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April 8, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:24:45

2655 The Massive Conspiracy to Keep a Straight Face - Wednesday Call In Show April 2nd, 2014

The challenge of long-distance relationships, knowing your emotional age vs. physical age, the conspiracy to keep a straight face, we deserve to be ruled, the forgiveness trap and the value of shame in changing the world.

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	Good evening, everybody.
	Stefan Molyne from Freedom In Radio.
	I hope you're doing well.
	I stand before you, ladies and gentlemen, in, as Phil Collins sang, a Stu Stu studio.
	It is not ready for visual consumption as yet.
	We're still working to tamp down a tiny little bit of an echo, but it's live, and the flashpots are available to go.
	At the slightest raise of an eyebrow, the Amazon rainforest pygmy dancers are securely ensconced in their bubbling cages, and the laser light show, which transcribes live Pink Floyd lyrics on my forehead, always a tough target when I'm fast moving, are all cranked up and ready to go.
	Of course, we have you, the kind listeners, not Not you, the kind of listeners who don't donate, but you, the kind of listeners who do donate for this.
	It's been...
	What's it about, Mike?
	Mike, about two months?
	Two and a half months in the making?
	Yeah, it's quite a bit of work.
	I think about two months or so.
	Quite a bit of work.
	But it looks nice.
	It looks beautiful.
	I've got these rounded corners that I want to do obscene things to.
	They're so pretty.
	And probably will for some of the donators.
	But it's a separate ventilation system.
	It's noise.
	Canceling...
	Can't hear any outside noise, which is fantastic.
	And room enough to pace.
	It's got room for good lighting, multiple camera angles.
	Locks on the doors.
	A slot where I can slide food through to Steph after I lock him in there to produce show after show.
	You know, the essentials.
	The important stuff.
	The usual.
	The essentials.
	So we're quite excited about it.
	And thanks.
	In all seriousness, thank you so much to the listeners.
	It's going to look better than the white background, which I think was okay.
	I still prefer the black background, but that's not my choice.
	We had a white background, which was nice, but we want multi-camera angles.
	We want a bit more of a room to move, and I couldn't really move.
	I like to move when I'm doing my shows.
	This sort of sitting thing doesn't really work for me, and I like to move when I'm speechifying and just keeps the blood going, keeps the Adrenaline pumping and so I can do that now and we can have cameras and we'll start doing videos for the call-in shows because I can actually do video now and have it look like, well, not the Red Room, but something slightly more professional.
	So thanks, of course, to the fine lady who's been building it, thus sacrificing, I think, most of the feeling in her arms for the cause of philosophy and thanks to the listeners so much.
	For donating to make this kind of labor of love possible.
	It really means the world to us and I think it will help the show gain some reach.
	Donations are for the show.
	I like to eat.
	I'm happy to have food and shelter.
	But for me, the show is the all-consuming philosophy bitch goddess that I lavish cash on.
	So I sort of take what I need to live and try to put the rest into expanding The show, we're doing some advertising coming up, which I'm quite excited about.
	And, yeah, flying around different places to talk to a variety of people.
	And that's all going very well, I guess.
	Was it March 9th, the Bitcoin conference, Mike?
	Oh, it's April 12th, the Toronto Bitcoin Expo in downtown Toronto.
	And then April 24th and 25th, the next web conference, Europe in Amsterdam and the Netherlands.
	That's what we got on the schedule so far.
	Yes, I've always wanted to visit the netherworld, so I'm quite excited at that.
	I assume that Hades and his blue-flamed hair, voiced by James Woods, will be there to greet us when we come there.
	I'm looking forward to crossing the River Styx.
	We can do that.
	It's an option on the table.
	All right.
	First up today is Brian.
	Brian writes in and says, I've been with my girlfriend for two years, but jobs keep us away from each other for over eight months out of the year.
	As the relationship has developed, being apart has become increasingly painful for us, but there are serious financial benefits as I am 18 months from nearly tripling my income.
	We're having difficulty weighing the cost of being away from each other versus investing three or four more years of this schedule for financial security and the chance to raise children without having to work.
	What are your thoughts on long-distance relationships, and are there any important pros or cons that we should consider when making this decision?
	All right, Brian.
	Screw that.
	I want to know how to triple my income.
	I don't care about your relationship.
	Just tell me about how to triple my income and then we'll talk about your relationship.
	I'm sorry.
	Go ahead.
	Are you on?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Can you hear me?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Great.
	Well – I have some curiosity about all of this, but it's not important, right?
	The financial arrangements and the wheres and the whys.
	I'm going to assume that you've thought through everything, that you can – Try and figure out to get closer together and all that.
	And how long have you guys been going out?
	Two years, as long as I've been out on the river where I'm gone, yeah.
	Okay.
	And did you – like you met right before you went out, like to the river?
	Yeah, after my first one-month trip.
	When I came back, that's when we met and started dating, yeah.
	Right.
	And she can't move and obviously you're – so you're going to work to triple your income and then your hope is to be able to sort of retire?
	Is that – Is that the idea?
	Right, yeah.
	The job is I go for a month and I ride boats up and down the rivers in the United States and so I'm on a boat where she's not allowed and it's just me and a bunch of guys, a lot of guys that have bad histories and a little bit – I mean more corrupt than the average people and that's one of the bigger costs in addition to my being away.
	So I'm going to assume you're not like a gay cruise director.
	No.
	No, but the way I'm tripling my income is I've been promoted to drive the boats rather than just be a deckhand.
	And so I'm in training for 18 months and I'll go to a six-figure income.
	But the cost of me being away is one thing, but the other cost is to be around people who are...
	I mean, I can't show myself.
	I have to wear a veil and guard myself.
	It would be career suicide.
	I wouldn't let any philosophy out whatsoever.
	Sure, yeah.
	No, I understand.
	I understand.
	Okay, and what's your question?
	Well, Mike said that he might have some input as far as managing long-term relationships, but this is just so extreme.
	I'm gone 30 days and back 12.
	Have you had any experiences managing this sort of relationship, or have you heard Not successful ones.
	Yeah, I mean, look, I moved like 18 times from the age of 15 to the age of like 27.
	So, you know, I was in a lot of long distance relationships.
	For me, they never worked.
	But you have, I mean, it's not hugely long distance in some ways, like the 30 days off is tough, 12 days home is It's pretty good.
	Of course, I worked up north and I worked for three or four months and then take a month at home and stuff.
	So I did have a bunch of long-distance relationships but they never worked out.
	I'm not saying specifically the long distance but I don't have – now, Mike, of course, should probably defer to him because he has had a long-distance relationship but then blossomed into his current marriage.
	So Mike, maybe you should give them some thoughts perhaps.
	Yeah.
	For those that don't know my story, I ended up meeting my wife at a Freedom Man radio meetup, and we really hit it off and kept in close contact.
	We live about an eight-hour drive.
	At the time, we lived about eight hours from each other via car in different states, and we both had jobs and ties locally.
	So it wasn't like either of us could just have immediately picked up and moved the next day or the next week or whatnot.
	As the relationship continued to develop and we got closer and closer and closer, like you're talking about, Brian, the being away for any significant period of time started becoming really, really challenging.
	And it was something where, you know, it seems like every month one of us would, you know, come up for like a week to the other person's place and we'd alternate or do whatever made most sense at the time.
	And I know, and I'm sure you can probably talk about this quite a bit, Brian, you know, like that last day when it's like, oh, I have to go home tomorrow or I have to go, you know, back to work tomorrow for you.
	I found that to be rather excruciating after a certain period of time.
	I'd spend all this time with someone that I tremendously cared about and we'd get connected and just have a blast.
	And then it's like, oh, now I need to go back.
	And I was going back to my job where...
	You know, I also had to deal with some toxic personalities.
	So I went as someone who was incredibly connected to my partner and, like, loving life to, you know, from a safe, vulnerable environment where I could, you know, be myself, not have to hide things, be honest, open, no problems, going immediately to a place where it was pretty dangerous to be in that state, where I, you know, kind of had to be more closed off or, hey, you know, I could...
	Let certain people in, they could do some damage emotionally.
	And that kind of yo-yo, you know, every month, I found to be just excruciating after, you know, enough months.
	And it became something where it's like, eventually we were like, you know, this relationship is incredibly important to us.
	And we couldn't sustain doing that kind of thing for, I think, I think it was like maybe a year.
	It was a year, 18 months or so that we ended up doing the long distance thing, but towards the end there especially, at the end of that 18 months, it was like, you know, when it came time to go back, separate, go back to work for both of us, it was really painful.
	And the more we became connected in the time we were together, the more painful it became.
	So, you know, you guys have been together for two years, you said.
	And I can imagine that, you know, you have great conversations, you connect, and then it's time for you to go away.
	I mean, what does that feel like to you when that last day or leading up to the last day where you know that you're not going to see each other for another month?
	Yeah, it's been...
	It's been a rollercoaster up and down.
	The more that we've grown with FDR and philosophy, it seemed certainly to help in the way that we've been more honest and more vulnerable with one another.
	That sort of creates a bond that gives us a durability.
	But as time goes on, we start to realize that we've spent more time on the phone together than we have in person.
	And I noticed last month that as soon as I left, I was almost able to talk more clearly with her over the phone than in person because I'm just not used to being able to look at her when I talk.
	Oh, wow.
	So being aware of that has helped.
	Did you guys, in the 18 months that you guys were long distance, did you have a goal of saving money?
	Is that why you were doing it?
	No.
	I mean, we were both working occupations.
	And, you know, we weren't, hey, we met each other, now let's immediately move to where we are.
	We wanted to get to know each other better and see, okay, is this a relationship that we want to make the investment in to move to be in the same place?
	And it was.
	And it's still tough.
	I mean, she owned property and we both had jobs and had friendships and other things.
	We had to weigh who was going to move where and when.
	And trying to make it happen was a logistical nightmare.
	But it was something that just got to the point where we could not, after 18 months, keep doing it.
	It was too painful.
	It was really too painful to keep doing.
	The idea of doing that for three to four years, like you suggest, to kind of get the financial security, that, I mean, I can't even fathom that myself.
	The idea of being away from the person I love for a month at a time over the course of three to four years.
	To me, I couldn't do that.
	I'm not saying you shouldn't or it's bad to do that or anything.
	I just know for me, 18 months, I was getting to be severely painful whenever we had to separate.
	And then on top of that, going to have to interact with people that were...
	The opposite from my partner.
	The opposite from my future wife.
	To people that I didn't want to be my...
	I couldn't be myself around.
	Or I'd get attacked or criticized or whatnot.
	And it was something that I didn't think was sustainable long term.
	I think it would have led to some serious problems in the relationship if...
	Over the course of...
	Well, I think 18 months was kind of the breaking point for us.
	Where it's like, no, we've got to be together.
	And...
	Yeah, that's what scares me now, is how much this might really, you know, I'm 30 years old now, and how much this might really stifle my passions and really just really staunting my growth in terms of, you know, philosophy.
	I'm really picking things up now more than ever.
	ever.
	I've been with FDR for about a year and as I'm really starting to hit the ground running with it, if I maintain the schedule, I feel like I might cap my own personal growth by sticking this out.
	Well, I imagine too, I imagine it's pretty tough to do therapy of any kind.
	I've been in a couple of sessions while I'm home, but that's it.
	as well, unless you're doing some type of call-in Skype therapy sessions, which might be something that's available that you could look into.
	Yeah.
	It seems like, you know, hey, this is your life.
	Start, stop.
	And it's almost like you're living two different lives, one on a riverboat, you know, and another when you go back, you get to spend time with your partner, go to therapy and, you know, focus on the stuff that's important to you.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah.
	Do you feel that's something that, I mean, you've been doing it for a while now.
	Do you think that's something that you can push through for another two years, three years, four years?
	Yeah.
	It's the first, now that I've actually achieved being, like now that I know I'm going to drive a boat and the raise is coming, like for the last two years I didn't know.
	And now that it's finally here, it's like that's what I was shooting for the whole time.
	And now that I have it, I definitely feel like I don't even want it now.
	So it is hard to, it's a very strange, strange experience.
	What does your girlfriend think about the schedule?
	It's obviously tough for you going to this riverboat for a month at a time and being apart, but what does she do in the month while you're away?
	How does she experience this?
	She has a full-time job that she enjoys.
	She works out of desire, whereas I would work out of will, as I heard Steph describe it once.
	I've never earned more than $25,000, $30,000 a year, and this is her first full-time job.
	In terms of finances, we don't have a lot to fall back on, so she definitely understands the benefit.
	But as far as being away, it's definitely terrible for her, as it is for me.
	How old are you both?
	I'm 30.
	She's 21.
	She's 21.
	So as far as time-wise for having kids and stuff, she's got plenty of time.
	Yes.
	And you said the timetable for that is pretty much three or four years, retire, and then raise children without either of you having to work?
	Right, absolutely.
	Or maybe at most one of us, part-time after the first few years, we'd like to both be there for the first three or four years at least.
	So I have to bring this up just because it's something that it always, whenever it comes up, I'm always curious.
