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May 1, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:43:52

2682 Freedom Versus Basement Bombs! - Sunday Call In Show April 30th, 2014

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	Good evening, everybody.
	Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio, back from the Pangalactic European Tour.
	I hope you're doing very well.
	Let's just tell you that I missed you people more than words can say.
	It is great to be back chatting philosophy with you fine-feathered folk.
	So, Mike, just all you've got to tell me, who's on first?
	All right, up first today is Peter.
	And Peter wrote in with the question, how can fundamental science, especially megaprojects like the Large Hadron Collider, be funded in an anarcho-capitalist society without some form of taxation?
	Do you think making a good case to scientists...
	Hold on, hold on.
	Do you think making a good case to scientists that we don't need a government to tax society yet in order to fund science would be a great progress?
	Mike, can I tell you something?
	Go ahead, Steph.
	Mike, can I tell you something?
	Are you sitting down?
	Do you know that in the Amsterdam meetup, other people wanted to talk?
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	And...
	I mean, that's all I have to say.
	Other people wanted to talk, and by God, they did.
	Normally, when it's time for other people to talk, I just mute your audio.
	So, you know, they get the impression that other people are allowed to talk on this show.
	But in real life...
	Pointing their IR blasters at my throat.
	Anyway.
	All right.
	So, sorry.
	Keep going.
	Large Hadron Colliders in a Free Society.
	Do you think making a good case to scientists that we don't need a government to tax society in order to fund science would make great progress for the voluntary movement?
	That is Peter's question.
	Right.
	Okay, Peter, why do you assume that we need or want a large hadron collider in a free society?
	You would like it, I assume, right?
	I wouldn't mind it.
	Oh, what do you mean you wouldn't mind it?
	You get a chance to come on a philosophy show.
	This is your question.
	Don't tell me you're indifferent or we'll have to move to another topic.
	No, no, of course.
	I'm just suggesting, how do you put it, just the fundamental science in general, whether it be projects that are deemed important regardless of the cost, not regardless of the cost, but contingent on the cost.
	Let me just think.
	There certainly is room in a free society to have such projects.
	Okay, so what's your question?
	I mean, so in a free society, if you want a large Hadron Collider, you think it's the greatest thing since sliced laser bread, then you make the case.
	You say, hey man, here's all of the great things we can get out of it.
	And it doesn't have to be profit.
	It doesn't have to be money.
	It can be just cool pictures of atoms exploding.
	You know, you can put a Hubble Space Telescope up, hopefully a little bit better than NASA did.
	If you want, it's just that you actually, you know, you can say to people, look, it's not going to make us any money, but man, we're going to get some cool wallpaper for our tablets.
	So that's fine.
	People do that kind of stuff all the time.
	So if you want big scientific projects in a free society, you make the case to people.
	Now you can make the case to people a wide variety of ways, aesthetics, knowledge.
	It furthers some scientific position or it furthers some atheist position or further some religious position if you're a really interesting scientist.
	Or it's cool or it makes money.
	And, of course, a lot of people write to me like when I bag on physicists, which is just bagging on statists.
	I mean, it's not like I'm against science.
	I'm against state science.
	And it's sort of like if you've got a bunch of school kids who are told to write at gunpoint and we say, hey, let's take the guns away from those kids.
	You're like, oh, are you against literacy?
	No, I'm against the guns, as I have to say repeatedly.
	So...
	You just say this is going to be voluntary.
	Now, you can say to the scientists, look, there's going to be less bureaucracy, there's going to be less politics, there's going to be less junk, less crap, but for a lot of the scientists, that's going to be a problem, right?
	You basically, when you take the government out of things, once people have adapted to those things, like they've had a generation or two to adapt to those things, Then you've got a certain personality type, a certain sort of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory type of personality in there.
	And those people, like crappy government educators, they know what's going to happen if the free market comes along.
	Well, by God, they're going to have to grow up and in a hurry.
	And they're not really keen on doing that.
	People have gotten in there, have gotten to the top by working the system, by working the academic system, by working the politics, by knowing how to write the grant applications.
	It's a particular skill set that has become The crap has risen to the top.
	In the free market, the cream rises to the top.
	In state society, the crap rises to the top.
	So I don't know if we're going to get a whole bunch of converts.
	It's like if you say, let's privatize education.
	In other words, let's take the gun away from the parents, the kids, the teachers, the bureaucrats, you name it.
	Well, some people are like, oh, God, I couldn't think of anything better.
	And other people are like, oh, my God, I can't think of anything worse.
	So, yeah, some will like it.
	But the people who would like it the most probably aren't in the scientific system anyway right now because it's largely junk.
	You know, they've published a bunch of randomly generated stuff.
	Articles in scientific journals, just like completely randomly generated, randomly generated words, graphs, equations, and dozens of these articles got published in peer-reviewed journals!
	And, uh, it's junk.
	It's garbage.
	Not all of it, but the vast majority of it in many ways is not market-focused.
	It's all based on coercion.
	It's scaremongering.
	It's fear-mongering.
	Like the global warmest, some of the scientists have actually said, hey, you know, we're happy to scare the crap out of people because it raises awareness, which basically means it provides ammo to the politicians.
	To scare the people into handing over more of their rights.
	You know what is it Obama said?
	Global warming is a fact.
	The science is settled.
	Bullshit.
	Science is never settled.
	Particularly weather forecasts for 100 years from now are not settled.
	Anyway, does that help at all?
	Sure, sure.
	And to add on that point, there's actually some really cool research that's coming out of, I think it's near Toronto, or maybe Waterloo in Canada, where they are doing research showing that Carbon emissions might not be the main source of global warming in general if it exists, but CFCs or carbofluorocarbons might be dominant, but that's an aside.
	Didn't we already ban those?
	I thought CFCs were banned.
	I guess in third world, right, or whatever, developing countries, they're not banned, right?
	They're slowly coming out of the market.
	They're still being used, but we're weaning off of them in a sense.
	Well, and those bastards stick around forever, right?
	I mean, they are a catalyst in the upper atmosphere, and so they're pretty persistent buggers, right?
	Right.
	But in any case, the main part of my question was not so much...
	I'm making a case for specifically the Large Hadron Collider, but for people to fund this, but the question is going to be how do we...
	Collect the funds for this.
	And I have some solutions of how to collect the funds instead of just taxation, for example.
	Instead of trying to get investments from purely private companies or corporations, but from the general public as a whole.
	Wait, wait, wait, wait.
	Sorry.
	I think you just walked through a giant wall of flame without even noticing that you were on fire because you're sort of saying, well, how do we collect the money?
	You know, if we don't do taxation, we can do investment or whatever, voluntary.
	Well, there's not this continuum between taxes and voluntary association, right?
	It's like saying, well, you know, I guess I could, you know, make sweet love to this woman or I could rape her.
	You know, one or the other is going to get the job done.
	Basically, you had a big giant gun in the room and you were talking about taxation, and then when you started talking about investments and voluntary stuff, well then the gun in the room is gone.
	And I'm not sure if you noticed that you were kind of veering between coercion and voluntarism.
	Well, so the question of coercion is sort of murky in the way I'm suggesting.
	So for example, you can create, similar to how you have DROs, You can create what I call SEOs, social collection organizations, where, for example, you have an organization and they can collect funds for science or some other social program from the public,
	and by doing so, the members of the public are partnered with this SEO in one shape or form.
	For example, they can If you've heard of AAA, for example, you're part of this community and you can, as a benefit of being part of this organization, you can receive discounts, for example, within a community.
	Just like AAA, for example.
	And there's other forms that you can do this in.
	Yeah, I mean, if people want it to be done, if enough people want it to be done, then it will be done.
	You know, it's funny, how much in society gets screwed up and how much coercion do we need because people simply don't want to ask.
	You know, I run a show which is based on donations and so every now and then I ask for donations.
	Here's me asking for donations.
	It's the end of the month.
	If you haven't donated for a while, we would love to see some bitcoins, some fiat currency to keep the operation flowing smoothly.
	I would really appreciate that.
	You know, every time I go on a speech, my wife has to not work, especially when it's a distance and I need to acclimatize, so we've got to cover some income there, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Anyway, so FDRURL.com forward slash donate.
	And you go out and you ask.
	Now, when you ask people for things in society, some people will say yes, some people will shrug.
	And then, you know, a bunch of really acid-hearted, mean little fuckers will swarm you and say, you're e-begging, you're a panhandler, you're a bastard, how could you scorn that guy for giving you a dollar?
	Right?
	And that's because when you ask for something, you put yourself in a position of vulnerability, And all these people are doing is telling me exactly how their parents were when they were children.
	That's all they're doing.
	And maybe they think they're shooting some arrows into my heart or something.
	They are evoking in me some, I guess if you could say, contemptuous sympathy.
	Like I'm sympathetic.
	All that's happening is I'm putting myself in a position of vulnerability by saying ask, and then people are...
	Attacking me because they have switched into their parental alter egos and they're telling me exactly what it was like for them as children.
	And these people who attack those who ask for stuff do a massive amount of damage to society because it makes people afraid to ask for stuff.
	And so instead of asking for stuff, what people do is run to the state and use the state to get stuff and then they're not put in that position of vulnerability.
	In fact, they become the aggressors.
	So In society, you're asking me, who's funded by voluntary donations, how are we going to get great and important projects funded without the state?
	Well, I'm not taking a dime of government money.
	So I think I'm a pretty good example of how this kind of stuff can happen.
	Sure, sure.
	I think you might know more than others that just asking for donations, you're not going to get...
	Projects are not—you're not going to get the big bucks from that.
	I mean, you have—you can have alternatives, for example, in that it's not— Wait, what do you mean?
	You ask for donations and you're not going to get the big bucks?
	I mean, Catholic Church, it's about the richest institution in America.
	Okay, so sure.
	And so we can use psychological coercion in that sense, but— Well, yeah, but I mean, it's still to some, I mean, there is definitely threats and all that involved, you know, but I'm just saying that it's not necessarily true that asking for things is going to leave you broke.
	There's lots of, I mean...
	Hundreds of billions of dollars get given just in America every year to charities and so on.
	So it does require that you really try and serve the needs of your audience in particular.
	And so it's a challenge from that standpoint.
	But it is something that you can do.
	Are you going to get, I don't know, what's the budget of the Hadron Supercollider?
	It's around, we spent around $9 billion on it.
	Oh my god.
	Can you tell me what we've got out of it?
	Well, so far we've found the Higgs, and there's question on whether or not there's implications on if they're being supersymmetry or multiverse, but I'm not going to get into that.
	Okay, so, but have we gotten anything out of it, like anything which sits on the shelf of a store?
	Well, I mean, CERN, for example, I mean, they developed the internet, but besides that, I mean, colliders for...
	I know, come on, come on.
	I mean, they developed a protocol for exchanging information across decentralized networks.
	The internet is something that was developed and propagated by the free market, by private interests.
	Sure, sure, but...
	I mean, another example is the way they're – the systems that they're using, the protocols that they're using – or maybe not protocols, but the system that they're using to collect all the data.
	I mean, the amount of data that's coming out of that system – When there's collisions taking place, it's a huge amount.
	I'm not too familiar with how it's done, but there's technical developments that have come out of that as well.
	Okay, well, I mean, so it's voluntary.
	You make the case, and if people don't like it, then unfortunately they're on the side of violence.
	I'm not putting you in that category, but that's where...
	Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about?
	Well, I wanted to push the one part that we were talking about a little further in terms of the voluntary and asking for donations.
	Now, would it be considered coercion if, so say you have this collection organization, and then they, and as part of this organization, just like the DRO, you say, okay, you fund this science or helping the needy or whatever this social organization is asking for.
	The community as a whole will decide to economically ostracize you or, in a sense, banish you or whatever.
	It's similar to the DRO if you commit a crime and you decide not to pay your dues.
	I'm sorry, I just missed that question.
	I heard the statements.
	I just wasn't sure what the question was.
	Would that be considered coercion?
	You mean to be kicked out of an organization if you didn't conform to the rules?
	No, if you decide not to be part of this organization, if you decide not to, just like the DRO, if you don't pay into this SEO, there's an agreement that people won't do business with you, as with the DRO. And so you, yeah.
	I'm sorry, I'm not sure how, maybe I'm missing something in the question, but I'm not sure how choosing not to do business with someone is the initiation of force.
	In that case, it's not.
	You have a community, for example, and it doesn't have to be science, for example.
	They can say, okay, we want to help the poor, create a food bank, and we need this food bank to be funded.
	So if you decide not to fund this food bank through this SEO, you can't do business with us, for example.
	So you would not consider that coercion.
	Okay.
	Yeah, listen, there's a little sound that you can hear when somebody is vaulting over the fiery lake to violence, and it goes a little something like this.
	Click.
	Did you hear that?
	Click.
	Sure.
	So the click is the safety coming off the gun.
	And if I decide not to do business with someone, I don't have to take the safety off my gun.
	If I decide that I don't want to get married to someone or don't want to go on a date with someone or don't want to take a job or don't want to rent a house or don't want to listen to someone's podcast or don't want to donate to a podcast, there's no click.
	You have to listen for the click.
	And if there's no click, it's completely fine.
	You know, it doesn't mean it's great, right?
	I mean, I think people who listen to this podcast, dare I say religiously, should donate.
	I think that they should donate.
	They are not initiating force because we have no contract.
	It's not fraud.
	You know, it's kind of cheap.
	They should donate time or money to the podcast.
	Or find some other show that they can donate time and money to or blah, blah, blah, the usual caveats.
	But they're not initiating force.
	There's no click.
	There's no gun.
	So listen for the click.
	If there's no click, it's fine.
	It may not be great, but it's fine.
	And saying, hey, if you don't donate to my charity, I'm not going to do business with you.
	That's fine.
	That's perfectly fine.
	You know, people who are Roman Catholics can hire only Roman Catholics.
	I hear occasionally Jews like to hire other Jews.
	They can do that.
	That's perfectly fine.
	It's not the end.
	There's no click.
	It may be a little biased, it may be limiting, but it's fine.
	So, yeah, just listen for the click.
	If there's no click, then you are okay.
	Okay.
	Sure.
	Okay.
	Thank you.
	Thank you very much.
	Mike, who's on next?
	I just want to say this.
	What do you ask?
	How much have we spent on this thing?
	I looked in Google just to see if I could pull that up real quick.
	And I found an article that was just published today.
	Headline is, Earth is safe!
	No black holes spun out of atom smasher.
	Yet.
	Talks about a study.
	So yeah, so for, you know, nine billion dollars, you know, we could get the end of the world.
	Look, I mean, science is one of these things.
	It's like education.
	Like, if you're against government science, then idiots think you're against science.
	And if you're against government education, then you're against science.
	Education.
	It's like saying, I think Egyptian slavery was monstrous.
	Oh, so you don't want houses to be built.
	You just want us to live in wigwams or in caves.
	It's like, no, not really.
	I was against slavery.
	I'm against slavery in the American South, in the 18th century, in the 19th century, in the 17th century.
	Oh, so you're saying we should all be naked and nobody should pick any cotton?
	No.
	It's really just the gun.
	It's just the click.
	It's just the whip.
	It's just the beating, the blood, the violence.
