2859 RIGHT?!?! – Saturday Call In Show December 6th, 2014
In the aftermath of the Michael Brown case - it seems as though the black identity is so rooted in being the victim or slave. I feel like many blacks cling to this identity in order to get a sense of unity and power, preventing them from excelling in the free market like other groups - do blacks really want to live in a free society? --- I am very angry at my parents for the emotional abuse that happened during my childhood. I feel stuck in this anger stage - how do I move forward and make peace with the past? --- Some people say that having children is aesthetically negative or morally wrong because the parent will inevitably transmit or project his/her unprocessed childhood trauma to the child. Are any of these claims accurate, and by what standard do we judge them? --- I am the "quiet" one in many social occasions and have difficult opening up with new people whether it’s dating, work or family. How can I be vulnerable to the people I would like to know more about and have them to know who I am? --- Includes: without government somebody will rape your dog, promoting the idea that freedom is dangerous, the propaganda economy of fear-mongering, difficulty expressing your needs, bending a child’s will to it’s parental masters, objectification of people, asking people to surrender to manipulation to meet your needs, figuring out how to break the cycle of abuse, nihilism, beneficial discomfort and statists on a plane!
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So, I hope you're doing well, and Mike, who do we have up front?
Alright, up first today is Shane.
Shane wrote in and said, I wanted to talk about the topic of racism relating to the Michael Brown case.
My question is, do blacks really want to live in a free society?
It seems as though the black identity is so rooted in being a victim slash slave.
I feel like many blacks cling to this identity in order to get a sense of unity and power, preventing them from excelling in the free market, like other groups.
Do you want to expand on that, make sure I understand your thesis?
Yes.
Thanks for having me, Steph.
You're welcome.
Thank you for calling in.
This isn't really a full-fledged-out argument, but it's just some of my thoughts and opinions.
The way I look at these riots and everything...
I think for many in the black community, the idea that they are still victims of racism seems to become more of a religion today.
I think that a lot of people in the black community love the idea of racism existing.
I think in a world where whites are no longer racist, blacks really wouldn't know what to do.
They wouldn't know who they are as a sense of identity.
I think it would be completely lost.
And I think deep down, a lot of people in the black community are terrified of freedom.
I think that occurred because when the civil rights movement came about, blacks began to move into freedom.
But freedom wasn't necessarily good for many.
A lot of blacks had no previous experience with it.
They weren't accustomed to Renaissance enlightenment principles.
They weren't really prepared for it because a lot of it was based off of individual will.
And I think a lot of blacks came into freedom I'm seeing it as humiliation because it tended to show how inadequate they were in many respects in comparison to whites as far as being uneducated and non-competitive in the marketplace.
I think the same thing happened in a lot of the colonies that got freedom.
Blacks didn't know how to become entrepreneurs.
When they became free, it seems like they were basically still in the same position.
So this new sort of freedom was a shame and a really painful experience.
Because that freedom is associated with that pain, I think a lot of blacks say to themselves, I'm not really free today.
Racism is everywhere.
It's white supremacy.
It's institutionalized racism.
I think that a lot of blacks have a fear of freedom because they just didn't do well in it.
I think over time, the black identity that has merged today has been one to say, well, we really deep down are not free.
If you look today, I think I think it seems like blacks are more obsessed with racism now than when they were actually segregated.
I think that explains why they haven't done better.
I think they've been traumatized not by oppression but by freedom.
I just wanted to get your thoughts on that.
A lot of it came from reading Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele.
Right, right.
Well, I mean, you've got a lot in there.
And, you know, of course, first and foremost, I am scarcely an expert on race relations.
So these are just, you know, we're just sort of sharing thoughts.
It's really hard to come up with conclusive stuff around this.
But I think that there's some important stuff to remember.
Now, I think the first thing to note is that the blacks that are looting and – in Ferguson, most of them weren't even from Ferguson.
They just bussed in or came in or hitchhiked in or carpooled in for shits and giggles in a horrible kind of way.
The blacks, it's very hard to paint with a broad brush in any group and particularly a group that's tens of millions strong like the black community in America.
It is Highly diverse.
Diversity isn't just different races.
It's within each race.
There are diverse cultures and choices and you could say kind of tribes and this is true of whites and of Asians and Hispanics and blacks and so on.
Look, the people who hate the looting the most in Ferguson are the black men and women who have fought to build their stores and worked 80 hours a week.
And they're getting themselves all rioted and burned up and torn down and all of that.
I mean, boy, you know, we look at it and we say, well, that's pretty bad, right?
It's pretty bad behavior.
But, you know, we can turn off the TV. They're not burning down our life's work.
There are a lot of black people who supported Officer Wilson's testimony.
And in Ferguson, a black woman walked into a burning convenience store in the middle of a riot and put the fire out with gallons of milk.
They – I mean the hardworking, honorable, decent blacks can't stand this stuff.
They can't stand it.
And for most of – let's just say white America.
I mean it's obviously other groups as well.
But for most of white America, who do you see in the media?
I mean, you see Al Sharpton, who as far as I understand it is not actually an official reverend and also owes about $3 million in back taxes from his organization.
Right.
Because he's not much of an administrator.
But boy, I mean...
And so there's a lot of eye-rolling in the white community about Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, you know, all of the race baiters.
But oh my god, in the black community, it's much worse in terms of what they say and what they think about these guys.
A lot of...
White people don't have easygoing conversations with blacks and vice versa.
Because when race comes up, you know, there's an old Seinfeld bit where they talk about, oh, I don't think we're supposed to be talking about this.
So the idea that you can have a frank discussion with a member of the opposite race about race, well, people get very tense.
Because the R-bomb, the racist bomb, it's fired indiscriminately.
Mm-hmm.
And a lot of the – I mean a lot of the blacks, they hate rap, the sort of thuggish gangster rap.
They hate the looting.
They hate the laziness.
They hate all of this kind of stuff.
And they do cooperate a lot with the cops when this kind of stuff goes down.
So way back in the day, there was a guy named Edmund Perry who – Tried to mug a guy who turned out to be a cop and got shot.
And, of course, the New York Times was – oh, he was a prize symbol of hope.
He was a college student and this and that and the other.
But Perry's – the shooter, Edmund Perry, his neighbors were saying to the grand jury, oh, yeah, his brother admitted that they mugged a cop together.
They were giving the information to – but they hate that guy.
I mean, God – Live in a black neighborhood, particularly a poor black neighborhood, you are not scared of white people.
Right?
Because 90% of black homicides are other blacks.
You're scared of black people.
Way back in the day, there was a rapist in Central Park.
They jumped a woman and literally, literally almost raped her to death.
And three of their black friends told the police...
That their friends had confessed to attacking this woman who was a jogger.
I don't know if you remember Bernie Goetz.
I believe he's a character in a Billy Joel song.
But no, Bernie Goetz was a guy who was about to be mugged, as he claimed, by, I think, three or four black youths in the subway, and he shot him.
He shot four black muggers.
One of them, I think, ended up in a wheelchair.
And there was a young black woman who was in the subway car with her husband and kid.
She told the jury at the trial, those punks got what they deserved.
Now, when Bernie Getz's lawyer wanted a jury, they want a sympathetic jury, right?
And he wanted blacks on the jury, right?
So, to say, well, there's this one, you know, blacks are this, that, and the other, right?
I mean, he wanted blacks...
On the jury.
Goetz's biggest defender was a black bus driver from Harlem.
Working and married blacks, according to most prosecutors, make great jurors.
And so a lot of the hardworking, honorable, decent, good blacks, I mean, they hate this thug stuff, this gangbanger stuff.
It's terrifying for them.
Mm-hmm.
Back in the day, crack cocaine came like a tsunami of fire from hell through Harlem.
Back in the days.
This was in the 80s.
And there were these huge and harsh sentences that were imposed on the crack cocaine dealers.
And it was the blacks who were pushing for this.
Basically, they wanted the death penalty for crack dealers because they could see it literally destroying their neighborhoods and selling to kids and all this kind of stuff.
So, it's really tough, and I would sort of argue, and I'm not saying you're doing this, but just for the general listenership, it's really tough to say, well, the blacks are like this, the blacks are like that.
I mean...
I can't imagine how frustrated blacks are with certain elements of the black community.
I know that because I'm incredibly frustrated with certain elements of every community because I am an equal opportunity contemptobot.
And so there certainly is...
The race baiters and there are the woe is us and there are we want $1.7 trillion reparations for slavery and there are those people for whom race is always front and center and race baiting seems to be.
But we only see these people because there's a leftist agenda in the media and the leftist agenda is they're really having a tough time The leftist and feminist and race-baiting agenda is let's put forward injustice as the essence of the free market.
The free market is unjust.
The free market screws people over.
The free market is predatory capitalists with monocles, with little orphans strapped to their feet as they stride over coals and giggle hysterically and light their cigars with thousand-dollar bills.
They have to create this narrative that freedom, freedom is unfair and unjust.
And freedom will rape your dog.
And freedom will shit on your lawn.
And freedom will set fire to your house.
And in a state of freedom, the hot tap water will burn your children.
And without the government, they'll be selling you rotten meat with mouse turds in them.
Without the government, the milk will be full of vinegar and the blood of virgins.
They have to just create this, boy, you know, the thing you don't want is an absence of violence because when there's an absence of violence, your life will be a nightmare.
And so they have to pretend that it's somehow incredibly economically unjust that women are paid 70 cents on the dollar.
For men.
And they have to pretend that it's somehow incredibly unjust that blacks make less money than whites on average and in general.
And then they have to completely ignore the fact that Asians make more money than whites because they just say, well, whites are racist against everyone.
I mean it's weird because they hold blacks down economically but they just subsidize all these Asians.
I mean it's not very good racism.
It's not very consistent racism and it sure as hell isn't very clear racism but – right?
And so where there are injustices or perceived – sorry, what did I say?
Where there are disparities in the world – Then the left-wing agenda is to say those disparities result from freedom and the solution to the disparities that result from freedom is coercion.
I mean that's just – that's Marxism 101.
That's cultural Marxism 101.
Freedom is unfair and the only way to make it fair is to have a giant government that has all the guns pointed at everyone to make it fair, right?
Right, right.
They all go to undergrad and sometimes graduate school and so on.
And if you ever go to them and say, well, you know, there are kids in these classes.
They're not that smart.
They don't work that hard.
So we're just going to take, say, 20% of your grades and redistribute them to the kids who don't have as good of grades and be like, what?
Yeah.
That's wrong.
I earned this.
It's like – because their grades are the ticket to their platform of faucets.
Right.
So – and I'll finish the – yeah, so – Median household income for Asians in 2012, over $68,000, $57,000 for whites, $39,000 for Hispanics, and $33,000 for blacks.
So they have to say to women, well, you see, it's unfair.
You get paid less than men.
Okay, it is true that you have children, you're pregnant, and if you're a good mom, And you can.
You aim to breastfeed for 12 to 18 months after the baby is born.
But hey, what should that have to do with anything?
Why would the fact that you are big with child, up all night, breastfeeding, tired, cranky, not at work, why would that have anything to do with your income?
I mean, just try that.
Sorry.
I mean, to show just how, you know, just say, man, just have this when you go to a job interview, right?
I mean, let's just do an experiment.
Every man who goes through a job interview now Just say, well, yeah, you know, I like this job, but odds are that I'm going to take two, three, five, seven years off, and I want you to hold my job for at least a year while I'm gone, and then if I choose to come back, I will.
You have to give me my job back at my old salary, but I may not choose to come back.
So you're going to have to try and find someone to stay in my job for like a year because I want to go and, you know...
See if I can join the Bolshei Ballet or I'd like to learn how to discover World War II airplanes on the bottom of the floor with extreme scuba diving and stuff.
It's going to take me a couple of years.
So pay me.
I may quit at any time, but then you can't replace me because that's what I want in my contract.
And you've got to hold my job.
I've got to pay someone else to fill my job.
Maybe I'll come back.
Maybe I won't.
I don't know.
And then if you go in with those demands and many more, you go in with those demands and women are generally the primary caregivers for kids, which means school lets out.
They've got to go and get their kids, 5 o'clock.
Men work later and longer.
Men work more hours than women.
So go in with all those demands as a man and just see what happens to your economic opportunities and you will find very quickly that your economic opportunities are a little bit diminished and there's nothing wrong with I mean, I'm a dad.
I've given up economic opportunities to raise my daughter.
I just don't expect other people to foot the damn bill.
I mean, other than donators and so on, right?
But I don't expect to coercively get other people to foot the bill for the fact that I want to spend time with my daughter rather than writing books.
You know, I could drop her in daycare for 10 hours a day and I could get a book done every four to six months as I used to.
I've chosen not to write the books, which has diminished the capacity of the show to grow and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
And that's – I don't expect to go at gunpoint up and down to people who are working and say, well, you've got to pay for me now because I'm home with my daughter and not writing books.
I mean I can't expect it.
You've got to fund that.
I've got to pay that myself.
It's ridiculous.
This is what people think.
Now, the reasons as to why the blacks are doing worse than – The White is complex, and we can go into it another time.
I think it's about a 120-slide presentation that's currently on our back burner, so I don't want to bore you with all the details, although I pretty much guarantee you that none of those details will be boring.
But it's not just a matter of injustice.
And, of course, one of the things is that among certain elements, Of the black community, there is great profit in crying racism.
In the same way that in certain elements of the women's community, there's great profit in crying sexism.
But it has nothing to do with the market.
I mean, it's just if you cry racism, then you can get government money.
I mean, that's just the way it works.
So whatever you pay for, you will get more of.
Whatever you subsidize, you will get more of.
This victimhood and so on is – it's just paid for.
It's just – the sort of weird market forces that come up when you get giant government programs, that's just the way it's worked.
It's got nothing to do with reality.
And with that reality, that slavery was horrible for everyone except a few idiots – Who had incredibly significant political and violent power and an incredibly poor understanding of economics.
So there's this weird idea that somehow whites profited from slavery.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Boy, did we ever make a fortune from slavery because, you know, the richest countries in the world are those with the most slaves because slaves are just so profitable.
Right?
Boy, don't you wish the record company executives who managed Sam Cooke's incredible career, R&B and soul, a singer, came out of the gospel tradition, came out of the soul stirrers in the 50s.
Don't you wish that the guys who were in charge of Sam Cooke's career wished he was still a slave?
Don't you wish that the people in charge of Michael Jackson's career wished he was still a slave?
Don't you wish Morgan Freeman's agent wished he was still a slave so that he could really make some money from the guy?
Come on.
Come on.
Slavery was a complete economic clusterfrag for almost everyone involved.
It retarded the invention of labor-saving devices.
It failed to harness the creativity and energy of the slaves, some of which was prodigious.
I mean, there were some slaves...
Who went aloud.
They made patents.
They wrote books.
They invented machinery.
They just did amazing stuff.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, whites.
Oh, we profited so much from slavery.
You know, that's why every time everybody wants to raise their GDP, they just enslave vast sections of the population because that's how you build your wealth.
I mean, this is just ridiculous.
It's absolutely ridiculous that this is put forward with any seriousness.
Slavery was a human curse ended by...
White Western European – ended by the White Western European tradition and it was one of the major barriers to the progress of the species, if not the major barrier.
I mean there's strong arguments to be made that the whole reason there was never an industrial revolution in the ancient world was because there was slavery.
And if you buy a bunch of slaves, the last thing you want is labor-saving devices because it destroys the value of of your slaves and these slave owners and slave catchers regularly forced non-slaves to go and catch their slaves and to do slave patrols.
They hated this stuff.
Slavery was an abomination for everyone involved and it was not primarily a white Western European tradition.
White Western Europeans, really since the fall of Rome, slavery was not really part of the economy.
There was serfdom, which was bad, but not as bad Anyway, I won't get into all of this.
We've got a whole truth about slavery, the truth about slavery presentation, which people can get into if they want.
But it's important to recognize that the black community that you see presented to you by the left-wing media, which is basically to say the media, that that is not the black community.
That is just a politically expedient group of idiots that That serves the leftist cause by making people hostile to freedom and making them beg for an ever-expanding state to save them from voluntarism.
This is not the black community.
It's really important to not confuse them for that, if that makes sense.
Right, right.
I mean, the last thing I'll say, if you're in Russia in the 1950s under Stalin and The way that capitalists would be presented to you would be these hook-nosed, quasi-Jewish monstrosities who are eating kids for breakfast.
That would have no connection to the reality of the free market and the way that blacks are presented in many ways through the news in particular.
In movies, it's a little different.
But through the news in particular, that's not – to me, this is a complete caricature.
It's got nothing to do with the reality of that.
I mean, I think that there's a black family just had a kid killed, I think, by a cop.
A new one.
And Al Sharpton must have come to the funeral.
They're like, no, no, no, no.
Don't you come to our funeral.
They recognize these Nazgul when they see them.
But anyway, sorry, you were going to say.
Right, yeah, yeah.
Great points.
Yeah, I kind of hate how a lot of these...
Black leaders like Sharpton and Jackson have been able to make a lot of people think that they represent all of Black people.
I think, you know, just a lot of the black leadership has failed in general.
It seems like the NAACP is more concerned about, you know, discrimination at the workplace rather than promoting an idea like peaceful parenting or something that would actually strengthen the black family.
So I think anytime you have an oppressed people where they were once oppressed by colonialism, Or whatever.
And they're now free.
You get that concept of white guilt.
And I agree.
I think that liberalism is an outgrowth for white guilt.
And I think that black leadership uses the white guilt by going to a corporation, for example, and saying, if you give me this, I will say you're not racist.
I won't stigmatize your organization as being racist.
I think they've done this with Texaco and Toyota and Coca-Cola.
Oh, yeah.
There's a shakedown.
Hey, you want to spend a quarter million dollars on diversity training or would you like to be called racist on national television?
It's your choice.
But the racist on national television, again, is only a viable threat because of the Marxists and leftists and other clusterfracts who are in the media who will amplify that message, right?
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Actually, I had to take a course, a graduate school course.
We had to read a book.
It was a race and ethnicity course, and we had to read a book called Racism Without Racists, and basically the argument was there's this dominant white group racial ideology, and people who say, people who blame, basically they were saying that you can't blame the victim, and So telling blacks to stop playing the race card, you're being racist by trying to silence the minority.
And if you're in favor of a voter ID law or an argument for states' rights, I don't believe in any state, but basically if you were arguing for states' rights, that would be covert racism, colorblind racism.
