stuff like that.
Like a victim, right?
Right, yeah.
Like, mysteriously, this 15-year-old kid spawned in her house, sent by the devil himself, and she had nothing to do with his upbringing or who he became, right?
Right.
Right.
And it really has become...
You should give her some chalk.
What do you mean...
Well, you should give her her chalk.
So if she's that good at playing the victim, right, then you should give her chalk so she can draw her own body out lying on the ground, you know, just so that she can really help everyone understand the degree of victimhood she's part of or the degree of victimhood that's inflicted on her by a child that she chose to have.
And she is the biggest single influence on you as a child.
But somehow if you turn out badly, there's nothing to do with her, right?
Yeah, I mean...
And it's tough because I know that I should probably talk to her about it, but it's just...
It's really hard.
I don't want to.
Like, I... Well, you don't have to.
I mean, I hope you understand that, right?
You don't have to.
There can be value in it, but, you know, the whole point...
I mean, I wouldn't want to tell someone who was yelled at a lot as a kid that you have to do something, right?
That would not be really the best way of approaching it, right?
But the weird part is, like, I feel...
Like, this affection for her anyway.
Like, and it's confusing.
And it's...
And what is the affection?
I mean, again, I'm not saying you shouldn't.
I'm just, you know, exploring what is the affection.
I don't know.
Like, I feel like she did a relatively good job mothering me, like, in some ways.
Like, you know, she would always...
I have anxiety issues, for example.
And she would really take care of me when I'd have, like, panic attacks and stuff.
And you feel that the panic attacks came out of nowhere, and she was sympathetic and helpful with you when they occurred.
Okay, yeah, kind of.
Okay.
Well, I mean, it's like, I have this big fear of throwing up, and that would always, I would always think that I was going to throw up, which I never would, but it would always scare me.
But that's verbal abuse, right?
That's the internal body recognition of verbal abuse.
It's because your mother was constantly ejecting venom and acid onto you, right?
Right.
Right.
I never thought of it that way.
That would be my thought, right?
I'm not saying it's proven, but that would certainly be the first thing that I would think of, right?
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
So, helping you with the wounds that she has created does not, to me, qualify as, you know, if I stab you in the leg, then I don't think I'm a great friend for calling 911, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, give me something else.
Well, it gets a little tough because I, like, I live with her still because in, like, a weird situation.
Turn of events.
I was going to move in with my girlfriend about six months ago, but she were both actors and she booked this national tour of a musical, so now she's going off for six months and I'm stuck here.
I mean, I'm not stuck here.
It just doesn't...
What does your girlfriend think of your mother?
I don't know.
I mean, most everybody, including my girlfriend...
Do not move in with this woman.
I hate telling people what to do.
It's very lucky that your girlfriend got this gig.
What do you mean?
You don't know what she thinks of your mom.
No, I do.
I do.
She thinks that she's a little clingy and she thinks that she's really clingy and really overprotective of me.
Yeah, all of which are needy and victimhood-based relationships.
Does she know about her verbal aggression?
Yeah.
Yeah, I would say so.
Does she think that was abusive behavior?
No.
Why not?
Because she was a victim of worse abuse and she doesn't consider it abusive behavior.
Right.
And you know what that means, right?
What?
I mean, I think...
she's going to verbally abuse you or your children.
Also, what do you think of her parents?
I like them.
I do.
But there was this one time...
That her dad.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Do you love your girlfriend?
Yes.
Have her parents harmed her?
Yes.
But you like them?
No.
Well, you just told me you did!
Oh, I know.
I tried to.
What?
Oh my god, you're making my head spin.
I know.
I... But, you know, if you like people who've harmed your girlfriend, I think you were using the wrong words.
Somewhere, right?
No, you're right.
I... Yeah.
No, I don't.
Yeah, don't enable abuse, right, in your life or in the lives of those around you.
I mean, if you love your girlfriend and there are people who are doing her harm, it doesn't mean she can't see them or anything like that, but it doesn't mean you have to support it.
Right.
If she says, I want to go and see people who've abused me, be like, well, I don't agree with that, and I sure as hell ain't going.
