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Sept. 23, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:48:20

2800 I Believe I Can Fly - Saturday Call In Show September 20th, 2014

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	Good evening!
	Hope you're doing well, Stefan Molyneux.
	Welcome to your Saturday night mashup philosophy book brain conversation.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Nothing major to report.
	Thank you to the Bitcoin conference who had me in yelling at their audience.
	They decided to have me in remotely because halitosis.
	I can't remember what they meant.
	But anyway, so that'll be up soon.
	And I don't have a huge amount of news and weather to report other than the show is doing well.
	And now is the time to support your friendly neighborhood local philosophy show.
	You know, at the rate we're doing shows, we might do 70 million shows a year.
	And I think it'll be probably closer to 100 million, 120 million next year.
	By God, the world has never been exposed to so much philosophy, I would argue, in its entire history combined.
	So I hope that you will do what you can to help spread the value of critical thinking, forehead worship, and allegiance to the mothership.
	So, hope you're having a wonderful week.
	Let's move straight on to the callers.
	Oh, that's right.
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	So FDRURL.com slash donate.
	Hugely appreciated to sign up for a subscription, send us some cash.
	I'm sorry if it makes me sound crass and it makes you feel cynical.
	But all great endeavors require resources.
	And now we have three cheeping baby chicklet mouths to feed.
	Myself, Mike, and Stoyan.
	Even though we are trying to treat Stoyan so badly that he's going to go on a hunger strike, which obviously will cut down on his grocery bills.
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	So, hope that you can.
	Help us out.
	Let's move on to the callers.
	All right, up for today is Presley.
	And Presley wrote in and said, I suffered through an abusive childhood and feel very angry at my stepfather for what I endured, but not my mother.
	Why do I have a problem placing the same level of responsibility for my childhood on my mother as I do my stepfather?
	Ah, the answer would be ovaries, my friend.
	The answer would be ovaries.
	Listen, let me first of all say I'm incredibly sorry for your childhood.
	I want to sort of say that in all seriousness up front.
	But I also want to tell you, you are not the only man who has trouble pinning moral responsibility on a woman.
	Sometimes it's like pin the tail on the donkey when the donkey is actually orbiting a suborbital moon on Alpha Centauri.
	So, you are not the only person who has trouble pinning moral responsibility on women.
	Women can get away with claiming that they got pregnant and had a child and it wasn't their fault.
	Other than one M. Magdalene, I'm not sure that that can really be conceived of as plausible by anyone, but women can claim to be victims of actions they themselves take, and for various biological reasons we've gone into a number of times in the show, they get away with it.
	So, do you want to give me a little bit more details about what happened, what you're angry about?
	Well, you know, growing up, my stepdad, he was an explosive yeller, and...
	I never really got to speak to him very much growing up.
	It's kind of crazy how I lived in the same house with him, but we would literally go months and he wouldn't say a word to me.
	But the only time I would ever really hear from him was if I got a bad report card, which I got often, or if I did something, I got in trouble, he would get really angry with me and I'd get either a spanking or yelled at or something like that.
	I remember just growing up and being very afraid of him and really afraid to go down the hallway and go to my room.
	I would be really trying to look and see if he'd be looking my way down the hallway and see me.
	I would try to avoid him and duck him to see if I can run past his room and get to my room because I would be so afraid of him.
	I never really had a close relationship with him.
	Apparently I had You know, they tell me that, you know, I was really kind of close to him when I was really, really young before I remember much.
	But I guess that's just kind of, you know, the innocence of a child not knowing, you know, what's coming.
	And then the longer the relationship goes on with the getting only upset at you when you're mad, the more you're exposed to that, the less of a bond you have.
	And then...
	And yeah, so, you know, a lot of that happened and, you know, most of the spanking and the yelling came from him.
	It didn't happen very often for my mother, but it did happen sometimes.
	Sorry, can I just interrupt for a second?
	Go ahead.
	You were hit with implements, right?
	I was hit with a belt.
	That was it.
	Yeah.
	I'm sorry, that was it?
	You mean that's...
	You mean that's...
	You're not minimizing that, right?
	You know this is not the show to minimize that on, right?
	Right, right.
	It's not that...
	Yeah, I shouldn't be doing that, but it's...
	Okay, so let's...
	Don't give me your script, right?
	Because we all have a script that we talk about with people we're not that close to.
	Now, I know that you and I, we're not like best buds or anything, but this is not the conversation for that, okay?
	Okay.
	So, people say it's a spanking when they hit with their hands.
	Right.
	It is not a...
	I mean, even people who are spanking advocates would not call it spanking if you're hit with a belt.
	That's called a beating.
	And in rational, moral, philosophical terms, that's called child assault.
	So...
	Being hit with a belt is terrifying.
	It's incredibly dangerous.
	Was it buckle side down or buckle side away?
	The buckle side was away.
	Okay.
	It can hit your genitals.
	It can wrap around.
	That happened once.
	You actually hit me in my genitals once when I was a kid.
	And that can torque your testicles, that can do some serious damage.
	Yeah.
	So, you were assaulted by a giant with a strip of leather.
	And I bet you had hurt like hell, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, to this day...
	Listen, man, you gotta not...
	I'm not trying to be critical here.
	I'm just really trying to be straight with you.
	You gotta not say insane things to me like, we weren't that close.
	Yeah.
	Like, I get it.
	If he assaults you and beats you, guess fucking what?
	You're not going to be that close.
	Why?
	Because he's beating you.
	Right.
	He doesn't talk to you.
	Except to verbally abuse you and beat you, I get, I get that you're not going to be that close.
	You don't need to tell that to me, right?
	Right.
	In fact, if you were close, that would be seriously disturbing, right?
	Right.
	I really bonded with the guy who never talked to me except to verbally abuse me and beat me with implements.
	Then I never felt closer to him.
	That would be really fucked up, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Okay.
	So let's keep going, but you're in a different space with me, right?
	Right, yeah.
	Yeah, you're right.
	Okay.
	So keep going.
	To this day, you know, when I hear the sound of a belt buckle, I automatically think of, you know, a belt coming for me and, you know, him about to spank me.
	It just reminds me...
	I'm sorry?
	What was that?
	About to what you?
	About...
	Beat me.
	I'm sorry.
	Yeah, no problem.
	Hey, don't apologize to me.
	I'm just reminding you of the reality of the situation.
	Like if somebody's standing in the desert and says, this is a nice jungle, I say, sorry, it's a desert, right?
	Yeah.
	You know, it's really crazy in my family.
	I'm...
	I'm black and my entire family, obviously, we're all black.
	It's really insane now that I know about all these things.
	If I go to a family gathering, everybody just talks about the way that they abuse their children.
	I give them a good beating or whatever.
	Everybody just laughs and chuckles it off.
	It's really crazy.
	You don't even have to be part of the family.
	All black people seem to think that this is just okay, and it's just, it's not...
	No, no, no, not that it's okay.
	That it's good, that it's necessary.
	Right.
	And isn't the theory that beating your kids protects them from white people?
	Is that some of the theory?
	I don't know if I've heard that one before.
	Like it's, a belt to the ass is better than a white cop's bullet to the brain?
	Yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah.
	But what do they talk about?
	How do they frame this conversation?
	I mean, even recently, like a few, maybe a couple months ago or so, I was in the room with my mom and my mom would talk about how she said something like how she has to...
	One of my cousins, he wasn't doing well in school, and she was just saying, oh, he just needs a good beating, and he'll do good.
	I have another cousin who said that I just need to beat her one good time, and then she'll learn not to do that anymore.
	It's just so casual.
	It's just normal.
	Now it blows my mind.
	Before, I would have been right along with him, kind of like, yeah, you know.
	That makes sense because, you know, and before I started listening to you, I would have done that to my children and I would have thought that that was a good thing to do.
	It's just so natural and, not natural, but it's so universally accepted and just everywhere in the family gatherings and community.
	It's just, I don't know, it's really crazy.
	Look, I'm not saying you should, but I mean, if you can imagine or if you have talked about this in the family gatherings, in the black family gatherings, what would you hear?
	What would be the comeback?
	I mean, they would just think it's some white thing or it's some...
	Yeah, white people don't hit their kids.
	I've heard people say that before.
	Like, the Asians yell at and hit their kids, and the blacks yell at and hit their kids.
	But white people don't, right?
	Is that sort of the general?
	Yeah.
	You like an Oreo if you don't want to hit your kids?
	Yeah, pretty much.
	I wish people would act a little more white this way.
	I'm not saying you've got to wear suspenders.
	I'm not saying you've got to dance badly.
	I'm not saying you've got to drive way below the speed limit.
	I'm just saying don't hit your kids.
	Right.
	It's, yeah, and I remember the first time I heard about the whole concept of not spanking your children, because I have one of my best friends, he's Spanish, and he had asthma and a lot of health issues, and so he was spanked one time, and then he started having an asthma attack, and then his mother started learning about alternative ways to raise the children, because obviously she didn't want to kill him, but And then so she, I remember him telling me that she learned that, you know, you shouldn't do it that way.
	You should try to talk to them or discipline them in another way other than spanking.
	I remember thinking at the time, I was just like, that's really crazy.
	Like, you know, if you do something bad, you should get spanked, you know, kind of thing.
	And it was, you know, and obviously I had everybody around me reinforcing that idea.
	But yeah.
	Now, your biological dad, what was the story with that?
	Honestly, I've only heard Pits and Pieces.
	I haven't had the courage to ask them directly, but when I heard, I have two full sisters, and they...
	After my youngest full sister was born, apparently, when my mother found out at the doctor's office that he just said he can't deal with this, and he just kind of left.
	And apparently he was physically abusive to my mother, but that's about as much as I know.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	So...
	And did your mother not like being physically abused?
	Uh, no.
	She didn't like it.
	Did she not feel that he was correcting her in some manner?
	No, I don't think so.
	No.
	Well, no.
	She must have done something wrong.
	He must have been unhappy.
	He must have been disciplining her in some manner.
	Isn't that how you deal with disagreements in relationships?
	You beat the other person until they conform to your expectations?
	Why would she be complaining about that?
	Right.
	Um, yeah.
	Yes, I... And also, I mean, if beating worked, then shouldn't black kids be doing better?
	Yeah.
	I mean, black kids, you know, you sound like a great guy, but man alive, you know, black youths, particularly black male youths, they're not doing so hot, right?
	No, they're not.
	So, where's the biofeedback?
	Where's the empiricism?
	I mean, whatever the black community is doing, not working that well, right?
	No, it's not.
	I mean, what is it black families have on average?
	5% of the wealth of white families?
	Yeah.
	Blacks, youths committing crimes, many, many times that of whites.
	If it's any consolation, whites do it more than...
	Asians.
	But anyway, if this was such a great plan, hit them till they break into virtue.
	Smash them until the art comes out.
	I mean, ah, yes, but of course the black community can say, but it's white racism, right?
	Right.
	It's nothing we as a community are doing.
	It's not the rampant illegitimacy.
	Right?
	It's not the absent fatherhood.
	Nothing like that.
	It's white people.
	Boy, when you have a scapegoat, you just don't have a mirror, right?
	Right.
	Which is not to say, you know, and you always have to put these caveats in.
	Of course there's racism.
	But I'll tell you, brother, and I mean brother because we're brothers in thought.
	Holy crap.
	I mean, have a stroll over to my videos on Nelson Mandela.
	Have a stroll over to my videos on Martin Luther King Jr.
	Oh my God.
	Oh my god!
	I mean, I don't think I've been called that vile names from my real white haters!
	Although, I still like Hunky.
	Still a big fan of that.
	But this racism, I don't think it's endemic.
	I think there's definitely racism in the world.
	I don't think it's endemic.
	Look, I don't mean to get on a big sort of black-white racism thing, but As a child advocate, you know, the firefighters go to where the fire is.
	And I've certainly tried to aim stuff at the black community by putting the anti-spanking message into the Zimmerman video and so on.
	And holy, I mean, at some point, at some point, you know, and I know that there's efforts with the system, I'm sorry, movement and all that.
	There's efforts within the black community to deal with this stuff.
	But man, oh man, trying to find some way to...
	To not be as aggressive with the kids.
	Boy, that would be magic.
	I mean, one of the places I donate to, even though they do some religious teachings, one of the places I donate to is a group exactly focused on teaching black moms peaceful parenting techniques.
	Because that's where the fire is, by and large, in society.
	If you're going to go someplace, that's where you want to go.
	So, anyway, listen, I don't mean to blow past this, and I'm going to go right back to the emotional stuff you're talking about.
	I just wanted to get that off my chest.
	I just want to say something about the racism thing.
	Honestly, I don't...
	I've never met a racist white person ever in my life.
	I don't even think it exists, honestly.
	Everybody else, all the other black people think that there's so much white racism in the world.
	I don't see it.
	I really don't.
	The only racism I see is from black people.
	I mean, it's crazy rampant racism from black people, but I never see any...
	Racism from white people ever.
	It just doesn't happen.
	I don't know.
	Okay, so give me a look behind the curtain.
	So what sort of racist stuff do you see from black people?
	I know, look, I mean, I'm fairly aware that the blacks and Hispanics, not exactly a morning children's cartoon of extra hugging.
	But what do you see in the black community?
	Oh, it's just kind of like, you know, a lot of, you know...
	think oh they just think differently or they just they there's really this kind of attitude that just white people are just different they're just really different uh as far as their thought process and they think that they have this idea that white people just hate black people they just don't like them like this is something that uh white people are out to get them you know the whole the man keeping you down kind of thing and it's just like i don't know i just Like I said, I've never seen it before.
	I don't think that it really is a thing.
	And it's just a really fundamental belief that it seems like a lot of black people have.
	And it's, I don't know, it's strange.
	And I know I kind of felt like, not that I was kind of treated in a racial manner, but I did feel when I was in high school that White people were almost afraid of me in a sense that if I... They weren't sure what kind of black person I would be.
	Would I be the kind of black person that...
	They weren't sure if...
	Okay, am I going to be a nice black person?
	Go ahead.
	I know what you mean.
	Go on.
	So until I approach them or talk to them...
	Excuse me, young man.
	Would your last name happen to be a Roman letter?
	Is it X by any chance?
	I just need to know before we go any further.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, so that would be the extent of what, you know, if you can even call that racism.
	But, I mean, given the amount of, you know, stuff that, you know, when you look at the statistics that black people are doing, robberies and rapes and stuff like that, I don't blame them, you know, for being a little bit cautious.
	Well, look, I mean, was it Jesse Jackson who said, I think 20 years ago, he said, one of the saddest things that has occurred to me as a black activist is hearing footsteps behind me on a street at night, turning around and being relieved it's a white person.
