Nov. 20, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:00:55
2846 The Stephen Hawking Pin Up Calendar - Wednesday Call In Show November 19th, 2014
Are "buy-here finance-here" businesses ethical or do they exploit the poor? Does empathy actually make you weak? Why is it when I am open and honest with people I push them away rather than connect with them?Includes: The poor are not immune to being dicks, the importance of social trust, the cost of doing business, no such thing as a free lunch, paying the douche-bag tax, feminist response to scientist Matt Taylor’s “offensive” shirt, street harassment in NYC, preparing yourself for financial collapse, why it’s essential to be hated, welfare programs vs. open immigration, gender related empathy differences, empathy leaves you vulnerable to predators, authenticity is punished, the science behind empathy, disrespecting the idea of love, the disgusting suggestion that rape victims should love their rapists, pushing back against hallmark card myths, the vacuum of unanswered questions and dissociating through the use of marijuana.
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Mikey Mike, who do we have on first?
All right.
Up first today is Chase.
And Chase wrote in and said, what are Stefan's thoughts on buy here, pay here businesses?
And does he think that they help customers or do more to harm them in the long run by being in existence?
You what now what?
Kind of what now?
Hey, Stefan.
Hi.
Basically, I should probably start by kind of explaining what we do as a business and go from there, give you guys an idea of that, and then go back to the question if that sounds good to you.
I have no idea whether it sounds good to me or not, but I'm certainly willing to listen.
Okay.
So, basically, we are in-house financing.
We finance the same customers that we sell vehicles to.
We finance cars to people with either no credit or bad credit, even though we have our own ways of seeing if somebody's potentially going to be a good customer or not.
And so, basically, to make up for the risk that we charge, we charge more, quite a bit more, than your conventional financing or even a secondary financing.
And we don't have the control The banks don't have control over us.
We can kind of decide who we want to finance or who we don't want to finance to.
Basically, that's kind of an idea of the business.
Okay.
I understand.
Basically, your business model is our horse has less chance of winning, so we'll pay greater odds.
In other words, the greater the risk, the greater the reward needs to be to cover the cost for the bad risks.
It's not that Risky to lend $10 to Bill Gates, but to lend $10,000 to someone who declared bankruptcy a year ago is more risky, and so you charge a premium for that risk, right?
Exactly.
But my only reservation in the business—I mean, I'm already in it—is that we're charging quite a bit to people that are on the lower-income scale or middle class that already can't afford a lot of things.
On the other side of that, if we didn't provide a service, they wouldn't be buying the vehicles from us.
Yeah, we're going to assume that at least some of those people are buying vehicles so they can get to a job, right?
Exactly.
I mean, there's some jobs that it's really tough to get to if you don't have a car, right?
Exactly.
The thing about it, too, is that it's quite a bit more expensive to do what we do than it is to just be a used car dealership.
We have to Hire somebody just to collect on the accounts.
And, you know, we have additional software expenses that can get pretty pricey.
You know, we have a lot more expense involved because we're, you know, having to track down our money.
Whereas the regular used car dealership, the only time that they really Have to deal with the customer is on day one, and maybe the customer will come back once or twice if they have an issue or complaint.
But with us, we set up the payments to when they get paid.
So if they get paid weekly, we get paid right after they get paid.
There's no time to go out and spend that money.
Just out of curiosity, what are the software costs that you're incurring over and above?
I think it could be a grand or two a month.
My dad generally does a lot of the accounting and billing, my dad and one other lady, but yeah, it's grander to at least to run that.
No, but why do you need additional software?
We have to be able to track everybody's payments.
Also, the software has it built in to print all of our contracts.
And basically just keeping track of all the accounts.
And also we report to the credit bureau, which we're one of only two of them, the buyer payers in our town that do that, which requires automatic uploading of everybody's pay history into online.
Right.
And how many points are you guys charging?
Just give me a spread, and this is anonymous, right?
Nobody knows who you are, so I'm just curious.
No.
So basically, the interest is 18.95%.
And but the thing about us is that a bank only controls the actual what they can charge on interest, whereas we have more room to control prices.
Wait, wait.
Sorry.
I don't understand what that means.
The bank only controls what they charge on interest?
The bank can only control the interest rate, whereas since we're selling the vehicle and controlling interest, we can market the vehicle And, you know, more than normal and then also charge interest.
Oh, so this is sort of like at a movie theater.
They can charge more for the entrance fee but then they can charge less for popcorn or they can charge more for popcorn and charge less for the interest fee.
So they have – you have two profit opportunities which you can balance depending on customer needs, right?
Exactly.
So if somebody wants to – like they don't have as much cash up front and they say, listen, I need to get a car because I've got a great job across town – You may lower the price of selling the car while upping the interest payments because they'll have more money after they buy the car than before.
I'm just trying to dip in.
Is that sort of roughly the idea?
Right.
I mean, our interest, we keep it fixed at the 18.95%.
What I was saying is the price we can charge, generally on like a $3,000 vehicle, We try to hold like a $5,000 average gross.
So we're making the money on that and also the interest.
But we're not making all that money because there's probably 30% to 40% of our customers never pay off.
Oh, really?
So let's say a guy wants to come in and buy a $3,000 car, right?
Which is something up from a beater but something down from a new, right?
Yeah.
A reliable, what, five, six, seven-year-old car and certified, I assume.
So the guy comes in and he needs a $3,000 car.
Does he have to put a down payment or you can finance the whole thing?
We basically finance almost the whole thing.
Tax title and license on something like that would be probably in the $600 to $800 range.
We're financing over 100% because most of our customers only have $300, $400.
You set them up at 18 points and change, and they drive off the lot with virtually no money down, right?
Exactly.
Like maybe an administrative fee or whatever, right?
Yep.
Doc fee, but they're not paying all the fees.
Sorry, so 30% to 40% of your customers don't finish paying the loan?
Exactly.
So the other customers basically have to cover the costs of those.
Oh, yeah.
No, absolutely.
I mean, if you think you get rid of the welfare state by getting rid of the government, you don't understand how loans work.
Because you guys have a giant welfare state, right?
So the people who are paying off the loans are subsidizing all the people who welch out, right?
Exactly.
Now, if a customer can't afford a car anymore, is there a mechanism by which they return it?
Can they honorably kind of get out of it?
Let's say they get fired, whatever.
They can't afford the car.
Do they call you and say, listen, come pick it up, and sorry, but how do they normally get out, or can they?
Or is it basically just repo time?
There's all kinds of different ways.
Sometimes we have to search out for the vehicle.
Sometimes it's just dropped off on the lot after hours.
Sometimes they'll drop it off honorably, but we always try and work with them.
So if there's a special situation, we'll try and work things out.
But, I mean, we can only hold off for so long.
Sometimes we'll look for payments.
One of the biggest determiners of the economic success of a country or any neighborhood is social trust.
So Milton Friedman was writing about this with regards to France.
He said, look, capitalism has never really taken off in France because nobody trusts each other.
I mean, this is a place where when the prime minister dies, his wife is standing next to his mistress at the funeral.
I mean, it's not a very honorable country, at least as far as business transactions go.
Whereas if you have a kind of my word is my bond kind of business environment, then...
Your transaction costs go way down because any transaction cost that involves collection agencies and lawyers and small claims and all that is just a mess, right?
So there is just a huge subsidy, right?
I mean, people who are on the up and up and pay off or if something bad happens and they can't pay off, then they at least can do the right thing.
But then there's a lot of people who just vanish with the car, so to speak, right?
Oh, yeah.
Another thing, though, is that we completely disclose it, but we put GPS, hidden GPSs in all of them, so we can actually find our vehicles and find our collateral.
Well, otherwise, you'd have to charge like 25% or 30% on a loan, right?
Because at least in this way, you could get the cars back.
Right.
Yeah.
But, you know, I mean, I just thought you might think it's interesting.
It's kind of, I see us as being a little bit more free market because a bank, you know, they have more government control, whereas we're just the small guy out here trying to kind of do the same thing, but in our own way.
Yeah, I mean, I think that you guys are operating in a pretty cut-and-dried economic reality situation.
I mean, You'd obviously love to lower your interest payments, the requirement, but this is the cost of having people who are not hugely reliable.
Exactly.
You know, somebody goes and leases, I don't know, some Lexus or something, they're very unlikely to abscond with the car, you know, or just sort of go off the grid.
You know, I mean, I don't know, maybe it's someone who goes into a bitter divorce or whatever, and then they call up the Lexus folks and say, listen, I can't fulfill my contract.
And so on, right?
And there's probably more responsible people, which is not to say that all the wealthy people are responsible, good God.
I mean, there's Wall Street after all.
I mean, those guys can make off with the kind of money that somebody stealing a $3,000 car can't even dream about.
So I'm not sort of trying to correlate wealth with honesty and integrity, but you guys have a pretty substantial risk.
And of course, you have to You have to eat.
There's no point subsidizing to the point where you go out of business and then nobody gets a car, right?
Oh yeah, for sure.
One thing I think is interesting is that we don't really need a lot of government control.
To kind of hold us back from hurting the poor customers and that, you know, there's a few things that we can't do.
Like, we can't charge too much to our customers because we just never get it.
You know, we'd get it like 2% of the time.
And then we'd just be incurring all the taxes on the false profit.
And so we really can't charge too much, you know.
You can charge what you think you can actually get, you know.
Oh, yeah.
People who talk about businesses ripping off people are just people who've never run a business.
It's like, I'm going to open a steakhouse and charge $500 a steak.
And it's like, yeah, good luck with that.
Right.
I think that there's at least some typo in your menu.
No, no.
$500 a steak.
Now, excuse me while I spin in my softly rotating chair, stroking my pencil-thin mustache and my bald cat to boot.
I mean, it's just ridiculous.
And the other thing, too, is people say, ah, you know, 18.5%, that's exploiting the poor.
Oh, yeah!
Oh yeah, because the poor never exploit anyone.
All your customers are honest and they tell you if they run into problems and they never try and run off with cars or anything like that.
They never lie.
They never promise they're going to pay next month when they really know they can't.
They never try to exploit you, right?
Oh no, never.
I got a big message to the socialists.
The poor are not immune from being dicks.
Yeah.
I mean, the poor can be grasping, lying, filthy-headed, scum-sucking, false, exploitive vermin, as can the rich.
It's a human failing, and this idea of the noble poor is just – I mean, I worked – I don't have any experience in what you've done.
I worked at a collections agency, not for very long because the work was pretty dispiriting, but getting people to – people who are behind on their gas bills.
And this wasn't like, you bastards, we're going to send fire down your gas-type pipes and blow up your house.
We were like, hey, we need money to cover our costs.
We've got a payroll to meet and so on, so can we figure out when you're going to pay your gas bill?
Right.
And, I mean, man, the lies that people would tell.
I mean, you just knew it.
You knew it.
Oh, yeah.
I'm getting a check for my grandmother in a week and a half, so I'll do it then.
You just know.
Oh, yeah.
You know the guy's on his way out to buy some weed.
I mean, you just know it.
You know, you can hear the Wizard of Oz on the background with the Pink Floyd soundtrack, and, you know, the guy's like...
You phone him at 2 o'clock in the afternoon and he's like, hello?
Hello?
Hang on a sec!
I need to clear my lungs!
Alright, yeah, I got some money coming your way just about soon.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you know that they've been taking their gas money and they've been blowing it on Doritos.
I mean, you know it.
And they're just lying scumbags.
And this to me is the egalitarianism.
I refuse to promote any class of human beings to either devil or angel status.
I mean, the poor are liars of such adeptness that they make Bill Clinton look like the myth of George Washington.
I mean, a lot of them are kind of weaselbags who will, like a vampire trying to turn into smoke to get through a keyhole, just attempt to wriggle out of any situation with an endless cascade of ever-escalating falsehoods.
And not all the poor or anything like that.
But generally, the honest poor...
Don't stay poor.
You know, if you're honest, if you're forthright, if you work hard, if you have a good attitude, well, you are almost like one in a hundred, it feels like, I mean, having had a bunch of employees over the course of my life.
And so the poor can be very evasive, very false, and they can be as exploitive as you can I mean, don't you spend at least some portion of your day rolling your eyes at the stuff coming down the phone wire?
Oh yeah, that's every day, you know?
Yeah, another thing I was going to say too is, you know, part of the cost is that I think a lot of our customers have like the rental mentality, whereas if I'm renting this place, or if they think that they're renting the vehicle, that It'll be fixed.
If I'm paying this price, then this should be fixed when somebody like myself, it's either black and white.
It's either under warranty or it's not.
I can't uphold that because if we don't fix something that's preventing them getting back and forth to work, they're just going to give up on the loan.
Oh, so sometimes you do have to offer to fix stuff?
Oh, yeah.
Well, I mean, the thing is, is if we don't fix it, we'll get the car back and we'll still have to fix it.
And it'd be worse, right?
Yeah, and then we have to clean it, and then we have to put it back on the lot, wait the 21 days by law that we have to wait before we can resell it, and then pay a salesperson to resell the vehicle.
It's also in our best interest to try and keep that customer in the vehicle.
We've got quite a bit of money out there just on either Repairs that we just covered for the customer at no charge or set up like a side loan for them to pay on, which that rarely gets paid on.
Well, because they've kind of got you by the balls.
They've got your property, and if they destroy the value of your property, then you're kind of in a hole.
So they kind of got you by the short and curlies when they've got your property, and there's a lot of vulnerability in that.
So yeah, I can say...
Now, it's a good thing you're not saying where you are or the name of your company.
Otherwise, it's like, are you telling me I can go get a car from these guys and I'll fix it for free?
All right!
Right.
And, yeah, listen, the desire of the poor to get something for nothing is one of the reasons they stay poor.
Right?
I mean, you know, they're just, oh, get something for nothing.
I'll pay the lottery.
Yeah, okay, because that's going to get you something for nothing.
Right.
Look at the size of those lottery winnings.
It's like, yeah, you know that they're funded by people not winning the lottery, right?
Right.
Which is, like, completely insane.
It's like going into the First World War and saying, well, I'm sure that the gods of war have had enough to eat.
They won't touch me.
It's like, well, no, that's not, you know.
So, I mean, in the poor, you know, like, I get something for nothing.
And I think that's kind of like a low IQ phenomenon.
Mm-hmm.
So, and let me just...
A short rant here because this really bothers me.
You can't run a free market system with a low IQ population.
You just can't.
Because the whole point of economics is nothing is free.
And one of the basic things that happens to people who say, well, you know, I know I've kind of got them by the short and curlies.
They have to fix this car because otherwise it's going to be useless and they spin these stores and so on.
They don't get that it's not free.
And that they are forcing other people to pay for their own thievery.
They're forcing other people to pay for their own thievery.
Like, I got an Obamacare subsidy.
I get free healthcare.
No, you don't.
No, you don't.
You're just forcing other people to pay for your doctoring.
And for your unwillingness or inability to pay for your healthcare beforehand.
And a lot of times, public sector unions...
That your own unhealthy lifestyle choices, you now must force other people to pay for them.
And it is a basic point of honor that I think requires at least an average IQ, like 100 plus.
You have to at least have that, I think, to fundamentally or just basic empathy, which I'm not saying people who are less intelligent can't have, but to understand that it's stealing.
These guys basically are forcing you to pay for their repairs or they're not paying their bills and they're lying about it or they're abandoning their cars or they're making you spend money to go collect their dues.
They're forcing other people to pay for their immorality and it is immorality.
It's lying.
It's fraud.
It's deceitful and it pushes costs onto other people.
If you had an entirely honorable poor set of clients, you could probably charge five or six points and make a fairly good income.
But because you've got all of these false lying weasel bags, you have to charge a significant amount of money.
It really bothers me that people think they can get something for nothing, think they can get away with something, or think that somehow their economic decisions don't have some massive impact.
On everyone else.
My secret is, despite what your government tells you, debts are very real things.
It is very real.
Look, you get a credit card.
It's not free money party time.
It's really not.
And there's nothing more expensive than credit.
I mean, people who pay these interest rates like 20% or more on their credit card bills, I mean, that's a good way to pay $500 for an $80 pair of shoes.
Right.
What's funny is… So people have this idea that there's just somehow this free stuff that's flying around the universe and you've just got to stick out your butterfly net and catch it!
Lookie!
The world is Oprah!
Everyone gets a car!
Well, actually, they didn't get a car even because they had to pay tax on that thing as if it were a gift.
A lot of people couldn't even afford to get a free car.
So debt is a very real thing.
And my secret, it's a weird one, I mean, for a lot of people, pay your debts.
Pay your debts.
Your debts are very real things.
Like, I used to lend money to people a lot more.
But as Shakespeare says, neither a borrower nor a lender be.
Because basically, if you lend money to a friend, you usually lose the money and the friendship.
And it also dulls the edge of husbandry, which means that if you borrow, you then don't end up conserving your money as much because you get this weird free money thing.
And there is this economic illiteracy that people have.
They say, well, if I borrow $1,000 and I only have to pay back $50 a month, that's like $953.
It's not that way at all.
It's very, very expensive.
I get wonderful credit card services.
For free.
Because I am what credit card companies call a deadbeat.
Do you know what that means?
A deadbeat?
Yeah.
Who or what type of person does a credit card company call a deadbeat?
Somebody not making their payments or somebody avoiding them, maybe?
No.
No.
That's a profit center.
A deadbeat to the credit card companies is somebody who pays off They're balanced every single month.
Gotcha.
And do you know why we're called deadbeats?
I don't.
Because we're getting all this free service.
Oh, there you go.
Okay.
Right?
Because we're not paying for our credit cards.
Gotcha.
So we get all of this wonderful infrastructure, all of this security, all of this don't have to carry cash and all this sort of stuff.
We get all of this amazing infrastructure...
And we don't have to pay for it because we pay our bills every month.
And you know what?
If I don't have enough money to buy something, do you know what happens?
This is kind of weird.
If I don't have enough money to buy something, do you know what I do?
Don't buy it.
I don't buy it.
I really don't.
I got a budget for something.
I need some piece of technical equipment for the show.
Well, do I have the money?
Nope.
Okay.
I guess I'll start saving.
And if I can't pay it off within a month, in other words, within the cycle of the credit card, I don't buy it.
I mean, maybe it's growing up dirt poor.
I don't know.
But there's two things.
One is that I pay off my debts and the other thing is I'll never be rich enough to buy low quality.
You have to buy good quality stuff because replacing it is really expensive.
So, you know, I'm not I'm not rich enough to buy low quality, and if I want something and I can't afford it, I will wait until such time as I can afford it.
And these rules, you know, pay your debts.
I mean, I like using credit cards.
I like getting points.
And I don't think – I can't even remember the last time that I did not pay off my credit card balance in full every single month.
And that's – it's a pretty simple life if you just do that stuff.
Just don't get seduced by that dancing harem fairy of credit.
It will – you know, basically credit is just like inviting a vampire into your house.
Hey, come on in.
You look thirsty.
I'll give you some tomato.
You're just going to get fried, fried, fried, fried.
And so – and now I can sort of understand – By this, I'm certainly not discrediting what you're doing.
It can be a fantastic investment to get a car that you need to get to a job that pays well.
If you can earn double your money by going across town, then okay, get a car.
That's an investment.
That's like going to school or buying a house or something.
It's like you can never be So I'm not discrediting what you're doing.
But, you know, the average American household is $15,000 in credit card debt.
Are you kidding me?
$15,000 in credit card debt.
I mean, that is absolutely appalling.
$15,000 in credit card debt.
I'm just going to do a little bit of math here.
So let's see.
$15,000.
Times, let's just say, let's just give it 20%, right?
So you're paying $3,000 a year and not even paying off your debt, right?
I mean, that's some crazy stuff right there.
Oh, yeah.
And let's see, let's put that at 12 months.
$250 a month.
$250 a month to not even pay off your debt.
Just to pay the interest.
And that is some crazy, stupid stuff.
And the fact that no economic literacy is taught in government schools is inevitable.
The government doesn't want you having a shred of economic literacy.
Otherwise, you'd, I don't know, be an even remotely informed voter.