	That's it.
	It's not what they do.
	It's how they do it.
	Anyway, I'm against rape.
	Oh, so you just want the population to no longer breed and die off?
	It's like, no, didn't say that.
	But it's just, you know, standard.
	It's idiot status defense 101, right?
	Sorry, who's up next?
	All right, up next is Chris.
	Chris writes in and says, how did my two brothers and I end up so different even though we had the same childhood?
	My older brother turned into my father, I turned into a coward, and my little brother became strong.
	Wow.
	All right, so I'm just going to give you a brief little thing here.
	You didn't have the same childhood at all, right?
	I mean, you had the same parents.
	We assume, right, although, again, one in ten kids is not...
	Born to the father who the mom writes down on the birth certificate, so you may not have had the same dad, but let's assume that you did.
	Birth order is very important, right?
	So the first kid gets lots of resources, second kid gets fewer resources, third kid gets fewer resources even still.
	There's usually more competent parenting for the eldest child.
	Because the eldest child gets more time with the parents and by the time the younger child comes along usually they're tossed into the pit with the older siblings who then end up doing a lot more quote parenting than the parents did at the beginning.
	Eggs are older, right?
	And so may be of slightly lower quality.
	The sperm is older for the younger kids and therefore may be of slightly lower quality.
	The mom may have eaten different things during the womb.
	During the time that the kids are growing in the womb, there may have been life stressors or different stressors.
	Certainly a mom who's pregnant with the first child is going to face a lot less stress than the mom who's pregnant with more children, right?
	Later children.
	Because when she's pregnant with the third kid, The first two kids are still hanging off her leg and wanting attention.
	It's not exactly a calm and serene what to expect when you're expecting reasing with chamomile tea in a hammock between two fig trees.
	That's not the way it works when your kids get older.
	There may be financial stressors that occur.
	The first kid, usually there's enough money.
	By the time the third kid comes along, there may be some financial stressors.
	There may be stuff that happens.
	Somebody may have died or gotten sick or somebody may have lost a job or there may have been a health scare.
	And all of these can create stressors which fundamentally alter the children from the moment of conception.
	This is just off the top of my head.
	You didn't have the same childhood.
	It's really not possible.
	Even twins, in some ways, don't have the same childhood.
	That's one way.
	Of course, people make choices.
	People make choices.
	The X factor of choosing to focus on information or choosing to not focus on information is something that is...
	Unknown.
	I don't know what causes someone to focus on information or not focus on information.
	You know, if you focus on the pleasure of the next cigarette, you keep smoking.
	If you focus on getting lung cancer, you're more likely to quit.
	So I don't know what makes people choose that.
	It is voluntary and it is a choice.
	So does that help at all?
	I'm not sure that answers a huge amount, but hopefully that's some perspective.
	Could I give you just a little bit of background?
	Yeah, please do.
	I mean, it's all white over here, so get some more.
	My father, he was abused by his parents, and they abused him and his brothers.
	They really let him have it.
	And so he grew up, and when he met my mom, he had already tried to commit suicide at least twice.
	And...
	Sorry.
	And when you say they let him have it, do you mean that they were physically violent?
	Yes, extremely violent.
	Church-going people.
	And what do you mean by extremely?
	Give me a sense here.
	Breaking bones.
	Oh my god.
	So they would beat him so savagely that they would break his bones?
	His father would and his mother, she would let it happen.
	I'm so sorry.
	What an unbelievably hellish existence to start from.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	And he grew up and he never wanted to face the facts about the things that happened to him as a kid.
	He went to multiple therapists and he would refuse help.
	My mother, she would take him to different therapists and try to get him help.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	He went to multiple therapists but he refused help?
	Yes.
	They would start to get to the breakthrough where they gave him the answer, what he had to do, and he would tell my mother that he didn't like them anymore and he wanted to go to a different one.
	So he didn't want to confront his parents about the evil.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, it would be very dangerous to do that, right?
	If they're willing to break the bones of children, they're very dangerous people to confront.
	You know, like if you testify against the mafia, they don't say, well, go and confront the made man.
	You know, you just vanish, right?
	You just go into the witness protection program and you're gone, right?
	Since he refused to deal with the problems, he began to become, you know, emotionally and physically abusive towards my mother and me and my brothers.
	He would really beat my mother when we were just very, very young, very small toddlers and babies.
	He would take her head and put it through cabinet doors and And eventually she stuck with him for so long because she told me that she hadn't ever experienced real evil like that in her life before.
	That she grew up...
	You know, I don't know your mom, I don't know your dad, but that seems like not true.
	Bullcrap.
	Yeah, I mean it seems like bullshit.
	I think when we're talking about breaking bones of kids, we don't need to be overly delicate in our language.
	But the idea that she'd never experienced any kind of brutality before, and therefore she didn't notice it or was fine with it, just doesn't seem to me to be very true at all.
	In that my daughter's never experienced cruelty, and every now and then she'll run across a mean kid.
	She recoils.
	She's like, oh my god, this kid's crazy.
	I don't have anything to do with him.
	So...
	Eventually one day she just got fed up with it and she like yanked him by the hair, asked him how he liked it and he was just completely shocked.
	She left him, she took off onto her own, she got her own house and she started living there.
	She never moved back in with her parents.
	How old were you guys when this happened?
	I don't really remember any of it, so we were probably less than four years old apiece.
	Because...
	The first memories I have are when we were in the next house after that one.
	She had divorced him and she took a job on her own.
	She tried to spend time with us, but our grandparents became co-parents.
	They would watch over us a lot.
	Your grandparents on which side?
	My mother's side.
	Right.
	And what were they like?
	Slightly impatient.
	With smaller children.
	Why do you think your mom married your dad?
	I couldn't tell you.
	I really don't.
	No.
	Because seeing your shows, I can't imagine why the hell she would.
	Was he handsome?
	No, he was bald by, you know, my age.
	21.
	Hey, hey, hey.
	Hey, that doesn't mean he's not handsome.
	Patrick Stewart is quite the...
	Maybe it was the mustache.
	No, I mean, so he was not an attractive man.
	He wasn't unattractive.
	He was just kind of average.
	I don't understand.
	They worked at the same places.
	He was fairly...
	I can't...
	We call him antisocial, but he didn't really interact with a whole lot of people.
	He had the same group of friends from high school till death.
	And was he charismatic?
	No, I guess if he's not very social, he's probably not very charismatic, right?
	Although sometimes people who are not very social can be charismatic in social situations.
	He would embarrass My mom, whenever they would go out, because he would just make a scene.
	He would start getting very upset about something small.
	Was there something wrong with your mom in the dating pool that she may have felt she had to hit the bottom of the barrel somehow?
	I don't know.
	She had plenty of friends back then.
	I mean, was she ugly?
	No.
	She was very pretty by the standards of that time.
	Okay, that's fine.
	Okay, so she was very pretty.
	Was she more attractive than he was?
	You know, sort of the 1 to 10 thing?
	He's like a 6 and she's an 8 kind of thing?
	Yeah, she was maybe a few points higher than him.
	Yeah.
	And did she know anything about his family history when she married him?
	Yes.
	A lot.
	She knew about the violence in his history.
	Yeah, she refused to ever stay with his parents because they never claimed they had a cat turd in their window for about six years.
	And did...
	Was he violent with her before kids came along?
	I don't know that.
	Probably, right?
	I mean, this is not a...
	I think that would be where the emotional abuse started, but not when physical...
	Yeah, listen, I mean, I don't know.
	I mean, obviously, your mom's not here to ask her, but it's a huge question.
	You know, why do women screw assholes?
	Like, I don't know.
	I just did a podcast that I don't know.
	I mean, it's a huge factor.
	You know, sex is the ultimate subsidy, right?
	It's a huge factor in the violence of the world, the fact that women will have...
	Sex with violent men is one of the great tragedies of the world.
	And it's, in my way, it's the most controllable fundamental reason why violence continues in the world.
	If we could just get women to stop having sex with violent men, then the world would be peaceful very quickly.
	So I don't know why women...
	Have sex with, get married to, and have kids with completely violent men.
	It's not like there's a shortage of nice men in the world.
	There's lots of nice men in the world.
	So I have no idea why women do that.
	I think it is something that I hold women enormously accountable for.
	And they are the ones who choose the mates.
	The men say, will you go out with me?
	And the women say, yes or no.
	So if a woman says yes to a violent man, she is adding another Log on the fire that burns the world.
	So I don't know.
	I wish I didn't know.
	There may be something in her history.
	I have no idea.
	But it is one of the most destructive decisions that human beings can make is on the part of women to subsidize violence with sex and children and loyalty so often as well.
	So I don't know.
	But I think it's important to ask.
	But is there anything else you wanted to add to that?
	Because I've got a couple other questions.
	There are There was one story I heard kind of recently.
	She was physically sexually abused by a neighbor on their street and she had completely forgotten about it.
	She buried it until a long time after.
	Well, that would certainly have something to do with it, but then why wouldn't she tell her parents?
	I don't know.
	And of course the sexual predator would almost certainly know that she wouldn't tell her parents.
	As I've talked about in the show before, people who sexually prey upon children are taking such staggering risks every time they assault a child that they have to be really, really damn sure that those kids don't have a strong enough bond with the parents that they're going to go straight home and tell their parents.
	So there has to be a broken bond.
	There has to be I mean, think about it.
	You go and rape some kid or you go sexually assault some kid.
	If that kid runs home and tells the parents, I mean, you're going off to jail.
	And we all know what happens to child molesters in jail.
	I mean, you're courting serial rape and death to satisfy your unholy lusts for children.
	So you have to be Damn sure that these kids are not going to go and tell their parents and That's you know why to protect your children the most fundamental thing I think you can do to protect your children is to create a very strong and open bond To make sure that they're always welcome to tell you things that you always want them to tell you things and that They never get punished for telling the truth.
	And if that were there, these sexual predators would have no place to go.
	Because anyone they would sense, any child that they would pray on would go immediately to tell the parents, and then those people would go to jail.
	I'm just going to skip ahead in the future.
	After they got divorced, they would have shared custody.
	My father would get us like two weekends out of the month because...
	Why?
	Whenever he would stay alone...
	Did she not know he was violent?
	No, hang on, hang on.
	Did she not know?
	She knew that your dad was violent, right?
	Yes.
	And he was violent towards the kids, right?
	So why the fuck would he get any custody at all?
	I don't know.
	He was...
	pity, maybe.
	I don't know.
	He's what?
	He...
	Maybe he got it out of pity because...
	Oh, she had sympathy for him.
	So she can't stand living with him because he's too violent.
	But the fucking four-year-olds can go over.
	I mean, she was, what, 30 or so?
	Maybe 35?
	She can't handle living with this violent guy.
	But you know who can handle it?
	Four-year-olds!
	They're great with violent people because they've got fantastic, mad non-violent communication skills and they can calm tsunamis, they can cool down lava, heat up ice, they can control the very elements themselves, they can take on the Gorgons, and they can take on Ragnarok and come out alive.
	Not really.
	So wonderful.
	She can't stand living with this violent bastard.
	Let's send him the children.
	Whenever we were over there, he would accuse us of being brainwashed by our mother because we would bring up something and he would say, your guys are brainwashed.
	You're letting your mother brainwash you.
	You guys are against me.
	And we would feel horrible.
	We would feel scared and everything, but...
	I just wanted to...
	I wanted to have a father.
	I wanted to love him for, you know, no matter what.
	But...
	Why did you want to love him no matter what?
	I don't really know.
	Were you guys raised religious?
	No.
	I'm very against religion, seeing as how his parents were.
	Every time I've thought about religion, it's because I'd Kind of turn away from church because of his parents.
	I've been told that church-going people are pretty much hypocrites, that they would do one thing in church and then they'd go home and they'd be completely sinful.
	And then they'd go back, just apologize for it in the confession booth, and then it'd be fine.
	Okay, so your mom obviously didn't love him no matter what, right?
	After that, but he still loved her.
	What are you using this word for?
	Loved?
	Didn't he beat her up?
	I was told when I was growing up that he loved us, he just didn't understand how to show it.
	And who told you that, your mom?
	Yes.
	And your mom also said that he loved her?
	She said that he would...
	He would jump at the chance if she ever offered to take him back, but she never did because, you know, he was a dick.
	I mean, God, I don't want to interrupt you with a big rant, but I get so angry when parents use the same word for opposite things.
	You know, like, talk about programming your children for failure.
	You know, if you say to your kids, a pass is a fail and a fail is a pass, we're just going to reverse those words.
	Or a game that my brother used to play with me was, yes means no and no means yes.
	Do you want me to hit you?
	No, no, no.
	Ah!
	Right?
	You can't win that game.
	Right?
	Because if you say yes, he's going to say, game was over.
	Boom.
	If you say no, he said, well, no means yes.
	Boom.
	Right?
	Opposite word conflation is...
	One of the most subtle and pervasive forms of child abuse there is.
	So applying the word love to a guy who beats people up and hits his children and saying that that's love?
	What the fuck do you call a good parent then?
	What do you call a nice guy?
	How can you even use the same word?
	Again, it's like saying lovemaking and rape are interchangeable.
	That you use the same word for both.
	I mean, that's just gonna completely screw children up.
	Hitting people is the opposite of loving them.
	It is cruel.
	It is sadistic.
	It is violent.
	It is abusive.
	It is not love.
	It has nothing to do with love.
	It is the complete opposite of love.
	Theft is not charity times 1.01% or sometimes 101% or 99%.
	It's not a little bit off the beaten path of charity.
	Theft is the opposite of charity.
	You know, a year ago, some surgeons cut open my neck and took out a tumor.
	Great.
	Guy stabs me in the neck tomorrow?
	He's not kind of like the surgeons!
	So, I'm sorry that you got fed that extraordinary amount of self-serving bullshit from both parents about what love is and what attachment is and what loyalty is and...
	Well, he just can't express it.
	Yeah.
	That was a...
	In the beginning of the call, you...
	The guy who stabs you and takes your wallet, you know, he really wants to run a charity.
	He just hasn't figured out the right way to get it across to people.
	Bullshit.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	In the beginning of the call, you mentioned that my brother, my oldest brother, would get, like, the majority of the resources and everything, but...
	When we were growing up, whenever we'd go over there, my mom would ask him to please make sure that we are taken care of because my dad, he would...
	Most often not.
	So my brother ended up making meals when we were down there.
	He would try to take care of us as the best he could.
	And how old is he when this started to happen?
	He is only a few years older than I am and we only were there until he was about 14.
	And, sorry, just to be clear, I don't mean that the oldest gets more resources throughout the childhood, because as I point out, the oldest children are often roped into being mini-parents, or in this case, maxi-parents.
	What I mean is that, let's say there are two years between the eldest and the next child, then at least for the first year to 18 months, you have two parents and one child.
	So they get more resources as infants, usually, than their brothers or sisters will get who come along later.
	I don't mean throughout the whole childhood, I just want to be clear there.
	He's brilliant, my brother.
	He is a gifted writer, but he lacks the aspirations to do so.
	Well, again, I mean, lacks is the wrong word, right?
	I mean, he's beaten out of him, traumatized out of him.
	But lax is just like, well, you know, he's missing his genes or something.