	Yeah.
	So if caution around black youths is racist, then it seems some racial leaders in the black community are pretty racist.
	And unfortunately, it's just statistics.
	Right.
	I'm like that too.
	And it's not fundamentally about – it's about markers, right?
	I mean you turn around and you see a black guy walking in a three-piece suit holding a computer magazine.
	You're not going to be that freaked out, right?
	But you see some white kid with swastikas on his forehead and crap like that.
	Well, you're probably going to be kind of nervous.
	So there is a kind of display that is alarming to some people.
	But anyway, sorry.
	Don't let me tell you about the black experience.
	Go ahead.
	I absolutely feel the same way.
	I mean, and all black people feel the same way.
	If they are around somebody who looks like that, looks like a thug or whatever, they're going to be more cautious.
	But they won't acknowledge that they are just as cautious as a white person would be.
	And they'll call it racism when a white person does it.
	But then when they do it, it's just like they don't even see what they're doing.
	They can't see that they're contradicting themselves.
	And it's freaking really frustrating.
	Well, and I mean, the blacks suffer at the fists and knives and bullets of blacks the most.
	Right.
	I mean, yeah, obviously some white people are scared of black violence, but my God, I mean, the amount of destruction that occurs within the black community as a result of this kind of violence is absolutely staggering.
	And, you know, I think, I mean, there's lots of theories floating around, which we don't have to dig into at this point.
	But, you know, the one thing that is clear that can be done is to focus on the peaceful parenting.
	I don't know if it comes from, some people say it comes from slavery.
	Some people say it comes from religiosity.
	Some people, who knows, right?
	But Man Alive, this idea that if white people are doing it, we can't do it.
	Yeah.
	You know, I mean, you know, we're not doing that bad, white people.
	Everything we do is wrong, you know?
	I mean, I agree that our breakdancing quite often is the suckiness, but man, there's some things that aren't too bad and, you know, emulate, you know, I look at Asian study habits and say, well, that's pretty damn good, you know?
	I mean, there's things we can learn from each other.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, and...
	Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
	I can see the crazy now.
	I couldn't see it before, but now it's just like how what I – I mean I'm a pretty oddball in my family.
	Now I'm a black atheist anarchist, and so it's like – I don't even know what kind of cookie to call you now.
	I mean, you're not an Oreo.
	I mean, I don't even know.
	You have some rainbow cannon shot into the sky.
	You're like, Mr.
	Christie Fireworks.
	Who knows, right?
	There's no confined insult to give you from that perspective from any community.
	So we have completely escaped categorization even from a negative standpoint.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Go ahead.
	No, I was going to say, it's really difficult to talk to anybody in my family about my viewpoint just because of how unique my views are because of the race that I'm part of.
	And it's just like, you know, people are like, man, you have some really wild and extreme ideas.
	And it's like, I don't even know what to say to that.
	Wait, hang on.
	The community that has, to some degree, embraced Louis Farrakhan is saying that you have some crazy, extreme ideas because you're into the non-aggression principle.
	Oh, yeah.
	Right.
	Well, all right.
	That's not good.
	All right.
	So let's get...
	If you don't mind, I mean, I find this stuff fascinating, but I do want to make sure that we talk about the personal issues that you called up about.
	All right.
	So your bio dad beat your mom.
	Obviously, I would assume that was violence towards you kids.
	You said you have two...
	You have two full sisters, is that right?
	And you've got some half-siblings from the second dad?
	No, I have some half-siblings from my biological dad.
	My stepdad never had any children of his own.
	My biological dad had another...
	Oh, he had another wife, or another girlfriend.
	He had two extra wives, two other wives.
	He had one half-sister from his second wife and another...
	and hates.
	She's a terrible witch lady.
	Is there a black cliche that your biological dad did not inhabit?
	Right.
	Did he walk with a pimp roll?
	Did he have a funny hat to one side?
	What possible...
	God, that's so annoying.
	Anyway.
	Your mom...
	She married your dad.
	Did he have already the siblings from her or has that been since?
	No, the siblings were after.
	I'm the oldest and the two...
	Oh, okay, okay.
	Yeah, so those are after his...
	Although it's kind of questionable whether his daughter from his second wife, if she was conceived while they were married or not.
	So that's kind of...
	Yeah, so that's kind of questionable, but...
	But anyways, you know, I don't—there wasn't too much— Sorry, did he do child support?
	Did he do—like, did he keep you guys in casual?
	Well, apparently he put in child support, but a lot of times he didn't pay it, and my mom told me how he's like, oh, he doesn't pay it all the time, and he's late and stuff like that.
	And, you know, my mom was always telling me she just can't wait until my youngest full sister gets— Right.
	- Right. - All right, so, did he, was he part of your life at all after he left? - My mom didn't want it apparently, but my stepdad said that he should be a part of our lives And I think that was just an attempt to have somebody feel the role of a father since he was so neglectful and he didn't either want to do it or didn't know how to do it or whatever the reason he decided to do that was.
	But yeah, apparently he was the advocate to make sure that he was in our lives.
	And he was.
	And I didn't suffer a whole lot of abuse from him.
	I remember being spanked by him once.
	And it's really crazy how your memory works because I remember...
	That entire event, where I was, the couch I was on, and everything, even though it only happened once.
	I remember the whole thing.
	How old were you?
	Do you remember?
	I was young.
	I had to be like seven.
	Something around that age.
	Okay.
	And did your mom use corporal punishment at all?
	Yeah.
	Not as often, but yes.
	And how would she do it?
	Just through spanking.
	She used the belt as well.
	God, wow, this is like, I'm sorry.
	No, no, you've got nothing to apologize.
	I'm the annoying guy looking for moral precision in the language, so you've got nothing to apologize to me for.
	I'm incredibly sorry you went through all of that.
	I remember one time in particular, my stepdad, and it was the most vivid spanking I've ever had.
	First off, my sisters were being spanked for whatever the same reason, and they were in the room adjacent to mine, so I can hear their shrill screaming, and it was a horrible screaming sound.
	And then he burst into my room, and I had a bump bag, and it was in the corner, and I ran.
	I tried to run away, but there was a wall there, obviously, but I was so afraid.
	I was just trying to get away from him.
	And he grabbed me by the leg and picked me up upside down and was beating me with the belt while I was hanging upside down.
	And I remember that so vividly.
	It was absolutely terrifying.
	Yeah, it would be.
	Do you know where your mom was at that time?
	I think she was in our room, which was right next to my room.
	I'm sure she heard the whole thing.
	I must tell you, Presley, that I fail fundamentally to comprehend how much the bond between mother and child has been broken when the mother does not throw herself in front of whatever is harming her child.
	You know, there are these stories of like the moms who like lift the cars That their kids are trapped under in some accident.
	That they mother grizzlies.
	You come and you harm my children.
	You snarl and get in front and block.
	Right.
	I mean, you try getting between a mom ape and her cub.
	Or a mama grizzly, as I said, and her cub.
	I mean, they are fierce in the protection of their young.
	I can't Fathom how a woman can harm the fruit of her loins, but also how she can bring a man into her life who dangles, who beats her daughters and dangles her son upside down and beats him and doesn't, like, chew his face off.
	Right.
	Doesn't launch herself at him to protect her children.
	I don't fundamentally, even remotely understand that at all, how you can just sit there and Yeah, seems legit.
	It's just discipline.
	It's for their own good.
	It's like, ooh, what the hell is wrong with these moms?
	I think part of the difficulty that I have with placing this on her is that our relationship is kind of like We'll laugh and we'll make a lot of jokes and things like that.
	And she's very friendly.
	And there's really no aggression at all.
	Obviously now that I'm older, but I don't feel like I'm...
	I don't know.
	It's just...
	She doesn't seem very...
	Forceful as much anymore.
	And I did notice that as I grew up, it was...
	Because one thing that really bothered me when I was younger is she always seemed to have the answer.
	Anything I said was just wrong.
	And then I started to grow up and get a little bit more intelligent and she couldn't deny certain things anymore.
	Well, you know why she's nice now, right?
	Yeah, doesn't have power over me anymore.
	Well, it's not just that.
	A, she doesn't have power over you anymore.
	And B, she needs things from you.
	Like, you're in the free market now.
	We all grow up in a dictatorship and then we suddenly convert to the free market when we become adults and everybody tries to pretend that we're not in the free market and we've got to see all these people and no matter what and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	We try to make parenthood into some sort of public sector union that you can't escape.
	But...
	She now has to woo you, whereas before she could beat you, right?
	Because now she wants you to come over and you don't have to.
	You had to live in her house.
	You had to obey her rules because she could hit you.
	She had a guy there who could hit you, who she could call for backup when you got too big for her to hit.
	She could call him for backup because he's bigger.
	So you had to deal with that, right?
	You had to put up with that.
	You couldn't leave that.
	Now you're an adult, right?
	You don't have to go by if you don't want to.
	So now, she's got to be more sugar and spice, right?
	Yeah, and I never understood.
	When I went off to college, I didn't understand why I never wanted to talk to her.
	It was just I didn't want her to call me.
	I was like, every time she called me, I rolled my eyes, and then I moved out, and it was just kind of like she wanted to come over.
	I just thought it was kind of a, well, I'm older now, and parents just aren't cool.
	I just don't want to hang around them.
	Now I'm seeing more of that.
	I know some people actually call their parents and they go and see how they are and stuff like that.
	To me, that was always really weird.
	I was like, why would you want to call your parents?
	I never understood why people would want to do that.
	Now I'm understanding more that it's because of all the stuff that happened in my childhood that I don't have nearly as close a bond with her as I should under better circumstances.
	Well, look, I mean, your biological father hit your mother, right?
	Right.
	Does she want to have anything to do with him?
	No.
	Not at all.
	So, what's the principle there?
	You hit me, fuck off.
	You hit me, I don't want to have anything to do with you.
	You beat me, I don't want to have anything to do with you.
	So, she's very concerned, I would imagine, deep down, that you're going to make that same connection and you're going to evaluate...
	Your relationship with your mother and your stepfather, according to the same principles that your mother evaluated, her relationship with your biological father.
	You hit me, don't want to have anything to do with you.
	I mean, she can't, I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, I'm just saying that she can't possibly complain if you have problems wanting to go and see her, right?
	Right.
	Because she already made that case and lived that case, which is, he hit me, I don't want to have anything to do with him.
	Right.
	So she can't say, well, it doesn't matter if people hit you.
	You've got to go and see them anyway.
	It's like, hey, you didn't have anything to do with Dad, right?
	Yeah.
	Another thing that she did when I was a kid, there was a lot of...
	I really felt like when I was a kid that I couldn't really kind of explore the things that I wanted to explore.
	I know my stepdad, every time I brought a bad report card home, he would call me stupid and...
	And my mom, you know, I was really, I really liked to write music, or not write music, but I really used to like poetry.
	And I actually have a really good singing voice.
	And I actually have a range that's really high and can actually go really high and really low.
	And I wanted to refine that and get better with it.
	But And my mom knew I had a really big interest in music.
	And she really just was like, no, you need to go to college.
	And she was really discouraging.
	And I just really kind of ended up dropping the whole music thing.
	And I've lost all of my...
	I haven't lost my voice, obviously.
	That's kind of biological.
	But my ability to control my voice and the sounds has gone away because you need to practice that.
	Now, wait.
	You know what I'm going to ask next, right?
	No.
	What are you going to ask?
	We got a guy named Presley on the show who can sing.
	Listen, people put up with my yawping from time to time.
	You wouldn't give us a bar or two, would you, brother?
	Oh, man.
	It's been so long since I've sang.
	Okay, well, what was your favorite song to sing?
	Oh, man.
	Brian McKnight, Back at One.
	All right.
	Hey, if you want to, listen.
	Listen.
	I mean, here's what I think.
	Why the fuck not?
	You love to sing.
	You know, make a joyful noise.
	Share your love with the world.
	Okay.
	Oh, man.
	All right.
	Yes, undeniable that we should be together.
	It's unbelievable how I used to say that I'll fall never.
	The basses need to know if you don't know just how I feel.
	Then let me show you now that I'm for real.
	If all things and times I will reveal, yeah.
	Ah, beautiful!
	Love it!
	That's great stuff, man.
	Very nice.
	I was waiting for you.
	I thought you were going to do Soar Up to give us some Marvin Gaye Stratosphere stuff, but that was nice.
	Sweet time.
	A nice little vibrato.
	Very nice.
	Soulful.
	Good stuff.
	Alright.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	No problem.
	I really appreciate that.
	Yeah.
	Don't let that go, man.
	Don't save that for twice a year drunk karaoke.
	Do something with that instrument.
	It's a beautiful thing.
	Alright.
	Um...
	So what do you think the effects have been on you, Presley, of this aggression that you experienced, this violence?
	It's really hard to say what the violence did for me.
	I really feel like the discouraging part, which came from my mother, actually had a greater effect on me than the violence.
	The effect of the violence is not something that I don't know.
	I don't know what effect that had on me.
	My job right now is just...
	I don't know if most people would, but a lot of people would think that my job is a dream job.
	I've started to notice recently that it's really a trap.
	I get paid for 40 hours and I work 3 or 4 hours a week because...
	I work tech support over the phone, and I work the third shift, so I get maybe five calls a week.
	And so I don't get very many calls.
	I don't do very much.
	And so I sit at home, and I play video games for like eight hours on my shift, and I have the two days off for the weekend.
	I just get all this money, and I barely work.
	And it's just so comforting to be here in this job.
	And I've tried to get out And do other things.
	And it's just really hard to...
	When I come across something that's really difficult, I really just kind of tell myself I can't do it.
	And I kind of really shut down.
	Difficult like what?
	Do you mean the music stuff or something else?
	No, not the music stuff.
	That was really natural for me.
	But something like programming, because I have an IT degree.
	And if I were to really try to get...
	And I'd fail a few times.
	I would really get discouraged and I maybe would put it down and not go back to it for another month or two.
	I have all of these books.
	I have a whole library shelf of books and I'll start reading the books and I won't complete the books.
	I have a really hard time following through with things and getting them done.
	And I hate it because I have a cousin.
	And his father really taught him a lot of things about discipline and stuff like that.
	And he's always posting stuff on Facebook about entrepreneurship.
	And he's topped in sales at one of the T-Mobile branches.
	And he's really doing it big.
	And I'm just kind of looking at him like I wish I had that drive.
	And I just don't.
	And I just hate it.
	I can't do that.
	This is terrible.
	Right What games do you play?
	There's the most popular game in the world called League of Legends.
	It has the most players in the world right now.
	Yeah, I play that game.
	Is it like a superhero World of Warcraft kind of thing?