But no, the poor can be incredible dicks.
The poor can be ridiculously bad money managers.
In general, lower IQ is associated with poverty.
But that having been said, I think that what you guys do is a fine and honorable thing because there are poor people who need a car.
I remember after – let's see.
After I graduated from undergrad, I actually – I needed a job that was a recession on.
I put an ad in the paper.
I saw an ad in the newspaper.
It caught my eye.
And someone answered the ad and he ran a courier company.
And he was interested in me and we had a bunch of meetings and I ended up not pursuing that opportunity for reasons that aren't particularly important now and I ended up going back to get my master's degree instead.
But I had to take like three buses to go and meet this guy.
I mean… Like an hour and a half.
It's like that maid on two and a half men.
Three buses to meet the guy.
And the first thing I would have had to do if I were to have that job would be I'd have to get a car.
I couldn't be doing all that stuff to get to work or anything like that.
So, yeah.
So, I mean, there are times when you need a car to have a job and that's a good investment and the poor should have access to that.
But, you know, it's not...
It's not hard to stop being poor.
I mean, it may be hard for people who are not that smart, but it's really not that hard to stop being poor.
Work hard, save your money, pay off your debts, get a good credit rating, and for God's sakes, don't borrow on a credit card.
If you need to, get a line of credit or something like that, which is secured against something where you're only paying a couple of points.
But, I mean, lots of people are like, hey, I got a credit card!
Oh, boy.
Right.
Here comes the long rope to scoop you up and swing you like Mussolini.
Anyway, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Go ahead.
No, I see us as being good and bad.
I mean, yeah, they're paying more, but at the same time, we're giving them an opportunity to get themselves out of the situation that they're in by reporting to the credit bureau.
Not a lot of buy-here-pay-here's do that.
Right.
Another thing, too, that always gets me is, like you were saying, is where they get the stuff and then they don't want to pay for it.
When we sign a car deal, a contract, they are okay with the price the day that they need the vehicle, but then a few months later, they'll come back in and say, oh, I'm paying five grand over Kelly Blue Book.
It's like, Do you know why you're paying that?
They have no idea on how expensive it is to be in a business such as what we're in.
Well, and if they had any kind of credit rating, then they wouldn't be talking to you guys, right?
Exactly.
Right?
I mean, if they had a good credit rating, they'd be able to talk to a bank, right?
They get a bank loan.
Yep.
And the bank will loan you out a car at a couple of points, right?
Yep.
It's because they...
Now, this is not true for everyone, right?
There are obviously people who are new to the workforce and so on.
But in general, I mean, I had a good credit rating when I was in my teens, for God's sake.
Because, you know, I had jobs at bank accounts and all that.
And one of the reasons that people end up talking to you guys...
It's because they've screwed some stuff up pretty seriously, right?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, when you look at somebody's credit and they've got one or two other repossessions on their credit, who else is going to finance them, you know?
Right.
And then they expect you to be free.
And if they call you up voluntarily and they say, yes, man, I can't, right?
Then it doesn't end up being a repo, right?
No, no.
If somebody's in contact with us and stays in contact with us, we try and work with them as much as we can.
Yeah.
Yeah, so the only reason that they end up with a repo on their credit rating is because basically they tried to steal a car.
Yep.
I mean, that's the reality.
I want to keep the car, want to have access to the car, don't want to pay for the car.
Well, you're kind of like a thief now.
And that is not a good decision.
And look, I mean, I understand that there is a very fundamental human desire of close your eyes, cross your fingers, and hope it goes away.
Right?
I mean, that's a very understandable human impulse.
And it is a very bad human impulse that people have with regards to that stuff.
I mean...
This, dodge the phone and play some Xbox.
I knew a guy, when I was younger, I used to do work on being an extra.
You can actually see me as a featured headshot in an old TV movie called Cain and Abel.
I think it was a Jeffrey Archer novel or something.
And I was in the opening shot, full face of a video for some 80s band.
I kind of remember now.
But anyway, so I used to do this extra work just to sort of make some...
Can I dare say it?
Extra money.
Oh!
See, this is why I don't do a lot of stand-up.
Anyway, and I met this guy and we sort of hit it off and he was a pretty funny guy and so on, right?
So I truly hung out with him a little bit here and there, but holy crap.
I mean, was he ever in trouble financially?
I shouldn't laugh, but I mean, he owed money to the point where he's like, hey man, you want to call me?
Okay, here's how you call me.
First of all, You call the phone, you let it ring once, then you hang up.
Then you call the phone, you let it ring twice, then you hang up.
Then you call me back and let the phone ring four times, then you hang up.
And then you call me and I'll pick up.
And I'm like, are you in witness protection program?
He's like, no man, I owe some money.
And I think it was like not even to a formal organization, if you catch my drift.
People who would probably repossess bits of your anatomy rather than some car.
And I was like, holy crap.
I mean, I didn't obviously hang out with the guy very much past that, but I was like, oh man, what a horrible, scary life of being in debt.
Oh yeah.
It's horrible.
And this overhead of douchebags, like the douchebag tax in human society, is really, really annoying.
Way back in the day, again, I'm sorry to give you all these war stories, but I sort of want to reinforce the point that we're making.
So, when I was at Glendon College, the campus of York University, I did two years, I think, of an English degree before going to theater school.
And I used to do a radio show there back in the day.
I mean, please don't get me wrong.
It was not much of a radio show.
I think it was basically just broadcast on campus.
And There was a guy there—I can't remember if he had a show or not, but there was a guy there who had this great idea for a scam, you know, because this is way back in the day.
ATMs had just come out, like automatic telemachines, and this was, like, shocking.
I mean, trying to explain to people what it was like when you could only get to the bank from, like, 10 o'clock till 3 o'clock Monday to Thursday— It's kind of mind-blowing.
Didn't get $305, you have no weekend because you have no money or any way to get it.
And this guy was, you know, oh, I've got a great idea, right?
So he was the first guy to figure out, oh, you know, if you can go to a bunch of different ATMs, you can only take out $150 per transaction, but if you go to 10 ATMs across the city, blah, blah, blah, you can get $1,500 out before they even check your account and blah, blah, blah, right?
Nice.
And I was like, ah, douchebag tax.
You son of a bitch.
Because now I have to pay all these stupid fees because they have to put all this extra code in.
To make sure you don't take out more than you're supposed to at different bank machines, we've got to put in douchebag defense system, which I have to pay for.
You tool!
You unbelievable, parasitical tool.
It's people like you that make people like me pay through our asses for the rest of our lives.
And the douchebag tax is really annoying, and there'll obviously be some of that in a free society, but not that much.
But, oh yeah, I mean, people like that, they're just so annoying.
I got a system.
I got a scam.
No!
No!
You're taking my goddamn money, you unbelievable time thief.
I now have to work an extra 20 minutes a week or half an hour a week to pay for all the shit that the banks and credit card companies have to do because of douchebags like you.
You predatory motherfuckers.
And so, yeah, I mean, I think that what you're doing is great.
You give people an opportunity for a second chance.
And a lot of times they got themselves into that sort of bullshit by taking out loans before and then crossing their fingers and hoping it was going to go away.
And sometimes that works, of course, right?
In that you guys will sometimes just take the car and say, screw it.
Guy's got no assets.
What can we do, right?
Yeah, everything's so good.
But I'm really glad that there's a credit report.
I love credit reports.
Love them!
Love them!
Because that means douchebags pay and good people don't.
Yep.
I can go and get a loan if I want at a couple of points interest because I have spent, lo, these 35 years paying off my debts.
And when I didn't have money, I didn't spend the money.
I remember when I was in Montreal at McGill doing my undergrad in history.
There was a student newspaper that came out and in it there was a coupon which was two for one.
I mean, I would go, and I would get all those student newspapers, and I would take out those ads, and I would get two-for-one 12-inch veggie subs, put some in the freezer, put some in the fridge, and I could live on that.
And I could get a souvlaki for $2.75 that basically was like swallowing a small Greek brick with yogurt, and that would keep me pretty full.
For a while, there was a peel pub in Montreal where for $1...
I could get Eggs, Toast and All You Can Drink Coffee where I would sit with the wonderful Iranian director who directed me in Shakespeare's Macbeth when I played Macbeth and I would continually remind him that he could not replace all of his bodily fluids with coffee because at one point he told me that he'd sat there so long and drank about 20 coffees he ended up having to go to the hospital because his heart was palpitating.
Not a guy who was very much into deferred gratification but he came from the apostata of I mean, I cooked and all that sort of stuff too, but man, you could not spend a lot of money and you could live pretty damn cheap.
And that's what I did.
I remember one winter in Montreal, which is a really, really cold city, one winter in Montreal, I barely turned on the heat.
I wake up in the morning and see my breath in the air because I needed to save money because heat was very expensive.
As it turns out, you didn't even pay for heat.
They just gave you the average of what it cost last year, so the person who moved in after me got a very good year.
I didn't.
I just freeze my nipples off.
But you just stop spending, stop spending, stop spending the money.
Don't buy what you can't afford and pay back your debts.
It's not that complicated, but it seems to be for a lot of people.
All right, that's the end of my rant.
Yeah, I mean I have an instituted new plan.
I got in touch with a company that does re-credit pair to try and help give my customers, when they buy a car from us, the opportunity to deal with this company for free to help them build up their credit.
I had one customer ever use it, so we stopped paying for it because nobody used it.
Oh man, that's sad.
And people are like, well, it's just a number.
It's like, yeah.
And so is your blood pressure.
It doesn't mean it's irrelevant.
So is your penis size, but we add an inch to everything, right?
So, I mean, I don't know.
It is sad.
And look, I get it.
I mean, there are some people who aren't as smart as other people.
This is the old Christian idea of the soul, that we're all equal in the eyes of God.
It's like, well, maybe we are all equal in the eyes of imaginary beings, but in the very real world of brain capacity, we are not equal.
Right?
And I think it's sad.
I sort of hesitate to sort of get overly frustrated and upset with people who have an IQ of 80 because they have an IQ of 80.
And I think Coco the gorilla tested at 75.
So it's hard to get angry at a gorilla for having a bad credit rate.
But yeah, it's just one of these sad things that you just shake your head and say, what the hell is wrong with people?
Right.
I mean, there's no free lunch.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
You don't need to be a brain surgeon to figure that one out.
Nobody thinks that Lars and the Real Girl has a real girl.
It's just a doll, right?
And this idea that there's just all this free stuff out there, if you could just figure out some angle, it fundamentally alienates people from other human beings.
I mean, A, you have to not have much empathy in order to end up ripping off other people.
And B, it permanently, I think, detaches you from having empathy.
Right.
Because when you do wrong, when you cheat people, when you rip people off, and I'm obviously not talking about you.
I'm talking about the people who don't pay for their cars, which they voluntarily sign up to pay for.
But when you don't do the right thing, empathy becomes your enemy.
Because if you ever do develop empathy, I don't know how you would, but if you ever did develop empathy, what would happen is you'd actually start to feel bad for the people you ripped off.
And that is pretty bad.
It's a pretty bad experience.
It's why I'm not hoping for a lot of, I don't know, suddenly sprouting consciences from the wolves of Wall Street, so to speak, right?
I mean, Bernie Madoff's not going to wake up one day and say, oh, you know what?
I've suddenly got a lot of empathy.
Wow!
Did I ever rip off a lot of people who trusted me?
I mean, what would he do?
He'd just throw himself off a bridge.
Empathy is a survival mechanism when you're in a loving, happy set of relationships.
But empathy becomes a huge and I think will kill you if you develop it later.
And so if you've spent your life sort of cheating and ripping people off and lying to people and scamming people and so on, I genuinely believe – I don't know, but I genuinely believe that if you were to magically be given the power of empathy – After you've been a cheating, lying parasite, I literally think you'd wake up and you'd look in the mirror with such horror that you'd just throw yourself off a cliff.
I actually think it becomes a base survival mechanism to do all that you can to avoid the perils of empathy after you've become an irredeemably bad person.
In other words, you've done so much wrong that you can't possibly give recompense to it.
People's ability to not pay back stuff...
It has always been a surprise to me.
I mean, I lent a friend of mine $800 back in the day.
I mean, this is like 25 years ago.
That's a lot of money, isn't it?
That's a lot of money now, but back then it'd be like a couple of grand.
And man, I had to really push him to get the money back.
That woman I lent $2,000 to, and holy crap!
I mean, To really, you know, hey, where's my money?
I mean, I am not a rich man.
Where is my money?
Oh, you know, it's coming.
It's like, no, just give me – it doesn't get frustrating.
Just tell me the truth.
If you're not going to pay it back, just tell me.
You know, just put this weaselly, foggy, jello-up-the-nose crap that people give you.
Yeah, really, to hound this person.
I once put a deposit down – On a condo, the guy said, listen, I've got to check with whoever I'm going to be living with.
I'm not sure.
Not condo.
A rental place.
And then my roommate ended up not liking it.
He said, oh, yeah, you know, if you don't like it, I'll give you the deposit back.
And I ended up going back to the guy and said, listen, my deposit back guy doesn't like it.
He's like, oh, no, I never said that.
I'm like, oh, man.
So, yeah, people are just annoying.
They just make people cautious.
And, you know, I mean...
If we could have a life or a world wherein people would just tell the truth, boy, would we ever have.
A paradise and economic growth would be enormous.
You know, we could overcome even the predations of government if we all just committed to telling the truth about things as sure as hell would make your job easier, right?
Oh, yeah.
One thing I hear you talk a lot about is kind of, you know, defooing with people that are maybe, you know, government status, you know.
And one thing that I see is, like, I'm surrounded by irrational people every day.
I think I'm smart enough to see through a lot of the BS, but it still makes me wonder if I was surrounded by some people who actually thought more like you and I, what I would be able to accomplish there.
Well, that's a big question, right?
And this question of voluntary relationships and our relationships to status, just for those who don't know, I talked about it, gosh, I don't know, six years ago in a whole series of podcasts.
I think four podcasts called Ron Paul versus Personal Liberty, specifically aimed at people who were supporting Ron Paul with massive amounts of time and money and energy and effort and focus and all that.
And my case was that you can probably get better leverage in convincing people about the sincerity of your cause if you say to people who are statists, like you ask the question, do you support the use of violence against me?
And statists do.
If you don't want to pay your taxes, then they support you being thrown in jail.
If you smoke drugs, marijuana, and therefore the war on drugs, then they support you being thrown in jail for a personal habit that initiates no force against anyone.
And it's not – my recommendation has never been – of course, it's parodied this way or caricatured this way.
My recommendation has never been, wake up tomorrow and ask everyone if they're an anarchist.
And everyone who says no, never see them again.
That's never been my recommendation.
It's just a bunch of nonsense that's put forward by people.
But my recommendation is that – It is a basic reality that status supports the use of force against you for following your conscience.
I find that the Western meddling in the Middle East is reprehensible, immoral, destructive, and puts my friends and family at risk of retaliation.
I consider it a gross, underhanded, malevolent violation of the sanctity of my conscience to be forced to pay for military adventures in the Middle East.
I consider it just horrendous.
And people who support the state and who support that war, they want me thrown in jail for not wanting to fund imperialism.
They want me thrown in jail.
That is a reality, and people can get upset at that all they want.
I couldn't give a shit about people who get upset about it.
What I care about is find a way to disprove it.
You get this weird thing in the world now where people are like, I'm upset!
It's like, so?
I mean, philosophy don't give a shit.
I got upset about having cancer.
My cancer didn't give a shit, right?
I mean, who cares?
I mean, I don't know if it's some female influence.
Like, I'm upset!
Okay, well, you know, I guess if you're a young, attractive woman, people care.
But when you grow up as a man, I'm upset!
I mean, there's this guy who was the president of Harvard, I think it was.
And he was asked why there aren't more women in the STEM fields.
Was it science, technology, engineering?
I can't remember what the last one is.
Anyway, so, and he said, I don't know, maybe, you know, maybe it could be a bunch of reasons, but maybe one of them is that men and women's brains could be a little different, right?
And of course, men's brains are better at spatial recognition, of which STEM fields kind of work that way, right?
And, yeah, sorry, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Thanks, Mike.
If you could get me the guy's name, I think it was Larry Saunders or something like that.
Anyway, so he said this, and there were women in the audience who got up and ran out of the room.
Like, the woman was like, I thought I would faint!
I thought I was going to throw up!
And I'm like, are you kidding me?
So you hear an argument or a perspective that you disagree with, and you're Impulse, ladies, is to run out of the room and feel like you're about to throw up.
Could you be more of a hysterical Victorian female cliche if you tried?
I don't think so.
I mean, I was on a debating team for a couple of years when I was in college, and sometimes I came up against some really good debaters.
And I actually did really well.
I came in like sixth out of all of Canada the first year I tried out of thousands of debaters.
And...
I was pretty good, but there were some people who were really good.
And, I mean, the idea that if I felt I might be losing a debate, that I would run out of the room.
Sorry, I didn't say it.
I'm going to run out of the room hyperventilating into a paper bag and saying that I feel like I'm going to throw up.
And this is what happened.
Yeah, the guy's name was Lawrence Summers.
He just put out some speculation.
That's crazy.
About possible reasons as to why there aren't as many women in the STEM fields, right?
And, uh, holy crap!
I mean, the women are, ah!
Oh, I can't believe what he said that I need my vapors!
I mean, basically, they're acting like Blanche Dubois hit with electroconvulsive therapy.
It's like, oh boy, that must be nice.
It must be nice to have people care about you being offended and upset.
I mean, as a man, it doesn't really work that way.
Hey, I get offended by my tax bill.
I see me running out of the room hyperventilating and saying I'm going to throw up and that's a real issue.
But I don't know.
It's just strange to me that there are people in this world who think that I'm upset.
And so, yeah, so I put these arguments out about statism and personal relationships, and it's like people say, well, I'm upset.
I don't like that argument.
That argument seems mean to me.
Are you just saying you should get rid of everyone who disagrees with you?
It's like, well, at least I'm not saying I should put them in fucking jail.
That's what the statists are saying.
Get thee to a fucking jail.
Get thee to a rape room.
And, oh my god!
Oh my god!
And then, of course, the feminists didn't even get upset about Clinton's reported or reputed serial groping of everything with a pulse and at least two out of three titties.
So, yeah, I'm upset.
I find that it's so sad.
I mean, part of me is like, you idiots, and part of me is like, well, how sad that is.
How sad that is that people will...
Talk about being upset with my arguments.
Who gives a shit if you're upset?
Who gives a shit if I'm upset?
I mean, it literally is like the Pope talking to Galileo.
I'm upset!
But what's the truth of the matter?
I'm upset.
And what this guy, he landed a spaceship on a comet.
I mean, that's a little bit beyond lunar lander for those who had a few quarters too many in the 80s.
A guy landed on a comet.
He landed just like hitting a bullet with a bullet.
I mean, that's incredible.
And he wore a t-shirt with some women in bikinis on it that was actually given to him by a woman.
And he's crying.
His moment of greatest triumph.
He's crying.
Yeah.
I mean, you don't see men picketing Chippendales, for fuck's sakes.
Because those greased-up, mega-squatting and crunching bastards.
Oh, my God, you're so objectivizing these men.
I mean, oh my God.
It's a shirt, for God's sakes.
I mean, yeah, because all women are into Brad Pitt for his brain.
Because he's just so smart.
Which is why you see all these women with pinups of Stephen Hawking hyperventilating from his chair.
And the woman who gave him his t-shirt is a feminist.
But he wore a t-shirt with some semi-clad women on it in the moment of his greatest scientific triumph, one of the greatest scientific triumphs that the public consumed without getting confused.
And women are all, you better apologize, because I didn't know that women had belly buttons until I saw that shirt!
You've got to be kidding me!
Has he beaten any women up?
No!
Is he a rapist?
No!
Has he sexually harassed anyone?
No!
But I guess he doesn't have the power to protect abortion like Bill Clinton, so he doesn't have feminists willing up to say, oh, I'll give him a hummer if he'll keep Roe v.
Wade.
My God!
It must be!
I can't imagine the world...