	So you guys started dating when she was 19, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh-huh.
	So at 19, what attracted you to her primarily?
	Well, she was actually 18.
	I don't think she'd even turned 19 yet.
	And it was pre-philosophy, I mean, 100%.
	She was attractive and...
	Just the circumstances worked out.
	I mean, it had very corrupt beginnings in a way.
	Her mother had been dating my father for about seven years, and I had never been around.
	And she was her first year off to college, and...
	You what now?
	Yeah.
	I'm sorry, what?
	That's something...
	I'm sorry, what?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	This may not end up being about the riverboat, just so you know.
	So her mother had been dating your mother for seven years?
	No, my father.
	I'm sorry.
	So her mother had been dating your father for about seven years?
	Yes.
	So did you know her since she was 11?
	No, I spent one day at my dad's when she was...
	About 14 and I said hi to her and that was it.
	And then I came back again when she was 16 for my grandma's funeral and then those were the only two times I ever saw her.
	And that was it.
	Okay.
	And what's her relationship like with her dad?
	It's a bad situation.
	It's corrupt.
	She's at a place where she's pretty much broken with him.
	And why did that happen?
	Why has she chosen to break?
	Because he is a bully.
	He hit her with spoons when she was growing up.
	And at the beginning of our relationship, she sympathized with that.
	I was a handful and all that sort of thing.
	But probably a year into our relationship, I shared some of the podcasts.
	She really started to connect with those things, and so that's led to the break.
	Well, I'm sorry to hear about her history.
	It's terrible, terrible stuff, and please do give her my deepest, deepest sympathies and admiration for her courage and self-protection.
	What about her mom?
	What's the relationship like with her mom?
	It's bad.
	Her mom is similar to yours.
	Right.
	And your relationship with your parents?
	My relationship to my dad, who she Grew up with some is non-existent.
	I mean, he's an alcoholic and we haven't had a relationship really.
	Okay, so her dad's an alcoholic and her mom?
	Right, her dad, yeah, both her dad and my dad are alcoholic, yeah.
	Right.
	Right, okay.
	The cards are certainly stacked against us, and we both understand that we started from corrupt beginnings, and we're both willing to accept the possibility that it might...
	I mean, just being able to be honest with one another and really...
	I mean, we both know exactly what's on the table, and we have helped each other out of Like we're both supporting one another through breaking with the family and it just happens to intertwine.
	So she's broken with her dad and...
	And her mom.
	Is her dad and your mom, are they still dating?
	Her dad and...
	I'm sorry, my father and her mother are the ones that are together.
	Her father...
	I'm sorry, your father and her mother, are they still dating?
	Yes.
	And are her parents separated?
	Of course, right, obviously, right?
	So she has obviously a better relationship.
	She hasn't broken with her mom, right?
	She has, yeah.
	Yeah, there's no contact.
	And her dad too?
	Correct.
	Her dad most recently, yeah.
	And you with your parents?
	Yeah.
	What's the story there?
	I still have some – well, I don't have contact with my mother, but the – My mom still thinks that we're on good terms.
	We haven't spoken in probably six months.
	So that break needs to take place.
	And just in terms of my being honest with her and my experience, she always looked at herself as the good parent, even though she was equally manipulative and corrupt as my father was.
	So what would you rate your girlfriend's emotional age as?
	Probably where we are now, probably 24, 25.
	Okay.
	Maybe older.
	So she's more mature than her physical age?
	Yes.
	And that's despite a horrendous upbringing, right?
	Correct.
	How do you think that's possible?
	Well, it certainly wasn't the case when we first started.
	I mean, if something upset her, it might take 30 minutes to an hour for her to be able to really talk about it.
	She's in therapy.
	She hasn't been going.
	I mean, she's been for three or four sessions, but she's really taken your materials and your books for the last She's been diving in really pretty steadily for the last four months, but she's been exposed to your stuff for the last eight months, I would say.
	So she's really taken that a long ways, plus our relationship and really being able to look at her family and her experience honestly, and then that I'm not aggressive with her at all completely.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's good.
	I mean it seems surprising to me that in sort of four to eight months she would have accelerated from probably being younger emotionally than her biological age because of her traumatic history to vaulting over and being ahead.
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	And does that seem believable to you?
	Absolutely.
	I mean it's certainly a possibility.
	That wouldn't be the case, and I'm reading it wrong.
	We're both seeing the same therapist, and I don't know if...
	But she's been four times, you said?
	Yeah, four or five, yeah.
	All right.
	Now, I mean, I'm pretty smart, and I've been pursuing self-knowledge for a long time, and I went to a therapist twice a week for a little over two years.
	Yeah.
	So that's, what, 400 times?
	So it seems to me that when you say she's made massive progress in four sessions, it's like someone who's had 400 lessons and I still had a lot of work to do and I'm still doing a lot of work saying, well, it's massive progress in four lessons.
	It doesn't seem too credible to me.
	I'm not saying it's not true.
	I'm just saying that it's – Yeah, I don't attribute her progress to the therapy sessions at all, more so to my relationship and then secondarily to your materials, but that will be, I mean, that's taken a lead for sure as she...
	Okay, well, let's say that by some miracle her emotional age is 24.
	What's your emotional age?
	Probably about 24, 25.
	So she's accelerated, but you're still behind?
	Yes.
	Riddle me this, Batman.
	How does that work?
	I mean, you've been at it longer, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I really, I could be farther along.
	I really probably am farther along.
	How pretty is she?
	One to ten?
	She's a ten.
	Well, a nine.
	She's a ten.
	Mm-hmm.
	Okay.
	And you?
	I'm attractive too.
	Okay.
	All right.
	So you're 30 with a mental age of 24.
	She's 21 with a mental age of 24.
	So you're compatible but heading in opposite directions, right?
	I wouldn't say that I'm heading in an opposite direction.
	I'd say I'm heading...
	Well, with a shorter amount of...
	Exposure to philosophy, she's gone from 10, 12, 13 probably up a whole decade from a couple of months with philosophy.
	Whereas you who have had a longer time with philosophy have not only not got a lot further ahead but have actually – are still actually behind your biological age.
	Like she's gone real forward, right?
	She probably – I don't know.
	Like this is all off the top of my head and there's no way to answer this in any clear way.
	But if she had this kind of traumatic childhood, then her emotional age would be significantly further back from her physical age.
	So when she was 18, she might have had an emotional age of 12 or 13 or 14.
	Maybe, maybe.
	But then she's gone forward a full decade in a couple of months, but you who've had exposure to the material for longer are still – Six years younger than your biological age, right?
	Yeah.
	It's hard for me to say exactly where I'm at because I don't have very much interaction with the public.
	I'm isolated.
	I've been that way for the last two years with my job.
	So the people that I'm around for the majority of the year are exceptionally...
	I mean, they're very below average.
	She's not with you right now, is she?
	She is.
	Oh, does she want to talk?
	Probably not, but I mean, maybe.
	Hold on one second.
	Would you like to talk?
	Steph would like to talk with you.
	She's been listening to the feed over the internet, so it might be a little...
	I don't know how much of a delay is there.
	And so she actually hasn't been keeping up with what I've been saying.
	Here she is.
	Can you still hear me?
	Yes, I can.
	Okay, here she goes.
	Hello?
	Oh, hi.
	I'm sorry to yank you out of nowhere into the call.
	I apologize for that.
	I hope it's not too startling, but I'm just sort of trying to get a map of the relationship, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	Yeah.
	So listen, first of all, I'm incredibly sorry to hear about your father hitting you with spoons and all this terrible, terrible, terrible stuff that went on in your childhood.
	That's completely horrible.
	You know, as a father, sometimes I wish there was a different word for good fathers as opposed to bad fathers.
	I sort of even hate sharing the syllables with people like your dad.
	So I just wanted to really point out I'm very, very sorry about that, just sort of first and foremost.
	Thank you.
	Your boyfriend – I don't know.
	Should I call him Batman?
	I don't know.
	I don't want to use names or anything, right?
	We were just talking – I'm not sure what you caught up to but there's sort of emotional age and physical age, right?
	Now, for people who've got really good childhoods and happy and loved and secure and protected and hopefully not stuffed into government schools and stuff, the emotional age It's usually a little further ahead than the physical age.
	So the average is like your emotional age and your physical age.
	You have to kind of go by the average because who knows what emotional age really means, right?
	But since you're 21, I sort of asked him what his – what he thought your emotional age was.
	In other words, your level of maturity emotionally.
	He said sort of 23, 24 and I asked him what his emotional age was and he said 24, 25.
	Did you hear any of that or is that – Yeah.
	You did, right?
	Now, what do you think of that assessment?
	I think it's pretty accurate.
	I think it's pretty accurate.
	I'm not sure, you know, if I... I would assess myself as, you know, more mature than, you know, the average 21-year-old, for sure.
	But, I mean, I do still have things that I struggle with.
	Like, my awareness of myself.
	That's a big thing that I struggle with.
	So I guess I'm sort of confused on where I should place myself, you know, in the emotional...
	And how do you think...
	I appreciate that.
	How do you think you gained more maturity than the average 21-year-old?
	Well, I am the oldest out of six children.
	I have five younger brothers.
	So, I mean, I've always had the more responsible role in the family.
	So that makes me feel more mature, you know, than somebody my age.
	But in terms of emotionally, that's sort of where I get messed up.
	I don't really know where I should place myself emotionally.
	I mean I'll tell you why.
	I mean why I'm asking the question is that as a father, we want our children to become mature obviously.
	We want them to grow up and to be mature, wise and competent adults.
	And I'm really concerned that some of what's coming through in this conversation, more from your boyfriend, is if you want your children to be mature, you can hit them with belts or you can hit them with spoons or you can be drunk or you can date other drunks or whatever.
	And that will help really hit the gas on your children's maturity, right?
	Right.
	But clearly, that doesn't seem quite right, does it?
	No, no, not at all.
	Right.
	We want our children to be mature and I'm concerned that this may be perceived by some people as treat them really badly to the point where they don't even want to see you as adults and that will help them to be more mature, right?
	Or have them be the eldest, which I assume means having lots of responsibility for the youngest.
	So turn the eldest children into sort of babysitters or stand-in parents and that will help them to become really mature and grow, right?
	Yeah, and that's exactly what my position was.
	Right, because, I mean, you had one alcoholic parent, one abusive parent, and four younger siblings to protect and take care of.
	You know, guess what?
	Guess who gets voted into the substitute parent with no authority role, which sucks, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, that's...
	You probably don't have an enemy bad enough in the world to wish that on, right?
	Right.
	So...
	So I don't know how you could be significantly more mature than the average.
	And it's not a criticism at all in any way, shape, or form.
	Like I'm just trying to work as empirically as possible.
	How you could be more mature than the average with this kind of terrible upbringing?
	So, I mean there's an age difference which is nine years if I haven't taken off my shoes to do the math.
	But I think that's – I'm more of a language person than a math person.
	But it's nine years, right?
	Which, I mean, there's – you're very young and you also come from a bad background, which means that emotional development probably hasn't taken as easy a route as it would have from other people, right?
	For other people who – I mean, you have a bad childhood even by the standards of a world that is not great to children overall.
	I mean, even by the average standard, you hit it.
	Really bad, right?
	Yeah, I did.
	So, yeah, so I guess my concern is – my guess would be that your emotional age would be a little bit less than your physiological age just based upon your history, right?
	I mean there was so much that – You didn't have nurtured and cared for and developed and protected and modeled, right?
	Modeling is huge when it comes to emotional maturity.
	I mean, I don't know.
	I mean, probably until you met your boyfriend, you may never have seen a positive, healthy, successful resolution of adult conflict, right?
	Right.
	I mean, I hadn't.
	I hadn't.
	It was completely new to me, our relationship.
	Right.
	Yeah, I mean, my daughter sees my wife and I disagree from time to time.
	And sometimes the disagreements can be quite strong but we reason.
	We don't raise our voices.
	We never use any names.
	We simply talk until it's worked out.
	We're not going to hide it from her because that's – it's not like it's traumatic for her to see people disagree, right?
	But the modeling that you have not received is significant, right?
	Right.
	I mean, we want kids to get to the age of 18 having seen literally hundreds of examples of conflict resolution that is successful among their parents or between their parents and dozens even perhaps of significant differences of opinion.
	And not only did you not see that, but you saw conflicts, as I would imagine, really destructive, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, my emotional maturity definitely isn't, you know, I don't think it's as high as, you know, he was saying.
	It's probably below my actual age.
	And again, you know, this is not a deficiency at all or a criticism in any way, shape, form.
	It's just I've not been exposed to a lot of Mandarin, so my Mandarin proficiency is not, you know, it's not there.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I mean, there's still a lot of things that, you know, I'm working on and I don't think I'm nearly caught up.
	You know, as if I would have had, you know, a good child or a good childhood or a better childhood.
	You know, I don't think I'm nearly to that stage where, like, leveled out.
	Right.
	No, and it's good.
	I mean, to know the deficiencies is the first part of addressing them.
	And you're listening to shows like this, you're going to therapy, which I think is all...
