2980 Unobtanium, One World Government and The Moon - Call In Show - May 23rd, 2015
Introduction: The Problem with Nature Documentaries | Question 1: In committed relationships, physical cheating is obviously a no-go, but other things like 'flirting with the opposite sex' can exist in a grey area. How can one rationally delineate boundaries in romantic relationships? | Question 2: Raising children with violence actually releases chemicals causing apoptotic cell death in the active areas of the brain during violent incidents, similar to forming a logic gate in a silicon structure of a computer. Isn’t this smoking gun evidence proving that one should follow the non-aggression principle? | Question 3: I am having trouble finding a definition of property that would explain ownership of finite things that are not products of a person's labor. The definition that I have heard provided by Stefan is "property is something that is created," and I agree with this statement, but I am not sure that it explains how something that was not produced by a person can be exclusively used by that person.
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyne from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
Welcome to the Saturday Night Philosophy Show, 8pm Eastern Standard Time.
I hope that you can call in and chat about whatever is on your mind.
The more criticism, the more debate, the more contradiction, the better.
Those who disagree get to the front of the line.
But a little something on my mind before we dive in to the listener questions and calls tonight.
I'd just like to say something to the people who make nature documentaries.
Yes, you know who you are.
I'm not going to get into particular names, Edinburgh, but...
You know who you are.
And I'd like to tell you from the perspective of a father, maybe some of you are fathers, maybe you just don't really get this perspective, but let me tell you what it's like watching a nature documentary with your daughter.
We don't watch a lot.
And I always turn them off about eight and a half minutes before the end.
And do you know why?
Because this is every single nature documentary you have ever or will ever see.
It goes a little something like this.
Nature.
It's beautiful.
It's complex.
It's magical.
Plants look like snakes when they're sped up.
Frogs look like weird anorexic ballerinas as they fly through the air.
Insects are an ecosystem of magical complexity and pseudo-intelligence.
The rainforest is alive.
The coral is alive.
There are vampire squid in the depths.
And it's all too amazing for words.
It's staggeringly beautiful.
It's furry.
It's fuzzy.
It's cute.
It's got big eyes.
It makes mating calls.
It's basically one giant porn fest that goes on under a rainforest canopy from dawn till dusk and all night long.
It's beautiful.
It's wonderful.
It's amazing.
It's magical.
And over the course of the next 44 and a half minutes, your child...
And even you, you hot-hearted middle-aged bastard, you are gonna fall in love with nature.
You are gonna just want to go and kiss nature.
You may, in fact, be tempted to dry hump nature's leg.
It's that appealing, that complex, that ancient, that beautiful, that magical.
And you're killing it.
That's the part.
I always turn it off before we get to that part.
Because basically, it's like taking a kitty down to an animal shelter.
She loves cats.
You say, oh, look at this beautiful kitten.
Oh, isn't this beautiful kitten?
Look, big eyes, little whiskers, little furries, little tickle its belly.
And then you twist its neck because global warming and hunting and pollution and you're killing the kitty.
So basically, it's 42 minutes...
Of making you fall in love with everything about nature and then saying, by the way, that car of your daddy's that's parked in that garage might as well be driving backward and forward over these baby turtles with your daddy laughing maniacally in joy at crushing the little exoskeleton rat bastards.
So I'm just telling you, I'm a little annoyed, as you may be able to tell if you read between the lines, a little annoyed at these echo sadists who basically make you fall in love with nature and then say, you're killing it.
Look at this blue whale, this magnificent animal, up from the blowhole like a geyser of mammalian possibilities.
It rises and they're being killed one at a time!
What do you think?
The sharks are pretty?
We cut off their fins and throw them into the deep!
Like the rainforest?
It's being bulldozed!
You're killing everything!
We made you love it!
Now you gotta watch it die!
So, love the nature!
I'm very much an environmentalist, but can you please stop making my daughter fall in love with stuff and then tell her that daddy's basically killing it?
A little tricky!
Maybe, just maybe, hold off a little bit on the strangling the kiddies that you made the kid love.
They can wait till they're a little bit older.
What do you think?
It's just a thought.
Just a thought.
Because right now it seems like, oh, nice little cuddly nature you got there.
Be a real shame if something happened to it now, wouldn't it?
So give money to the Sierra Club or the baby seal gets it between the eyes with a 22.
Would that be nice for you?
Okay.
Oh, the money didn't come up soon enough.
Well, maybe there's a couple other baby seals you might like to think about saving.
I don't know.
The hostage of the cute, cuddly, and magnificent, and the implied death sentence, the macabre genocide of all that moves and breathes at the end of every single one of these nature shows is driving me a little crazy.
That's it for my rant.
Thank you for your attention.
Let us move on with the show.
All right.
Well, up for us today is Alfie.
Alfie wrote in and said, In committed relationships, physical cheating is obviously a no-go, but other things like, quote, flirting with the opposite sex can exist in a gray area.
How can one rationally delineate boundaries in romantic relationships?
That's from Alfie.
Hello, Alfie.
Hi, Stefan.
You don't make any nature documentaries, do you?
I've never made any.
Good.
Then okay, we can chat.
Oh, fantastic.
Okay, so what's this flirting thing?