That people live in, especially women.
Young, attractive women in particular.
And this is not all young, attractive women do this.
I'm just saying.
Sort of reminds me of this old Dilbert cartoon where the engineers are in a sensitivity exercise and Dark Bird is running it.
And he says to the engineers, all right, I want you guys to just imagine for a moment that you're a woman.
And one of the engineers says, whoa, someone's offering to buy me drinks.
And another one says, wow, people are being nice to me for like no reason at all.
And another one says, I can't find my keys.
And another one says, my shirt slowly flutters to the floor.
Stop!
No more!
The exercise is over!
And that's what it's like.
I mean, I just, I'd love, I would love to be reincarnated as a sexy woman.
I think that would be an absolutely fascinating experience.
I mean, to just walk through the world and have people be nice to my eggs in the form of me.
I just think that would be fascinating.
Anyway, so that's sort of neither here nor there.
I just think it would be a completely fascinating experience.
Like this woman who was walking down the street in New York City who got harassed, apparently, for walking down the street.
And...
Oh man, there's so much to say about that, which we won't necessarily get into at all.
But first of all, there's another video of a guy who's a model walking down the street, a good-looking guy, and he gets harassed like crazy as well by women.
Secondly, for this woman walking down the street in New York, you know, it does not look like these men are on their lunch breaks from work.
It was a weekday, it was the middle of the weekday, and these guys are all kind of lounging around.
Just lounging around!
Can you say welfare state?
I think you can.
Because there's nothing that civilizes sexists more than getting into the workforce.
Because if you're a sexist pig in the workforce, you're not going to keep your job.
But if you're in welfare, yeah, you could be a sexist pig, whether you're male or female, and they're not going to cut off your welfare check for that.
So the basic civilizing influence of actually having a job is...
Is absent.
And also, I mean, not a lot of white guys who were catcalling this woman.
And now, people sort of pointed it out that just about everyone who catcalled this woman was black or Hispanic.
And in New York, of course, there's a disproportionate amount of sex crimes that occur for the black and Hispanic community, like wildly disproportionate, which is why rape culture is never specifically targeted at any particular race or culture, which by statistics it should be.
But, they said, oh yeah, well, white guys did catcall too, but I guess we never quite got that on film, or there were sirens, or, you know, it's just like, yeah, well, you know, there's an uncomfortable truth about all of this, that you've got a bunch of non-white guys hanging around in New York who are harassing women.
And there's a homosexual version too, right?
You saw this one, Mike.
I don't have my Google Alert set to new gay porn, but Mike, you...
You saw something?
Yeah, there was a homosexual male version of the walking in New York City for three hours and getting harassed, and he was getting treated pretty brutally by both men and women coming up to him, so...
Wait, he was a gay guy?
Or someone pretending to be a gay guy.
I'm not exactly sure about that.
Okay, how do you pretend to be a gay guy?
He was wearing the tightest t-shirt and pants imaginable and carrying a pink bag.
It was a bit over the top.
Now, was he harassed by men who were homophobes, or was he just harassed by men who wanted a piece of that Chicken Hawk stuff?
Yes.
Yeah, everyone.
Well, I remember, so again, way back in the day, when I seem to have ended up with a whole bunch of gay roommates.
Maybe it's the accent.
I don't know.
And there was this guy who was a ballet dancer and a really nice guy.
I actually liked him a lot.
But he basically came out and he said, like, holy crap.
You wouldn't believe the amount of sinister, predatory interest in me that came out of the gay community when I came out because he was a ballet dancer.
So, of course, he had a fantastic figure, a great body, lean and long legs and all that sort of stuff.
And yeah, I mean, the amount of harassment he got in the gay community was significant and alarming.
So, anyway, I just sort of wanted to mention that, anyway, I don't know where the hell we ended up with that.
Anyway, anything else?
I've got to get on to the next caller.
Thank you for the springboard to Randfest that you provided.
I hope it wasn't too dispiriting for you.
Yeah.
Do you have time for one more question?
It's another topic, or I can always call in another time.
If it's quick, yeah.
Yeah.
You've done quite a few of the economy videos on to prepare yourself accordingly.
And I was just wondering, I've done some things to prepare myself accordingly, but I was just kind of curious on what you've done in your personal life to prepare yourself accordingly.
I mean, I've talked about it before.
I mean, I think having some diversity of assets I think is important.
I think recognizing that money may lose some value, I think that's important.
I think...
See if you can get something that is a real thing.
If you can translate cash into stuff that has value, that doesn't depreciate, then I think that's a useful thing.
Maybe get a couple of bitcoins by doing some work from people who can pay you in bitcoins or something like that.
And a little bit of gold.
Just diversify.
I've not read it, but I get the general understanding.
Harry Brown, the late Harry Brown, B-R-O-W-N-E, I had a book, basically 25% stocks, bonds, cash, and gold, I think was his.
Please don't quote me on it because it's off the top of my head.
Permanent Portfolio is the name of the book.
A lot of people swear by it.
Yeah, the Permanent Portfolio.
I thought that involved a perm.
So for me, I was not particularly...
Anyway.
Cryptocurrencies have kind of thrown that up in the air, though, because now, you know, had the four categories, and now you're throwing cryptocurrencies in the mix.
And do they kind of take the place of gold, or do they not?
It's been a lot of conjecture, but interesting and worth reading nonetheless.
And can I just say one other thing?
Yeah.
Oh, the people who say, well, if there's no electricity, you don't have any Bitcoin.
Yeah.
If there's no electricity, your missing bitcoins will be the least of your worries.
If there's no electricity, you won't have any food.
What about as far as food?
I know you're in Canada, so some things you may not want to say if you do have them.
I've got some weapons here, and I've got some body armor ready.
If you're living in Ferguson, you could buy a hand weapon right now.
I've got some night vision ready, and I've kind of gotten into four-wheel drives as well, so just kind of trying to diversify that as well.
Yeah, look, I think having some extra food is a good idea no matter what, because you may have noticed that the price of groceries has been kind of heading through the roof over the last couple of years.
Yep.
I mean, it's mental going to the grocery store.
I'm like...
It's a big giant tech taper on my forehead so my brain doesn't explode when I see the prices in combination with the lowered ingredient list, like size.
The cost is going up and the portions are going down.
It's like, what, are we getting further away from the Earth here?
I mean, we have some sort of giant interstellar spaceship.
We've got to ration ourselves for the next 200 years.
So I think having some, you know, just buy some food and, you know, stick it in the basement.
You know, worst case scenario, you're going to save 100 bucks or more off your grocery bill by just going with your I think that's not a bad idea in general.
And know the people who are around you.
And if you can get any relationships going with farmers, I think that's a good idea and all that.
Yeah, there's lots of things that you can do.
You can join a co-op, a farmer, and learn some stuff about how to grow.
If you've got any land, plant a garden.
I mean, I'm not expecting it to get to that point, but it's not bad stuff to do as a whole, and it's not going to harm you to know more about food and all that.
But have a community.
I was just thinking about this today, the degree to which the government wanted women out of the family and into the workforce to Aaron Russo has talked about it, and you can look at that on the internet, on YouTube, A-A-R-O-N-R-U-S-S-O. But another thing I was thinking about as well is when you get women into the workforce, and by that I mean sort of out of raising kids, there's a real community.
I didn't really know much about this community because I grew up in a sort of dirt poor working mom environment, so there really wasn't much of a community.
But, you know, now that I'm older, and being a stay-at-home dad, there's, you know, for people, like, for the women who stay home, and I'm usually the only guy around, right?
But for the women who stay home, there's a real community there.
And when you get those women to go to work, that community breaks down.
And that's a power vacuum that the state rushes into.
If you know your neighbors, you don't really fear for much.
Yep.
Exactly.
And so I think that's – get to know the people around you.
We have this kind of atomic lifestyle that's provided by the state, and I think that's actually not that great for a – For the long run.
So you don't want to start trying to develop relationships with your neighbors if the shit hits the fan.
You kind of want to have that ahead of time.
And I think that's pretty important.
You'll notice that in World War Z and stuff like that, it's like, well, you don't need your neighbors if you are an ex-CIA death machine who can fade into a cloud and survive bits of burning shrapnel running through your innards and all that kind of stuff and inject yourself with fatal illnesses.
So if you're basically a comic superhero, you don't need a community.
But I don't know about you, but my capacity to survive bits of red-hot engine casing skewed through my innards...
It's probably not as much as Brad Pitt's modesty allows him to be.
So I would say that it's really all about the community.
Because that's what we're going to need when the government shrinks.
The government's going to shrink.
Or it's going to grow.
Look at that!
I'm predicting.
I mean, obviously, I'm aiming for it to shrink.
So the government's going to shrink.
It doesn't mean we're not going to...
We're still going to need some stuff that the government provides, some security and so on.
And...
Why do people feel this need for Obamacare?
Well, because they don't have a community.
People don't have a community of like-minded people around them who will help them out with medical bills or whatever, right?
So anyway, it's not as simple as get some stuff and hunker down.
It really is around reach out and build up a community of people that you trust and who can trust you.
I think that's important.
I mean, look, and what harm is that going to do you anyway, right?
Right.
There's a guy on YouTube, very popular, called Nut and Fancy, and he has a video on that.
It's where everybody kind of does what they're good at.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And you can see this.
How many people only get to know their neighbors when there's some massive power failure?
It's like, well, no, that's not the time, you know?
Or when eight feet of snow suddenly falls on your hometown within the span of, I don't know, a couple days.
Right.
Yeah, Mike, we're trying to talk practicalities, not just green at the moment.
As someone who lives in Buffalo, New York, this has been an interesting week.
We'll put it that way.
Or what used to be known as Buffalo, New York, and now is known as the bottom of a snow globe that won't stop!
Indeed.
Indeed.
I don't know if you know the story behind this, Mike, but I was reading how some guy basically died.
This 46-year-old guy died in his car under 15 feet of snow.
I know one guy...
Close the sunroof!
Oh, there's people stranded out on the highway.
I don't know if it's the case right now, but it was coming down so fast that people got stuck in their cars and they thought that they were going to get through.
You know, oh, it's just a slowdown in traffic.
It'll clear up and we'll push through and an hour passed or half an hour passed and snow was coming down so quick their cars pretty much got buried.
And they had nowhere to go, so it's all, I'll sit here with the heat on, and yeah.
I know someone died trying to push someone else's car when it got stuck and ended up getting hit by another vehicle, and a couple people had medical emergencies and couldn't get to the hospital, and they died.
It's quite the deal up here.
Yeah, and there was a women's basketball team stuck for 17 hours on their bus.
Really?
To the point where they're eating snow, and the coach was traveling with her one-year-old baby.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, that's 17 hours on a bus not getting anywhere.
Even getting places is pretty tough to spend that time on a bus.
But yeah, it's some serious stuff.
I mean, it's like when there's a heat wave, you know?
I mean, people without air conditioning, they can die.
Although, generally, I think it's a cold snap that's more problematic.
But yeah, it's a signal.
It's not just like, wow, that's a lot of snow.
I guess I've got some shoveling to do.
But yeah, people can die.
So you don't see anything being long-term?
You see it as either government's going to get smaller or they'll just take over on everything?
Capitalism doesn't work?
No, no.
Look, I mean, I don't think it's a done deal.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing all this crazy stuff on the internet.
There's easier ways to make a living.
So I don't think it's a done deal.
I feel that I have a responsibility as somebody who's fairly good at communicating this stuff.
I feel I have a responsibility to jig the game.
I want to put my fingers on the scales of liberty, so to speak.
I don't want to just wait.
I really believe in that old adage that the only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
As somebody who's got a fairly bully pulpit in talking about these ideas, I really feel I have a responsibility in the same way that if you're a doctor...
And you know how to do the Heimlich maneuver and somebody's choking, you should go and help that person.
I sort of feel like if you – with ability comes responsibility.
And this is not a moral argument.
I just feel it's a very compelling aesthetic argument.
And so I don't feel like it's a done deal.
I mean if it was a done deal, I'd be like, okay, well, I guess I'll do something else for a living sometimes, feel like it.
But it's not a done deal.
But I do genuinely believe that the lesson of the free market is fairly well understood by the powers that be, which is why when there is a panic these days, there is often at least a move towards shrinking government.
It doesn't often happen.
Even Scott Walker in Wisconsin went through the humiliation, so to speak, of I think there is an understanding and there is this pathetic, pitiful groping towards the Republicans these days as people are desperate to ward off amnesty for these 4 or 5 million Americans, which is not that complicated a thing to figure out.
It's that they'll cost $24,000 a year in services on average and they'll They'll pay $10,000 a year in taxes.
So that's $14,000 at least in the first year or two that people will have to pay for each immigrant.
Illegal immigrant is the wrong word because if they're legal, they're an immigrant.
If they're not legal, they're not an immigrant.
So, I mean, there is an aesthetic, right, which is that this was supposed to – I mean, America was supposed to be sort of white, Western, Christian – I'm a Protestant nation and multiculturalism has its challenges to say the least.
I mean just ask the Jews how multicultural they want Israel to be or how multicultural – how the Japanese leaders view American multiculturalism, whether it's strength.
I mean outside of food and music – If somebody can tell me the economic and political benefits of multiculturalism, I'd be fascinated to hear them.
I hear a lot of negatives, but I don't hear any practical positives outside of food and music, which are great.
So people are swinging towards the Republicans because they believe that the Republicans are somehow ideologically committed to small government.
And they could be.
Certainly, if I was involved in the Republican Party, I'd be counseling, like, just go for it.
Like, I mean, go for smaller government or die trying.
But don't do this trying to woo all sides of the electorate.
And, you know, I mean, there are people who are never going to vote for you, so screw them.
Like, sorry.
There are people who are too conflicted in the political system to have any kind of rational vote.
The people who are getting stuff from the government are not ever going to vote for shrinking the government.
That is a basic reality of...
That the Republicans have yet to process.
The people with the I hate Coldplay website are not the people you go and try and sell your Coldplay tickets to.
This is just something that you need to figure out as the Republicans stop trying to placate the leftists who are going to call you racist scum-sucking teabaggers anyway.
Just go and deal with your core constituency.
Talk about smaller government.
There are people on the black and Hispanic side who want smaller government.
And there is frustrated.
I mean, good lord.
I mean, the blacks are not that keen on the illegal immigrants because a lot of Hispanics hate the hell out of the black population.
I mean, just look at what's going on in Los Angeles and the schools.
I mean, the...
The riots and gang fights, I mean, it's brutal.
And massive floods of illegal immigrants are not going to do a fantastic amount of positive benefit to the wages of black people.
Anyway, they just need to figure out that, you know, it's the one great breakthrough that I had years and years and years ago, which is not only is it okay to be hated, it is essential to be hated.
Right.
And if you're trying – and politicians, of course, they want to play the room.
They want to be liked.
And they don't like being hated.
I understand that.
I mean it's not like you wake up in the morning and go, yay, I'm hated.
I get that.
But if you are committed to a virtue, then everybody that those virtues costs will not like you.
Of course.
Of course.
I mean how could it be otherwise?
Aiming to be in politics without offense is simply selling the future for the sake of contempt in the present.
And so, in my opinion, the media is heavily controlled by the left.
And therefore, when you talk...
And by the left, I basically mean communists.
They are...
I mean, socialistic for sure, heavily, heavily communist.
I mean, I can't remember any time anybody on the left has talked about cutting the government in any significant fashion, even when they tried under the Clinton years to end welfare as we know it.
I mean, it's all bullshit and it's all bigger now than it ever was.
And social spending, in particular, spending on social programs, goes up faster under Republicans than it does under Democrats because the Republicans are absolutely and totally unwilling to take the necessary stand...
To actually shrink the size and power of government.
Until every single leftist newspaper is screaming absolute blue murder about the Republicans, I will pay them no attention.
Every time Republicans get praised for bipartisanship, you just know that they've just sold off another one of your grandchildren's kidneys for the sake of...
I mean, at least be hated.
The people who aren't going to vote the Republicans, at least they should fear the Republicans.
Right?
I mean, at least they should hate the Republicans.
But they put up with the Republicans because, in my mind, the Republicans...
I mean, Rand Paul shouldn't be down there trying to woo...
I mean, it's crazy stuff.
It's crazy stuff.
Take your stand.
I mean, you could say to the population if you wanted, and this is why I'd never be in politics, you say to the population, hey, you know when we had open borders in the 19th century?
Wasn't that great?
I thought that was wonderful.
I mean, unless you were actually coughing up Thomas Duncan out of your left lung, you could come into the country and work, and I think that's great.
You know what we didn't have in the 19th century?
Massive welfare programs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Government provided healthcare.
Government provided pensions.
All of the Bismarckian socialist crap that ended up with Europe going to the war in the First World War over.
So, you know, hey, let's open borders.
Fantastic.
Let's do open borders.
We've had it before.
We know that they work.
We know there's some conflicts and challenges and so on.
Let's open up the borders.
Absolutely, completely and totally great.
But...
If you want open borders, which is the 19th century revolution, then you don't get the 20th century socialistic crap with welfare states and SNAP and food stamps and all this.
You can't have both.
You can't have a welfare state and open borders because that will kill the birth rate of the domestic population.
Because it becomes too expensive to raise children and people want to check out of the economy because they don't want to work 80 hours a week to fund people who are coming in.
I mean, they don't want to do it to fund people already here.
But this is, of course, what Republicans won't get into because they don't want to have that Ragnarok showdown.
With the leftist press, which I understand, because the leftist press will dig up every piece of scumduggery that they can find and throw it at everyone, and they just hope that they can somehow get away with shrinking the government without confronting all the parasites and their hosts who are dependent on the government, and that includes the rich as well as the poor.
So that's the frustrating thing about the Republicans, but it's also perfectly natural.
I mean, they don't want that showdown.
They don't want that fight.
And so they're going to lose.
And that's why I'm not appealing to politics.
But people who are good at politics generally have an addiction to being liked.
And unless you can learn to enjoy being hated, you really can't do any good in this world.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, one thing I've thought about is, you know, wasn't it Rome that had like a million or more people?
And then after the dollar collapsed in Rome, there's only like 20,000 or so left.
Oh, yeah.
I think it went from a million five to 17,000.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Radical depopulation.
Now...
I don't think that's going to happen here.
And I've talked about this, gosh, I was in Phoenix, I think 2010, Hancock's Freedom Summits, talking about how, I mean, they'll just turn on the dependent classes.
Look, farmers don't shut down the farm.
It's just, it's too lucrative.
And I, you know, I don't, everybody in government knows what the problems are, and until now, they have been able to To keep the bullshit going.
Now, when they're unable to keep the bullshit going, they'll just change.
They'll just change.
The old horse, they'll keep around as long as the kids are paying two bucks for a pony ride.
When the kids stop showing up, hey, it's not profitable anymore.
It's glue factory time.
And there was a giant welfare state set up in Germany.
And then the eugenicists came along, and suddenly, if you were mentally handicapped, if you were considered to be economically unproductive and so on, well, it's off to a concentration camp for you, right?
And this massive pendulum of excessive sympathy followed by excessive brutality, not that any amount of brutality is not excessive, but it will swing.
And it is actually out of my concern for the poor that I talk about shrinking the state.
Because you can shrink the state like landing a plane or you can shrink the state like the plane's engines fall off.
Like, it's got to come down.
And either it's going to be a landing or it's going to be a crash.
Now, I'd like it to be a landing.
I'm not holding my breath, but I'd like it to be a landing, and I'm doing everything within my power to ensure that we can have a landing so that the poor can walk away from the plane when it lands.
Because if it's not, if the government simply runs out of money, there will be a brutal period of which Ferguson, of course, is a prequel.
There will be a brutal period.
There's a reason why governments are trying to grab as much power as humanly possible at the moment.
It's because they know that in the not-too-too-distant future, you're going to run out of money.
You're going to run out of money.
Mathematically, that which cannot continue will not continue.
And what are they going to do?
They are going to brutally repress the poor.
And, I mean, it's going to be rough.
And what's going to come out of that is anybody's guess.