This is kind of the garbage that you have to read in a lot of these graduate courses.
It's pretty sad.
Yeah.
But yeah, my last point...
Oh, hang on, hang on.
Let me just make a rant out here.
Sure.
I'll try and keep it brief.
But the idea that there's some monolithic white presence that dominates society, it doesn't even survive the most cursory analysis.
Like, it doesn't even survive the tiniest moment of thought.
So, when I was in college, there was a Hispanic group.
There was a Japanese lesbians group, right?
There was a Hispanic Dungeons and Dragons cross-dressing group.
There was, you know, every kind of group that you could conceivably imagine.
Have you ever heard of a white group?
No.
No.
Like, have you ever heard, like, well, we'd like to get together to promote the interests of white people?
Mm-hmm.
Can you even imagine such a thing?
A few people have tried in colleges.
And, I mean, there are riots.
There are demonstrations.
I mean, they don't get funding.
They don't get permission to meet on campus.
So, like, white power is kind of like the patriarchy.
It's like, boy, we suck at it for anyone who just takes a moment to think about it.
I mean, where's the National Association for the Advancement of White People?
Right.
I mean, can you imagine?
I mean, if whites are so good, then why the hell since 1965 has white Western European crashed and non-white, non-Western European soared?
I mean, where is this?
We're to the point in America where within a few decades, whites are going to be a minority in their own country.
And if whites were to organize and say, you know what?
600,000 white people mostly and some blacks died to end...
I'm just going with the mainstream narrative and so on.
We built this country and so on.
We don't want it to become a non-white country.
We don't want it to become a non-European, non-Western country.
I mean if a bunch of whites got together and decided to do that, holy crap, can you imagine?
Can you imagine?
I could not.
What would happen if whites tried to organize to say, you know, not so comfortable.
I've called it the Freedom Club.
I'm just saying that can you imagine if this were to occur and whites were to say, we need a national association for the preservation of white people.
And they were to attempt to influence legislation to make sure that more white Western Europeans came to America and not other races and other cultures.
Can you imagine?
What would happen if whites tried to organize to even one-tenth of one percent of the degree to which other races and cultures organize?
You'd probably see Al Sharpton on television a lot more.
Oh, my God!
They would be called the KKK. They'd be called a bunch of white supremacists.
They'd be called – I mean, holy crap!
It would be insane what would happen.
You're immediately a far-right, xenophobic, fascist skinhead, right?
And so this idea that there's this monolithic white culture that is just so great at protecting its own interests and holding everyone else down and so on.
Holy crap!
I mean, that is just the most ridiculous thing.
I mean, go to any history class in just about any college and listen to what is talked about white people.
What do you hear?
Do you hear how, you know, I'll say, you know, modern science, the free market, medicine, democracy, republics, and so on, you know, kind of came off the paler skin hide, not exclusively, but, you know, to a very significant and large degree.
No.
I mean, and that's, it's like, oh, yeah, fucking whiteys.
Bunch of colonial terrorists.
Bunch of oppressors.
Cancer on the planet.
Holy shit.
Like, you won't – I mean, boy, this white power.
I mean, white – I mean, so the idea that other races and cultures feel that their voices are silenced and they don't – I mean, oh my god.
And just all you have to do, don't listen to anything I'm saying.
You understand, I'm not advocating any course of action here.
I'm just pointing out a basic reality.
Like, imagine if – I mean, everybody knows that if there's a Hispanic group on society, you kind of got to, like in society or on a campus or something, you kind of got to be Hispanic to join, right?
I mean, you can if you're not, but, you know, basically.
And just imagine, okay, there's going to be White Club, right?
You're going to be white club on campus, right?
There's only one rule about white club.
You do not talk about white club.
I mean – and just everybody, look into your hearts.
Look into your hearts.
Look into your conscience.
Look into your soul, dare I say.
Look into your soul and imagine.
You see pasted up there a picture of Ward Cleaver saying, white club, now forming, now joining.
And you kind of knew you had to be white to be in the club.
People would go insane.
And then they complain that non-whites don't have a voice.
Are you kidding me?
I mean, again, this is just an empirical test of self-honesty.
I mean, everybody knows what happens if whites decide to join a club or to start a club for the interests of white culture or white people.
Well, you are automatically a racist.
I've said this before on the show.
Like, if you're a proud black man, you're just a proud black man.
If you're a proud Hispanic...
You're a proud Hispanic.
If you're a proud white man, you're a racist.
You're a KKK or you're just a white power supremacist and so on.
This is just how ridiculous it's become.
Until this stuff gets acknowledged, I don't think anyone can really have an honest conversation about race.
You can only have a manipulation of caricatures, which is the essence of propaganda.
Anyway, sorry, you had another point to make.
Yeah, those are really great points.
I'll pretty much just wrap up here.
Just watching what's on television with these riots and everything, it's just really, really sad.
I'd like to see more progress occur in the black community.
I think generally there's three reasons why groups differ.
Genetics, culture, and And discrimination.
And I believe when you look at a lot of the problems with the crime with blacks, I think it's a big cultural problem.
I don't think it's genetics at all.
You know, you see immigrant groups.
Sorry, why don't you think it's genetics at all?
I'm not saying it is.
I'm just curious.
That's a big thing to sweep off the table, right?
I mean, maybe you've got a way of doing it.
I don't know.
But I'm just curious what your reasoning is behind that.
I don't really – okay.
I guess it's just – you know, I've looked at – This probably isn't a great argument, but just looking at history of Africa and the Moors and the accomplishments that they've made, I don't feel like the black community is forever stuck where they are now because of genetics.
I think it's...
Well, no.
You're not answering the question.
Okay.
Right?
Because you're just saying, well, why have you eliminated genetics?
It's like, well, because...
I don't like to think of the blacks as being stuck because of genetics, right?
And look, I know we are wandering into the area that dare not speak its name.
I understand all of that.
But if you're able to sweep genetics off the table, I mean, let me know.
I mean, a lot of people have been unable to do that.
And so if you have a way of doing that, I'd like to...
I certainly don't right now.
This is kind of just something I've been thinking about for a short period of time.
But my overall point was just, even if you got rid of all the white racism, I don't think it would do a whole lot to increase the black test scores or improve their savings rates or reduce a lot of that black-on-black crime or the way that the children are treated in the home.
Well, and we have some laboratory examples of that, right?
I mean, Detroit is like overwhelmingly black and almost exclusively run and ruled by blacks, right?
Right.
And we have, of course, ever since the withdrawal of the colonial powers in Africa, we have examples of blacks in charge of blacks.
Right.
Right.
And so we do have examples of where blacks have achieved more autonomy and self-direction and so on and have received the reins of power and so on.
And it's not exactly conclusive.
It's not like, wow, now that Detroit is mostly black, it's a paradise because they managed to get rid of all the whites.
So now they're not laboring under white oppression and white racism and so on.
Boy, that's a paradise.
I'd walk down there with bags of money taped to my...
Nuts!
And feel perfectly safe at midnight, right?
So, I mean, there are, again, what's the proof?
Who knows?
But there are indications that, you know, eliminating whites from the equation does not a paradise produce, right?
Right.
Okay, my final question was...
Wait, wait.
Okay.
So, and the reason I'm bugging you about this is that there is a lot of Yeah, I mean,
that may be premature because there are lots of people – Charles Murray – And James Flynn and the American Psychological Association and so on who have admitted basically, well, look, there's something going on between the races that's quantifiable that is different, which we can't explain.
And nobody can.
But to say, well, it can't be genetics.
Well, that – again, I just don't be – again, I don't have a conclusion.
I don't know the answer, but it may be premature to sweep that off the table, right?
Yeah, yeah.
You're right.
You're right.
But I guess my last question was, do you see any hope in the future of a lot of people in the black community moving more towards embracing volunteerism or atheism or anything like that, freedom?
Oh, absolutely.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, and otherwise I'd be like a racial separatist or something like that, right?
Yeah, I really do.
I really do.
And, I mean, I won't repeat the rant because I just did one the other day about feminism and the state and so on, right?
But, you know, idiocy is a luxury that only survives through subsidies.
And this is not particular to the black community.
It's idiocy between the genders.
It's idiocy between and among all races and cultures.
Like, Blacks and – I mean just because your question is about blacks, certain segments of the black community I think are woefully held back by unbelievably shitty education.
Woefully held back by unbelievably shitty education.
And I think that creates a vicious circle which I'm sure we don't have to go to much detail about here.
But if that – and that's – We're going to run out of money for that shit.
We're just going to run out of money.
Running out of money for welfare, running out of money for EBT cards, running out of money for crappy schools.
I mean, this whole ship is breaking up.
This whole ship of state is breaking up as we speak.
The sky should come with a spiderweb of cracks and a falling in of the biodome of illusory heaven of statism.
And so the free market, voluntarism, Smooths out and solves just about everything.
Just about everything.
Doesn't mean that everyone's happy.
Doesn't mean that everyone's content.
There are people who are better at words than they are with their hands.
They're better at spinning clouds, castles of propaganda than they are at actually making something.
Oh, I know.
People are like, isn't that you, Steph?
No.
It's not me.
I had a successful career in the software industry.
Long before I started doing any of this stuff.
Most of the people in the media, that's all they've ever done.
They've never run a business.
They've never hired.
They've never fired.
They've just basically gone from the amniotic sack of higher education to the amniotic sack of Bobby Head, Karl Marx, flea-picking compliance of the leftist media.
They've never had a real job.
They don't know what the hell it is to have a real economy.
They're in the propaganda economy.
And the propaganda economy only survives because of the state.
And so for blacks and for race relations, all I want to see is race relations that are conditioned or influenced by voluntarism.
That's all I want to see.
I don't want to see any of this affirmative action bullshit.
I just don't.
I don't want to see the war on drugs.
I don't want to see welfare.
I don't want to see crappy government schools in ghettos.
I don't want to see any of this crap.
The relations between the races, just as the relations between the genders, just as the relations between all human beings should be fundamentally informed, influenced and conditioned by voluntarism.
This is true for boyfriend and girlfriend, boyfriend and boyfriend, girlfriend and boyfriend, boyfriend, girlfriend and goat.
I don't care.
Voluntarism is the key for races, for genders, for everyone, for families.
Voluntarism is the key.
So while there's the state in there, it's sort of like saying, who's going to win this soccer match when the referee keeps switching sides?
Well, who's going to win this soccer match?
Well, whichever side the referee is on.
Because the referee can say, oh, foul, you're off the field, you're off the field, can make up whatever he wants, people got to obey, right?
Mm-hmm.
Or it's like saying, who's going to win this chess game when someone can switch pieces psychically?
Whoever can switch pieces psychically is probably going to win.
And so the idea, like, I don't know what the relations are between the races.
I have no idea.
No idea.
Because the government is in there mucking the living shit out of all of it.
I don't know what the relations between the genders are or will be in a state of freedom because the government is in there mucking it all to shit.
So I don't particularly care about race relations because race relations only matter when there's a government.
Do you care if there are blacks on the other side of town who like hanging out more with blacks than with you?
No.
I don't care.
Go to it.
Somebody could tell me that.
I'd be like, why are you even telling me this?
Do you know there's some Mexicans over there who actually really prefer hanging out with other Mexicans rather than whites?
I'll survive.
I'll find a way to get through the day knowing that I am Genetically unpopular.
Like, fine.
And if you hear, oh, you know, there are some whites who prefer hanging out with other...
Oh, well, that's different.
That's racist.
I mean, in a free society, you go to some Chinatown and you say to some elderly Chinese guy...
You should get a translator.
Do you know, elderly Chinese guy, that there are some Serbians three towns over who kind of hang out with other Serbians?
And he'd be like, you know you're in Chinatown, right?
I think I understand.
And I don't care.
Look, if people – if there's a little Italy, a little Greece, Chinatown, I don't care.
I don't care.
If you want to go live with white people, if you want to go live with rainbow-colored people – Who fought the Fifth Symphony?
I don't care.
In a free society, who cares?
Who cares?
If you want to have a cello society and you don't let anyone in who plays the viola, I don't care.
We only care because there's this giant fist of the government smashing everything all over the place, right?
I mean, if the...
Referee can change sides.
Everyone's obsessed with the referee and is wooing the referee and knows if you've got the referee on yours.
The referee gets his sociopathic, narcissistic vanity ego stroked more than Peter North's joystick.
So I don't care.
Get rid of the referee.
I mean get rid of the state.
And I don't care where people do.
Look, I like to hang out with a bunch of different people.
Other people may want to hang out more with people like themselves.
I don't care.
And I don't want to care.
But that's the beauty of freedom.
Freedom is the unbelievable privilege of not giving a shit about other people's decisions.
Like, oh my god.
It's so good.
It's so good.
And last thing I'll say, this is obviously a bit of a tragic story, but in Ferguson...
A white guy is driving with his pregnant wife, white guy, a bunch of black kids, literally kids, right?
They start hitting his car with a hammer, with hammers, and he gets out, what the hell are you doing?
You know, didn't know what the hell was going on.
And they beat him to death as he's sort of trying to protect his pregnant wife and so on.
And apparently, it's not verified, but apparently they were basically screaming death to Whitey beforehand, right?
Obviously, there's a Racial hate crime, if these facts are all true.
Now, the police department have not classified it as a racial hate crime because, you see, there's no way that the blacks could have known he was Bosnian.
This is how Alice in Wonderland, evil and insane, our society is.
And boy...
I mean having grown up on a steady diet of white people are bad and never ever being able to talk about white issues or white history or like anything like that in any positive light.
And when you hear about a white guy being beaten to death by a bunch of black kids screaming death to whitey and well it's not a hate crime because they didn't know he was Bosnian because that's the important thing.
I mean, Jesus.
Can you imagine a gang of whites beats to death a black guy and they say it's not a hate crime because they didn't know which part of Africa his ancestors were from?
I mean, this is literally how, like, the stuff that we're supposed to swallow in the name of social narrative is like, basically, you're asked to swallow for your filet of fish, Bruce the Mechanical Shark from the original Jaws movie, Sideways.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, it's just completely mental.
But all of this stuff, it's just bullshit from the state.
Once we've outgrown the state, God, I don't care.
I don't care.
I don't care.
If there's some business that says, well, we don't hire young married women because 60% of them get pregnant within two years.
I don't care.
I mean – and the fact that I don't care doesn't mean that other people shouldn't care.
Like what I mean by that is there may be a bunch of young women who want to get hired and they really care that there's some company that doesn't hire young recently married women because 60% of them – I'm just making these numbers up.
Because 60% of them have kids and therefore you invest all this time.
Excuse me, you invest all this time in training them and just set fire to all that money, right?
Now, there may be a bunch of people out there who are like, wow, that's really unjust, that's unfair, and blah, blah, blah.
Well, what they should do, of course, is they should go and make the economic case to the people, to the managers, and attempt to reason and educate them out of their prejudice, if it's prejudice at all.
And they can then make the case.
I think it's kind of tough to make the case.
Like, if you're...
If you're going to hire maybe a 20-year-old unmarried young man and a 28-year-old recently married or 32-year-old recently married woman who wants kids, it's going to be tough to make the case that their next five or seven years are going to be equal in terms of availability and productivity.
A young man could get hit by a bus and the woman might be infertile.
Or she might be just some wonder woman who's able to juggle kids and families.
But You go and make the case and let's say you've made the case and it's a great case and there's still a bunch of guys who won't hire pregnant – or women who might get pregnant.
Then organize a boycott.
Knock your socks off.
That's all voluntarism.
That's all fine.
That's all fine.
But I fundamentally don't want to care.
I mean just think about – open up – I don't know.
Where do you go for news?
Pretty much all over.
I read everything.
New York Times, CNN. I try and read everything.
Fox News.
Kind of a mix of...
Yeah, I used to read the New York Times.
I won't read them.
I won't go near the site ever since they published Darren Wilson and his pregnant wife's home address.
Okay.
To me, that's just like, holy shit.
You people are just stone evil.
Anyway, so you go to a bunch of different places...
All you have to do – and I did this years ago in a show here – just open up the newspaper, go to wherever you go, Drudge or wherever – go to wherever you go and just scroll through and say, okay, so how much of this is about people trying to influence other people or get stuff through the government?
Mm-hmm.
Right?
How much of it is?
Well, how much of it involves the government?
Michelle Obama's lunches are gross.
I mean, it's literally – and I would just love to not care about any of this.
Mm-hmm.
And that doesn't mean that I don't care about people.
I mean, I'm a very charitable guy.
I'm a helpful guy.
It doesn't mean I don't care about people.
I don't like having to care.
I don't like having to care.
I don't care how many people of a different culture, different race, different nationality, different history.
I don't care how many people come into whatever geographical area you talk about.
I don't care.
I do care if there's a government and there's a vote.
And a particular group tends to skew one way or the other.
Yeah, then suddenly it's like, oh, fuck, do I have to care about this?
Oh, come on.
I don't want to have to care about this.
You know, it's like when I'm 50, I've got to go get a colonoscopy, apparently.
Oh, yay!
I can't wait.
And it's like, oh, now I have to care where my ass tube goes.
I didn't have to care about that before.
I remember I had a professor...
Skip Chant, his name was, if I remember rightly.
I had a professor many, many years ago when I was in college.
I was taking an English degree.
And I normally didn't, but then I just happened to – there was some street meat vendor on the campus, and I just – I got a hot dog.
And I just – because I was a completely broke student, I would – When I bought a hot dog, like that sometimes could be my big meal for the day.
And so like I was the guy basically who like jams the hot dog bun down and puts everything on it, even stuff I don't like because it has some nutritional value.
Like there's that weird squishy semi-onion-y crap that you can put on hot dogs.
There's relish which I'm not particularly – I don't relish it.
I'm not particularly a big fan of relish and then there's the fucking – Olives?
You could get olives and like just tomatoes and the real – and I basically would be like – it would be like the hot dog salad, the giant tube of everything that could possibly be digested by any other human being including probably one of the vendor's fingers.
And I basically would just mountain this crap up and eat it and there's like two pounds of topping for every one ounce of hot dog.
And, you know, ketchup is like, well, hey, free tomato soup.
I mean, yay, let's put it on.
And I remember this professor, he cast me in a Pinter play called A Slight Egg.
And I did that.
That was a dramatic role I did one night, and the other was Chekhov's The Bear.
I played a comedic role in Chekhov's The Bear, and I was playing a dramatic role in Harold Pinter's A Slight Egg.
And we were talking about the play and he was the director and all that.