	You know, it's not, you know, when you have that kind of adversity that early in life.
	I mean, particularly if you have to go and take care of your younger siblings with an asshole abusive dad around.
	You have to grow up way too quickly and you miss out pretty serious and important stages of emotional development and you don't have a bond, you don't have a mentor, you don't learn self-trust, you're just paranoid that bad things are going to happen to your siblings because you're promoted to not only being a parent at the age of six or seven, which is bad enough, but protecting them from an abusive actual adult that your mom ran away from, which is an insane task to give to a child.
	And if your mom had charged The husband, her husband, with the abuse, he would have gone to jail.
	He certainly wouldn't have been given custody and you guys would have been safe from that environment to some degree.
	But then she would have had to give up the bullshit story of love, you know?
	I believe that's how my brother became kind of like my father.
	Like he was forced to grow up so fast that he kind of degenerated back to kind of a kid.
	After it was all over and hasn't really recovered.
	And I feel like I ended up as a coward because, as you said, you don't really have a whole lot of power when you're a child in front of a screaming lunatic.
	Make to me the case that you could be objectively judged a coward for what happened to you.
	I don't follow that case, but I'm happy to hear it.
	So, how can you be judged as a coward for what happened to you as a child?
	I always kind of...
	I'll run away from conflicts.
	I won't engage in actions that I see will, you know, equal me having to stand up.
	No, no, no, no.
	I'm not saying you don't have any symptoms of trauma.
	I'm not saying you don't have any symptoms of trauma.
	But the word coward has no context, right?
	There's no history.
	Right, so given your history, then rank fear over conflict would be literally carved into your very DNA. And I mean that literally carved into the genetics of your DNA. Terror over conflict would be, against your will, carved into your biology.
	So would we use that word coward to describe someone who had this inflicted them as a child or somebody who decided say not to speak out who came from a good upbringing and decided not to speak out against an evil for the sake of minor social prestige or to avoid minor social inconvenience or to avoid upsetting people whose lives he was just passing through that would be kind of cowardly, right?
	In that the stakes are relatively low, the upbringing was relatively good, and the ideals are very high than somebody who says, oh, you know, well, I'm really against child abuse.
	I was raised very well myself.
	I'm seeing a man hitting his child, but if I intervene, it might make me miss my bus, so I'm just going to keep running.
	To me, that would be cowardly.
	That would be the wrong thing to do, right?
	But I'm not sure how being raised in such a hyper-violent environment, being put back into that violent environment by a mom who fled, I don't see how the effects of that could really be called cowardice in the same way.
	Again, I don't want to use the same word for two different things.
	Okay.
	I'm trying to think about something.
	Because I don't want to just bore you with the stories.
	So I'll get on to my present.
	Look, I'm happy to hear the stories.
	If you feel it will help you or if there's any perspective I can offer, I'm certainly happy to be an enlightened witness as best I can.
	If that's important to you, it's certainly fine with me.
	Thank you.
	I know it probably would be a little ill-advised to confront him now, but...
	Even if I wanted to, I can't because back in the junior year of my high school, he killed himself.
	I'm sorry about that too.
	We hadn't talked for five years previous to that because when my older brother was 14, we were evacuated due to a fire scare from where we are and he came up to us and he says, you know, I don't want to see you guys anymore.
	I don't want to screw you up.
	He leaves and then a few months later he comes back and he says, hey, I want to see my kids.
	But he had already made it clear he didn't want to ever see us again.
	So we were very confused, upset.
	He'd show up sometimes because he knew where we lived.
	And honestly, the last time I ever saw him, I went back inside crying because I was scared the hell out of him because he showed up.
	He didn't pay child support for a number of years.
	I've got to just interrupt you for a second.
	I know I just said to hear the stories.
	No need to apologize.
	I'm having a tough time staying with my own feelings because you're kind of like reading a laundry list here.
	Yeah.
	Like there's no real emotional connection with what you're saying and so I'm finding it hard to stay emotionally connected to myself, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah.
	You know, like if we both speak Japanese and then you switch to Japanese, it's going to be hard for me to stay in English, right?
	And if I speak emotional connection and you're speaking dissociation, one of us has to win, right?
	Either I'm going to dissociate or you're going to reconnect.
	Because I have a feeling that you're not having a feeling.
	And maybe you are, but I'm not, because it's, you know, it's also just audio, right?
	So how are you feeling about this stuff?
	Or this conversation.
	And the reason I'm asking is, you know, you came in with some story time, right?
	Which is, you know, well, I have the story.
	I'm a coward.
	We all had the same childhood.
	This is what love is, right?
	And I've really pushed hard back against some of the story time that you've come in with, which is your parents' story time and society's story time.
	And the emotional content, as I... Pound back against some of the delusions, the emotional content in you hasn't changed, which means we're not connecting.
	I could be wrong, you get upset with me, I could be right, and you make some connections or get some relief from an interpretation that fits with your genuine and deep experience.
	But the emotions that you have after talking for like 40 minutes and having me push back against a lot of your story time, the emotionless nature of the conversation has remained unchanged, which means I'm not connecting.
	I have a hard time connecting with people due to the fact that I feel like they will reject me for having any emotions.
	Do you think I will reject you for having emotions?
	No.
	I don't believe that you will reject me.
	Do you have the capacity to have emotions in this area at this time?
	I should hope so.
	Otherwise I'm dead.
	Well, that's kind of an extreme way of putting it, but...
	I was just thinking about your...
	Because if you have a theory that says I'm afraid of being rejected and then you say...
	I'm sorry, go ahead.
	I heard you talk about the idea of being...
	Kind of emotionally dead where you're only reactive to the different things that happen in life and that's what it means to be dead or...
	I'm sorry, I'm not...
	No, don't give me abstractions.
	Come on, come on.
	Why are you calling me?
	I'm not complaining about you calling me.
	I'm not criticizing you calling me at all.
	But I need to know why you're calling.
	I was just curious how we could all end up so differently.
	I'm not saying there's no reason.
	I'm sure there is.
	I figured that we all had the same childhood and we all faced the same horror.
	And yet we all ended up so differently.
	Right.
	And I gave you a pretty good speech at the beginning.
	Hang on.
	I gave you a pretty good speech at the beginning about the reasons why.
	And then you gave me some other examples, which was that your eldest brother was supposed to take care of you when you were in the house of this crazy violent lunatic, right?
	So those have, to some degree, had some fairly good answers.
	So what are you really calling me about?
	Because I've answered that.
	I've answered a bunch of other stuff, given you a huge amount to think about, and you keep on going.
	And that means I haven't given you what you need yet.
	Maybe this is what you need for somebody to say, dude, you are not connected at all emotionally to this.
	It's off-putting that you're talking about horror in a mechanical way.
	Do you know what I mean?
	It's like having Microsoft Sam...
	Read Dante's Inferno or the speech about hell from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or something.
	It is robotic.
	And so I haven't given you what you want because you've given me things that you say you need.
	I've provided them and you continue to pursue a conversation, which means I haven't given you what you need yet.
	So why are you, what are you not getting from this conversation that you need?
	I guess I was hoping that eventually in the...
	I was going to do your feeling for you No, he just dropped off the call No Let's see if Skype can get them back.
	Come on Skype.
	You can do it.
	All right.
	Well, we'll have to move on to the next caller.
	And if he comes back, tell him.
	Maybe we can take him at the end.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Matthew.
	Is there anything, sorry, just because it's a little tough to, right, to interrupt that, what were your thoughts on the call, Mike?
	Sorry, just before we get to the next call.
	Excuse me.
	It's always tough to hear, you know, in the introduction, I mean, he called himself a coward and then was jumping in with, you know, I don't want to bore you.
	There's a lot of assumptions there about how other people are going to perceive him, and most of those perceptions are Our self-generated inside his head, for good reason.
	I mean, it makes sense why he'd have those, all those internal parts that were only there because of his childhood and his upbringing, that were there to protect him when he had to be cowardly.
	It was very unsafe to not be cowardly.
	Well, if you have to, it's not coward, right?
	It's not cowardly if you have to do it.
	Right, right.
	Let me just try and get him back one more time.
	I hate to just drop it there.
	I think he wanted me to challenge him on the disconnection.
	Are you there, Chris?
	Sorry, my internet dropped out.
	Oh, okay.
	So I was asking why you were still on the call, what you weren't getting, and there was a long pause, and you said...
	I thought, I was hoping that you would, or that it would, and what I thought you were going to say was, you wanted me to do some of the feeling for you, to feel some of the things that had occurred to you, to help you connect with that?
	Yeah, that feels like something.
	And so as I gave you intellectual answers to what was an emotional reach out, it wasn't satisfying to you, right?
	No, not really.
	I was a little bit happier when you'd get outraged because of the things that happened, and I'd feel a little bit more satisfied.
	But my outrage didn't connect you with your outrage, right?
	Because I feel like I can be outraged because...
	Because why?
	Why?
	Why can't you be outraged?
	God, you've got reason.
	Because if I get outraged, I'm going to get freaking kind of hurt.
	I have tried to have discussions about getting help in the past when I... I rose a topic with my...
	No, no, no.
	You're giving me stories again.
	What happens if you get outraged?
	What happens if you get outraged?
	I actually tell the truth and then my mom gets pissed.
	She tells my brother that I made her sad and he comes at me.
	My little brother.
	What do you mean he comes at you?
	What does that mean?
	Your older brother or your younger brother?
	My younger brother.
	He gets very angry that I It made her upset because at a point we were drawing off of savings.
	She got laid off of her previous job and I wanted to join the Navy so I could help send money home.
	And I was talking to my grandfather and I was seeing what I needed to do to get involved.
	Well, the story got back to my mom and when she heard she came at me with the most The angriest I've ever seen her be.
	Because, what, you were thinking to join in the Navy?
	Yes, because I hid it from her.
	She asked me when I was going to let her know.
	I said, probably on the bus and...
	Wait, wait, wait!
	She's got a problem with you hiding stuff from her?
	You don't even know why she married your dad?
	You don't know why she stayed so long?
	You don't know why you were sent back to your dad?
	You don't know what attracted your mom to your dad?
	You don't know if she had other offers from better guys?
	You don't...
	When did she tell you about the sexual abuse she experienced?
	When my older brother was confessing a love to a girl that hasn't loved him in six years.
	And he got very upset and said that she...
	My mom had raised the issue that she wasn't a virgin anymore, and he says, don't even talk about that because she was raped by her father, and she says, well, I was raped too.
	So you get over it.
	Okay, so she didn't tell you that she'd been raped as a child, which is, you know, kind of withholding information, right?
	She didn't tell you why she's attracted to your dad.
	She didn't tell you why she had three children with this guy.
	She didn't tell you if he was violent before they got married or before they had children.
	She didn't tell you if he was violent in front of any of her family members or whether they told him.
	She didn't tell you what her friends thought, right?
	She's been keeping almost everything of importance from you.
	And then she gets upset because you keep a secret from her?
	Are you kidding me?
	Where the fuck do you think you learned it from?
	I wasn't really welcome with the rest of the family for the next three months.
	Because...
	Oh, gosh, really?
	We all lived in the same...
	Evil genetic clan from hell didn't want you to come over and rip the leg off another child and eat it deep-dipped in blue cheese dressing?
	Damn, kicked out of Satan Club?
	Oh, no, what will you do?
	It must be so much fun over there.
	You must be so connected to yourself over there.
	What are you going to do if these people won't talk to you?
	They're not talking to you anyway.
	Any minor bump-ins.
	It's all a distraction, isn't it?
	A distraction?
	How old are you?
	I'm 21, but I was 19 at the time when all that happened about the Navy.
	Okay, well you can talk about family history with your kids when they're very young.
	My daughter is asking me about my family and you can, you know, in inappropriate ways, you can talk about family history with kids when they're very young.
	But let's say that your mom couldn't talk to you about stuff until you were 14.
	It's really important for parents to talk to their children about romance and sexual attraction and, frankly, what gets their mojo running.
	When those kids hit the hormone maelstrom known as teenage demons, their dick starts pointing at anything with half a pulse, right?
	Really important to understand for parents to talk about Sexuality in an open and frank way.
	Mistakes and productive things that they've done.
	Because otherwise everything is unconscious.
	And the patterns replicate because they're not dragged down to the light and exposed.
	And you cannot navigate blindfolded.
	And most families, they keep the blindfolds on the children and then they send them running down a steep hill into the woods and saying, good luck!
	Well, of course, you can't see where you're going.
	Bam!
	You slam into a tree and then the cycle repeats and repeats and repeats.
	Take the blindfold off, you can dodge the trees and you can get to someplace better.
	So what I mean by distraction is, let's say that at 14, suddenly your mom says, hey, you know, probably it's kind of important for me to talk about the history and this and that and the other because my son is now starting to be a sexual being and is in romantic interest and blah, blah, blah.
	So she's got five years.
	Five years is a seriously huge amount of time for people who live under the same roof.
	Five years is a massive amount of time.
	These conversations can occur eight hours.
	Eight hours, maybe.
	Now, if you can find a way to wedge eight hours into five years, I bet you can find a way to do that.
	I bet you it's entirely possible.
	It's like throwing a hot dog in a canyon, getting this eight-hour conversation in somewhere wedged into those five years.
	So what I mean is, families, they all sit together under these roofs.
	They all sit together and they sit across the table and they pass the potatoes and where's the mustard and can I get a glass of water and blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
	And they talk about, I don't know, what the fuck they talk about.
	I mean, they talk about sports, and they talk about the weather, and maybe they do a little bit of politics, and maybe they do a little bit of, can you believe that so-and-so did this, and I can't believe that, you know what he said, and then he did this, and I can't believe that, and what happened with the Republicans, and the votes, and the politics, I don't know.
	But it's like the whole goddamn thing is a massive avoidance of the important shit that families need to talk about, which is what went right, and what went wrong, and what can we learn!
	You know, every time I was in business, when we had a project, we had a post-mortem.
	And a post-mortem, as we sit down, you say, this shit went well.
	This shit went badly.
	Let's do more of the shit that went well and less of the shit that went badly.
	Well, I'll tell you, every day in a family is a project that's a little bit more important than what I was doing with relational database management systems and environmental protection.
	A little bit more important.
	Every single day, I have a postmortem with my daughter.
	I have a postmortem with my wife.
	Mike, do we have premortems, inmortems, and postmortems to just about every show we do?
	Yes, we do.
	Absolutely.
	Do you find them helpful?
	Incredibly helpful.
	Do they help us refine the show to make it more pointed and more poignant to more people?
	Yes, they do.
	Mike, do I lean upon you for your judgment about what I'm doing in a relentlessly new way?
	Relentlessly.
	That's the perfect way to describe it.
	Exhaustingly.
	Almost vampiric.
	You're ravenous.
	No, do I say, Mike, am I going to do a good job with this speech?
	Absolutely.
	You ask me that before every big speech you do, before every interview you do?
	You're ravenous in your desire.
	Am I going to do a good job?
	I need to know that you think I can.
	And afterwards we say, well, what worked well?
	What didn't work?
	What did we like?
	What did we not like?
	What could be improved?
	We do this with donation pitches.
	We do this with shows, with choices.
	We have, of course, the feedback to some degree from the downloads and so on.