Again, I hope that what's going to come out of that is an understanding of what went wrong, that force has been tried and found wanting.
And...
I don't know.
I mean, all I can do is speak as much truth as entertainingly and engagingly as possible and to challenge people with as many facts of history and reason and arguments and evidence and philosophy as I can.
More than that can no man do that I know of.
Maybe there's other people who could do more, in which case tell me and I'll go join them.
But we've just got to get as much information out there.
It's force that's failed.
It's government that's failed.
It's violence that's failed, as it always will.
Because if we misdiagnose the illness, we will never, ever be cured of our addiction to propagandized power.
So, yeah, that's my hope.
Anyway, am I going to get on to the next caller?
Yeah, not a problem.
Thank you so much for calling in, and thanks for helping the poor get mobile.
Right.
Thank you very much, Stefan.
Thank you.
Alright, up next is Pigmon.
He wrote in and said, I'm a non-violent...
What now?
Pigmon is his name.
And if I put it again, my apologies.
No.
Okay.
Can you spell that for me, please?
P-E-I-J-M-A-N. Pigmon?
And it's pronounced Pejmon.
Oh, I butchered it again.
Yes.
Okay.
It's a hard one.
Don't feel bad.
It's a really hard one.
I get this.
You don't know how many times I get this.
Alright, I'm going to read your question.
The question is...
I am a nonviolence and conflict transformation workshop facilitator.
I notice that people are intrigued by the notion of nonviolence, but do not want to seem weak.
Empathy is another subject that seems to be more easily embraced by women.
Is empathy actually tough?
And how can we talk to men or people who don't want to be seen as weak about empathy?
All right, all right, Fijman.
Could you perhaps tell me exactly how you've noticed women to be overly prone to empathy?
Okay.
I think that they are more attuned to Expressing it, and they're more open to the idea of it, you know?
Like, I'll talk to a series of guys, and then I'll talk to a series of girls, and I feel like the kind of skepticism that comes back to me is more on the male side.
And so I think it's an easily more...
No, no, look, okay.
Look, I understand that.
Women will talk about...
Right, right.
But where's your evidence rather than what people say, right?
Where is my evidence?
Okay, well, I don't know.
I'm not necessarily saying that there is evidence.
I'm saying that the concept itself is more easily embraced by them.
Yeah, but I mean, so what?
I mean, that's just words, right?
Right.
I mean, it's like saying the concept of trust is easily embraced by con men.
Well, yeah, because they need to violate it and understand it in order to violate it, right?
I don't know if you know much about my history, but you're talking to a guy who was beaten up regularly by a woman.
Most of my friends were violently aggressed against by women.
The statistics are that women are the significant majority of child abusers.
Women initiate 70-80% of the divorces, which scarcely seems like an overly empathetic act.
And, you know, anytime you talk about shrinking government, which is for the benefit of kids and the future and so on, a lot of people screech, and a lot of those people are women.
Right.
So, you know, help me to understand.
Look, I'm totally open to the fact that, you know, maybe I just had a whole series of bad experiences and data and facts, but help me understand where you see this surfeit of...
You know, empathy coming from women.
Like, so, for instance, I mean, you know, talking about the Emma Watson speech that came out a little while back ago, she's like, hey, we need men to step up and stand up for women.
And it's like, that's not empathetic.
I mean, where's the empathy for men or when, you know, in Florida when they were trying to end...
Halimony and alimony and just saying, look, you split and you're done, right?
And women went nuts about that.
I mean, tell me, again, I'm not saying there are no women with empathy.
I mean, of course not, right?
Of course.
I love my wife.
But it just seems to me kind of like a propagandized cliche that women are so prone to empathy and men aren't.
I mean, I get that women talk about it, but when we are in philosophy, we don't do face value.
In fact, face value, wherever there are cliches, we tend to get more suspicious.
So can you tell me where the actual evidence is that you have that women are so great at empathy?
I'm not saying necessarily that women are great at empathy.
I mean, I've listened to your podcast.
I'm a longtime listener.
It's an absolute honor to be on this show.
So I totally get the statistics about women being the primary abusers of children.
You're single, right?
No, I'm in a relationship.
How long have you been in the relationship?
Almost two years.
And how old are you roughly?
Just tell me.
Mid-30s, mid-20s, mid-40s?
I'm like early 30s.
Early 30s.
And how many girlfriends have you had?
I have had, I don't know, seven.
And do you think that your current relationship is heading towards marriage?
It's definitely probably one of the most, the deepest relationship I've had.
So, possibly.
So, you might marry the girl, right?
It's possible.
We're not thinking about that at all.
Why?
Why?
I mean, do you want to have kids?
Yes.
So, you're in your early 30s, right?
Yes.
So, what are you doing?
I mean, we're thinking...
I'm trying to have the best relationship possible with her.
Oh, so you think not talking about your future or marriage or children is the way to have the best relationship possible?
I mean, I think that there's other ways to commit to each other outside of officially getting married.
Like, that doesn't necessarily...
Stand for the utmost commitment to me.
But we do constantly talk about the future and building a life together.
And so it is very serious on that level.
And does she want to have kids too?
She wants to have kids, yeah.
And how old is she?
She is 29.
Right.
So her fertility has already started to decline, right?
And so I guess that's my question is that – and I don't necessarily mean like a government marriage, right?
I mean marriage is – long predates governments and will be around long after governments.
Marriage arises out of the dependency of human children for about a quarter century or so until their brains mature.
So does she – she wants to have kids.
You want to have kids.
So – Given that time's ticking away and you're not both in your early 20s, I mean, are you on the road to family commitments, I guess is my question.
I mean, I think so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's not much of an answer, right?
No, I mean, yes, we are.
I mean, she's met my family.
I'm about to meet her.
I'm going to be visiting her family over the holidays.
Are they overseas?
No, but they're not in the city that we live in.
But wait, wait.
You've been dating the woman for two years.
You've never met her family?
No.
I've met her family when they visited here, but I haven't visited them because they live like five or six hours away by plane, so this will be the first time that I meet them in their home.
Right.
Okay.
Now, I mean, the reason that I'm asking all this is probably kind of obscure.
Yeah.
Because, you know, it probably comes out of left field for you, and I'll tell you why.
It's not any particular hidden agenda, but I'll tell you why I'm asking you these questions, is that Men who are not in a rest-of-their-life relationship with a woman can rarely be trusted in their opinions about women.
That's why I'm asking you these questions.
Because generally, men will conform their opinions to what women prefer because men who annoy too many women did not get to pass on their genetic material.
And so men have a genetic desire, almost a genetic imperative given that that's how evolution works, a genetic imperative to tell women what they want to hear.
You know, I was in – and I'm not trying to call you a liar or anything like that and I say this as a guy who was single for many years.
But when a man is not married or is not happily married, it's hard for me – I'm not saying this is some empirically proven reality but there's very strong biological arguments for it.
When a man has not found the love of his life, who he's committed to for the rest of his days, it's very hard for me to take his opinions about women seriously.
It doesn't mean you're wrong.
I'm just telling you my experience because men are genetically programmed to tell women what they want to hear, which is why women have so much power in the political sphere because it's generally male politicians who are wooing females with a very well-honed male desire to please women at whatever cost it takes because of eggs. which is why women have so much power in the Right?
We have eggs.
Eggs scrambled sunny side up.
I don't care.
Give me some eggs.
Eggs, glorious eggs.
And anyone who annoyed women too much seemed like a freak.
Right.
It seems like a freak because it's like how could that genetically have survived because annoyed women don't give eggs to men who annoy them.
And so there's a natural, you know, the eggs are the current and the sperm are the salmon and they swim with the current because if you don't swim with the current, you get swept away.
And so that's why I was asking because you basically were praising women at the expense of men.
Oh, women are so into empathy and more so than men and so on, right?
Right.
And that is something that a man who has yet to commit to the love of his life says because he's used to praising and pleasing and knee scraping and bowing and scraping before women because of the eggs.
So I'm just telling you that.
I'm not telling you you're wrong.
I'm just telling you sort of what I think.
Okay, so here's my answer to that.
Like, I totally agree with you on those points.
Not...
I don't feel that I am doing that kind of thing.
As a nonviolence trainer and someone that really has to take a stand on things, I believe in speaking my truth and really being authentic no matter how it's going to be taken from the other side.
I appreciate that.
That's a lovely little piece of propaganda.
You're just telling me stuff.
I'm asking you for evidence and you're just telling me stuff.
I don't want the commercial.
I want to test the product.
So tell me, you basically said, well, I'm a nonviolence communicator, and I find women are more empathetic.
So my question is, what is your evidence that women are less violent than men?
Okay, so I think that there's a misunderstanding in what my question was because I'm not saying that women are necessarily more empathetic.
They're just more drawn towards empathy to begin with.
So let me give you the evidence for that as far as what I've seen in my personal world.
So I'm involved in starting a business that's related to empathy.
I did a trial version of it, and I found that the people that I was attracting ended up being older women, like women over 40.
The idea of empathy for women over 40 seems like a no-brainer.
They'll sign up to be a part of this business really fast.
But other demographics that I've reached out to, they need a little bit more of understanding of how it would help them or why it's useful for them.
I'm sorry.
Sorry, who is it who has trouble understanding the value of empathy?
Well, I've had – No, I'm not trying to catch you.
I'm sorry.
I just missed it if you said it.
Just repeat what you said.
You said women over 40 are very big on empathy, or at least receptive to it, but who was it who's not?
Pretty much any other demographic is not as receptive to it as that demographic.
Right.
Okay, so men are generally raised by women under 40, right?
Right.
Right, so if men are raised by women and men don't have empathy...
empathy, right?
I mean, if a man is raised in Japan and doesn't speak English, I would assume his mother didn't speak English to him, right?
Sure, sure.
So this idea that there's one gender that's really good on empathy and one gender that's not, when the empathetic gender raises the other gender, it seems to me kind of odd.
It's like saying, well, in this family, the men all speak Japanese and no English, and the women all speak English and no Japanese.
A child who is treated empathetically will surely know some of the value of empathy.
Absolutely.
I totally agree with that.
It just seems that in reaching out to people with what I was putting out there, that was the initial demographic that was coming out at me.
Sorry to interrupt.
Have you then taught these classes with these women now?
I haven't taught specific empathy classes.
I've taught non-violence workshops and conflict transformation workshops, and that's to anyone.
In those workshops, there's equally as many men as there are women.
Would you say that either gender is better or worse at understanding the concepts?
No, no, no, no.
And that's what I want to say about...
Okay, so hang on.
So, wait.
So, let me just get to where...
Because you started with a pretty broad statement about women and empathy.
And it's my understanding that your evidence is that you've put some ads out about empathy workshops and you seem to get more interest from women over 40.
Is that right?
Yes, yes.
But you haven't actually taught any of these workshops and found out if these women...
Maybe they're contacting you because they need empathy.
Look, I mean, if I'm going to teach a course on how to use a spreadsheet...
And more women over 40 apply to learn that course.
Wouldn't I assume that women over 40 know the least about spreadsheets?
Yeah, I think that they need empathy, but they're also open to the idea of it.
No, no, you're not understanding what I'm saying!
So if I say, listen, anyone can take this course about Excel or spreadsheets or whatever, right?
And then women over 40 are the ones who mostly sign up for it or show an interest in it, then I would assume that there's a deficiency of knowledge about spreadsheets, particularly to women over 40, and then saying, well, they're open to learning about spreadsheets.
Well, of course they are.
But by applying to that course, one thing, I mean, it could be that there's a higher demand, but one thing you'd know for sure is that women over 40 seem to have the least knowledge about spreadsheets, which is why they're signing up for them.
Maybe.
So I'm not sure how the response to your ads for empathy workshops by women over 40 gives you the indication that women are better with empathy.
It could mean that women over 40...
Have finally figured out that they need more empathy, right?
That they need to learn more about empathy.
In other words, that they're deficient in empathy.
I think that they're more aware that they need empathy in their lives than other demographics.
No, no, no, no.
That doesn't logically follow.
That's like me saying, well, everybody needs to learn spreadsheets, but women over 40 are the only ones aware of the knowledge that they need to learn spreadsheets.
Maybe the men already know how to do spreadsheets.
Maybe the men aren't interested in signing out for your courses because they're pretty empathetic to begin with.
I'm just saying it's a possibility.
I don't think that's true.
I mean, I think that empathy...
No, you're not listening!
Sorry to get annoyed, but I'm annoyed.
I didn't say it was true.
I said it's a possibility.
It's a possibility.
It's sure.
That's all I'm asking.
It could be.
Okay, so then don't say it's because women are greater with empathy.
Say it's a possibility.
Right.
All I'm saying is that in my experience, through reaching out and putting out my service, that the initial demographic that came out was women over 40, and they seemed to have recognized the need for it.
So maybe they need it more than others.
Maybe they just recognize that they need it more than others.
I can't tell you that.
So then we don't know anything other than a particular demographic is showing a particular need for empathy.
Right, right.
Okay, so that doesn't at all say that women are better at or more open to or anything like that in terms of empathy.
I just want to be clear about that.
Because if you start putting those ideas out there which are incredibly cliched and contradicted by the evidence, women initiate more than half of domestic violence incidents.
Women rape men at an equivalent level and degree to which men rape women.
Women abuse children more than men.
So if you're putting out stuff based upon extremely flimsy evidence about how women are so empathetic, I think you are not helping them.
The world and its problems with violence.
And I'm not saying that only women are violent.
Of course not.
But what I am saying is that women's capacity for aggression is swept under the rug, is hidden, and is cloaked, and is to some degree cloaked, my friend, by people like you who are talking about how women are just sensitive and empathy and this and that and the other, right?
No, no, no, no.
We need to give women the respect of saying, hey, the facts are that you guys are pretty violent and you're violent in the worst possible way, the most, which is against children.
Because there's no greater power disparity in any human relationship than that between parent and child.
And so I push back hard against people who gloss over women's capacity for violence and abuse.
Because until that's processed in the world, we're not going to get any kind of real handle on the cycle of violence.
We've now been focusing on men's role in the cycle of violence for approximately 20,000 years.
Because men hitting women, yes, been illegal for many, many, many years.
Hundreds and hundreds of years.
Men's capacity for war has been examined.
Men's capacity for aggression, sociopathy, coldness, cruelty, all has been examined up the yin-yang.
And we have still yet to break the cycle of violence.
And I believe, and I have more than a belief in this, in that I've done significant numbers of presentations on this and interviews about this with subject matter experts and academics and researchers and PhDs and so on.
That is, it is our inability to recognize women's capacity for immorality.
That is the fundamental reason why we can't seem to break this cycle of violence that has continued as long as our species has.
And so when I hear you putting out things like, well, you know, women are empathy, I'm going to ask you tough questions, because that's not the information that I've had, and it's not the arguments I put for.
It doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong.
But it means if you're going to put something that contradicts a massive amount of empirical evidence, you better have stronger arguments than, well, women over 40 seem to show some more interest in my proposals for empathy workshops.
So, sorry to be harsh, but I just really wanted to make at least my perspective clear on that.
Yeah, no, and I don't know.
Maybe it was something in the way I worded it, but I totally understand that.
What you're talking about there.
If you want, and for those who want, and I'll shut up about this now, but it's called The Truth About Violence.
It's a presentation that I did some months ago that's doing fairly well and I think is a very, very important one.
But anyway, let's move on from that.
And I appreciate you, Pejman.
I really appreciate you letting me have my rant about that.
But let's move on to the substance of your question, if that's all right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So basically, I just want to know when I'm talking to people about empathy, it seems like I'm wondering how do I present it to them and how do I attract people into this conversation even?
About empathy, which I feel is such an important part of our lives and an important need for anyone, male or female.
Sorry, but I think you have to be honest in that empathy is a significant weakness around non-empathetic people.
I mean, if you have empathy, let's take an extreme example.
If you have a really cruel and mean and sociopathic person in your life and you show great empathy towards that person, that person will exploit you.
They will play upon your sympathies.
They will play upon your empathy.
They will play upon your kindness.
They will play upon your feeling for their situation.
They will milk every last drop of human kindness out of you to exploit them.
It's like being around drug addicts, right?
Drug addicts, if you have a sympathy for a drug addict to the point where you're like enabling them or alcoholics or whatever, they'll play you and they'll manipulate you and they'll lie to you.
And so empathy is a huge weakness around certain kinds of people.
And if you want empathy to be a strength rather than a weakness, then you have to have people around you who are also empathetic.
But wandering out into the world, spraying off empathy is mocking yourself with all of the airstrike laser paint that you can imagine to call in everyone who can come and exploit you saying, hey, I'm sensitive.
You can push my buttons.
And so I think that you have to really be – in my opinion, right?
I mean, be honest and say empathy is a wonderful, wonderful binding glue of human intimacy if you are around the right people.
If you are around kind and empathetic people, then you want to have empathy, but you need to be able to seal that shit up pretty damn quickly when you are around predatory, selfish, taking people.
Empathy is something that is for the love only.
It's for lovers and for children and for extended family and empathy is for people who have empathy.
Empathy must be hidden away and kept very safe from people who are exploitive.
Right.
So you're saying it leaves you vulnerable, basically.
But what I'm wondering is that kind of saving empathy only for your most intimate moments, is that kind of reinforcing a kind of separation within society and our relations?
Yeah, I hope so.
I hope so.
I hope the hell so.
I really do.
And that separation is essential for a society to progress.
Look, we empathetic people, we need to fucking put up our shields and gather together.
And this is well known.
Look, if...
I'm no psychologist or addictions counselor, but my understanding is that if you want to stop doing heroin, who do you not need to be around?
Heroinetics.
Heroin addicts, heroin dealers, the whole scene.
You have to turn on your heel and GTFO, right?
Not look back.
If you leave your wallet there, get a new wallet.
If you leave your prosthetic leg there, hop out.
But you need to not be with dysfunctional people if you are recovering from said dysfunction.
Now, If you are an empathetic person who has cruel people around him or her, then clearly you are in recovery.
Because if my daughter is growing up and she's got empathetic people around her and all that, she doesn't know cruel people.
So she's not going to be in recovery.
But for most of us, We grew up with cruel teachers or cruel priests or cruel parents maybe or cruel extender.
Some combination usually of some thing.
And so if you have managed to make it to adulthood with your secret heart intact, fantastic!
But you are then in recovery from exposure to cruelty.
And so until I hear lots of therapists say that the best thing...
To cure alcoholism is to spend lots of time with alcoholics in bars with triggers.
The best way to cure sex addiction is at strip clubs and the best way to cure a gambling addiction is at the racetrack in Vegas.
Until I hear that kind of advice spraying around, then I will continue to say to people that if you wish to grow your empathy, as I've always talked about in real-time relationships, The Logic of Love, it's a free book at freedomainradio.com.
I stand by it even more now than the years ago when I wrote it.
Be honest, be open, be vulnerable with people in your life.
And if they hurt you and exploit you because of your vulnerability, let it hurt and let it inform your decisions.
But this idea that empathy is this like, you know, we have a bottle of water in a desert full of thirsty people called empathy and we can hand it around to everyone.
And everyone will drink and everybody will be happier thereby, I think is a complete myth.
In many, many cultures, in many, many situations, in many, many environments, empathy is a surefire way to get yourself exploited.
Empathy in a good portion of society is like running through a poor, bad neighborhood with a clear plastic bag full of $100 bills.
I mean, you may make it through a life, but it'd only be by luck.
Yeah, you know something that's coming up for me when you're talking about this is You know, is first being clear and able to be authentic with yourself.
It seems like, you know, you're talking about some of the abuse that you've suffered as a child or early in your life.
And you had to talk about that within a safe confine and really be able to have that empathy for yourself and get it from others within your environment.
And now you're able to put yourself out there and talking about this to anyone, right?
So in that sense, you've kind of grown your ability to be authentic by having those empathic experiences.
Yeah, I'm not sure what that means.
Sorry.
Well, I guess what I'm saying is empathy helps you become more authentic because you're expressing yourself as you are.
You're being totally vulnerable.
When you're in that vulnerable position, someone else can take advantage of you.