And I had this basically giant need for people to carry it over a mountain of toppings with a tiny hot dog underneath.
And I'm just eating it, right?
Because I'm like, I'm 20.
And I remember he was probably as old as I am now, like 48 or whatever it is.
And he was...
Looking over at me and like his eyes went wide and he's like, oh man, I could remember when I could eat that stuff.
And at the time, I'm like, what are you talking about?
It's good!
Okay, it wasn't actually that good.
Damn, it was filling.
You know, I might as well have just been eating polyfilla and then drinking half a gallon of water because basically it just comes out and you can basically reassemble it on the hot dog cart if you want.
Because I remember at the time thinking, wow, that's interesting.
I guess I never really thought about that.
When you get older, you can't handle your food as much.
And it's actually kind of like a little true.
And so it's like, I don't want to care about I can't eat this kind of food anymore.
But now I'm 48.
So, you know, face planting into a giant bento box of tandoori fried whatever.
It's not necessarily the way for me to have a peaceful and restful evening followed by a non-illulating crap in the morning.
So I just – I'd love to live in a world where I'm not forced to care because being forced to care is such a contradiction in terms.
I want to care because I spontaneously care.
It moves me.
It touches me.
It means something to me.
I want to help and so on, right?
And I mean that's great.
I mean it's just in the grocery store the other day.
I bought like a whole whack load of, you know, the bagged meals for people at Christmas who are short.
I mean, yeah, great.
I love it.
I mean, that's a wonderful thing.
It's Christmas.
And, you know, people obviously, some people are not doing that well, and it's nice to help.
But I like the fact that nobody's got a gun to my head.
and saying, buy these people a meal or they're going to vote to increase your property taxes.
Dan is like, oh man, don't I get to just care because I care?
Do I have to do it as a defensive thing?
Do I have to do it because people might have power?
And so this is the thing with races.
I want to care maybe about individuals.
I want to care because maybe there's something I can offer a community that is not that down on peaceful parenting or philosophy, but I don't want to have to care.
Right?
And right now, unfortunately… We live in a society where you have to care.
And that is exhausting and feels kind of rapey emotionally.
I know that's a strong word to use, but it feels that way.
Because I don't get the joy of spontaneous benevolence and kindness and charity.
I now have to care because there's a threat to my interest in some manner.
So anyway, sorry, that's a long rant, but I certainly enjoyed the bits about house tubes.
No, no problem.
Thank you for the conversation.
I have a lot to think about now.
I really love the show.
I love the work you're doing on peaceful parenting.
So I really appreciate what you and Mike are doing.
So I'll continue to support the show in the future.
Thank you.
Oh, do you mean like donning or donning?
What is that even a word?
That's not even a word.
Do you mean sort of sharing or just liking the show or donating?
Both.
Mostly sharing the concept of peaceful parenting and I'm actually going to be becoming an attorney.
I'm becoming an attorney pretty soon so my donations will increase.
Looking forward to that.
Well, look, I appreciate that.
I wasn't trying to corner you.
No, it's okay.
I really, really appreciate that.
You know, that support is, you know, sometimes the days in philosophy can seem a little long and occasionally a little overcast.
And donations are very nice for that.
And again, for the people who don't have money and who share the shows, when you see the view can't go through the roof, like Bill Cosby, the truth about Bill Cosby kind of started off slow.
I think it just kicked past $100.
I think Mike Brown is close to or just over half a million.
So even if you're just sharing, that lifts the spirits too.
So donations and sharing the shows, I hugely appreciate it.
And yeah, keep in touch.
Always an enjoyable conversation with you.
Or I shouldn't say always, so far.
And yeah, call back anytime you like.
Okay, great.
Thanks a lot, Steph.
Thanks, man.
Bye.
Alright, thanks Shane.
Up next is Mirella.
She wrote in and said, I am very angry at my parents for the emotional abuse that happened during my childhood.
Even though I moved thousands of miles away, I only talk to them a few times a month, I still feel stuck in this anger stage.
How do I move forward and make peace with the past?
Oh, Mirella, why are you trying to get me in trouble?
Okay, so tell me more.
What happened...
Can you guys hear me okay?
Yes.
Thank you for taking my call, and I just want to say I'm really nervous.
So I'm just going to try to explain.
Maybe, I don't know, just hearing the question, I was just thinking maybe the word abuse is a little much, so I don't know why I thought of that word when I wrote the question.
Maybe I would say now emotional unavailability from my parents.
Oh, no.
No, I've got your ACE score, your Adverse Childhood Experience score.
I'm sorry?
I have your ACE score.
Okay.
Your Adverse Childhood Experience score.
And number three was molestation slash sex slash rape.
Yeah, well, that one was the one.
I'm glad you brought it up because it was one that I wasn't quite sure about.
It wasn't something that happened in my family.
It was...
It's something that happened.
I used to spend my summers at my grandma's in the countryside and just a friend of mine and both of us we went to like the store, the general store because there was only one store in the countryside there.
So the guy that was the manager at the store, he kind of tried to touch me but like nothing happened because I I immediately stormed out of the store, and I just left my friend there.
I know probably that was bad, but I was only 11 years old.
So that was the only thing, but I just didn't know if it would even count or not.
No, it's important to share.
No, that's important to share, and that is, of course, that's very scary.
I'm obviously glad that nothing further happened.
Yeah, I was scared.
I remember being scared, but after that, I don't remember being traumatized by thoughts.
Right, right.
But did you tell anyone at the time?
No, no.
Now, under one, you have verbal abuse slash threats?
Yes.
My parents, my dad was the one that he just...
It was always confrontational and didn't like anybody disagreeing with him.
So if I would disagree with him, then he would start yelling and just, I don't know, call me names.
But not just me, he did that with my mom too.
So I kind of, growing up, my mom was kind of passive and she Just was trying not to say anything, just hoping that if she doesn't say anything, then he's going to stop eventually.
But the fact that he just kept going on and on, I just kind of felt like...
I have a brother.
My brother wasn't really participating.
He just was going to his room and putting the headphones on and just kind of escaping that.
So I thought it was my job to just defend my mom.
So I would just get into these arguments with my dad.
About their problems.
So, my dad just kept insisting that he was right and he got angry with me why I wasn't taking his side.
And I'm not saying that my mom was always right, but I was siding with her because she was the victim.
So, I'm sorry, I forgot what you were asking.
I'm sorry, I'm nervous.
Do you mean that your mother was the victim?
Yeah.
What was your mother the victim of?
Of his anger.
Of my dad's anger.
Well, but she chose to marry him, right?
She did, yeah.
And I just want to make a small parenthesis and say that I've been listening to your show for a couple of months.
My husband actually helped me discover this.
And until you started talking about, you know, it's important not to take the moral responsibility away from the parents.
I never really thought about it that way.
I mean, I've been going to therapy for a while now, maybe for like the past six years.
So I'm really trying to work through things.
But the way you work at it, it really helped me.
Well, let me tell you why I sort of interrupted with that, because I think that it's an ironclad argument to say that all voluntary marriages,
all participants in voluntary marriages, insofar as they weren't auctioned off In some godforsaken fashion when they were eight, and they are legally allowed to divorce.
That is a voluntary marriage.
You don't have to get married.
You choose who you marry, and you can leave anytime.
That's a voluntary marriage, right?
Right.
So, I think, and I'm 100% certain on this one, it's at a praxeological or axiomatic level of truth.
But in any marriage, there is almost infinitely more responsibility between the marriage partners than there is between the married partners and their children.
In other words, if we're going to talk about victims in a family, we must always and forever start with the children.
Because the children are not there by choice.
The children didn't have the choice to be born or not.
And the children certainly did not choose their parents, right?
Your mother did not have to get married.
And she had a choice to get married.
And then she had, of her various suitors, she chose to marry with your father.
And then she chose to stay with your father.
Right.
And so I'm always concerned...
Though I understand it.
When people start talking about parents as victims, because parents are there by choice, they are staying there by choice, they didn't have to be there in the first place, they can leave at any time, none of which is true for the children.
The only victims worth talking about in a family are the children, not the adults.
So this is when you start talking about, well, your mother was a victim and this and that.
I don't think that you can make that case.
I mean, you could say, well, there was a lot of propaganda, and she was told this, and the priest told her to stay.
And that's true, and I can sympathize with that.
But you certainly weren't there by choice and had no capacity to leave.
I'm not saying you should have left or anything like that.
My daughter is not with me by choice, and she has no capacity to leave.
What's she going to do?
Call a cab?
You know, go to a motel, get a job, right?
I mean, my daughter did not choose to be born and she sure as hell didn't choose me as a father.
And so I would never want her to look upon me as a victim because I'm the one making decisions here.
My wife and I are the ones making decisions here.
And I'm sorry to give you a long sidebar, so to speak.
I'm sorry to give you a long sidebar, but I am always concerned when people start talking about the victimization of parents.
Because the only fundamental victimization that occurs in the world is between adults and children.
Everything else is a footnote at best.
Yeah.
And back then, I remember I saw her as a victim and I just thought that it was only natural to just side with the weak.
But now, you know, since I... Since I've been in...
Sorry to interrupt you again.
You saw her as a victim.
Then, yeah, as a child.
Yes, but why did you see her as a victim?
Because she couldn't defend herself.
I'm sorry?
I just saw that she was just incapable of defending herself.
She wasn't doing anything.
That's why I just felt like I just have to fight with my dad for her.
No.
You saw her as a victim...
Because she saw herself as a victim.
Right, yes.
Do you understand?
Yeah.
In other words, it was a requirement of any kind of connection with your mother, I would assume, that you portray her in your own mind as a victim because that's how she portrayed herself in her own mind, right?
Right, yes.
And if you disagreed with your mother and you said, no mom, you're not a victim, you chose to get married, you chose to marry dad, You've chosen to stay.
You chose to have children with him.
All of these are choices.
You are not a victim.
If there's any victims in this damn family, it's the children.
So stop this whining and stop this pitying of yourself and stop this minister of doom and gloom from the kingdom of woe is me bullshit.
Get a spine and do something about your life.
Exactly.
And that's exactly what I told you.
But what would happen?
Actually, I did say all those things to her, but later on, maybe just a couple of years ago after being in therapy, I just got the courage to say them.
Right now, I just feel this anger because she's still...
When I was a child, I felt sorry for her.
Now I feel angry with her that she's still...
She just continues to be a victim, even though I've offered her...
I told her I'm going to therapy, and I told her what a good thing that has been for me, and I offered to go with her, because we have unresolved issues as well.
So she just refuses, and all she can...
All she can do is cry when I bring out these things, and then it makes me even angrier that she doesn't even say anything.
She doesn't have that will to just want to do something about it.
She's just kind of dead inside, kind of saying, well, this is just my cross, and I'm just going to have to take it.
It's no point trying to just...
Find anybody else right now.
I'm already in my 50s.
I'm older.
She's actually 60.
She just gave up on life.
To me, I'm angry because it kind of means that she gave up on me too in our relationship.
I've been working so hard just trying to improve it because I thought that when I expressed to her how I felt and I just thought that she was just going to be open to here and I wanted to make things better and I thought that she was going to want the same thing too with our relationship and she says that she does but then she doesn't
really do anything about it so She actually asked me not to bring up these things anymore because they upset her.
I remember actually a few shows ago you were talking with the guy with Ruben, with his endless conversations with his dad that passed away.
I remember a lot of those things that you said apply to me as well.
I guess I've been doing all this work because I want to figure out what I can do to improve our relationship because there has been no connection ever since I was a little girl.
So now that I'm an adult, I just want to make it better.
Yeah, I don't know what that means.
I'm sorry?
I don't know what it means when you say you want to make your relationship with your mother better.
I just want to feel the connection that I haven't felt when I was a kid.
And I guess I just thought that if I was open to change and just doing things differently, maybe she was going to just meet me halfway.
How's that felt?
It hasn't.
It has not worked so far, but I'm wondering...
It has not worked, right?
No, it hasn't worked, no.
But I'm wondering if there's anything wrong that I'm doing.
Do you mind if I surprise you at the moment?
Go ahead.
It strikes me, and this is just my thought, I don't...
I'm not going to say it's true, but it strikes me, my friend...
That with regards to your mother, you are being very selfish.
In that you are focusing only on your needs, what you need, what you want, not who she is.
Okay.
Right?
Because you've said, well, I want to feel close and I want the relationship to be better, right?
Mm-hmm.
And...
You're really stuck focusing on trying to get something from your mother that you want.
And that's got to feel a bit like a broken record.
Oh, does anyone even know what that means anymore?
I don't know with CDs.
Right?
But where you're stuck in a groove just repeating and repeating like Groundhog Day.
Like isn't there this pattern where you want something from your mother.
You want that connection.
You want the relationship to be better.
Right?
And it's about your needs, and you can't put your own needs aside and evaluate her empirically for who she is.
And say, forget about my needs for the moment.
Let's just spend a day not trying to get something out of my mother that will make me feel better.
But let me evaluate her as a human being rather than evaluate or Manipulate based upon trying to fulfill my own needs.
It's an unusual way to talk about selfishness, but I think it's quite valid.
Because you really have only talked about what you want and need.
And I'm not saying that this means self-sacrifice because I think what you're doing right now is self-sacrifice.
But try to look at it from outside of your own needs.
Because where we have needs, we are distorted, right?
It's called a conflict of interest in the business realm.
Like, when I was a kid, my mom, I don't know, even when I was a teenager, my mom had this belief that When you went to the grocery store, any money that was left over,
over and above what they needed to balance the cash out, whatever money was left over was divided among the cashiers, which would give them an incentive, she felt, for them to shortchange you.
Because, I mean, that would be a conflict of interest.
No reasonable business person would set that up and say, well, you know, if you end up overcharging customers and shortchanging them, you can keep the profits, right?
That wouldn't make any sense, right?
Because then they wouldn't be focusing on the good of the store, the good of the customer service, the honesty of the transaction.
They'd be focused on – there'd be a conflict of interest then.
The same people making change – and this is back in the day where it was all manual – Like, literally, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, when we first started, right, in the 70s, in the 60s, actually.
Sorry, I guess early 70s.
Like, you literally push down buttons, and they stayed down, and little things came popping up.
These little black, little tiny black tombstones with white numbers on them came popping back up.
And I told her, I mean, even as a kid, I said, Mom, that's just not true.
That can't be true.
There's no way they could run a store like that.
I mean, and then she'd just scream at me and, you know, whatever, right?
And then you'd learn to shut the hell up in a hurry, right?
And so, if you have an overwhelming need for something from someone, you can't be close to that person.
Let me give you another example.
Have you ever had any kind of addiction?
No.
No, okay.
Other than the one we're talking about right now.
Okay, but let's say you were addicted to heroin.
And you really, really, really needed that heroin.
I'm talking like late stage Sid Vicious, or as Freddie Mercury called him, Mr.
Ferocious.
If you really, really desperately needed heroin, could you have a relaxed and intimate conversation with a heroin dealer?
No.
Why not?
Well, because you're already anxious and you just know you need something and you want your need to be fulfilled, no matter what.
Now, imagine that you can't even pay the heroin dealer.
But you really, really need that heroin.
I mean, your skin is itching, your bowels are turned to water, your ears are ringing, your hands are shaking.
You need it so badly.
Can you have a relaxed conversation showing genuine and spontaneous interest in the heroin dealer's life and thoughts?
No.
No.
Your sole thought is, how do I separate the heroin from the heroin dealer and get it home?
It's sort of like if you're in a bar and whatever you find...
In terms of physical characteristics, the most attractive in the opposite sex or the same sex or whatever cranks your lever, that person walks in and you're like, you know what?
I'm going to make a play.
I'm going to try and get this person to go out with me.
I'm going to try and play this man and get him to ask me out or I'm going to do whatever.
And you have this huge need that this person just turns you on so much, whatever the physical characteristic is or whatever it is, the X factor, the chemistry, they turn you on so much you can barely think straight.
And then when that person comes to talk to you, you cannot have a relaxed conversation because you have a huge need.
And when you have a huge need for someone, they turn into a thing that That you try to manipulate to satisfy your need.
Does this make any sense?
Yes, it does.
I never thought about it that way, but yeah, it does.
I guess I just have the need of being heard, because I never felt heard.
So I guess I understand that when you have a need, then that person has kind of a power over you.
And there's no greater, just to be clear, there is no greater addiction Then the need from children for security.
And security comes from a child.
Security comes from love, from empathy, from, as you put it, being heard.
When we are children, we know that we are completely dependent on our parents.
We know that without our parents' good regard, or at least resources, we're dead.
Dead.
Literally dead.
Like, the guy who's jonesing for heroin feels like he's going to die if he doesn't get it, but he probably won't.
But if you don't have your parents' resources as a baby, as a toddler, as a child, you will die.
You will die.
And so, life itself is predicated on our fundamental addiction to Our parents' resources.
We are addicted to our parents' resources as children more extremely than a heroin addict is addicted to heroin.
Because the heroin addict can theoretically survive without heroin, but the child cannot survive without parental resources.
And so we need to know that those parental resources will be made available to us.
And the best way, the most Fundamental way that we can feel secure, sorry, that we can feel we're going to get those resources is to know that our parents really care about us, really view us as individuals, really treasure our existence and treasure our life, really care about us as individuals, take great delight in our presence.
Because that way we know that because they love us so much that we will get their resources and we will survive.
The love of a parent, the good regard of a parent, the emotional connection with a parent is the most fundamental and primal addiction we all have.
And I think this is pretty common throughout at least the mammal kingdom or the mammal classification.
So your need to be heard, your need for connection with your mother, your need for love, your need for intimacy, your need for security, Your need for love is so foundational, is so fundamental to your existence as a bipedal mammal that it is as foundational as our need for air.
Like if somebody, if I can't breathe, I understand that my body It cries out for air.
It's called air hunger.
Your body thrashes.
You need air because without air, you will die.
Many years ago, I was in the Dominican Republic and I was without my brain.
I'm pretty sure I packed it.
I certainly had underwear, sunscreen, goggles, flippers.
I just don't think I packed my brain because I went and I'm a good swimmer.
I mean, I was on a swim team.
I swam very well.
I was a water polo team.
I mean, I'm a good swimmer, a strong swimmer.
And I swam.
I was following a fish, and I swam into a hole in the side of a submerged ship.
Like, what a ridiculous and retarded and, like, could-be-fatal-in-two-minutes thing to do.
And then, when I was swimming back out, there was a strong current coming in.