What is this flirting thing?
Well, I was thinking, you know, like there are things that are definitely cheating and then things that, you know, kind of going that way, but maybe not cheating.
And it's kind of a question I was wondering about as far as, you know, how strict is too strict in regulating your own behavior and trying to, you know, have virtue and Conduct yourself, respectively.
And why is this the question for you?
This is the question for me mainly.
It got me thinking, well, my friends and I are longtime fans of yours and Mike's, and also basically all of us are kind of culturally conservative anti-statists in the tradition of Hoppe, Rothbard, and in this way.
And then I was thinking...
Basically, I think last week or two weeks ago, my girlfriend was saying an old friend was in town and she was going to have dinner with him at night.
Oh, Alfie, you're the guy who was formerly in one of the colonies and now is in the mothership, right?
Sorry?
You were formerly in America and now you're in England.
Oh yeah, exactly.
I don't want to get into details if you truncated it for a reason, but do you mind if I mention what I remember?
Yeah, go ahead.
I'm happy to talk about anything.
Okay, so your girlfriend of 15 months, you went to live with her in London where you're pursuing...
An MBA. And she had an old friend, which is a friend from a time past, I assume not some sugar daddy, who came to town and said, Hello, Sila.
Love to take you out for dinner.
I don't know if he's Australian or even cliched.
So this fellow wanted to take your girlfriend out for dinner.
And she says, Oh, he's such a flirt.
He flirts with me all the time.
And she's like, But I'm still going out for dinner with him.
And then you got all testicled up, right?
Yeah, I mean, well, I think I perhaps sensationalized it a little bit in the email because I wrote it when I was kind of annoyed about it.
Maybe I should have slept on it.
But yeah, basically...
I think in retrospect, now that I have some perspective, yeah, it was basically an old friend where she was on a program, I guess, a study abroad program, and they were friends and they were going to do lunch or something and then it ended up So she was studying abroad and he was studying abroad, if you know.
Aren't we all?
Alright, so I don't think that you being upset is at all problematic.
In fact, I think your new attitude is problematic, not your old attitude, and I'll make a case for that in a bit.
Yeah, yeah.
So this is a guy she met when she was studying abroad at the same age?
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know a lot about it, but yeah, I think so.
And are you and your girlfriend the same age?
She's three years younger than me.
Okay.
And did this dinner go off?
Did she have dinner with him?
No.
Oh, I thought she did.
No.
No, it never transpired.
Why?
Well, I think the day of, she...
I don't know.
I think she just...
We talked about it a bit, and then she actually invited me to come with.
She invited you?
Yes, yeah.
Not the guy?
No, no.
Wait, the fact that you're laughing is why you were annoyed earlier, and rightly so, I think.
Yeah.
A penis is used for two things.
Number one, insemination.
Number two, peeing to mock territory.
But we'll get to that in a second.
But...
Alright.
So she decided not to and you don't know why?
Yeah, I think she wasn't feeling good the day of.
She actually invited me along initially, then she wasn't feeling good the day of, and then after that she...
But she wasn't feeling, sorry, she wasn't feeling well?
Yeah, she was feeling sick, and then later she said, you know, we can all reschedule and we'll, the three of us, or four of us, like multiple, a group of us will basically, you know, we'll reschedule and we'll go out, you know, as soon as we can basically.
Does she not admit that the reason this guy wants to take her out for dinner is because he wants to have sex with her?
I feel like, you know, it's...
I don't know.
I guess it goes back to the old thing.
Can women and men, you know, just be friends?
I don't know.
I don't want to speculate.
Well, you know, we talked about that before, but one indication that a man doesn't want to be friends with a woman is he keeps hitting on her.
That is one indication.
You know, if somebody keeps stealing from my store, it's possible that they want to pay the next time they come in, but I'm not counting on it.
Yeah.
To be fair though, I mean, I just want to be very honest.
I don't know that necessarily that was the case.
I don't know that it was someone who was constantly hitting on her.
Like I said, I was in a bit of...
Didn't she say that he hit on her?
Not really, but I think in the past I've gotten the impression that that happened.
But no, she never really said that and maintains that it's just like a friendly scenario, which I honestly believe.
So if it's a friendly scenario, why wouldn't he invite both of you?
Right, yeah, and that's what...
I'd like you to come for dinner.
Please don't bring that boyfriend of yours.
I'd like to loo you in a dark alley.
For God's sakes, leave your bodyguards at home.
Right, that's not the way that things should go, right?
Yeah, I think so.
I think sometimes you have, you know, I have certain friends that are women and I have certain things in common with them that Maybe I'd like to see them alone.
It's not a romantic thing, but I certainly feel that there are certain occasions where I would just want to see some of my friends who are girls alone, and I maybe wouldn't invite my girlfriend, and there's no bad intentions or anything.
I guess I was just toying with that in my head, wondering when is it appropriate and when is it not.
Is lunch okay?
Why would you want to get together with your female friends without your girlfriend?
My background is classical music, and I used to go to a classical music conservatory.
For example, I have a lot of friends that are really into classical music, but my girlfriend, she's not into it.
It's not her thing.
If I wanted to hang out with some of my classical music friends, for example, and I wanted to talk about that, for my girlfriend, it's not her thing.