	Really, really great stuff to do and I just wanted to compliment you on your wisdom in doing that.
	What would you put your boyfriend's emotional age at?
	Again, I know it's not really quantifiable, just sort of a gut instinct kind of thing.
	I would probably put him around 24 or 25 like he did.
	He still has a ways to go as well with a lot of stuff.
	I mean, he had therapy for two years before we had started dating, and then he had stopped therapy for a while.
	And the two years of therapy that he did have, I don't think they were as progressive as now with philosophy and with all your material, we're able to We're able to, you know, progress a lot better than he did two years ago or two years that he had therapy.
	Right.
	Yeah, so, I mean, my suggestion for a long-distance relationship is you can't go through the same experiences and grow together that way, right?
	So that's one aspect that's just kind of missing.
	Yeah.
	Long-distance relationships are a lot about...
	Distance, lust, when you reconnect, obviously there's lots of sex and all of that, but there's not a lot of daily living stuff.
	It's not like, hey, I'm home for three days.
	Let's do taxes.
	I mean there's not a lot of day-to-day stuff.
	So one of the problems with long-distance relationships is they're kind of like affairs in a way.
	Affairs and long-distance relationships are very seductive and addictive because there's not a huge amount of real life in there.
	You're not like, oh my god, there's been an increase in the water bill.
	Let's sit down and figure out our finances and how we can handle it.
	You're kind of living two lives.
	You miss each other.
	You talk about missing each other.
	You get back together.
	You have massive amounts of sex and you do cool things.
	But there's not a lot of regular relationships.
	Day-to-day life.
	Like you don't have, oh, my aunt is sick.
	We got to pick up some flowers and go see her in the hospital because your time together is so precious when you are together that it's like reality dare not intervene so to speak.
	And so sort of my concern is sort of that aspect of unreality that happens in long-distance relationships.
	But the second is if you have disparate emotional maturity levels, that's a big challenge, right?
	And you have to make sure – so if you're behind, right?
	If you say maybe you're a little younger emotionally than you are chronologically sort of mid to late teens, then you've got to hit the gas to catch up to him.
	Hopefully he's heading up, not down, right?
	I mean so you have to identify – The disparities in where you are emotionally as a couple.
	And it's not just one thing.
	One of you may be better at handling anger.
	Another one may be better at handling jealousy.
	One of you may be better at handling irritation or boredom.
	It's complex, right?
	But I would really sit down and figure out where the emotional maturity levels are in various areas and then have a plan to try and get them to match up because – Long distance relationships, it's hard to grow because it's about missing and sex and fun and all of that.
	You can spend all day in bed chatting and all that, which is great.
	No complaints.
	There's nothing wrong with that at all.
	But there's not a lot of, and now we have to live the ordinary parts of life.
	And so that's sort of – be aware of that aspect of the long-distance relationship that people who have long-distance relationships and then they get together, there's a little bit of like, huh?
	Where's the excitement of missing each other and getting back together and all of that, right?
	And now we've got to what?
	We've got to – We got a leak in the basement we have to fix.
	Well, we didn't have to do any of that stuff when we were in a long-distance relationship.
	This intrusion of reality that comes in to a long-distance relationship.
	I think most importantly, if you guys want success in the long term, figure out where you guys are in your emotional development.
	Look, you already have a challenge with the nine-year gap.
	I'm always concerned about compatibility.
	It's more than values.
	There's also maturity.
	A 70-year-old woman might have the same values as a 25-year-old man, but their life experiences, their maturity, their perspectives and their life stages are so different that even if they have the same values, right?
	This Harold and Maud scenario is pretty uncommon.
	They're probably not going to make a really good couple, right?
	So you already have a nine-year gap in life experience.
	Either that means you're super mature and he's not mature.
	Or you're super, super, super mature and he's average, or you're average and he's super, super immature.
	Like, you have to meet somewhere.
	It doesn't have to be the exact same day, but you have to meet somewhere in your emotional age in order to have compatibility.
	Like, you probably like going to clubs, right?
	No, no.
	I've never...
	Okay.
	Let's say you did like going to clubs.
	When I was your age, I loved going to clubs.
	I would go dance until they kicked me out.
	I just loved going to clubs or whatever it is that you like doing.
	Now, if I were dating a 21-year-old and she's like, hey, let's go clubbing, I'm like, please hit me with a club before you take me clubbing.
	I like hot chocolate, a blanket, and an episode of The Good Wife or whatever, right?
	So – and that's nothing wrong with going clubbing.
	There's nothing wrong with hot chocolate in a blanket.
	It's just I'm 47 years old, so I don't want to go clubbing.
	I think the last time I went to a club was like nine years ago or whatever.
	I'd be very happy if my frame never darkens the door of another nightclub even though I loved going when I was younger.
	And so – and like the cliche, oh, I'm 19.
	I want to go drinking.
	I haven't been drunk in like – I don't know, 25 years or something.
	So like the idea, I'm like, no, I really don't want to.
	But that would be a dampener for whatever the younger person wanted to do.
	But it's just like, I've been there.
	I've done that.
	I don't want to do that again.
	It's like saying, let's go do grade 12 again.
	I don't want to.
	I really don't want to.
	So that's the challenge.
	With age differences, right?
	It's just he's got nine years on you.
	Now, either those nine years have been spent in cryogenic hand solo style freezing, and you're probably too young to even get that reference, but...
	Or he's got nine years of sort of additional experience and either you need to catch up.
	Wherever he's further ahead, you just kind of have to work to catch up because he can't, unless he gets like a railway spike through the brain, he can't go back and unlearn or unexperience the things that he's experienced.
	So I think that's the challenge is to find a way to get your emotional lives to meet up.
	Does this make any sense?
	Yeah, it does.
	It definitely does.
	Mike, did you want to add anything in?
	You pretty much covered it, Steph, as far as I'm concerned.
	Yeah, it's what Steph said as far as being apart.
	And then, you know, once you finally get time to spend together and it being completely different from just day to day, I mean, at least me and my wife certainly found that to be the case.
	There's definitely like, oh, great, we get to be together.
	This is like a vacation.
	And, you know, we were doing stuff, you know, not just...
	Exactly, there's a leak in the basement type stuff.
	Some day-to-day stuff to get us to the place where we could be together that was not too fun to work through.
	We both had a lot of stuff that we were working through at the time from an emotional standpoint and our relationships and family stuff and that.
	So it wasn't all just, you know, let's have sex and go to theme parks and have fun.
	But it's certainly, it's very different living When you have those periods where you're apart for a really long time and then you get to spend the time together versus you're together on a regular basis every single day, it is a different feel and it's something that you need to be conscious of and prepare yourself for.
	You can wallpaper over a lot of conflicts in long distance.
	It's like, well, we only have four days together.
	Let's not fight.
	But then when you live together, some of those things are worth having conflicts about and working out.
	I mean, sorry, this is to both of the listeners.
	Does that help?
	Is there anything else that I can be of assistance with?
	Um...
	Do you think there is...
	Hold on.
	Is there anything else?
	Hey, I'm back.
	No, that pretty well covers it.
	I had actually reserved the idea of trying to give a donation for a one-on-one about our relationship.
	So, sorry, it ended up getting...
	Diving right in there on the call-in show.
	I mean, I'm not, sir.
	I know that's where you wanted to take it.
	But no, I don't have anything more.
	Fantastic.
	Fantastic.
	And donations, of course, are still welcome.
	And it's always better when listeners offer a one-on-one rather than a three-way.
	All right.
	Thanks so much, Mike.
	Who do we have next?
	Not always.
	Mostly.
	Generally.
	It depends.
	Up next is Michael.
	He writes in and says, I can understand being totally indifferent to the facts, but the applause really threw me for a loop.
	Imagine a Japanese comedian.
	They're disappearing, too, with the same level of applause.
	Does Stefan think it will become profitable for the government for white guilt to disappear in the next 30 years?
	I know sensitive race issues are, yada, yada, yada.
	But yes, it will become profitable for...
	When it comes to sensitivity, we're all about the yada, yada.
	After vagina suction cups, sensitivity...
	You know, first of all, they should absolutely be for sale in the FDR goodies shop.
	Patented Freedom Aid Radio, vagina suction cups, suitable for masturbation and cat burgling.
	Actually, both of them are stealing from pussies.
	Anyway, so that would be my suggestion, if you note that down in the Things We'll Never Do column.
	Is the caller, are you on the line?
	Stefan.
	Hello.
	Hi, Stefan.
	Hi.
	So tell me a little bit more about what you mean by white guilt?
	I don't know.
	I'm freezing up now.
	I'm getting nervous.
	I'm sorry.
	See, taboo topics are one thing in an email, but another thing when you can be found by voice recognition software the world over.
	Well, do you want me to sort of say what I understand by it?
	Yes, thank you.
	The way that I try and look at history is from the vantage point of a space alien.
	I was hugely influenced by the Enlightenment works.
	It came out around Voltaire and they were sort of very popular.
	And in the Enlightenment works, which was a critique of contemporary society, they had just discovered the new world and they brought over what they called the savages, the Native Americans, Indians as they called them too.
	And what they did was they tried to...
	Understand their own world through the viewpoint of somebody completely foreign to their own world, which is a really, really fantastic exercise.
	I'm reading Gulliver's Travels to My Daughter and it's a similar kind of thing.
	Like you look at the ridiculousness in politics of court life through looking at the Lilliputians, which are cute and funny and not quite as threatening.
	So I've always tried to – since I started reading these guys, I always tried to look at – Human society, our society history as if I was an alien anthropologist.
	Some would say perhaps I am.
	So what I do is I say, okay, well, let's look at contributions of the various cultures.
	More sensible to me than race.
	Now I know I'm down on the word culture and all that kind of stuff, but damn it, we've got to use some word that makes sense.
	And race is not the word, right?
	I mean, but culture certainly has some value to it, right?
	Because if you say race, then you're saying, well, someone from – like a Caucasian from Iceland is pretty much the same as a Caucasian from Greece.
	And culturally, they're not that way inclined at all.
	So I prefer to think culture.
	And so I'd say, okay, so, you know, let's look at the European cultures, look at the Asiatic cultures, and look at the African cultures, right?
	So, you know, well, what are the great values that have helped the world the most?
	And I would argue those values are threefold.
	The first is philosophy.
	The second is free market economics.
	And the third is the scientific method.
	Let me just do those again because they're important.
	They really are.
	The first great value to humankind is philosophy.
	The second is free market economics and the third is science.
	Philosophy of course allows you to think and philosophy is necessary but not a sufficient requirement for the following two.
	Philosophy allows us how to think at all and allows us to determine or differentiate true opinions from false opinions and the free market allows us to create wealth and to trade and to invent exactly this kind of technology That is – or at least exploit this technology that is used for this communication.
	So that is the second great boon.
	And the third great boon is the scientific method, which is the application of philosophy to questions of matter and energy.
	So these three great boons are the greatest advances in human history.
	There's nothing else that comes even remotely close.
	You cannot have medicine.
	Without the wealth generated by the free market and the scientific method to differentiate true from false cures and so on.
	So these three things – I mean politics is bullshit and art is largely bullshit, fun bullshit but bullshit nonetheless.
	But philosophy, free market, capitalism, scientific method, that's the major boons.
	And I'd say, OK, well, so who has been the most responsible – Did they come from Africa?
	They did not.
	Some philosophical ideas came out of China, but China had 6,000 years of stagnation, which is always the result of abuse in childhood in particular.
	So it didn't come out of Africa.
	It didn't really come out of the Asian oriental cultures.
	It came out of Europe, right?
	Philosophy comes out of Greece and out of Rome to some degree more of a practical philosophy and had such a huge impact throughout the Dark and Middle Ages that, I mean, the medieval scholastics, the theologians referred to Aristotle as the philosopher, not just the philosopher.
	And out of the...
	The Roman practical application of Greek theoretical reason and evidence eventually coalesced into the scientific method and free market capitalism.
	So that, in turn, you know, the one great thing about the free market is its egalitarianism.
	And people get confused by this because there's rich and poor in the free market and they consider that to be some – there's income disparity.
	Oh, this massive gap between the rich and the poor.
	Oh, screw that.
	I mean it's completely unimportant.
	The only fundamental gap there is is gaps in capacity to use violence to get what you want.
	That's the only gap that matters.
	Not whether there are rich and poor people, but who gets to use violence legitimately or at least legally and who doesn't?
	That's the only fundamental differentiation.
	And the free market capitalism is fundamentally opposed to slavery.
	I know, I know.
	All the people in the world with all the propaganda known to human species is like, wait a minute, free market capitalism relies on slavery, is slavery, colonialism, exploitation.
	Wow!
	But it's all nonsense.
	Capitalism says you own yourself and the products of your labor.
	That's what property rights are.
	Capitalism is about the non-initiation of force and respect for property rights.
	And so since you own yourself, you can't be owned by someone else and therefore – and it's no accident that it was the most capitalist countries and the most capitalist regions within particular countries – That opposed most vociferously slavery.