That's the danger that you were talking about.
But you first need to be able to express that within yourself, to be authentic with yourself.
And then you can be your authentic self with others and not feel like you will get exploited.
Because it's only what you are afraid of within yourself that is holding you back from presenting yourself to the world.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I agree.
Yeah.
When I say I agree, that's just nothing more than my personal expression of opinion, but we are inauthentic because authenticity harms us.
I mean, a baby is completely authentic, right?
They cry when they're upset.
They laugh when they're happy.
We are born authentic and honest and open and vulnerable.
I mean, every time a baby cries, they're being vulnerable.
So we are...
When we are children, if we are in these tragic familial environments, then we very quickly learn that authenticity brings punishment.
Because when we are authentic, we are often inconvenient to selfish people.
We have needs that contradict their needs or preferences in the moment.
And most people who are selfish, when they are faced with someone being inconvenient...
They will basically just punish that person until the inconvenient desires the other person manifests vanish.
I mean, the opposite to authenticity is fear, is punishment.
We are punished for being honest.
And so then, you know, you can say we become inauthentic and so on.
Well, sure, absolutely.
Absolutely.
But that's like saying that somebody running from a lion is out for their morning constitutional.
It's like, well, I guess it's healthy for them to run because it's good for their heart, but they're running because a lion is chasing them, not because they are into the exercise itself.
And so when I view someone who is inauthentic, and I've seen those people, of course, as we all have many times, to me, that's just a form of Stress disorder from being punished as a child.
And it also occurs as adults.
There's a lot of exploitation in the business world.
There is a lot of exploitation in the business world.
In particular around stocks and going public and finances and so on.
And so I... Yeah, I agree with you that you need to know the truth about yourself before you can express the truth to others.
But I think it's also important, you know, every mythology that has lasted has what's called the myth of the golden age or the myth of the absent fairy tale.
You know, like the Garden of Eden or the noble savage or mankind in a state of nature and so on.
And there's this idea in most mythologies that at the beginning, everything was better.
And then, you know, Eve ate of the apple and convinced Adam to do so.
And human beings first figured out that they could exploit others.
And then the egalitarian hunter-gatherer community was disrupted and destroyed and so on.
on, we went from egalitarian villagers to human farms that stretch across the whole continent.
And there's this idea that back in the beginning was a golden age of oneness with nature and God.
And why is this myth, which historically is the opposite of true, there was no wonderful golden age of egalitarian togetherness back at the dawn of the species.
The dawn of the species was we stopped eating each other.
That was a huge step forward.
Less cannibalism was a huge step forward.
Leaving Africa was another step forward in many ways in that the ice people had more challenging environments that had various changes in biology and social structure.
There were these Huge leaps forward, but we started off in this horrible eating each other and raping each other.
I mean, this is a horrible situation.
I mean, there was a special I saw on a nature show once where four killer whales were attempting to eat a baby humpback whale, and the mother was trying to protect it, and they kept biting it, and it was horrible.
The mother tried bringing the Humpback, baby humpback whale up to the surface of the water and then the killer whales would come in and chew more of its sides off and oh god it was just agonizing to watch this went on for hours and hours and hours and finally the mother had to give up and leave the baby to be devoured by the killer whales and as it turns out the killer whales only ate part of its tongue part of the baby's tongue that's all they ate they weren't even that hungry They
just wanted to murder and eat a baby.
And these are mammals.
These aren't even sharks.
And that's nature.
You know, the mother desperately trying to protect its young from the killer whales who only want to eat its tongue.
And then the rest of it slid into the depths to be gnawed upon by all of the lower-dwelling crustaceans and fish.
And that's where we came from.
There's no golden age.
But personally, I think, for us as individuals, there is a golden age, and we're all born honest and must be traumatized into falsehoods.
We're all born with the lusty cries of laughter and pain.
That's who we are as children.
We are honest and clear in our communications.
We do not lie.
We do not manipulate.
We do not dissemble.
We do not defraud.
We are honest.
And then...
So many times the straight channels are waterfalls of direct communication and experience and honesty must be carved into these endlessly complicated channels like the lower intestine of some magic mad beast because direct communication is punished as inconvenient to the selfish needs of those who have power over us.
And the dishonesty that we are contorted into You know, we are just the natural air moving around the planet of honesty.
And then we are trapped in balloons, and then the clowns of culture twist us into these constipated balloon animals and distort us.
And so it is a great challenge to get back to the simple honesty of infancy.
But we really have to be hurt to move away.
Or be ejected, violently ejected usually from that natural state.
We have to be told, you are immoral.
You are evil for having been born.
Jesus died for you.
You are bad.
You are selfish.
You are mean.
Go sit on those stairs.
You didn't share.
You weren't nice.
You weren't diplomatic.
You didn't kiss the peppermint wart-smelling great aunt whose hair brushes against your eyeball.
You were mean.
You were rude.
You were nasty.
You didn't listen.
You didn't respect me.
You didn't do what I said.
Dad, I have to tell you once.
I have to tell you a hundred times.
And we are bullied and brutalized into having to lie for a living.
Because if you displease your parents, biologically, you didn't survive.
Because they could always make more, and if you were too inconvenient, you were on an iceberg, or you were thrown to the sharks, or you were handed over to the priest for some other Aztec god-awful human sacrifice ritual.
And so, the terrifying power and authority that adults have over children is the power that corrupts.
You know, as Lord Acton said, power tends to corrupt absolute power, tends to corrupt absolutely.
Well, there's no greater power than a parent over a child.
It's that.
The fact that we never think of that in terms of parents, but we only think of it in terms of politics, What we fundamentally misunderstand about where power comes from and what it really is, which is power over children.
And so when I see inauthentic people, I see a history of them having a golden age which may have lasted only hours or days as an infant where honesty was as natural as breathing.
Honesty was as natural as digestion.
And I see the amount of force and violence and pressure and rejection and And aggression that drove the honesty out of them like the demons driven out of the pigs or driven out of the demon haunted by Christ and thrown into the pigs who ran off a cliff.
That those around those babies were such demons that they viewed honesty as a devil that needed violent exorcism.
And that sadly remains the nature of a lot of The world.
Less so in the West, more so, I think, in other cultures.
And so, empathy, I think, is a wonderful, wonderful gift.
Which we must be very careful who we bestow it on.
Because empathy is the surrender of power.
I mean, the people in my life who I love have the power to hurt me irrevocably.
I have the power to hurt them irrevocably.
It is the surrender of power.
And most people, when you give them power, will not use it wisely to say it as nicely as humanly possible.
So I teach, as best I can, the wonderful power of empathy.
But empathy without discrimination, empathy without strength, empathy without In other words, are you worthy of my empathy?
Not in like I do a video on World War I and I cry and I feel very passionate about that, but I don't have relationships with people like that.
And there, of course, are the douchebags who were like, oh, man, you shouldn't cry.
It's so stupid.
Okay, well, fine.
You can have that life.
I'll have mine.
But to me, empathy without discrimination is a form of self-abuse.
It is a form of inviting predators into your life with a big jar full of marinade on your balls and then hoping things go well.
Does that help at all?
I'm not saying, is that true or anything?
I just mean, does it sort of help with my perspective?
It does, and I also want to push back on a little bit on what you said in terms of I've found that conflicts are just a part of life, and we're going to have conflicts with people no matter what.
I agree.
And if we can empathize with them, it can actually...
If we just say, okay, that person is not worthy of my empathy, I'm in a conflict with them, but they're not worthy of my empathy, that conflict...
It may not get resolved.
It may not come out to a win-win.
It may not be de-escalated.
It may escalate into way worse.
But I'm speaking from personal experience.
Can you give me an example?
Because theoreticals are always tough to...
Sure.
Here's an example.
I used to be a bouncer or door guy for bars.
So I would have to deal with people that come in.
They're a little bit too drunk.
They are being disruptive to people.
They're interrupting people's conversations or whatever.
They're being aggressive.
I have to come in and basically intervene.
So before I was dealing and studying empathy and nonviolence, I had a more typical approach, which was like, that guy's a troublemaker.
We've got to get him out of here.
That's it.
And sure, that stopped some of the conflicts to a certain degree.
And to another degree, it ended up with me having these ongoing conflicts with that person.
Sorry, what do you mean by ongoing?
They'd come back?
Night after night?
Yeah, because a lot of the people that go to bars, specific bars, are regulars.
So you want to make sure that you can deal with everything in a diplomatic manner.
So anyways, I'll give you my...
My example here, there was one night a regular came in and he looked extremely disturbed after a while and he was interrupting people and people were like complaining to me.
And so I went up to him and I would have normally just thrown him out or been like, look, you got to just go home and just like kind of I ended it there.
But in this situation, I was like, okay, let me just take a second here and see what is it that this person could be possibly going through that they're needing to act out like this.
So I took that moment and I didn't even say anything, but it was just me holding that space.
And it ended up that...
That he opened up.
He was vulnerable to me.
And he had experienced some trauma recently.
And basically in sharing that with me, he de-escalated himself.
And then basically he just kind of walked away.
And the end result of that...
As far as my assessment was that we became more connected and then he was able to achieve some kind of peace within himself.
And then also he wasn't bothering people anymore at the bar.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
And I'm certainly willing to accept that as an outcome.
Right, so basically the point of this is that like, and this is something that I've dealt with even when people are like completely aggressive against me, you know, like they come at me completely violent and I can say, well, in this case, I just have to guard myself and defend myself and like...
And whatever, like, kick this person away and beat them down so that they don't get to me, right?
Like, that's the typical response, and that's fine if that's all you know.
But if you can respond empathically, even in a moment when someone is aggressing against you, it opens up a humanity within them.
And I've seen it happen to me, where people are yelling at me, and then I, instead of reacting against that, I'm like...
Well, what is it that you're really angry about?
Let me really understand that and let me really understand what are the feelings and needs and why is it that you're so passionate about this subject?
And it's like just turning that around and turning those habits around and not reacting the way we're taught to react when someone is aggressing is amazing, the kind of human connection that comes out of that.
So I think that when you're talking about saving empathy only for your trusted friends, I don't know.
I don't I don't really...
I haven't...
I've had amazing experience of having empathy with people who were enemies of mine.
Okay.
I think that's...
I mean, I certainly appreciate the story.
But I'm not sure what that has to do.
Maybe we're using the word empathy in two different ways.
Okay.
Because it seems to be that when you ask someone what's really bothering you, You're not being vulnerable, are you?
Well, so here's how I... How I am taking empathy to mean.
Basically, it's the willingness to look at things from another person's perspective and see the world from their shoes, basically, and understand their feelings and needs.
And with a genuine kind of concern to help them with those needs.
And then self-empathy is basically being completely honest and vulnerable with yourself.
So I think that when you're vulnerable, you're not necessarily being empathic.
You're just expressing yourself.
And whether or not they're going to be empathic towards you depends on the person.
Does that make sense?
Somewhat.
I mean, you're still not being vulnerable, right?
If you're being empathic to the other person, like say, okay, so they aggress against you, and then you're like, well, actually, what is it that you're angry about?
What are your feelings and your needs?
And you're listening to them, and you're trying to understand them, then you are being empathic towards them.
That's not what I'm saying.
And you're not necessarily being vulnerable, no.
Okay, and so, look, I understand that.
Yeah, get to the root of what people's problems are.
I think that's fine.
Right, right.
That makes sense to me.
Okay.
That's not what I'm talking about though, because you can't be exploited in that situation, right?
Right.
So the whole thing I gave a big long speech was about being exploited by people.
And then you give me an example where you still have the authority as the bouncer to kick the person out, to call the cops, you still have authority, but you're asking the person what the issue is, but that person cannot possibly exploit you because you hold all the power in that situation.
And, you know, maybe you're using that power very wisely.
It sounds like a very nice thing that you did, but it's not even remotely related to what I'm talking about because you don't have a relationship with that person.
You are not being vulnerable to that person, and you retain all of the power in that interaction with that person.
And so you have a better way of approaching it than picking the guy up and throwing him out on his ass.
Fine.
Okay.
I think that's, you know, good for you.
I think that's great.
That's a very efficient form of customer management, especially if the person can come back.
But I was talking about personal relationships.
I was talking about sort of friends, family, lovers and so on where you have ongoing communications with them and where vulnerability can be used for exploitation, right?
Like a typical example would be something like you tell your parents that you love this toy the most.
You know, let's say it's your Slinky.
You know, you tell yourself, the Slinky is my favorite, favorite toy.
Well, you've just given the parents power.
Because if the parents want to punish you, what are they going to do?
They just take away.
Right.
And so, your honesty has now been used against you.
You are punished because now they know what your favorite thing is, and that's what they want to take away.
If you say, I'm really looking forward to going to the school dance on Friday, and they're upset with you, what are they going to say?
No school dance on Friday.
That's what I'm talking about in terms of vulnerability and exploitation, in that your desires are used to punish you.
People don't want to go to jail.
So what does the government do?
Threatens them with jail.
It knows they don't want to go to jail.
It makes jail as unpleasant as possible without breaking too many international violations, too many international laws.
And so vulnerability...
It gives people power, and not everyone, but some people will use that power to hurt you.
Like in a divorce, right?
The man loves the beach house because it was given to him by his grandfather.
It's been in the family for generations.
A particularly vindictive kind of woman might expressly want that beach house because she knows how much it's going to hurt.
This could happen either gender.
It just happened to be the way I picked it.
So that's what I'm talking about, not you're a bouncer who can call the cops.
And you're de-escalating by asking someone what the problem is rather than kicking him out because he's going to come back.
I think that's fine.
But that's not what I'm talking about.
But do you think that in not being authentic and not being vulnerable just as a human, isn't that kind of – there's some kind of pain in having to withhold yourself when you're just out there in the world expressing yourself as a human and you have to hold back parts of yourself?
I mean, I guess.
I mean, it's painful to me that I can't leave my wallet in a park bench and come back a week later and it's still there, but it's a necessary caution in a world where not everyone is honest, right?
I mean, does it bother me that I have to lock my car?
I guess, but, you know, what's my option?
Does it bother me that I need a pass card on my cell phone?
Does it bother me that I need to lock my front door?
I mean...
I mean it's just – it's the way things are and it's easier, right?
I could leave my front door open if I wanted and I could leave, I don't know, 50 bucks on a rock in front of my house but that's not the way the world is.
I mean I'd like it if that's the way the world – and I certainly want people to work towards a world like that primarily through being very empathetic and not punishing children and being very gentle and positive and peaceful with children for sure.
But the idea that there are people out there who are dangerous, who are exploitive, who are manipulative, well, I don't doubt that.
The statistics seem to be fairly clear.
My personal experience and the experience of now hundreds and hundreds of people I've talked to on this show seem to be very clear that there are people out there who are dangerous.
our front doors unlocked.
There are places in the world where that has been the case before.
And I think that would be wonderful.
I think we need to work towards that kind of world.
We never need to – we never want to let go of the possibility of that kind of world.
And I'm absolutely positive we can achieve that kind of world.
But that's not the kind of world we have right now.
I don't believe that empathy is contagious, except through parent to child, In other words, nobody that I know of has been able to cure sociopathy or psychopathy in the population.
And people have tried so many different things to try and cure a fundamental lack of empathy on the part of other human beings.
I mean, they've tried ice therapy, they've tried drug therapies, they've tried LSD, they've tried extensive talk therapy, because, I mean, it's a holy grail, I guess, of Psychiatry is psychology.
To be able to grow the mirror neurons that were not grown in early childhood.
But it seems to be about as effective...
If some kid was grown up malnourished and ended up six inches shorter than they would have other...
There's no point giving them lots of food later.
It just makes them fatter.
It doesn't make them taller.
Because that window of development is gone.
It's past.
It can't be fixed after the fact.
So until...
Look, I'm open to it.
Maybe someone can figure it out.
I doubt it, but what the hell do I know?
I'm just some amateur idiot on the internet.
Until somebody can show to me brain scan proof that they have taken an unempathetic brain and physically transformed it into an empathetic brain, and they've got to show me the fMRIs, they've got to show me the psych tests, they've got to show me the long-term tests, Changes in behavior.
I really, really want to see this cure for selfishness.
And when people can show that to me, then I will say, great, now we can speed up the process and it no longer has to be intergenerational.
But people have been trying for thousands of years to cure sociopathy in one form or another.
Even the Inuit have a name for it, the guy who steals all your food and tries to seduce all your women.
Their only cure, the Inuit in the north, their only cure was to put this guy in an iceberg and push it away from the shore.
I couldn't figure out how to make this kind of person better.
But I know for sure, as of now, or as sure as sure can be, as of now, my capacity for empathy cannot make anybody else who's selfish empathetic.
Any more than me knowing Japanese can make someone else speak Japanese somehow without them studying it for years.
And even studying it for years doesn't seem to help fix this problem.
And sociopaths are 1 in 20, 1 in 16, depending on how you count.
There's a lot of people out there.
And a lot of other people will conform to the sociopath because the sociopath is the more dangerous person.
And most people, when they're pretending to be ethical, they're just conforming to the most dangerous person in the room.
And what that means is that when you are in the orbit of someone like this, most of the people who you think are close to you are going to end up conforming to that person, to the most dangerous person around, and betraying you.
That's, I think, a fairly well-known phenomenon.
You know about the Milgram experiments, where people, you know, significant majorities of people will Electrocute another person to death if someone in power tells them to.
This is the level of where we are.
This has been reproduced all over the world.
It's even more common among women than men, which is where your argument for empathy...
More women will electrocute a stranger than men will.
Men will at least hesitate one out of four, if I remember rightly, but most women will do it.
Because, I don't know, for a variety of reasons.
So I'm very happy.
Once they can figure out how to cure...
This kind of selfishness, and I'm just talking about the more extreme of it, like the 1 in 16 or 1 in 20, which is not to say that everyone else is really empathetic.
I think empathy is a very scarce resource in the world these days.
I mean, I could literally, you know, before I got married, I could count on the fingers of one hand the few genuinely empathetic people I'd met in my entire life out of meeting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people.
So I'm not saying don't be nice.
I'm not saying don't be curious.
I mean, I ask strangers about their thoughts and histories.
Every time I have a show, every time we talk about these kinds of issues, I'm super curious and super interested in what people have to say about their histories and so on.
But I don't imagine that I have some sort of magical power to cure a lack of empathy in others.
Until science tells me otherwise, I have to go with the facts.
But sorry, go ahead.
I just wanted to share a story that was related to...
You're talking about curing selfishness or someone in an extreme sociopathic state of how they can make a shift.
There's a lifelong peace activist named David Hartzell.
He's definitely a hero of mine.
He just came out with a book, Waging Peace.
He was involved in the lunch counter sit-ins.
Back in the American Civil Rights Movement.
And he was basically in the lunch counter.
He was sitting in.
He was one of the activists.
And in came in basically the kind of...
They weren't the police, but they were...
They were against this kind of mixing of the races within the cafeteria.
And they were bullies, basically.
They were like neighborhood bullies.
And they were backed up by the police, although it wasn't the police.
And they came in.
They had weapons and they had knives.
And this one particular aggressive, you could say sociopathic person, came up to David.
And he was sitting there locking arms with someone else.
And basically, the man put a knife in his face.
And he said...
Get out of here right now or I'm going to kill you, essentially.
And David Hartzell's response, he'd been trained in nonviolence and basically his response was, he said, brother, you do what you have to do and I'm going to sit here and love you.
And basically what happened was that man basically started immediately crying and dropped his knife and basically ran out of the room.
So it's a kind of extreme example, but I think it's one, you know, in extreme situations where It's an example of an extreme vulnerability in the face of an extreme threat that actually had an extremely transformative effect.
And I think that there's some core humanity within us that we all have.
And if we say, oh, this person wasn't capable of empathy, then that moment wouldn't have happened, that transformation wouldn't have happened.
Okay, so...
This is not how philosophy works.
I mean, I'm going to be authentic and honest with you that this is not how philosophy works.
I gave a lot of physical evidence, empirical evidence, and so on, and what did you respond with?
That's a real story that happened.
No, a story.