	We know that...
	The Sunday shows and the Wednesday call-in shows are the most popular for podcasters.
	We know that current events are the most widely disseminated on YouTube.
	We've sliced and diced the data six ways from Sunday to figure out how to make it better.
	So this is a premortem, and even during We're good to go.
	Going over, living together, doing stuff, going to parks, going to movies and so on.
	When I say that there's nothing but avoidance going on, it's because you go in five years and that's probably more like ten years.
	Can you fit eight hours in to talk about shit that helps your children not make the same goddamn mistakes that you made as a parent?
	Find a place to wedge that shit in, in between sitcoms and video games and politics and weather and cruises and boring shit, picking up birthday presents for Aunt Edna's cat!
	I bet you can.
	But the families don't do any post-mortems on the entire fucking process of raising a child.
	Parents don't sit down with their kids and say, hey, what worked for you?
	Hey, what didn't work for you?
	What did you like?
	What did you not like?
	I mean, parents should be doing that stuff every day or every couple of days with their kids.
	Kids are the service receivers, parents are the service providers, and any reasonably competent service provider polls the living shit out of their audience to find out what works and what doesn't.
	So that's when I say it's just a whole bunch of avoidance.
	And oh my God, the people who won't talk to you about anything important, thus condemning you to a very high likelihood of repeating the exactly same mistakes, are not inviting you back into their anti-platonic cave of dissociation, ripping your mind from your heart, shredding your emotions, replicating the past, self-justifying.
	My God, what are you going to do without that?
	Really don't know.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	I mean, you say they didn't talk to me like they were talking to you otherwise.
	Well, it wasn't that they didn't talk to me.
	It's just that any run-in would be filled with a lot of aggression because it was still not forgotten about.
	About six months later, I had to ask that we please put it behind us because I... Eventually told her why I wanted to do it, why I wanted to join, and then she had an actual conversation with me about it, but it didn't really lead anywhere.
	It was just placing it behind us.
	Okay, so there's your information.
	Look, what are you going to do with this information?
	I hope I can actually try and talk about something important, try and hide something important.
	You get aggression, avoidance, and then the talks don't go anywhere.
	I want to have some sort of argument that I can take and persuade against aggression, persuade against getting angry about things and learning to really talk it persuade against getting angry about things and learning to really talk it over and actually have a conversation when something makes you want to Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Alright, so let's say you bring that to your family.
	Emily, what do you think is going to happen?
	I have less of an opinion than I should.
	I feel like it will end terribly where I end up getting shunned again and No, no, no, no!
	Oh God, you're killing me!
	Oh, you're killing me!
	Ah!
	No.
	Honesty never ends terribly.
	It may not give you what you want, but honesty never ends terribly.
	Do you know what I mean by that?
	Yeah.
	Because it's progress.
	Yes?
	It gets you facts!
	We are empirical-based lifeforms as philosophers, right?
	As thinkers.
	We don't care about our preferences.
	We don't care about our wishes and our desires and the mad fantasies infected by the jellyfish squid brains of other people's needs to justify their own evils in history.
	We don't give a shit!
	It doesn't mean that we don't care at all about, you know, our feelings or our desires or whatever.
	But we go for the facts, right?
	We can't say to people, oh, you know what?
	I think that your religious delusions are bad for you, and I think you should give up your delusions about there being an all-loving waterbed of infinite deification that's going to catch you when you fall out of this flat mattress of meat called life.
	You should go for the truth, and you should not go for your fantasies.
	You should not go for your historically inflicted superstitious delusions.
	You should go for the truth.
	And then we go to our relationships and we say, well shit, I don't want any of the truth about this.
	I want to make my family my religion.
	And I want to apply the same bullshit, non-standards of avoidance, projection, fantasy, and delusion to my family that I so scorn other people for applying to their nation state, to their race, to their class, and to their gods.
	You go get the facts about your family if you want to be honest.
	If you want to be a thinker, if you want to be a philosopher, you gather facts.
	And I don't care if the facts feel like shrapnel straight to your heart, you gather the fucking facts.
	When you are honest with people, unless they shoot you in the chest, it cannot end badly because when you are honest with people, all you get is information.
	All you get is the truth.
	When you are honest with people, you will see with clear, laser, foghorn, supernova, Krakatoa eyeballs, you will see how they respond to your honesty.
	That's what you will see.
	And if they rail at you, if they scream at you, if they abuse at you, that's going to hurt.
	But the only part of you that hurts when the truth comes to you is the part of you that lives on lies.
	Right?
	When you are honest with people, they are honest back whether they want to be or not.
	If they yell at you or scream at you or ostracize you, call your names, bully you, they are being really fucking honest with you.
	They're telling you how it is down to the last atomic degree of elemental accuracy.
	And if it hurts us when assholes attack us, it only hurts our delusions that they're either not assholes or won't attack us.
	The only thing that honesty hurts is delusion, is fantasy.
	And fantasies That people are better than they are?
	Enslave us to evil.
	Enslave us to corruption.
	Enslave us to abuse.
	Your father, you see, says your mother, didn't, you know, yes, he hit you, but he really loves you.
	He just didn't really know how to express it except with his fucking fists.
	Well, that's not an expression of love.
	I raped this woman because I couldn't really express how much and how tenderly I loved her.
	No.
	Rape is not an expression of love.
	Raining fists and curses and screams down on children is not an expression of love.
	It's an expression of hatred.
	There can be no negative consequences to anything other than our own delusions from being honest.
	It hurts, but it only hurts the bullshit piled up in us, right?
	It's like one of those hard Crowd dispersing sprays pointed at this entire zombie army of bullshit that marches through our hearts on a continual basis.
	Vampires really don't like sunlight.
	Fuck them.
	Burn them.
	Life has to come in.
	Steph, I'd just like to say thank you for telling me what I really, really needed to hear.
	Yeah.
	I appreciate you taking the time to have this call with me, and I look forward to hearing your next show.
	All right.
	Good luck.
	Good luck, my friend, and I'm very, very sorry about your history.
	All right, Mike, who's up next?
	All right, Matthew.
	Matthew writes in and says, with technological improvement and the propagation of gender theory, Do you think the concept of sexual abstinence will obtain a relevant role in human relations moving forward?
	Otherwise put, can we live without sex?
	Not an easy one, right?
	Can we live without sex?
	What do you mean by sex?
	Do you mean like no orgasm at all, no masturbation, nothing?
	Or do you mean just sex with someone else?
	Just in the beginning, I want to say that English is not my native language.
	So, if there are any disruptions, it will be...
	Oh, no, that's fine.
	That's fine.
	So, go ahead.
	I just want to put forward some vocabulary, okay?
	Because there are different terms to describe antisexual values.
	The first of them is antisexual.
	And I will link it with the Ethic and UPB. It's a rational preference, maybe, that we will be able to discuss it.
	Am I still connected?
	Yeah, I need a more specific question.
	I feel we're just sort of, I hate to use the phrase, beating around the bush when it comes to sexual stuff, but if you can ask me something more direct.
	I think you were asking, can we live without sex?
	Because it's a huge topic, you know, because When you're talking about anti-sexual values, people will come back with religious things like the Augustine, the anti-sexual paradigm in the city of God, if I'm well.
	And it's like you must not have sex with people, but it's not paradoxical, but it's impossible because the human species will vanish if it goes like that.
	But I think that today is not true.
	It's no more true.
	It's epistemologically obsolete.
	Because we have science and technology, we can permit us to pursue reproduction by other means.
	Am I correct?
	Yeah, I don't know why we're talking about this topic.
	I mean, what's the point here?
	Okay.
	I don't mean to be critical, I'm not sure why we're talking about this.
	Yeah, this is not a...
	Sorry, do you have a problem with sex yourself?
	The personal side of the topic may be interesting, but first of all, I wanted to talk about it in a scientific manner.
	No, but why?
	Why do you want to talk about it?
	Because I'm not sure what philosophy has to say about it.
	I mean, if people want to have sex or not have sex, it's not really a philosophical issue.
	It may be a self-knowledge issue, perhaps, but...
	It's certainly not a moral issue.
	I mean, not having sex doesn't initiate, there's no click, right?
	That doesn't initiate force.
	In Japan, like, crazy numbers of people are not having sex, like the young people, like 40% of them are very good.
	In my opinion, if we take a UPB, okay, the description of the representation of the belief in sexuality doesn't match the empirical facts.
	Because when we talk about sex, it will mean choice or contract or reason, like if it was a purely rational decision.
	But I don't think it is really, because I heard you speak about our wits, some POAs or...
	I'm sorry, I still don't know what the fuck are we talking about.
	What do you want to talk about?
	Whether people should have sex, whether sex is UPP, I still don't know what we're talking about.
	It's difficult because, you know, anti-sexual, okay?
	It's not a mainstream topic.
	But my interest to discuss it is to put it forward because there's not a lot of people who have heard about it.
	And I want to...
	I don't want to fall in the religious trap about it.
	I want to...
	About what?
	What are we talking about?
	When someone says, I don't want to have sex, automatically we will think that it fits in some religious paradigms.
	Do you copy?
	No, I think Japan is mostly atheist as far as I understand it.
	40% of the young women there have no interest in sexual relationships.
	The birth rate is catastrophic.
	I think the island is in a situation of decline.
	They have no interest in sexuality.
	It's not worth it.
	There's this It's called the herbivore man, the man who is not a meat eater and so they have hobbies and they live with their parents and they're just not interested in it.
	I don't think that there's anything sexual about that.
	I think it's 20 years of a bad economy.
	A very female unfriendly work environment and pretty stereotypical old-fashioned gender roles and so on just hasn't been appealing.
	Why would a man want to go to work for 80 hours a week so someone else can spend his money he can never see his kids?
	Why would a woman want to give up a career?
	You know, Japanese, as are a lot of Asians, Orientals, pretty high IQ group of genetic bases.
	And why would they want to do any of this stuff?
	I think that being anti-sexual or asexual...
	It's not to do with religion.
	There's the whole men going their own way movement, MGTOW movement, which is about men who are eschewing or rejecting relationships because they're too dangerous politically in terms of the state being involved in marriage and reproduction and for a variety of other reasons and simply refusing to serve women.
	They're constantly in search of what some of them consider to be the mythicals in our world.
	Not all women are like that.
	And so there are people who are rejecting sexuality and certainly relationships and certainly marriage for non-religious reasons and I mean obviously there are some who do it for religious reasons but I think the highest concentration of people rejecting sex tend to be in atheist countries these days.
	But there's nothing fundamentally religious, right?
	Religious commit the fallacy of the diplomacy of consciousness.
	It's a representation.
	It's a mental representation with words.
	It's a creation.
	It's a social construction.
	But about the state.
	Yeah, I'm sorry.
	Got to move on to the next caller.
	We've been going at this for 10 or 15 minutes and I still don't know what we're talking about.
	I'm sorry about that.
	Maybe we can reformulate the question at another time.
	But Mike, if you could move on to the next caller, I do apologize for that.
	But maybe it's a language barrier.
	But I think we'll have to move on.
	Alright, Wim is next.
	He writes in and says, Stefan says that government does not actually exist.
	It's only a concept in your mind.
	There are only people and buildings.
	Could Stefan give us thoughts on some additional concepts, such as love, homeowners associations, patriarchy, matriarchy, and philosophy?
	Well, are they nouns?
	Or are they adjectives?
	Right?
	I mean, that's sort of a fundamental thing.
	So, yeah, government is a state of mind.
	A state, literally, of mind.
	And there are guns, and there are buildings, and there are pieces of paper with shit written on them, but there's no actual thing called a government.
	Philosophy is a methodology, like science is a methodology.
	It does not exist in the real world.
	Love is something that does not exist in the real world.
	It's a state of mind and so on.
	It has products and you can measure it.
	Like you can measure whether somebody's following the scientific method.
	And you can measure if somebody is in love with someone, you know, based upon the degree of attachment, treating them well and so on.
	I mean, I guess you could say, well, he really hates her, but he's doing the exact opposite or whatever.
	Maybe you could measure that biochemically.
	But...
	Yeah, so basically, if it's not a thing that you can touch or, you know, really measure directly, then it is a concept.
	So if you can measure it or measure the effects of it, then it may be something that could be real.
	But it really is important.
	To understand the difference between, you know, what is empirical and what is conceptual, right?
	And the reason for that is that if we think that things exist, they create a kind of solidity in our own minds and they create an independent existence and then what we have to do...
	Is we have to create some alternate universe where these things actually exist and we pretend to be wed to this alternate universe like God exists outside the universe or, you know, the government exists in our hearts or whatever it is, right?
	And so if somebody says, I love you, and then punches you in the face, then they don't love you.
	They're just using the word, right?
	And if you focus on the word rather than the punch in the face, you're going to be mighty fucking confused, right?
	Because, you know, he says he loves me.
	Maybe he just got to express it, as the first caller was talking about.
	So, whenever you talk about something like government as if it's something that people understand or something that exists, like if I say rock, yeah, people know what that is.
	They know that it exists.
	But if we talk about government, it's important to know what we're really talking about, which is a group of individuals with guns and a bunch of language.
	And there's not a thing called government that exists independently in the universe.
	And therefore, any conflict between empiricism and theory, between sense data and conceptual theory, Information or conceptual formulation, empiricism always wins.
	And if someone says, well, I'm doing science and they're reading tea leaves, they're not doing science because the evidence goes against what they say.
	So anyone says, well, the government is morally justified in doing this and the government has a role in this and the government has money and the government spends this and that.
	I mean, basically, it's just saying a unicorn runs my accounting department.
	I mean, if they don't know that it's a unicorn, then they're probably not someone you want to do business with.
	Does that help, Rob?
	Yes, but homeowners association, does that exist?
	Because you can't...
	Is it a thing?
	Is it a noun?
	Is it a person, place or thing?
	No, no.
	And it doesn't exist?
	Yeah.
	But who owns the road then?
	If in an apartment building there's a homeowner's association and in a libertarian society there are homeowner's associations for the roads, but if that doesn't exist, what then?
	Well, ownership always comes to a person, right?
	Yes.
	Like, ownership always comes to a person.
	And there may be sort of legal things, like corporations or trust funds and shit like that, but it always comes back to a person.
	A piece of paper cannot own a car, right?
	A piece of paper gives you the right to use the car as an ownership paper or whatever, right?
	But ownership always comes back to a person, right?
	And, like, rape is always a penis, right?
	Or a broomstick or whatever, right?
	I mean...
	But it's not a concept, right?
	And so concepts can't do anything.
	They're just inert brain patterns or whatever.
	And so when you say who owns the roads, well, it's going to be somebody and it may be a group of people who have some legal aggregation that they're using to share risks.
	It's like who owns a company?
	Well, it's a bunch of shareholders and so on, right?
	I mean, so, but it always comes down To individuals, to people who own stuff, whatever their legal complications.
	In another video you have said some concepts are valid and some concepts are not valid.
	Where you can draw the line between those two concepts, the valid ones and the invalid ones?
	Well, the first is, are they logically consistent?
	Right, so if I say, lizards are mammals...
	When lizards are defined as cold-blooded and mammals are defined as warm-blooded and lizards are defined as giving birth to an egg young and mammals are defined as giving birth to live young, then I have a contradictory concept, right?