I feel like maybe it would bore her, so I would probably just have a better time hanging out with these people alone, I guess.
Right.
Okay.
Got it.
Got it.
Is it the case with your girlfriend and this fellow that they have things in common, like your thing with classical music, that would be something that you wouldn't be interested in?
No, that's a great question.
I don't necessarily know the honest answer to it, but that would be a really important thing to find out, definitely.
Right.
Okay.
And your girlfriend doesn't mind when you hang out with your female classical music friends?
It hasn't really come up on my end so much, but she certainly wouldn't mind.
I know she wouldn't.
She would definitely encourage me to a certain extent, I think to maybe a reasonable extent.
But yeah, I think that we trust each other a lot and we talk about this stuff.
We both read Real-Time Relationships and And, you know, she and I are both really committed, you know, to each other.
She didn't want in on this call, right?
She's sleeping.
We're in London, and I think she would have joined.
I'm pretty positive she would have, but she's been sleeping for a while, and I'm going to wake her up.
Okay.
All right.
So your question is around, is there an acceptable level of flirting when you're in a committed relationship?
Yeah.
It was, I guess, in a more general sense, like, you know, where...
Where should I draw the line?
I feel like I'm pretty strict with myself.
I feel like I don't know if I would necessarily go to dinner with one of my female friends.
That might be a certain context, I guess.
I mean, would I do lunch?
I don't know.
I feel like I'm very strict with myself.
And then it's like, where should I draw the line for myself being in a really committed relationship?
And then what should I expect from my partner along the same lines?
Yeah, look, if you want to get together with friends, coffee is just as good as dinner.
And there is something kind of vaguely romantic-y about dinner.
Right.
As opposed to, you know, going for coffee mid-afternoon kind of thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I don't think that it's appropriate to flirt with When you're in a committed relationship.
I mean, it depends what you mean by flirting, right?
So some people say, oh, that Steph, he was totally flirting with that female caller.
Because any time you enjoy the conversation of a woman, you must be flirting.
But no, I think that you should not be put in situations that could be even remotely compromising.
I don't think that men and women...
Can be...
Can have a sustainable friendship with someone of the opposite sex outside of the relationship if there's a certain amount...
If there's any possibility of sexual attraction.
Wow.
Yeah.
So, I mean, if you have...
Like, if you had a sort of regular thing with a woman who was into classical music and you got together every week or two...
That would be one thing that may be kind of problematic.
But, you know, if someone comes through once a year, you know, that kind of stuff, whatever, right?
There's no particular capacity for it to go anywhere.
That's kind of different.
But I don't think that it's really possible to have a...
A relationship with an unattached member of whatever sex you prefer for any particularly intimate period, lengthy or repetitive period of time, if that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, I see.
So it can kind of become like a pattern of behavior issue as opposed to like, you know, a friend is in town.
Yeah, a one-time thing is different than an ongoing relationship because ultimately I guess just given nature, like you were saying, it could threaten the relationship, I guess, if it goes on too long, possibly.
Well, it's like that old song Brian Adams sang, if you're looking for trouble, get it from me, right?
And what that means for me is what's missing in your relationship with your girlfriend that you'd need to go and find someone else to hang out with.
Now, if it's just classical music, well, I like classical music.
I don't know that it's the foundation of a relationship.
Right.
Right?
I mean, you know, and so I think that my concern is that when you start developing attachments outside of your romantic relationship, that you stop, in a sense, looking to find that fulfillment or whatever fulfillment you're getting outside from within your romantic relationship.
Yeah.
You know, if you keep eating out, you're never going to get to be a better cook at home, right?
And I think that is, the question then is, okay, well, what's missing?
Like, if I constantly need to hang around with some woman who's not my wife, what's missing in my relationship with my wife?
And wouldn't it be more convenient to get whatever's missing from my wife instead of trying to find it elsewhere?
And what if the other person starts developing feelings?
And what if the other person starts developing feelings and doesn't tell you?
And what if the other person starts developing feelings, doesn't tell you, and begins to plant seeds?
Yeah.
Right?
There's a, you know, there's this old thing about the way sharks attack.
You know, hey, the shark's just swimming round and round me.
I guess it's just like a carousel.
Well, it kind of is, but it's a carousel with a string tied to the shark and the rest tied to your balls.
Which means as it keeps going around, it gets closer, and then there's going to be a chomp.
A lot of seduction is quite long-term and involves the planting of lots of seeds.
So you are playing with fire.
Maybe you don't find the other person attractive, the other person finds you attractive.
Yeah.
And begins to plant seeds, begins to cause trouble, begins to dress better or put on pharonyms.
And you may not even know what's slowly winding its way around you, but it is a risk that you take.
Or if you find that you're developing feelings, then do you have to be honest with your girlfriend and say, oh, you know what?
I'm really starting to get turned on by this woman while we were having sex last night.
I was actually kind of thinking of her.
And, but, you know, so I guess I should stop seeing her or whatever, right?
I mean, that's not a great conversation to be having.
So the upside, if the upside is really high, then something's really missing from your relationship, which you should try and work on.
If the upside is only sort of medium or middling, then I don't see how it's worth the risk of what might unravel.