	People say, oh yes, well you see, it was Christians who ended slavery.
	Bullshit!
	It was not Christians who ended slavery.
	It was capitalists who ended slavery.
	The Christians that had, oh, I don't know, 17, 1800 years with which to violently oppose slavery didn't quite get round to it, did they?
	Too busy debating about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and whether Adam, made in God's image, had a belly button when God himself doesn't have a belly button.
	Once they squared that shit away, Maybe they'd look at the subjugation of significant portions of humanity, didn't quite get round to it until, lo and behold, the free market came along.
	And with the ethic of self-ownership, began to oppose that.
	Now, of course, a lot of the people who opposed it were Christians, but we don't know that for sure because people who weren't Christians tended to get imprisoned or killed or ostracized or whatever, right?
	Banished.
	So you can't really call people in history Christians because they tended to get burned alive if they didn't say they were Christians.
	Oh, look at that.
	Lo and behold, lots of people self-identify as Christians.
	Yeah, you got a gun to people's head.
	You can tell them to say just about anything.
	I don't call a lot of Russians under Stalin avowed voluntary communists.
	They just didn't want to join Solzhenitsyn in the gulag.
	And so they said, hey, communism.
	Yeah, I'm down for that.
	Don't shoot me, brother.
	Oh, comrade.
	Comrade in arms just means call you comrade and I get arms.
	Anyway.
	I'm so glad you joined this show because you're the only person that talks about this kind of stuff.
	Well, I mean I'm just trying to work empirically.
	People can give me the contrary facts if they want but sorry.
	Europe gets the crown.
	Europe gets the – free market capitalism, ends slavery and my god, the resistance.
	That Europeans got in the rest of the world for trying to end slavery was astounding.
	Boy, heading over to the Middle East of the Muslim countries saying, you know what?
	We're ending slavery.
	It's a vile, evil institution.
	And the Muslims are like, no, we're not.
	Fuck you, we're not.
	We're the religion of peace.
	We're not ending shit, right?
	And they had to bribe them.
	They had to threaten them.
	I mean just massive amounts of labor to end slavery.
	It would then be argued, I would say, that Europeans have the greatest empathy.
	I go with DeMoss about child raising and all this kind of stuff.
	In terms of concern over the rights of children, Europeans have been kind of at the forefront for, I would say, I would argue between 400 and 500 years.
	I don't know of a contemporary book of the time like Rousseau's.
	I think it was Emile about the education of a child.
	Rousseau himself is a bastard, but at least he talked about children with some sympathy.
	I don't know of African novelists who at the time of Dickens, like in the mid-19th century, talked so sensitively and so compassionately and so empathetically about the plight of children, as you find in, say, David Copperfield or In particular, Oliver Twist.
	I was in a production of Oliver.
	Food, glorious food.
	Some great songs in that musical.
	And I just remember being so...
	Moved by the plight of Oliver.
	And so I don't know, like hundreds of years ago, the degree to which other cultures were writing sympathetically and really empathetically about children, but it did start to come about with the rise of capitalism, better communications and so on.
	That children began to be treated better.
	There was no bucolic and wonderful age of childhood before the Industrial Revolution.
	The children were alive.
	That's why they looked hungry.
	They were alive and hungry, not dead and in the ground.
	But that, of course, is hard for people with the abstract abilities of soap dishes to comprehend and process.
	But it doesn't matter.
	We'll move forward without you.
	So I would argue that the Western European cultures...
	Really, we're the first to develop empathy in any societal, functional way.
	And this empathy was gruesome in its implementation.
	It was exhausting.
	It was debilitating.
	It was social upheavals, revolutions, wars.
	But this growth of empathy was the most foundational resource that the world required to climb out of the medieval fucking hellhole that it inhabited for approximately...
	Give or take a couple of Thursdays, the past 150,000 years of human history.
	So there's a growth of empathy.
	And now – so a space alien would say, holy shit, these guys did philosophy.
	These guys did free market capitalism.
	These guys ended slavery.
	These guys developed the scientific method.
	Wow!
	People must think they're really great.
	And I would say to that space alien, I'm sorry.
	You're actually very wrong about that.
	You are extremely incorrect about that.
	In fact, there is no more reviled and hated group in the known universe of mankind than white Western Europeans.
	It is naturally – it is naturally – How it's going to work because the first person to develop empathy in a sociopathic world is kind of screwed, right?
	Because the sociopaths are like, oh shit, that guy's got empathy?
	Oh yeah, they got a big giant empathy button.
	Let me harden my diamond-tipped sociopathic nipples and drill right through that fucker's heart and mine out all the good economic Religious, sociopolitical juiciness that lies inside that is now open to mind for the taking because the man can be manipulated because he's got empathy.
	Empathy in a sociopathic world is giant target on the head exploitation.
	It's extremely dangerous.
	And it is one of the great failures of early empathy to recognize how dangerous being empathetic is in the world.
	Because predators will prey on empathy all the time.
	I mean you know how it works, right?
	Some guy jumps you in the alley, puts a gun to your ribs and says, your money or your life?
	And what do you say?
	You say, hey man, first of all, Don't quote Adam Antz songs to me.
	Second of all, I am jujitsu master!
	And then, you know, giant reptile tentacles come out of your back and knock the gun away.
	Take the gun away.
	And what does the guy do?
	The guy says, oh, man, I'm so sorry.
	I had a really bad childhood.
	Don't hurt me.
	Don't call the cops.
	I'm so sad I got kids at home.
	I had a terrible time.
	Right?
	He's just going to start milking that shit.
	Is it because he suddenly developed empathy?
	No.
	All that happened is he lost the gun.
	So he's switching.
	To empathy, right?
	And so to have – and so if you have immature empathy, then you'll be like, oh, this poor guy.
	I guess he did have a tough – I guess I won't call the cops, right?
	And so to develop empathy, we think – those of us with empathy, we think, well, empathy is really good.
	Everybody says they like empathy, so I'm sure I'll be praised for doing empathetic things.
	And that's not true.
	You will be exploited for doing empathetic things.
	So Europeans freed the slaves.
	They were the first society in the history of the world to end slavery and they didn't just end it in their own society.
	They made it a worldwide mission to end slavery.
	And how many people say, fuck, we should really have a yay Europeans day.
	Thank you, you pasty bastards, for ending slavery, one of the greatest curses the world has ever known.
	You guys are fantastic.
	Wow!
	I mean, none of you living guys, but man, your ancestors were really fucking cool.
	Ended slavery the whole world over.
	Damn, what an incredible moral accomplishment.
	You should be praised, or at least we should praise those historical people.
	But that's not what happens, is it?
	What happens...
	Is people all the world over say, man, fucking European suckers.
	Oh man!
	Suckers!
	You guys really showed your hair, didn't you?
	You showed that you care about people, you stupid bastards.
	Don't you know?
	That's just like catnip.
	To our entire ring of lions that we are now going to send charging at you and your children.
	Oh, you guys are capable of guilt.
	Oh, you guys are capable of remorse.
	You guys feel bad about slavery so bad you ended it.
	Well, now we're going to stick the fork in, you pasty white sides, and we're going to keep turning it until you cough up more money than God has in his Swiss bank account, right?
	And that's what happens when you develop empathy and do good in a world of sociopaths.
	Well, how do the empathetic convince the sociopaths to become empathetic?
	You can't convince sociopaths to become empathetic.
	I mean, it's like telling someone, yelling at someone or giving someone a back rub until their severed arms regrow.
	As far as I understand it, again, I'm no expert, but from what I've read and I've read fairly extensively in it, A sociopathy is a particular brain configuration that results from trauma and there's some genetic element but the real trigger seems to be early childhood trauma and there's no fix for it later.
	People don't understand the degree to which human beings are a predatory species on human beings.
	We're not all the same.
	Goddammit, I wish I could get this across to people.
	We are not all the same.
	You know, there are lambs and there are gazelle and there are tigers.
	And we all kind of look the same and there's this bullshit from religion that we all have souls and we're all good deep down and you can find that goodness deep down in someone.
	You reach down their throat, you spread their hands, you double fist their spine until you reach that goodness right down there in the heart of them and oh boy, it's going to be so tasty.
	We just have to go mining.
	There's gold down in the bottom of that crackerjack box, right?
	I mean, it shows up in weird things, like weird ways that we know it.
	Like, we know this stuff, right?
	I mean, vampires look like people, right?
	They just don't have a reflection, right?
	They have no sense of self.
	They can't stand sunlight or exposure.
	There's the Cylons in the second Battlestar Galactica look just like people except their spines glow when they come, right?
	And...
	So they're incredibly camouflaged predators.
	And because we're blinded by religion and we don't listen to science, we don't see that these people are everywhere.
	And they absolutely laugh at us.
	They absolutely laugh at us.
	I mean, Jesus Christ, do you think the people in charge of the financial systems and the political systems and the Federal Reserve, the central banks, I mean, do you think that people don't – I don't know how they keep a straight face.
	I don't know how they keep a straight face when they look at our pathetic, bleating, begging, confused, TV-addled, pasty, bullshit faces looking up at them saying, God bless America.
	I'm a proud Ukrainian.
	Russian blood runs through my veins and they see us standing and saluting and then they say, put on this fucking costume and go shoot those people and we're like, oh, me, me, I'll do it, I'll do it.
	Oh, do you have shiny bits of metal you can ship back in a box with my body to my children?
	Yay!
	That's what I want!
	I want to be transmogrified into a bit of metal and a memory.
	Ooh, and if you could ship them a fucking flag too, that sure beats me having me as a dad for the next 25 or 30 years.
	Great!
	I'm in!
	I love being a slave!
	Give me some fucking chains to kiss!
	I couldn't be happier!
	That's how we live.
	I mean, it's so sad.
	They see us fighting over these bits of toilet paper that are passing off as money and we call it money.
	We don't call it counterfeiting.
	We call it central banking.
	They give us all the words to use to cover up our crimes and then if one of us happens to turn to the other one and say, you know, this is just counterfeiting.
	That's not war.
	It's murder.
	Oh!
	Traitor!
	Conspiracy theorist!
	Liar!
	Miscreant!
	Right?
	We fucking deserve to be ruled.
	We are so spineless.
	I'm not sure I'd even want us to be free in our current state.
	We've got to grow at least one tiny gnat-sized group of testicles first.
	I don't know how they keep a straight face and I don't know how they don't throw up their lunches at the bullshit we swallow.
	We just listen to any political speech.
	Just read.
	Forget the – just pick up one of Obama's speeches or John Edwards' speeches or – doesn't care – Republican, Democrat, doesn't matter.
	Pick up their speeches and read it.
	And that's what we're ruled by.
	The vaporware of political bullshit.
	That's all we're ruled by.
	I mean we're a zoo.
	We don't even have any fucking bars.
	It's just slave-on-slave violence.
	One guy turns to the other and says, you know, I think we're slaves.
	Oh, fuck!
	Let's shit on that guy.
	Oh, he's a cult leader.
	Oh, he's a bad guy.
	Oh, he said something true.
	Let's fuck him up.
	The masters don't even have to lift a finger.
	We all just turn on each other.
	I mean, we haven't even earned the respect of the masters To put cages around us yet, right?
	I mean, does anyone ever say, oh yeah, you know, fuck, my kids turned five.
	I got to hand them over to the indoctrination camps.
	I got to hand them over to the government schools, you know?
	Ah, Jesus.
	It's not with a sense of regret that people send their kids to government schools.
	It's with a sense of relief and patriotic duty and binding us all together in the oneness of democratic brain tapioca turpitude.
	Nobody ever says, well, they fucked me over with property taxes.
	I've got no money for private school.
	I've got to work.
	I've got to send them.
	No!
	No!
	People say to me, where's your daughter going to school?
	I say, school?
	Are you fucking kidding me?
	Do you even remember school?
	I mean, why would I put my kid in prison?
	She hasn't even done anything wrong.
	Not that I would if she did.
	But I say to people, I said, did you like school?
	I said, fuck no.
	Well, why would I send her – I hated school too.
	Why the hell would I send her someplace that I hated and why would you say, where is she going to school?
	Like it's just another topic of conversation.
	Which particular government hellhole are you going to force her into?
	Anyway, so we don't – you know, we don't deserve freedom yet.
	We don't have a shred of self-respect.
	I mean, we send our kids off to die for flags and bullshit and trumpets.
	And do you know what they do at military funerals?
	They fire guns.
	They fire guns.
	That's like burying someone who died of cancer by injecting other people with cancer.
	Spreading the violence that brought them down.
	They shoot guns at military funerals and they hand a flag to the son of the dead man.
	A flag!
	That's what the dead man died for.
	You dye flags their red color and people dye four flags bleeding red colors.
	People say, well, when are we going to be free?
	I mean we're so far from that.
	We can't even get people to stop kissing the hand that's punching them, begging it to punch them some more and holding up their children so the punching hand has something softer to hit so it doesn't get any knuckle scrapes.
	We are so far from getting angry at being ruled.
	My hope is to get people from 150% loving being ruled to 140%.
	That would be like nirvana to me.