	I'm saying two things which are kind of opposites or at least not congruent are the same thing, right?
	So if I say lizards are mammals, that's an invalid concept or an invalid argument, right?
	Yeah.
	So that's sort of the first thing.
	And the second thing is empirical, right?
	I mean, if I say the sky is plaid colored, then that's invalid, right?
	If I say a cloud is composed of boulders, that is invalid.
	And we know that even without Tesco's boulders would fall down or whatever, right?
	So the first thing is logical consistency.
	And if the concept is not logically consistent, then you don't need to look for empirical evidence, right?
	I don't need to search the whole universe over to find a square circle.
	A square circle is a contradictory concept and therefore is invalid.
	And there may be pink unicorns somewhere in the universe.
	I can't say there aren't, right?
	But square circles you can dismiss without looking for them.
	If I say pink unicorns exist, that is an invalid statement if I can't prove the existence of pink unicorns.
	If I say pink unicorns can never exist, well, that's a different matter.
	Then I'm making an absolute universal statement about all the empiricism possible throughout all of time and all of the universe.
	And if it's not a self-contradictory concept, you simply cannot say.
	Okay.
	You simply cannot say.
	And so, yeah, self-contradictory stuff you can dismiss out of hand.
	If somebody makes a truth statement about empiricism, they need to back it up empirically.
	But at the same time, if something is not self-contradictory, you cannot openly state with certainty that it can never exist, right?
	So...
	So that would sort of be a very brief introduction to valid and invalid concepts.
	But in the case of a homeowner's association, you need to look at the members of the association, if they are really the owners?
	I'm not sure what the question is.
	The members of the homeowners association.
	Homeowners association, is that a valid concept or not?
	Well, is it self-contradictory?
	No.
	No, so it's not an invalid concept.
	It describes A legal relationship between individuals, right?
	Yes.
	Now, that legal relationship is valid.
	It doesn't exist, right?
	Like, if I tie myself to someone with rope, then we are physically bound together, right?
	If I jump off the cliff, he jumps, he has to follow me, right?
	Assuming I'm heavy enough, right?
	Yes.
	Because we are literally tied together.
	Siamese twins literally bonded together biologically, right?
	Yeah.
	So those are two people holding hands, right?
	They are touching their...
	Now, if one member of the homeowner's association jumps off a cliff, the other people, right?
	They can go about their daily business.
	They're not attached physically, right?
	Yes.
	So, the relationship does not exist.
	Mm-hmm.
	Right?
	You can't take a picture of a family with no family members present.
	Yes.
	Right?
	You can't say, well, we're going to chip off family from the ankle and we can put family in the middle and take a picture of that.
	No.
	No.
	And so...
	When you say the homeowners association, it is not an invalid concept and it does describe a legal or contractual relationship between individuals, but that relationship does not exist in the way that tying people together does.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Can I ask another question?
	If it's quick, but we still have some callers.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	What do you think about the value of a marriage?
	Because you are against alimony and I'm a little bit curious about it.
	Well, I mean, I don't mind.
	I say I'm against alimony.
	I'm against government alimony.
	I'm against alimony that is government driven because it's driven by pleasing idiots as most government policies is.
	If people want to get married and they want to sign a contract that says, look, if I'm unfaithful, you've got to pay me a million dollars a month.
	For the rest of my life, yeah, you can sign whatever contract you want, right?
	I mean, so alimony could be perfectly valid in a free society.
	I don't like it being the law of the land, and I certainly think that it subsidizes immature people busting up families.
	It also subsidizes people choosing the wrong person to get married to.
	But the value of a marriage, again, the value of the marriage is the security that comes from knowing that you are pair bonded.
	You know, it's the security that women in particular need if they're going to have children.
	Right.
	If a woman decides to have a child for a man, you know, making a child is, you know, 10 minutes and, you know, a couple of eyedroppers versus of sperm.
	Yeah.
	For a woman making a child is, you know, nine months plus breastfeeding.
	I mean, it's a massive investment.
	And so a woman needs to feel secure that the man is going to stick around to provide resources if she's going to have a child with the man.
	And that's where marriage developed.
	It was the need to pair bond.
	And that is, of course, for the best interest of the child in the long run as well.
	So the value of the child is emotional.
	It is knowing someone's going to be there with you through thick and thin.
	It is something that is a deeper bond than friendship.
	You know, friends can move away.
	Marriage partners generally don't move apart from each other.
	Like, I don't have friends that say, well, if you go to Australia, obviously I'm coming too, right?
	If my wife decides to go to Australia, I'm coming too, right?
	That's where we go, right?
	So you have that Siamese twin bonding, so to speak, for your life.
	And you know that this is the person...
	That as long as you're alive, you're going through life with.
	There's a lot of security in that.
	Plus, you get to know what each other likes sexually, which is massively great.
	New sex sucks.
	Old sex is the best.
	But anyway, so I think there's some value in the marriage, and that's, of course, independent with anything the government can offer or provide, really.
	Okay, but now marriage doesn't provide that security because a lot of people divorce.
	Sure, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	And there's a lot of reasons for that, which we can go into another time.
	But that is the goal.
	The goal is to stay together, and if you choose wisely, and as I've said before on this show, and I can't really say enough times, who you choose to get married to, who you choose to date, and who you choose to have children are by far the most important choices you will ever make in your life.
	Those are the choices that most fundamentally will determine Your happiness or godforsaken misery in this life.
	And people generally don't understand the absolute fundamental make or break importance of choosing your marriage partner, choosing your life partner is.
	You know, we live in a kind of fuck-a-thon culture where people meet, they have sex, and then they learn each other's last names, and then they try to make a relationship.
	It's all junk.
	It's all garbage.
	You see this stuff in Woody Allen movies.
	Mm-hmm.
	God forsaken accused pedophile.
	You see this in Woody Allen movies.
	You see these neurotic people who cling to each other out of desperation and so on.
	Who you choose to surround yourself is the most fundamental aspect of happiness that you can get.
	If you surround yourself with difficult and complicated people, your life is going to get difficult and complicated.
	If you surround yourself with self-confident, happy, and encouraging people, your life will be fantastic.
	Most people want to choose junk because they don't want to upgrade themselves from junk.
	They just stay in the same underworld of people who abandon and abuse and so on, right?
	Yeah.
	You work on yourself so that you can earn better company.
	You develop self-knowledge so that people who have self-knowledge will be attracted to you and people who don't want self-knowledge will thank you for your advice and look forward to your next show.
	I said they look forward to your next show.
	And so, yeah, people get divorced, but that's because society is heavily invested in not telling them how important it is to marry the right person.
	And there's so many people out there with crappy marriages and divorces who are defending their own bad choices by not learning and paying it forward to the next people.
	And, of course, there's the state, and people are raised badly, stuck in stupid schools, and abused as children, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So there's lots of mess.
	But there is no greater security and no greater happiness than a happy and committed marriage, in my opinion, and experience, and I think for some good reasons.
	Okay.
	Okay, fine.
	And if you choose a good...
	I'm sorry, that was, I'm afraid, the last question before we move on, if you don't mind.
	Okay, fine.
	Perfect.
	Thank you.
	Feel free to call back in.
	Mike, who do we have up next?
	All right.
	Up next is John.
	John wrote in and said, In engineering school, I'm always competing with my classmates for grades, extracurricular activities, jobs, and internship experience.
	It's hard not to compare myself to others and feel woefully underprepared, lazy, socially unaware, and slow.
	To simplify, I'd like to talk about competition.
	What is a mature way of handling it, and how do I develop the skills to be more aware of who I am, and how can I discover ways that I can contribute that others cannot?
	Well, Mike, let me throw that one over to you first and foremost.
	Thank you.
	Who do you think we compete with and how do you think we win?
	Or do we compete with anyone and is there such a thing as winning?
	Interesting question.
	Who do we compete with, Free Domain Radio?
	Show-wise, who do we compete with?
	Well, certainly, as far as podcasts, we're a podcast.
	There's plenty of other podcasts out there that people could listen to.
	Is there any podcast that specifically fits the kind of genre that we're in?
	There's people that touch on the various subjects that we touch on.
	There's atheist podcasts, there's political podcasts, there's self-knowledge podcasts, occasional parenting podcasts or two, but there's no podcast that really encapsulates everything, so...
	I mean, we certainly compete with people for time, but, you know, I mean, certainly on YouTube, there's plenty of videos for people to choose from.
	Why do they click ours?
	Are we competing with people?
	In a way.
	But we kind of define our own market in oh so many ways that makes competition, direct competition, a little tough to say who our competitors truly are.
	And how do we win?
	How do we know if we're winning?
	Well, we look at numbers.
	We look at the results.
	We look at what is achieved.
	Yeah, I think that's...
	Yeah, when you create something new, you're not competing with anyone except the old, right?
	I mean, if you're the first guy to come up with a tablet, you're not competing with other tablet makers, right?
	You will be creating a market full with other people, wannabes and tablets and so on, right?
	But the first guy who created a cell phone wasn't competing with a rotary dial phone, right?
	Not really, right?
	So you create something new and then hopefully you remain unique enough or whatever, right?
	But yeah, everyone who does anything is competing with everything else for every other resource, right?
	You could do anything with your day, anything with your time, and I'm aware of this with listeners.
	And if they choose to listen to this show, that means something, and we obviously try to reward them with stuff that's useful in their lives, or stuff that's valuable, or stuff that makes them excited, or think, or whatever, right?
	Now, do we compare ourselves with other people?
	What do you think, Mike?
	I certainly look at people that are successful.
	In the areas that we participate, like YouTube and iTunes and stuff like that, and see what they're doing and go, oh, they have more downloads than us, or oh, they have more views on specific videos.
	I normally do that in a positive way, as in, how can I improve what we're doing?
	How can we make it better?
	How can we get more views?
	What are they doing that works?
	What can we take from that?
	But I don't compare as like, oh, look, they've got an additional 10,000 views compared to our channel.
	That means we suck.
	No, it's...
	I look at the people around me and what they're doing and what they're doing better than we are potentially and what we can learn from that without going through and just making trial and error mistakes till the cows come home.
	What can we learn from the people around us what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong, too?
	Yeah, I mean, our entire eight-year philosophical journey adds up to about a third of a second of a Justin Bieber video.
	But I think...
	Have you seen Miley's latest video?
	Oh my goodness.
	Compare that to the story of your enslavement or one of the call-in shows.
	That's a bit painful to look at when it comes to views.
	Right, right.
	So, as far as competition goes, Mike, I think you were perhaps a little surprised by my constant moving of the bar and restlessness when it came to goals, right?
	I'm like, hey, we've achieved this.
	This now sucks.
	We must now look for the next thing.
	We've barely touched an objective.
	Now let's move the goalposts 20 feet further.
	No, I like that.
	I like the constant progress and wanting to always be, you know, what's next?
	What's next?
	What's next?
	What's the next goal?
	Okay, we got this.
	Let's not, you know, rest on our laurels.
	Well, it can be better.
	It can always be better.
	Because I certainly came from a background where, okay, we're doing okay.
	Things are not terrible.
	This is an objective.
	Let's just sit here and wait, you know?
	Right.
	And if you're not growing, if you're not getting better...
	Yeah, I mean, I'm constantly striving to be...
	I'm trying to be better at communicating.
	I'm still constantly striving to be better at what it is that I'm doing.
	And I mean, that's how you stay interested.
	And I certainly, I think we've achieved more than we expected, even from starting to work together at about a year and a bit ago, a year and four months ago.
	But I think we can say that we've achieved more, but now we're not looking and saying resting on our doors, but we're saying, okay, well, what more can we achieve?
	What, you know, if we've got this kind of momentum, how can we hit the gas Even more.
	And part of that is due to just, you know, stay interested and part of that is due to the more people we can reach, the better the world can become.
	The more critical thinking we can inculcate, the more skepticism towards abuse, the better parenting we can inculcate, all this kind of stuff.
	So it's not just, you know, we're building a faster NASCAR car, which is fine, but we actually, what we measure is the spread of virtue in the world At least this avenue for the spread of virtue, which is more than donations,
	it's more than views, it is the changing of people's lives for the better and the changing of the lives of the next generation for the better, which is kind of addictive, you know, I mean, because it's important to sort of measure what you do as well, like to be measured in what you do, because when you have a goal that is personally gratifying, can be financially rewarding, and is contributing to the virtue of the world, it's kind of hard to say, whoa, whoa, whoa.
	We really should slow down.
	Stop and smell the roses stuff.
	What are you doing doing another podcaster show?
	Come on, slow down, buddy.
	And, you know, that is important.
	It is important.
	You've got to pace yourself.
	You know, life is a marathon, not a sprint.
	But at the same time, the idea of saying, oh, let's take six months off or whatever.
	I think, you know, in my mind's eye, there's, you know, that's 100 or 200 or 300,000 kids who are going to continue to get spanked.
	Is the caller on the line?
	Does he want to talk more about this?
	Yeah, I'm here.
	Can you hear me?
	Hello?
	So really, you are a lazy engineer?
	Is that right?
	No, no.
	It's just...
	When...
	So...
	At my school we have a relatively small petroleum engineering department.
	I think last year there was like 50 kids in our graduating class.
	This year it's 100.
	Next year it's going to be 200.
	It's probably the fastest growing department we have at our university and it's getting to the point where Our classes are overcrowded.
	They're starting to raise the level.
	Before, it was like if you had Ds, you could get by, but now you need Cs to get by.
	Thankfully, I'm not at that level at all, not even close.
	Whenever there's job postings, it's just a flood of kids there.
	When I'm talking with my colleagues, we're like, wow, there's a lot of kids.
	Everyone's really active.
	I look at myself and I'm like, look, I got an okay GPA. My work experience isn't the best, but then there's some other kids who are superstars with...
	A 3.8 out of 4.0 GPA and they're still struggling to find internships.
	It's like, holy crap.
	If they can't do it, then where am I? Why are there so many people in the program?
	If there aren't the jobs.
	If there aren't the jobs, why are there so many people in the program?
	This is from my Small and narrow perspective.
	But, I mean, years ago I heard that the petroleum industry is growing, and I'm not sure if it is.
	I mean, you hear from our professors, yeah, it's growing whenever I go to a job fair.
	They tend to like to hire kids who are almost out the door because it takes less...
	If you're a student, you have a minimum commitment of 15 hours a week that you have to go to school.
	They recommend that you spend two hours outside of...
	For every hour you're in school, you spend two hours.
	So there's an incentive like, yeah, you'll hire interns who will work over the summer.
	But if you're getting ready to graduate, they're more concerned about hiring...
	People out the door, you know, like seniors, like people who are about to graduate in half a year.
	Okay, sorry.
	I appreciate what you're saying.
	I just don't know what it has to do with my question.
	So, is there demand in the industry for the number of graduates that are being produced?
	I don't know the specifics.
	Well, you should find out the specifics, right?
	Because it would kind of suck to pull that time and effort into getting a degree if the demand wasn't there.
	That's important to know.
	Because, look, the schools are not pointed at business.
	Schools, in general, are not pointed at business.
	It used to be the case.