Yeah, no, I think that's a fantastic argument and I appreciate it.
I kind of see a parallel.
I used to be like the thinnest of thin libertarians, so to speak, kind of like Walter Bloch says he is.
Sorry, when I hear the thinnest of thin libertarians, what I see is, what I get in my mind's eye is a two-dimensional libertarian, but that's probably unkind, so go ahead.
Yeah, so that used to be kind of my mindset.
And then I started getting into a little bit of Ayn Rand and some stuff like that.
And then also a lot of Hoppe.
Hoppe is my number one guy.
Anything he says I love, I agree with everything he says.
And, you know, he argues for, I guess you can call it, thick libertarianism, kind of on the grounds that, you know, you could either take a step towards barbarism or you could take a step towards, you know, reason and enlightenment.
And if you do things that are going to impair your own mind and impair your own judgment, let's say if you want to be a junkie or like a drug addict or do things that are demoralizing, like prostitution, is it a step towards reason and respecting private property rights and understanding that, or is it a step towards barbarism?
And for me, that made me realize that, you know, it is important to have these types of values, you know, as a libertarian as well.
And I see the parallel with my question, where, you know, you're right, you can have these friends outside, I guess, maybe if it's once in a while, but if it's an ongoing thing, is it a step towards, is it going along the road of something bad, or is it going along the road of bolstering your current relationship And I would say that I agree with you.
You know, it's definitely not a step towards strengthening your own relationship.
It's probably a step in the other direction if you had to choose.
Yeah, I think that it's something to be steadfastly resisted and avoided.
But of course, given that self-knowledge is so essential and curiosity about the self is so essential, what I would say is that if you start to feel really attracted towards another woman, Or if you feel the urge to flirt with another woman, that is a wonderful opportunity to be curious about why that might be happening for yourself, right?
Because then if, you know, if...
Penis ain't pointing north, but it's spinning wildly, then it's important to figure out what's going on, you know, what's missing from your relationship that you feel sexual attraction outside of the relationship and so on.
But it isn't part of that.
No, I didn't mean to cut you off.
No, go ahead.
Yeah, I understand what you're saying.
Sometimes I wonder, though, is it maybe a little bit just biology, you know, when you see certain women...
You know, of course, there's physical impulses.
It doesn't...
Having a physical impulse like that doesn't necessarily mean there are grave problems in your...
Oh, yeah.
No, I get that.
I mean, if your body...
If your ideal body type walks past, then you stare at her and say, oh, I thought that was you, honey.
No, but you...
There is a...
There's a physiological reaction, of course, for these kinds of things.
But I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about if you start to feel romantic rather than, you know...
Beyond lust.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, so yeah, I learned a lot from, I definitely learned a lot from reading Real-Time Relationships.
I read a lot of your other books, but that was the only one that pertained to like, I guess, that focused on romantic relationships.
And I kind of wanted to change my question a little bit because I got to thinking about it and I felt like I thought about it a lot and I kind of reached the same conclusion that you just reached sort of.
So I thought having a general discussion would be good.
Now, as far as the second part of the question, like what to expect from your partner, I guess it just ends up being the same thing where you have to find someone who voluntarily subscribes to the same values more or less that you do.
I can't impose...
If I say floating is bad, I can't impose that onto my partner unless they already agree.
Okay, so that's a very interesting question, which is...
Can you negotiate after you've bought?
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
And the answer is, you cannot negotiate after you've bought.
Really?
Right?
Okay.
Yeah, but no, you can haggle for, you know, you're going to go buy a car or whatever, and you can haggle, but after you sign the papers, you can't haggle.
Right?
You've bought what you've bought.
And this is so important that I'm really glad you've brought it up.
Because, and I've used this analogy before about, you know, If someone says, I really want a form of transportation, they go out and research all the boats and they go and test drive all the boats and they finally, after six months of looking, they finally buy a boat and they bring it back to their garage.
They break out the welding goggles.
And all the power tools, and they say, now I'm going to turn this thing into a car.
And it's like, well, if you wanted a car, maybe you should.
So to me, it doesn't mean you can't negotiate in a relationship.
Of course you can, but you cannot negotiate.
Don't negotiate anything fundamental in a relationship once you are in that relationship.
And this fantasy that people have, I'm not saying you, but this fantasy that people have that will sort it out as we go forward or somehow I'm going to get my hooks into the person and then with the leverage of their fallacy of sunk cost investment,
I'm then going to maneuver them into the right frame of mind for what I want is all to me Literally like haggling in an empty dealership after everyone's gone home and you bought the car four years ago.
You don't haggle after you have embarked upon the relationship in any fundamental way.
It means, of course, you still negotiate.
Absolutely, no question.
But you cannot negotiate anything fundamental about...
About the other person or about who you are.
So things like, you know, well, after we'd been dating for two years, we decided to talk about whether we wanted kids.
Like, you know, I mean, that's madness.
That's complete madness.
Like, two years after I bought the car, I thought that maybe I'd like a sunroof and it should be a boat.
Yeah.
It's like...
And so with these kinds of things, when you say, well, what should I, you know...
These things should kind of be understood...
Ahead of time.