	It's a 5v5 competitive game where you have a team of four other players and yourself and go up against another team of Four other players, and you guys have a match, and then you basically play, and then after the game's over, you can just re-cue and go back in the queue and play again.
	All right.
	I'm going to tell you what's popped into my head, Presley, and just interrupt me, hopefully in song, if it's not a value.
	Look, you didn't have a whole lot of fun as a child, right?
	No.
	No.
	I mean, you had a whole lot of not fun, right?
	A whole lot of fear, a whole lot of anxiety, a whole lot of not relaxing.
	Not being able to relax, right?
	Right.
	So, one of the...
	And look, I... I get that.
	I get that.
	And one of the things that happened to me because I had such so little fun as a child is I sort of felt I had a fun deficit.
	I was owed fun.
	I was owed enjoyment.
	I was owed relaxation.
	Like I was it was like, you know, oh, you're never too old to have a happy childhood.
	So I'm just going to have happiness now.
	Right.
	Right.
	Thank you.
	But what I found for myself, Presley, was that that was actually a continuation of the dysfunction.
	Because it's like, I was hungry all the time as a child, so I'll eat more food now.
	Well, what happens?
	It doesn't make my childhood any less hungry, it just makes me fat now, right?
	And I actually was literally hungry quite a lot in my childhood.
	I remember when I was a kid thinking, oh man, when I get to be an adult, I can literally buy the whole row of chocolate bars and eat them.
	And you get to be an adult, it's like, well, cavities and diabetes.
	But for me, I had to say, look, I'm not going to get the fun that I was supposed to get as a child.
	I'm never going to get that.
	And Giving it to myself now is actually a way of just avoiding the grieving.
	Right.
	Yeah, there's nothing you can do now to make you have a happy childhood, right?
	Right.
	But don't you feel like you're owed some good times?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	My junior year of college, I... I never drank before in junior year of college and then I started drinking and I drank a lot and I drank like every weekend and sometimes on the weekdays and I got involved with this girl and it was a really dumb thing to do and I did a lot of really stupid stuff.
	And the thing was I really liked the attention because when I was drunk I was funny.
	People laughed at the things I did and I got to Be social.
	And that was also another thing.
	I was very not social with people because, I don't know, I've always had that problem.
	I have that problem now where I still...
	People that I call friends, I have a hard time seeing them as actual friends.
	I feel like at any moment I could just drop them and just never talk to them again and I wouldn't care that much.
	And so I had a real...
	Difficult time connecting with people.
	But when you're in college, you live right next to everybody, so you're kind of connected by geography.
	And so I would drink and be the center of attention, and that was really fun for me.
	And then I stopped doing it after junior year because I embarrassed myself by confessing my love for this girl when I was drunk at a party, and it was just really...
	Embarrassing.
	I've never done anything that embarrassing before.
	And it was really bad.
	And, you know, it wasn't even the thing.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Was it bad because you were drunk?
	Or it was just the wrong girl to declare yourself to?
	Oh, it was absolutely the wrong girl.
	And it wasn't even like a relationship.
	It was kind of this, I knew what it was kind of thing.
	Like, it wasn't a relationship.
	It was just kind of us having sex.
	But I got drunk.
	And it was a big end-of-the-year kind of party thing.
	And I really...
	Made an ass of myself.
	Yeah, it's tough.
	You can't say the I love you while actually staring at her tits.
	I love you guys.
	Can I take a plastic cast of you when I go away?
	Right.
	Yeah, that was really, really bad.
	So, Presley, what goes on in your life if nothing changes sort of like five years from now?
	If nothing changes, I'll be right here in the same spot.
	I'm the best rep that they have.
	I'm certainly the most intelligent, I can tell.
	I've been there for three years now, and I'm definitely not going anywhere.
	Since I do know something about programming, I actually help with the building of some of the internal websites that we have.
	But that's it.
	So I'll still be here, just playing games and taking calls once a Why?
	I mean, if...
	Like, I've been a manager, and, you know, if I had a smart guy who wasn't achieving his potential or whatever, then I'd be sort of swooping in and saying, so, what do you want to do that you could do more of that would be more helpful to the company and so on?
	Do you think there's a reason that's not happening?
	It has happened.
	They actually asked me if they wanted to promote me to team lead.
	And I turned it down just because...
	I mean, if I become team lead, then I have to go into the office, and I have to work the day shift, and I don't hit the night shift, and I have to...
	There's a lot more work.
	Like, would I give up?
	I think what you mean to say is you have to work.
	I mean, you can just end it there, you know?
	It's like, I have to work, dot, dot, dot.
	Oh, yeah, I got it.
	Okay, you gotta work.
	That's no good.
	Right.
	I understand.
	Yeah, so I was like, I don't know about that.
	So, yeah.
	Yeah.
	I'm moving up the worldwide rankings.
	I mean, I'm really focusing on customer satisfaction.
	Right.
	Right.
	Okay, so, I mean, we haven't talked much about the verbal abuse other than that you said that your stepdad would call you dumb.
	Yeah, every report card, he'd be like, what are you stupid?
	What are you stupid?
	And he wouldn't say, you are stupid directly, but obviously that's how I felt.
	He kept saying, what are you stupid?
	And so he said that literally every time I brought a report card back, and I didn't have good report cards.
	What did your stepdad do that he felt his intellectual superiority was so high?
	What was his occupation?
	He, like, did something with newspapers, worked in some kind of factory or something like that.
	Definitely not the most...
	Did something with newspapers?
	Yeah, definitely.
	Are you kidding me?
	He made hats out of newspapers.
	He covered homeless people with newspapers.
	He lined the bottom of bird cages with newspapers.
	I don't know what that means, but it's like...
	Well, let me just say he's definitely not the most intelligent person.
	He stopped helping me with my homework at about probably around 6th grade math.
	Around 6th grade, so yeah.
	Here's a hint.
	You know, when evil people call you evil, you're either super evil or super good, right?
	You're not anywhere in the middle, right?
	When dumb people call you stupid, you're either...
	Incredibly dumb.
	Oh, you're really smart.
	Right.
	I don't think you're dumb.
	Nobody, you know, you wouldn't even listen to my, wouldn't be listening to this show.
	So, so the dumb guy calls you dumb, but to what degree do you think that the stupid word has, you know, there's an, I don't know if you were raised religious, I'm guessing yes.
	Yes.
	But, yeah.
	Going out on a limb.
	Yeah.
	So, you know the story, right?
	Genesis, right?
	I mean, God casts Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, and he puts a flaming sword that bars their way whenever they try to go back in.
	This big, giant, fiery sword comes at them.
	Now, we're born supremely self-confident, I believe, and rightly so.
	Think of all the things we master in the first two years of our life, you know, rolling, sitting up.
	Retaining urine and feces, walking, dancing, whistling, whatever.
	All the crap that we...
	Like, we're incredible.
	You could keep that progress going throughout your whole life.
	You'd be like a deity by the time you were 12.
	So we do this incredible, amazing language, drawing, counting.
	I mean, the things that we can do.
	In the first couple of years, we are incredibly confident, and rightly so.
	And if we were insecure, oh, I don't know if I can walk.
	You know, that looks complicated.
	I mean, these giants can do it, but I'm tiny!
	And when my daughter was learning to walk, I mean, I still so vividly remember.
	She had this little push cart, basically.
	And she would go, like, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth with this push cart, you know, taking more weight off every single time.
	And she was so concentrated.
	You know, she's a good laugher and very responsive.
	But when she was, you could see her laser in.
	Learning to walk.
	Learning to walk.
	Can't talk.
	Learning to walk.
	Don't.
	Hey, don't distract me.
	Don't give me any toys.
	Don't turn the lights on.
	I'm concentrating on the walking.
	And she did it.
	And she did that because she was confident.
	And she was confident because she was born into confidence and that's how we achieve so much when we're little.
	So that to me is like the Garden of Eden.
	And then the gods drive us out with words.
	You know, God didn't materialize his hand into the Garden of Eden, didn't flick them out like somebody playing Subutio.
	He pushed them out with words.
	And then there was a sword that was placed to prevent Adam and Eve from going back to the Garden of Eden, which is confidence.
	They were naked.
	They finally knew they were naked and they were ashamed.
	They became ashamed of themselves with the curse of work and of childbirth given to them by the Christian deity.
	And I felt that in my life I was very confident when I was a toddler.
	My first memory is before I could even walk.
	So I'm guessing nine or ten months.
	I was very confident when I was younger and then adults just Like took a ball-peen hammer to that giant crystal vase of confidence.
	Just bang, bang, bang, bang.
	I was broken.
	You must be broken.
	I was smashed.
	You must be smashed.
	I'm preparing you for a world of smashers by smashing you myself.
	You can only be delivered into adulthood in fragments.
	So I'm doing you a service.
	The wrecking ball of reality is coming in.
	I'm going to start off soft and gentle, just with the kneecaps, work my way up, and you're going to be a fine granulated powder when you get to adulthood.
	And there's this ferocity and this sadism in so many instances when dealing with the people say it's the terrible twos.
	No, this is, it's the confident twos being smashed up by adults.
	My daughter never went through the terrible twos, never went through the terrible threes.
	People go, oh yeah, you think of being a father is so easy.
	You wait till the twos come along.
	I'm like, oh, I guess I'll wait till the twos come along.
	Well, it was pretty easy.
	Oh, you wait till...
	And people say, oh, you wait till she becomes a teenager.
	It's like, well, I bet you that's going to be easy too.
	All of these curses, how bad and tough.
	Ooh, if you had a boy...
	It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	If you had two...
	Anyway, so...
	So I just, like, I'm thinking when you said, well, I could do the coding and so on, and you say you feel this, right?
	Right.
	So I just wonder the degree to which your stepdad, and to some degree your dad, and to more of a degree your mom, put this flaming sword between you and your early confidence.
	Right.
	I do think about that.
	Yeah.
	And it really is, like, I kind of can almost hear the words, not from him, but just, you know, I get my own internal voice saying, you know, you're not going to be able to do this.
	And seeing as how I have an IT degree, I happen to know just how vast the world of technology can be and how much, you know, how much I don't know.
	And, you know, when it comes to, like, you know, I tell myself, you know, if I were to try to build a website and I would try to, you know, develop, you I would think, you know, if I can't get through this, how am I going to do even greater things with the website?
	What do you mean?
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Hang on.
	We can't get through what?
	If I can't get through...
	One thing that I built was I built a call scoring sheet for the team leads so that they can just click the radio buttons and it adds up the total and then they can get the score of the rep.
	And so I built that.
	But during that process, it was really difficult for me to do that because during the process, I was telling myself, as I ran into problems while trying to code it, I was like, if I can't get through this, am I going to get through doing something even more complicated with a website?
	I don't know, anything more complicated because, like I said, I know how complicated it can get.
	And that kind of thing really keeps me from being able to do a lot of stuff.
	Obviously, I pushed through because everybody was expecting me to do it and I was getting paid for it, and so I had to Really buckle down.
	But it was really difficult.
	Yeah, okay.
	Here's 101.
	And I'm sorry, that sounds condescending.
	I don't mean to be that way at all.
	But because you didn't grow up with it.
	I grew up at least with some artistic background.
	I mean, families.
	Anyway, it doesn't matter.
	You cannot observe yourself in the act of creation.
	To observe yourself in the act of creation is to destroy the act of creation.
	So when you are coding, you cannot observe yourself coding.
	You cannot say, well, if I can't get through this, or what's going to happen with this, or what's going to happen with that, right?
	You sang earlier beautifully.
	Thank you.
	And of course, part of you was thinking, hey, I hope I sound all right, right?
	But I hope that you were feeling the music, right?
	You cannot observe yourself.
	And the purpose of abuse is to get you to observe yourself, to push you out of yourself and have you observe yourself.
	You know, when people say, look at yourself from the outside, what do they mean complementarily?
	No.
	They mean get out of your own skin, get out of your own experience, eject yourself from your own body so that it falls away like a downed fighter jet.
	Observe yourself means do not be yourself.
	And so, this is something really, really important to understand because I view programming as art.
	Of course, there's technique.
	So is there technique in painting.
	And dancing.
	There's technique in dancing.
	But the whole point of excellence is to practice and practice and practice and then simply be in the moment of creation.
	Right?
	When I am podcasting, I am not...
	I'm not observing myself.
	I'm not evaluating myself.
	Have I talked about this before?
	How does this compare?
	Is there inspiration happening?
	Was that joke funny?
	What are people going to think of this?
	Does my voice sound funny?
	Is the mic too far away?
	I am speaking as vitally and connectedly as I humanly can.
	And I don't know what the next words are going to be necessarily.
	I don't know if the next metaphor is going to work.
	But when you are in pursuit of creation...
	When you are creating, observation is like setting fire to a movie screen.
	And that's one of the reasons why you prefer video games.
	Listen, playing video games is an escape from self-observation, right?
	Because you're so absorbed in the video game, you're not sitting there outside of yourself looking at yourself, right?
	Right, yeah.
	So through the immediate and intense stimulation of your sensory and nervous system, you escape self-observation, right?
	Right.
	What did you say about declaring yourself to the woman?
	I've never looked so ridiculous, right?
	Viewing yourself from the outside, right?
	Right.
	I bet you the drinking had a lot to do...
	I shouldn't say I bet.
	I would imagine that the drinking had a lot to do with...
	Escaping self-observation.
	The cold critical eye that can float above us and ridicule us and make us seem ridiculous to ourselves, right?
	Right.
	And drinking diminishes that.
	Yeah, I really felt like I was allowed to be whoever I wanted to be when I was drinking because everybody would accept it because I was drunk.
	So it's okay.
	I can just be who I want to be when I'm drunk.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I think that vividly.
	I remember thinking that.
	Yeah, and people will always try to get you to sit outside of yourself and evaluate yourself.
	Because if people can get you to observe yourself, then you will paralyze yourself.
	Self-observation is self-paralysis.
	Yeah.
	And if you want to, you can get the same and even greater high from programming than you can from a video game.
	And I say this having played my share of video games and having done my damn well share of programming.
	You can get the same high.
	and a greater high from programming than you do from video games.
	But you have to start to get the discipline together to not observe yourself.
	Right.
	And this doesn't mean you never do anything wrong.
	You can never compare your actions to a higher standard.
	It simply means in the moment of creation, fuck observation, fuck evaluation, fuck analysis.
	You fucking well create.
	And you align yourself with that creation and you get behind that creation and there is nothing that creation can do wrong and there is nothing that you can do wrong in the act of creating.
	And then, after the skyfall of the new mountain of what you have created, then you can map that piece of shit, and you can find out if it's good or bad or right or wrong, and you can evaluate it all you want.