	So, when my father got a PhD in geology, The way he got his PhD was the company that he had done some work with or some interning with said, listen, we will pay for your PhD, but we need you to do X, Y, and Z in your PhD, and we guarantee you a job after you graduate, right?
	Now, this is way back in the day, right?
	This is back in the, I guess, late 50s or early 60s.
	So that's how it used to be.
	There used to be this giant sucking sound that would come from business that would pull people...
	Through the academic world, like putting one of those toilet plungers on a baby's head and pulling it out if it's recalcitrant from a mom.
	So that's how it used to suck.
	The kids used to be sucked through the education environment in order because, right, and then they knew they got a job because that was the whole point, right?
	Now that's changed.
	That's all.
	Government stepped in and started guaranteeing student loans and gave massive subsidies to Universities and economically illiterate people think, oh, universities got subsidies.
	That must mean that the tuition went down.
	Of course not.
	Once you start getting subsidies, you start spending like crazy and then you use those subsidies as collateral for debt that you can expand and create your little empires and build your buildings and all that kind of crap and go on your junkets and do your sabbaticals in Tora Bora or Bali or whatever.
	And so then the bills come due and the tuitions have to go up like crazy and so on.
	And there is this belief, of course, that you get a degree and you're set for life.
	And petroleum engineering...
	Correct.
	I don't know if we've hit peak oil.
	Maybe we've hit peak oil engineers.
	I don't know, right?
	But it seems to me it's pretty hard to run out of need in petroleum engineering because...
	Billions of human beings' lives require the continuation of the cheap energy, which has allowed us to not die on a regular basis.
	There's technology and prices.
	For example, fracking has made a lot more oil wells economically viable, more than ever before.
	You could produce 6,000 barrels of oil.
	But then so many feet of natural gas, that's more revenue that a business can live on.
	Right, right.
	And just, you know, by the by, you know, the people say, well, I'm against fracking.
	It's like, well, okay, I understand that.
	But then you're against like people continuing to live because literally billions of lives hang on energy.
	And if you're against energy, hey, if you've got some great substitute that's cleaner and better, I'm all ears and I'll invest if I can.
	But people who are just like, well, I don't want the pipeline.
	I don't want drilling in Alaska.
	I don't want fracking.
	I don't want The oil sands or whatever, well, fuck you.
	I mean, you're just condemning billions of people to death.
	I mean, are you aware of that?
	You know, that that's not really a very humane thing to do if there's any way to continue those lives without seriously destroying the planet.
	I certainly, you know, nobody's volunteering.
	You know, if you want to get rid of an oil-dependent society, kill yourself, and you've just reduced, especially in the first world, you've reduced the oil requirements of the planet by quite some extent.
	Some amount, but everybody's like well other people should die because I'm paranoid about technology and energy and But nobody wants to volunteer.
	It's always the other people, the people over the hill, the brown people, the different people, the people of the other side of the world.
	Like with global warming, we should cut our energy usage.
	Well, fine for you, if you're not Al Gore powering a small moon unit with your electricity consumption, it's fine for you to cut your energy usage.
	It's a little different in the third goddamn world, where hundreds of millions of people will die if global warming targets are.
	But, you know, those are other people.
	And Sheryl Crow says, use one piece of toilet paper, and she's cute.
	So, Screw them.
	I'm going to go listen to Soak Up the Sun.
	So look, it could be that there's jobs out there and so on, in which case, the fact that there's more competition for those jobs is a good thing, right?
	So you're, you know, nostril deep in academia at the moment, right?
	So it's hard for you to see the bigger picture.
	And I understand that was the same way when I was in school.
	So what does it mean that there's tons of people trying to get into your industry?
	Well, it means that your industry is growing.
	It means that your industry is essential.
	And it means that your industry is going to survive economic downturns.
	It means that you have a worldwide, particularly in the oil field, you have a worldwide market for your job skill set.
	All of this stuff is fantastic.
	It's beautiful.
	It's wonderful.
	And so the fact that you have to compete with a whole bunch of propeller heads to get into this industry simply means that...
	The rewards are really great on the other side, right?
	Because everybody wants to get in.
	I mean, how much fun is it to be a movie star?
	Must be quite a bit of fun because even after people make enough money to live for the rest of their lives on a movie, they keep doing it.
	Jack Nicholson is still doing movies.
	So it must be kind of fun to be a movie star, which is why so many people want to go into acting.
	Is it fun to be a model?
	It probably must be kind of fun to be a model, other than the fact that you're hungry and dehydrated all the time.
	You're in your Calvin Klein skivvies, but it must be fun to be a model.
	Lots of people want to get into that business.
	Is it cool to be a petroleum engineer?
	Well, one of the ways that you can figure that out is how many people want to do it.
	People end up being like...
	It's not like, wow, you know, I'm currently a model, but I can't wait to get into sanitation engineering.
	You know, the people who send robots down to figure out what's blocking the sewage line so they can go in and clean it out.
	You know, these are not people who are fulfilling childhood dreams of being an astronaut slash sanitation worker.
	So where there's a big lineup, there's a great show.
	And where there's nobody wanting to get in, then there's not a great show.
	So the degree of competition that you're facing is directly proportional to the degree of cool stuff that you're going to get on the other side.
	Job opportunities all over the world, a good income, a steady paycheck, and job security, or at least industry security.
	And all of that.
	So look at the competition and the expanding number of people all vying for the same thing as indication that you're on the right path.
	You know, I mean, if there's a woman that everybody wants to ask out because she's smart and sexy or, you know, whatever is considered to be attractive by all those guys, well, then they've got competition to ask the girl out, but she's a prize, right?
	And so...
	You know, the woman who nobody's asking out, you can probably go and get her to go out with you, but there may be a good reason.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, so, I mean, you watch House of Cards, right?
	Or you have watched it?
	Yeah.
	I remember when the guy was talking about the gas industry, he's like, when the titty's that big, everyone gets in line.
	Kind of that idea, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, so look at your competitors as the people who Are driving towards that because it's a mecca, right?
	They want to get there because, you know, the chocolate doesn't give you cavities and the sun doesn't give you sunburns.
	So, you know, that's why the real estate is expensive by the beach, right?
	I mean, that's basically what I'm suggesting to look at it.
	So look at your competition as a good thing because if nobody was competing for your job, your job would absolutely suck.
	I mean, how many people want to do what I do?
	Geez, are you kidding me?
	How many people want to do what I do?
	A lot.
	And they try and they come up with shows, they come up with podcasts and varying degrees of success and all that.
	But man, I'm happy I'm doing what I'm doing.
	I couldn't imagine doing anything more worthwhile, more satisfying, more productive, more good with my life.
	And so the fact that a lot of people want to do what I'm doing is a good sign that it's kind of cool, right?
	And lots of people want to be podcasters.
	You get to work from home, you get to talk about what's important to you, and you get to have endless technical difficulties even after six years into doing it.
	But that's, you know, that's just the way it is.
	Well, we've got this new studio, so there's some kinks to iron out.
	But anyway, so you look around and say, yay, I'm not the only person heading to the gold rush.
	That must mean there's gold there.
	Okay, yeah.
	One of the reasons I called into the show is I watched one of your videos on resume building and this was a time maybe a few months ago when I was getting ready to apply for some companies and you gave the suggestion instead of listing jobs and duties, Listing skills and abilities that you've learned and developed instead.
	I was really interested about that and I was interested about hearing your point of view as an entrepreneur as far as personally developing your career skills.
	So I can understand that You know, competition is ultimately a good thing.
	If you're at a competitive school, you're going to get the best students.
	But I just wanted to talk more about, like, a personal level, at least where my career is going.
	I mean, I could give you that response or I can give you another response, which I think might be more relevant.
	I mean, is there, like, a pact that you sign...
	In blood with some satanic figure with a slide ruler up his ass that says you're simply not allowed to be enthusiastic as an engineer?
	Oh, whoa.
	I didn't say I was not enthusiastic.
	When I signed up for the project...
	You don't sound enthusiastic.
	What?
	No, I'm sorry.
	I'm telling you.
	People in the chatroom can tell me if I'm wrong.
	You kind of monotone.
	Okay, maybe that's just how I talk.
	But, so let me make myself clear.
	I'm telling you that's how you talk, right?
	Because you're going to try and stand out with an interviewer over the phone first, right?
	And you don't want to be monotone.
	Okay, yeah, yeah.
	Like, if you want my help on, like, do you find engineering exciting?
	I mean, you're interested in it, right?
	Right, right.
	So, and I'm encountering this problem, so...
	Let me explain this.
	So right now, I work as a machinist assistant.
	The mechanical engineering building, so it's not petroleum, it's mechanical.
	They have a machine shop there, and I go there, and my boss is the foreman, and he gives me projects to do.
	He gives me things to maintain.
	Okay, you've got to make this quick.
	I'm sorry.
	You've got to get to the point here, like, right away, because I've got another question to ask.
	Anyways, I really like machining.
	I really like creating things.
	I really like making things better.
	And it's just something that, like, I've never done it before in the past, and I really do like it.
	But it's all, like, shop experience, technician experience.
	It's not, like, I don't even, maybe, like, I've never had a chance, or I don't even know what real engineering is.
	I understand it's making things cheaper and designing things, but I've been mostly doing machining, hands-on things, and I'm still working towards learning what actual engineering is, and it's a process that I'm still at the start of.
	Okay.
	I don't know what that was all about, but let me sort of tell you what I think will get people's attention if you're being interviewed, right?
	Okay.
	So, Steve Jobs, back in the day when they were designing the operating system to the Macintosh, the Macintosh used to boot up in like two minutes.
	And he said, you've got to get it down to a minute.
	And people would say, well, why?
	It's just like one more minute, you know, just go get a coffee or whatever.
	And he's like, well, we're going to sell 50 million of these.
	And 50 million minutes, and I can't do the math in my head, and he probably couldn't either, but 50 million minutes translates to this, translates to this.
	It's years and years and years of human lifespan that you're going to save every single morning by having this thing boot up one minute faster.
	Yes.
	So, when he put that in perspective for the engineers, then the engineers busted their butts, and it wasn't about a minute, right?
	What was that?
	It was about years and years and years of human life saved every single morning by having it boot up a minute faster.
	Right, right.
	Now, his ability to translate...
	Engineering into bigger lifespan, quality of life issues and so on, right?
	Is really important.
	And so if I were you, right, somebody says to me, why are you in petroleum engineering?
	It's like, because I want to save lives.
	Because I'm acutely aware of the fact that literally hundreds of millions or billions of human lives depend upon our continuous supply of relatively cheap energy.
	And I think that the quality of life we've amassed as a technological 21st century species is nothing short of miraculous.
	If you look throughout human history, it's like incredible how not well off we were and how few resources we had as a species.
	We've got this incredible thing where human population has grown.
	Why has it grown?
	Because of oil, because of plastics, because of a huge amount of technology that rests on petrochemicals.
	And I think that if you have the skill and ability to contribute what is arguably the greatest contribution to human life, to the quality of life and to the continuation or existence of human life, well, it's energy.
	And what's the best source of energy is oil.
	Nothing really comes close.
	Maybe coal a little bit, but oil fundamentally.
	And...
	I am grateful for the standard of living that is available.
	I'm grateful for the leisure.
	I'm enthusiastic about joining an industry that keeps hundreds of millions or billions of people literally alive and can help spread that wealth to the third world and raise up other countries that are still on the developmental path.
	I'm excited about finding ways to make it less polluting.
	I'm excited about finding ways to create or develop more energy in this field.
	It is What keeps the species going?
	And I think there's very little that's more exciting to work on.
	Yeah, I absolutely agree.
	That's, I think, what's going to get you jobs.
	And if you want to compete with people, if you want to compete with people, get a bigger picture, get a bigger picture, get a bigger picture, get the biggest picture.
	And then there's no limit to who you can compete with.
	But you have to tie what you're doing in to something important.
	Now, petrochemical engineer, not even that hard.
	Waiter, a little more challenging.
	Philosopher, easy peasy, right?
	And so, if you can find a way to connect with what you're doing, which is literally going to save the lives of millions of people, I think that's kind of cool.
	If you're a cancer researcher, you're like, well, shit, I'd really like hundreds of millions of people not to die next year.
	That's kind of motivating.
	But it's the same thing with petrochemical engineering.
	You people are keeping us alive.
	I have lights on me in the studio because you people, you brilliant people are finding new ways to suck ancient dinosaur tree juice up out of the ground.
	So I think that's, if you really want to compete with people, you have to keep refining and redefining what you're doing to get to the biggest possible picture that you can logically sustain.
	Does that help?
	Yeah, that's great.
	I never really thought of it that way.
	Well, please think of it that way and don't tell anyone else in your degree about that.
	You hook into that and And you are a hero making money, and there's really little better that you can get out of life.
	Does that help at all?
	Yes, yes.
	All right.
	So, all right.
	Well, thanks, Mike.
	Do we have anyone else?
	Yeah, one more caller.
	Alec wrote in and asked, how can we reasonably avoid government regulation for items that allow one person to kill many people very quickly?
	That gives mustard gas as an example.
	Obviously, mass murdering a crowd of people is wrong, but I'm inclined to think that if a person wants to stockpile mustard gas on his own property, it begins to infringe on the rights of others.
	It seems that stockpiling such a substance puts others in danger, but I'm afraid to compromise on the previously mentioned non-aggression principle, because it seems without it, the whole idea of ownership can be...
	You know, I'm...
	Are you a new listener?
	Um...
	I'm an amateur libertarian, so you can tell me if I'm thinking about this the wrong way.
	But I mean, I guess the core of what I'm getting at is like, it seems like there's some...
	No, no, no, no, no.
	I understand the core of what you're getting at.
	Let me ask you a question.
	How many nuclear weapons does America have?
	I don't know, but I presume many.
	I don't know.
	1,500?
	Mike, if you want to look it up and tell me if I'm way off base.
	But like 1,500 city-slaughtering, region-radioactivating nuclear weapons, right?
	Chemical weapons.
	I think some of those have been destroyed after 2007, some agreement.
	Bioweapons.
	I mean, space lasers.
	I mean, you name that shit.
	Drones.
	I mean, so...
	We have a system at the moment where a small number of people have control over a massive amount of stockpiled weapons for which the passcodes to launch were 000000000.
	In other words, if somebody fucking leaned on the keypad, put the numlocks on, we're all kissing the sky in radioactive atoms, right?
	So, is your concern that in a free society, someone might have mustard gas in their basement, and you're comparing that saying, how do we fix that?
	Don't we have a giant fucking problem, which is that governments around the world can destroy the planet many times over with their existing weapons?
	Do you really think that getting rid of governments is going to make that worse?
	Oh, no, no, I agree with you.
	And so, I'm 100% like, agree with you 100% there.
	Oh, 5,000, sorry, 5,113 nuclear warheads for America.
	Yeah, I agree with you.
	You know, because 5,112 would be insane.
	I mean, you'd be completely defenseless.
	So, you know, I'm willing to take my chances for some lunatic getting mustard gas in his basement, right?
	But forcing everyone to develop over 5,000 nuclear warheads...
	The American government sells arms, as does Russia and England, all over the world.
	Arms dictatorships, arms monstrous, sells weapons to guys who turn out to be assholes and attack Americans with those very same weapons and so on.