And, you know, you don't, of course, have to go through every conceivable possibility like that old Saturday Night Live sketch where they're worrying about the guy going on vacation, the newscaster.
I think Dana Carvey does it.
Brilliant.
I think he's being Tom Brokaw or something.
And they're worried about him going on vacation, so they're having him record every single possible news item that could happen, just in case it happens.
Zombies attack New York.
Wait, can this really...
So, um...
So you don't have to negotiate everything, but you do have to have the basics of negotiation front and center.
And, you know, one of the fundamental things is if it really bothers the other person, don't do it.
And people, oh, you're controlling me.
And it's like, that's not controlling you.
That's being considerate.
If it really bothers the other person, don't do it.
Like, I don't smoke cigars.
I don't smoke anything.
But, I mean, if my friends are over and I just pull out one of those big, you know, the size of a Madagascar iguana stink bombs of a cigar and light it up while everyone's sitting at the dinner table, People say, that really smells bad.
Steph, can you put that out?
I'm like, hey man, don't try and control me.
Don't tell me what to do.
I'll pee around the rim if I want to.
Don't fence me in, man.
No, I mean, if it bothers other people, don't do it.
I couldn't imagine being a cigar smoker just lighting up in other people's houses without asking them.
And if they say no, then...
Then you don't do it.
And so I think understanding that a guy asking a girl out for dinner without her boyfriend, when you sense that there's a sexual attraction on the part of the man, that's bothersome.
Yeah, for sure.
That makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, that's great.
So don't do it.
And then people say...
Well, you know, I'm not saying your girlfriend would do this, but some people would do this like, well, you're just being jealous, you're being paranoid, there's no reason to bring this friends and this kind of stuff, right?
She wouldn't say that.
Yeah, no.
Okay, good.
Yeah, she would never say that.
We're really considerate.
And then the only thing then you have to figure out, if this were ever to come about, your clincher is...
Does she dress up?
Does she put on makeup?
That kind of stuff.
She shows up in sweats with a full-on Kirstie Alley Van de Graaff generator spike head.
That's okay.
But if she's like, I'm going out for dinner.
I'll need an hour and a half to get ready.
It's like, you what now?
I appreciate that very much.
What a great perspective.
For me, when I try to To reflect and try to get this type of self-knowledge.
Sometimes I wonder, like you said, if someone does something that bothers you or makes you upset, they should be considerate and not want to do it.
Sometimes I wonder if it's rational for me to be upset about certain things.
So for example, real briefly, my parents were divorced and my mom was always very paranoid that my dad was cheating on her and she used to Basically more or less like, you know, breeze by boyfriend's houses to see if they were really home.
You know, this type of, I guess, paranoid behavior.
I'm sorry, she used to breeze by boyfriend's houses?
After they got divorced, when she started dating again, she was always very...
Oh, sorry!
Yeah, sorry.
Because it sounded like, I thought your dad was cheating on me, so I'm going to go past his boyfriend's houses to see if he's, you know, having a full-on wraparound sausage fest with...
Chesty McThunderloins or something.
Okay.
So she's got this paranoia.
Did her dad cheat?
Yeah, yeah.
So you've got a history of this, right?
Yeah, her dad did, and she was always paranoid.
But my dad is like a paragon of virtue.
He has the most sterling reputation, and he always maintains that he never did any of that stuff.
And to be honest, I believe him.
Anyway, so I've had some trust issues with my mom.
I've seen her behave like this.
And then also...
When I was in high school, she took out...
This is bad, but it's really bad.
She took out a credit card in my name without telling me.
And when I found out, it really kind of destroyed our relationship for a long time.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on.
So when you were in high school, your mother took out a credit card in your name, but I guess because you were a minor, she had signing privileges?
I'm not sure.
I think it might have been my first year of college.
I think maybe I was 18 or 19.
But how do you take out a credit card in someone else's name?
I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't understand the mechanics of it.
Yeah, well, I don't know the particulars.
I mean, I have to give, like, retina scans four fingerprints and a sperm sample sometimes to use my credit card, so I'm not...
No, they don't obviously want the sperm sample, but, you know, sometimes...
Anyway, but I just...
How would you...
How would you even do that?
I think she just put in my information.
Well, it was also 10 years ago.
I don't know.
Maybe it was a little bit easier.
I'm not really exactly sure, but I think she put in my social and my name and stuff.
And then she got the card that I didn't find out until about a year later when I got my...
I did my credit report for the first time.
Yeah, credit report.
And I saw a credit card on there that didn't open.
And after pushing her, she admitted that she opened it up under my name.
And the reason I... Sorry?
Sorry.
So she used this credit card, and did she abuse this credit card?
Yeah.
So she ran up debts in your name, screwing up your credit rating, and didn't tell you until you were confronted, until you confronted her.
Yes.
Yeah.
So that's exactly right.
Why?
Did she want to hide purchases from your dad?
Was she already divorced?
Yeah, she was already divorced.
They divorced when I was 12.
This was when I was 19.
She was always hard up for money.
We had a nice house and everything, but she was living paycheck to paycheck.
I'm not excusing it.
It's a horrendous behavior, no matter how you slice it.
Ultimately, fast forward.
Was she getting alimony?
Yeah, yes.