I mean, years and years ago I dated a woman whose father treated her horribly and she graduated from college and she's like, I'm gonna go have dinner with my father.
Do you want to come?
I'm like, fuck no.
Right.
You want to go and hang with your abuser?
I don't think it's the right idea.
I don't think it's a good thing to do.
But I'm not coming.
I'm not going to sit next to someone who has done great harm to a woman I really care about.
Yeah.
And that's a very loving thing to do, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're a Jew and someone says, to take an extreme example, right, I want to go hang with these Nazis, you're like, do you want to come?
You're like, no.
No, I don't want to come.
Right?
Right.
Right.
It's just – that is a little tough.
Well, we've talked about that.
Like, I've talked about that with her, and I've told her, you realize that what your parents have done was abusive.
And why the hell are you telling me that you like them?
I couldn't tell you.
Okay.
All right, let's keep going then.
Let's keep going.
Um...
I mean, I guess just to keep up appearances, you know?
But it's stupid.
Yeah, because, you know, this is the show where it's important to keep up appearances, right?
Because we're definitely...
We prefer illusions to facts and we prefer lies to honesty.
You're right.
Anyway, go on.
But, I mean, we've talked about it, you know, when there's been times when we've really...
She's very introverted towards most people.
But...
I'm one of the very few people that she's open with.
I've said, listen, your parents abused you.
They spanked her.
They did terrible verbal abuse towards her.
She has anxiety issues as well.
When she was a kid, her parents would neglect her when she was having them.
They would just say, get over it.
She would go retreat to a room and just quietly have panic attacks.
And her mom would sort of treat her like she was the parent, like I've heard you mention before.
And she for some reason told her dad that I was an anarcho-capitalist.
And he's like a staunch Republican guy.
Democrat thing, mixture.
I don't even know what to call this guy.
A statist.
He's a total statist.
And...
I mean...
When he found out that I was an ANCAP, he like...
I don't even know.
He just wanted to talk to me about it for like an hour and a half.
When I brought up the spanking thing, basically I believe in the non-aggression principle and I think spanking is a huge issue.
He said, well, spanking, no, you got to spank.
When he told me that he'd spanked my girlfriend, I wanted to punch him right in the face.
He spanked his what?
Girlfriend?
I'm sorry.
No, your girlfriend.
Sorry.
He spanked your girlfriend.
His daughter when she was about four.
Right.
Right.
But it's become a big issue, this anger in my life.
It's hard for me to hold down.
Not hold down.
No, I don't understand.
Why are you not getting angry at things that should make you angry?
That's what I'm trying to understand.
Like you say, anger is a big problem in your life.
Fucking lack of anger is a big problem in your life.
How so?
You said that you like your girlfriend's abusive parents.
Right.
I mean, where's the anger at people who beat your girlfriend when she was four?
And who want you thrown in jail for wanting peaceful and voluntary interactions in the world?
Maybe you feel that there's an excess of anger.
I feel like it's a bit of a deficiency of anger.
And you've not expressed any anger towards your mom.
You've expressed some sympathy, some affection, right?
Right.
Because she was nice at binding up the wounds she caused, right?
Yeah.
So I'm not sure that an excess of anger is really your problem.
Maybe displaced anger, right?
In other words, you do have some really reasonable shit to be angry about, but it's inconvenient to people around you for you to get angry about real stuff, so you get angry about inconsequential stuff, right?
Right.
That makes sense.
And the degree to which you don't get angry at the right things in the right way is the degree to which your anger will be out of control in other areas, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That makes a lot of sense.
I mean, the degree to which libertarians process daddy issues by talking about the Fed is ridiculous, right?
Right.
Some all-powerful entity that creates money in mysterious ways.
Oh, come on.
It's not just the zeitgeist who are working on childhood issues, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
Definitely.
So what happens if you get angry at some people that you might have good reasons to be angry at?
I get ostracized or I kill relationships, right?
You kill relationships, right?
Wow.
Oh my god.
That's a very violent imagery, right?
Yeah, that is.
If your honesty kills relationships, they were dead anyway.
Right?
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, if you're pretending to be someone other than who you are in order to have a relationship, guess what?