	So if you're concerned about stockpiling dangerous weapons, why would anarchy trouble you?
	Yeah, that's an excellent point.
	Thank you for putting it in perspective.
	Yeah, that's great.
	Thank you.
	Can I give you another answer?
	I mean, I don't want to, that's too easy.
	Oh, oh, yeah, yeah.
	So you don't want some guy, it's the question of a tank in the backyard, right?
	So you're in some nice neighborhood, it's bucolic, white picket fences, you know, robot dogs chasing phantom cats, whatever turns your crank.
	And then some guy says, hey, you know, I think I'm going to just start building a tank in my backyard, right?
	So he orders the parts from tanks or us or whatever, and he starts building this tank.
	Neighbors get a little concerned.
	And he's like, no, no, no, I'm just, you know, it's just my thing.
	I just want to build a tank.
	Is it going to have live ammunition?
	Well, yeah, it's a tank.
	It's got to have live ammunition and whatnot.
	So the question is, somebody starts building a tank in their backyard.
	Well, right now you call the cops and they come and shut it down, right?
	In a free society, what happens to the guy who wants to start building a tank in his backyard?
	He's ostracized?
	What do you think happens?
	He's ostracized?
	Would be my guess.
	Or people just...
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, people are just like...
	Well, let me ask the question.
	I'm not delivering electricity to the guy.
	I'm not delivering water to the guy.
	I'm not going to socialize with him.
	You know, if you have kids in particular, you know, your kids are friends with the other kids in the neighborhood.
	If people just suddenly, you know, they draw up the drawbridge of social society, you know, I imagine it probably gets kind of lonely on a...
	A suburban street where nobody wants to talk to you.
	So, you know, there's a huge amount of social pressure people can bring to bear and economic pressure that people can bring to bear on people who are just doing kind of crazy stuff, right?
	Right.
	I agree with you.
	But I guess the core of my question is more, I don't know, I don't want to make impossible situations and ask stupid philosophical questions.
	Oh, yes you do.
	Oh, I can feel you do.
	You're hungry for it.
	You want it bad.
	You want those impossible questions like you, like a stripper wants a $20 bill.
	You are all over that like a fat kid on a smarty.
	Don't hold back.
	Let's do it.
	Let's do an impossible scenario.
	I think one of the reasons I've been so drawn to your ideology is that it's just so consistent and I love it.
	So I guess, so I don't want to ask this question, I don't know, because I'm trying to, I really want you to prove me wrong.
	So I'm not trying to be, you know.
	Okay, go ahead.
	I guess my concern is that I want to think of this morally.
	So let me ask my question in a different way.
	Morally, do we have any rights to enter someone else's property if they're stockpiling something dangerous?
	I understand the tank is really obvious.
	People can ostracize it.
	That's kind of a separate question, right?
	Because that still doesn't deal with the morality of him stockpiling it so much.
	It really deals more with how are people going to respond to that.
	And so certainly people can We cannot interact with them.
	But I guess my question is more about the morality of the action.
	Or on what grounds would we have the rights to violate the non-aggression principle?
	To belabor the mustard gas example, suppose that a person has a large quantity of mustard gas or someone builds a bomb, let's go with just builds a small bomb in their house that could hurt the neighborhood.
	If someone finds out about it, is that considered a threat of aggression?
	Or on what grounds would it be considered coercion, a threat of physical force?
	It just seems like a fuzzy line and I don't want to push it too far because then it's like, well, couldn't anything seem like in some sense it could hurt someone so we can enter someone else's property?
	I was just hoping you could bring some clarity to that specifically.
	Did that question make sense?
	So, let's say that I'm You and I live on the same street.
	And I'm building some street obliterating bomb in my basement, right?
	And then someone sees this through my window.
	They talk to me about it and I say, yeah, I'm building this bomb in my basement, right?
	And they call the DRO or the authorities, whatever, and they come over and he won't let them in and they kick in his door and they deactivate the bomb.
	Do you have a problem Yeah, I mean, I'm concerned.
	So the reason I'm concerned is that it just seems like, it just seems like...
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	From a practical standpoint, do you have a problem with a bomb being deactivated on your street?
	Please don't tell me you do.
	I mean, come on.
	It's a fucking bomb.
	So no, I don't have a problem with it.
	Who knows if this guy is any good at it?
	He might cross some wires.
	He could blow you to sky high.
	I do have a problem with it.
	You don't have a problem with a bomb being deactivated on your street.
	I mean, really, you don't.
	I mean, I'm not trying to tell you what to think, but I can't believe that you would, for some abstract principle, be willing to have a bomb on your street being built by an amateur.
	So is your point then that you're doomed to be inconsistent at some point?
	No, no, no.
	I'm just starting the argument.
	I haven't got a point yet.
	I'm just saying that you don't have a problem with it.
	I'm telling you I don't have a problem with it because I don't want to live on a fucking street where some lunatic is building a bomb in his basement.
	Okay, I'm with you.
	Now, other than the guy himself, is there anyone who would say, you should live with the guy building a bomb in his basement on your street?
	There's nothing wrong with that.
	Nobody's going to say that.
	Who's sane, right?
	Right.
	Okay.
	Problem solved.
	See, ethics...
	You used the word rights, which is a confusing word to use because they don't exist, right?
	But...
	Ethics is not like physics, right?
	Ethics requires that people have a problem, right?
	I know this sounds like the rapiest metaphor show, but it's just the way it's worked out, right?
	What is the difference between rape and lovemaking?
	They can look exactly the same if people are into rough sex.
	The difference with rape and lovemaking is the woman has a problem with it, right?
	Right.
	The woman didn't want the sex.
	Or the man didn't want the sex.
	Okay.
	And so they can kind of look the same, but what makes the difference between good and evil is the person has a problem with it.
	It's like this tree falling in a forest thing, right?
	Rape exists when the woman comes forward and says, I was raped.
	If it was a role play, if they were being kinky, if it was like, you come in and pretend you're an intruder, whatever, right?
	Then it's not rape.
	Rape is, meh, meh, meh, alarm, alarm, rape, rape, right?
	That's when it is.
	It doesn't exist independently in a way of the woman having a complaint.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, that makes sense to me.
	So, the complaint is the problem.
	There's no problem without the complaint.
	I mean, in some existential, abstract, whatever, right?
	But in practical terms, which is kind of what we're talking about here, if there's no complaint, there's no problem.
	Okay, I'm with you.
	Does that make sense?
	But it doesn't seem to answer the question.
	So...
	Because someone...
	No, no, but hang on, hang on a sec.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	So I'm almost done, and thanks to your patience.
	Okay, so...
	If no one...
	Has a problem with people going into this guy's house and deactivating his bomb?
	There's no problem.
	Because there's no God who's going to enforce the morality.
	It's not like physics.
	It doesn't get enforced If no one has a problem except the guy who's building the bomb who nobody's going to sympathize with, right, if the guy calls his DRO, his dispute resolution organization, and says, these guys are coming into my house, and they're like, well, we're going to send a squad right over.
	Why are they coming into your house?
	Because I'm building a giant fucking bomb in the basement.
	They'd be like, good luck with that.
	But we're not sending guys over.
	Why?
	Because you've got a bomb in the basement.
	His DRO is not going to defend him.
	And no one's DRO is going to have a problem with them going into this guy's house and deactivating a bomb.
	And if there's no problem, there's no problem.
	There's no abstract rights-y thing that we need, whatever.
	Do you know what I mean?
	I get what you're saying.
	It's just, I don't know.
	I don't want to say I disagree.
	Can I ask you this?
	If someone is getting raped...
	No, no, no.
	Disagree if you do.
	But you understand, in a very practical sense...
	Yes, I agree with you practically.
	If I don't complain that someone stole something from me, in a kind of way, no theft has occurred in sort of how society deals with it, right?
	Right.
	Let's say I've got some old bicycle in my backyard, right?
	Things rusty up and me need to throw it out and some kid comes along and takes it, right?
	Okay.
	At one level, there's been a theft, right?
	But if I'm like, well, that's great.
	That saved me a trip to the dump.
	Good on you, kid.
	Has there been a theft?
	Well, not really because I don't have a problem with it.
	I'm actually quite relieved about it, right?
	So this is the question of what is theft?
	Is theft, well, he came and took my property without permission.
	That's theft.
	Or if it's like, well, he took some old junky bicycle off my hands that I was going to throw out anyway and he saved me a trip to the dump.
	You can, after the fact, turn something into a non-theft.
	The theft is in the complaint.
	The theft is in the having a problem with it.
	So, and just to make this even more clear, let's say that I hid My life savings in diamonds in that old bicycle, right?
	Suddenly I have a big fucking problem with the kid taking my bike, right?
	I'm calling the cops, they took my bike, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Now, we've got a moral violation, we've got society leaps into action, your DRO goes and whatever, right?
	But if it's just some old junky bike that I wanted to throw out anyway and it's to save me some time, has there been a theft?
	No!
	Because I don't have a problem with it.
	I'm actually relieved about it.
	And if everyone says, I'm really glad that asshole's bomb got deactivated, has there been a break and enter?
	You know what I mean?
	If no one has a problem with it, in fact, they're very glad that it happened, then there's nothing to adjudicate.
	It's like me saying, do I have the right to declare war all by myself, on my own, with no one else's resources?
	Well, if you're doing that, you're kind of not declaring war, right?
	So I'm sort of because I'm concerned about what actually happens in society, not sort of some theoretical violation of the imaginary physics of rights and ethics.
	What is actually going to happen if a bunch of neighbors see some guy building a ticking bomb in their basement, they kick in the door and they deactivate the bomb, people are going to be like, you're a fucking hero.
	Thank you for saving us from whatever smoking cloud mushroom shit was going to happen here.
	Here's a medal.
	You eat here free for the next year.
	Yay!
	And they'll be in the papers saying, yay, good job!
	This douchebag was building a bomb and these guys kicked in his door and deactivated it.
	So where's the problem?
	I mean, the guy building the bomb has the problem, but...
	Nobody agrees with him.
	Does that...
	I know that's not like some sort of clear-cut answer, but I think it helps you to understand that if people are rational in society about their ethics, then people who do things that are egregiously wrong, no one is going to rush to their defense.
	No one is going to take up their cause.
	No one is going to stand by them.
	No one is right.
	And therefore...
	Society doesn't really have a problem to adjudicate.
	Well, okay, so let me...
	Okay, so I agree with you on a practical level, but I mean, I guess my question is...
	Let me say it like this.
	So, suppose that a woman gets raped, and obviously she opposes her rape, that's what makes it a rape.
	But for the sake of argument, hypothetical world, because those are totally true, everybody else is okay with it.
	I would still, even if society said it was right and everybody was like, yay, she got raped, I would still say that it's wrong because it's a violation of property rights.
	Because at some level I'm labeling things as right and wrong based on this, what I like to think is an objective moral standard.
	And so I guess what I'm asking you is, okay, fine.
	So maybe in reality, yes, people would band together and they would enter his property and they would disarm the bomb.
	And that's all fine and great and everybody can be happy about it.
	But I feel like I would have to choose between violating my objective moral standard or saying that they were wrong to do that.
	No, no, no, no.
	It's a bomb!
	It's a bomb, which means he's violating...
	I mean, if you want to get technical about it, he's violating other people's property rights.
	Okay, so I can go with that argument, but then where do you draw the line?
	No, because he's threatening to destroy their houses.
	So you would consider...
	His actions are threatening to destroy their houses.
	So you would consider a bomb an act of coercion?
	So he's endangering their property.
	So you would consider having a bomb a form of coercion, a threat of physical force?
	Well, of course, you don't have to wait.
	You don't have to wait for someone to shoot you for self-defense, right?
	Right.
	Okay, so now I'm not...
	Look, if I follow you around all day with a gun pointed to the back of your head and the safety off, right?
	Have I actually shot you?
	No.
	Can you do something about it?
	Of course you can.
	Preemptive self-defense is kind of the point of self-defense because if you wait until I've shot you in the head, there's not much left to defend then, is there?
	Right.
	That's true.
	But on the same level, it seems...
	So, yeah, if some asshole's building a bomb on my street, I'm, you know, yes, do whatever...
	He is threatening my property.
	I don't have to wait for the bomb to go off and then expect my next of kin to somehow take revenge, right?
	Preemptive self-defense is essential.
	I mean, this is the Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman case, right?
	Where, according to Zimmerman, right, Trayvon Martin was threatening him with grievous bodily harm or death.
	He didn't have to wait for his head to crack open like a melon drop from the third story in order to act in self-defense, which is why the cops let him go the first night.
	I mean, he was beaten up, his head was cracked, his nose was cracked, right?
	I mean, then they say, okay, well, obviously the guy was beating you up and you shot him.
	So you don't have to wait for the bomb to go off.
	He's already threatening their property.
	That's why death threats are actionable.
	You throw people in jail for threatening to kill someone.
	You don't have to wait for them to actually kill them, right?
	And this guy's threatening to blow up everyone else's property by building a bomb.
	Okay, so bear with me.
	I'm sorry if I'm belaboring the point.
	I really don't mean to.
	No, no, go for it.
	So the difference seems to be – so I agree with what you're saying that obviously if someone's making a threat, you want to be preemptive about that.
	And I recognize threats of physical force as an act of coercion.
	I think that's totally conformant to the NAP. But that being said, so if someone holds a gun to your head, that's a threat because they're – like what makes it a threat is that they're intending to shoot you.
	And, I mean, that can be conveyed in a lot of ways with a reasonable amount of accuracy.
	They could say it.
	They could just hold the gun to your head.
	But you can very quickly go – you can establish, okay, yes, this is an act – this is a threat.
	I can violate the NAP – or not violate, but I can use – you get the point.
	I'm enabled to use coercion to stop that.
	But it seems like if the person just builds the bomb and they don't arm it, I mean, it seems like the same type of argument that you just made could be used to say that a person can't own it.
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	Because you're assuming an omniscience which we don't possess.
	How do you know it's not armed?
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Okay, so let me ask you this.
	So, I mean, so what would stop me from making...
	No, no, no, the veil of ignorance is really important.
	We don't know.
	I don't know if it's armed or not.
	I can see that there's a bomb in there.
	The guy says, oh, it's not armed.
	The fuck am I supposed to know?
	I'm not going to take his word for it.
	Why?
	Because he's building a bomb.
	He's already an idiot and a lunatic and dangerous.
	I'm not going to take his word for it.
	Oh, well, he'll build a bomb on a crowded city street, but I'm sure he wouldn't tell a lie, right?
	I mean, once somebody has signaled that they're batshit crazy and possibly evil, then sorry, you know, the...
	Trust you with telling the truth factor doesn't really apply, right?
	Okay, that's fair.
	Because you're creating a scenario wherein perfect knowledge is available.
	And it's not.
	It can't be.
	You can't know that, whether he's actually armed it or not.
	And maybe he's going to arm it tomorrow.
	Maybe he thinks he hasn't armed it, but he actually has.
	Okay.
	Right?
	You don't know.
	Maybe the gun is made out of chocolate.
	I don't know.
	Maybe the knife is one of those stage knives where it doesn't actually stab you.
	Fuck, you can play that game forever.