Well, child support, yeah.
All right.
I'm not sure why there's this laughter going on, but I'll brush past that for just a second.
Yeah, all right.
I don't mean to.
Because you want to invite me into this world where this is kind of quirky but funny, right?
No, it's an absurd thing.
I'm laughing at the absurdity, I guess.
No, it's not an absurd thing.
It's a horrible thing.
It's an evil and criminal thing.
I know, I know, I know.
You know, it's not absurd.
It's not, you know, quirky.
It's...
Deception, fraud, and theft.
This is true.
Right.
I mean, that's why I get that, you know, when people are talking about difficult things, they kind of want to make a joke.
I know, you're right.
It's really horrendous, right?
No, I get it.
Yeah, no, you're right.
So she lived in a big house.
She was getting alimony.
Did she work?
Yeah, she worked.
So she worked.
She's got a big house.
She's got alimony.
She's got child support, or at least she did until you went to college, maybe?
I don't know.
Yeah, right.
I think my dad was paying some of it, and then we also got loans.
And then she got child support until I was 21.
So she did this while she was still getting child support.
But she didn't pay for your college, I assume?
No.
Jesus.
So, of course, that...
Why the hell was she out of money?
I mean, the house was paid for, I assume.
Yeah, so she just...
House is paid for?
What about, was car paid for?
Well, no, she had a mortgage on the house and she kind of bit off more than she could chew.
So she bought too big a house?
Exactly, yeah.
So it was...
Oh, this wasn't the house that, sorry to interrupt.
This wasn't the house that was part of the divorce?
No, we lived in a really nice house and after the divorce, my mom had to sell it.
And then my dad let her keep the entire proceeds of the house.
What?
Yeah.
What?
Well, it was...
And this is before the housing crash, right?
Because we're talking at least a decade or more ago, right?
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
It was 1997.
Holy crap!
So your mom got at least hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars from this house, gets alimony, gets child support, is working.
Yeah, yeah.
All that is correct.
But...
My dad agreed to it because he wanted to keep his entire pension.
So the way it was going to work was he was going to split the house with her and then he was going to split his pension with her.
And then he said, let me keep my pension and in return I'll give you the house.
And he kind of started from scratch and built himself up again over the years.
And she accepted this?
She accepted it.
This was a fair thing that she gets the whole proceeds...
Of the house in return for not taking his pension.
He had...
Well, I think that she thought it was fair.
I assume so.
He had a rather large pension.
Sorry to interrupt.
Was she working throughout the marriage?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, so she was working throughout the marriage.
Your dad was working throughout the marriage.
Somehow she gets the whole house.
Yeah.
Maybe I'm missing something, but in what sane planet is that considered fair?
I guess, I don't know, my dad agreed to it because he wanted to keep his entire pension.
That's not, no, your dad agreed to it because you're in the United States.
Yeah.
And therefore, you are in the Kafkaesque living nightmare of the family court system.
And so your dad is like, well, it's easier to give you the house than to give half the house to you and half the house to your lawyers, right?
Yeah.
So he's basically up against the wall and Robocop has got pincers around his naughty parts and he's like, okay, take the house!
Just leave me with my pension.
Yeah, and he just went through his second divorce actually.
He just got done with his second divorce about half a year ago.
So I think he's done with marriage.
Okay, that guy needs to look up MGTOW. That guy needs to look up MGTOW, men grabbing their own wallets or men going their own way.
He needs to look up MGTOW if this is a habit for him.
He's not so much into philosophy and everything, but I think he would benefit.
Oh, that's not philosophy.
I mean, there's a lot of philosophy behind it.
That's not philosophy.
That's like saying if you hear a bomb and you go into a bomb shelter, that takes a PhD in philosophy.
No.
It just takes you covering your balls and turning away from all the lawyers who are powering up their ungreased dildos, advancing on you like some horrible gang in prison.
Yeah.
No, I couldn't agree more.
So yeah, so basically the reason I brought this whole thing up, thanks for listening to that by the way, but the reason I brought it up is so when this credit card thing happened that really started a whole bunch of trust issues that I had with my mom obviously.
So then from that I've noticed in romantic relationships after that I was kind of always suspicious of my partner.
Hang on.
Let's go back.
Let's go back.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
Dude, what happened with your mom?
Right, right.
The resolution.
And this came up.
Right, sorry.
I totally glossed over that.
Okay, so I presented her with it and she admitted it and tried to explain it.
You know, she got defensive and made a few excuses.
Wait, wait, wait.
Explained it away.
Like, I was possessed.
I thought I was you.
I thought I was you.
I figured if the umbilical cord was still attached mentally, that was enough.
Yeah.
Well, her excuse was pretty bad.
It's hard to even say.
She said that...
No, no.
No, please, if you don't mind.
If you don't mind.
You're anonymous.
I'm completely happy to talk about anything.
Her reason, she said that she wanted to take out a credit card in my name to build my credit.
And then she was going to...
Wait, wait.
Alfie, my question is, did she say that with a straight face?
Probably barely.
Holy shit.
So she...
Took a credit card out without asking you, racked up debts, never paid them, blew up your credit score, and she did that to help you with your credit score.
Quite, yeah.