Through the hole in the side of the underwater ship.
And I had to literally kick and swim like a crazy person to get through that current.
And I scratched the hell out of my arm, a scar which lasted.
I still have it.
And then, of course, I was bleeding in the water and tropical waters and all.
But, I mean, that was unbelievably ridiculous and incredibly stupid.
And I might not have been found for months.
If I hadn't been able to swim back out of that hole that I'd swum into.
There's no air inside the ship.
And that moment where I realized that I needed to get to air within 30 to 60 seconds or I would die and I could not swim out because the current was so strong.
And I realized, well, this could be it for me.
Because, of course, when you have to swim that hard, you're burning up your remaining oxygen reserves very quickly.
It's like afterburners with your gas.
I understood in that moment what air hunger really was.
I have to get to that air or I'm going to die.
And that is the same as our need for our parental...
So the fact that you have a hunger for connection with your mother is to me as unsurprising and as automatic as me having a hunger to get to the surface when I'm half trapped inside an underwater ship.
But It remains selfish.
Because you cannot connect with someone, with anyone, when you have an overwhelming need for something that person is not providing.
You cannot connect with a heroin dealer if you're a heroin addict without any money.
Because all you're fundamentally doing is trying to get that person to give you the heroin.
So whenever you have that greater need, You need, you must step back from that person because you cannot get what you need from someone if your need is too great because they become an object to satisfy your need.
They become a thing, they become a drug, they become a dispenser of anxiety reduction.
They are not a person you can meet as an equal if your need is so great.
You're focusing on your need, which I completely understand and I hugely sympathize with.
But need eclipses the existence of others.
You know, there's this old example that people use in libertarian circles, or all circles.
The guy is starving to death and he steals a loaf of bread from a baker.
Starving to death.
His need for the bread, because he's almost dead from hunger, has completely eclipsed the humanity of the baker and the baker's property rights.
Well, I understand it.
I would steal the bread, too.
But his need has eclipsed the humanity of the other person, because he can't deal with the baker as an individual human being with property rights and a right for trade, and he's got to eat or he's going to die.
If I stumbled out of a desert and saw a kid drinking a bottle of water, I would rip the bottle of water from that kid's hands and drink it.
Assuming that, you know, I'm sorry, I can't deal with you as a human being who has property rights and I must get that water or I'm going to die.
Yeah.
I'm so sorry for the long speech because I'm talking to you about other people's needs and I'll be quiet in a sec.
I absolutely promise you.
But it is the very need that keeps you in the state of reaching, of wanting.
of needing and you want to find a way to make your mother fulfill your needs but because your need is so great And because she hasn't for many, many, many years, it can't happen the way that you're trying to make it happen.
Does this make any sense at all?
Yeah.
Yeah, it does.
It does.
I wanted to say that you were saying that I'm focusing on my needs, and that's fairly new to me, focusing on my needs, because growing up, I was focusing on their needs.
On my parents' needs.
I wanted to make sure that they were happy, hoping that, okay, after they're happy, maybe I'm going to feel cared for as well.
So it's a new thing to me to focus on my needs.
And I kept doing that also after I left home with my relationships with my friends, my girlfriends.
It was always me, the one that I was listening to them.
They always had all these problems.
My problems didn't even compare to theirs.
Theirs were always bigger.
You had a show about, I guess, emotional dumping.
I always felt that.
I always felt that, but I felt, hey, if I show that I care about them, maybe they're going to reciprocate.
So like I said, I was just saying that just to say that focusing on my needs is new.
It's fairly new to me.
But I do understand also what you're saying.
But you need to look at it in a deeper way.
I'm sorry to sound annoying, but you need to look at it in a deeper way.
The question is, why were you focusing on your parents' needs?
So I can get my needs met eventually?
No.
I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry.
That sounds so jerky, but it's true.
It's jerky, but true.
No.
No.
You were not focusing on your parents' needs in the hopes that you would get your needs met later, because that would mean to say that you are completely foolish and retarded.
Because now it's been decades, right?
Right.
You're getting your needs met.
Really?
No.
Come on.
If you say, listen, I'll lend you money, and I'll lend you money.
And then, you know, when I need to borrow money, I'll get – you know, you'll then meet some money when you're back on your feet, right?
And let's say I've been doing this for 30 years and every time I come to you for money, you say you don't have any.
I say, well, I'll lend you more money.
Like at some point, I would just be like, what the hell is wrong with you?
Why can't you see this pattern?
You did not meet your parents' needs in the hopes that you would get your own needs met later because now it's been however many years it's been and you don't sound like you're 12.
And you're still not getting your needs met, right?
Right.
So no, that is not true.
Because then I'd have to be doing this talk with hand puppets and diagrams and something like that.
So now, why did you meet your parents' needs and not demand that they meet yours?
Because I was a child.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Nope.
Because not all children do that.
I don't want my daughter to worry about my needs.
I don't want my daughter to try and meet my needs.
I mean, I'm not saying that I don't want to have needs with my daughter.
I don't want this blank, you know, child entertainer puppet.
But I don't want her to think first and foremost when she wakes up in the morning...
How can I meet my father's needs?
Because then she'd be sitting watching me write a book.
We wouldn't be going to a play center, right?
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I'm not really sure.
All right.
Well, I'm not going to beat about the bush.
I'm going to give you the answer.
Okay.
You met...
And we'll just talk about your mother because we haven't really mentioned much about your father.
You met your mother's needs, my friend, because you would be punished if you didn't.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Am I right?
Yes.
So what happens?
Give me a situation where you met your mother's needs when you were a kid.
My mom and dad, they were having their fights and then my mom would come to me and confide and just tell me everything about that and just would want me to tell her that she was right and to go talk with my dad and maybe I could change his mind.
Sorry, you would go and talk with your dad?
Yeah.
God almighty.
God almighty.
I'm sorry, that is just shitty parenting 101.
Introduction to shitty parenting.
Drag your children into your adult married fights and then get the child on your side and use your child to score points against your husband.
There were no boundaries in my family.
Sorry, there were no what?
There were no boundaries.
No, right.
Yeah, I mean, she would tell me things, like, even intimate things that I really didn't want to know, but...
Oh, yeah, no, my mom would tell me about her dates to the point where I just want to, like, chew my own ears off, but yeah, okay.
So, that's, like, unbelievably shitty parenting, right?
Mm-hmm.
So, let me give you a very brief speech that you could have said to your mom.
Okay, how old were you when this was happening, the earliest that you remember?
Like sixth grade.
Probably 12.
And it didn't happen before that?
Not too.
It happened that I was taking her side, but she didn't tell me details about her intimate life.
No, no, no.
We were talking about when she would come in and say, try and get you on her side with a fight with your dad.
Well, probably I was about 10 when she started doing that.
Because I would see her upset and I would ask her, you know, what's wrong?
And I guess she saw in me maybe a friend.
That's another thing.
She didn't have any friends that she would talk to.
I was the one who was listening to her.
Okay, so I just want to get rough age.
I'm sure it happened before then.
Bad habits don't suddenly pop up when you become 8 or 9 or 10 or whatever.
But anyway, let's just go with that.
So saying, okay, mom, first of all, you should not be fighting with dad in any way that I can hear.
It is deeply scary to me when you fight with dad.
Because it shows me that you guys don't have the maturity to have disagreements without frightening your children.
It shows me that you're being selfish in having a fight when I can hear it.
That's number one.
I don't want to hear you guys fighting because you're supposed to be the adults.
You're supposed to be in control.
You can disagree and you can have a conversation about your disagreements, but fighting, yelling, raised voices, name-calling, no.
That tells me that you guys don't have control of your emotions.
It tells me that you don't have the self-respect of a dignified interaction.
It tells me that you're self-indulgent.
All of that scares the living shit out of me as a child.
So, I don't want to hear you guys fighting.
You can have your disagreements.
We can even have disagreements at the table, but you resolve them in a reasonable and mature manner.
Number one.
Number two, don't come in here and try and drag me into your side.
I am a child!
I am a child.
If you were a nurse, you wouldn't drag me into your shift to cover for your work because you had to go get a massage, would you?
You wouldn't put on that uniform and have me trailing around with my feet where your knees should be?
No!
I am a child.
I do not get dragged into adult fights in a marriage.
That is irresponsible.
That is manipulative.
That is exploitive.
It is immature.
Stop it.
Do not even remotely think about asking me to go and fight whatever stupid fight you're having with dad on your behalf.
Are you ridiculous?
You're not supposed to use your children as a human shield and human weapons in your bullshit marital discord.
Go to marriage counseling.
Read some books.
Figure out how to act like a halfway decent adult.
Stop fighting with dad like this.
Stop coming in and telling me about it.
I'm a kid.
You're my adults.
I don't want to know.
Grow up.
You're the one who's supposed to be in charge.
Stop this bullshit.
And for God's sake, don't ever once ask me to go and talk to dad about your bullshit disagreements.
You fight your own fights.
Fight them in a civilized way.
Fight them in a mature way.
Don't drag me into it.
I'm supposed to be enjoying my childhood, not getting dragged into your Puerto Rican soap opera of a marriage.
What would you say?
Um...
She would say, they would both say, just don't exaggerate.
Because that's what they said when I confronted them with things that I felt.
So don't exaggerate.
You're just making a big deal out of it.
It's not that bad.
Other people have more problems in there.
No, no.
So they'd say, okay, so you guys are experts at not making a big deal out of stuff, right?
That keeping things in their proper perspective and not exaggerating or making a big deal out of stuff.
But if you guys are so good at that, why are you fighting?
Isn't fighting and raising your voice and yelling and calling names, isn't that by definition making a big deal out of something?
If you guys are really great and have all of the answers about how not to make a big deal out of something, why am I even hearing your fights?
Right.
Right, but every time I would disagree, I was wrong and they were right.
No, I understand.
Look, I get that.
But what I'm saying is that you were punished.
There's a reason you didn't – like people say, well, my family has no boundaries.
I think that that's not a very clear statement because boundaries is a morally neutral term and saying, well, there are no boundaries, it's just one of these psychological terms that I think doesn't really answer that much.
It doesn't give anyone – because it's got no moral content.
If you were emotionally exploited by your parents for their own petty battles, that to me is a bit closer to the situation.
And I'll tell you, I'm trying not to sort of put my own experiences on yours, of course, Mirella, but when I was a kid, my mom would come in and tell me all about whatever stupid stuff she was up to socially or romantically or whatever.
I should go to some And I literally could do that for three hours straight and still not scratch the surface of all the complexities she put my brain into.
I remember sitting in front of my Atari 800 playing one of the first 3D games that ever came out.
It was a maze game called Way Out with a tiny, tiny little screen.
And it was like the first three-dimensional maze game that ever came out before.
They were all sort of Pac-Man style top down.
I remember thinking there, looking at that maze and saying, well, shit, I can find my way out of the computer maze.
I cannot find my way out of the maze of my mother's conversations.
Well, monologues.
They were monologues.
But the reason that I couldn't say, Mom, I'm playing a game here.
I don't care about your dating life.
Please give me some space.
I don't want to hear.
Why didn't I say that?
Thank you.
Because you would be punished?
Yeah, yes, yes, because you're trapped.
Because it's easier to swallow your disgust.
With me, it was horror at times.
It's easier to just swallow that, bite by bite, than have the Krakatoa of parental explosions.
Because the horror, drip by drip, is manageable.
The explosion...
is overwhelming.
So, people say, well, there weren't boundaries, this and that and the other, but no, it means that if I asserted my needs, I was attacked.
It escalated Eric Garner style until I submit it.
So if you're in that kind of situation, the reason that you can't assert your needs is because if you assert your needs, you will be attacked. you will be attacked.
And that threatens your life.
Not because they choke you or anything, but because if the bond is that insecure between parent and child, the child does not rock the boat.
The child complies.
Compliance with parents is a sign of a very weak bond between parent and child.
Well, it's compliance when you're a child and then rebellion as a teenager.
These are two sides of the same coin.
If I'm chatting about something, I'm going to do a show on first principles because I keep getting asked about that.
And although my introduction to sophistry doesn't do great view-wise, at least on YouTube, it's just important stuff for me to do.
And so I was talking to my daughter about it, and we chatted about it for about, I think about 15 minutes we did.
First principles.
You know, where does error exist in the mind or in the world?
How do you know if something's true or false and all that?
And she did it.
And then she said, you know, actually, I'm a bit bored of this now.
I'm like, well, thank you for telling me.
What would you like to do?
I want her, I need her to be able to say she's bored.
I need her to be able to do that.
I need her to let me know.
She was really enjoying the topic and then just, you know, she's five.
So yes, that makes perfect sense to me.
And I need her to be able to assert her preferences and needs.
I mean, how else are we going to be close?
She needs to feel comfortable doing that.
And if you probably didn't feel great about your mom coming in and dragging you into these conflicts and explaining and making you talk to your dad later, that wasn't fun for you, right?
No, not at all.
And the only reason you complied was because the baby had been beaten out of you.
In one way or another.
I don't mean necessarily physically beaten.
But the baby had been intimidated out of you.
Because we're born shitting and screaming, right?
We want something, we cry.
We're happy with Google.
We are non-compliant as babies.
And there's nothing more terrifying than a compliant baby.
That means a broken baby.
And We become compliant because the baby has been bullied out of us.
You get back in touch with that inner baby, you can change the world.
But the purpose of many parents, all government schools, and all religions is to beat the baby out of the baby.
To beat the necessary non-compliance of individual needs out of the baby.
You can't fit into a jigsaw puzzle If you're a complete picture, you have to be broken up and carved up and shaped into that which is convenient to society.
And when you tell me that you couldn't express your needs with your parents, that you were afraid to express your needs with your parents, that it was difficult to do even as an adult with independence, what I know for a fact then is that the baby was beaten out of you or intimidated out of you or bullied out of you.
Right.
Or frightened out of you.
And you now want to try and connect with someone who, I'm not saying it's all she did, but who exploited you as a child and had...
You know, when I was talking about your overwhelming need for your parents' approval and intimacy, love and empathy and all of that, parents...
So many parents have these overwhelming needs for control over their children, or compliance from their children, or I'm sure that when your mother was dragging you into her side of her fights with your father, she was the victim, and he was the bad one, and she was right, and he was wrong, right?
Just this overwhelming need for victimhood and self-righteousness and all of that, which means she can't get close to you.
You are then an object which she can meet her own illegitimate needs.
You become a thing.
You become a thing.
Like if I'm dead thirsty and there's a glass of water, I'll drink it.
I don't think, what does the water want?
Maybe the water is enjoying the sunshine and the view of the kitchen counter.
Maybe it doesn't want to see my lower intestine.
I don't think about it because the water is an object I use to satisfy my desires.
As I've said before, I don't say to my car, well, I'd like to go to the grocery store, but what do you feel like?
You want to drive and see the fall colors?
Tell me.
Let me put on the Bluetooth, right?
I don't ask my car where it wants to go.
I don't ask my computer what it wants to do because it is a thing.
It is an object to satisfy desires.
My desires.
My preferences.
The difference is that you're not a car or a glass of water or a computer.
You are a sovereign individual with her own needs and preferences, which need to be negotiated.
But you can't use other people like things until you can get them to believe that they are things themselves.
You can't use other people as objects unless they believe themselves to be objects.
And the way you do that is to punish them for having needs, to turn them into a compliant thing.
And this is why I think it's hard to break out of this cycle with your mother, because she treated you as a thing to satisfy her needs, and now you're trying to treat her as a thing to satisfy your needs, which is how you were treated, and your needs are so great that that's the automatic preference.
But the purpose of philosophy...
Is to replace idealism with empiricism.
Like the purpose of science is to replace superstition with empiricism.
And if you critically examine from a rational and empirical standpoint, if you critically examine your relationship just with your mother, and you say, well, for let's say 30 years my needs have not been met, My mother shows no indication of wanting to even learn how to meet my needs.
And I am reproducing bad habits of manipulation because of how I'm approaching things with my mother.
What would the logical thing be to do at the moment?
To just stop doing that so I won't do the same thing.
Change what you're doing.
Right.
Change what you're doing.
Okay, well, at the moment, you know, we're talking probably like a couple of times a month because we're in different time zones, so only in the weekend.
Sometimes we're not even talking every weekend, but the conversation...
Oh, you can't think I'm that naive.
I'm sorry.
Oh, Mirella!
Oh, who do you think you're talking to?
Some guy on a bus?
I'm sorry, what do you mean, Steph?
Do you think...
Are you trying to tell me that problems with your mother are limited because you only talk to her a few times within a month?
No, no, no, no.
I wasn't trying to say that.
I was just trying to say where we are right now.
Nope.
No, no, no.
Come on.
Come on.
I mean, it's like saying, well, when...
My mother dies, I will never have had any problems with her, and she will never have had an effect on me.
Proximity doesn't matter because they're in your head.
Right.
Yes.
Right?
You have conversations with your mother all the time, and because I think this problem of the opposition between great need and intimacy is unclear for you, it has massive impact on your relationships, every single one of them, personal, professional, you name it.
You said this is true with your friends, right?
You focus on your friends' needs.
Waiting for your needs to be returned or for a return interest in your needs.
Without realizing that the way that you were with your mother and fundamentally the way your mother was with you is causing you to regrow your mother in every single potted social plant around you.
Right?
It's not like because the stuff with your mom is unconscious in my Obviously, humble and amateur opinion.
But because this stuff with your mother is unconscious, you can't find friends who meet your needs.
Because your Simon the Boxer, that's from the free book Real-Time Relationships at freedomainradio.com slash free, but your repetitive compulsion, so to speak, would be, my needs don't get met.
Right?
Right.
And you won't...
And that means...
In all of your relationships, that's what's going to happen.
So saying, well, you only talk to your mother a couple of times a month is a way of trying to say the effect is less.
But I would argue that means that the effect is more.
Right.
Well, I was saying that because in the past, the only conversations we used to have were about her relationship.
Problems with my dad.
And since I told her I don't want to hear anything about that anymore, we don't really have anything else to connect on.
I don't tell her things about my life.
I don't feel comfortable sharing things.
So then, just talk about the weather and what I cooked and how is my car running.
And it's just kind of, if I record the conversation, I could just play it every weekend and not have to talk to her.
You know?
Right.
Oh yeah, no, and so now you're in a kind of Mexican standoff, right?
Which is, you have now expressed your preferences, or I guess to use your parlance, you have set up a boundary which says, I don't want to hear about your problems with dad, right?