Now, I don't know if it's a real story.
Were there witnesses?
Was it recorded?
I don't know.
I gave you a lot of facts and evidence, and you gave me an unverified anecdote.
This is not how philosophy works, my friend.
This is not how the pursuit of truth works.
I'll tell you, when I got sick with cancer, I had all these people who emailed me and said, Well, I know a guy who did this and he got better.
It's all just anecdotes.
Don't give me anecdotes.
Give me science.
Give me verification.
Give me truth.
The idea that you can love someone who has a knife to your throat is deranged.
Why?
The idea that somebody who's capable of putting a knife to your throat is going to run off crying because you tell them that you love them Until I see it on videotape, I don't believe.
And look, you can tell me, well, that's cynical and so on.
No, that's skeptical.
Skeptical is good.
Skeptical is healthy.
You cannot overturn years and decades of neurological science.
You've got to read The Science of Evil by someone, Baron Cohen, the comedian's cousin or whatever.
He talks about empathy is a system of 10 to 12 to 13 complex...
Areas within the brain all interacting with each other.
Now it cannot be that empathy which is a very complex and sophisticated series of brain activities all connected to each other, all needing to be present and working properly in order for empathy to occur.
The physical process of developing mirror neurons which allow you to experience what other people experience in a real way This idea that you turn to someone who's got a knife to your throat and you say, you do what you have to do,
I'm going to sit here and love you, that that somehow spontaneously creates mirror neurons within the other person's mind, that it spontaneously creates these 10 to 13 complex interrelated systems within the brain that are necessary for empathy.
The idea that A little phrase can somehow grow empathy in another human brain?
You are literally telling me a story that a man's words can regrow an arm that is missing.
I don't think it's just his words though.
Sorry, the book is called The Science of Evil on Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty by Simon Baron Cohen.
You need to read this.
You need to know what the facts are about empathy.
You need to not have anecdotes.
You need to have facts in your theories because so far I've given you a lot of facts and you have given me two anecdotes about being a bouncer and some unverified story from a peace activist.
I'm sorry.
Can you just remind me what his name was again?
Yeah.
His name is David Hartzell.
Can you spell that for me?
Sure.
It's H-A-R-T-S-O-U-G-H. And the book is called Waging Peace, Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist.
So he was a son of a minister, right?
Right, yeah.
Okay, I'm just having a look up.
I'm going to assume if he was into the civil rights movement he was from the left, which is neither here nor there.
It's just a...
I mean, on the back of the book you have a quote by Daniel Ellsberg giving him a testimonial.
So is his argument that women who are about to be raped should say that they love their rapists because that is showing empathy and that will cause the rapists to drop their knives and run away?
Is that his argument?
That we really should blame women who are raped for their lack of empathy towards their rapists, thus propelling their rapists into their violent actions?
No, I mean, I don't think he has a statement on that particular situation.
Wait, is that different from the guy who's got a knife to his throat?
I think the point here is that...
No, no, don't give me no.
Give me an answer here.
I'm asking you a direct question.
If he is saying that empathy reduces violence, then victims of violence...
No.
No, I don't think so.
No, the point of the story for me is to show that if you choose to take a step...
If you choose to really stand with your integrity and if you're really going to love and if you're really going to be empathic and really put yourself out there and stand for what you believe in, which was what he was doing in the lunch counter sit-ins, he was putting his life on the line.
Someone was there and saying basically, I will kill you unless you stop fighting for this right.
He said, no, I will put my life on the line for the right to do this.
And that vulnerability, that deep, deep, like, commitment to justice, and that core of humanity within him to still not hold that person as an enemy, even though that person was ready to kill him, was, I think...
And he solved, but he solved the violence, and he ended the violence by loving his attacker, right?
Yes, but he was doing it for a cause.
He wasn't just...
No, no.
The course doesn't matter.
Yeah, it does.
Do you not think that the woman has a course called Don't Rate Me?
Well, see, I think...
I think...
I don't think that the message of this is to say, look, just go there and take whatever violence anyone's going to give you, and that will magically open them up.
I don't want to say that message at all.
You gave me this story, which was that a man has a knife to this guy's throat, he says he loves him, and the man drops the knife and runs away.
That's the only response you gave to me after I gave you all the facts and signs.
So you were giving me a story which was the sole example that you provided along with empathizing with the violent drunk.
That was your story about how to deal with violence.
Now, you didn't say to me, well, sometimes that doesn't work or most times that doesn't work or I guess he was lucky or whatever, right?
That was your story.
That was your proof.
That was what you brought to the table in response to what I was saying.
So I can only assume that that is your perspective, that that is what people should do in the face of violence, because that's what you were talking about when I talked about human beings' capacity for cruelty and the fact that there are sadists out there whose brains light up orgasmically when they view intentional human cruelty on a videotape.
So that is your argument, that this is what people should do.
They should love their enemies in the Christ-like fashion, right?
I mean if your enemy asks you to walk a mile, walk two miles.
If he asks for your cloak, give him your jacket too.
If he asks for your coat, give him your shirt as well.
That you should love your enemies and that will reduce or eliminate their capacity for violence.
That's the story that you gave to me.
Now you didn't give that to me with caveats.
Like, well, you know, I guess he was lucky or, you know, I don't recommend this in every situation, blah, blah, blah, blah.
He could have just got stabbed or the guy could have run away and waited for him later and whatever, right?
That was your story to me.
So that's your response.
This is what you think is the ideal.
In other words, this man, this peace activist, this David Fellow, he did the right thing and that eliminated violence and that's what we should do.
In which case...
Women who resist rapists instead of loving them are kind of causal in the rape because if they had loved their rapists and said, I love you so much, you can rape me but just know that I love you.
That the women by resisting have causality in the rape because they should have acted in a different way to diffuse the situation.
So, basically, what I'm saying is that I'm not saying that this is something that everyone should do or that this is the ideal.
I'm saying that you were mentioning...
Why did you give me the story if you don't think it's a good thing to do?
I'll tell you exactly why.
I'm saying you have to be prepared to take that level of commitment to nonviolence.
That's not something I recommend to someone.
And you're saying you're bringing up that people who are sociopaths, they can't be awakened to humanity or someone who's acting that extreme.
And I'm saying that's an example of that it is possible, that there is that kind of being vulnerable, even in an extreme situation.
If you're doing it for a reason, for a cause...
That can be immensely powerful.
I mean, that's the power of, you know, the great nonviolent leaders that we have.
And the way they put themselves out there and they were vulnerable, it shows that it's possible.
I'm not saying everyone needs to do that.
Sometimes the most nonviolent thing...
Wait, wait, wait.
So hang on.
So unless you are a political activist, this is useless to you?
No.
So, let me give you...
So, hang on.
So, it is useful to you if you're about to be raped.
You should say to your rapist that you love him or her.
No.
No.
I wouldn't say that.
You can be...
You can be...
You can express yourself.
You can say...
Well, you have a number of choices.
First, get the hell out of there.
If someone's raping you, get the hell out of there.
But isn't that what David should have done?
But he was there engaging in an action for a reason, for a cause, to repair the relationship.
So if you're in a relationship with someone who's abusing you, and you want this relationship to continue, you don't want to just cut it off, then you express yourself.
You express how much pain you're feeling, and see if that causes a change.
See if that person can have empathy for you and really understand you.
And if they don't...
Hang on, sorry to interrupt, but that's not what David did.
David didn't say, it's terrifying to me that you have a knife to my throat when I'm aggressing against no one.
He said, I love you.
Right.
So that's not like an example for every situation.
I'm just saying that's one example of a sociopath like turning around.
Well, I'm sorry.
How do you know?
So that's an example of if we assume the story is true.
And again, this is an anecdote.
There's no verification to it.
There's no...
I assume what the guy said, right?
What David said.
I don't know if it's true or not.
I don't.
I mean, because it's an anecdote.
It doesn't mean it's false.
It's not like the guy said he turned into a unicorn, but I don't know if it's true.
But how do we know that the sociopath then changed?
We don't.
I don't know if there was any follow-up studies or tests or anything like that.
So we don't know.
You're assuming a huge amount there.
Let me tell you one other...
Oftentimes, I think you can't know the effect of something that you do until a long period of time passes, and the person can process what they experienced.
There's another story, if it's okay to share.
David's mother, for example, she was also an activist.
It's like a couple generations of activists.
She was protesting at a nuclear base, basically.
Every day, the workers would come in, and they were specifically advised to not look at the protesters.
One day the worker did look at the protester who was David's mom and she had a smile on her face while she was protesting.
She was waving at him and she was very happy and meanwhile she's protesting what they're doing.
Nothing spectacular.
20 years later, she runs into someone at the supermarket and he says, are you the lady who was protesting at that nuclear base?
And she says, yes.
Why?
You smiled at me that day.
I wasn't supposed to look at you.
That day, I went in and quit my job and I've never been working there since.
Just from your smile.
Right.
She could have held him in an enemy image and been super angry at him and been like, you're causing all this evil by creating all these nuclear weapons.
But she didn't want to do that because she has a commitment to nonviolence.
And so she was protesting what they were doing while still holding them as a beautiful human.
And that has a power, I think, that can really awaken people to...
Empathy and, you know, a greater, you know, the core of humanity within us can be awakened.
Do you know if he's done any work on child abuse?
I do not.
And just the reason being, you know, and pardon my cynicism, right?
I mean, I'm a skeptic, which, you know, doesn't mean anything.
But so let's see, he's been in the civil rights movement, leftist.
Anti-nuclear testing movement?
Leftist.
Movement to end the Vietnam War?
Leftist.
US Central America Peace Movement?
Leftist.
Anti-apartheid movement?
Leftist.
Movements to end the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Leftist.
It's kind of a cliche.
And the reason that bothers me is not because I disagree with all of these movements, but rather because it's very predictable, the causes that he's involved in.
Like, if he had thrown his weight into, you know, let's stop child abuse, if he'd thrown his weight into, let's expose women's capacity for evil to break the cycle of violence and so on, that would have been against the cliché handbook of leftist stereotypes.
And I think that would have done a lot more good than all the frou-frou that he would have gotten involved in.
Like, so, it's great that they have these stories about a guy had a knife to my throat and I told him I loved him and he ran out of the room.
And my mom smiled at a guy who quit his job.
So these are all fine anecdotes and so on and I guess they move people who prefer anecdotes to facts.
But my approach on ending violence is to do a huge amount of research into what causes violence.
And what causes violence is not a lack of people saying that they love someone who's about to stab them.
What causes violence is not a lack of people smiling at people who work at a nuclear power plant.
What causes violence is child abuse.
Now, if you are dedicated to a particular cause...
You need to be as responsible as humanly possible about that cause, which means throw away all your dogma, throw away all your cliches, throw away all the answers that people have given you, and look at it and wrestle with it as if you were completely new to the planet.
We get letters, many letters a week, calls, you've heard them, people saying, I'm not hitting my children anymore.
Now, We don't overplay these.
I talk about them from time to time.
But these are, I guess, I mean, I can't prove it.
I don't have cameras in people's houses, but I believe them when they say that they're no longer aggressing against their children.
Well, there's a measurable reduction, not just in the present reality of human violence, but in the future reality of human violence, there is a reduction.
Measurable.
Tangible.
You know, we can extrapolate and play the numbers any which way you want.
I choose to believe that of the couple of million podcast downloads and video views and books that we have a month, that at least a few thousand people are deciding to stop hitting their children.
That's 1%.
That's not...
I'm not saying half the people...
1%.
A month they're deciding not to hit their kids.
I make a pretty good case for it.
And I talk about it a lot.
This is, you know, when I talk to people about donate to this show.
Donate to this show so that we can take a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of people not hitting or punishing their children.
To millions of people.
To tens of millions of people.
To hundreds of millions of people not punishing or hitting their children.
That is when you take the science rather than the leftist clichés about how to deal with the problem of human violence.
And I don't need stories because I have facts.
I don't need butterfly effects of smiles in a lineup because we have pretty verifiable Pretty measurable estimates of the amount of human violence, both present and future, that this show is eliminating every day, week, month, year, and into the decades.
So let's say 3,000 people a month decide to stop hitting their children as a result of this show.
Or let's say 1,500 people.
Doesn't really matter.
Let's say those people have two kids each.
Well, it's 3,000 to 6,000 children a month who are no longer being punished or hit.
36,000 to 72,000 children every year not being hit, not being punished, not being aggressed against.
Not bad for a day's work.
And we're going to only grow from here.
So listen, I mean, I'm not...
He's not a bad guy.
I'm glad he's out there doing what he's doing.
But I am suspicious of anecdotes.
I don't want to hear that someone ran out of a diner.
I don't want to hear that someone quit their job.
I want to know what are the facts.
I am a businessman.
I am an empiricist.
And stories hold about as much weight to me as the Old Testament, or the New Testament for that matter.
They're just stories.
What I want to know is, how has your life's work measurably reduced the amount of violence in this world?
Well, civil rights movement?
Kind of dicey.
Anti-nuclear testing movement?
Hey, I think it's great that they're not testing nukes as much anymore.
The Vietnam War, I don't think they ended much about that.
Anti-apartheid movement?
Well, South Africa is now the rape capital of the world, but nobody cares because it's black-on-black violence, and who gives a shit about that, right?
And the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
I don't think he did much about that.
But he's got stories about guys running out of diners and people quitting their jobs.
Unverifiable, unprovable, unfollowed up.
I am a businessman.
When I was in business, I needed measurable, tangible, practical results.
Not some salesman coming up to me and saying, well, I talked to a guy at a conference.
He seemed really interested in the product.
I don't see how that puts a dollar in the bank to pay the employees.
Now, I think that if people dedicate themselves to peace, they need to rise above cliches.
They need to rise above anecdotes.
They need to rise above unverifiable stories and they need to dedicate themselves to the science and they need to dedicate themselves to that which is measurable.
Like when – and I understand.
I'm just telling you my perspective.
I'm not trying to disprove what this guy's done.
Maybe he's done some fantastic stuff.
But it reminds me of when Bill Gates started getting involved in humanitarian work.
And he'd ship out all these mosquito nets to all these NGOs, these non-governmental organizations, these charities.
And he wouldn't hear anything back.
He'd pick up the phone.
He'd say, well, what happened to these mosquito nets?
Oh, yeah, we handed those out.
Well, where did you hand them out?
Are they still working?
I mean, who got them?
Where did they go?
And he's like, oh, I don't know.
We've got that written down somewhere.
He's like, no, no, no, no, no.
Don't give me your anecdotes.
Give me the facts.
Where did they go?
I need to get this stuff tracked.
You can't manage what you can't measure.
And I have annoyance.
I'm just telling you my subjective opinion.
I'm not saying this is proof.
I have annoyance with this guy you're quoting.
I think it's great that he got involved in all the trendy leftist courses.
And I think it's great that he's got some nice anecdotes.
And I'm sure he's heralded as a hero in many circles of cliches.
But I sure as shit wish he'd worried a little bit less about nuclear power plants and a little bit more about child abuse.
Because if the left...
Have been working on child abuse in the 50s, I might have not been hit in the 60s and 70s and 80s.
If the left had dropped all their trendy causes, which is not to say that they're unimportant causes or whatever, but if they'd really gotten to the root of the problem, if people like this David guy have been focusing on child abuse, on the death of the family...
On the necessity of fathers, if this guy had on his resume that he fought against the welfare state as the violent redistribution of hard-earned income, because the welfare state sure as hell is violence, but that's not on the leftist agenda, so that doesn't exist.
It relies upon feeding the resentments of women rather than holding them responsible, just as it feeds on the resentments of minorities rather than holding them responsible, because it needs to portray capitalism as fundamentally inegalitarian, so they need to provoke resentment and create victims rather than remind people of their moral responsibilities and rail against the victimhood of imaginary inequality.
If they had done that, if they'd followed principles in science, rather than following the communist handbook of destabilizing The family destabilizing the West.
Well, if he'd focused on the welfare state, the destruction of the family and child abuse, well, I could have had a different childhood, but he didn't.
He did all this stuff that didn't change how one child was treated.
In fact, by ignoring things like the welfare state, the destruction of the family and avoiding child abuse, particularly women's role in child abuse, He didn't do that which would have measurably reduced human violence.
Instead, he pursued a leftist agenda, and all he has to show for it is some unverified anecdotes, based upon what you've told me, based upon the little I know.
So I'm not saying this guy did anything bad or wrong.
I'm just telling you that my childhood could have benefited a hell of a lot more from people focusing on On child abuse, divorce laws, the welfare state, father absenteeism, and all that stuff.
If this guy had circled back, if he really cared about the black community, if he had circled back from the civil rights movement, had gone back to the black community and had said, whoa, affirmative action, no, no, no, no, no.
That's no good.
That's not the post-racial society we were aiming for, so stop that shit.
No, bet you didn't.
Did he circle back to the black community and say, whoa, no, no, no, no, no.
No, you can't have father absent households in 75% of the black community.
That is a disaster.
These kids need fathers.
The welfare state is really bad for the black community, as it is for the white community, but he didn't.
He just keeps moving on from leftist cliché to leftist cliché.
A whole bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing, leaving behind a trail of unverified anecdotes.
I think that is a waste.
So I'm so sorry to end on that note, but I do need to get to the next caller.
I really, really appreciate you calling in.
And if you see this man and you're over 40, he can teach you empathy, apparently.
All right, Mike, who do we have up next?
All right, up next is Nicole.
Nicole says, I find it difficult to stick with my goals as if I'm in a bipolar relationship with myself.
One week I'm saying, you have what it takes, go for it baby.
Another week it's, I don't think it's working out, we should take a break.
How does one teach themselves the vital skill of self-discipline?
Hmm.
Hmm.
Is there any particular project you have in mind?
Oh wait, Nicole dropped off.
Oh dear.
What, she couldn't even commit to the call?
Are you kidding me?
All right, I guess we're not going to go to Nicole.
We're going to go to Tyler.
All right, up next is Tyler.
Tyler wrote in and said, Why is it when I am open and honest with people, I push them away rather than connect with them?
All right.
You want to fill in those cracks a little more there, brother?
Okay.
Well, I just feel like every time when I'm trying to make new friends or...
I went to a new job starting January of this year.
I'm meeting new people for the first time.
I try to let everything be out there.
It's like, this is who I am.
This is what I do.
But I get nothing back.
It's usually nine chances at ten negative that come back.
The feedback I get is negative.
Like what?
What kind of feedback do you get?
Well, it just gets the sense that they don't want to be around me.
Like, they don't appreciate, okay, yeah, you're being honest.
Like, what's wrong with this guy?
Like, why are you doing this?
Why are you so nice?
Wait, their criticism of you is why are you so nice?
Yeah.
You mean, like, do they think you're being falsely nice?
And that...
Are you trying to manipulate them in some way?
Maybe.
I'm not 100% sure.
An example I can give of this would be the other night.
I know a friend.
She's from back home.
I had some extra codfish from home, which is Newfoundland, and I brought it over to her.
Resisting no cliches about Newfoundland, I see.
Some extra cod, some screech.
Well, it was fresh codfish.
Some welfare checks.
I live in Nova Scotia now, and I've heard what the cod is like up here, so I tend to stay away from it, unless it's fresh.
Anyway, I brought it over to this girl's house, and Earlier before this, she asked me to pick her up some liquor.
I did, and I took money from her for the payment of liquor.
But for myself, I just felt kind of bad that I did that, because usually I'm a giving person.
Okay, yeah, you want that?
Yeah, sure.
Here it is.
I can afford it.
Actually, I think free liquor is called enabling rather than generous, but all right.
But anyway, I tossed that in there anyway.
And can I just make one other joke?
Would you mind?
Give her.
All right.
Consummate Newfoundland date.
Free liquor and cod!
All right.
Go on.
But yeah, I left that to her and she just asked me, I was like, why are you so nice to me?
Like, I don't get it.
And she just told me, she's like, I'm not used to guys not wanting just to have sex with me and Is she that attractive or is it just Newfoundland standards?
I'm not going to lie.
She is very attractive.
But instead of losing somebody in my life, why not just make friends?