Yeah, it's sort of like me saying, I'll take your car to go get it washed.
I enter it into a demolition derby, and the good news is you'll never have to wash it again.
Yeah, exactly.
So I didn't talk to her.
I mean, I just...
I kind of completely severed all ties with her for a long time after that.
And then for about a year.
And then I started talking to her again.
I'm not saying that they should or shouldn't.
I'm just curious.
What happened that you started talking with her again?
I wanted to find a way to get it off my credit report.
So I researched it.
There's three agencies in America and they basically said that she just needs to We'll assume responsibility for it and they'll take it off mine and put it on hers.
So I said, hey, I have these forms.
But doesn't that involve her being faced with criminal charges?
It didn't.
It didn't.
Really?
Yeah, it didn't.
She signed two documents that I prepared.
The agencies didn't even prepare it.
I prepared the documents and she said, this was all me and I assume responsibility for it.
Within three months, they zapped it off my report and they put it on hers.
Yeah, it was...
All right.
Yeah.
So she didn't...
The whole year that you weren't talking to her, Alfie, she didn't do this of her own accord.
No.
Like, she didn't say, wow, you know, I'm really upset my son isn't talking to me.
I guess I did steal from him and screw up his credit report, which, you know, for...
Those of you still living in a basement is a big deal, right?
I mean, it's really complicated if you've got a bad credit report.
You can't get credit cards, you can't get car loans, you have lots of trouble with a wide variety of things that people take for granted in the modern world.
So, the whole time that you weren't talking to her for a year, she never saw fit to pursue this course of action of her own accord.
Exactly, and that really stung, you know, the most.
Beyond stung, that was just so beyond my comprehension.
So, yeah, to sum it up, she ultimately did take responsibility, but, I mean, it's not really taking responsibility if you force someone to take responsibility.
But, you know, it's like putting a gun to your dad's head to go to your hockey game and then saying, oh, look at my dad.
He loves me, you know?
Hey, dude, dude, I know you've got this temptation to keep laughing about this stuff.
It's really starting to piss me off.
Okay, because this is, you know, you shouldn't stop laughing because it's pissing me off, but...
I really feel the need to shake you a little here.
Yeah.
Right?
Because you're giggling through this.
I mean, your mom lied, withheld, stole, denied, defended, avoided, and then did fuck all for a year until you cornered her.
Right.
So that tells me I'm telling you every single thing I need to know about two people in your life.
Number one, your mother.
Number two is who?
I don't know.
I don't know where you're going.
Who did you refer to, Alfie, as the paragon of virtue?
My dad.
Right.
And this is who he married?
And this is who he decided to have a child or children with?
Mm-hmm.
And he sure as hell didn't learn that much if he gets divorced again.
Yeah, he went from the frying pan into the fire, actually.
So, yeah.
Here's that laugh again.
Yeah.
You need to try and just physically relax and take some deep breaths, right?
Because your parents are giggling so that I don't point out these things.
Your parents and your head are putting on the fucking circus so I don't see the torture chamber, right?
Yeah.
Look, It's funny up here.
Don't look at the bodies.
We're just dancing clowns.
Yeah.
It makes a lot of sense.
And I need to confront it more directly, like you're saying.
Yeah, I agree.
When your mother took this stuff back on, what happened then?
Okay.
So, yeah.
She took it on her report.
My report was okay.
We started...
We kept talking a little bit.
I kind of kept her at arm's length and she was just pretty much non-stop apologizing.
She just wouldn't stop apologizing.
Even to this day, she's like, I can't believe how I could have done that.
She's like, I was not in my right mind.
She was seeing a psychiatrist and this is not to make any excuses.
Of course, people have free will.
She was on a few different medications for depression and OCD as well.
She had never behaved in this fashion before.
Can I interrupt you for just a second?
Look, I hate those medications with an unholy passion.
People need to look up Robert Whitaker's book.
It's on the anatomy of an epidemic.
He's been on this show.
You need to look that stuff up.
And that stuff can really mess with your mind.
But Alfie, when you say that your mother had never acted in this way before, stolen from a family member, didn't she take the whole fucking house?
Yes.
So how is...
How is it that this is unprecedented behavior when your dad had to cover his pension because he didn't give your mother the whole house?
Yeah, I understand.
You don't take those things from the father of your children.
You don't just take the fucking house.
Yeah, I know.
I completely understand.
And the child support and the alimony.
And I mean, my dad agreed.
It's like, you know, my dad willingly agreed to that.
He said, gladly...
No, it's not willing!
I know.
It's because of the court system.
You're right.
Okay.
No, it's not even because of the court system.
It's because of the mother and the court system.
I'm not frightened of a gun if I know no one's going to pull the trigger.
It's the finger on the trigger plus the gun.
I see, yeah.
And when that gun is jammed up your ass, it gets your attention, right?
It's not the court system fundamentally.
You can get divorced, if I understand this correctly, I'm certainly no lawyer, but you can get divorced and you can figure everything out.
And you can simply say, this is what's happening.
Now, again, what do I know?
But your dad clearly was scared...
Of your mom taking him to court.
So it's not just the court system, it's the court system plus angry vagina that is the gun that's loaded.
No, yeah, excellent point.