You ain't having a relationship.
Yeah.
That's not a relationship.
A relationship means to relate, which means to honestly interact.
Right.
Right.
And if proximity demands self-obliteration, that is not a relationship.
Yeah.
I mean, in our conversation here, I'm calling you out on things that I think are not true or that don't make sense to me.
Whereas if you spoke honestly and I attempted to talk you out of everything you thought and felt, I would be demanding that you not exist in order to interact with me, right?
Yeah.
Right.
In which case, who the hell is interacting?
But if you're just pleasing other people, which you have to do as a kid, right?
Right.
If you're raised by irrational parents, you have to please them.
You have to please them.
Because ostracism for children is death.
Death.
I don't mean, obviously, if you disagreed with your mom, she would have killed you.
But what I mean is that, historically, the disagreeing with parents gene didn't last very long, right?
Right.
Because back in the day, yeah, I've heard you talk about that.
Yeah, just get abandoned or, oh, this kid's too inconvenient, let's throw him to the priest for child sacrifice so the other children see what happens to disagreeable children.
Now we've advanced to the point where we just wage biochemical warfare on them through psychoactive drugs rather than...
Slip their throats on a stone altar, right?
Yeah.
We just mash their brains biochemically and laden them down with debt and put them in shitty schools and have them graduate with massive amounts of debt for the schools.
And then we prey upon them for old age pensions and we use them as collateral to satisfy our material wants in the here and now.
It's a step up from child sacrifice, but our society is still Founded on child sacrifice.
Democracy cannot work without child sacrifice because democracy cannot work without debt and the debt always gets passed on to the next generation, right?
So child sacrifice is the foundation of society and always has been.
That's how culture survives, by sacrificing children, which is why there's very little youth rebellion these days, right?
I mean, 78% of young people say they don't believe that Social Security will be there when they retire.
What are they doing about it?
Nothing.
Yeah.
Because they saw rebellious kids in their school be dragged off to the principal's office And have one flew over the cuckoo's nest chemical shit stuffed down their throats where they come back groggy and drooling and they're like, well, I guess I'm going to agree with teacher because I'd really like to keep that extra 10% of my brain mass that psychoactive drugs slaughters.
Yeah, I was one of the kids that was drugged, so...
I'm sorry about that.
I'm very sorry.
I'm very sorry about that.
I'm very sorry about that.
Thanks.
And why were you drugged?
What was the cover story?
They had me tested...
Which made-up acronyms did they throw at you?
ADD. They had me tested for ADD, and they gave me Ritalin from age 8 until I was about 14, 15.
Wow.
And, I mean, I can't really...
I don't think that I have ADD. Because there's no such thing as ADD. Right.
At least, you know, and this is the experts I've talked to, when they say they had you tested, what that means is they asked a bunch of questions and had teachers and parents answer them.
Right.
Right, and the teacher is...
Obviously, can't handle a bunch of curious, energetic, intellectual kids.
Mostly boys, right?
It's 9 out of 10.
Boys are drugged with this stuff, right?
Yeah.
Because boys are ferociously bored by schools designed for girls, right?
Yeah, I never did well.
And if you're listening to this show, by definition, you're of above-average intelligence and curiosity.
And you have staunch moral fiber and willingness to discuss uncomfortable things.
So school is just...
Wretchedly boring.
My whole school life is just days.
Just days of dissociation and shuffling around.
I mean, I might as well have been drugged, right?
I mean, in some ways, because it was just a dazed shuffle from class to class until the bell rang off.
And getting outside for recess was literally like the exercise yard in a prison.
And it was just ghastly.
So boring.
So boring.
So unimportant.
You know, there's nothing more soul-destroying than trivia.
And everything that I was being taught was trivial and useless.
And there was nothing of any importance or any principles whatsoever that I was being taught in any of what laughingly passed as education.
Because the whole purpose is not to educate children, good heavens.
The purpose is to confine children so that parents can go to work and teachers can get their pensions.
I mean, it's hostage taking, it's not education.
Right.
And so I'm very sorry.
What test is there?
I don't remember.
Oh, you have diabetes, then you take a test, and you, right?