	But in the moment of creation, commit to the creation, not to the observation, which brings a hammer down on the delicate crystal of making something new.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	I think I can do that.
	If you're dancing and you watch yourself from the outside, you fall.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, definitely.
	Definitely.
	I mean, when I write, which I actually dictate, but when I When I'm creating a book or when I'm writing or dictating, it's the ideas, the language, and the words.
	I'm not thinking, what are people going to think of this?
	What's the book cover going to be like?
	Does my voice sound funny?
	It's the passionate connection with whatever it is that you're creating.
	With all negative language pushed aside as a stain upon the very act of creation.
	Oh, sorry, somebody's asked, how do you avoid viewing yourself in the moment?
	Well, anger.
	Anger.
	Fuck you, critical voices.
	Hey, Critical Voices, you feel like taking over here?
	Y'all know so much.
	Why don't you take over?
	Oh, do you not want to take over?
	Oh, don't you want to do the writing?
	Oh, then maybe you should step the fuck aside and let me get something done here.
	Afterwards, I will consult with you.
	I'm not calling you an enemy.
	Right now, you're in the way.
	Right now, you're shouting numbers in my ear while I'm trying to do complex math.
	So fuck off with that.
	Talk to me later.
	Get behind me, help me, or fuck off for now.
	And of course, you're really not talking to your critical voices, are you?
	Right.
	Who are you talking to?
	My parents.
	Yeah.
	All the people who put that bullshit in your head.
	All the people holding you upside down and hitting your tender body, right?
	Right.
	Back the fuck off.
	Give a brother some space to create.
	You know, don't criticize my cooking if you're not willing to step into the goddamn kitchen.
	Right.
	If you can write better, inner critics, then take over!
	I leave...
	The dictation microphone in your hands.
	Show me how it's done!
	Show me how!
	You can create so wonderfully that you can criticize me in the very act of creating.
	You're so good at it, you do it!
	Oh, don't you want to do it?
	Oh, not such a tough talker now, are you?
	Then back the fuck off and let me create.
	Help me create!
	But don't get in my goddamn way.
	Between me and creation, It's a straight 100-yard track without even air resistance.
	You get in the way, you're going to have a step-sized hole right in your ass.
	Get behind me and propel me.
	Step aside.
	Meet me at the end.
	We'll talk about it then.
	But don't get in my fucking way.
	Unless you can do it better.
	Right.
	Right.
	Absolutely.
	All these people tell me how I should be doing this show.
	Call in.
	I'm not hard to find.
	Right.
	Do a better show!
	God!
	I mean, it's not like the...
	I don't have a giant mere spaceship worth a trillion dollars floating over the planet beaming special microwave waves directly into people's brains.
	I'm a guy with a mic and an internet plan.
	That's it!
	You got a cell phone?
	You know where the library is?
	Go compete!
	Don't tell me how to do it better!
	Show me how to do it better!
	Oh, that Freddie Mercury!
	I don't think he was a great singer!
	I don't think he was a good frontman!
	I could do so much better!
	Why are you talking about him?
	Go and do it!
	Don't bitch at me!
	Beat me!
	Go win.
	Go take my audience.
	Go do what you can do.
	That's so fat.
	Oh, that's deaf guy.
	He doesn't know what he's talking about.
	He's an idiot.
	He's a doobie.
	Well, there's obviously a market for philosophy.
	If I suck, come and don't suck.
	Come and be without the sucking.
	Come and be with the brains.
	Come and be with the skill.
	I don't like the way he talked to that caller.
	Get that caller to come on your show!
	Show me how it's done!
	I'll worry about how I talk to my callers when nobody wants to talk to me anymore.
	Anyway.
	I just really want to point out to you that these inner critics is a mean.
	You don't want to be somebody who doesn't self-analyze and self-criticize, of course, right?
	But at the same time, the inner critics can't be Air horns to your symphony, right?
	Right.
	So you've got some stuff to be angry about.
	I know we've brushed past your mom, but basically, Presley, your stepdad was in your life because your mom wanted him there.
	Right.
	Right?
	She invited him in.
	I hate to put it this crudely, she had sex with him, repeatedly, at least three times that we know of.
	And she cooked for him.
	I assume she kept house with him.
	She did whatever, right?
	Right.
	So he was there because she wanted him there.
	Yeah.
	And the only fundamental reward mechanism that men have is sex.
	Mm-hmm.
	I mean, I hate to put it that crudely.
	Mm-hmm.
	Because biologically, that's the only thing that reinforces whatever genetics we have, right?
	If you have some preferences and you don't get any sex, those preferences will not be part of the future gene pool, right?
	Right.
	So the only positive reinforcement that fundamentally matters to men or to women is sex.
	Whoever you're giving sex to is the absolute pinnacle of your life's existence.
	Yeah.
	So she was like, hey, that guy who holds my kids upside down and beats them with a belt, fuck, he's the best.
	Yeah, she had already had three kids by the time she met him.
	And I know that a lot of people in my family, they don't understand why he got with my mom.
	Yeah.
	Because, you know, women with three kids and you go off and get married to them and take in all those kids and everybody's like, oh, he's such a great guy for taking in all those kids and stuff like that.
	And, you know, the thing that pisses me off is like when I go over there and then they say stuff, you know, I'm so proud of you.
	You know, we did a good job raising you.
	You know, you got a job.
	You got your own place.
	And it's just like, you know, you don't have any kids and, you know, you're stable.
	And it's just kind of like, you know, I'm thinking like, you know, that had nothing to do with you.
	Yeah.
	You know, they weren't in class when I was in college.
	They didn't go out and get the job and interview and all that.
	They didn't do any of that.
	And it's just like they're trying to take credit when they did all this shit to me.
	And it's just...
	It really pisses me off.
	Well, this is...
	It's like a communist dictatorship taking credit for the remnants of the economy kept alive by the black market.
	Right.
	I mean, not only did they not do the stuff that they claim, but they...
	development significantly.
	But now you're part of the propaganda machine, right?
	Now you're part of, well, you've got to now believe this.
	And now we're rewriting the past and it's all 1984 stuff, right?
	Right.
	Got to rewrite the past.
	No one's allowed to have any dissenting opinions.
	We were always a happy and wonderful family.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And nothing bad happened.
	And if it did, well, we did the best we could.
	But the knowledge we had at the time, and I was beaten as a kid.
	It turned out all right, didn't you?
	Yeah.
	I like that.
	People say, well, your mom must have done something right, Steph, because look who you are.
	Yeah.
	No, they say that a lot about the concentration camp victims, too.
	A lot of concentration camp victims came out and wrote some amazing plays, amazing poetry.
	So, yay Nazis!
	Good job!
	Provoking all that creativity.
	Wow!
	Those Nazis must have done something, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah, I mean, I would certainly talk about your issues, but also focus on You know, your brain's dying on the stem, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, video games are fun, but they're fun like candy is tasty, right?
	It is.
	Yeah.
	But it's not going to do you much good in excess, right?
	No, it's not.
	So I try and cut back on that.
	Certainly get involved in some more creative stuff at work and try and work on really pushing aside the inner critics and simply focusing on the very act of creation itself.
	And at the same time, I would start to probe.
	Your family sounds pretty volatile.
	So I would just start to probe a little bit.
	And you understand, I'm not telling you anything like you should do.
	I'm just telling you what my thoughts are.
	I just start to probe a little bit.
	And I think it's going to have to be pretty delicate because, and I say this with cognizance of that you're talking in a black community where this stuff is so ridiculously normalized.
	It's like you're saying, well, maybe there is no moon.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Well, you can just see it.
	It's right there.
	Because you're going to be running right up against a community standard that is deeply entrenched, widely shared, and considered a virtue.
	White people can go in guns blazing, so to speak, but I'd go in and lay out the land a little bit first.
	And just start to...
	Do they even remember it?
	Do they acknowledge it?
	Do they know that it happened?
	Do they know the extent that it happened?
	Are they willing to admit, just probe and see what's out there?
	Have you ever done any therapy or anything like that?
	No, I haven't.
	Sounds like you have some time.
	Yeah, that's true.
	Sounds like you have some money.
	So I would definitely look into that.
	Now, listen, I've got to move on to the next caller.
	There's no way, no way that I could get on Bended Knee and ask you for another little song.
	Tiny.
	Okay.
	No, it was beautiful, man.
	Listen, it's a lot more melodious than anything I could put out, so...
	Right.
	Well, thanks for the call.
	Do you have a second favorite song?
	Oh, I love it.
	Because you don't have any.
	Oh, I'm listening.
	I'm trying to remember that song, On Bending Knee.
	I can't remember how it goes, but I used to love that song as well.
	Do you know any Sam Cooke?
	No.
	Oh, the youth!
	Oh, the youth!
	Oh, man.
	Take your time.
	Listen, if you're game, I don't mind if you take some time to think about it.
	That's fine.
	Okay, alright.
	Give me a second.
	Uh...
	Let's see, what do I have here?
	All right, so, okay, I remember how this goes.
	I'm going to try to sing this on bended knee.
	Darling...
	I can't explain.
	Where do we lose our way?
	A girl is driving me insane.
	And I know I just need one more chance to prove my love to you.
	If you come back to me, I guarantee that I'll never let you go.
	I'm not going to go into the chorus.
	Can't go that far.
	Oh, come on!
	Oh, song is interruptus!
	Don't ever do that to a woman.
	Listen, I'd just like to chat with you for a little bit.
	Anyway.
	Okay, first of all, nice falsetto, good belting.
	I just really want it technically very nice.
	So I hope that you'll keep with it.
	And anytime you want to come back and do an intro, I'm all over it.
	All right.
	All right.
	Well, thanks, man.
	Keep us posted, and I really, really appreciate your call.
	It was a real pleasure to talk with you, and I hope that we get to talk again.
	All right.
	All right.
	Thanks, man.
	You're welcome.
	Bye-bye.
	All right.
	Thank you, Presley.
	Dan is up there.
	Somebody soiled their pants.
	I think that's a compliment in the chat room, I just said.
	Alright, Dan is up next, and Dan wrote in and said, How did Steph come to formulate his theory of literary criticism, wherein magic is always and forever a metaphor for madness?
	And what kind of evidence slash argumentation would it take to change his theoretical framework, or a specific interpretation of any given piece of fantasy fiction, such as Frozen?
	Alrighty.
	Switching gears.
	Um...
	So, for those who don't know, my approach to fantasy is that everything that occurs in stories, which is overt magic, must be occurring in the mind of the narrator or the storyteller or whoever.
	The protagonist, if it's If it's that way structured, if it's not like a first person eye story or whatever, right?
	So it must occur because magic does not occur in the world, right?
	Magic does not occur in the world.
	And so if magic is born being portrayed as real, then what's...
	Crazy people are not people who have irrational thoughts.
	Crazy people are people who have irrational thoughts and don't know that they're irrational.
	So I'm not crazy.
	We all have irrational thoughts.
	I mean, 98% of our thoughts come from our monkey brain and don't make a whole lot of sense sometimes.
	But because magic doesn't exist in the world, if magic is portrayed as existing in the world, it must be a portrayal of madness.
	Because magic doesn't exist in the world.
	And only mad people believe that magical thoughts make reality.
	Now, I'm not saying that everyone who writes about magic is insane.
	I'm saying it's a portrayal of madness insofar as it takes an internal state, which is a rational thinking, and makes that internal state external and real, which is fundamentally an act of madness.
	Does that make any sense?
	I'm not saying do you agree with it.
	I'm just saying do you at least understand the framework?
	Yeah, that's pretty clear.
	I guess one question that I would have immediately about that would be, how do we differentiate the rest of the fictional world that the writer creates, including all those non-magical characters?
	Because the world itself that the writers are discussing also don't exist in reality.
	So how do you draw a differentiation there?
	I'm not sure I quite follow that.
	Okay, so I guess in the Disney universe, right, all of the non-magical characters that exist in that space are also entities that don't occur in reality.
	So wouldn't they be as equally a representation of madness in that theory?
	Well, no, because I mean, so you're talking about like in Frozen, there's like Olaf and people who don't have magical powers, right?
	Yeah.
	Well, so they are portrayals of human beings who could exist in the world and don't have any supernatural powers and are subject to the laws of gravity and so on, right?
	Okay.
	Let's take another example.
	So, in the movie The Matrix, everybody lives...
	Oh, spoiler!
	Sorry, I've got to do it by now.
	Everybody lives in a computer simulation, right?
	Right.
	In other words, everybody lives in the products of the mind of another person, like in this case, I guess, the machines or the robots.
	And therefore, because it's a program, you can disrupt and change the program.
	You can fly.
	You can do bullet time and stuff like that, right?
	Now, in reality, you can't do bullet time and you can't fly and you can't do all this other kinds of cool stuff, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Now, if I did believe I could fly and do bullet time and genuinely believe that, I'd get shot and fall off a building, right?
	So, what they're portraying there is what a crazy person would believe to be true, right?
	Right.
	I guess the question would be, why does the fictional universe in any given fantasy work have to be, I guess, viewed from our particular perspective, using our laws of physics?
	Why can't we just have a literary theory of literary criticism that just suspends disbelief about the ground rules that are laid out at the beginning of a story and then just interpret the kind of metaphors going on in the story?
	You know, just taking the author's word at face value with respect to things like that.
	But that would be to say that we have no value or capacity to discriminate between reality and unreality, between reality and fantasy.
	That would also be madness, right?
	People who are crazy can't distinguish between madness and between fantasy and reality.
	And so the reason we call something in the movies magic is because it's impossible in the world, right?
	Well, and so we like there are stories that are set in worlds that are perfectly possible, more or less.
	And then there are stories set in worlds which are completely impossible and don't exist.
	And so we have, you know, fantasy, science fiction, we have documentary, we have fiction, and so we have all these categories, and a lot of them have to do with realistic portrayals or anti-realistic portrayals.
	So if you say, well, why don't we just have one theory for everything...
	Well, that's not being able to differentiate between magic and reality, which would be another example of madness.
	I guess even...
	But even in the world of Frozen, those characters recognize certain aspects or certain characteristics as different than the way that the rest of the population behaves, right?
	So, like, the king and Anna and the general population recognizes that Elsa...
	No, no, no, no, no.
	No, impossible.
	Strange or abnormal?
	Look, she might be somebody who picked up amazing piano in three weeks because of whatever, right?
	Or she could have the ability to spontaneously create haikus while doing somersaults on a trapeze act or something.
	Those would be strange and unusual, but not impossible, right?
	Being able to spontaneously create ice and bring eternal winter to an entire kingdom is not even remotely possible, right?