	For people to be slightly less bloody handed applauding the bloody handed rulers.
	That's all I want.
	For the slow clap Of the pompadour, pontificating sociopaths that rule us, for us to just give them a slightly slower, slow clap.
	That would be fantastic for me.
	But I am not holding my – you can't even decelerate this shit.
	You can't even decelerate it.
	And so, no, you can't cure sociopathy.
	You can't end it.
	And in fact, the desire to do so, the desire to make bad people better is one of the things that gives bad people so much power, right?
	I mean if you think you can reform the bacteria that's eating you, then you don't take medicine because you think you can talk it out of eating your skin, right?
	Or your flesh.
	No, no.
	I'll reason with it.
	I'll tell it about Jesus.
	I'll tell it about UPB. I'll reason with the virus so I don't need to take any medicine.
	No, it's amputation.
	The only way that you solve sociopathy is amputation.
	You have nothing to do with those people.
	You have nothing to do with those people and I use the term peaceful rather loosely, right?
	But no, this can't occur.
	We don't In a zoo, you keep the antelope separate from the tigers.
	Of course you do.
	You don't lock the hungry tigers up with the antelope and say to the antelope, reason with them, will you?
	No, you don't do any of that.
	You amputate.
	You isolate.
	It's like that scene in World War Z. The woman gets the zombie disease.
	In her hand, Brad Pitt cuts her fucking hand off.
	He didn't say, reason with the zombie virus.
	Cut it off.
	This is why I say to people, hey, if you've got monsters in your life, maybe you don't have to have monsters in your life.
	And some people, some very brave people have decided to not have monsters in their life.
	Good.
	Good.
	That helps to slow down the spread of the disease of evil.
	Keep them away from your children.
	I just did this in a call this last week.
	Military, ex-military man.
	Keep these people away from your children and your children can grow up free of viruses.
	There's a play zone near here.
	And they had two instances of measles recently.
	That's bad.
	Measles is bad, right?
	They shut the place down.
	People are like, oh my god, I'm never going back.
	Two instances of measles.
	But be sure to finish your homework about how good the government is, how necessary the military and the police are, so I can put you back in government school and then we're going to take you to church.
	But I'm really worried about measles harming my children.
	Brain viruses, we don't just expose our children to do.
	We shove them up their goddamn noses.
	Brain viruses, children can't get away from.
	We fucking strap them down and inject them in their eyeballs.
	And then there's two cases of measles and everybody goes crazy.
	So no, white guilt is not going to end anytime soon.
	Because there is going to be a battle between the empathetic and the sociopathic.
	Sociopaths are parasites.
	Dominatory parasites.
	All predators are parasites, right?
	The gazelle can live without...
	The lion.
	The lion can't live without the gazelle.
	Now I understand if there are no lions, there will be too many gazelles and blah, blah, blah, blah.
	But they will reach population stability and so on, right?
	And the analogy is somewhat limited with people.
	But we all can live without sociopaths.
	Sociopaths can't live, right?
	They don't want to fucking work, right?
	Think Janet Yellen wants to work?
	No.
	She would rather have power over people.
	So… Yeah, there's going to be a fight, but people – this kumbaya, we are all one bullshit, people aren't even close to having even a remote animal sense of good versus evil.
	I was playing with my daughter with some baby kittens and it took a while to warm the kittens up to us, right?
	Because they were cautious of us.
	These big giant fuckers are going into my bedroom, right?
	And after a while, we fed them, we cooted them, we chatted with them and then they were climbing all over us and we played with them.
	It was great.
	And I mean kittens a couple of weeks old have the common sense to shy away from potential danger.
	But we flock to kiss and embrace and worship it.
	We sing songs to evildoers.
	We have battle hymns called national anthems.
	What was I taught as a kid?
	Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, right?
	We sang this shit.
	This is what we were trained to do.
	This is how our Basic kitten sense of imminent danger was scrubbed from us and replaced with this Winston Smith's livestock home syndrome worship of evildoers.
	You can't get people to stop hitting their children.
	But you say that their BPA in baby bottles might be a problem and everyone goes insane.
	Let's ban BPA! It might be dangerous to one in a million children.
	You know, spanking does this, this.
	Hey, fuck you!
	Right.
	Because everybody loves the play-acting of concern over actually doing some shit that helps people.
	Right?
	So no, white guilt is too profitable a resource.
	And...
	I mean I don't feel guilty at all.
	I mean first of all, I haven't oppressed anyone.
	Give me a break.
	2% of people in America own slaves.
	They're all the rich bastards who are in good with the state who got the state to pay for their slave owning.
	What the hell do I have to do with that?
	Nothing to do with me.
	I don't take pride in the collective achievements of Europeans, which means that I can look at those achievements objectively.
	Pretend to be a space alien.
	If you could take one culture out of the world and all of the gifts that that culture had generated for the world, would it be the Europeans?
	Would it be the Africans?
	Would it be the Aboriginals in Australia?
	Would it be the Orientals?
	Or would it be the Europeans?
	Right?
	So no, I mean objectively, it's just a fact and I don't know.
	I guess if people want to feel guilty about it, then they can.
	I mean anyone can do whatever the hell they want but – I mean making people guilty to cough up money wasn't invented by the Catholics alone, right?
	It's a staple of human livestock farming.
	Make people feel guilty and they'll cough up money.
	You know, you didn't build that.
	We built the roads that you used to get to work to build the company that made the money.
	So give us our fucking money back.
	It's like, wait a minute.
	Don't I pay for that?
	Didn't I pay for that already?
	Weren't these roads built a long time ago and have been badly maintained?
	Weren't they in fact not even paid for but just added to the national debt?
	Shut up!
	Give us money!
	Feel guilty!
	Complete bullshit.
	You're rich, but you're just lucky, man.
	You didn't work hard.
	You're just lucky.
	Those poor, hardworking people.
	That woman who had three children by three different guys.
	She was just unlucky.
	It was slippery out there and there were men lying on their backs having dreams about Kim Kardashian.
	She slipped, fell on some cocks, dropped some babies.
	You're lucky.
	She was unlucky.
	Give her money.
	She's not responsible for her choices.
	So give her money.
	Oh, you are responsible for your choices, which is I am taking the money from you.
	Guilt is a great lever for getting money out of people.
	Get people to feel guilty and they'll pay you to make the guilt go away.
	I was raised Catholic.
	I'm sorry?
	I was raised Catholic.
	I know what you mean.
	You know the story, right?
	You know, Adam and Eve ate a magical apple and fuck it, give me money.
	I am going to put a curse on you and I've got a funny hat.
	So give me your fucking money.
	I mean, this is voodoo.
	And it's got like 90% of the money transfers in the world that there's a result of emotionally manipulative voodoo.
	I mean, it's mad.
	It's completely mad.
	And it's so obvious.
	I mean, you don't need a philosopher to tell you this shit, right?
	Jesus said, sell everything you own, give your money to the poor, and follow me.
	Except for you, the guy in Rome, you get carried around by 19 guys on a fucking golden chair.
	You sit on all the world's Arch treasures and 19 asteroids worth of fucking gold and make sure you create your own country so you don't get taxed too much.
	So all you poor bastards who want to follow me, sell all your shit, give the money to the poor.
	You guys over there, get all the money in the known universe and make it obvious.
	I mean, you be the only guys who've got glass in the year 1200.
	And not just any kind of glass.
	Stained glass.
	You get the beautiful glass.
	You get the most beautiful glass made from the tears of hungry children.
	Everyone else be poor.
	I mean, I could understand it if they were high.
	If the Roman Church, if the Catholic Church was pretending to be poor, you know, like if he just went around in some Dishrag loincloth and a massive pair of underskin Spanx to make himself look thinner.
	I mean, but they're not even pretending it.
	He's got his own fucking jet.
	Jesus walked on water.
	He flies a hundred-million-year-old dinosaur juice on his own plane.
	I mean, it's mad.
	Barack Obama wants to get rid of guns.
	Oh, except for the 12 million snipers at his daughter's school, because those guns are really helpful.
	Gun control is really good, except when a president steps out of any bulletproof area, in which case you need 9,000 guys with guns to keep him safe.
	See, guns don't keep you safe.
	But they really do keep the president safe.
	Guns don't deter crime in your house, but in the president, wherever he is, guns have this amazing ability to eliminate and reduce and provide negative repercussions for crime.
	So yeah, it is quite mad.
	It is.
	It's completely mad.
	I mean, it's literally like fucking Al Gore.
	Al Gore.
	You know, we've got to reduce our consumption of this planet's resources.
	Now, excuse me, I must fly first class in a tiny plane to every one of my speaking engagements, have a house the size of Kansas, that when I turn on the fucking electricity, the sun gets dimmer.
	I mean, I... The problem is we just don't have enough of a sense of humor yet.
	I mean it is laughter that finally dispels evil.
	I mean it's – I mean Barack Obama is talking about austerity.
	You tighten your belts and you can cut your cable bill to pay for your healthcare.
	His wife and daughters are on a multimillion-dollar tour of China – At the taxpayers' expense.
	I mean, how can you look at this with any seriousness whatsoever?
	But everyone, like, I don't know if there's just a massive conspiracy to keep a straight face called the human condition or called patriotism or respect or anything like that.
	I mean, it's all completely insane.
	Barack Obama won't tell The black culture to stop having babies out of wedlock because he wants their votes, you see.
	Sheryl Crow says, you know, you can tear your toilet paper in half.
	Well, I don't want my fingers breaking through that tissue paper going halfway up my hiney.
	I'd rather have a professional prostate exam by a woman in deep leather dungarees.
	And then she goes on these giant tours to stadiums and private buses and planes.
	She's like, well, no, but I plant some trees.
	God almighty.
	Yeah, somebody says Gorse Tennessee Mansion has a $5,000 utility bill per month.
	Per month.
	I mean, if only we could fuel it with white guilt.
	Oh, no, then it would go supernova, right?
	So, no, I mean, white guilt, I mean...
	Nobody wants to provoke what happens when you reject guilt, right?
	When you reject guilt, you get the secondary attack, right?
	And people don't want to face that, right?
	When I stopped being guilty around people, they attacked me.
	Of course they did.
	That's natural.
	That's inevitable.
	I know it more in hindsight now than I did at the time.
	But...
	Yeah, it's – people don't want to – they don't want to touch the electric fence.
	They want to pretend that it's just a lovely view with some spiky lines.
	But nobody wants to say, no, I am not guilty.
	I'm not guilty about slavery.
	I'm not guilty about environmental problems.
	I mean Christ almighty, if you want to solve environmental problems and say, well, how can everyone live at the level that Americans live at, blah, blah, blah.
	The environment is that much as good for people.
	Sorry, slums in Calcutta with 9,000 people per square inch, no, not good for people.
	When you get – the best contraception is industrialization.
	When you get lots of people with lots of money, what do they do?
	They stop having children.
	They stop having – 20 percent of women over childbearing age never had children.
	In America, in the UK, in Canada, in Australia, we just stop breeding.
	When you get enough money, you stop breeding.
	We don't have to worry about all of that shit.
	Anyway, so does this help at all?
	I really appreciate your passion for this.
	Thank you.
	It's a great site.
	It's a great question.
	Thank you for the rent opportunity.
	Mr.
	Mike!
	All right.
	Thank you, Michael.
	And thank you, Steph, for that awesome rant.
	Thank you for the studio that keeps me from frightening my child.
	All right.
	Next up is Samir.
	And Samir writes in and says, which emotion do you think drives people to work harder, anger or hope?
	Also says, is forgiveness an essential part of empathy?
	And what are the core attributes of empathy?
	All right.
	Fine.
	Are you on?
	Samir, are you on?
	Sorry, I forgot to unmute.
	No problem.
	Did you fall asleep?
	Because, you know, the show hasn't been too exciting as yet.
	All right, let's start with the first one.
	Can you give me the first question again?
	Actually, my first question was on empathy, but I think you pretty much covered a lot of it on the rant.
	I mean...
	Well, except for the forgiveness one.
	I mean, let me talk about forgiveness much.
	Yeah, so forgiveness is something that requires behavior on the part of someone else's, right?
	The best way to approach the world is with extreme emotional laziness.
	To be inert and say...
	What moves me in the world?
	What are people doing that moves me?
	How do I feel about this person?
	Not how should I feel.
	The moment you say should, you have shot a bullet through the diamond spider web of your identity.
	The moment you say should, you have buried yourself into a chasm, and a truly bottomless chasm it is, of other people's expectations and exploitations.
	So should, as I talk about in the long-ago video on procrastination, should is the only five-letter word that should be a four-letter word, right?
	You should forgive me.
	No.
	I don't know that I should.
	In fact, I think the fact that you saying I should forgive you means I'm not going to forgive you because you're just as entitled as the asshole who did something to wrong me At the beginning, right?
	Can I go to a woman and say, you should find me sexually desirable and then expect her to get all wet and puddly as a result?
	Of course not.
	She finds me sexually desirable if she's sane and carbon-based or she doesn't, right?
	If she's blind and dead.
	So, should is bullshit.
	It's complete and total bullshit.