Yeah, I was...
I don't know, whatever, right?
There's no test.
They had me look at a bunch of computer screens, I remember, and I had to, like, just answer simple grammar questions, and I don't even know.
I, like, I remember doing pretty well.
I don't know how exactly they decided that I had ADHD. It doesn't really make sense to me.
Did you, you haven't mentioned anything about your dad.
Well, my dad, he's a libertarian.
He's like a super libertarian atheist.
He's an anarchist, actually.
Wait, wait.
So he's a libertarian anarchist.
So what kind of school did you go to?
I went to a private school.
But it was just a very strict private school with incredibly...
Difficult subjects for, quote, gifted, unquote, children.
And I remember studying my ass off and just failing incessantly and never doing well.
It was awful.
I hated every school they ever put me in.
And why do you think you hated it?
Were you interested in the subject matter?
No.
Never.
Never.
And I didn't connect with any of the other students, really.
I normally had one to two friends at the most, where I would see other students with five to ten.
Well, no, that's okay.
Listen, one to two friends is pretty good.
Five to ten friends usually means your standards are too low.
Right.
You know, everybody says, be popular.
And what that means is shave your potential down to the lowest common denominator of the idiots around you.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Definitely.
I know this is sort of like, I mean, you mentioned at the beginning of the call that I should not move in with my girlfriend.
And I just want to retouch on that because I mean, I don't, you know, I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong or right, but I'm like, I'm crazy about her.
I really, you know, she makes me really, really, really happy.
And Yeah, okay.
But crazy about her means acting in ways that are of benefit to her too, right?
Sure.
Not just about how she makes you feel?
Right.
And how long have you guys been going out?
We've been dating for about a year and a half.
We've known each other for like six years though.
Right.
Now, the moment that you move in with someone, you cannot fundamentally ask them to change, right?
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
You can't buy a car, drive it off the lot, and then demand that it have a sunroof at no extra charge, right?
The moment you drive it off the lot, no fundamental change can be demanded, right?
Right.
Right.
What am I talking about here?
You're saying...
Because she's a bit of a statist herself.
A bit.
A bit of a statist.
What does that mean?
What is a bit of a statist?
Okay, she's a total statist.
Okay, thank you very much for...
Being honest again?
She's a...
Sorry.
Is she religious?
No.
She's spiritual.
What?
What does that mean?
Oh, that's like religion without any rules, right?
Yeah.
So like all the comfort of fictitious friends with none of their demands.
Exactly.
She doesn't believe necessarily in organized religion, but she believes that...
I'm an atheist myself, but she believes that ghosts exist and that there is an afterlife and that spirits exist.
Oh my god.
Dude, come on.
Come on.
What are you doing?
What are you doing?
She's a statist.
She's spiritual.
She believes in ghosts.
You are an atheist and an anarchist.
She tells her father something about your beliefs that's bound to be a powder cake, right?
Right.
And did she defend you with her father?
No, she just threw you to the wolves, right?
Right.
I'm telling you it will be a disaster.
Yeah.
You need to help her.
Do you think these beliefs are unhealthy for her?
Yes.
Okay.
So what are you doing to help her stop unhealthy habits like believing in ghosts and the virtue of coercion?
I have been trying to get her to not be a Democrat.
She's reading Atlas Shrugged now.
I'm doing everything I can to try to get her off the status train.
As far as the spiritual beliefs...
I've been holding off on that a little bit because that used to be something that we connected on before I discovered you, actually.
I considered myself to be spiritual, but after arduous listening to Free Domain Radio and certain readings, I'm an atheist.
Okay.
Now, are you ready for true honesty?
That's what I called for.
That's what you called for.
Okay.
Now, she's an actress, so I'm going to guess some of this.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how pretty is she?
10.
So you don't want to cock-lock yourself by talking about difficult things, right?
Not...
I mean, yeah, that's what is happening.
Yeah.
Right.
So what happens if you continue to confront her on her anti-rational beliefs?
She would get upset.
Okay, fine.
So she would get upset, and then what?
That's fine, right?
I mean, people can get upset.
She would probably...
I don't really know.