	So you have to be precise in what you're talking about.
	Strange and unusual, no.
	Anna's powers are impossible, which means they cannot be occurring in the real world.
	So in the story, they must be occurring in the minds of people.
	Like in the sixth sense...
	Spoiler!
	In the sixth sense...
	Over a decade, you're okay.
	Yeah, over a decade, I think I'm okay.
	In the sixth sense, when he says, I'm born in debt, I see fed people.
	Right?
	So in the sixth sense, he sees ghosts.
	Ghosts don't exist in the real world, but post-traumatic stress disorder kind of does, right?
	And our memories of evil people or evildoers, they kind of do exist in the real world.
	So in the sixth sense, he can't actually be seeing ghosts.
	So he's seeing the shadows of past people in other people's minds.
	And he's picking up on the stories because of small cues in their bodies and in their, right?
	And so you have all these shows like...
	Psych is a show where this guy pretends to be a psychic.
	He's not.
	He's just incredibly observant.
	And he was taught how to be observant by some guy who used to be a lawyer on L.A. Law.
	Anyway, he's just incredibly observant.
	Now, everyone, he claims to have psychic powers, but...
	And there's a lot of this stuff where we used to think it was okay, or you could sort of do this, but there's mostly now what they have is...
	Stuff which is supposed to be psychic but isn't in fact psychic.
	The kid in the sixth sense does not have a dad, asks James.
	So what is possible and what is not possible is a kind of elemental dividing line in stories.
	And this is why there's a theory which I and others have worked on, which is that since there's no magic, then...
	In the Harry Potter stories, he's violent because of the result of horrible trauma.
	And his parents were murdered.
	He's been stuffed under the stairs in a tiny room.
	He's rejected and scorned and starved and humiliated and so on.
	And he blows up and he's sent to an asylum.
	And because there is no magic, there are no magic wands, there's none of all of this stuff.
	And so we're in his...
	Psychotic break with reality.
	He's gone to an asylum, but he pretends it's a school where he's learning basically how to be more crazy.
	So we have to differentiate between that which is possible in the world and that which is not possible in the world.
	Otherwise, I think the craziness kind of beat us, if that makes any sense.
	Well, I guess...
	Why do you draw the line at magic within a fantasy story and not just the entire fantasy story as an impossibility?
	When we open a book and see that this book is not meant to...
	When you read the little disclosure at the beginning of the book that says that it's entirely fictional or just an invention of the author's imagination, everybody understands that what's going on in a storyline isn't something that actually occurs in reality.
	But then they interpret the use of magic as analogies for things other than madness, like political power or certain kinds of communication between individuals.
	There are a lot of other analogies that magic can stand in for, aside from madness.
	But political power rests on madness as well.
	The madness in the belief of the existence of the state.
	The madness in the belief of the virtue of violence for one group of people, but not another group of people.
	So even if political power is, or if magic is a stand-in for political power, they're both kinds of madness.
	One is just something that does exist in the world, and the other is something that doesn't, which is magic.
	So, I mean, I guess, would your contention be that political power doesn't exist in the world?
	No, no.
	Political power does exist in the world, but it rests on madness.
	Okay.
	So...
	Like patriotism.
	Like, we need the government.
	Like, the government is virtuous.
	Like, violence is good, but also evil.
	I mean, that's...
	You know, in the future, they will look at that and say, this is psychotic thinking.
	I mean, this is insane.
	I guess that...
	One thing I'd like—I'd be curious about is how you differentiate—or if you draw a distinction between insanity and certain kinds of effective decision-making, because it seems to me, you know, like pretty clearly the people, all the politicians who control the levers of power and are able to convince the general population of the virtues of the state and so on, they make very calculated decisions in order to achieve their specific ends, right, which is just to accumulate more political power, right?
	Yeah, like the Democrats have just dropped Obama from all of their speeches, right?
	Oops!
	The postage stamp has gone blank!
	But anyway, go on.
	Yeah, so I guess, you know, when you're talking about certain people in works of fiction, you know, being insane or, you know, representing madness, how does that impact your understanding of their decision-making within a story, right?
	Because...
	I guess going back to Frozen, Elsa, with respect to, say, romantic relationships, is able to see her sister Anna's crazy decision-making to try to get engaged to this person that she met two minutes ago.
	So some person who represents madness or insanity in your literary framework makes better decisions with respect to, say, romance than somebody who doesn't have magical powers.
	Well, yeah, but basically you're saying that people who have visions can walk through doors and tie their shoes.
	Yeah, I mean, nobody's completely crazy, right?
	And a lot of crazy people are actually just cunning, right?
	So, I mean, if you've ever dealt with, as I have, if you've ever dealt with a paranoid person up close, their insanity is incredibly structured and absolutely not random.
	And so...
	People who are paranoid are constantly on the lookout for any information that goes counter to their paranoia so that they can attack that person or that information.
	And so if you, you know, if people were really just crazy crazy, then they wouldn't, they'd just act randomly and whatever, right?
	And maybe there are people like that, I don't know.
	But if you're dealing with somebody whose craziness is paranoia or megalomania or narcissism or whatever, then They're very happy with you as long as you support their fantasy, but the moment you take a step outside it, you know, they'll call down all the airstrikes of narcissistic rage on you.
	And so it's not random.
	It's not accidental.
	There's very much a structure to madness.
	But as long as the information that they're asked to process has no particular impact on their madness...
	They can be quite rational about it.
	You know, it's like the landmine is over there.
	You can dance all you want over here.
	No problem.
	You go into the landmine, well, then you're kind of in another planet, right?
	And so the fact that crazy people can be quite rational in areas that do not directly affect their There's a structure of madness that is doing its thing in their brains.
	Yeah, they can be fine.
	I mean, Elsa in Frozen was the authoritarian older sister.
	She had the powers, she was older, she was more mature, she was wiser, and so on.
	So the fact that she's going to scorn Anna for wanting to marry Hans within a, you know...
	A night of meeting him, well, that's entirely what you'd expect from a grandiose and insane older sister who wants to scorn you.
	And the way that she does it is so terrible, she couldn't have done it in a worse kind of way.
	Insulting, condescending, scornful, humiliating, without any like, whoa, well, tell me where this is coming from, help me understand, and so on, right?
	So she may have, well, wow, what that person, you know, what Anna's doing is crazy, but the way she handled it was crazy, and it also fit into her craziness, which is that she was somebody who was megalomaniacal and believed she had all these crazy powers.
	I guess when we're talking, so the point you made about, you know, I guess insane people can be fairly structured and rational if it doesn't attack.
	Their delusion is pretty straightforward and that makes sense.
	But I guess when we're talking about all of the other characters that are reacting to Elsa, even when she's not there, when she flees the kingdom or in the scene where she starts freezing the various parts of the courtyard and then Other people who enter the courtyard later are able to see the newly winterized state of the kingdom.
	How does that play out?
	What that means is that there's a reason why she's a queen.
	What that means is that she has so much political power that you have to conform to her delusions.
	Right?
	I mean...
	Stalin, in the 1930s, got increasingly paranoid.
	And there was a great purge.
	Now, if you disagreed with Stalin's paranoia, what happened to you?
	You got killed.
	Right?
	So, the first young man that Alissa Rosenbaum, Ayn Rand, the first young man that she fell in love with, Ended up killed by Stalin in 1937 because he was accused of sabotaging tanks in a Soviet factory.
	So what that means is that if you don't fall in line with the ruler's madness, the ruler will kill you.
	So it's a case of the emperor's clothes.
	The emperor's new clothes.
	The emperor's walking around naked because he's got these...
	Tailors who say they're making this amazing magical suit that is invisible to everyone who's not worthy of his or her position.
	Nobody wants to admit they can't see the suit.
	So he's walking around naked and everyone's saying, wow, what a beautiful suit!
	Because they know the consequence is pretty negative if they say, well, I can't see it.
	I guess that means I'm not fit for my position.
	I'm going to get fired or maybe thrown in jail or whatever, right?
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Well, one reason why that particular interpretation doesn't make sense with respect to Frozen is that Elsa abdicates her power and literally runs as fast as she can away from the kingdom, right?
	So if Stalin left Russia to go move to Argentina or Brazil, we wouldn't expect to see, you know, the rest of the Soviets kind of maintaining his old policies.
	No, but she doesn't leave the kingdom because she goes to the mountain and the kingdom becomes encased in ice.
	So her powers are directly affecting the kingdom.
	Let's say she tied a boat anchor around her leg, threw herself in the ocean, and drowned and died and vanished.
	We all know what would happen to her ice powers.
	They would melt, and the fountain would melt, and because she was gone, people wouldn't have to believe in her delusion.
	But she doesn't leave.
	She doesn't go to Argentina.
	She goes to the mountains, and it produces perpetual cold in the kingdom.
	So her power is still affecting the kingdom.
	So this is the example of perhaps a queen in exile who's getting an army or whatever it is, but she's definitely not out of the kingdom, and her presence in the kingdom is incredibly destructive.
	Well, I mean, the only reason she got back to the capital in the first place was there was a raiding party that, you know, assaulted her and then brought her back.
	So, I mean, I guess...
	Sorry, the raiding party?
	Oh, wait, the...
	No, but...
	But her presence, the whole reason that they all went up there was because her presence was freezing the whole kingdom.
	I mean, if she just became some crazy old woman living in the woods and had no effect on anyone, they wouldn't send out all these raiding parties, right?
	I mean, I guess that kind of goes against the point about complying with the leader's insanity, right?
	Because they couldn't take a much more active form of disagreement than a raiding party.
	Does that make sense?
	Well, but the raiding party is only occurring because everyone is believing in her madness.
	Right?
	Because everyone believes that the kingdom is frozen.
	Again, I know we're right on the edge of allegory here.
	But the only reason the raiding party cares about her at all is because she has all these powers.
	So the analogy would be the queen has run into exile and nobody will accept the new king because the queen is still alive and in exile.
	Right?
	Which is political uncertainty.
	It's the trade, right?
	It's destroyed with the neighboring kingdom.
	Weselton!
	Right?
	So if the queen has run away and everyone still has allegiance to the queen, then all of the politics in the kingdom are frozen.
	They're in stasis.
	Nothing can move.
	The ships can't move.
	The trade can't happen because there's no queen.
	So that's an example of political power in exile.
	And so what they do is exactly what the Bolsheviks did to the Romanovs, to the royal family of Russia.
	They killed them.
	Right?
	So they go out because the queen is in exile, but everyone still has allegiance to the queen.
	In other words, they see the frozen madness and they're living in the frozen madness and the whole kingdom is paralyzed.
	So they have to go out and kill the queen or imprison the queen or do something because her madness or whatever is still casting a pall and freezing the kingdom.
	So you could say it's a disagreement with the queen.
	Sure it is, but still a recognition of her power.
	I guess the piece of evidence within the structure of the film itself that would disagree with that would be the 10-year gap in between the death of the previous monarch and when Elsa ascended to the throne.
	So the economy didn't grind to a halt.
	They were still conducting trade.
	The question of how much political power, whether or not it's an old medieval type of kingship or more of a modern...
	There would be a regency, right?
	So there would be a regency.
	In other words, somebody would be nominally in charge on behalf of the queen.
	But we know that the queen was very important to the citizens because they're all standing outside her wedding or standing outside her – sorry, not her wedding, but standing outside her coronation.
	Oh, what's happening?
	Everyone's – the whole scene where everyone's rushing to go in.
	Oh, there's a new queen.
	Let's go see the new queen.
	Oh, how's the new queen?
	And so on, right?
	Everybody's obsessed with the queen.
	The whole town.
	There's not anybody – Sweeping the streets.
	They're all basically staring at the castle because the new queen is being crowned.
	Well, we see those celebrations of celebrity today or recently in England when the jubilee happened.
	thousands of people around the ex-commonwealth nations went out to celebrate when one of the recent princes got married.
	I mean, the kind of publications that have been going on about that and the subsequent births of their children covers the newspapers internationally.
	Yet, those, the monarchs of the United Kingdom are hood ornaments and then parliament is the one that controls the- No, no, no, no.
	Did you grow up in England at all?
	No.
	Have you spent much time there?
	I've spent time in New Zealand and, you know, I have friends in a lot of countries.
	Not exactly England.
	So having grown up in England, which I fully accept does not make me any kind of fundamental expert on England.
	I mean, I've studied years and years of English history academically in university and in my master's program.
	And I grew up there.
	The monarchy are not at all mere figureheads.
	At all.
	They own vast tracts of English land.
	The existence and presence of the monarchy in England fundamentally defines what is considered valuable in British society.
	Proximity to royalty, proximity to the Queen, the entire pyramid of aristocracy is foundational to the British experience.
	And the class consciousness in England, from the Queen down to the lowest...
	Liverpudli and Cockney.
	Everything is defined by class, by accent, by access to land, by access to aristocracy, by whether you made your money through the historical murder fest called the aristocracy, or whether you shamefully earned it in the free market, is still foundation and fundamental to British society.
	And again, I'm talking about sort of the non-immigrant British society.
	Look, I mean, I grew up there.
	I went to boarding school there.
	Boarding school was the training ground for the sort of future leaders of the British society.
	And royalty, the aristocracy came to visit the school.
	We all lined up.
	You know, I mean, they were central to the entire narrative of British society.
	I mean, if they were just – look, I mean, a figurehead is something like the governor general in Canada.
	I mean, who gives a shit, right?
	But the degree to which British society orbits psychologically and from a class standpoint, the aristocracy is pretty fundamental to England.
	And so, you know, I think saying, well, they don't really have that much power.
	I mean, boy, I just I don't think that's that's true at all.
	There's the cultural analog where the entire society got excited about having the ball in the court in the frozen world, and people definitely get excited about the Queen's cultural impact for sure.
	But as far as the Queen actually intervening in terms of economic policy or trade or anything along those lines, clearly they have impact on what people get excited about.
	Yeah, but look, I'm sorry to interrupt, but you can't compare the world of Frozen, which is an entirely aristocratic world, with the world of the modern English state, post-enlightenment, post-revolution, post-industrial revolution, post-war, right?
	I mean, this is how much power they still have.
	I mean, Princess Diana dies, people go insane.
	I mean, do you know that after Princess Diana died, mental health indicators in England went up substantially.
	People were less depressed, less anxious.
	I mean, she had a massive...
	She was like the most famous person in the world.
	Well known for, as one person coarsely put it, shopping, fucking, and vomiting.
	Because she had sex a lot, and she was bulimic.
	And the power of the monarchy and the power of the aristocracy is, what do we call little girls?
	Princess!
	The princess, the princess stories everywhere, the princess stories.
	Don't try calling my daughter a princess.