And do you think she's punishing you?
Well, I'm not going to talk about anything then.
Until I get to talk about what I talk about, what I want to talk about.
I've asked her and she said that she doesn't really have anything.
Her life is all about her work and then going home and having the drama at home.
So she doesn't really do anything else to have something to talk about.
But she's expecting me to share things about my life And I told her that it kind of has to be a mutual thing, and if she has nothing to say, then I don't feel comfortable sharing either.
I'm telling you, I am so sorry that your mother sounds like this much work.
No, I'm serious.
I want to get that across to you.
Like, oh my god.
Does your mother sound like a lot of work?
Yeah.
It's like playing tennis by running back and forth from each side of the tennis court, you know?
That's pretty exhausting, right?
Right, right.
That's a great analogy.
It's like she's not there and you're flipping the chessboard around pretending you're having a game with someone.
And then you flip it back and you flip it back and you...
Wow, that is a huge amount of work.
Right.
So where do I go from here?
Because I'm just getting kind of tired of the same conversations.
We're having the same shallow conversations.
But I don't know if I... What does your therapist say?
She says that...
I almost know what this is going to be, but I don't want to say.
But go ahead.
What does your therapist say?
She says that I'm spending all my energy trying to change her and I can't do that and I'm not responsible for her happiness.
So I just need to focus on the people that do fulfill my needs.
What does that mean, you need to focus on?
What practical steps is your therapist saying you should do?
Actually my mom came to visit me here in the States when I got married last year and I took her with me to my therapy session and she doesn't speak any English but I just wanted I just wanted her to see how it was and I was translating and I know it probably wasn't the same as understanding directly what the therapist was saying but Then my therapist
said that, you know, my mom, she's just not very willing to hear the things that I have to say.
She's probably depressed.
What does your therapist say you should do?
Or does she have any?
Because she's giving you a lot of, well, she doesn't seem to be this or this little bit, you should focus more on that and so on, right?
Yeah.
She says that I need to focus on the relationship, not what I can do for my mom to help her.
That's what she says.
She says that I need to stop focusing on what I can do to help my mom see and get out of the stage that she's at, the victim stage, and just do something To be happy.
But what is that thing?
I don't know.
She didn't give me any steps.
Okay, so this is, you know, I mean, if I go to a nutritionist, this is what bugs me.
And look, your therapist could be completely right.
I mean, I could be completely wrong.
I'm not a therapist, not a psychologist, whatever.
But I'm just telling you, this is what bugs me.
I go to a nutritionist.
I'm fat, right?
Mm-hmm.
Does the nutritionist say, well, you should focus on foods that are healthier?
It's like, yeah, I know.
I understand.
Right?
I get that.
Well, you know, you should try to not have as much of the food that makes you fat.
Yes, I know that.
Right?
I get that, right?
Right.
And it's like, okay, but can you give a brother a diet?
Right?
Right.
Well, to...
To lose this amount of weight, you need to cut your caloric intake.
I mean, I was in the mall the other day, and there was a little weighing station.
You put a dollar in, and it asks you a couple of questions, right?
How tall are you?
How much do you weigh?
Your gender or whatever.
And then, I didn't do this, but it weighs you, and then it prints out and says, this is your current weight.
This is the weight you should be statistically.
And here's how many calories you need to cut down over four months to get to this weight.
Now that's a machine that costs a dollar.
Right.
And so it kind of bothers me when therapists are like, well, you should focus on the stuff that makes you more happy.
It's like, yes!
I mean, I can get a fortune cookie to tell me that.
What are the practical steps I can take?
And I can tell you what I think.
Okay, that would be great.
Since I'm not a therapist.
Well, let me ask you a couple of questions.
What do you like and admire about your mother?
Um...
Is she honest?
I can't really think of...
Wait, wait.
In what way is she honest?
I mean, because as far as I remember, when you brought stuff up with your parents, they claimed that you were exaggerating.
Right.
And when you said that you wanted to talk about some stuff with your mother, she basically said, I don't want to.
Which I guess is honest, right?
But it's not very nice, right?
Right.
So I'm not sure I'm getting a whole lot of honesty.
Right.
Okay, so what do you like and admire?
I didn't even say love.
What do you like and admire about your mother?
I can't think of anything.
I know this is horrible to say, but I can't think of anything.
It's not horrible to say.
No.
Honesty is never horrible.
Honesty may be uncomfortable.
It's never horrible.
I mean, a kid comes up to me and says, you're bald.
I say, you're right.
It's not horrible.
I mean, he's right.
There's nothing horrible about it.
And it's not horrible for you to say that at all.
I think it's sad that this is the result of you having decades of experience with your mother.
I think it's very sad.
Because that is a relationship that should be the glowing heart of your femininity and your mother should be a hero that you admire and respect and whose advice you treasure and whose wisdom you drink deep of and who smooths your life and who helps your career and enhances your marriage with her knowledge of what it's like to be married.
I mean, your mother should be a wonderful bedrock to your adult life whose value only increases your With age.
And it was pretty damn valuable to begin with.
So this is what you should have.
This is what I should have had.
This is what everyone should have.
This is what we aim to work on creating here, right?
Through this conversation.
So I'm very sorry.
Very sorry.
That you have nothing to admire and respect and like about your mother.
Because your first question...
Let me make sure I've got it correct.
You said, I'm very angry at my parents for the emotional abuse that happened during my childhood.
Even though I moved thousands of miles away and I only talk with them a few times a month, I feel stuck in the anger stage.
How do I move forward and make peace with the past?
Well, what does your anger want?
And don't tell me it wants them to change because that would mean to say that your anger is unempirical and unintelligent.
What does your anger want?
What would satisfy your anger?
I'm not really sure.
I'm not really sure.
Do you not have an impulse to answer what I just asked?
Or do you have an impulse that's unacceptable to you?
No, I don't.
I guess...
Anger is this.
Stop.
That is what anger is.
Anger is a synonym for stop.
Right.
Someone's charging at you with a knife, you get angry.
You want that person to stop, right?
I'm sure Darren Wilson was quite angry when he was apparently being charged by Marco Brown.
And he had, you know...
Six pieces of lead worth of stop, right?
Stop.
Anger means stop.
So, in my mind, there's a good case for this to be made.
When you have chronic anger in your life, it's because you are unable to make something stop that needs to stop.
Okay.
When you were a child, I'm sure, you wanted your mother to stop playing the victim, and you wanted your mother to stop dragging you into marital conflicts, right?
Mm-hmm.
Thank you.
I feel like you just checked out of the conversation about 48 seconds ago.
No.
Are you sure?
I'm here.
What do you feel?
What do you think?
I feel that it's right.
what you're saying is right.
It's just, she stopped right now.
She's not doing that anymore.
No, no, no.
No.
It's not about her.
The anger is no longer about her.
The anger is what you need to stop.
Okay, that makes sense.
What do you need to stop?
I need to stop expecting my needs to be met by my mom and my parents.
Yeah.
You need to stop manipulating her.
You need to stop controlling her.
You need to stop trying to make her do what you need her to do.
Because that will never, ever work.
If you can somehow manipulate her into providing you with your needs, because you have manipulated her, they won't be your needs that she's meeting.
She will be surrendering to your manipulation.
Does that make sense?
Yes, it does.
Trying to manipulate someone into giving you what you need is like trying to steal from your own store, calling it a sale and saying that was a good day.
I'm glad you mentioned that because I wasn't seeing that I was doing the same thing that my mom was doing with me when I was little.
No, it's not the same.
No, it's not the same because she was the adult and you were the child.
So it's not the same because...
You were not there voluntarily and she was the adult and so on.
It's not the same.
It's a similar pattern.
Yeah.
But it's not the same.
Because then you're going to get blurred and confused between adulthood and childhood and autonomy and dependence and all that.
Sorry to be annoying, but just be clear about that.
Yeah, I understand.
So if...
If you don't like your mother, the only way that she has value to you is if you pretend she can give you something she can't.
Because then you can keep circling back to try and get something from her.
But it's an artificially created value that doesn't actually exist in the world.
This time, this way, if I find this...
If I think I'm picking a lock, I have some hope of getting through, right?
But if I'm actually, in fact, picking the side of a mountain, I can't get in.
there's no lock, there's no door, there's nothing right?
and if the only thing that your mother has to offer you is the illusion of a connection that can never happen that's what your anger is saying needs to stop and I don't know what will happen if you give up this need with your mother, which is not going to be fulfilled.
And I say that with absolute certainty.
Doesn't mean I'm right.
I'm just telling you that I'm certain.
Just so you know the distinction.
I say this with absolute certainty.
What you're doing will never connect you with your mother.
Because you're manipulating her.
And because your need is so great you cannot connect with her.
So what you're doing right now will never give you the connection that you want.
If you stop doing it, I don't know what's going to happen, but it certainly will change things.
And sometimes all we have left is anything that's different from what's been happening.
And I think your anger is incredible frustration at the unempirical nature of Of your addiction.
Anti-empirical nature.
All addiction is anti-empirical.
Because it starts off as the pursuit of pleasure and it ends up with the avoidance of anxiety.
There's a great line from an Annie Lennox song.
She says, give up your needs, your poison seeds.
Find yourself elected to a different kind of greed.
Give up your needs, your poison seeds.
Find yourself elected to a different kind of greed.
Money can't buy it off diva, I think.
But...
It is...
It is the illusion of value that I think has got you stuck in this rut.
And I think your anger wants to break out.
It says stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
Stop doing what you're doing.
Stop.
It means, and fundamentally I think anger in relationships means stop pretending.
Accept reality.
Because endless needs Are a rejection of reality.
If I keep asking out the same woman who doesn't want to date me, then my need is trumping the evidence, right?
Right.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
That makes a lot of sense.
Thank you so much, Steph.
You're welcome.
I'll definitely have to reflect on this.
Listen back to the show.
And so, practical steps are, I mean, you give up the need, give up the manipulation.
Say, I am not going to manipulate people.
I am not going to view them as objects to satisfy my needs.
I'm not going to do that.
I refuse to do that because that's going to harm my husband.
Do you want to have kids?
Yes.
Good.
10 or 12 would be great.
That's what philosophy needs.
So, I'm putting the order in, just so you know.
Okay.
It's going to be harmful to your children.
It's going to be harmful to your friendships.
It's going to be harmful to your professional relationships.
It's going to be harmful to your husband and it's harmful to yourself.
You are not an object with which to satisfy your own needs and desires.
Your mother is not an object you can use to satisfy your needs and desires.
Your husband, your children, your friends, they're not those things.
And it is unjust and wrong and fundamentally isolating, alienating and lonely to treat people as things.
We end up In a world not of people or even of zombies but of mannequins that we dress up and drag around and think we're socializing.
One under each arm.
Hey, we're going to go see a movie.
It's like Lars and the Real Girl without even a real girl.
And if you simply say that your anger is saying, stop using people.
Stop.
And when you stop using people, you will stop being used by people.
That just happens.
It's like day follows night.
When you make the commitment to stop using people, you will no longer be used by people.
I will stop using people.
I will stop trying to connect with my mother to reduce my anxiety.
I will stop making phone calls out of obligations.
I will stop trying to pursue people for the sake of appearances.
You know, I had a boss who sadly has since died, although I dreamt about him the other day.
I had a boss.
Pretty nice guy.
And we were at a corporate retreat.
And there were a bunch of clients there and we were playing golf and eating and there were some seminars and I did some stuff.
Anyway, And we were all having cocktails and finger food.
And some people came up and they were just talking about themselves.
And my boss, he was, you know, a nice guy, polite and all that.
His wife was there.
Anyway, after a bunch of these people had just come up blathering about themselves, he just turned to me and he said, Hey, you know, you're still a young man.
I get that.
But I tell you, when you get to my age, you'll recognize.
I give people, he said, maybe five minutes.
And if after five minutes, my wife and I talked about this the other day, said if after five minutes they haven't asked me a single question about myself, I make my excuses, I move on.
It really, it really, it really stuck with me.
Now, this guy, oh, I'm trying to figure this out.
This guy only had about eight years to live.
So I'm glad he didn't waste those eight years or much portion thereof.
Listening to self-involved people who only wanted a pretend ear for an endless monologue.
I'm glad that in the eight years he had left to live after giving me the speech, and he wasn't an old guy, I'm glad in the eight years he had left, he did not waste it on shallow self-absorbed people who have nothing to offer.
Other than the illusion of proximity and a nearby pulse.
Yeah.
I'm glad you shared that story because it's definitely going to stick with me.
Good.
Have we talked enough?
Yes.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me, Steph.
And you guys keep up the great work.
Thank you.
And Mirella, thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for sharing everything.
This is so amazingly helpful.
I mean, the listeners, you guys don't see the emails that we see here.
I hope you get just how much you're benefiting so many other people.
Yeah.
You know, hundreds of thousands of people, millions will hear this over time.
And what you and I have talked about will change people's lives.
And I thank you so much for Opening your heart in this way.
It's an amazing thing to do and it's a courageous thing to do.
People who haven't done it, you don't know.
It's hard, right?
I'm still, you know, I did this Nathaniel Brandon thing.
I'm still like, what is this too much?
Too open?
Too vulnerable?
I don't know.
So, thank you so much.
It is a great honor to talk to you about these issues.
Thank you.
Thank you, Steph.
Thank you, guys.
You guys have a good night.
You too.
Take care.
Bye.
And let us know how it goes.
Okay, I definitely will.
All right, well up next is Connor.
Connor wrote in with a question based off of Daniel Mackler's criticism of childbearing.
He wrote in and said, some people say that having children is aesthetically negative or morally wrong because the parent will inevitably transmit or project his or her unprocessed childhood trauma onto the child.
Are any of these claims accurate and by what standard do we judge them?
Oh, Danny boy, the nihilism is calling.
All right.
It's been a while since I've read Danny Mac's Wish We Weren't Here postcard from the edge.
So, is he saying that it is inevitable for parents to traumatize their children?
Um...
I actually haven't read a lot of what he's written.
To be honest, this is a lot influenced by my own therapist because he is influenced by Daniel a lot.
And I just think it's interesting.
And I don't have a lot of...
I've actually had a lot of time to think about this since I sent the question in.
And I don't think it's morally wrong or aesthetically negative.
I think the vast majority of parents shouldn't be having children now.
Why?
Well, parents who haven't processed their own childhood trauma.
And I think most people are traumatized.
And then the solution to that is not to have children?
I don't agree with that.
But I just wanted to hear your take on it.
Well, my take on it is that I was scared of dying of cancer.
I mean, I'm sorry to drop that bomb, but I mean, that's the first thing that pops into my head.
You know, my parents, on the scale of fit to unfit, you know, probably a smidge closer to unfit than fit, to put it mildly.
But I'm incredibly happy to be alive.
I mean, they were bad parents.
Well, my dad wasn't really around, my mother.
I've talked about it before, I don't need to get into it here, but if life is unbearable, it's an option, right?
Every time you're not throwing yourself off a bridge or eating a lead sandwich, you are affirming your happiness of being alive, or at least your preference for being alive.
So, if If my mother had said, well, I am too messed up to have a kid, I wouldn't be here.
But I'm happy to be here.
That's not some universal philosophical argument at all.
And obviously, no child abuse is vastly preferable to child abuse.
But...
Again, I'm sorry for a probably inappropriate response that popped into my head, but it's sort of like saying that being murdered is preferable to being raped.
Well, most men and women who are raped choose not to fight to the death, right?
Right, and this is a logical conclusion that I came to as well, is that if you accept the principle that People shouldn't have kids, then you have to accept that you shouldn't be alive.
But you are alive.
And you're trying to convince other people to not have children, which if the argument had been successfully applied to your parents, in other words, if your parents had listened to the advice you're giving other parents, you wouldn't be here to give the advice to not have...
Anyway.
So it doesn't UPB itself all too well.
Right.
And I think there's a hopelessness in it.
And...
It's been a long time.
I think I last talked to Daniel Mackler after I'd been diagnosed with cancer, and after I'd had my operation, but before I went public with it when I was in New York.
And I don't know enough about his personality to speak to him as an individual, but I could say that what gives me hope...
In the future of the world, most fundamentally, is that when you are...
No, let me try another tack.
That's not for me to speak about.
But how do you improve the family?
How do you improve the family?
This is the most fundamental question.
How do you improve the family?
And my goal for improving the family is to promote volunteerism within the family.
Which is absolutely completely and totally consistent with my approach for improving society in every other regard.
How do we improve education for children?
Make it voluntary!
Right?
How do we improve sex?
How do we differentiate it from rape?
We make it voluntary!
How do we improve policing?
We make it voluntary because with volunteerism comes competition, comes improvement.
How do we improve the economy?
We make it voluntary.
How do we make restaurants better?
We make them voluntary.
So, you know, in the Soviet Union, there was some restaurant signed there by the government that didn't have to provide any good service for you to eat there.
How do we improve the human condition?
By promoting voluntarism.
Now, there are two kinds of compulsion in the world.
There is Force, right, which is the equivalent in 1916 in England, they began to use the draft to get the young men into the trenches because male privilege.
White male privilege, if I remember rightly.
So they started using the draft, but before that, it was social pressure.
And social pressure is very close to being as compulsive as force because For most people, unarmed by philosophy, social rejection or ostracism is as painful as physical torture.
It lights up the same part of the brain.
And so, outside of...
I think in China, there's a law that says you've got to call your parents.
But in the vestiges of a free society, no one can make you see your parents.
There's no compulsion.
Now, they can make you...
Fund your parents.
They can make you pay for your parents, right?
Because Social Security, what's called here the Canada Pension Plan, Medicare, and you have here, of course, socialized medicine, right?
So they can force you to pay for your parents.
They can't force you to see your parents, right?
But there's a huge amount of social pressure to see your parents, right?
What does this woman say?
I don't think that there's anything that I like or admire about my mother.
She said, I know that that's horrible to say.
Well, who told her it's horrible to say?
I mean, if you were in an abusive relationship with a man for 20 years and you got away and you say, well, I don't think there's anything I admire about that guy, people would say, well, yeah, he was an abuser.
Of course, right?
It would be the Stockholm Syndrome to talk about how much you admired someone who abused you or whatever, right?
And I know abuse and I hear what she's saying.
Abuse is a strong term, but Exploit it, at least, right?
And so just the promotion of voluntarism within the family is how you improve the family.
Because if parents understand that there's not going to be that automatic social torture to see your parents, they're going to behave better towards their children.