I think that she would...
Yes, you know!
She would probably...
You know!
It would end the relationship.
Yeah, look, if you don't know after six years, then you're blind as hell, right?
No, you're right.
It would end the relationship.
I just didn't want to say it.
So she would literally choose ghosts over your fleshy penis, right?
She would literally choose to believe in the undead over a live, loving boyfriend.
Yeah.
So you are less important to her than...
Invisible imaginary friends.
Ouch.
No, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong.
I mean, I... I'm just going with the evidence here, right?
But tell me if I'm wrong.
I don't know.
I don't want to believe that she would break up with me because I refused to believe in her spiritual beliefs, but...
No, no, it's not refuse to believe.
You're making it all subjective, right?
Mm-hmm.
Because I don't believe in them?
No, it's not that they're not true.
It's not that you don't believe in them.
It's not your choice, right?
They're not true.
No ghosts.
No afterlife.
It's not true.
Right.
Right?
Yeah.
And statism is violence.
These are not things for us to just choose.
I don't go where she goes.
I don't go with her belief system.
No, it's not true.
The whole point of philosophy is to be able to be certain when we say, eh, or yay, right?
Right.
So she is avidly pursuing anti-rational beliefs.
Right.
And she's shielded from the consequences of those beliefs because she's a 10.
And because you are willing to hold her to a lower standard because she has well-shaped tits, ass, and face, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, if she was an ugly male friend of yours?
You're right.
I would be fighting her tooth and nail.
Of course you would.
Of course you would.
Because I do.
That is something I do.
How pretty was your mother when she was younger on a scale from 1 to 10?
10.
Right.
So it's not even fundamentally this woman that you're relating to, right?
It's my mom.
Yeah.
Yeah, that seems to be a pattern.
Now, your little toe doesn't care about her spiritual beliefs, right?
No.
What does your little toe care about?
It cares about making another little toe.
And so your little toe is putting out all this fog, right?
And it's saying, I don't care what her spiritual beliefs is, make me another toe!
Fucker, fucker, fucker, fucker, fucker, fucker, fucker.
Make me another toe, goddammit.
Don't squirt in the dirt, squirt in the egg.
Right?
Make me a toe.
Make me a toe.
Come on!
Give me some toe porn.
Grease up that toe.
I want a toe.
Make another toe.
Toe, toe, toe, toe, toe.
For God's sake, don't examine the philosophical beliefs of the egg holder.
Then we don't get the egg and I don't get another toe!
Make me the toe!
I don't care what beliefs her father has.
That doesn't help me make another toe!
I am a toe photocopier, and if you examine the egg holder too closely, I don't know when the next egg holder is going to come along.
I was raised in a tribal environment where there were maybe 30 egg holders at any given time, all of whom talked to each other, all of whom had pretty much the same beliefs.
So if you question or oppose...
The crazy-ass beliefs of the egg holders.
Well, all the other egg holders are going to be the same.
They all talk to each other.
I don't get to make another toe.
And I am here to tell you your job is to make another toe and then to fight off any other person who might step on that toe.
Photocopy the toe.
Defend the toe.
That is your job as a man.
Right?
Right.
Right.
So I need to not...
I mean, I need to talk to her about this.
Well, I think so.
No, I do.
Yeah.
Are you going to want to spend...
You're in your 20s, right?
Yeah, I'm 23.
23.
Okay.
Do you want to spend the next 40 years with her parents?
No.
But that's what you're signing up for.
You don't just get the egg holder.
I talked about this a couple of shows ago.
You get the whole tribe, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And once you drive it off the lot, you don't get to change it.
So, but the thing is, like, I don't feel, I don't feel like that's all I see in her is her physical appearance.
And, I mean, maybe I'm wrong.
I mean, I don't know.
I never said that's all you see in her.
But what if she absolutely just is staunch on keeping her beliefs?
I mean, we recognize that we don't believe the same things.
I don't know how to now talk her into seeing the right side.
I've tried.
I mean, we've had...
Well, it means that she won't listen to reason.
Do you think it's about ghosts?
It's not about ghosts.
That's a symptom.
It's not about ghosts, my friend.