	She will very much tell you she is not a princess.
	But it's incredibly powerful.
	The psychological hold that the monarchy has, I mean...
	In Canada here, I mean, I remember working as a COBOL programmer on a stock trading floor when I was first starting my career.
	Prince Charles walked out of a car into a building across the road.
	Everyone was like limpet minds, like snails on an aquarium wall up there watching, and I was too.
	I remember thinking, wow, that's a pretty trim guy.
	Guy hasn't had a job in 40 years.
	He's looking awful good.
	I mean, the city shut down.
	There's parades.
	You can buy magazines here entirely devoted to the royal family.
	There are plates.
	China, souvenirs.
	And you go into a store that specializes in British goods and just see how much of the monarchy is plastered on the wall.
	They're on our money, for God's sakes.
	Well, with the exception of being on currency, you could make all the same statements about Justin Bieber's popularity with, you know, teenage people around this time, right?
	So cultural power definitely, you know, has influence on the way that people evaluate certain things.
	But if we're, so I guess tying it back to the film, if we're saying that the evidence that...
	Hang on, I can't let that fly by, that That the monarchy and Justin Bieber have equal psychological impact to people?
	I didn't say equal, I said similar, right?
	Okay, okay.
	So let's go with similar.
	That's fine, too.
	Are you really going to say that the most ancient institution of social domination in the entire world, which is a violent, murder-based hierarchy, is the same as a baby-faced singer?
	With respect to the, you know, amount of faces glued to the screen as soon as anybody walks by or enters into a certain shop, I'd say that the effect is similar.
	I've seen more scary and frightening reactions to, you know, American celebrities walking by than has been the case.
	Yeah, but Justin Bieber isn't on the money.
	Right, and I pointed that out earlier when I said with exception to being on the currency.
	And Justin Bieber doesn't have, like, little boys don't want to be called Justin Biebers.
	Or Beliebers.
	Little girls want to be princesses.
	They're not little boy costumes all over the world that make boys look like Justin Bieber, but they're little costumes all over the world where little girls look like princesses.
	I mean, there's not stories that people read to children all about Justin Bieber and the dragon.
	I mean, there's some who would like that, I think, because they would assume the dragon would win.
	But I think to...
	I mean, yes, he's famous.
	Absolutely.
	No question.
	No question.
	And, you know, maybe more people turned in to watch Live Aid than they did to watch The Last Royal Wedding.
	I don't know.
	But he is not a person with political or deep psychological or emotional or historical power.
	Well, historical, I obviously have to grant since his career is, you know, less than 10 years old or so.
	But people pass out at his concerts.
	People model themselves after his style or his clothing.
	You can look at boy bands since the Beatles.
	People have been emulating their look.
	Any time there's a celebrity that pops up, people alter their lifestyles in order to get themselves closer to a center of desire.
	I'm sorry to interrupt you.
	I think we've come a long way from the original question, which was, why do I view magic as madness?
	I'm not sure I want to get into, does Justin Bieber have more psychological impact on people than Princess Diana?
	That's Obviously, somewhat non-quantifiable, which I'll certainly grant you.
	But I think I've sort of made the case as to why I view it that way.
	And I think I've defended it fairly well.
	I'm not saying it's, you know, ah, it is now as certain as physics.
	But I think I've taken a fairly good swing at defending it.
	But I don't really want to spend a lot of time arguing the relative, I guess, collective unconscious behavior.
	Justin Bieber versus worldwide royalty.
	I just feel like that starts to get a bit obtuse for most of our listeners.
	All right.
	I mean, would you mind just expanding a little bit on the second part of the question, which was what kind of evidence or argumentation it would take for you to change your literary theories about magic in fiction works?
	Well, unfortunately, or I guess fortunately, it's kind of tautological.
	So that things which occur in society.
	Sorry.
	Things which are impossible in the world must be occurring in the mind.
	Right?
	Impossibilities cannot occur in the world.
	Therefore, impossibilities must be occurring within the mind.
	Right?
	I think that's...
	I mean, to argue that is pretty tough.
	Right?
	I mean, I can't fly in the world, but I can imagine flying in my dreams.
	Right?
	Sure.
	So...
	Impossibilities must be occurring in the mind, not in reality.
	Now, crazy people believe that their impossibilities are occurring in reality, right?
	Because, again, we all have irrational...
	I can imagine myself flying.
	I don't think I can fly.
	If I really think I can fly and jump off a building and flap my wings, I'm crazy, right?
	Right.
	Because now I think that the impossibilities in my mind...
	Can somehow be made real in the world, right?
	Okay.
	Wait, I'm not sure what okay means there.
	I'm following the argument.
	Do you agree with the argument so far?
	Yeah, what you've presented is consistent.
	Do you agree with the argument so far?
	Yes.
	Okay, fantastic.
	Okay.
	It's important because I sort of feel like everyone waits for me to put the final argument in before agreeing or not.
	And that's not how arguments work, right?
	Arguments work because you agree with every step and then you have to agree with the conclusion whether you like it or not, right?
	Which is the same thing for me, right?
	Okay, so if you agree with the argument so far, impossibilities must occur within the mind.
	And only crazy people believe that the impossibilities within their minds are somehow manifest in the world, right?
	Right.
	So since the very essence of craziness is portraying impossibilities within the mind as occurring within the world, then all stories that portray impossibilities in the world rather than in the mind are portraits of madness.
	I think there was a logical leap there, which I'll just try to point out quickly, and then I'll state my case.
	Okay, so if a reader of a book were to interpret Impossible acts like magic as being things that could occur in the real world, then that, I think, would be—then your argument would logically follow that the reader, who, in holding that belief that magic could occur— In the reader's world is impossible, right?
	That would be, I guess, an act of magic.
	You mean if there's a story that relies on ghosts and people really believe in ghosts?
	Sure, yeah.
	Or, yeah, if someone read a Superman comic and then thought that, you know, Krypton had sent its last son to Earth and then there was some newspaper superhuman, you know, kind of wandering the world, saving people.
	That wouldn't be a rational position to take, right?
	So...
	But I guess when we bracket a work of fiction and then look at what the characters within that fake world are experiencing, I mean, you said when magic is the physics of that fictional world, then, you know, the metaphors with it or, you know, the reader...
	No, no, no, no.
	Because if I genuinely believe I can fly, that's the physics of my crazy world.
	It doesn't make it real.
	It doesn't make it not crazy, right?
	Well, no, it wouldn't be the physics of your world.
	It would be an incorrect interpretation of the physics, right?
	Because if you attempt to fly and then physics wouldn't actually support your flight, then you would understand that pretty...
	Or maybe you wouldn't, you know, after brain death, that the physics of that universe were different than what you interpreted it to be.
	But if you change the equation...
	So manned flight was possible...
	Or functionally possible after the Wright brothers, for example.
	But it would have been, you know, prior to understanding physics in the way that allowed for flight, you know, having people just jump off of cliffs and then flapping their wings vigorously would have been an insane way to pursue the specific goal of flight.
	But if you alter the facts of reality so that, you know, flight is actually capable, and then you believe that you can fly and then just put yourself in a position where that's in accordance with the physics, that's not an insane thing.
	And so in fake universes, you know, I don't see why we can't say that alternate physics exists in constructs of the imagination.
	So within those universes, when characters interact with magic as if it were real, it wouldn't be insane because in the fake universe, the magic would actually exist as part of their physics.
	Well, I'm going to tell you, you were very close to following a logical argument, but I'm afraid you jumped off the cliff at the end.
	So we're going to have to move on to the next caller, but thank you very much.
	For the call.
	And Mike, who do we have up next?
	All right.
	Up next is Dirk.
	And Dirk wrote in and said, I know my neglectful upbringing is the root of my ongoing relationship issues and psychotherapy can heal those emotional wounds.
	Stefan, why did you undergo psychotherapy and how has it improved your relationships?
	All right.
	Did you want to add more to the question?
	Hi, Stef.
	Hello.
	Well, I can give you the background on it, but also I'm quite interested in your experience when you did take psychotherapy, because I tried it twice and it did not exactly turn out quite well for me.
	But I very much recognize I do have ongoing relationship issues and I have an emotional, neglectful parent, my mother.
	My father, he was not quite as bad, but he was a workaholic, an alcoholic.
	How much detail do you want?
	Oh, it's your call, man, whatever you want to talk about.
	Well, psychotherapy.
	Well, I tried it twice, and the first experience was with a woman with my former girlfriend back then.
	And to summarize this, essentially, they asked me, well, what can you bring to the table in a relationship?
	And the counselor, she pretty much said, well, you know, whatever you just said actually doesn't hold because, you know, you might can fix things around the house, but your girlfriend, she can always call the plumber or the electrician.
	So here, no economic synergy between a relationship.
	Well, you know, what about the romance and what about the sex part?
	And, well, you know, your girlfriend, she's a pretty good-looking girl.
	She can always go out and find herself a guy, maybe just for the evening, and what do you do then?
	And, well, then I made the argument, well, what if you want to start a family?
	Well, then she said, well, she can always...
	Wait, sorry, who was saying this about your girlfriend?
	That was our common relationship counselor.
	So not exactly psychotherapy, but I guess close.
	I think the first two syllables sound correct, but go on.
	Yeah, so back then I wasn't exactly, I should say, I was not a libertarian.
	I didn't believe in the non-aggression principle and I didn't listen to actually to none of your videos and you're very nice, you're very clear in the way how you present how important a husband is for families and And,
	you know, I did not know anything of that, but still, the counseling session, they struck me as a little bit, wow, no, this cannot be, and I didn't have any arguments, but the point was...
	So basically, the relationship counselor was attempting to get you to believe that you were fundamentally replaceable.
	That's exactly how it was, yes.
	So you were, you know, two hands, a strong back, and a penis, of which there are three billion in the world, right?
	Six billion counting hands.
	Yeah.
	Man has no worth whatsoever.
	Sorry, was this a man or a woman?
	It was a woman.
	Isn't that a shock?
	Wait, are you trying to tell me that a woman was trying to make you feel disposable in a relationship?
	From today, I would say this is exactly how it was back then.
	Did she ever say anything like that?
	Hey, you're just two tits and a vagina, so there's lots of those walking the planet too, so he can just replace you like that as well.
	No, no, no, no.
	No, of course not.
	You see, because you're supposed to be hanging on by a thread.
	Mm-hmm.
	Hanging on by one twinchy little pussy hair.
	Just hanging on.
	She can strug you off.
	No, you are so replaceable.
	And that way, you don't ever say boo to a mouse.
	You don't ever resist.
	You don't ever bring yourself.
	You don't ever disagree with her.
	You're just hanging on there by the good grace of her whim, right?
	Yeah.
	So all that therapist is doing, in my humble opinion, is telling you all about his mother and nothing about your girlfriend.
	Oh, well, this might be too.
	Yeah, the counselor probably also had some baggages.
	But what was really interesting that I was the loser out of the whole counseling session.
	I know I had to go back home and… Sorry, was your girlfriend in the room while this woman was saying all this?
	Yes, yes.
	We were both together.
	And as a consequence of that...
	Did you find this psychotherapist like...
	In an abandoned bus?
	Under a bridge?
	Did you get lost in the sewers and find a little tent table with a candle?
	Where the hell would you find someone to say this insane stuff?
	No, she had a degree, a psychological degree.
	I don't know exactly from what university she collected the money.
	It's a German university, Man Crunch Ball Busters, I believe would be the university.
	Yeah, that's a likely scenario.
	But actually, at the time, I was in America, so she was definitely American.
	Look, I'm no expert in this.
	I can't imagine a theory of relationship helping that includes making the man feel completely replaceable.
	I can't think of any conceivable Relationship help that involves making the man feel like an annoying dust mite on the ass of his girlfriend that she just puts up with, right?
	Did she have a clown wig on?
	Did she have elongated shoes and a little car horn on?
	No, I guess she had a degree from a statist university and, you know, you can talk in length how screwed up the whole system is.
	And, you know, this is what these universities now turn out, you know, I guess kind of screwed up council itself.
	Well, I'm sorry.
	Again, I... I am not a therapist, not a psychologist, but holy crap, that just sounds like about the worst possible advice you could give.
	I mean, can you imagine?
	Imagine.
	Imagine a therapist.
	You go with your girlfriend to a male therapist, and the male therapist says, well, everything that your girlfriend does can be done by professionals.
	You can hire a hooker.
	You can get a cook.
	You can get a cleaner in.
	I mean, what the hell does she matter?
	And what would your girlfriend say?
	She would be outrageous.
	She would leave the room.
	What a misogynistic bastard!
	Do I not have any individual value?
	Am I merely body parts?
	How objectified am I? But men get objectified all the time.
	It's called a uniform and...
	Anyway, all right.
	Well, from today, I would say they were both feminists.
	My former girlfriend and the counselor.
	From the finest sort.
	Actually, no.
	That's just man-hating.
	I have my disagreement with feminists, but I am not going to equate feminists with man-hating.
	That's like saying Muslim is terrorist.
	There's a small subsection of Muslims who are terrorists.
	But I will not call that feminism.
	That is just outright Man-hatred.
	And maybe they call themselves a feminist, I don't know why, but that to me is just outright, because it's one-sided, it dissolves you down into mere body parts that are interchangeable with other male body parts, no individuality, no personal value, no ethics, no personality.
	Your hands and your penis can be replaced.
	And women, of course, hate, and to some degree, rightly so, hate it when they're simply reduced to their body parts.
	Okay, they do draw attention to those body parts sometimes, but they still don't want to be reduced to just those body parts.
	And so reducing a man to mere flesh, interchangeable flesh with other men's flesh, is so hateful.
	So vile that though I disagree with a lot of what is called modern feminism, I simply cannot say that that's feminism.
	That to me, I mean, yeah, that's too far.
	This is a subspecies of feminism and it includes non-feminists.
	That's just rampant male hatred.
	That is absolute bigotry and sexism against men.
	And it's vile and vicious and I actually believe it's kind of an abuse of power.
	Yeah.
	What are you going to say?
	She's going to say, well, the therapist said that, right?
	Yeah.
	Right, yeah.
	She reverted several times back to the therapist talk to win the argument and made me do things for her.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, and look, I mean, you're obviously wiser now.
	But I would just get up and walk out.
	Or maybe I just get up and walk out and demand a refund.
	And say, why on earth would I pay to be reduced to body parts?
	I mean, this is a complete destruction of who I am as a human being.
	How poisonous is that?
	Well, Stefan, your words, they provide clarity and also they provide comfort.
	Look, I'm incredibly sorry that you experienced that.
	I'm incredibly sorry that you experienced that.
	That, of course, is far from all women and it's certainly not all feminists.