	But in a state of ignorance, you have to gain certainty.
	And you don't wait for the worst to occur and then say, well, now I know, right?
	I mean, you have to act proactively to protect yourself and you certainly aren't going to take, oh, well, I know for sure that bomb isn't armed.
	You simply won't have that knowledge, right?
	I agree.
	Sorry.
	I really have agreed with everything you've said so far.
	I don't mean to keep coming back.
	I'm trying to address this.
	So I guess my next question is, silly question, but where do you draw the line?
	So what I mean by that is, if someone had, let's say, a machine gun in their house, would you say, well, the fact that they have a machine gun is evidence that they're mentally unstable, having a machine gun in a crowded place.
	Therefore, we should be able to take that.
	And how far would you allow that to go?
	You know what I mean?
	How far can that kind of argument go?
	Well, first of all, it's a status thing to say, how far would I allow that to go?
	It's not up to me.
	Look, if people want to have a community where nobody has a machine gun, that's pretty easy to achieve.
	Some guy buys up all the land, builds a whole bunch of houses, And retains ownership over the land and says, you've leased these houses for 99 years, here's the shit you've got to sign to have the house.
	Right?
	No tanks in the backyard, no bombs in the basement, no machine guns, no blindfolded firing rockets up people's asses or anything like that, right?
	No blowjobs.
	I don't care whatever they come up with, right?
	You sign that and then you get the house and you stay there until you violate the Regional agreement or whatever, right?
	If people want that.
	I don't think it's going to be too much overhead.
	You're going to have to pay a lot more for your house with that kind of stuff.
	You know, how many people raised well, and we're gonna have to be raised peacefully without spanking with being negotiated, not in government schools in order to have a free society.
	How many people are gonna want machine guns unless they're batshit crazy, beaten up, abused as children and shit like that.
	But, and so who's gonna want to pay all that overhead for something that's never gonna happen?
	Nobody.
	But theoretically, right, you could say, I want to live in a place with no machine guns.
	And so or no guns, no handguns, no guns of any kind, because I want to be a magnet for thieves.
	Right.
	And then you simply find a community where this is the situation where to get the house, you have to sign these agreements.
	And these are all over the place.
	Condos do it all the time.
	These are no loud parties, no elks in the hallway, no yaks in the blender or whatever.
	Right.
	And they come up with all of that stuff.
	And then you sign that shit and then you stay there until you decide to move or you don't want to be there anymore because you don't like the rules.
	So, and those are transferable with the property and so on because fundamentally the condo is owned by, the building is owned by people and then you basically are leasing the condo from them in perpetuity if you abide by the rules.
	So if you want that kind of thing, then you can find that.
	And I hope that, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom.
	How many experiments can there be in optimum human coexistence?
	I hope that people will continue to innovate and reduce prices and increase comfort level and security and friendliness and neighborliness and so on, right?
	I agree with you, but I think there's an important difference between the scenario you just described and the hypothetical bomb scenario.
	It's specifically that...
	Okay, yes.
	Yes, if someone enters into a contract and says they won't do it, then absolutely.
	I mean, it's a violation of the contract.
	But I was specifically referring to the case...
	So what I think I heard...
	So let me just tell you what I think I heard in your response was...
	Okay, no.
	Give me a case.
	Don't give me a somewhere in the gray area stuff.
	Give me a case.
	Okay.
	Because look, you can...
	This God of the Gap stuff, you can create some scenario that is so hypothetical that it's hard to figure out.
	I... But I need an actual scenario.
	Well, what about the gray area?
	By definition, the gray area is something that's negotiated.
	So how much threat do you actually objectively need to experience before you can use self-defense?
	Well, people will work that out.
	And some people will err a little bit too soon and they might get in trouble.
	And some people will err a little bit too late and they will also get in trouble because they'll be dead.
	And each case gets looked at because each case is individual.
	And there will be some shit that's really hard to decide.
	You know, the guy was walking down, and it looked like he had a toy gun in his pocket, and he looked like a guy who'd shot three people yesterday, and...
	Well, I mean, there's gonna be...
	I mean, with the Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin case, there was a lot of controversy, obviously, about it.
	And, you know, the jury saw the evidence and acquitted him.
	And...
	There is going to be situations which you can invent where it will be very hard to know for sure.
	And this is where the concept of reasonable doubt, which is a common law concept, not a government concept, this is where the concept of reasonable doubt holds sway.
	But you can, of course, invent a situation wherein nobody can know for sure and so on, and those will occur.
	And this is exactly why you can't have a government, because you need constantly people refining and improving the way things work.
	And this is not what, of course, happens in government, right?
	Right.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	I mean, Zimmerman has been found not guilty, and his life is still in the shitter and will be for the rest of his life.
	I mean, the man's going to fear everywhere he goes.
	I mean, this is government justice.
	This is the way it works in a government society.
	I mean, in Detroit, murder trials are being thrown out because it's taken them five years to get a trial, and by then, half the witnesses have been killed or died of natural causes or something like that.
	As you know, in government courts in America, like 97% or 98% of people plea bargain because they're just hit with such outrageously crazy extended sentences that they just say, well, rather than 20 years, I'll take two and I'll just plea down.
	Right?
	And then, oh, they're guilty.
	Well, no, they've been bribed with 18 years of not being in jail to go to jail for two years.
	So, I mean, there's no justice that's going on right now in the government system.
	The prison population has exploded.
	The war on drugs is crazy.
	The degree to which soldiers are traumatized in these hyperextended leaves overseas and then come back to, quote, commit crimes, even though their brains have been shredded by traumatic brain injuries and excessive trauma and psychotropics, which are handed out like candy among people.
	The troops, 1 in 13 American kids on psychotropic medications, which cause massive shrinking in the brain and behavioral problems, homicidality, suicidality, they have a black box warning from the FDA, it's the most dangerous stuff around.
	Single moms, the girlfriend farms of public housing, ghettos, terrible government schools and so on.
	And so you're facing that giant wall, not to mention the 5,100 and change nuclear weapons held by the US government, which is just one of the many ways they have of killing hundreds of millions of people.
	You're looking at all of that giant wall of dysfunction and evil, not to mention the fact that an average working American who's going to work in the future, average kid born in America who's going to have a job in the future, is $1.4 million in debt by the time they're born.
	That amount of intergenerational predation has not been known since King Lear.
	And so you're looking at that giant wall of evil, right?
	And you're saying, well, you know, but I could think of a scenario where in a free society, it could get a little fuzzy.
	I'm like, let's take that fucking chance.
	Seriously, let's, like, oh my god, let's take that chance.
	The plane is going into the mountainside, and the valley is full of soft, fluffy snow and trampolines.
	And you're saying, well, I don't know.
	I might bend a toe a little bit on one of those trampolines.
	I'm like, well, you know what's happening right now is the plane is about to go into the fucking mountain!
	So, let's take a chance with the fluffy trampolines!
	Yeah, I agree with you.
	I agree with you 100%.
	And I'm not advocating for statism as a solution.
	In this case, I was just curious what your thoughts were on the situation.
	And maybe the situation is engineered in a way that it's undecidable.
	Wait, what situation?
	The bomb situation.
	We did the bomb one, right?
	We're fine with that.
	No, no, we did the bomb one.
	We're done with the bomb one.
	Oh, okay.
	Well, I was still concerned about the bomb one.
	That's why I was asking questions.
	Right, because you said, what if it's disarmed?
	And I said, we can't possibly know that.
	And you have the right to protect your own property, and the guy's already signaled he's unstable, and you don't know for sure if the bomb is armed or not, so you go in to protect your property and life.
	That we've done.
	Maybe there's another one you want to do, but that one is done.
	Well, but I didn't necessarily...
	Because you agreed with every conclusion, and therefore you can't say, but there's an X factor left of...
	No, right?
	Okay, so...
	I mean, you can't agree with every answer and then say, but they still don't agree with you, right?
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	So I agree with that reasoning, but it seems to follow from that reasoning that then we'd have the same kind of issue with someone just having a gun.
	And so that's where I'm confused.
	So I shouldn't have said I agree.
	I should have said I follow you.
	Well, we did that.
	That if you want to live...
	No, we did that.
	If you want to live where there's no guns, then you go to a place where people have signed contracts and not have guns.
	not a violation of other people's property because the gun is self-defense or whatever it is right now if you go around raving the gun and shooting it in the air then you're endangering other people a gun is not a bomb right a gun has self-defense characteristics uh a bomb does not right right so uh having a gun uh in a free society is not a violation it's In fact, it is a protection of property in that guns reduce crime massively, right?
	A million crimes a year every year are prevented in the U.S. by people having handguns.
	And, you know, in England where you're not allowed to have a handgun, I mean, people go and rob them in broad daylight when the families are home.
	They don't do that in America because people have their guns, right?
	And, of course, then the liberals say, well, you see, but guns, you're more likely to be killed by your own gun, and they neglect to mention that that, in fact, includes suicides, which is kind of a little bit different from having a home invasion.
	But, no, you can have a gun in a free society, of course.
	I mean, I hope my neighbors are armed.
	I want them to be armed, because that means that I don't actually have to have a gun if I don't want one.
	I still get the halo benefit, right, of other people having weapons.
	So, No, you can have a gun.
	And if you desperately don't want to ever see a gun, then you have to go to a community and pay the extra cost where the non-gun ownership is enforced and take the consequences of that, which may be increased criminal predation.
	So I think we've answered that.
	Was there another one?
	So, I'm sorry.
	I don't mean to be sick, so I guess my question is, I'm sorry, I really am.
	I'm sure you've answered it several times and maybe I'm missing it.
	You're not going to be as sorry as when you watch this back on the video.
	I guarantee you, then you're going to be like, oh my god, I can't.
	But go ahead.
	If you've got the impulse, let's go for it.
	But what's the difference between the bomb and the gun?
	I'm sorry.
	So I understand that if people have entered into a contract and they say no gun.
	We just did that one.
	What did I say was the difference between the bomb and the gun?
	Well, it seemed to be that one could potentially be used for self-defense and one couldn't.
	Yeah.
	And so is that it?
	So that's a pretty good one, right?
	So that's...
	Okay.
	Then I mean, I don't know.
	I suppose...
	Also, the gun cannot blow up other people's houses, right?
	Unless you're talking about a hip howitzer or something, right?
	The bomb is not a self-defense thing and will destroy other people's houses and the gun is not that, right?
	Okay.
	I know where your brain is going now.
	How big does the gun have to be exactly down to the last millimeter when it no longer is used in self-defense and now it can be used, right?
	Right.
	I mean, yeah, I guess I can see how maybe that's unanswerable.
	But yes, that is what I'm thinking.
	I'm trying to figure out if there's a rule that one could use to determine that, but it just might not be possible.
	There is no rule because you cannot get down to an atomic scale exactly how long or how destructive a weapon has to be before people don't think it's usable in self-defense anymore.
	I think a bazooka, yeah.
	Surface-to-air missile, really not a very big self-defense kind of base thing.
	A pistol, sure, that's used for self-defense.
	A Glock, yes, that's used for self-defense, right?
	A top-mounted 50mm machine gun, probably not used in self-defense, right?
	Right.
	And people, you know, they'll kind of get it.
	But all this, I mean, it's fundamentally irrelevant because by the time we have a free society, you won't need guns.
	Anymore than you're terrified of getting polio or smallpox now.
	I mean, this seems like a big issue now because we haven't cured evil yet because we're still abusing children.
	We're not going to get to a free society until we stop abusing children.
	Once we stop abusing children, we're not going to worry how long the barrel of a gun has to be in order to be.
	We just won't need any of that shit anymore.
	It will be as...
	Gone as gone can be, it will be a distant memory in history, like our fears of cholera and typhus in the first world.
	It's just, you know, if you're like in the 19th century, I mean, smallpox was a massive disaster.
	Like in the first half of the 20th century, moms were terrified to send their kids to public swimming pools because polio was so incredibly disastrous for an entire family.
	You might have to live in an iron lung for the rest of your short days or long days, which could happen.
	But now we don't worry about that stuff because we cured it.
	We have the inoculations.
	We have the vaccines.
	We just don't worry about it anymore.
	That means we still get our vaccines or whatever, but we don't worry about that shit anymore.
	I mean, when was the last time you worried about dying from polio or smallpox?
	You don't because we cured.
	The same thing is true with violence.
	We can cure it.
	We know what the cure is, raising children peacefully.
	So we're not going to have a whole bunch of people making bombs in their basements and tanks in their backyards.
	You can't see this yet because you probably haven't done the research to see what the cure is and how obvious the cure is.
	You can go to FDRURL.com forward slash BIB for like a long presentation called The Bomb and the Brain about where dysfunction and violence comes from and how to cure it.
	But I'm telling you, And I'm not just telling you like believe me because I'm telling you, but I'm telling you the data is there, the experts have been on the show, the facts are very clear.
	Violence is eminently treatable, is eminently curable, sorry not curable, is eminently preventable with the peaceful raising of children.
	We raise predators by treating them as prey.
	We raise predators by treating children as prey.
	And when we stop treating children as prey, we will very quickly run out of adult predators.
	Of whom to be afraid, of who to run to the state for protection, of whom to project our own fears onto external enemies, thus causing conflicts and wars and us-versus-them tribal mentality.
	But it is so preventable it's ridiculous.
	We just have to have the willpower to keep promoting the right solutions.
	Don't worry about the size of a gun that will be accepted in a commune in the 24th century.
	That's a distraction of your immense and powerful reasoning and communications abilities.
	Focus on getting people to treat their children better.
	Study up the effects of spanking.
	Study up the effects of child abuse.
	Focus on trying to get children treated better in society, and everything else will fall into place.
	Awesome.
	Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me, Stefan.
	I really appreciate it.
	And just to be clear, I... You're welcome, and thank you for sticking with it.
	I'm not meaning to argue against a free society or any of those things.
	I really agree with them.
	I was trying to be ultra-consistent on morality, or I don't know.
	Just for the fun of it, I wanted to see what your thoughts were.
	So thank you so much for indulging me.
	I appreciate that.
	Mike, do we have any announcements?
	Nothing immediate in the periphery.
	We're going to be on the regular schedule for call-in shows again, after having a bit of a departure when Steph went to Amsterdam, but...
	Yeah, what is it?
	Now, 4 a.m.
	my time?
	4 a.m.
	Amsterdam time, which I think is just when the party gets started, according to key dollar sign.
	Anyway, well, thanks everyone for a great show.
	I appreciate that.
	And thanks, Mike, of course, for setting it up.
	Yeah, we're back to Wednesday nights at 8 p.m.
	Eastern Standard, Saturday mornings, 10 a.m.
	Eastern Standard.
	Send your...
	Questions, if you want to run through the regular videos without the annoyance of my intrusions into your thoughts, mailbag at freedomainradio.com, operations at freedomainradio.com to chat with Mike if you want to be...
	Do we have a separate email for the show?
	Pretty much everything goes through operations at freedomainradio.com, and I filter it where it needs to go.
	All right.
	Well, thanks, everyone.
	I really appreciate that.
	And have yourselves a great couple of days.
	We will see you Sunday morning, fdrurl.com.
	forward slash donate to help the show out and that's it for tonight.

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