And if I get along with that person, I get along with her.
Do you want to have sex with her?
Come on, it's just you, me and the rest of time.
You can tell me.
Well, yeah, sure.
It wouldn't be a bad thing.
I mean, if she slipped on the card and...
So you do want to have sex with her, but that wasn't your primary motive?
No.
So if she was like an elderly Asian gentleman, you'd have done the same thing?
If I got along with him just as fine, I drove 45 minutes out of the way today just to give somebody a hand with a curve.
With a what?
Do you mean like the thing with four wheels that goes from?
Yes.
Okay, sorry, because the way that human beings would pronounce that as cur, I thought you maybe had to shoot like some rabbit dog or something.
Okay, but you mean car.
Okay, got it.
Sorry, I just...
I don't have to give full Trainspotting subtitles, but just for those who...
I actually spent a summer in Newfoundland, so I have a little bit of experience with the accent, but I just want to translate for the non-adept in the field.
So, okay, go ahead.
Yeah, so I'm a little nervous here, too, so...
No, no, you're doing great.
You're doing great.
I appreciate it.
But, you know, I just...
For myself, you know, I just feel like I'm a nice person, just for the fact that I'm a nice person.
You know, I don't want to be a bad person.
I don't want to be treated badly, so I just...
I'm nice.
Right.
And your problem is that people don't like you for that?
It seems like they're more cautious of me.
Like, they kind of keep at bay.
Like, I don't know.
Now, are these people, are they like big city Ontario people?
Halifax, which I think makes...
Medium city Halifax people, right?
Yeah, I think it makes the connection there.
And do you have any theories about big city people?
There's a lot of sketchy shit that goes on and that you should not be trusting of everybody.
Did you grow up in St.
John's or some smaller place?
Fogo Island, if you've ever heard of it.
No?
Is that near Mordor?
I don't know for sure.
All right.
Near the Shrouded Isles of the Screaming Damned or something like that.
So a pretty small place, right?
The population of the entire island is around 3,000, so everybody knew everybody.
If someone gets on a boat, they have to change the number, right?
Somebody's gone swimming, boy!
Take that number down!
Don't know if the cod will get them!
But also, I've been thinking, too, I have been depressed for really as long as I can remember.
And I do open up to...
I'm sorry about the depression.
I tell you, man, you are not making a good advertisement for being nice.
Being nice gets you into the friend zone with attractive people, but on the other hand, you are depressed.
Yeah.
Why do you think you've been depressed?
I mean, in all seriousness, Tyler, why do you think you've been depressed?
Lonely, I guess.
Not really having anyone there for me.
Do you mean growing up?
Yeah.
My mother was, I think, was horrible.
My father, I didn't meet him until I was five years old, and I've never really had a good, healthy relationship.
Wait, when you say good, healthy relationship, do you mean sort of romantic?
No.
Holy shit!
ACE of nine?
Sorry, Mike, just...
Just gave that to me.
You got an ACE of nine.
Okay, I'm just going to run through these.
You don't have to give me details just for those who don't know.
Verbal abuse threats, physical abuse, non-spanking, no family love or support, neglect, not enough food, dirty clothes, no protection or medical treatment, parents divorced, physical abuse towards female adults.
Yeah, there's nothing sexist about the ACE. Lived with alcoholic or drug use or a household member depressed, mentally ill or suicide attempt, household member in prison.
Wow, I am so sorry about that.
Holy crap.
Well, I guess it's not fine, but at the same time, I guess it did make me the person who I am today, which is not a...
I don't think it's a horrible thing, because I am...
It's a horrible thing.
No, come on.
I mean, you don't want that, right?
I mean, you don't want that for your kids.
You don't want that at all.
No, well, but I've took this path that I've Struggling through now, but hopefully someday when I get out of my depression where I've discovered philosophy and you, your teachings of the no child abuse and everything.
Nothing like philosophy to help you with depression.
Oh God!
It's never going to end right now because, of course, when you develop self-knowledge, then I think as you're going through, Tyler, you realize that A lot of people can handle self-knowledge, right?
Yeah.
But I think just the circumstances of what I went through and how I handled it, it is shaping who I am today and acknowledging of what had happened, what mistakes were made, and seeing who I am today and how I can change to become a better person and not repeat what my parents did to me to No,
look, I really, really appreciate that, and I'm not going to tell you you can't have a great life.
Of course you can.
Of course you can have a great life.
But the reason that I'm pushing back a little bit against this, Tyler, is because if I said to you, well, I'm treating my daughter like shit.
I'm ignoring her.
I'm hitting her because I want her to be a better person.
I want her to live the Nietzsche fantasy that that which does not kill you makes you stronger, which is not true.
I mean, you can gain strength out of adversity, but it is certainly not true that that which does not kill you makes you stronger.
I mean, post-traumatic stress disorder is rarely associated with a massive amount of emotional strength and health.
You can gain strength through adversity, but But that's sort of like saying, well, I'm going to become paralyzed to work on my triceps in a wheelchair.
Yeah, your triceps will get stronger, but who the hell wants to be paralyzed, right?
So, you know, look, I appreciate that way of looking at it.
But I'm also concerned because you say that you've been depressed for as long as you can remember, which to me might have something to do with unprocessed grieving.
And if you're giving yourself the Sergeant Major self-improvement pep talk of that which hasn't killed me makes me stronger and it's made me into the person who I am, then in a way you are forbidding yourself or calling it a weakness or a self-rejection to grieve for an adverse childhood experience score of 90 fucking percent, which is a wretched way to start your life.
So my concern would be that if you are avoiding the grieving of a terrible beginning in this life, then you may not be able to overcome your depression.
Because if the depression is the unresolved or unacknowledged need to grieve the damage that was done to you, then the pep talks are not going to solve the problem, if that makes any sense, in my opinion.
How would I go through the process of grieving this?
Well, I mean, the first thing that you would have to recognize is that it was a terrible, terrible series of things that were done unto you for many years.
They were not inevitable.
They were chosen.
That immense wrong, if not downright evil, was done unto you.
And you suffered enormously as a result of other people's Inattention, carelessness, viciousness, coldness, lack of attention, lack of love, opposite of love, and that this did not just occur within the household with your mother, but in the community, right?
Are you going to try and tell me, I don't think you would, that nobody in the community had even the remotest idea of the degree to which you were suffering as a child, as a little boy at home?
They know.
And what did they do?
Nothing.
Nothing.
They question why I didn't get drunk or smoke or do drugs.
Right.
Right.
You see, child abuse is not a family problem.
It is a tribal problem.
It is a social problem.
And dealing with the immediacy of child abuse in the home is only the beginning of the tragic journey that teaches you more than you ever, ever wanted to know about the society that you live in.
Your mother was only able to do what she did because society allowed her to, covered up for her, in a way encouraged her.
Society is the enabler, and the abusers are the enactors.
But society is like the driver of the getaway car at the bank robbery without whom the bank robbery could never occur, because you can't get away on foot, right?
And so the abuses that happen to children in all but the most remote locations, and don't get me wrong, you're pretty close, but not there yet, right?
That only occurs because of the active collusion of priests, of teachers, of other children and their parents.
Children share a lot.
Children share a lot.
And you'd be amazed if you could listen into the conversations of other people's families how much they knew about what you were suffering.
And the blind eye that society turns toward child abuse is exactly what child abusers rely on.
Which is why there's such a deep shock when conversations like this show comes along or other shows come along where this stuff is openly talked about because that breaks the rule that the abusers relied on that nobody will show their children sympathy.
At least certainly not for free, right?
And so what was done to you within the home was inexcusable and reprehensible and downright immoral.
And it only occurred because your mother, and your father I suppose to some degree absent though he sounds he was, could rely on the colluding silence of everyone, right?
Yeah.
And now, you're out into a wider world.
You're out in Halifax, right?
Yeah.
And are you keeping these 90% ACE pretty close to your chest?
I'm trying to leave that part of my life behind and move towards the future, focus on a career, focus on something that's going to make me happy, really start a good life.
Right now, I'm troubled with going back, because I didn't...
Well, for two reasons I'm troubled about going back.
One is because I have a little brother home, and I just found out that his father has just left.
His father not being the same, I can assume, as your father?
Yeah.
His set father is now gone.
My mom didn't tell me this.
How old's your little brother?
Just roughly.
He's nine.
And, well, he's gone now.
I don't know for how long.
You mean the dad?
Yeah.
My mother told me a couple months ago that She just got a surgery and told me then that she had cancer.
I had no idea beforehand.
My grandfather, just a couple weeks ago, was diagnosed to give two to six months left to live.
And my great uncle has started having heart problems.
I just...
I want to leave it there, but my grandfather, I know he wasn't the best man.
But I'm not really sure.
Did he know about what your...
Is this your mother's father?
Yes.
And he...
She raised me in that house until I was about five years old.
And...
I remember some of the horrors that went on there.
He was highly abusive to my grandmother.
I remember, very rememberable, one night that my mom took me, brought me over to the neighbor's house because he chased us out of the house.
Me, my uncle, my grandmother, my mother chased us out of the house at gunpoint.
Wow.
Yeah.
And I remember those things and the stories that they said, what happened.
And I know later years, as I was growing up, when my, I suppose, ex-stepfather, however you want to classify that now, came in my life, he would occasionally go down there and he told me he regretted Everything that he's ever done, because I guess he finally realized that, well, he chased everybody away, and now he's really alone.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, Kammer's a bitch, for sure.
I want to go back and see him for the fact that, you know, I believe that if he did have that time back, he wouldn't have done those things, but...
Of your grandfather?
Yeah.
Why do you believe that?
I guess because I have a lot of happy memories with him also.
Just growing up, you know, teaching me how to fish and tie knots and, you know, rabbit slips and stuff like that.
It's just, it was good time spent with him.
But at the same time, I remember him for the man who he is.
And I kind of don't want to have the mental image in my head to see him again with poison running through his veins now.
He was an alcoholic.
Still is.
And this is why he's dying now.
Due to liver failure.
So it's hard.
Because...
Right now, my uncle, my two uncles, just went home to do the funeral plans while he's still alive.
And the uncle that grew up with me, he's only five years older than me, and he's kind of in the same position where I am to where he doesn't want to go back home anymore either.
He wants to leave it all behind.
He's finally...
Admitting that he is depressed and I think he wants to go and get help.
And every time we go home, me and him, it's always with my mom and my nan.
It's always, you know, I'll do this for me.
Oh, you don't come home.
They guilt you into picking sods.
It's always, you know, oh, you've never done this for me.
It's always a guilt trip.
And it makes it really hard to want to go back.
And when you don't, they'll always say, oh, you don't come home enough.
Use my little brother as, oh, he was doing this the other day.
You know, he misses you and everything.
And they have to realize that.
So they're very big on family issues.
Obligations and being nice and sensitive and caring, right?
That's their big thing, right?
Appear that way because...
And how were they acting that out for you when you were...
I mean, did they teach you that through their examples of being sensitive and nice and considerate and thoughtful and...
I think I learned that mostly from my grandparents on my father's side because they took me every summer until I was about 11 years old, gone, Nova Scotia, PEI, just traveling with me.
I was always with them every summer and they had a huge impact on my life.
I consider them more my parents than my actual parents.
And did they know about your 90% adverse childhood experience score?
Yes.
And what did they do about it?
Did they say, we can't possibly let you go back to that torture chamber, to that concentration camp, we can't possibly let that happen?
Or did they send you back?
At the time, I wanted to go back.
Okay.
Yeah, my daughter wants fistfuls of candy.
That doesn't mean she gets them.
Yes.
So yeah, they did send me back.
And what did they say to you about your mother?
Honestly, I can't remember.
Did they ever talk to her?
Sorry, did they ever talk about her with you?
I can't remember.
So that's probably now, right?
Probably.
Probably.
And they raised a son who got married to and had a child with this mom of yours.
I'll clarify on that a bit.
From what I take, from what was told to me, and this is just me connecting the dots, that I think my dad and my mom were just kind of a one-night thing or a small relationship.
I don't know what happened after she found out she was pregnant.
All I know is that it got to the point where apparently she brought him to court claiming that I was his child.
He was saying no and my grandmother was looking after me when I was a baby.
Well, all this was going on.
I don't know why he never said yes or I don't know why he wasn't there.
You mean why he wasn't...
Did you marry your mama now?
No.
And you didn't meet him until you were five?
Yeah.
And has he ever accepted paternity?
Has there ever been a paternity test?
Yes.
And he is the father?
Yeah.
So he was wrong?
Yeah.
And so he fathered a son...
Who he did not see for five years because he mistakenly thought that he was not the father.
I guess.
I mean, I would assume...
Don't guess.
I mean, you're telling me the story.
I'm just trying to put it together.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
I would have assumed that it would have been done earlier, like when I was actually born.
Yeah, like when I was actually born.
Well, certainly if there's contention, that's one of the things you do, right?
Not when I was like four years old or five years old.
You know, it seems a little delayed there.
I guess you can't get a lot of facts out of people these days, right?
Well, if I ask my mom, she holds that much resentment towards the man.
She's only going to say, he never wanted you, which she's told me before because I went to go in there one summer and...
This is what you told me.
Oh, why are you going in there with him?
He never wanted you.
He never raised you.
Yeah, but the fact of the matter is he didn't want her.
Yeah.
I mean, if he'd loved her, if she was a great woman, he probably would have been happy to get married and raise you, and it was her that he didn't want, right?
Yeah.
I don't know what my father's opinions are about me, but I know he couldn't stand living with my mom.
So, he left.
Of course, two babies.
Well, we could figure out a way to deal with her, but he couldn't.
I mean, he was in his 30s.
I was six months old.
Of course, I was going to be able to figure out what he couldn't figure out, which is how to stand her.
But I don't think he had any animosity towards me.
But...
He sure as shit didn't want to spend time with my mom.
Well, I keep in contact with him.
This breakdown is probably the best relationship that I've ever had with him, to where I can actually talk to him about work and my care and just what's going on in my life, what I'm doing, new.
But not your history?
No.
That's not...
Listen, man, I appreciate...
That you're having good chats with your dad.
And I'm not going to say that's anything wrong with that.
But you need to keep moving your needle.
You need to keep raising your standards.
You need someone that you can talk about this stuff with, right?
Sounds like you're a young man.
This is all pretty raw.
This is all pretty fresh.
And this has had a huge defining impact on who you are.
And it needs to be part of your conversations with people.
Now, I'm not saying you've got to go blur upon your dad or anything, but what I'm saying is I'm glad that you're talking with your father.
I think that's great.
But you need to be conscious of the limitations and say it could be a worse relationship.
In other words, we could not be talking or could be yelling at each other all the time, but it's a very limited relationship as it stands.
Is that fair?
Yeah.
That's fair.
And that doesn't mean that it's bad or wrong.
But you need to be aware that it's limited.
Because you need to keep raising your standards about what it is to have a relationship, right?
I mean, seriously, if you could talk to him, you wouldn't be talking to me, right?
I'm glad you're talking to me.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm glad that you're talking to me.
But you know you can talk to me about this stuff, but you can't talk to your family about it, right?
I just...
They worry about me so much.
My grandparents do, and he does too, and I don't want to cause them distress.
I feel like I'm just getting these Hallmark cards with sharp edges flicked at my eyeballs.
Look, if they care about you so much, then they should want to hear about what's really bothering you, right?
They do, but I know what I have to say.
How do you know they do?
You start talking to them like you're talking to me.
What happens?
All I see is worry in their face.
Good.
Well, I'm glad that they're worried about you.
They should be worried about you because you were horribly abused as a child.
They should damn well worry about you.
It would be nice if they'd worried about you a bit more while you were being abused as a child.
But they should worry about you.
Not that you're going to jump off a bridge or anything.
But yes, you went through some damaging, damaging stuff.
And they can help you by listening and answering all of your questions.
My God, do you know how much peace there is in the facts of your history?
Just knowing the facts of your history.
I have answers to maybe half the things I want to have answers to.
And that's given me an enormous amount of peace with my history.
The other stuff, be nice to know.
I'm never going to know.
But I have enough answers that I have some peace.
Because wherever there are unanswered questions, we go back.
You know, it's like when you're a kid and you lose a tooth, your tongue keeps going back to the gap.
We tend to get drawn backwards to the unanswered.
The predators of absence hunt us forever.
There's a great quote that actually, I mean, I just, I watched it.
This is on TV many years ago, The Great Gatsby.
Let me just get the quote for you.
I've read it on this show before, but it reminded me of this.
Let me just get it for you.
Typing on a tablet.
Always a problem.
Ah, here we go.
we go it's the last line of the great Gatsby so we beat on boats against the current born back ceaselessly into the past It's a fantastic line.
And so we beat on boats against the current born back ceaselessly into the past.
You're trying to row forward, trying to row forward, but there's a current that brings you back ceaselessly into the past.
Nature abhors a vacuum, right?
All matter will rush in to fill a vacuum.
And our attention rushes in to fill the vacuum of unanswered questions.
And the more answers you get, the more you can focus on the future.
The less answers you get, the more you are stuck in the past, in my experience and opinion.
And I appreciate and respect that your father and your grandparents are concerned about you.
But their concern should be for you, which means that they should focus on giving you what you need.
And they have some apologies to make for putting you in the household of a rampant child abuser.
They are responsible for that.
Your mother is responsible for what she did.
They knew about it.
And I'm glad that they did things to help you, like your grandparents took you for the summers and you have some good memories of your grandfather.
But they sent you back to a rampant, and it sounds like, unrepentant child abuser.
And you took that, and you suffered that, and there's a nine-year-old boy who is currently taking that and suffering that right now, right?
Yeah.
So, in my opinion, my opinion, I don't tell anyone what to do.
Just telling you my opinion.
There's a nine-year-old boy who needs the family's help.
You have a nine out of ten adverse childhood experience score, my friend.
And there's a nine-year-old child who is going through what you went through, maybe even worse.
The family needs to focus on the questions you need answered and on what can be done to help your half-brother.
That's top of the to-do list in my humble opinion.
Your childhood can't be rescued.
Your future can be changed.
But your childhood can't be rescued.
But there is a known, vicious child abuser in the family, right?
You know her all too well.
And she has a child.
Right?
Under her power, right?
What does the family need to do?
I mean, is this going to repeat, Tyler?
there.
Thank you.
That the family turned away from you and how much you were suffering?
And just let it happen and tried to step in where they could but never talked about it?
Do you wish they had acted differently?
From the way I see her with him, there is a difference than what I felt with Whenever mom was with me.
And my brother definitely, he does seem happier than I was.
Yet I know there will be times where she will yell and smack.
I mean, what was done to you was literally criminal, right?
That's criminal child abuse.
Yelling and hitting is not criminal, right?
Yeah.
Unless she's hitting him across the face or after he's 12.
I don't know.
That's the law.
I don't know if it's Canada-wide.
That's the law as far as I understand it and what I've read.
Anyway, I mean, I would suggest keeping an eye on that.
If you can, without too much trauma.
Yeah.
But I do think that trying to get some answers about your childhood is important.
Yeah, I did recently start going to therapy.
I've only been to one session.
I do have more planned in the future.
Good for you.
Good for you, man.
It's definitely something I've been thinking about for him.
I also do have a half-sister on my dad's side.
From what I... You're like swan-like fucking fish in a pond.
Like a bunch of salmon in a high stream.
Jesus.
Anyway.
But...
I was never raised by my father, so I can't really...
Speak for his parenting skills, but she seems okay.
I mean, a little spoiled, I would say, but I don't really know much about that situation.
I was not as close to her as I am with my brother.
But I do plan on getting a house within Maybe five, six years.
And then when they're ready to move out, I mean, if they did want to come live with me and go to college and everything, I'd be more than welcome to have them stay with me.
But it's just thinking about them getting to that point is the hard part.
Right.
Right.
Now, I'm obviously very thankful and happy that you're going to therapy.
I think that's fantastic and essential.
What I will say is that you have a lot of secrets to keep in your social relationships.
And it is going to be confusing to people because other people get that you're keeping at least a secret or two or that you're not forthcoming, you're not spontaneous, you're not open.
you're not relaxed, you're not available, if that makes sense.