	Forgiveness is just one of these things.
	People should never ever say to you, you owe me forgiveness, you owe your mother forgiveness, to err is human, to forgive is divine.
	It's like, okay, well, so you're basically saying that if forgiveness is divinity, then since divinity doesn't exist and is impossible, the same goes for forgiveness.
	So if somebody does me wrong, then I... Passively away to see what they're going to do.
	And then when they do something, I passively away to see how that makes me feel.
	It's the same thing with a restaurant meal.
	You order your food and they bring you the food.
	You put it in your mouth and you say, hey, I wonder if this tastes good or not.
	That's what you do.
	You don't order your tongue to say, like it, damn it, like it.
	Smile when you eat that shit sandwich.
	You don't do any of that nonsense.
	You put the food in your mouth and you say, huh, I wonder how this feels.
	I wonder how this tastes.
	Is this good or is this bad?
	And so you passively – I mean you take actions and then you passively see what your response is.
	And if you like the food, then you probably have it again.
	And if you hate the food, then you probably won't.
	It's the same thing.
	So somebody can do something wrong and I'm just, hey, I wonder what they're going to do next.
	And then they may do something next and then – I wonder how that makes me feel.
	But I don't get ordered around.
	I don't order my feelings around.
	They're not slaves.
	They're not a vacuum cleaner that I can just push around.
	Suck up the dust.
	Suck up the dust.
	Don't have any opinions of your own.
	I'm not that arrogant.
	To order myself around like my emotions are mind-drilled German soldiers all toilet-trained at gunpoint and itching to prostrate Polish women.
	No!
	No, no, my feelings are participants in my experience and they're smarter than me a lot of times.
	Oh, how many times have I felt anxiety before going in to do something really stupid?
	If only I had listened to my feelings.
	If only I had listened to my anxiety.
	If only I had listened to the distant drumming alarm bells of reptilian chorus of, ah, don't do it!
	Well, you know, you learn this slowly and painfully because emotions are anti-hierarchical.
	So, no, I don't order myself around.
	I don't say, well, you should feel like this.
	You should feel forgiveness to this person.
	You should love this person.
	You should want this or not want that.
	I mean, fuck, what is that?
	I don't sort of lecture my tongue every morning.
	Bad chocolate!
	Don't eat that chocolate!
	Broccoli is the best!
	Right?
	I mean, it's like Nathaniel Brandon, I guess.
	Ayn Rand may be an elderly, smoky Russian stick insect, but she's hot because she rode Atlas Shrugged, so balls, man up, and squirt some juice into that dried-up old cavern of non-eggness.
	How well did that work for him?
	Well, not really very well at all.
	I mean, you can yell at yourself all you want.
	I mean, all that...
	Your emotions will do is find some other way to change what you're doing, right?
	So, forgiveness...
	I don't know.
	I mean, if somebody earns my forgiveness, I will not impede that emotion.
	If somebody earns my love, I will not say I should love someone.
	I will not say I should not love someone, right?
	I will not say I must forgive this person.
	I will not say I must not forgive this person.
	I will listen to my second brain, my gut, really my third brain, right?
	Conscious, subconscious, and the gut, right?
	The instincts, all the complex nerves and ecosystem around the belly.
	So no, I'm curious.
	I'm curious to see how I respond to people, but I'm not going to order myself around.
	And you know one thing?
	If you don't order yourself around, you will always bring out the tyrant and insecure others.
	Just try it.
	Try it for a day or two.
	Seriously, I invite you to.
	This is real freedom.
	Just don't order yourself around.
	Don't order yourself around.
	And what will happen is if you don't order yourself around, you will immediately...
	Illuminate the assholes around you and it will be like this giant shrimp ring of prison, one-eyed brown mooning going on around you.
	If you stop ordering yourself around and just see how you feel, see what you want, have the laziness and self-knowledge and self-curiosity of simply reacting to things, well, first of all, you will have a much happier life.
	Being really at one with the multiplicity of yourself, if that makes any sense.
	Can I interrupt?
	Yeah, please.
	I think I get the gist of it about forgiveness as not being the essential part of empathy, but how do you argue?
	I don't know if argue is the right word, but how do you Recently, I've been going to a therapist and he's saying that forgiveness is an essential part of empathy and without forgiveness, there is no empathy.
	So how do I... Well, okay.
	So you be your therapist and I'll be me.
	Okay?
	So your therapist says this and I would say, okay, so people who don't forgive don't have empathy?
	What would your therapist say?
	Yeah, I mean...
	He would say, empathy is an essential part of...
	I mean, he just keeps stating, forgiveness is an essential part of empathy.
	Okay, no, no, I understand that.
	So I would then say, so people who don't forgive don't have empathy, right?
	And he would have to say yes, right?
	So then I would say...
	So my parents never forgave me.
	They punished me instead.
	So this means my parents do not have empathy.
	And he would then have to say yes or he would have to change his formulation, right?
	And then I would say, so is it – it's a negative thing to not have empathy.
	Would you argue that people who don't have empathy are more dangerous to be around than people who have empathy?
	And he would have to say yes if he's got any – Brains or compassion at all, at which point I would say – with regards to my parents, I'm talking about – then I would say, okay, well, then I should not spend time with my parents because my parents, by punishing me rather than forgiving me, showed that they don't have empathy and thus are dangerous to be around, right?
	Yes, I think.
	No, tell me where I'm incorrect.
	The forgiveness commandment only applies to the children, only applies to the slaves, only applies to the servants, only applies to the proletariat, only applies to the worker bees.
	Parents who punish children are by definition not forgiving those children.
	So if not forgiving is a bad thing, then parents who punish Are not forgiving.
	And does he then say all of the prisoners should be released from prison?
	Because clearly by putting people in prison, we are not forgiving them, but we are in fact punishing them.
	So I'm just – I can't understand those.
	If this guy says that forgiveness – Is essential.
	Then he must be extremely prominent in the anti-spanking, anti-child punishment movement.
	Because he must be going to parents and saying, if you don't forgive your children but rather punish them for what you call wrongdoing, you are simply communicating to the child that you don't have empathy.
	And that's bad.
	And is he also going...
	to the government and saying, by sentencing murderers and rapists to prison you are not forgiving them but are rather punishing them and that's bad.
	Please release the rapists and the murderers.
	Is he saying that?
	No!
	I guarantee you he's not.
	Because you see, those in power Get to punish!
	And those who are the victims must bleat and beg and kneel and ask for forgiveness from those who punish them.
	Those who punish don't have to be forgiving.
	In fact, being forgiving is very bad, but the children must be punished and the criminals must be punished.
	But the children, when the children grow up and achieve some independence and some choice in the family, ah, you see, now the children must be told about how wonderful Forgiveness is.
	Well, if I don't know how to forgive, even if forgiveness was a virtue, if I don't know how to forgive, whose fucking fault is that?
	It would be my parents.
	I know how to speak English because my parents spoke English.
	So I know how to speak English.
	Don't know how to speak Japanese?
	Not great on Croatian.
	Not bad on French.
	Pretty bad on German.
	No Gaelic at all.
	Parents didn't speak that.
	So it's like saying, Teaching your children Sanskrit is a great virtue.
	Well, then you've got to talk to the parents.
	Don't talk to the children, but all they do, these types of therapists, all they do is corrode the resolution, independence and courage of adult children by saying, you must forgive.
	But even if that were true, how do we forgive people who did not forgive but punished?
	Right?
	If forgiveness is a virtue, how do we deal with the parents who punished and did not forgive the child for his transgressions?
	Right?
	So I personally would challenge the therapist on this.
	And I would also ask for the science.
	You know what forgiveness is for people?
	Forgiveness is relief from independence.
	Forgiveness is relief from standing up for yourself.
	Forgiveness is relief from confrontation.
	Forgiveness is something you do on your own.
	Now, if somebody really genuinely attempts to make restitution for the wrongs that they've done you, that's their actions you're on the receiving end.
	If you had a jerk of a parent, A hitting parent, an abandoning parent, a punishing parent, a parent who never had time for you, a Kent Stevens parent, whatever, right?
	If you had a jerky parent, then my suggestion is go talk to that parent about how you feel.
	Now that's scary shit, right?
	You got to sit down across from someone who did you great harm and you got to stand up for yourself in front of a parent who dominated you for most of your life, right?
	Certainly most of your early life, right?
	So, that's hard.
	That's a hard thing to do.
	Go sit down, talk with your parent, tell your parent how you feel, tell your husband, tell your wife, tell whoever, your friend, how you feel.
	And that's a very, very tough thing to do.
	Forgiveness.
	Well, you can just sit there, snap your fingers and say the magic words, I forgive thee, I forgive thee, everything's bad, or release the butterflies, I am so happy!
	That I don't have to confront my parent.
	So yeah, it's greedily snatched at like morphine for an addict.
	It's greedily snatched at.
	And also by siding with the parent, which is really what telling victims to do, by telling victims to forgive wrongdoing without massive attempts or actions which would generate forgiveness on the part of the wrongdoers, By telling adult kids to forgive their parents, by siding with the parents at the expense of the children, well, you side with the cruel at the expense of the empathetic.
	And then you don't get angry parents calling you up, right?
	Like they call me up, like they call Peter Boghossian up, like they call other people up and threatening and getting angry and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	You don't get that because...
	The entire history of ethics in general is siding with the sociopaths to fuck the empathetic and the innocent.
	And I think that happens a lot in therapy too.
	Yes, sorry, Harry Chapin.
	I think Cat Stevens, Cats in the Cradle?
	Yeah, somebody said the other day that it was Cat Stevens and you're right, it is Harry Chapin who did Cats in the Cradle and should listen to the song.
	Samir, does that help at all?
	Yeah, I think so.
	I think so.
	This will do for now.
	Alright, well thank you, Samir.
	Up next is Lina, and she wrote in and said, How is it possible to fix issues on a grand scale concerning loss of liberty, growing size of the government, and economic disasters when people have trouble solving personal issues, learning, and growing on the individual level?
	I believe that everything starts from the inside, and the world we live in is simply a reflection of the collective mess and collective lack of consciousness and lack of desire to be responsible for our own actions.
	Go ahead, Lina.
	Hi, Stefan.
	Hello, hello.
	How are you doing?
	I'm good.
	I can.
	Thank you very much for the opportunity to talk, and it's a pleasure, and I wanted to thank you personally for all you do.
	Well, I appreciate that, Lena.
	Thank you for your kind words.
	So, that was quite a mouthful that Mike gave me.
	I wonder if you could boil it down just a smidgen.
	So, fixed issues on a grand scale concerning loss of liberty, growing size of government, When people have trouble solving personal issues, learning and growing on the individual level.
	Yeah, so you're basically saying, you know, think globally, act locally?
	Is that the idea?
	How would you solve the problems?
	I mean, I'm in agreement with you, I think.
	I just want to know how you would solve the problems of the grand scale problems.
	So what I was thinking about is that we all have our own fears and we have circumstances.
	Our first scholar actually had this – his girlfriend was going through some, you know, tough – Personal issues when she was a child.
	I mean, I have the same issues in my life.
	I know a lot of people who have the same thing and we all have fears of our personal, on personal level because of some past circumstances.
	Then also we have and get fears maybe installed by us by either media or people around us or even regime that we are living in.
	And I think I was wondering, how can you come to some kind of a normal lifestyle on a grand scale if you can't solve or understand yourself on the little personal level?
	Like, if you cannot liberate yourself, how can you think and talk about something big when it seems easy to fix things on the...
	Personal level, but at the end, it's being the hardest thing to do.
	Yeah.
	I think you're right.
	I think that the grandest and most abstract problems are really rooted in our deepest and usually our earliest experiences.
	I think people who try to solve abstract problems without solving problems like infant bonding Are missing the point completely.
	They really are mistaking cause for effect.
	And that is such a fundamental error and it's such a tempting error.
	So there's a study recently that came out.
	It said 40% of American children have an attachment disorder.
	And attachment disorder is a very serious thing.
	It means that you have not bonded or been mirrored or had an empathetic parent or caregiver close by during your ascent from babyhood.
	I'm not surprised about that because in America, I mean I live in California but I'm from a different country originally.
	So I mean here it seems like people go to work, mothers, after one month or two months of having a baby.
	So of course there's not enough bonding going on.
	So it doesn't mean that the mothers are bad, but it's just the society is arranged such a way.
	Well, it might mean that the mothers are bad.
	I don't know.
	I'm sure that it doesn't mean that all the mamas are bad.
	But I don't think we can automatically assume that the mothers aren't bad.
	They might be, right?
	They might not want to take – they might have had children and not wanted to really take care of them or they might have had children and then said, you know what?
	This is kind of boring.
	I think I'd rather go back to work.
	They might have done – they might have been crappy people.
	They might, right?
	I just – I don't like to say – it's like saying, well, it's true that husbands – some husbands do beat their wives, but that doesn't mean that those husbands are bad people.
	Well, it kind of does in a way, right?
	I mean, if they have epilepsy or whatever, right?
	Maybe not.