It's about, will the woman listen to reason?
If she won't listen to reason, you're screwed.
Sorry, that's what you're interested in.
You're doomed.
How are you going to resolve disputes with a woman who won't listen to reason?
how you were going to resolve disputes with anyone who won't listen to reason.
I don't know.
Well, you do know.
You can't.
Yeah, you can't.
Right.
You can't.
And when you get...
When you live with someone and when you get married and when you have children, you will have lots of disputes.
Yeah.
And how are you going to resolve those disputes?
You either have access to reason and evidence or one of you has to resentfully submit to the superior power Of the other one.
Right?
Right.
And given that divorce laws favor the woman, that will be you.
You will be ground down and you will have to submit because she won't listen to reason and when you don't have reason and evidence in a relationship, all you have is power.
Which is the threat of abuse.
Right?
Right.
Does she have tattoos?
No.
How many sexual partners has she had in the past?
I'm her first.
Okay.
That's a great sign.
80% of marriages where you're the first succeed.
If there are multiple partners, the odds go down significantly.
For the woman.
She has like 7 or 8 or 10 partners before you The odds of success go down to like 20%.
I mean, I've had other partners, but she's...
No, I mean, I don't know what the study is for men.
This is just a study that I've seen for women.
Okay.
So, I mean, do you think there's any hope?
Or is it just...
Well, I don't know.
Look, I don't know.
But I do know that if you get your life wrapped up with someone who doesn't submit to reason and evidence, then you are setting yourself up for a dictatorship of power.
And in the modern world, that power will always be in the hands of the woman.
And you don't think there's any way I can try to talk reason into her?
See, you keep asking me for these answers and what do I keep saying?
You don't know.
I don't know.
Right.
I know that you don't believe that, otherwise you'd have had the conversation and you'd have put it on the line and you'd have said, look, my philosophy is not a hobby, dammit.
My philosophy is not just my particular preference or the way that I like to skateboard or the kind of music that I'm into.
That is not what philosophy is for me.
Philosophy is for me like physics is for you.
It is a foundational absolute for the construction of my life.
And if we were going to cooperate on building a house and you wanted to build the house like it was on the moon and I knew it was going to be built on the earth, I would not build that house with you.
Because you're working with the wrong physics.
If you and I wanted to design an airplane and you thought that gravity Or pushed objects away from other objects, I would not build that airplane with you.
Because you would be dealing with things that are the opposite of true.
Philosophy is the physics of reality, translated into syllogisms.
And I don't get involved in science projects With witch doctors, right?
Right.
I don't get involved in engineering projects with mystics who believe that buildings are held up by prayer and chicken entrails.
I don't because I know that that won't work.
And it's a disrespect to the physics of philosophy to say that you can believe in the opposite of physics and still work really well with me.
I'm not going to build a business with someone who thinks it's really important to ship shitty products and spit in the face of our customers.
Why?
Because it won't work.
You need to respect philosophy more than you're doing it.
It's not your preference.
It's not your choice.
Any more than physics and gravity is our choice.
That is the reality that we have to work with as human beings.
Right?
Prayer will not shield me from a sunburn.
I put the goddamn sunscreen on, right?
Right.
The need for reason and evidence to resolve human conflicts is not a choice.
It is as foundational a reality as physics.
And if you ignore physics and try to build a building, that building will collapse.
And if you ignore the need for human beings around you to submit to reason and evidence in the resolution of disputes or in the general philosophy of living, your relationships will fall down.
Because in the absence of reason, we have only power.
In the absence of negotiation, we have only bullying.
And you are experiencing that already.
I'm not telling you something about the future.
You have specifically and resolutely avoided these topics for fear of her punishment, right?
Right.
So I'm not telling you something theoretical.
This is how you're already living.
I'm just pointing it out.
You're right.
You are avoiding these topics because you are terrified that she is going to choose ghosts over you.
And that's pretty humiliating, right?
You said...
But the ouch is there whether I point it out or not.
I'm just trying to make it conscious for you.
Right.
Ghosts or me, honey?
Flesh and butt human being or spirits?
Right?
Right.