Of course they are.
Because voluntarism promotes quality.
Voluntarism is quality.
It's the only way we know that That there's quality.
In the same way that voluntarism is the only way we know what the price of something is.
As soon as you force people to buy something, you don't know what the price is.
You don't know what the value is.
You just know it's not what they're being forced to do.
So, the promotion of voluntarism, which is a very challenging philosophical perspective.
I mean, I came to the voluntary family Through anarchism, for God's sakes.
In other words, I was able to accept a stateless society before I was able to accept the voluntary family.
Me too.
And so for, again, I don't want to say for Daniel Mackler because I don't know what his innermost thoughts are about this, but I would imagine for most people untrained in philosophy, and it took me like a quarter century almost of training and rigor in philosophy to get there.
And he's not – I mean he's – I would assume no more a philosopher than I am a therapist.
It doesn't mean he doesn't have smart ideas about philosophy.
I may have a few intelligent ideas about therapy.
Still not a therapist, right?
It's not my training.
It's not my occupation.
And so the question is if you can't figure out how to improve the family, then you can't break the cycle of abuse.
And if you can't break the cycle of abuse – If you don't know how to break the cycle of abuse or if the cycle of abuse is impossible to break, then I can understand how nihilism regarding child raising could come along.
Regarding having children.
Right?
If you can't figure out how to get out of hell, why would you want it more populated?
But I think, in fact, I know That how we get out of hell is the voluntary family.
This doesn't mean, of course, everyone has to leave their parents.
Good heavens, no.
Good heavens, no.
What a silly exaggeration that is of anything that I talk about.
Because the very introduction of voluntarism changes the institution of the family.
When parents cannot rely on social pressure and torture to drive their children back into or keep their children in their orbit from here to eternity then they have to actually start winning the allegiance of their customers called the children right and we understand this with regards to public school very clearly in public school children are forced to go and parents are forced to pay don't give a shit about quality they don't give a flying fuck about quality
in public schools the children are hostages for money But we understand that if the children aren't forced to go and the parents aren't forced to pay, what's going to happen?
Well, they're going to have to start giving a shit about pleasing the kids, right?
We understand that completely.
Same thing with the cops.
Have to obey, have to pay.
Well, what if they have to compete?
What if they have to find better ways to provide services?
What if they have to find less violent ways to To interfere with someone who's selling cigarettes or whether they should even bother, which they shouldn't.
We understand that completely.
The introduction of voluntarism, it's sort of like saying, well, I'm for the privatization of education, but education will never change, even if it's privatized.
Well, then why would I bother trying to privatize it, right?
It wouldn't make any sense.
It's not going to change.
But I understand the privatization or the introduction of voluntarism into formerly involuntary relationships fundamentally changes everything.
China is only, what, 25 years maybe into its capitalist experiment?
And it went from a complete dung heap of an economy, communist economy.
I mean, it was only 50 years ago or so.
The Cultural Revolution, which is to let the thousand flowers bloom so we can hunt them down and kill them.
The slaughterhouse under Mao, 50 years ago, 25 years ago or so, they began experimenting with the free market.
In only 25 years, it has now overtaken America as the largest economy in the world.
It doesn't make the communist stores a little better.
To introduce the free market, it revolutionizes everything.
When I was in China in 2000, I went down to the market.
I didn't speak Chinese.
I didn't speak English.
We haggled by handing calculators back and forth.
I wanted to buy a leather jacket.
I punched in how much I was willing to pay.
He hit the clear button.
He punched in what he was willing to accept and we went back and forth.
And I kept haggling until when I walked away, they didn't call me back, which I knew was their bottom line.
Went back and paid them a little more than that.
It changed everything.
Not just a little.
It didn't just make, well, okay, now there's twice as much bread in the communist store.
And the family can be radically improved simply through the concept of voluntarism.
But I would not expect somebody...
I mean, I'm not the dumbest guy on the planet, and it took me a quarter century of rigorous hard work Therapy, self-knowledge, endless conversations, God knows how many books to even get to the voluntary family.
I would not, and I'm sort of trying to share it in a way that's palatable and consumable to other people, knowing what a radical and dangerous idea, it is the most radical and dangerous idea in the history of the world.
And people won't recognize that probably for at least another generation.
They won't recognize how unbelievably Radical and dangerous the idea of the voluntary family is and what the most essential and life-saving and civilization-saving idea it is.
Because until the family can be improved, the world cannot be saved.
And there is no way to break into the family and fix it.
Because the family is a domestic tyranny.
Mine is.
Yours is.
Yours was.
Yours will be.
It's just the way it is.
Biological dependence.
And there's no voluntarism in the family unit when the children are young.
But if the children are going to graduate into voluntarism, you have to treat them better when they're young, when you can't rely upon people to drive your children back into your arms when you privatize the family.
It becomes as unrecognizable as a mall is To a dingy, lined up, empty Soviet store.
And so I can understand where nihilism would come into people who view child abuse without knowing how it could be changed.
Because they say, well, I can't change families around me.
And it's true, you can't.
You absolutely can't.
But when you introduce the idea of voluntarism into the social ether, and it spreads, and as I said, I think I misspoke earlier, I said 100 million shows.
We are close to, or at, or slightly over 100 million downloads of this show.
100 fucking million downloads of this show.
And the voluntary family is out of the bag.
It's in the world.
And It certainly is going to be my most difficult but my proudest achievement.
I'm certainly not the first to think of it.
But I'm certainly standing firm in the place of sometimes significant pressure to the contrary to stand firm by the idea.
And I'm sorry.
I know it's uncomfortable people.
I know it's difficult people.
I get it.
I do.
I do.
Because I lived through the 70s where The voluntary marriage was, I mean, no-fault divorce, the voluntary marriage.
The voluntary marriage was harmful to my generation.
It was difficult.
It was necessary.
Certainly it was believed to be at the time.
It was considered a great step forward, and nobody's talking about going back.
But the voluntary family is a bigger idea than the end of slavery, and that sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, and I fully understand how ridiculous it sounds.
And I don't want to get into all the reasons to why that is the case.
But in the same way that slavery could not sustain itself when you couldn't force other people to go and catch your slaves and bring them back, the despotic family, the abusive family cannot sustain itself in the absence of the social pressure to go back and kiss the ring of your abusers until they're dead.
Once society stopped catching and returning the slaves, slavery ended.
And child abuse will end when parents truly understand that the social pressures that keep children around them no matter how badly they treat them will no longer be there.
I knew a woman many years ago.
She had not only been raped by her father, but her father had invited his friends to rape her as well when she was a child.
And she was still mulling over whether to invite him to a significant event in her life.
I...
I... Well, I don't want to get...
But that's the reality of where we were as recently as a number of years ago.
And there was not a giant chorus of hell no.
Even in such an unbelievably evil extremity of a childhood.
Well, voluntarism and the consequences of voluntarism is all that I care about and And you cannot have any more volunteerism in the world than there is in the family.
Does that help at all?
So Yeah.
You sound superbly unimpressed.
No, it did resonate with me.
And I think I never really thought of it as nihilistic.
Yeah, I don't really have a lot to add.
Yeah, and I think this is, again, why I think that learning about economics is so valuable, because it's in economics that voluntarism really shines, right?
Once you learn about the free market in goods and services, we can eventually start to think about the free market in terms of families.
But I never would have got there without studying economics.
And again, I don't know Daniel Mackler's education and so on.
I don't think he's done a lot of economics.
And so he probably just wouldn't have learned a lot about even the value of voluntarism in the economy.
All right.
I think I know when to stop.
Alright, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Have a good day.
Alright, up next is Brian.
Brian wrote in and said, I've had a history and currently am a quiet one in many social occasions and have a difficult time opening up with new people I meet, whether it's dating, work, family, etc.
How can I be vulnerable to the people I would like to know more about and have them know who I am?
Hi, Steph.
Hello.
Is my mic okay?
Yeah, you're not going to be quiet in this call, are you?
No, no, not at all.
I think after having said it out loud, it's like I'm uncomfortable to people that I haven't met before or in new interactions, rather than just I'm happy and outgoing with my close friends.
So make the case for me, Brian, that that's not wisdom.
What do you mean, I'm not following you?
Well, so if I say, listen, I'm nervous walking the African plains in the middle of nowhere in the jungle at nighttime, would you say, well, that's a problem that needs to be fixed.
Don't be nervous, right?
No, yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
So that's my awareness.
I'm just not too sure how to go about fixing it.
No, no.
Oh, boy.
We already had the first one.
Okay, so what needs to be fixed?
Maybe.
I'm just taking the devil's advocate position here.
I don't know what the answer is.
But first of all, you're saying that, look, I have a problem in that I'm nervous or shy around new people, right?
Okay?
And in your experience or in your thoughts, out of 100 people you meet, what's the proportion of good, boring, or bad?
That you're going to meet.
Those are the basic categories of human beings.
Good, bad, and boring.
Oh, now since I've listened to your show and really kind of taken in the philosophy bug, it's 98% maybe?
98% what?
Like, boring and kind of uneventful and not really deep conversations and, yeah, nothing that I can ever really talk to about what we would talk about now or kind of the FDR thing.
Oh, yeah.
So, it's like if you're on a plane and it's a long flight, you know, what are you going to talk about?
Now, I'm an idiot that way because I'll just go balls deep into social conversations even.
Like, I remember basically on a flight when I was in...
Gosh, where was I going?
Oh, it doesn't matter.
I was in the business world and I was going on a flight somewhere.
This woman sat down next to me and Nice young woman.
And we were chatting and she started bringing up religion.
And I'm like, no, really?
Did you say that to her?
I said, really?
What do you mean?
And she's like, oh, my parents are, I think, Mormons.
So I went into the history and this and that and the other.
Because...
I'm sorry.
Maybe I'm missing that biofeedback mechanism.
But to me, that's an opportunity, right?
I mean, to me, I feel like I'm really good at the Heimlich maneuver and everyone around me is choking on a fishbone.
I just wish I had more arms with which to give Heimlich maneuvers, right?
And I'm not going to deny someone a life-changing conversation because they might get upset.
Listen, if they're that upset, they can always go upgrade themselves to first class and go sit with those guys, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I'll just, you know, I'm going in.
And, you know, if she gets upset, I'll just put my headphones on and listen to an audiobook and take a nap.
Yeah, could you kind of give your insight on, like, I'm uncomfortable in those situations where it's like I kind of need more thick skin and not caring what too many people think about, like, my reactions or just my original thought or response to them.
Well, look, first of all, you don't know.
I mean, the fact that they're uncomfortable in the moment doesn't mean that they're not going to thank you later.
I mean, Lord, Mike, have you ever had a message from anyone that says, I really didn't like your show for quite a while?
But then...
We get those all the time.
You talk about this weird anarchy stuff, and I'm like, these people are crazy, but I like the research presentations they do.
And then one day I listened to a call-in show, and something clicked.
And now I think I kind of get it.
Hey...
Oh yeah, this show, this guy bugs me so much, I can't believe I'm still watching this.
I hate this guy, but I can't stop watching him.
You don't know, right?
So the fact that someone's uncomfortable now...
Let me ask you this.
Let's say you know someone is about to get shot, but if you stomp on their foot, they will bend down and the bullet will miss them.
Will you stomp on their foot?
Yeah, absolutely.
Are they going to be upset with you?
No.
Well, they will be until they see the bullet, right?
Yeah, not until afterwards, yeah.
I think you did that.
They'll be like, what the hell are you?
Whoa, did that bullet just miss me?
Oh, thank you so much.
You know, they'll be like thinking you're a complete asshole to like naming their firstborn after you, right?
Sure.
So, you know, causing someone discomfort to help them is okay.
I mean, there'd be no dentistry pretty much otherwise, right?
I mean it's my genuine belief that like scraping the shit out of your teeth was just something a cruel person invented and then they later found out it just happened to be beneficial.
Like, well, I'm a sadist.
I wonder if I can get people – I wonder if people could possibly pay me to scrape their gum line.
Oh, that's a delicious kind of pain, especially if they're – I got a giant Slurpee machine going sucking the spit out so their mouth is dry.
It would be really great if I could shine giant bright lights into their eyeballs too while I'm scraping their gum line.
Mwahaha!
If only I could masturbate while I'm doing this, the picture would be complete.
And then they're doing all this crazy shit to people saying, oh yeah, it's good for you.
And then they later find out, Jesus, you know what?
I think it actually is good for people.
I think it's not just about me getting my jollies by causing people unbelievable eye and gum pain.
I think it's actually good for people.
Well, isn't that a kicker?
I actually think that's how most of dentistry developed, but that's perhaps a story for another time.
So, causing people discomfort...
Is kind of...
Okay, Mike, should I do it?
What you just timed?
Oh, I demand.
I demand.
Do you want to do it?
No.
Go for it.
Are you sure?
I'm sure.
Okay, so we were talking before, yeah.
And I get people who will go, you know, talk about the government and so on.
Look, and don't get me wrong.
Like, I'm not like, you know, you crazy statist and against me argument and so on and all that.
Like, I mean, I'll, you know, build up to it because...
Important thing is to get the ideas across, not to be right in people's faces all the time.
So I'm not pulling out the against me argument with someone I just met on a plane or anything like that.
I mean, it might happen, but yeah.
So for me, it's like I start talking politics to people on the plane.
It's like, status on a plane?
I want these motherfucking statists off this motherfucking plane!
The TSA loves that, by the way.
I just want to say.
So, the important thing is, if other people's discomfort is what really matters to you, you could never be a dentist, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And that's fine.
Not everyone has to be a dentist, right?
But that would not be the profession for you.
Now, if other people's emotional discomfort matters to you the most, then maybe philosophy isn't a thing for you, at least in terms of like your social life, right?
But as far as caution around other people, when you are a philosopher or when you're into philosophy, you are dangerous to other people.
And I don't just mean like dangerous to the way they think or dangerous to their preconceptions.
You're dangerous to everything they know is their identity.
No.
Yeah, I definitely get that up with bringing things up just with family and just people at work too.
I'll give you my impression of how most people see somebody who's into philosophy when they come up to that person.
Are you ready?
Yeah, go for it.
Hi, can I disassemble your body?
And you're smiling the whole time, and you don't blink.
Mm-hmm.
That is most people's impression of a philosophy.
Have you signed your organ donor card I'd like to collect?
It rubs the lotion on the skin!
So does it come to a point where it's...
Be sure to step on the tarpaulin while I tell you about Huey Lewis and Genesis.
Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
So does it come to a point where it's...
I get to the point where it's...
I have the thinking in my head where it's kind of useless to bring it up.
No, no, no.
That's not your thinking.
That's other people's thinking.
No, yeah.
No, listen.
Other people, human beings as they are currently constituted, are manipulative.
Because everybody needs to get shit done and nobody's philosophical.
So when you need to get shit done and you're not philosophical, you're manipulative, right?
Like before science, priests were the ones who said what went down.
But because they had no objective methodology, all they had was self-interest.
But they couldn't portray it as self-interest.
So they had to make up a god that they pretended was everybody's It's remarkable how many gods actually say, give money to the priests.
I mean, it's weird how the priests who worship that god have a god that they worship who says, give money to the priest.
It's almost like...
Anyway, I think you get it.
So, in the absence of an objective methodology, everybody is pursuing self-interest but pretending it's not.
For the good of the party!
For the good of the country!
For sisterhood, you're my brother.
Everybody is pursuing self-interest and pretending it's some sort of objective good, some sort of universal good.
I'm merely here to represent the self-interest we all share and remind you of it and blah-de-blah.
And so human beings, as they're currently constituted in the absence of rational philosophy, are manipulative.
And so when you go up to someone and you start talking to them about philosophy, they – they don't want to be disassembled.
They don't want to be turned into bits of their former selves, put in a bag and lower it into lie or something, right?
And so they will – but they don't want to say that because to say that would be, oh, if you're a clear thinker, I'm incredibly constructed of bullshit.
And so if you start asking me rational, clear questions, then I can't survive or any of that because I'm bullshit with a side of gas bag topped up on a giant source of irrational superstition.
Nobody wants to say that.
So they have to get you to stop talking because they're being disassembled.
They have to get you to stop talking, stop using your word blades to carve me up into chum.
Not friend, but food to attract sharks, right?
So please stop talking because your words are disassembling me, but I can't tell you why.
So the best way to get you to stop talking is to exhibit so much discomfort that you become uncomfortable with what you're saying and so will stop talking.
Do you want to get into a personal situation with my family?
A lot of things that this is just on my mind from the earlier call.
Hang on, hang on.
Are you basically demonstrating manipulation as we speak?
Maybe, yeah.
Do I want to get into your personal stuff with your family?
Yeah.
Who might in fact want to get into personal stuff with his or her family?
I... Oh, it's me.
Because I was just thinking, well, I'm making these moral arguments.
I'm making these arguments about, but I'd really want to get into some personal stuff with this guy's family.
That's what I'm going to ask next.
Or is that you?
No, yeah.
Thanks for pointing that out.
Could you just try that again, but more direct and honest?
Yeah, no.
Thanks for pointing that out.
That's just what I was...
Okay, try it again.
More direct and honest.
Could I talk about a personal family situation that I've been thinking about?
That's not direct and honest.
That's asking for permission.
Okay.
Then I'm kind of lost right now.
Good, good.
No, this is why...
Because you've just ceded power to me, right?
And that's not bad or anything.
I'm just sort of pointing it out.
Right?
So, what is in your heart?
Do you have a preference to talk about something personal and to do with your family?
Yes.
Okay, so what's the most honest thing you can say to me?
I'm having trouble deciding what to do.
No, no, no.
Because the decision is only coming up because you have a desire, right?
Great.
So what is the desire?
A lot of what Morella hit up on.
No, no, no.
Let's go back to...
Now you're trying to hide...
What is your desire?
My desire is to get more rid of the anger that I have towards the parents.
Okay, but what was your desire that you masked by asking me if I wanted to do something?
Your desire was that you want to talk, you have a desire to talk about something personal to do with your family, right?
Correct.
Okay, so what's the most honest way you can tell me that?
Right now, I'm still at a loss by just being upfront about it.
Being honest.
So you could say, Steph, we were just in the middle of a conversation.
I appreciate what you're saying.
I had a sudden strong urge to talk about something personal to do with my family.
I would like to talk about something personal to do with my family.
Now, not, would you like to talk about something personal to do with my family, right?
Or, can I talk about something personal to do with my family?