	But I just – this is something I'm sensitive to as a man, which is when male wrongdoing is put forward, we're just bad, right?
	Yes.
	But when female wrongdoing is put forward, everyone bends over backwards to say, well, no, no, no.
	We're not criticizing moms here.
	It doesn't mean that the moms are bad.
	Well, you know – Like 1,200 American children get murdered every year, the vast majority by their moms.
	They say, well, the moms are overwhelmed.
	Nobody ever said that about Adam Lanza.
	Oh, yeah, okay, he shot up a whole bunch of people in a movie theater, but he was stressed and overwhelmed.
	It's like, come on.
	It might be that the women are bitches and it might be that they are suffering or it could be that they have some genuine medical or whatever it is problem.
	But I'm just sort of sensitive to the fact that men never get this free get-out-of-jail-free card.
	But women, it seems, kind of do whenever people talk about this kind of stuff.
	So sorry to just sort of mention that.
	But yeah, 40 percent.
	Attachment disorders are significant predicators of massive problems down the road, criminality, aggression, violence, drug addiction.
	I mean, so 40 percent.
	30% of parents – and moms are the primary caregivers, so I'm warning you ahead of time.
	You're going to have an urge to forgive them and excuse them.
	I'll just tell you that ahead of time.
	But 30% of parents say they hit their babies over the last month.
	And that's just the ones who admit it.
	That's just over the last month.
	So the idea that we can solve something like global warming when we can't Get less than a third of parents to hit babies?
	Yes, I agree with you.
	Can we at least agree that we shouldn't be hitting the babies?
	Can we at least get that one squared away?
	And then maybe we can talk about global warming and maybe we can talk about how to solve poverty.
	Can we – basics.
	Stop hitting babies should not be a very – It's a big challenging question for us to be dealing with as a human culture anymore.
	But I mean, how come people are stuck with their problems?
	I mean, some of them, like for example, I have my issues and I am conscious about them.
	I'm aware of that.
	But it doesn't mean that I can solve them immediately.
	And which you talked about that, you know, sometimes it takes therapy, sometimes it takes journal writing and stuff like that.
	And it takes time and then talking to different people and maybe other experiences.
	That you can solve something that bugs you.
	But I mean, many people that I know from my surroundings, they're not aware of their own issues.
	And even if they are, they don't want to deal with them.
	They're kind of stuck with it.
	So what do you think about that?
	I mean, why do some people know and some people don't?
	Why people don't make effort to change something within themselves and rather stick to whatever is convenient?
	Well, look, first of all, we know that human populations can change their minds about essential moral issues and do on a regular basis.
	Maybe not regular, but certainly do on a wide basis.
	Right?
	So, you know, not 200 years ago, Maybe 250 years ago.
	No, actually, I think it was Thomas Woods who said that in the mid-19th century, only 2% of people in the States had any problem with slavery at all.
	And now you can't find anyone who's pro-slavery.
	Yes, correct.
	So human beings can change their minds about enormous, massive moral and social issues.
	And how does that occur?
	Well, it occurs.
	For some of us, it occurs because we reason things out.
	Right?
	Self-knowledge, reason, philosophy.
	Some of us are smart enough.
	Mm-hmm.
	To figure these things out for yourself.
	Now, I'm going to assume that your ears are not too sensitive, right?
	Because I might blister a little bit here because I feel very strongly about this.
	So I apologize in advance.
	And I know that that's hugely sexist because I haven't said that to the guys on the call.
	So I apologize for that too.
	No, no, no, no, no worries.
	Not at all.
	I have trouble throwing my own conditioning out the window.
	So anyway, so there are some of us who get it.
	And we didn't have to be taught it.
	We think about it and we've had influences and so on.
	But we patiently and painfully put those bricks together and we end up being able to stand on a wall, seeing further, getting where the future is.
	And we are in possession of this incredible gift, this knowledge, this truth, this love.
	These facts.
	I consider universally preferable behavior to be one of those facts.
	I consider the non-aggression principle with regards to children to be one of those facts.
	I don't claim – UPB is my formulation.
	I certainly don't claim originality in everything I do but these are I would say insights.
	They're not tough.
	Everyone knows that a rock falls, but it took like 50,000 years for people to get that the world is a rock that falls around the sun.
	So it's the same principle.
	Expanding principles from the personal to the universal is really tough.
	But some people are born with the brain power and the willpower and the moral passion.
	To do that, right?
	So extension of humanity to women, to slaves, to blah, blah.
	People got it, right?
	They're universalized.
	Yes.
	So the question, if I understand your question right, how do you get it from the elite to the masses?
	Yes.
	I think you said it better than I did.
	It's simple, but it's hard.
	Can I tell you?
	Are you ready?
	Yes, please.
	Well, through shame.
	Through shame?
	Through shame.
	By making people ashamed to have the old viewpoints.
	I wish there were a nicer way.
	I do.
	I really wish there was a nicer way.
	But what happens to a racist in society?
	What was that – I don't know if Paul is someone or other, this blank-eyed southern wrinkled Barbie who had a cooking show or whatever.
	I skimmed some – she ran into some problems with racism or something like that.
	She made a racist comment or whatever.
	Bang!
	Shame!
	Racist!
	Blah!
	Ah, racist!
	Shame! Hate! Vile! Vituperation! Stoning! Shame! Attack! Shame!
	Is the way to change people.
	In other words, people who don't listen to reason will fear consequences, right?
	I'm sure there are people out there who have horribly racist thoughts these days.
	Do they talk about them?
	No.
	Right?
	Probably not, right?
	They keep them very much themselves because there will be shaming.
	How did gays go from a persecuted minority to sitcoms, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	To being cool, to being the fashion accessory that no Manhattan socialite lady should be without, right?
	Well, by posing as women in Sex and the City, right?
	Which is really a show, as Ann Coulter mentioned, about gay men, written by gay men, about gay culture, but with pretend vaginas covering the penises, which is really the name of the worst porn film you could imagine.
	But it's through shame.
	Now, if you're a homophobe, right?
	Then you get attacked and you get shamed.
	And so the massive social attack mechanism, right?
	So when you were pro-abolition, you were a nigger lover and you favored mixing good Christian blondes with ungodly African driftwood or I don't know, whatever they made up at the time.
	And you got shamed and attacked and you shut the fuck up and you went along with slavery, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And now if...
	If you are a racist, then you are, you know, reviled and hated and, right, your reputation is, it's one of, I mean, in particular in America, it's about the worst thing that you can call someone, right?
	And so negative consequences is how you change people who refuse to think, right?
	If you can't reason with them like adults, you have to train them like animals, right?
	But may I ask you something else in what you're saying?
	I mean, I don't know.
	I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist or something like that, but I don't have TV. I don't really know what's going on on TV. I haven't had TV in the past maybe seven or eight years.
	But I have TV at work and I see sometimes occasionally what's happening and what they show.
	And I know that majority of the people after they come from work, they watch TV and there is nothing good happening there.
	So my point is that who is going to put people at shame?
	It seems to me that people are being brainwashed rather than being put...
	Oh, no, no.
	Look, I fully agree with that.
	It's a long and a slow process.
	But, I mean, it's nothing hugely new.
	I mean...
	The Christians in the 18th century used to go to the church, and if there were any questions about race, they were informed by the priest who was the appointed representative of God, at least particularly in the Catholic Church, that Africans were subhuman apes that needed to be civilized by white Christians so they would have even a snail's chance in a fry pan of getting into hell or whatever, right?
	So, I mean, there was – propaganda has been going on.
	At least we have the internet.
	There are options for different – Perspectives or different approaches, right?
	Yes, absolutely.
	Of course.
	But like when it comes to spanking, right?
	Yes.
	Or circumcision.
	I mean, it's despicable.
	It's vile.
	It's skin-crawlingly repulsive that we share a planet with bipeds who will decide not to hack off half the sun's penis skin if they're afraid that other people are going to say, you did that?
	Oh, that's not good.
	Naughty parent.
	Oh, I don't know.
	I think that's just bad.
	Not that they would say that.
	It would all be body language, right?
	They'd say, oh, we had our kids circumcised.
	People would be like – there would be an awkward silence.
	Awkward silences rule the world.
	People are so fucking terrified of awkward silences that they will literally go to war immediately.
	Rather than face an awkward silence.
	Well, your son's of enlistment age.
	Why is he not in the military?
	Okay, I'm signing up.
	I don't want that awkward silence.
	Oh, I'll take an eternity of silence six feet under rather than face five seconds of awkward silence from the neighbors, right?
	Yes.
	Awkward silence is like the great tyrant Sauron ruler that just powers the entire world's conformity.
	Oh, awkward silences.
	Oh, no!
	I can't take them.
	I would rather rip out my own heart.
	And place it on an Aztec god's altar rather than face an awkward silence.
	Oh no!
	I can't make people uncomfortable.
	I'd rather throw myself into Hun machine gun fire in some Gallipoli body-shredding slow-motion disintegration scene rather than face an awkward silence.
	I can't take it.
	get no awkward silences.
	I don't know why it's so terrifying for people to have awkward silence.
	I quite enjoy them, but I don't know why it's so terrifying for people to have awkward silences, but they do.
	So when will people stop spanking their kids?
	They'll stop spanking their kids when people are awkwardly silent around seeing or hearing about kids getting spanked, right?
	So it can be that level of shaming, and I hope it is that level of shaming that causes people to stop hitting babies or – or like there used to be this awkward silence, right?
	Which was, oh, you're – wait.
	You had a child without being married?
	Awkward silence.
	And rather than face that awkward silence – Like women would go off and have back alley abortions.
	That's how it used to be enforced.
	Now we've got the state and debt and guns and prisons and the IRS and shit like that.
	But we used to be ruled by awkward silences.
	Now we're ruled by even more awkward machine guns because you don't have the awkward silences which guide people as to the shit they should do and the shit they shouldn't do.
	Well, you get the nanny state and you get massive debts and all that sort of shit, right?
	And so now we just give money to victims, victim mothers who happen to be divinely impregnated by men who slipped like ghosts through the walls of their houses and vaginas.
	And now we just give them money because nobody can handle the awkward silence.
	There's too many of them now.
	Once you hit a tipping point and there's too many single moms, then they gang together and they fight back, right?
	But once you get a minority, then they're like, oh, well, there's nobody to gang together.
	Together with and I guess I'm bad and I shouldn't – and then other people, oh, you remember that?
	That kid down – that girl down the street, she had a baby out of wedlock and now she's not invited anywhere nice and nobody goes to her house.
	And if they do, all they bring – they don't bring gifts.
	You know what they bring?
	Oh, they bring awkward silences.
	And then she's like, no!
	Right?
	Right.
	So there is – and so consequences.
	So consequences is how people – if you want, right?
	Why does the drunk stop drinking?
	He either says, shit, this is bad for my liver.
	I keep losing weekends.
	I can't get up in the morning.
	I'm going to – I've got to stop, right?
	He looks at consequences and he figures it out.
	Or he's hooked up to some machine because his liver died, right?
	He's like, well, okay.
	I can't drink in here, so – Or he just dies, right?
	So people either look down the road and they have consequences, right?
	Or the consequences just have to hit them, right?
	So this is why I talk to people.
	It's one of the reasons other than it's just a moral, humane, compassionate, decent thing to do.
	So people who have abusive parents… I say, hey, remember what feminists said about abusive husbands?
	Well, I'm not going to say that.
	They just told women to get out of those marriages and marriage was a prison and marriage was slavery.
	Hillary Clinton said that when she was younger.
	Marriage is slavery and blah, blah, blah.
	Well, I don't think being the adult child of parents is slavery or anything in marriage.
	The family is not abusive.
	But if you have abusive parents, you don't have to see them.
	Now, that's a compassionate moral thing to do in the same way that I say to someone, you know...
	If you are afraid of lions, you don't have to go into the lion's den.
	You don't have to do that.
	And if somebody says, I'm very susceptible to infection, I might say, you know, maybe not working in a hospital would be a good idea because, you know, lots of germs in a hospital, all that kind of stuff.
	But with parents, right?
	Right now, abusive parents get to keep their kids because everyone in society says, you get the fuck back to those parents.
	You forgive them.
	They did the best they could with the knowledge they had.
	And if you don't see your parents, you're some kind of monster, right?
	And so kids get shamed into spending time with people who abuse them as children.
	They're shamed, cornered, right?
	Because God forbid you say, oh, I don't see my mom.
	She was abusive.
	What do you get?
	You know what you get, right?
	Yes.
	What do you get?
	No, usually it's not good.
	I mean, in society, it's not acceptable when you don't talk to your parents.
	It is looked bad.
	Even if you're coming from a single-parent family, then whoever is having both parents, they're like, oh, really?
	So you're from a divorced family?
	Oh, okay.
	Well, at least I had that sometimes.
	Such comments.
	Right.
	So, you know, and I know this from experience.
	People say, where does your mom live?
	Say, she lives in Toronto.
	Do you see her often?
	No.
	What do you mean?
	Don't see her at all.
	When did you last see her?
	13 years ago.
	Do you know what you get then?