Because you're managing, you're keeping things at bay, right?
Yeah.
And people sense that, and it's kind of off-putting.
You're hoping to leave the past in the past.
You're hoping that there's some switch, some cutoff.
Where you can put the past in the past and keep it there, right?
Yeah.
Listen, Tyler, absent brain injury, are you going to wake up tomorrow not knowing how to speak English?
No.
No.
No, you're not, right?
Are you going to wake up tomorrow not knowing how to walk or climb stairs?
No.
No.
We can't leave the past in the past because the past is who we are.
It's like saying, I wish I could forget English.
Or what you speak.
Whatever that is.
Nymphenese.
Nymphenese.
Aaron?
Naren.
Anyway, but you can't.
Yes.
I mean, you can't leave...
The past of the past any more than you can wake up with no hair on your balls in the morning.
You've done puberty.
It's past, right?
Unless you're doing a revival of Thriller, you're going to have to deal with your voice and your descended naughty bits, right?
Yeah.
So there is no leaving the past in the past.
But it doesn't mean the past has to define and dominate everything in the future.
The fact that I had a temper in my teens doesn't mean that I have to be an angry person for the rest of my life.
It just means that I had a lot to be angry about, but didn't have the language and the understanding to know what it was and how big it was.
I thought my anger was disproportionate.
To the environment, which is what's called having a bad temper.
But it just means that I underestimated the environment, and my anger was telling me how wide and deep child abuse was in society.
But I didn't understand that consciously, so I thought my anger was disproportionate to the environment, but it wasn't.
There's almost no amount of anger that is proportionate to the degree of child abuse in the world.
Except maybe the joker with a remote control.
So, the fantasy that you can not be somebody who lived through what you lived through is damaging to yourself and to your capacity to relate to others.
People who care about you, Tyler, people who are going to grow to love you need to know who you are and that you were shaped by what you experienced.
For better and for worse.
Look, you know a lot about my history too, right?
I've been pretty open about my past and my history.
Has that caused you to lose any respect for me or think of me as a lesser or worse person?
No.
No, I don't think so, right?
I don't mean it.
You're here now.
You're helping me.
You continue to help people.
Yeah, and I sure as shit probably wouldn't be doing all this work I'm doing in this show.
I'd be a safe little libertarian mouthing off about politics that would change nothing and talking about the minimum wage and foreign trade and trade deficits and the war on drugs and safely filling my air up with face farts of inconsequential noises, right?
But I have a responsibility Since I have the capacity, I have a responsibility to tell the truth as best I can and do the greatest good I can.
And do the greatest good that I wish had been done before me.
Everything I do, I wish had been done.
I wish Freud had done it.
I wish...
You know, Freud was one of the first people to really understand the depth of child abuse in 19th century Vienna where all of these...
Women and men were coming to him with these hysterical symptoms.
I can't feel my arm.
I can't see from my eyes, even though my eyes are working according to all medical tests.
Pupils are dilating, they're focusing, right?
And all of these people were coming to him with these hysterical symptoms.
And when he began to question them and to try and understand why they might have these symptoms, he heard these abhorrent stories of sexual abuse.
Within these nice upper-middle-class Viennese bourgeois families, he had all these horrifying stories of physical and sexual abuse.
And he began to write about them and to talk about them.
And then the hammer came down, and he was threatened, and he was bullied, and he felt he or thought he might have been in danger of losing his medical license, which was how he supported his family.
And so he changed his tune.
He recanted.
He retracted.
He said, well, okay, so there are these women who are talking about their fathers raping them all the time, which is why they are so disturbed.
They were sexually raped.
Sorry, that's redundant.
They were raped by their fathers.
But once I began writing about it, everybody threatened me as...
Threats occur to people who bring the truth, particularly about child abuse.
And he recanted and he said, well, maybe that's not the case.
Maybe they're just fantasizing about being raped by...
Maybe they really want to be raped by their fathers.
It didn't actually happen, but it's something they dreamt about or wanted to have happened or wished it happened.
Poof!
Then you get the electric complex and the Oedipus complex.
So...
When Freud began to uncover the fairly rampant sexual abuse of children in 19th century Vienna, they threatened him, just as the pedophiles' ring shot Aaron Pizzi's dog in America.
They threatened him for exposing their crimes against children, and he then recanted and said, well, it can't be real.
They must have fantasized it.
They must have really wanted...
To be raped by their fathers and to have sex with their mothers.
For the boys, right?
It's the Yedipus Complex and so on.
And he transformed one of the first cries of herd child abuse in the history of mankind into an assault upon the very mental health of Western society.
I don't believe it's a complete accident that after this immense betrayal of children by Freud, we ended up with the First World War.
I don't believe that is a coincidence at all.
But all the causality is not particularly essential right now.
But when I began the show, I knew that story very well.
And I remember saying to myself, no matter what is thrown at you, you will not back down.
You will not back down from receiving and validating the truth of the victims you hear from.
Because you know what it is to be a victim, and you know what an awful betrayal it is to withhold any level of love and empathy and support and care and concern and validation from the victims of child abuse.
And you know that war may hang in the balance.
Because if the abusers can cow public figures into backing off, From their sympathy for the victims and the sympathy for the victims includes reminding them of their right not to see their abusers should their abusers prove intransigent and continue the abuse that the future of the species may hang in the public acceptance of the truth spoke by the victims of child abuse and of the very public sympathy and empathy and getting to the
help they need through therapy of the victims of child abuse.
And I very clearly remember saying that to myself, that if I'm going to talk about these most essential of issues, that I will not pull a Freud and I will not back down from any pressure whatsoever.
I will not back down from the media.
I will not back down from the haters.
I will not repeat the mistakes of the past.
Freud himself was a victim of childhood sexual abuse, as was Jung.
So...
In backing away from the victims they received into their offices, they also got to back away from their own pain.
And so there is a great deal of challenge, Tyler, in talking about these issues.
Lots of people have been hurt in this world as children.
Most people have been hurt in this world as children.
And when you talk honestly and openly about these things, it is very difficult for people.
And this is why it tends to continue and continue and continue and who knows for how many generations this has occurred within your mother's family and perhaps even to some degree your father's family.
And if you can get to the truth of what happened, if you can understand why people made the decisions that they made, even if you don't agree with the reasons for those decisions, knowing the reasons for those decisions is enormously important.
In my opinion.
The more we know the truth of the history, the more confidently we can face the future without self-blame.
Children have a remarkable ability to blame themselves for what goes wrong in a family.
It's the only sense of control that victims of child abuse can experience, right?
I remember doing it.
Yeah, I did it, you did it, and we will do it.
It's what you do to survive, right?
Yeah.
And...
You know, I watched this documentary a little while back ago about a bad mountain climber.
A guy fell into a big gully of ice.
He had broken his leg, fell into a big gully of ice.
And he couldn't climb up.
It was ice, right?
Couldn't climb up.
And so he had to climb down.
It was the only hope he had.
Climb down, hope that there's some way out through the bottom.
That's what we have to do.
To keep going down, even when you're desperate to get up and out.
To keep going down, he found a way out, actually survived.
Crazy bastard.
Good for him.
And it's not that you're too nice, in my opinion.
It's that you're carrying a heavy burden that you have to hide.
It's literally like you're walking into a party pretending you're riding a horse.
And everyone sees you pretending to ride a horse and they say, what are you doing?
Why are you pretending to ride a horse?
And you're saying, horse?
What horse?
Right?
You got a history.
And the history is who you are.
The history is who I am.
You can do great good with that history, with the strength that comes from surviving that history.
It does not make the history good, does not make the history worthwhile, but you can do some great things with it.
But I wouldn't necessarily blame everyone else at the moment.
You've got a lot of unprocessed history, I think, that you're trying to keep away from.
And until you can be honest and open and forthright about that history without needing things from people, In other words, like, I can talk about my history.
I don't need things from people.
I mean, I think it's nice if they hear.
It's nice if they sympathize.
But I don't need for them to do that.
I've got closure for most of my history.
And you're a young man.
It took me a long time.
You may do it way faster than I did.
Every generation usually gets a little smarter.
But once you can get to a place through therapy and through conversations with your family about your history, once you can get to a place of some certainty and some closure, which is basically closure once you can get to a place of some certainty and some closure, which is basically closure is certainty and certainty is assigning Thank you.
right?
When you're a child, it's terrifying to think that your parents are out of control, so you pretend that you're the cause of their behavior because then you can pretend to have control.
Oh, if I did this and I do bad, I do that, I clean up.
You pretend that you can manage the insanity around you by pretending that the insanity comes out of your behavior.
It's natural.
But that which defends you as a child entraps you as an adult.
You know, the hugs that you give yourself as a child turn into the straitjacket that confines you as an adult.
Yeah.
And...
Closure to me about the past is simply accepting and assigning rational levels of responsibility to the actress.
You as a child had no capacity to affect the outcome of the adults around you in any practical or fundamental way.
The adults did, but were limited.
I don't know what was going on.
I don't know what the laws are in Newfoundland.
I don't know what custody means or anything like that.
But...
They were adults, which means they had infinitely greater power to influence and affect the outcome than you did as a child.
So simply giving people that responsibility and remembering and accepting the helplessness means that you stop trying to control crazy people.
Once you stop trying to control crazy people or bad people by assigning them responsibility, you don't have to keep recreating that in the present.
So that's a very sort of brief sprint, but I hope that gives you some help.
It definitely does.
It gives me a lot more to think about.
Will you drop us a line, let us know how it goes?
And just before you answer that, I'm so incredibly sorry for what you experienced as a child.
Everyone should have great parents.
Everyone should have peace and security.
As children, I'm very sorry about everything that you went through.
Thank you.
I do have...
If we've got time and if it's okay, just one quick question.
Quick is good.
Possibly quick.
Well, if it's not quick, then you can just tell me.
For some reason, and I've thought of it a lot too, that every time when I've been around marijuana, hard drugs I've rarely seen.
I keep that at bay as much as possible, but marijuana just seems to be everywhere.
Whenever I smell it, even if it comes up in a conversation or if I see it on TV, Facebook, anywhere, I get a very strong urge of repulsion towards it.
I feel my arms when it comes up in a conversation and it just doesn't go away fast.
You feel your arms?
Sorry, I just want to make sure I understand what that means.
Yeah, like a physical tension come over me, and it just...
I don't know, it just makes me...
I gotta shake out my arms afterwards.
Oh, I see.
But was there any marijuana around when you were growing up?
Marijuana smoke, or...?
Not until my stepfather came around and smoked, no.
I did smell it every now and then.
He did use it, stopped later on.
Um...
But for what I can remember, the only time that it had ever come up in my childhood would be in school.
And the only explanation that I can get from it, that why I don't like it as much, and I still think of it as an excuse, would be that I just think people use it as an excuse to get out of their sane and rational mind to get away from this world to go somewhere else and basically they're using this as a blanket to cover up all
their problems and think it's going to be the miracle solution of the world, which in reality it's the same thing as taking your dirt and sweeping it under the carpet.
Right, right.
No, and I, you know, I mean, I have a great deal of sympathy for the self-medication requirements that people feel they need from bad childhoods to various psychostimulants and various addictive behavior.
To me, it is a form of, not just to me, but it's a form of self-medication.
And as I've mentioned many times on the show, Gabber Mate is in the realm of hungry ghosts.
It's very important to read in this area to understand why people are drawn towards this stuff.
I dislike the smell of weed.
And for me, the reason for that is that every time I smell it, to me, it's just it's a tragically evaporated and missed opportunity for an increase in self-knowledge.
It is like taking painkillers when you have a toothache.
Yeah, you'll feel better in the moment, but your tooth is just going to get worse.
And what bothers me about marijuana, and this is true of a lot of drugs, is that there is...
A cliché of coolness about it that you don't see smokers of cigarettes trying to emulate.
And what I mean by that is that smokers are like, yeah, it's a bad habit.
I should quit, you know, but I'm addicted.
But there's not this Bob Marley, open your mind, cool crap about it.
And if you say, you know, I think that cigarette smoking is bad for you and people shouldn't smoke, people are like, yeah, okay, I get it.
It is bad for you.
People shouldn't smoke.
But they don't say, well, it opens the doors of perception and allows me to see all the deep interstellar fragments of Doritos that tell me all about the universe.
They don't defend it.
They don't defend it.
Yeah, it's a bad habit.
Shouldn't do it.
Got addicted.
Bad decision.
Whatever, right?
But the thing that bothers me about the pot smokers is, look, it is not opening the doors of self-perception.
You are self-medicating for trauma.
And I get that.
I mean, I understand why.
I sympathize with that.
But what bothers me is this cool aura, this, you know, you just don't get it, man.
You know, if you haven't tried them, you know, you just don't get it.
You know, it's like, yeah, okay.
I haven't tried killing anyone either.
That doesn't mean I can't have an opinion about killing, right?
I'm not putting them on the same moral plane, but, you know, I've never strangled a kitten in a bag.
That doesn't mean that I can't say whether strangling kittens in bags is necessarily positive or negative.
I've never sawn my own leg off.
That doesn't mean I can't have any opinions about that, for Christ's sake.
It's just one of these bullshit defenses that people put up.
Look, it's tragic that people feel the need to smoke pot.
I mean, biologically, I think I understand roughly the medical reasons behind it, and I think it's really tragic.
But there's this kind of invulnerable...
You know, don't be such a square.
Open your mind.
It's perception and it's cool and it expands your consciousness and blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah.
It's like, no, you're just fucking with your brain, that's all.
And it is not a courageous way to deal with personal problems, to put it as nicely as I can.
And I get, if people are addicted, yeah, I mean, it's a big deal.
It's tough.
It's tough to give up those kinds of addictions.
But nobody says, well, you know, when I drink alcohol, I'm just really cool and uninhibited.
And when I drink to blackout, I open the doors of perception and really understand things about the universe that I didn't before.
And I see music and smell color and, you know, all this sort of shit.
They just say, no, I got a drinking problem.
Well, they may deny it, but they don't say that there's anything really great about drinking or smoking cigarettes or whatever.
And every time I brought up the argument...
You know, two people that, you know, you shouldn't be smoking that, oh, well, why?
And brought up the argument, you know, well, what is it really doing for it?
And then they always come back to me, well, what do you drink?
And this is actually one of the things that I plan to stop drinking altogether.
Right now, I've just cut out buying beer to, if I go out to a restaurant, just to have one, and that's it.
You know, they're not going to let you back into Newfoundland now, right?
I mean, they'll hear the show, they'll track you down.
I mean, you're done, man.
They're not letting you back in.
You over 12?
Not drinking?
Can't come in.
Sorry.
I'll tell you why, but I'm wasted.
Anyway, go ahead.
One of the things I've tried to stop, because really I've just realized that, well, why do I like getting drunk?
Why do I like that feeling?
And it just occurred to me that, well, how do I feel when I'm drunk or buzzed or Well, how I feel is fantastic.
I'm not worrying about anything.
My mind is a million miles away.
I'm not worried about home.
I'm not worried about my brother.
I'm not worried about my past.
You know, everything is blank for a moment.
If I'm at a party loaded and stuff like that and I just don't remember, which is really not a great way to live because then I'm I'm not in my right mind, as I see it.
Yeah, it's a short-term gain.
It's a long-term pain.
And, of course, a lot of drinking has to do with managing social anxiety, and it doesn't really help with that.
Anyway, listen, man, I'm sorry to jump, but it's been an almost four-hour show, and I need to...
Take care of my own brain.
Not have a text too much.
I'm just going to end up.
But thanks for calling.
Please let us know how it goes.
Congratulations on getting into therapy.
I'm immensely happy about that, as always.
I think that's wonderful.
And, um...
Quote David Hartsoe.
Hartsoe.
This is the guy.
I smell non-violent communication all over that guy.
For better or for worse.
And, um...
This is a quote.
So his father was a minister.
And this peace activist, Waging Peace, I think was the name of his book, he said, Quakers believe that all people are created by God.
We're all children of God, so we are brothers and sisters.
So we have a responsibility to one another if someone is hungry or in prison or in a war zone.
Quakers try to live by their values and beliefs, love and compassion and caring for one another and for the planet and the environment.
And, as I said, this is the religious fantasy that we all have a soul, and the soul is put there by God and cannot be destroyed or fundamentally corrupted, because the soul is always available for salvation.
And so, in the religious mindset, there's no such thing as sociopathy, there's no such thing as...
A brain fundamentally altered by childhood because you always have a perfectly healthy brain, like a ghost brain within your brain, like emergency backup in case of emergencies, break glass.
In case of sin, break glass and use your emergency backup brain called your soul, which has never been harmed.
This is, of course, a complete fantasy.
It's like telling smokers, don't worry, you have a perfect set of ghostly lungs that is backed up.
And if you get lung cancer...
In these lungs, don't worry, you have God's backup lungs, which can never be damaged by cigarettes, which you can use.
This we would consider to be ridiculous and dangerous superstition when talking about medicine.
I consider this even more pernicious and a dangerous superstition when talking about the brain.
The brain is a physical organ.
There is no ghostly backup brain.
There is no soul which cannot be corrupted that you can get access to should you happen to not do well in the management and care of your mental health or your mind.
Doesn't happen isn't there.
And so when he is attempting to bring peace to the world then he is fundamentally wrong.
Because he believes in something called a soul, and he believes that we are all brothers and children of God, and therefore there's fundamentally no such thing as sociopathy.
And even in the story that the caller mentioned, where the man turned and said, I love you, well, he's talking to the soul of the man put in the man by God.
He's loving the soul of the man put in there by God.
Which doesn't exist any more than he's got a ghost in his left nutsack.
And so then, according to this mythology, empathy can suddenly arise within the brain because the man can switch to his emergency backup god-soul, right?
His parachute, his whatever, right?
And this is just so fundamentally incorrect that That it is like me being in a computer company and saying, it's not a computer bug, it's a malevolent demon in the computer that is causing the problems in the, say, Obamacare website.
It is a Republican devil that has been put there by a witch doctor.
And people would look at me, are you saying that there's a devil in the computer?
I mean, you need mental health help.
Like, you are so fundamentally incorrect about how to diagnose computer problems, I don't even know what to say to you.
This is not even remotely part of a rational conversation.
And so when he says, well, we're all children of God, we're all brothers and sisters, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
No!
No, no, no, no!
No soul.
There's no soul.
He also says, it is a central article of faith to seek justice for homeless and hungry people.
And for prisoners and refugees.
And it is crucial to alleviate the suffering caused by warfare.
The quote is...
Sorry, that's a description of his beliefs.
The quote, he says, is the causes of war are nationalism and greed and imperialism and we have a responsibility to address those causes of war.
No.
No, no, and no.
He basically is saying that the cause of war is sin.
Which is like me saying the cause of your broken arm Is a pixie that has it in for you and is dressed in a ninja costume and is bearing a flaming sword forged by elves.
I mean, just try being a doctor and saying that to a patient.
The only patient who would believe you would be the patients you really don't want to have.
No, the causes of war are not nationalism and greed and imperialism.
The causes of war are child abuse.
Now, why?
Why?
Can someone not see that?
Because he's religious or was raised by a religious man.
And religion, in most of its manifestations, not all, but in most of its manifestations, religion is child abuse.
Because you're telling children something is true which you cannot prove and you are relying on your science and power and authority.
And the child's naivety, dependence and inexperience and unformed brain...
You are relying upon that to have the child believe you.
Not a lot of priests go up to Christopher Hitchens in his prime and attempt to convert him to their religion because he'd leave them a smoking pile of cynical, whiskey-fumed dust.
But they'll go to five-year-old kids and fasten their mental jaws upon that tender young mind and bend it to their will and way.
So why can he not see the true cause of war as child abuse?
Because he's religious and or was raised by a minister and therefore he was told about hell and he was told about sin and that Jesus died for him and all that, all of which is highly toxic and abusive towards children, so of course he can't see it.
It would be unthinkable to imagine that he could And so he spends his life inhabiting cliches rather than solving problems.