Both of those are indirect ways of telling me that you have a sudden strong desire to talk about something personal with your family, right?
Correct.
And so...
And this is not bad, but those are both mildly manipulative.
The first one more so, the second one less so.
And so if you say...
They're very tentative.
So if you say to me, Steph, do you want to talk about something personal to do with my family?
It's like, I don't even know your family.
Why would that suddenly pop into my head, right?
And then I can say, well, no, I don't want to talk about something to do with your family.
Then what?
What do you then say?
Then it could go anywhere.
But then that avenue is cut off, right?
See, when you stay to desire, you can't be rejected.
When you ask permission...
You can.
Does that make sense?
No, that makes total sense.
Like if my daughter says, Daddy, will you buy me this candy bar?
I can say yes or no.
But if she says, Daddy, I really want this candy bar, what can I say?
No, you don't?
I can't say that.
And if I tried to, she'd say, you can't tell me what I want.
I've heard her say this to people.
You can't tell me what I like and don't like.
Which is true.
When you state a desire, you cannot be denied.
It doesn't mean that people then accede to every one of your desires.
It doesn't mean I have to buy her the candy bar, but I cannot reject my daughter who says, I want that candy bar.
I say, well, what about it do you like?
Have you had one before?
Do you like the wrapper?
I can ask her questions about it.
It doesn't mean I'm going to buy the candy bar or not buy it.
But when she says, I really want it, I say, wow, tell me more.
What do you like about it?
What do you think it will taste like?
Do you think it will taste like anything you've had before?
But state a desire.
That's the most honest thing that is occurring, right?
Correct.
Okay, so...
I'm sorry.
I know that this sounds like nitpicking to people.
This is really important.
No, thanks.
I apologize for doing that.
You don't have to?
I know that there was not a slightly, even a tiny bit of negative intent behind what you were doing.
So I appreciate you submitting yourself to the annoying cross-examination.
I appreciate that.
Okay, so give me a shot.
So when the impulse hit you, what would be the most direct way to say it?
Like I said before, that was my impulse.
Right, but how would you have said it to me, knowing what you know now?
Steph, I'm just thinking right now that I'd like to talk about this experience that I'm thinking about.
Would you like to be a part of it?
Yeah, I would certainly like to know.
At what point did that...
I know it's hard to remember now, maybe.
At what point did it come up right at the end of what we were just talking about, or somewhere halfway?
A little bit halfway.
Yeah.
I think being like fourth in the call, I was like, I have, I touched upon, or I feel like Morella's talk kind of hit home to me on a lot of situations that I've kind of, that I wanted to talk about too.
So that's just what I was thinking.
That's when it came up, like in the middle of when we were talking.
Right.
Because she, because we were talking about manipulation with Merle, right?
Correct.
So, what do you want to talk about with your family?
Kind of similars of having some, I guess, anger and also managing my anger, but I think it's their anger that I'm trying to manage, which has caused me just, for me, I feel exhausted trying to talk to them now.
Where it's like, one, I kind of just don't want to talk to them as much.
And whenever I do, it's like I just get stressed out.
I feel anger towards them and I don't know where to go.
You don't know where to go?
What do you mean?
Not where, like physically, but how to approach it and how to really kind of, I guess, manage it now.
But I know managing doesn't really help.
Because I'm trying to manage.
Oh yeah, no.
Managing is...
Managing is an act of contempt.
Right?
Managing is an act of contempt.
Managing adults.
Managing toddlers, obviously not.
But when you manage someone else's emotions, you are saying to them that you have no respect for them.
In fact, you are filled with contempt for them.
That they simply cannot handle.
Like, taxes is...
Contempt for the population.
You can't handle your own money.
You won't make wise decisions.
You won't actually choose to educate your children.
We have to take the money from you to do this.
Contempt.
Massive, massive contempt.
Tax is the mark of a civilized society.
No, taxes is the mark of massive contempt on the part of the elites towards the people.
Massive contempt.
And I don't like having relationships around where I have to manage people because I don't like experiencing contempt.
I think it's an ugly, difficult emotion, which, you know, if it's provoked, fine, but I don't have to have that voluntarily in my life.
But – so when do you think – No, I can't use that story.
You're not terribly direct with me, at least you weren't until I pointed it out.
Do you remember a time when you were more direct, or do you feel that that directness has become more difficult over the years with your family?
Yes.
Yeah, I currently don't.
I live 700 miles away from them, and I think I'm pretty much the one that has moved out of the state, where they're everyone.
I have two older siblings.
Nephews, and they're kind of all within, geographically, within 10.
I've realized that I'm not really like them in the way I view things, and I kind of, when I try and go back, and I've tried this for the past, like, six, seven months, and they're just not really listening, I think, and I just try and be as open as I can, but I feel like there's not too much use.
What happens if you are more direct?
A lot of uncomfortability for my parents and a lot of just blanket statements that really have no context of logical thinking or rational thought.
I've opened up to them where I wanted to talk about my past.
I don't remember a lot of things like my parents went through a divorce and they don't talk about any of the things and I have questions about it and they don't They say they're open to, for me, asking questions, but I know I'm not going to get the full entire truth from them because they're really not being proactive in the conversation as well.
Right.
Now, I would assume that when you were a kid, your parents Told you that sometimes doing something that was less comfortable or less pleasurable was important, right?
That was less comfortable?
Yeah.
I mean, or less pleasurable.
Doing stuff that's less pleasurable is important, right?
I mean, do kids want to do math homework or do they want to play computer games?
Correct, yeah.
My dad, he's pretty disciplined in something that he does.
Good, good.
Okay.
And so, listen, a lot of parenting...
I'm sure you remember, or if you become a dad, if you're not already, then you'll know very quickly.
A lot of parenting is extending the child's horizon of costs and benefits, right?
And stretching that out is the big...
It's like those Charles Atlas stretchy chest exercises.
Pull, pull up, stretch, stretch out, right?
So there's an old joke.
It's a comedian who makes this joke.
I have no idea who it is.
But...
He says something like this.
He says, I'm driving to the car.
And my daughter, who's young, is looking out the window.
She's got a big smile on her face.
And I say, hey, what are you thinking about?
And she says, candy.
And he says, oh, don't you miss being a kid?
I mean, I sit there and think about candy.
I'm like, oh, cavities, diabetes, fat.
Oh, man, I haven't been to the dentist in a while.
Oh, I've got to call the dentist now.
Oh, I hope there's nothing wrong with my teeth.
Oh man, I had a twinge the other day.
Like he says, I can't just sit there and think of candy and be happy.
And that's, I mean, that's obviously a bit neurotic.
But the whole point with being a dad and a mom is I think you're stretching out the child's cause and effect.
Right?
I mean, so it's like, yes, of course.
I remember when I was a kid, I'm like, I simply cannot wait until I have a job.
So I can buy an entire store's worth of candy.
And I worked it out.
It was one of my math exercises, which I did on my own.
Like back in the day, like God, when I first moved to Canada in 1977, I was just saying this to my daughter, candy bar cost 10 cents.
10 cents!
That's not that long ago.
30 years change.
And now it's like over a buck.
When I was even in junior high school, you could go to the Appian Way at the Don Mills Mall and you could get a slice of pizza for 75 cents and you could get a pop for 25 cents.
So for a buck, you could have a pretty decent lunch.
Now, tragically, I often didn't have that buck or any food in the home.
And this is a pretty sad story, but there was a fish and chips shop and they would sell you A bowl of batter for a dime.
Was there fish involved?
Absolutely not.
But you could get a bowl of batter, which basically you could just massage into your heart ventricles like Play-Doh to stop your heart.
You wouldn't want to do that when you're not a teenager.
I think they'll basically just kill you out, right?
But you could get...
Yeah, so you could even get some food for a dime.
But now it's...
What's it, 90% devaluation over a couple of decades?
Not that everything's gone up that much, but I remember I did the math.
I'm like, okay, well, my first job, I got $2.45 an hour.
Well, it's not my first job, but it's my first sort of job as an early teen at $2.45 an hour.
And candy bar, I think that was 20 cents.
I could buy this many candy.
So I could work for this long.
There were this many candy bars in the row.
I could buy at the whole store.
If I work for I don't know how many weeks or whatever, right?
And then, of course, by the time I actually had some money to spend on candy, I realized that it's not that great to eat that much candy, and so I didn't.
And so the stretching out of cause and effect and discipline, which is, you know, yeah, you've got to do your homework rather than play video games.
I mean, not that I actually did play the video games, but theoretically, and homework is bullshit, but that's what most parents will teach you.
Well, yeah, you've got to eat your vegetables.
I know chocolate tastes better, but vegetables are good for you, so that's what you should do, right?
And so the reason I'm bringing all this up is that if your dad and your mom spend a good deal of time, as almost all parents do, teaching you to endure discomfort for the sake of long-term gain, why wouldn't they do that with uncomfortable topics?
I mean, that's just the vegetables of conversation.
That's all it is.
It's just the vegetables.
Look, trivia and bullshit and sports and weather and politics, that's all the chocolate of conversation.
It tastes good and it's bad for you in too much, in too high a dose.
Trivia is just the chocolate of conversation.
Philosophy, depth, intimacy, self-knowledge, revelations, vulnerability, that's all the roughage and vegetables of conversation.
Yeah, maybe uncomfortable in the short run.
Everybody wants the chocolate, but you know it's good for you in the long run.
It's just – all it is is the sit-ups.
Nobody does sit-ups because they enjoy kissing their knees.
I mean that's just not why people do sit-ups.
People do sit-ups so that their bellies are flat.
And if you just sat around eating bonbons and sitting on the couch all day, people would say, dude, eat some decent food.
Get up, exercise, shower for God's sakes, right?
You'd say no because – I enjoy trivia and this is trivia.
And people would say, listen, man, I don't know what you call it.
It's bad for you, right?
And so if all you can talk about with people is inconsequential, unimportant, who cares what you want, so why'd you swallow your own head to conversations, then people are being ridiculously indulgent in their conversations and they're just eating and speaking junk food all day long and they're not doing the necessary roughage, sit-ups and vegetables of meaning, right?
But they don't believe that when it comes to conversation, right?
No, absolutely not.
And if you made that case, would that even be comprehensible to them?
No.
I brought up these things with my mother last week that I asked her what would happen if her and both of my sisters just sat down at a table and really discussed our past.
She just said, oh, this would be terribly uncomfortable for me.
I'm like, wow.
And look, but at least when you were a kid, you got to make the same excuse, right?
No, not at all.
I know, I'm being facetious.
So why the hell would it be a rule for a six-year-old but not for a 50-year-old?
Yeah, it's just a complete reverse.
Do you outgrow the need for discipline when you get older?
Were they being hypocritical?
Well, you know, we're imposing discipline on you because we're big and you're not big.
But if you try to impose exactly the same discipline on us when we get bigger...
Well, suddenly, our lack of preference for that which is necessary and healthy will trump everything.
So, don't have a lot of sympathy for your parents' viewpoint as far as this.
It's so obvious, right?
Don't do things which are uncomfortable, even if they're good for you and necessary.
And what's more necessary, vegetables or intimacy?
Intimacy, love, connection is more important than vegetables.
You can live without vegetables, not well.
But who the hell wants to live without intimacy?
Well, tragically, all too many people.
And so what happens if you push it?
Push it real good.
What happens then?
My mom cries.
My dad deflects.
Oh, your mom cries so that your daddy saddles up into the white knight.
You're making your mother cry.
Well, that's what happened last week with my stepdad.
My parents are divorced.
But yeah, that's when my stepdad came in and Saw her crying and kind of just did the big bad there and kind of threw me under the bus.
You're making the egg carrier upset.
No, yeah, exactly.
That kind of talk.
Bad penis carrier.
Right, okay.
Yeah, and he said, like, why can't we just talk about sports?
He brought up, like, he's pretty conservative, but he brought up, like, can we just talk about marijuana and politics and, like, Really, it's like, that's not what I really talked about over the past six years.
Sorry, did he say that he didn't want to talk about marijuana and politics?
No, he did.
He did.
He told me, like, why do you have to be so deep when I was talking to my mom about my nephew?
Right.
Why do you have to have substance in three dimensions?
We're supposed to be cardboard cutouts.
We're supposed to be flat.
We're supposed to be pictograms.
We're supposed to be spirogyra.
We're not supposed to be deep.
I'm so sorry.
I mean, I'm making fun of it, but it is a tragically common refrain.
Why do you have to be honest about what you think and feel?
Why don't you cover it up with useless sugary trivia like the rest of us?
Why don't you bury yourself in your own inconsequential dust like everyone else?
What are you doing with the pulse?
Offending the zombies!
Sorry, that's your family, but that's sort of how I feel about it sometimes.
No, and that just causes me so much frustration in trying to kind of uncover the past and make sure that I don't make mistakes.
Okay, but frustration.
So this is related to the anger that you've talked about, right?
Correct.
Where did you get this correct habit from?
I don't know.
I think it's just that I'm an accountant by day.
It's kind of annoying.
It doesn't mean that you're being annoying.
I'm just saying I find it kind of annoying.
Right.
It's kind of clipped and it's almost military and it's almost like you're an expert witness somewhere, you know?
Oh, I used to – like I was going to be in the Marines for a while, like after I graduated college.
Yeah, I'm just waiting for a couple of yeses and maybe a hoo-ah or two, just so you know.
It's kind of clipped and it's kind of distancing.
In my experience, I mean, it's just my thoughts about it.
It doesn't hugely matter.
Has anyone ever mentioned that habit?
No.
I catch myself saying, like, yeah, and right all the time, too.
Oh, I'm a right.
Right is my oxygen.
I do that to hypnotize people into agreeing with me.
What?
Mike?
Sorry.
I think I've been accused of that.
He says, right.
Only 8 million times.
That's why I'm agreeing with him.
You're linguistically programming people by saying, right with you.
I'm linguistically programming people to agree with me.
Right.
That's how we get 1 or 2% of people to donate.
It's important to donate.
Right.
Right.
Because it's that easy.
You don't actually have to study philosophy.
You just have to use the word right so often that people develop a facial tick or simply stop hearing it, one of the two.
But anyway.
So anyway, just the correct thing is just – it's an interesting verbal habit but it doesn't hugely matter.
It's just sort of curious about it.
When you listen – because we don't often get to hear ourselves recorded except for me who gets to hear myself recorded all too often.
But – Listen back.
It sounds very like you're clicking your heels and saluting somebody with a mustache somewhere.
I'm just saying.
I'm a little nervous and anxious.
Okay.
You're doing great.
You're doing great.
So, frustration.
Frustration, frustration, frustration.
Do you know what happens when somebody is going to freeze to death?
No.
What they experience?
No.
I can imagine.
They experience warmth and relaxation.
No, I know.
It's kind of counterintuitive.
So people who've frozen to death and then been revived or almost frozen to death or whatever, they, you know, I guess Walt Disney, if you want, they said, well, I experience great sleepiness, great warmth, and great relaxation.
And that's basically, if you don't mind me saying so, I guess if you were going to join the Marines, you don't mind the occasional F-bomb, when you're fucked.
When you're irrevocably fucked.
Like you're just, you're out of energy.
And so there's no frustration when you're completely fucked.
So frustration, I believe, is evidence of hope, right?
I mean, I know I use this analogy all the time and I should probably broaden it out a bit, but you know, if I want to be some ballerina or some ballet dancer, I'm not going to be frustrated because I can't do it.
I'm 48 and I have the flexibility Of a lamppost.
I actually just read this article the other day that is hugely relieving to me because I've never been able to touch my toes.
I make up for my lack of physical flexibility with mental gymnastics.
But no, I've never been able to touch my toes and people have always said to me my whole goddamn life, well, you just got to stretch.
You just have to stretch and you're fine.
You'll be able to touch your toes.
Just stretch, man.
I did have lumbago when I was growing up with my legs.
I think I got my legs from my dad and my Hamstrings for my mom because my leg bones were growing way faster than my tendons.
I had to have these ridiculously hot baths because they ached a lot.
I ended up relatively tall, taller than average, but it was kind of uncomfortable.
My whole life, I've been like, I can't touch my toes.
I can't even get close.
I had a friend of mine.
He can push his face into his knees with his legs straight.
It makes me kind of queasy.
It's like, are you broken?
Like, what's happened?
Like, how is that possible?
And I see, like, these dancers who, like, you know, anyway, dancers, like, I'm like, I don't even know what that's like.
Like, I can't even conceive of that.
I'm so not flexible.
Anyway, I just read this article the other day that said, you know what?
You can't stretch out your muscles or tendons.
They don't get longer.
All that happens is you dull your body's pain response with repetitive stretching to the point where it can do stuff it couldn't do before.
Basically, thinking that you can lengthen your muscles and tendons by stretching is the equivalent of saying, well, I can win a boxing match if I'm on heroin because I don't feel pain.
It doesn't make you a better boxer.
It's just dulling your sensations of getting hurt.
And that's a huge...
I mean, it's not a huge relief for me, but it's just like, ah!
Ha!
I knew it!
Because, I mean, when I was in theater school, we did...
We did stretching for like 45 minutes every day, and I never got a bit more flexible.
It was nice.
I still stretch every day, but I don't get more flexible.
Shit.
Too far into the woods, no breadcrumbs back.
The hell was I talking about all that shit for?
Flexibility, stretching.
I can't remember.
What were you talking about before?
Yeah, I was just going to say where we were heading.
Oh, frustration!
Sorry, sorry.
I just asked to interrupt it.
Yeah, so I don't have the flexibility and I'm not going to be frustrated by it because I'm not going to do it.
I have no chance.
No chance.
Never going to happen, right?
I am never, ever, ever going to play a high school student in a movie unless that movie is, oh my god, this is the least healthy high school student we've ever seen in our life.
He must be a victim of some horrible disease or he must have been out of the sun for 18 hours a day since he was born, right?
And...
So frustration is when you have a chance, and when you don't have a chance, you get the wonderful joy of resignation, right?
So frustration is your belief that you have a chance to affect the outcome, and it drives you to try to affect the outcome, right?
So then the question, as it was for the lady before, what are your odds to affect the outcome of these conversations?
After six months of trying, and they're not much, slim to none.
Right.
Well, I don't think that it's been six months.
Okay.
Children love deep topics.
It's been my experience.
Almost universally.
Children love deep topics.
Right?
So, every time, every time, I ask my daughter...
What would you like to chat about?
It's some big thing.
I mean, I can't think of a single exception.
She's never said, the weather!
Ponies!
Right?