	Yeah.
	Awkward silence.
	Yeah, you get an awkward silence, right?
	Oh, no!
	Oh, shit, I got to call her up.
	I got to go over for brunch.
	I hate that bitch, but I got to go over for brunch because the alternative to spending the rest of my life orbiting some crazy woman who beat the shit out of me as a kid is I might have some awkward silences.
	Oh, God, I can't have those, right?
	And so...
	What I want is – I want to switch that up.
	So right now, you can be a complete asshole to your children.
	Like, astonishing.
	Like, it would land you in prison if you did it to an adult, like in a New York Minute.
	But your kids will still show up on Father's Day, Mother's Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, right?
	They just dutifully go trudging over.
	Except I did actually see August Osange County just because there's nothing better than fiery female acting pyrotechnics sometimes and hugely encouraging.
	This monstrous abusive mom and the kids got the fuck out of town.
	Did not look like they were heading back.
	So some positive steps towards independence, freedom for victims of child abuse.
	But right now, the kids all go herding over to the parents, right?
	I'd like to at least open up the possibility that they don't have to.
	And that way, at least you can see who the abusers are.
	They're the ones whose kids don't come over.
	Look!
	You can see them now!
	They're exposed, right?
	Before they were camouflaged with the bruised bodies of their battered children, they could hug around them like a human shield, right?
	But now it's possible that, you know, maybe they don't have these human shields to pretend that they were good parents.
	Maybe the kids can get some liberty.
	Maybe the kids can get some freedom, some peace from abusers.
	Maybe the kids' kids don't have to be exposed to unrepentant child abusers.
	Maybe they won't have the human shields to pretend that they were great parents, right?
	And that's sort of one step.
	And the second step is – my hope is that if the idea of the voluntary family, right?
	Like we have voluntary marriage, right?
	Get married, get divorced.
	And women who get divorced, you go.
	Good for you.
	Don't care if it was no fault.
	Maybe you just got bored.
	Good for you.
	No negative thing, right?
	Well, that's because that only hurts men, right?
	Whereas the voluntary family, the defooing idea, well, that might hurt women.
	So, oh, can't be allowed, right?
	A man can't possibly choose to not see an abusive mother because that only benefits a man and that hurts a woman.
	Oh, don't you remember?
	Women and children first.
	Men are disposable.
	Men must always be sacrificed for the happiness of women.
	Go fight a war.
	Go down into the sewers.
	Go cut down some fucking trees and bring mommy a table board.
	Anyway.
	No, I agree with you.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Right.
	So the defooing thing is tough because it actually is for the benefit – it's for the benefit of women, of course, of women victims of child abuse.
	But what it fundamentally is, is it benefits men and it costs women.
	So it can't – See, war costs men and benefits women and that women don't have to go to war and men do.
	So that's okay.
	You're going to have 250 million men killed in wars in the 20th century.
	That's not anti-male.
	But saying to men you don't have to see your abusive mom, well, see, that's benefiting men at the expense of women and that just short-circuits us.
	Completely.
	But what I also want to recognize, and this is how things change, right?
	You sort of macro and micro was your initial question.
	How things change is people – we know this about government, right?
	If you don't have any personal consequences for your bad decisions, you're more likely to make bad decisions, right?
	Absolutely.
	I mean, yeah, if a poverty program doesn't work and then the people who – Voted for and implemented the poverty program, if they have to pay out of their own pocket for the poverty program that didn't work, they're going to be much more careful about it working or not working.
	Whereas if it doesn't work and they get a raise, well, that's great, right?
	Absolutely, yeah.
	Yeah, so we all know that if kids can't fail a test, they're not going to study.
	We get that.
	If there's no negative consequences, then bad behavior or inefficient behavior will continue.
	So if you are really great to your kids and then the expectation is your kids come over for your birthday, well, good.
	If you beat your kids up and don't feed them any decent food and don't care about their education and drink and whore around whether you're a man or a woman with other men, women or goats – Well, then if your kids still come over for your birthday, well, guess what?
	You just subsidized a whole bunch of bad parenting.
	Now, if your kids are told by some asshole on the internet, hey, you don't have to see abusive parents, what happens?
	Well, people might think twice about abusing their kids, right?
	Because now there might be some negative consequences to abuse.
	I mean we all know that female suicidality and depression went down when no-fault divorce came in because women were unhappy in their marriages, left their marriages, and I think that in some ways marriage has improved for those who have remained married.
	As a result, voluntarism is generally – it generally improves behavior.
	When you privatize something, generally behavior and efficiency improves.
	I'm privatizing the family as I've talked about Lo these many years.
	That way – Parents are going to be like, well, I want to hit my children.
	And then if some part of their brain says, ooh, you know what?
	If you hit them, they might not come over when they're adults, right?
	And that will give them some pause.
	We know that.
	People respond to incentives, a basic reality, a basic premise of economics, right?
	Yes.
	So this is an example, I think, of how you solve the big problems by focusing on the personal decisions.
	Does that help at all?
	I think so.
	Yeah, very much so.
	Thank you.
	You're welcome.
	Wow, that was easier than I thought.
	Look at that!
	Woo!
	Easy call.
	All right.
	All right.
	Thank you so much for your questions and comments.
	I'm sorry that I did have a half-calf latte before the show.
	I'm sure that when I listen back to this, I will regret it, Mike.
	You will, I'm sure, slow down the audio when I turned into a High-pitched anime Japanese schoolgirl squeal.
	I normally do.
	You normally do?
	Good.
	Excellent.
	Excellent.
	You did say you were going to add some bass to this, which hopefully will make me sound a little bit less like the chipmunks being electrocuted on stage.
	But is there anything you wanted to add or any comments you had for the finis donless show?
	No, I think that's just about it.
	I'll just run through the dates again real quick so everyone knows the upcoming events that Steph is going to be appearing at.
	Toronto Bitcoin Expo, 2014, April 12th.
	That's a Saturday at the Metro Toronto Convention Center.
	Going to be a good time.
	Steph's doing a three-person roundtable with Jeffrey Tucker and Andreas Antonopoulos on the future of Bitcoin and giving a speech on how Bitcoin can end war.
	Two really cool things happening on that day, Saturday, April 12th.
	Hope you turn out.
	I'll be there.
	Stuff will be there.
	Should be a good time.
	We stay.
	If people want to stay and chat, I love meeting listeners.
	So, you know, it's not just come and whatever, right?
	But you can hang out backstage, baby.
	No, we like to stay and chat, right?
	Oh, yeah, absolutely.
	And also the next web conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands, coming up April 24th and 25th of this month.
	Also going to be a really good time.
	Seth's going to that one solo.
	But, yeah, we're going to be doing a meetup as well in conjunction with that.
	And you can find that information out at the Freedomain Radio Facebook page.
	So, yeah.
	With alternative tasting brownies, if I understand this correctly.
	Some people want you to try some alternative tasting brownies.
	You know, I just have to keep my teeth white because sometimes I'm on TV. Anyway.
	Oh, yeah.
	I guess one last little thing.
	So people are saying to me, oh, do ads, do ads, right?
	I just – I want to just give you a thought about that, right?
	The thought isn't telling you to do something.
	The thought is a kind of a way of thinking.
	Like a way of thinking.
	So let's say we did as many ads as the shift shows, right?
	And they have like, I don't know, 15 minutes of ads every hour.
	And we do a three-hour show.
	It's 45 minutes of ads, right?
	So you have to sit through 45 minutes of ads to listen to one of these conversations.
	I mean obviously that's going to interrupt the flow, but forget about all of that.
	And that makes – so 45 minutes.
	So let's say you're willing to give up 45 minutes of your time per show.
	And people say, well, yeah, I'd be happy to do that, right?
	Well, let me give you another way of thinking about it, another way of looking at it.
	Why don't you spend 45 minutes sharing, promoting the show?
	It's still time that you would otherwise be listening to ads.
	Or let's say some of the times you're doing dishes or whatever, you'd listen to the ads or whatever, but most people will stop and pause and skip.
	Let's say it's half that time.
	So instead of 45 minutes less, 22 minutes, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, So just 10 minutes, finding some forums, finding some place to post a show, sharing the show, whatever, right?
	Sorry, someone's confused about the math.
	No.
	Peter Schiff does 15 minutes of ads per hour.
	So for a three-hour show, which is our show, Usually, a three-hour show, it's been three and a half for us – two and a half, sorry.
	It would be 45 minutes, so just in case people got confused about the math.
	But so instead of 40, just spend 10 minutes.
	Share the show.
	Promote the show.
	Invite people to come and see the show, right?
	That's a proactive way that you can help the show, which is much more valuable to me and to Mike than commercials would be.
	Again, it's just a way of thinking rather than – I'm talking about being active rather than passive, right?
	Being active rather than passive.
	So instead of saying, oh, Steph, you should get more money by me passively sitting here and receiving commercials.
	It's a way of thinking that I'd really like to invite you to start exercising.
	Saying, well, if I go and share this show, more people would be exposed to this philosophy show.
	Some of those people will end up donating.
	So instead of me sitting here listening to ads droning in my ears for 45 minutes, I can spend 10 or 15 or 20 minutes promoting the show.
	It costs me less time and gets more money to Steph and gets more people into philosophy.
	So that's my suggestion.
	About ways of thinking, right?
	About being proactive rather than passive.
	About doing something rather than waiting for other people to do something.
	So, of course, you can always go to fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
	Mike, let's be real.
	Oh, Steph, before you go.
	I hope you have a great time in the morning when you get up early to start your safari.
	Anyway, sorry, guys.
	I think you need to tell the Izzy story that you mentioned on Facebook today.
	It's everybody.
	Oh yeah, that was good.
	So you know what's great?
	It's basically we've told people to stop listening about 10 minutes ago.
	Well, that's it for the show.
	Here's all the dates.
	Oh, wait.
	No, here's some really good stuff about the show.
	It's like, you know what?
	This is like the bit at the end of the credits in the movie.
	For the people that waited.
	Stage to the end.
	To see who stage director number four was.
	Right, right.
	So, okay, yeah.
	So my daughter plays a game called Dragonvale where you breed dragons and you have these gems which you can use to speed things up and so on.
	And she has some gems and all that.
	And so there's a dragon that she really wants that's on sale.
	She hasn't had any luck trying to breed it and it's statistically rare to breed or whatever.
	And so the dragon is on sale from like 1750 to 175 gems.
	She has 165 gems and I thought – because I thought, well, the sale is going to end and then it's going to go back up.
	We won't be able to get this dragon she's wanted.
	And so I – and it's like – I think it's like $1.99 for a couple of gems or whatever, right?
	So I said, look.
	You know, you've only got, you only need 10 gems.
	I think it's 50 gems for $1.99.
	So I'll get you the extra gems if you want.
	No problem, right?
	And she didn't even pause.
	She said, you know, thanks daddy, but no, I would feel more satisfied and more proud if I earned the dragon all by myself.
	It's like, whoa.
	And this is like – if you've not done peaceful parenting, like you literally won't believe the results.
	Like the results are better than I expected and I had wildly optimistic expectations of peaceful parenting too.
	And she's five.
	She's five.
	She's really great at the deferral of gratification.
	She's really confident in social situations.
	She's really friendly to people but very assertive if she meets the odd mean kid and so on, right?
	And you can't fathom – like it looks like parenting CGI unless you've actually done it.
	It's like getting one of those broomsticks from the Harry Potter series and then thinking you can fly it.
	It's like, well, no, that was all CGI. It's like, no, it's not CGI. It's peaceful parenting.
	It's even cooler than CGI. So anyway, I just wanted to mention that is – I mean that's – is he in parenting for the win?
	And this is not something I've really talked about with her that much.
	And – She's having some frustration with reading because she resists learning it sometimes.
	But she understands how important it is and all that.
	And reading is one of these things like you just have to learn how to read and then you get how great it is.
	Like it's – I can see over the hill.
	She can't, right?
	So I really don't force her to but strongly encourage her to and all that.
	I can't force her to do anything.
	But I did sort of point out that, you know, I said, you know, if you had...
	She doesn't use tablets a huge amount, but I said, you know, if you had spent, you know, as much time working on reading as you had on...
	I can't remember what it was, some tablet things and one other thing, then, you know, you'd already be really good at reading and so on.
	She really took that to heart and she's like, okay, I get it.
	Like, okay, so there are costs to tablet time and there are benefits to reading time and all that.
	So, anyway, I just wanted to mention that.
	And...
	To also remind you that women use face creams made from the foreskins of circumcised baby boys.
	Oprah in fact has promoted one of these on her show.
	Since we were talking about male disposability, can you imagine if men had facial creams made from The discarded clitorises of baby girls, society would go insane.
	But women can grind up male foreskins and use them to make themselves look pretty and you don't even hear about it.
	And this is just one of those challenges that society needs to face.
	Society really needs to face up to male disposability.
	It is a grand challenge.
	It's not something that I was particularly aware of until I started reading more about it.
	Ladies, that's not the facial you want.
	So, hope you have a great week.
	We will talk to you again on Sunday morning.

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