	There are some feminists, Christina Hoff Summers and to some degree Phyllis Schlafly, I actually really admire.
	And there are female intellectuals who've had profound impact on my thinking.
	I've been more influenced by female intellectuals than by male intellectuals, probably by far.
	But I'm incredibly sorry that your heart was stabbed in that poison tongue manner.
	That is absolutely destructive and absolutely hideous.
	I'm just incredibly sorry you experienced that.
	I just really wanted to be clear about that before we move on.
	Thank you very much.
	I very much appreciate your warmth and the whole Stefan thing with all the other videos.
	There's more to it.
	I know that I probably need psychotherapy because of my ongoing relationship issues.
	And because of that bad experience with the female counselor, I also had another one with a male counselor where I had five sessions and it wasn't a typical Freudian psychoanalysis.
	It wasn't that bad.
	I just did not resonate very well with the counselor.
	But I definitely know that I can benefit from psychotherapy and I know that you actually did undergo psychotherapy, but I haven't found a video where you actually were talking in depth about it.
	So why did you go to psychotherapy and especially how did it improve your relationships back then?
	Can you talk about that?
	Well, first of all, you're assuming that it improved my relationship back then.
	I would say not so much that it improved my relationships.
	In fact, basically it was a giant neutron bomb over all living things in my vicinity.
	Well, I mean, this is obviously something I can go into more detail, so I'll just give you sort of a brief outline here.
	My therapist was a woman, and she was not the first one I went to, but she's the first one I stayed with.
	And...
	I went for, I think, a little over two years.
	For the majority of that, I went for three hours a week.
	Plus, I did at least 10 to 14 hours of journaling.
	I was not in a relationship at the time.
	And a romantic relationship.
	And I went because I couldn't sleep.
	I went because I couldn't sleep.
	There was nothing particularly dramatic that happened, but I just stopped being able to sleep.
	And if you've never been through insomnia, count yourself an extremely fortunate human being.
	It can't kill you, but it can make you wish you were dead.
	And everybody usually has occasional times where they can't sleep.
	So I chalked it up to, ah, you know, work is tough, you know, entrepreneur, something's going on, whatever, right?
	And then I remember I had a sore throat, so I took some Neocitron and I slept.
	And I'm like, oh, okay, good, well, it's passed.
	And then I couldn't sleep the next night.
	Just out of curiosity, tried Neocitron again, put me out, couldn't sleep.
	Couldn't sleep, went to see a doctor, got some valerian root, couldn't sleep.
	Couldn't sleep.
	Everything I did in therapy and all my journals, I actually have typed up in book format with footnotes so I could remember everything that went on.
	It goes on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages, all my dreams, all the conversations, all the interactions.
	One day, perhaps, it shall see the light of day, but...
	I was living...
	With a woman at the time, and the relationship was, of course, in hindsight, doomed.
	But I didn't know that at the time.
	In hindsight, I couldn't sleep, because I was sleepwalking through my life.
	Because I was responding, not initiating.
	Which sounds odd, you know, I've written books, I was an entrepreneur, got myself well-educated and all that.
	But fundamentally, I was not living my values.
	My philosophy, or philosophy itself, had precious little effect on my relationships.
	This is why I say to people, when you bring philosophy to your relationships, I said this from the very beginning of the show, you bring philosophy to your relationships, not many will survive.
	But those that do, will actually be real relationships.
	So, my girlfriend was seeing a therapist, and I said...
	I can't sleep.
	I've got to talk to someone.
	And she talked to her therapist.
	And her therapist knew that I was artistic and intellectual and philosophical and all that.
	And intelligent.
	So she recommended this woman that I went to go and see.
	I went to go and see her.
	I vividly remember our opening conversation.
	I've mentioned this on the show before.
	I drove to the appointment.
	Parked my car.
	I couldn't find it.
	Parked my car.
	This was before GPS. Parked my car.
	Finally, I said, I'm so sorry I'm late.
	I've been circling this whole neighborhood like a shark in the water trying to find...
	And she's like, wow, I guess that would make me the kill.
	It's a very, very violent image.
	Not bad.
	It just really struck me as a very violent image.
	Have a seat.
	Let's talk about it.
	I'm like, well...
	You know, when you're very intelligent, it's hard to find people interesting.
	But she was interesting.
	The major effect of therapy for me was that I recognized the value of my inner life.
	I recognized how essential it was for me to listen to my instincts, to be deeply rooted in myself, to listen to my dreams, to listen to my impulses, to examine my The little whiskers of feeling that tickle through our spines from time to time that we often just shrug off and ignore because they're so ridiculously inconvenient to our circumstances.
	The phone rings.
	Oh, I hope it's not this person.
	You say, oh, well, I'm sure I'm just being inattentive.
	Then you put on your dutiful mask and you have the conversation with whoever you don't particularly want to have the conversation with.
	And you go through this little shrinking, dying robot conversation Of conformity dance.
	Till your batteries fall out and you just can't put one more goddamn metal foot in front of the other.
	And I couldn't sleep because I was dying.
	I was surrounded by people who were selfish and corrupt and were corrupting me.
	And my soul was like a sapling in the shade.
	It was simply wilting, expiring.
	was not being fed by the energy of consistent values and integrity.
	And through the process of having somebody interested in me, I paid for it, but she was genuinely interested, and would ask but she was genuinely interested, and would ask me questions.
	Anne would ask me to tell her more.
	And I would bring in a dream, and sometimes we would spend the whole week on that dream, unpacking it, unpacking it.
	She took my inner life incredibly seriously.
	I had a dream that I was lost in a maze, fleeing a skinless woman, who was my mother, who was chasing me through these catacombs.
	And I opened a door, and I almost squished a little boy behind a door.
	And I told her about the little boy and I said, he really reminded me of me.
	And she leaned right forward and stared at me so intently.
	And she said, did the boy in the dream have legs?
	And she was so focused on that question.
	It incredibly mattered to her whether the boy had legs or not.
	I don't want to get into all the reasons why, but it was so striking to me that it absolutely, completely, and totally mattered to her whether a boy I almost squished with the door while fleeing from a skinless woman, whether that boy had legs.
	In the dream, she was leaning forward like someone about to pronounce a diagnosis of life or death.
	Did the boy have legs?
	In other words, was he a ghost?
	Was he floating?
	Was he dead?
	Or was he standing?
	It mattered what my inner life was.
	It mattered what my instincts were.
	I had an eruption of characters within me.
	I can still remember all of their names.
	There was a crusty old son of a bitch named Lord Gruul.
	There was a gentle maternal woman named Mama, which is a French for mother.
	A whole host of characters.
	All erupted in me.
	I would have endless conversations, the most incredible conversations with these characters.
	And they fought like fuck my intellectualization, my abstractions, my dissociation through cramming syllables together like I'm playing some unholy tune on an accordion from hell.
	They fought my abstraction and they drove me Like an iron spike into a railway tie, they drove my consciousness back down into my body.
	My body, you see, was the instrument of my torture when I was a child.
	They cannot torture your abstractions.
	They cannot spank or hit or starve your concepts, but they use your body to harm you.
	Your nerves, your sensations, your feelings, your preferences, your desires, your loves, your wants.
	They use those against you.
	And so your body, when you're abused as a child, becomes your enemy.
	It becomes that which is used to hurt you.
	And so you must eject from your body, to reuse the metaphor, like a fighter pilot out of a burning jet.
	You must go up into the sky and eject from your body, called dissociation, to survive the torture that your body inflicts on you through the hands of your torturers.
	Returning to my body, to the boy with legs, returning to what I thought was a burning airplane, was the hardest thing until last year that I've ever had to do.
	It is like going to embrace a corpse, which is not a corpse because you're willing to embrace it.
	And this amazing woman respected my intelligence, respected my capacity for language, respected my sensitivity, and just kept driving through it to pass through the abstractions, to connect to the real history which lies in the body, in the flesh, in the nerves, in the sensations.
	And when I connected...
	With my history when I connected.
	And this sounds like it's a moment.
	It's not.
	There's this fantasy that in therapy you have this goodwill hunting meltdown and you cry and you scream and you kick and then all is better.
	No.
	If you are repairing an abandoned house, there's not one moment where it becomes livable.
	It slowly transitions into something you can live in through work and sweat and gruel and And slivers and falls and roofs breaking and repairing it.
	You slowly repair and make something beautiful that was ruined and abandoned.
	And through that process of rehabilitating the haunted house of my history and turning it into a warm and living space, Through that process of re-inhabiting myself, my history, my body, of reclaiming my nerves and turning them back to the surface of my happiness rather than the sadism of my abusers.
	through that process, I became myself and lost almost everyone.
	Because when I became interested in myself, Because somebody was interested in me.
	when I recognized how much value I had within myself for myself, I recognized that I had to pay a stranger for years to do what my supposed friends and family should have been I recognized that I had to pay a stranger for years to do
	You know, when you pay a prostitute for sex, it can really help remind you that your wife isn't giving it to you.
	Thank you.
	And that process of connecting with myself detached me from others.
	Well, it didn't detach me from others.
	It woke me up to the fact that there was no attachment to others.
	Well, that sounds pretty unexpected.
	So what you're telling me, by connecting with your inner self, gaining self-knowledge, you lost everyone in your life.
	You must have felt pretty lonely.
	Well, no, it's more like...
	It's not that...
	Again, my experience at the time was of loss, but the loss had occurred from the moment of meeting onwards.
	There was never anything gained.
	Right, right, yeah.
	Right, so it felt like I was losing something, but all I was losing was an illusion.
	Right, let's say I think, oh, I'm going to go and audition for American Idol and win.
	Right?
	Let's say I end up not going to American Idol.
	Would I have won?
	I would not have won.
	I mean, you listen to the winners belt out a song.
	Holy crap.
	I mean, people can really sing.
	And losing the illusion feels like losing something real.
	But when you lose your illusions, you get a wee little consolation prize called truth and reality.
	Which feels like a shitty second prize.
	But it's not.
	For a philosopher, it means the world.
	Truth, and that's a very much ongoing theme.
	And now when I listen to you, that's more valuable than all the negative and hurtful relationships.
	But can you live in truth alone?
	Probably not.
	You need to find...
	You can.
	And this is why, look, there's something my therapist said to me that I sort of pay forward by passing along to other people because I think it's such an elemental truth, is that I thought I could just fix my childhood on my own.
	And again, this is a repeat, but it bears repeating.
	Problems that arise in solitude cannot be fixed in solitude.
	It's like solving hunger by starving yourself.
	Right?
	Problems which arise in solitude cannot be fixed in solitude.
	We are social animals.
	We become real to ourselves through genuine connection with others.
	Which is why I tell people, you've got problems with people in your life, go talk to them, go...
	Connect with them.
	When you connect with yourself, go connect with other people.
	You'll find out if they can or they can't.
	You'll find out if they even want to, if they're even interested in it.
	I swear to God, when I connected with myself and I tried to have conversations with people around me, they reacted as if I had walked into a ballet class with a goddamn flamethrower.
	You have never seen fear in another human being's eyes like the fear that you see when you bring a connected conversation to a destroyed person.
	I wasn't dead until I heard what life sounded like.
	and the amount of recoil, dissociation, frustration, hostility, and sometimes rage you get from being connected with yourself and talking in a connected way to others staggers the imagination and shocks the soul deeply.
	So who was mostly shocked in your life?
	Was it the...
	You said you went to ballet.
	Was it at the time when you were in theater?
	Or were you able to talk to your mom, which played a big role in your therapy?
	Or who was it?
	I did what I have recommended.
	I try not to prescribe any medicines I have not taken.
	I did.
	I talked to my mother.
	I talked to my mother about the past.
	I talked to my mother about the problems.
	I talked to my mother about the history.
	I talked to my mother about the abuse.
	And I saw in her eyes, my friend, I saw the worst thing that you can see when you're confronting someone with evil.
	I saw cunning.
	I saw calculation.
	I saw in her eyes her trying to figure out what she might be able to get away with in this moment.
	I saw the abacus of calculation blurring in her eyes.
	Like you corner a con man and they're not sorry, they're not proud, they won't admit, they just calculate what I imagine this must be exactly if I were to talk with my mother about emotional abuse.
	Playing these scenarios in my mind, I feel that there is very little chance to get any meaningful response, and I fear it would be similar to what you experienced.
	So what...
	So if it was just, you know, if you saw the fear, the cunning, the abacus, would you still recommend talking to your torturer?
	Well, as I've always said, if there's physical safety, talk until you get closure.
	Still you do.
	Okay.
	Well, look, I mean, there is no freedom like certainty.
	Certainty is the only freedom there is because doubt is paralyzing.
	Closure is just another word for certainty.
	And we must be certain about our relationships.
	I am certain that my wife loves me.
	I'm certain of my daughter's affections.
	I'm certain of Mike's friendship and loyalty.
	I'm working on Stoyan.
	No, I'm kidding.
	Stoyan, I'm a certain...
	Of Stoyan as I am of anyone else.
	And I have that capacity for certainty now because I am in touch with my own instincts.
	I trust my sense with others.
	Doesn't mean I don't make mistakes, but the mistakes come from historical illusions and can be relatively quickly dealt with.
	But When you talk to someone about prior abuse and you see cunning, actually in the chat room there's some surprise.
	Cunning is the worst thing because there's no feeling in it.
	There's only rank opportunism.
	There's no guilt.
	There's no anger.
	There's no regret.
	There's no shame.
	There's no horror.
	There's no rage.
	There's simply, ooh, caught on this one.
	Let's try moving a little over here.
	Let's try moving.
	Oh, do a little pirouette.
	Oh, I'll do something distracting.
	There's no feeling in it.
	Exactly.
	No emotions.
	No emotions at all.
	I get the feeling that they're probably as hurtful as the beating the previous caller has experienced.
	But maybe even they linger longer.
	The physical wounds, they fade away and some emotional wounds still remain.
	But if it's just emotional, neglect, cunning, that probably lasts for a lifetime.
	Right.
	And cunning means that the person is only worried about their own opportunism within the interaction.
	there is no sympathy for the pain they've inflicted, right?
	Okay.
	The the Somebody asked, sorry, just to answer a question, somebody asked what happened to my insomnia.
	It broke after about 18 months.
	Wow, 18 months insomnia.
	Incredible.
	Well, I mean, obviously it wasn't like I didn't sleep for 18 months, but yes, it was a grueling process to go through.
	It's amazing how the body and the mind are connected.
	Insomnia is a physical representation.
	You were physically sick, not able to sleep well, but the real cause are the buried-down emotional issues from your childhood.
	No, the real course was not the buried down emotional issues from my childhood.