And why the hell are you telling your dad about provocative beliefs that I have without being around to defend me?
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
No.
Look, these are just choices, right?
I mean, and I wish people had laid out these realities to me beforehand.
And I still have to remind myself about this reality.
But reason and evidence are not optional, nice-to-haves.
In a relationship.
Reason and evidence is the only way to have a relationship.
Because if you're being bullied, you are not having a relationship.
You are managing fear through compliance to irrationality.
Right?
Yeah.
And you already had enough of that, didn't you, with your mom, the other ten?
Yeah.
Don't you want to try something different where you're not managing your own fear by compliance to irrationality?
You know, break out of that mold.
Find a different way of relating to people where you can still respect yourself in the morning.
Okay.
Now, this may be with this woman.
I don't know.
But if a log had fallen on this woman, you would lift it up, right?
Yeah, of course.
But a family has fallen on this woman, and irrationality and ghosts are taking her away from you.
Are you just going to let them carry her off?
No.
Fight for her.
Dispel the ghosts.
Lift the log.
And connect with something other than your new toe maker.
Okay.
Deal?
Let me know how it goes.
I mean, I'm not trying to throw her under the bus.
But don't be half philosophy.
Philosophy doesn't do halves.
No halvesies, right?
No philosophy for my podcast but not for my penis, right?
Right.
This is the kind of thing you're in or you're out.
But if you're half in, it's like half being in a car when it's driving away.
Yeah.
You know, be in the car or be on the sidewalk.
Yeah.
But don't be half in the car, right?
Yeah.
Because you're just going to get your legs shredded, right?
Right.
Your face will hit another car.
Yeah, it's going to be gruesome, right?
Be in the plane or be out of the plane.
But don't be kind of hanging on to the outside when it takes off.
Right.
You've got to be in or be out, right?
Just say, you know what?
Forget this philosophy stuff, man.
It's no good.
Fine.
Then go for conformity or go for individuality.
But trying to combine the two really gives you nothing but the worst of both worlds.
And it is a form of self-abuse that comes out of early trauma.
Right.
Yeah.
Thank you.
You're very welcome.
You're very welcome.
Thank you.
Super quick question.
Are you guys doing any LA meetups?
Because I know you're in LA. I think we did one.
I know we did one already.
I don't think that there's going to be another one.
But we'll keep it posted.
Oh yeah, and I think I'm not doing Vancouver this year.
Some sort of strange miscommunication, but I was dropped off the speakers list, so I won't be doing Vancouver.
Just for those who are listening, at least that's my understanding at the moment.
But I don't think we're going to be doing another one, but we'll see.
You never know, right?
All right, cool.
We'll obviously post it on the board and Facebook and all that kind of stuff, if that is to be the case.
All right.
I'm very sorry, but...
I cannot get to the last two callers.
Maybe we can schedule another call later this week.
And I'm sorry because I know people are...
Wait!
Yeah, two callers.
Yeah, people are hanging on for the calls.
And I hugely apologize.
I mean, I know people have been waiting a long time to chat.
But I can't do a five-hour today.
But maybe we can reschedule something for later this week.
And thanks as always.
Mike, did you have anything that you wanted to add to our close?
No, other than if you shop with Amazon or something of the sort, please use our affiliate links, fdrurl.com forward slash Amazon.
And for the different country links, for the UK, it's fdrurl.com forward slash Amazon UK. For Canada, it's fdrurl.com forward slash Amazon Canada.
But that would be very helpful.
And yeah, fdrurl.com forward slash donate as well.
We'd like to support the show.
And thanks for a great show, all the callers and stuff.
Great show today.
Thank you.
Thanks to the callers.
We've had some inadvertent cancellations from people like our subscribers who have had some financial issues.
So there's a fairly substantial gaping hole in the monthly donator lineup.
So if you would like to step in and help the show, I believe it's the most important thing going on in the world today.
We, of course, have...
Billions of religious people to help out of their faith.
We have billions of status to help out of their addiction to violence.
And we have billions of people to help bring honesty to their personal relationships.
Please help us.
Help us.
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Where's the money?
So fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
Thank you all so much.
And have yourself a wonderful week.
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