Never.
And I'm going to get into the topics, but it's always something that has some substance.
You know, different degrees of substance, but it's never sports!
You know, or Leggings!
I don't know.
I mean, what do people talk about?
I don't know.
I don't know anymore.
I mean, what the average muggle talks about?
I don't have a clue.
I mean, I just don't talk to those people.
But kids love – and it's not – I mean, and it's not just her.
Like, kids love deep topics.
And – So I don't think it's just been over the last six months that you've had trouble with deep topics.
Kids come with deep topics.
They're trying to figure out the world.
They're trying to figure out their culture.
They're trying to figure out their place in the universe, what the universe is, where it came from.
They're puzzled and curious and excited and frightened of everything.
So I don't think it's just been the last six months.
You may have forgotten the earlier time, but depth has to be scared out of children.
It has to be bullied out of children, in my opinion and experience.
But a lot of us don't remember the early curiosity that was pushed back.
It may not be a first round of this, which is why it may be so alarming.
Yeah, it kind of is.
You put it in a good perspective there.
You can't make people...
You know this, right?
You can't make people do anything.
I mean, I have a fair amount of credibility, I think, with people who call in.
I can't make them do a damn thing.
I can't make them do a damn thing.
Will you go to therapy?
Will you call us if you go to therapy?
Tell us you're going to go to therapy.
No, I've been saying...
No, I don't mean you.
I mean, maybe that's fine too, but that's what I say to people sometimes, right?
Sure.
I've been listening to the show for five years.
Have you been to therapy?
No!
Never dawned on me.
I've never thought about it.
Well, I have an ACE of 9 million, but I figured I'd just work it out with plasticine.
Boogie!
Right?
Yeah.
Actually met people face to face.
Love your show!
We're a married couple!
We're prison guards!
Mmm.
One of those statements, I believe.
The other two can't both be true.
Anyway.
No, to their credit, they were looking at getting out, and we talked quite a bit about that.
So many conversations.
Anyway, so it may not be your first round, but I think you need to objectively evaluate using your full-on Vulcan, pointy-eared, rational side.
You know, given that you can't make people do what you want them to do, given that when you pressure people, they push back, you can be inviting, but you cannot be commanding in relationships, right?
The only thing that makes you commanding is a gun.
Everything else is wooing.
And given, I assume, that you're not going to try and shoot your way into depth with your family, well, it's a deep wound.
It's the only depth you're getting around here is my second chest wound.
So you're not going to aggress your way into depth with people, so all you have is stating your preferences.
Now, I tell you, one of the most agonizing things to do for most people is to state their preferences and then be quiet.
We state our preferences and then we want to manipulate the outcome and we want to make people do stuff and we want to hedge and we want to, right?
To state your preferences and then be quiet.
Even after some coaching, you couldn't do that earlier.
No criticism, I'm just pointing it out.
Because you said, I felt a strong desire to talk about my family and then there was a very slight pause and then you said, would you like to participate in that?
Right?
You couldn't You weren't comfortable with just stating your preferences and then being quiet.
Right?
I would like to talk about some family issues and then being quiet.
It's a very powerful thing to do.
Refusing to jig the outcome, refusing to stack the deck, refusing to try and control what other people come back to you when you state a preference.
Good salespeople Not that I'm saying this is sales.
Good salespeople know how to do that.
I would like you to buy this product.
It's an odd thing to do.
State of preference and be quiet.
Because that's not interfering with what's happening.
That's not manipulating, right?
I would like you to go on a date with me.
Will you?
Right?
It's hard to do, right?
Yeah.
It'll be fun!
We'll go kayaking!
We'll go hang gliding!
What would you like to do?
I mean, it's hard.
I find you very attractive.
It's hard.
State of preference.
I put out a donation ask video, which I do a couple of times a year, just to remind people, I like food!
Sorry, I probably just yell at people.
Put out a donation ask video, right?
You can go read the comments.
Oh my god!
I mean, what planet are these people on?
You're begging!
It's like, no.
See, begging is when I don't have anything of value to offer.
Right?
If I'm just some guy standing on the street saying, give me something for a coffee.
Will you give me money for a coffee?
I'm not giving you anything in value in return.
I'm not giving anything of value to me up front.
It's like if I go to a pay what you can, like here, they have these...
Shakespeare in the Park, and they do – well, I think you can figure it out.
I can't believe I can explain what Shakespeare in the Park is.
They disinter his body.
They prop it up, and then they make it one of the extras in The Walking Dead.
Season 12 million.
But it's pay what you can.
So you go watch a show, and then on the way out, there's a big jar you put your money in.
They're begging.
No, they just put on a show.
You watched it.
Pay what you can.
Pay what you want.
And I just state a preference.
I would like you to donate.
And here's the reasons why.
We need the show to survive.
We need the show to be here and can't be here if people don't donate.
So I would really like you to donate.
I think what we're doing is very important.
We're helping the world do it.
We're just stating a preference, giving some reasons, then I shut up.
So yeah, state a preference and then be quiet.
And people get very discomforted by that because they're so used to being manipulated that when you don't manipulate them, it really freaks them out.
I'm going to continue to disassemble you.
No!
Shoot him in the knees!
Shoot him in the knees!
He's begging!
But that's my suggestion.
Lonely relationships.
I'd like sex.
I told you to stop asking me sad stuff.
Actually, hang on, Mike, can we try that again?
I'd like sex!
Right.
Well, now that you mention it, shit!
Stare into my googly eyes!
I am caught.
Trust in me?
I never thought I'd find a 48-year-old man attractive, but, you know, what the hell?
I find myself strangely attracted to that giant speckled biodome you call ahead.
Ooh, 60 frames a second.
Let me see it again.
It's like you're in the room with me.
I am in the room with you.
Right.
Now what is your bank account?
Right.
You're going to break me up.
You know what we should call this call-in show?
Right. Right.
Right.
Done.
Sorry, who are we talking to again?
Sorry, Brian.
But no, I mean, in all seriousness, I mean, with your family, if you want to know what the status is, where things are, simply you state your preferences, state your desires.
They're not commandments.
Nobody has to do anything you want.
People don't have to donate to this show.
There's no compulsion.
I think they should.
freedommaderadio.com slash donate.
But nobody has to.
I stayed a preference and I showed up.
And with your family, if you want to break the cycle of manipulation and of the jockeying for power, I'll do a whole show about that at one point, not on your ear, but the jockeying for power is pretty much all that happens in relationships.
In most relationships.
And so you're trying to get your needs met, and they're trying to get their needs met.
And where the needs are conflicting, they're simply a jockeying for power.
There's not a negotiation which aims for a win-win.
There's, well, who gets sacrificed?
And of course, you're the kid, so you get sacrificed.
That's just the way it works for most families.
Well, you have the least power, and therefore, your needs don't get met.
And so to avoid the jockeying for power, you state your preferences, and then...
You see what comes back, right?
If you want to know how good your tennis partner is, you hit the ball to them and see what they do.
Run around and grab their arm and swing it and then run back to your...
I mean, that's not playing tennis.
I don't know what that is.
It's very fast, though.
But you hit the ball and you see what happens.
You hit the ball and you stop hitting the ball.
You express a preference and stop.
That's what my daughter does.
I want mac and cheese for dinner.
And, you know, there's an old movie with James Woods called The Boost.
It's a very good movie.
It's a great performance with him, particularly at the end.
He's selling a condo.
The guy agrees to buy it, and he's still listing off the features.
And his manager says, know when to stop selling.
You made the sale.
So, shh.
Right?
And, again, I know this sounds like a cheap...
Like, oh, it's manipulative.
It's not.
It's as honest as you can be.
I would like to talk about some issues that happen in this family.
They're important to me.
And then you don't try and control what happens next.
You give people space to react as they are.
You don't try and make a case as to why people should listen to you.
You don't say how it'll be beneficial to them.
You don't say how important it is to the long-term happiness and health of the family.
You don't say that it's what they owe you.
You don't say it's what they deserve.
You don't say, well, I listened to you and therefore now you have to listen to me.
You don't try and control the outcome.
You state your needs or your preferences and be open-minded and curious about how people receive it and what they do.
It is astonishingly powerful.
And...
It breaks the cycle of manipulation.
Sorry, Brian, go ahead.
No, I was just going to reaffirm that I haven't been...
I can't think of too many situations that I've really done that and really been comfortable with it.
Good.
Yeah, anything that breaks habits in conversation is good.
Habits where you kind of know what the other person is going to say and I think when we're really alive and listening and processing both ourselves and other people, if you just focus on other people, then you're just compliant to what they want or rebellious to what they want and you're not there.
If you just focus on yourself, the other person isn't there.
You listen to yourself, you listen to other people.
Learning that mutuality of listening to yourself and others is a challenge and it's something I'm still, of course, working on.
It's why you call in, why people listen to this show so much because I think it There's an aliveness to both sides of the conversation, usually on both sides.
And anything which breaks the script, you know, so many relationships come with the script.
You say this, I say that, you say this, I say that, and so on, right?
Jesus, I'm going to tell you a terrible story.
Sure.
When I was 19, I was working...
I can't remember.
It was either...
So I did it for a year and a bit when I was 19 and did another...
Four months or so when I was 20.
But I was doing this gold panning and all that.
And...
I won't tell that other story.
My Naked in the Woods story is a story for another time.
But this one was...
I was staying at this hunting lodge.
We were just getting ready to go and set up camp in the woods.
Staying at this hunting lodge.
And...
This elderly couple...
I guess they were elderly to me, probably in their early 60s.
This was, of course, elderly to me in my 20s.
Now it's like, hey, what's around the corner?
But it was about the worst married couple I've ever, ever heard.
And I grew up in a pretty rough section of town.
Terrible.
I mean, and their fights were like...
I was...
A joker back then.
I just go run for like two hours.
Just get out of that place.
Because they just like scream at the top of their lungs at each other.
And it was always the same shit over and over and over again.
Script.
It was a script.
It was a script.
It would always culminate the same way.
And the guy, the old guy, would scream at his wife, Oh yeah?
Well the only thing I know is, your sister gives way better blowjobs than you.
Okay.
What can you say?
I mean, this was just a script every night or two.
It was every night or second night to just go through this escalation and that's how it would end.
And we're like, oh my god.
Oh my god.
This is like a scene out of a Charles Bukowski novel.
It's a scene out of Barfly.
And that's a script.
That's a script.
I mean, they're probably dead now probably, but they're probably in hell now.
All I know is your sister gives way better blowjobs than you do.
You know, backstory is important.
There are some backstories you simply don't want to know.
In fact, you'd gouge that backstory out of your brain with a rusty spoon.
Anyway, so I'm not obviously comparing your family to this mess, but whatever you can do to break the habit and when you simply state your preferences without going further – If there's a habit of trying to control other people's responses, trying to manipulate, that breaks that.
And usually what happens is a lot of manipulation rushes in, but you get to see it really clearly.
When there's something going on in a relationship, and it's negative or dysfunctional, you want to make sure that you're not contributing to it.
You want to make sure that you're not perpetuating it or setting it in motion, because then you can see it much more clearly.
Yeah, I mean...
I mean, yeah, when I was in a relationship that was not working out years ago, I was just like, you know what?
I'm not going to raise my voice anymore.
I'm not going to raise my voice.
I'm going to be calm, I'm going to be reasonable, I'm not going to get provoked.
And the beautiful thing about that was then I just, I got to see how crazy the woman was.
Because before, she could always say, well, but you yelled too.
I'm like, well, yeah, I guess I did, so, you know, can't really, you know, glass houses, blah-de-blah.
Hey, Billy Joel theme for tonight.
Anyway, And, but when I stopped doing that, I was like, oh wow, she really escalates.
And then she accused me of provoking her by not escalating.
I'm like, oh, okay.
So, I am responsible for your escalating if I escalate.
I am also responsible for your escalating if I don't escalate.
Let me see if I can figure out the common thread.
Oh my god.
It's like decrypting the Rosetta Stone.
I can't do it.
So, yeah, I mean, so if you're concerned about, you know, manipulation or over-management, just state your needs, don't contribute to it, resist the urge to do it, and you can see the thing for what it is much more clearly.
Okay, great.
Yeah, thanks.
Thanks a lot for that.
You're very welcome.
Let me say this real quick about breaking the script.
You know, something that's really powerful that I've certainly noticed with Steph, like, going out to lunch, Steph will have the most fascinating conversations with, like, the waiter or waitress that I would never even think to have.
And just, they'll say something and show genuine curiosity.
It's like, oh, well, tell me more about that, or why is this, or why are you doing this now?
And, like, you could see, like, Wait a minute, this is not how this transaction is supposed to go.
The train has jumped the tracks!
This is unfamiliar territory.
And there's something about that genuine curiosity and interest in other people that Completely breaks the script.
And I've always found it fascinating, like, you know, going with stuff to the store.
You know, that's something I strive to be better at.
Where I'd like to do more is just show that genuine curiosity to other people because, God, people are fascinating creatures.
And there's so many pleasant conversations and cool little things you can learn about people in general and, you know, just things that make your day all the more pleasant as well by having those kind of interactions which definitely break the script.
So...
Breaking the script is a good rule to live by.
Yeah, thanks for that.
I appreciate it.
It's definitely kind of hit home.
Well, let us know how it goes if you can.
And I'm going to pack it in because we're pushing midnight.
3.43!
I was trying to keep it under four hours because, you know, four hours just seems like a long time.
Are you seriously going to tease people with a naked-in-the-wood story and then go off the air without talking about it?
Do you want the Naked in the Wood story?
The people in the chat seem rather disappointed that you would tease the Naked in the Wood story, or as I like to call it...
You know why?
It's good, too, because now that I'm closer to 50 than 40, or even 45, I better tell it before I forget it.
Okay, so the Naked in the Wood story.
So I was actually working with three women, and they were very...
Strong and nice women got along really well.
So...
But they were supposed to be in town.
They were supposed to be in town getting stuff that we needed.
They were supposed to be gone for quite some time.
Turns out, I think one of them forgot their wallet to come back.
Anyway, so I'm in the camp and I am in a very sandy part of the woods.
And...
We have set up the tent for processing the soil samples.
But anyway, it's a lot of water.
And my job for the afternoon was while they went into town – I don't want to go into town.
And I was supposed to dig a trench from the water processing hut to the lake and lay pipe down to get the runoff from all of that.
Anyway, and I had to get it done.
Because all the samples were coming in the next day and we had to get started to process and just basically swirling in a deep dish with ridges to look for the gold and all that.
Anyway, it's really sandy and it's soft sand.
So like I'm going in like up to like my knees sometimes and I'm in a pair of track pants and the sand keeps getting into my track pants and basically keeps riding up because I'm digging, I'm pulling stuff up and I'm getting sanding and my butt crack, I'm extending my nads.
I'm basically...
When I chewed or blinked, I made gritty noises.
I just got so covered in sand, I had to get all this work done.
And it was raining.
I started raining really hard.
And so now, my track bands were falling off because they were so heavy with sand.
I'm getting sand everywhere.
And because my clothes are covering my body, the sand just keeps getting further and further into my innards.
I thought it was going to start coming out my nipples.
I'm breastfeeding the planet's sand milk.
So I did what any sensible person who's perhaps been away from a city for too long would do.
I took my clothes off.
Do you know why?
Because they were supposed to be in town.
You still sound bitter about this.
No, I just really want to make that point in case I hadn't been clear about that.
And look, it was a perfectly sensible thing to do.
I'm not circumcised.
No.
It was a perfectly sensible thing to do because the rain washed all the sand off my body while I was working.
And it was raining so hard there weren't any bugs because mosquitoes.
Anyway.
So I was much more efficient.
I was much happier.
I wasn't being weighed down.
My pants were hanging down.
All the sand was washed off me by the rain.
It was great.
Until.
It wouldn't be a story unless there was an until.
Until...
Two trucks came up.
One was the women who came back because they forgot their wallet.
And behind them was the regional director who came up a day early to check out the camp and see how we were doing.
Yeah.
So, from what I heard later from the story, they basically just saw two extremely white buttcheeks heading off into the woods at high speed and Because I had left my clothes up where the hut was.
Because I took them off so I could dig my way down to the lake.
So basically, I ran from the regional director and these three young women who, whatever, I mean, did not deserve that.
And I hid in the woods, naked, until it was safe.
To come out.
Steph, would that qualify as a microaggression?
I'm just kidding.
It was cold!
No, wait, wait, what are you talking about?
A maxoaggression.
And you don't know when to come out, because I didn't know if anyone had seen me.
I found out later that they had.
But I didn't know.
So I didn't know, because the guy came to check out, hey, the camp, the equipment, the tent.
So I didn't know where they were, and I certainly didn't want to go out and find my clothes and When people were just sort of hanging about, you know?
So...
What do you think about in moments like that as you're hiding in the woods, naked?
What crosses your mind?
Well, one of the things I remember thinking about was that it might have actually been a good idea to go into town.
Because I may have gone a bit native at this point, like to the point where you're thinking, it's Sandy!
I'm getting naked!
Yeah!
It may be a bit Lord of the Flies at that point.
Like, it might not be a decision you'd make if you'd had any contact with civilization over the past, say, six weeks.
You try and turn a coconut into a radio.
That's when you know you hit the breaking point.
Yeah, going native is a big risk when you work into the woods for too long.
So after that, you know, after apologizing to everyone, after that, I definitely decided not to...
I decided to go into town wherever possible.
That became sort of the play.
Hey, anyone want to go to town?
I'm going to town.
Go to town?
Let's go to town.
Because I recognize that you can devolve relatively quickly to the point where it just seems perfectly rational because it's raining.
You take your clothes off.
I mean, it seemed like it would have been a perfectly sensible decision had not these two events occurred.
I think everyone got their money's worth for that story.
Yeah, well...
There's more up-northerly kinds of stories, but perhaps...
Oh, the gold panning years.
Lots of good material.
Lots of good material for the gold panning years.
No question about it.
So, yeah, anyway.
Sometimes it doesn't seem like that hard a job that I do now compared to some of the stuff that I was doing up then.
Yeah, there was some hard work up there, I'll tell you that.
Yeah.
So, anyway, thanks everyone so much for a wonderful, wonderful evening of conversation and freedomainradio.com slash donate to keep the show going, to keep the show alive.
It's really, really important.
If you listen and consume, please help out with all the various costs, including pants.
For me, I think 2015, we have years of – it's the year of the pants.
I think that's been voted on by everyone except me.