	I'm sorry to be annoying.
	I hate to contradict you.
	No, because I already knew.
	I already knew that I wasn't denying my childhood.
	I knew that I'd had a terrible childhood.
	That there was almost nothing that could go wrong with the childhood that didn't happen to me.
	I already knew all of that.
	It wasn't that I'd had a terrible childhood that I couldn't sleep.
	It's because my terrible childhood was not saving me from my increasingly terrible adulthood.
	The lessons of my childhood were not informing and saving my adulthood.
	I had a terrible childhood that wasn't affecting my adult decisions.
	I was still around abusers.
	So it wasn't the childhood trauma Right?
	If your hand is in the fire, and then it ends up being melted to a crisp, it's not because your hand was in the fire, it's that your hand stayed in the fire.
	Yes.
	Right?
	You put your hand in fire, shit, that's hot, right?
	Maybe you get a blister or two, right?
	Maybe get a blister on your thumb.
	But it's if you leave your hand in the fire, right?
	And so it wasn't that I was burned as a child.
	It was that I was melting in the fire as an adult.
	And to put the analogy in, as a child, you haven't learned the lesson to pull out your hand out of the fire before.
	That's something that should have been done, but it didn't.
	So that's why the psychotherapy was able to heal that, to put that metaphorically, that ability to pull the hand out of the fire back into your system.
	Well, it was the first time that somebody had been interested in me.
	I mean, I swear to God, people have asked, when did I do it?
	I think it was my early 30s.
	But I don't remember the exact year.
	I mean, I do somewhere, but I know it was after the year 2000, because I went on a trip with a friend to Morocco for Y2K, and then I went to China for business.
	And I know I still had insomnia then.
	I did actually find that going to China helped, because it just switched my day completely.
	Because I was sleeping.
	Insomnia is like being exhausted in the day and awake at night.
	It's mental.
	So when I switched, it helped a lot.
	And I know I was in therapy at that point.
	Anyway, so it's because this is somebody who was...
	It was the experience of somebody being interested in me for the first time in my life.
	Actually, and I was paying for her, but it was still somebody who was interested in me.
	Who wasn't trying to use me.
	Who wasn't...
	You know, I have a lot of talents and a lot of abilities, and I have been poured around and exploited throughout a lot of my younger life.
	And when I... You can only be exploited when you don't respect yourself.
	And...
	I had a history of not being respected as a child, and then by not knowing the value of taking my childhood lessons and applying them in my life, I continued to not respect myself as an adult.
	To feel like I had to be what I talked about in the Robin Williams tribute, me plus.
	I gotta be me plus my talents, gotta be me plus my acting ability, my writing ability, my programming ability, my management ability, my sales ability, my marketing ability, my wit, me plus!
	Right?
	Clearly, if you've got to put a lot of sugar on something, it's got to taste pretty bad to begin with, right?
	And so I've got to be me plus sugar because I don't taste that good.
	But then when somebody was interested in me, like really interested in me, and took my inner life incredibly seriously, my dreams, holy shit, my dreams rose to meet me in absolutely unbelievable ways.
	I had...
	And I haven't had them since this period.
	I had dreams.
	I think it's called lucid dreaming.
	I still remember them so vividly.
	I was flying over a city and I could see every bottle cap crushed into the sidewalk.
	I could see every diamond glint of granite.
	On a stone wall.
	I could see every fabric on every flag being furled, every license plate on every car.
	You know how you look at something and you can see that thing and you can't see everything?
	I could see my whole vision was non-peripheral, was direct.
	It blew my mind.
	And other things, I remember walking out of a hotel room in a dream when I was in the South, right before a presentation.
	All I did was look at wallpaper.
	And I could see almost every atom of that wallpaper so incredibly vividly.
	And I could focus on the dust right in front of my eyes and the dust an inch and two inch and five inches all the way to the wall and the entire wall and the whirlpools of light and dark wood in the floor.
	I was just looking at wallpaper and it's like I'd never even used my eyes before.
	Sorry, you're right.
	That's not a lucid dream.
	It's one you can control.
	It's a highly vivid dream.
	And I had these dreams, which is the invention of the self based on empirical history is an unstoppable force.
	When we are empirical and rational, I had the rationality down.
	Abstract thinking, reasoning, blah, blah.
	I'd already finished my master's.
	I did a great job.
	But when I became who I was with empiricism, with the actual emotions of my history, when they became real, when they informed, when they had an impact, when they changed my life, then I was like when the side wall of the Bastille gets blown open before the revolution and the unjustly imprisoned tenants come pouring out through the hall of Man,
	you take a side fist to that wall, you open it up, and all the history comes out and demands to be heard.
	And so when I became, when I became informed by my history as something that needed to help me make decisions, not just, well, I had a bad childhood, let me go on with my day.
	Well, that is Actually living values.
	And that's why I say to people, man, go to therapy when you get involved in these kinds of things, because it is a hell of a lot.
	I mean, it is a hell of a lot to handle.
	And I had the luxury of dropping 20 grand plus on therapy and having the time.
	And I mean, people, when you start to connect with your history in a tangible, empirical, actionable manner, When your trauma changes your values, which changes your decisions, which changes your life, you shouldn't be doing that stuff without someone serious in your corner.
	Yeah, I can clearly see and understand.
	One has to be really serious to go through what you have gone through.
	But as eloquently as you explained it, you found yourself.
	You reconnected with yourself.
	You became the Stefan Molyneux who you are today.
	So definitely that was a very positive event for yourself and for 10,000 of listeners or 100,000 all around the world.
	Well, I mean, so I knew I was hurt.
	I simply didn't know that I could stop hurting.
	Because, well, the hurt is in the past.
	You see, it was when I was 3 and 6 and 10 and 15.
	That was painful.
	That was horrible.
	That was scary.
	That was terrible.
	That was traumatic.
	That was abusive.
	Oh, I really hurt.
	And I didn't even know I was still hurting as much as I was.
	And I sure as hell didn't know that I could stop hurting.
	Because the price of not hurting...
	It's so high that it seems unimaginable at the time.
	And because we're social animals and we Stockholm Syndrome with our abusers, it feels like suicide to not want to be hurt.
	It feels like you're going to die.
	And my insomnia stopped when I said, either I sleep or I'm going to die.
	I cannot live like this anymore.
	And when I was willing to accept death rather than the continued half-life of insomnia...
	That's when everybody turned around, and that's when I slept, and that's when I really changed.
	Well, this is definitely one of the Steph moments again.
	It's like a life and death struggle to sleep again.
	It's not like a life and death struggle.
	It literally is a life and death struggle.
	It is a life and death struggle.
	And I'll tell you one last thing, if this helps.
	Because, I mean, being so appalled as I was by what you said about what the therapist said, I just want to give you a...
	When...
	When you accept that you were traumatized, and you accept that you don't want to be traumatized, then you start to deal with people...
	In a very real way, in a very connected and very deep way.
	And most people run screaming.
	In fact, in my life at the time, everybody ran screaming.
	With no exceptions.
	And then you say, geez, man, I was surrounded by ghosts.
	I guess I must be living in a mausoleum.
	Must be in a funeral home.
	Boy, that was a lot of ghosts.
	So I'm gonna step out into the world and find me some non-ghosts.
	Okay, well...
	I guess there were a lot of car accidents in the street outside the mausoleum, because pretty much just ghosts walking up and down this street.
	Okay, uh...
	I'll go to the park.
	Wow.
	Guess pretty much horrible waves of cholera must have run through this park, because pretty much all dead people in the park and ghosts here, too.
	I'll go to Morocco!
	Damn, there must have been a lot of typhus in Morocco.
	Maybe an asteroid strike.
	There's nothing but dead people and turbans in Morocco.
	I'm going to China!
	Damn!
	Did the Cultural Revolution just end?
	Did we just have the mass starvation?
	Bodies animated, walking all over the streets in China.
	And then I went to England.
	I met a woman on a plane who was a literary agent, read one of my novels, said liked it, didn't like the ending, naturally.
	Took a month off from work, went to England, because that's where the novel was set.
	Wrote the novel.
	Hey, I'm in England!
	Well, okay, I know there's lots of bodies in England.
	Lots of bodies in England.
	And so what happens is, you realize that most of the world...
	Is fundamentally traumatized, is fundamentally unable to connect with anything real.
	Most people have as much chance of human contact as a ghost have as bumping its nose on the Berlin Wall.
	Just walk through.
	Most people are incorporeal, no capacity for connection or intimacy.
	And then, and then, and this was really the birth of this show, Then you say to yourself, and then you say to yourself, if I can't live in a world of ghosts, then I have to become a resurrectionist.
	Which is actually a poem I wrote called The Resurrectionist when I was 17 years old, in which I said we must bury ourselves in order to be resurrected.
	And then...
	You accept that if you cannot live in the world that is you must change it into the world that isn't.
	If you can't connect with ghosts you need to bring them into their bodies.
	If you can't live in the dead you must bring them to life.
	And that really was the birth of the show and that's why the very sixth show I talked about was about family trauma, how self-defense doesn't work because I've only experienced violence within the family and why I talk about elementally connected and emotional stuff.
	Because I cannot live in a world of the dead.
	I can't.
	We are too precious a species for that.
	We have far too much potential.
	We have far too much capacity for love and joy, connection, beauty, truth, love, virtue, peace, creativity.
	We have far too much in the world that is real, that we can have if we come to life.
	But the dead can't dance.
	There's such beautiful music in the universe.
	And so the essence of the show for me was to speak as truthfully and honestly and in as real a way as possible.
	To connect with that which is still alive and real in others.
	To show the depth of what I can speak and think and feel so that other people can experience the depths of what they can think and feel.
	To remake the world in the image of everyone who still has a spark of life left, who can cup it from the harsh winds of the empty-hearted, who can cup that flame and bring that flame up and bring it to life and make it real so that we can go from isolated starlight to full-on sunshine.
	And that's what this show is fundamentally all about.
	And people say, well, why do you talk to people about their feelings?
	Why do you talk to people about their histories?
	Why do you talk to people about who they are when you could be dissecting the Fed?
	Because dissecting the Fed will not save us.
	The Fed exists because of the fiat currency of the false self.
	Everything that is economic, everything that is political, everything that is nationalistic, is a reflection of our deepest betrayals in how we've been betrayed and how we continue to betray ourselves.
	In all innocence, in many ways, as I did.
	But it is only through very, very deep certainties that we can fight the insistent predations of evildoers.
	How are we supposed to fight those who vastly profit from immorality, except using the very deepest stakes of certainty we can drive into the ground?
	To the point where very trucks will run into us in the highway and shatter.
	Where stones will rain from us in the sky and turn to powder.
	With the power of our certainty.
	And you cannot gain certainty without fully inhabiting your history, without being fully informed by your history, without having blown away the fantastical ghosts of your own misperceptions, which are always there based upon the needs of the narcissistic.
	I mean, we are in general, as I was, hand puppets of the hysterics.
	Who need, who need, who need, who have nothing to offer, who exploit, who use, who prey upon, who prey upon us.
	And so this really is all, and always will be, about connect.
	Connect with yourself, connect with your history, connect with your values.
	Act on the truth.
	We can't reach into anyone's heart Snap our fingers and have it ignite into life.
	But we can hold our own burning hearts so high that all but the most willfully self-blinded can see them.
	And they don't come to warm themselves from our hearts, because they can't.
	But they can ignite their own hearts as an echo.
	Which is not an echo, really.
	But the culmination of a new flame.
	And that's the warmth that lights the way to the future.
	And you can't get that without being ruthlessly honest with yourself, accepting the pain of your history and having it inform your future.
	And being relentlessly who you are, no matter what the world says.
	The world hates me?
	So what?
	So what?
	I mean, who...
	Comes along and demands that the human condition be raised, that standards be raised, that people live with integrity.
	Who isn't hated?
	Who does that?
	The world hates me.
	That is the punching of ghosts.
	Unless you fear ghosts, they have no way to harm you.
	So that...
	It's why I encourage people to speak honestly, to live their values, to go to therapy, to connect with themselves, to take no substitutes for true human contact.
	Because if we don't have that depth of certainty, we can't win.
	We can't win against our personal history and we sure as hell cannot win against the generally brutal history of the species.
	Well, Stefan, there's nothing I should say or that's This is pure poetry.
	Very impressive.
	I have to re-listen to that.
	It's so rich, so deep.
	Thank you very much for the insight and all for the other videos.
	You really have very positively touched my life.
	I wish I would have discovered you like 10 years earlier than My relationship would be intact and I would have not gone wrong with some jobs and so on.
	And I appreciate that.
	And, you know, regret acted on properly is merely a promise to avoid repetition.
	So I think regret is very healthy as long as it informs avoidance.
	So I really appreciate you bringing up the topic.
	It's not something I talk about a huge amount, but it obviously is an important topic to talk about.
	And I really, really appreciate it.
	Thank you so much for calling in.
	And of course, please feel free to call in again.
	I hope you get a better therapist next time.
	But really trust your instincts when it comes to a therapist.
	If you're not excited to go, if you're not thrilled and challenged and enriched and deepened by your interactions with your therapist, Keep on moving.
	There's lots of people around who can offer help, and when there's a connection, you'll really know it.
	And if there's not, and if you doubt, it's because it's not there, in my opinion.
	So, again, thanks so much.
	Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful evening, everybody.
	Hold on, hold on, hold on, Stan.
	Oh, Mike!
	Oh, Mike!
	We have a special song coming up.
	Presley?
	Wait, wait, wait.
	So, Presley...
	I just wonder if you could perhaps chime in on some of the literary criticisms that we had earlier with reference to the Wright Brothers and Flight and whether it's so possible or not.
	I used to think that I could not go on And life was nothing but an awful song But now I know the meaning of true love, yeah.
	I'm leaning on the everlasting arms, if I can see it.
	Then I can do it If I just believe it There's nothing to it I believe I can fly I believe I can touch the sky I think about it every night and day I spread my wings and fly away I believe I can soar I
	see me running through that open door I believe I can fly I believe I can fly.
	Oh, I believe I can fly.
	I actually believe it now, too.
	Let me finish the next chord.
	I'll do more for this song.
	Well, I really, really appreciate that.
	That was beautiful.
	And you really haven't experienced the song until you've seen me dancing to it.
	Anyway, if you've only listened to the audio...
	Please check out the video.
	So, thank you so much.
	I appreciate that, everybody.
	And thank you so much for coming back.
	You are welcome anytime.
	And have yourselves a wonderful week, everyone.
	If you'd like to help out the show, of course, fdrurl.com slash donate.
	Help us bring more philosophy to the planet babies.
	I hope you have a great, great week.

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