Yeah, no, I see what you mean now.
That's right.
And let's say that the court ordered this.
Okay, then take the house, sell the house, give half the money to your dad.
But yeah, this well-lawyered up vagina dentata is really terrifying stuff.
And so this was not a, oh, let's be nice or whatever, right?
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.
So I don't know if you want me to connect this to my original question.
I mean, I brought this up in reference to my original question, but if you want to go a different way.
And discuss this, you know, obviously.
Well, you know, we're looking, we're sort of digging down among the tree roots of female betrayal, which is where we started, right?
Yeah, exactly, right.
That's a great way to tie it in.
Okay, so yeah, so then we started talking again, and she's always just been so profusely apologetic.
And has she made financial restitution to you for this?
Well, it...
That's a no, right?
Well, in what way?
It didn't cost me any money.
She assumed the debt and then she paid the debt off on her own.
It didn't impact me.
How about time?
How about stress?
How about sleep?
How about concentration?
Is it a great thing when you're in college to find out that your mom's been ripping you off?
Is that really helping your concentration?
Is that making your life a quality place to be?
No, yeah, of course.
You know, there is such a thing as emotional damages, which are recognized, and that is, you know, praying like a Blood squid money vampire on your children's lack of knowledge of your predations is pretty powerful.
It's a pretty significant break with a bond and then not talking to you for a year and then how much work did you have to do to figure all this out and get it sorted out?
How many hours did you spend thinking about it or with it being on your mind or dealing with it?
I bet you it was at least hundreds.
If not more.
Yeah, for sure.
It was a lot.
It was definitely a ton of work.
Okay, so let's put your value at, not counting any of the emotional stuff, let's just put you at 25 bucks an hour, right?
And let's say that you fretted about it or had to deal with it or did something about it for, you know, 250 hours, right?
It's hard to say, but for all your sake.
I know, I know.
I get it.
Okay, so what have we got, $6,250?
$6,250?
Okay.
See, let me tell you what restitution is.
Restitution is, here's the amount of money that you would take to the point where you'd say, okay, I'm okay with it happening.
Yeah.
That's what restitution is.
So clearly if I knock over your lawn ornament and it costs 500 bucks, I go to the store, I pay 500 bucks, I get the new one, I install it, and you're like, okay, so maybe give you 100 bucks for your time.
And you're like, okay, that sort of balances out.
Yeah.
Now, you don't want restitution to be where you're really glad that it happened, because otherwise people will do more of it, right?
Then they'll lay out all their garden ornaments with tripwires and so on, because if it's $50,000, then it's a cash cow, right?
So you want restitution is like walking on this seesaw.
You want enough money that you're okay with it having happened, but not so much money that you're glad that it happened and want it to happen again, right?
So how much money would your mother have to give you For you to be okay that it happened?
What's your guess?
It really so deeply damaged my relationship with my mom.
We had quite a good relationship.
To me, our relationship was really priceless.
I couldn't put a value on it.
How much would you have to pay me to destroy my relationship with my mom or dad?
I would say I wouldn't do it for any amount.
Yeah, so she could say, I'm going to give you a million bucks, or we could rewind and have this never happen.
You'd say, I wish we could rewind and have this never happen, right?
Probably, probably.
Just being honest, probably.
No, no, listen, I appreciate that.
And I agree with you.
I mean, parental relationships are without price.
Parental relationships are foundational to our being.
Parental resources, when we get older, particularly we have kids of our own, are impossible to replace.
Parental relationships are very, very important.
And that kind of betrayal and its effects not just upon your time and worry and money and energy and focus and all that, but, you know, what has this done to your view of women?
What has this done to your capacity to trust?
I mean...
Exactly.
God, does your dad know about this?
Yeah, yeah, he...
Yeah, I told him and he was...
I mean, he was horrified, really.
He just...
He couldn't believe it.
He was disgusted.
Well...
I don't mean for it to come down to dollars and cents, but I said I don't mean for it to come down to dollars and cents, you know, between family or among family.
But it's an interesting question.
And the fact that she's never offered you to pay restitution for your time and energy that you spent dealing with this is...
I don't know.
Apologies are...
Cheap.
Real apologies, you know, if she keeps apologizing, it's because she's not getting what she wants, right?
Well, we don't really talk about it anymore, but yeah, at the time, I understand.
Apologies, you apologize until the other person gets closure.
And it sounds to me, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds to me like it kind of got annoying with her continuing to apologize.
Honestly, I never really felt that way.
Okay.
Well, good.
Then don't let me tell you you did.
It kind of took a while for her to really understand and feel what she did.
It took a while for it to hit her.
And we've talked about it at length many times.
And if it counts for anything, she's just been always so sincere.
And that aside, again, it's not to trivialize it and say that aside, because that's a huge event.
But that aside, I mean, we've always had an amazing relationship, I guess it's hard to believe.
Someone would do that if you had an amazing relationship, but always the most generous, compassionate person in all other aspects, generally speaking.
For me, I feel that I forgive her, and we have a strong relationship today.
Okay, so let me just run through a quick checklist.
When you were a kid, did your mother hit you?
No.
Yell at you?
Yeah, sometimes.
And did she ever call you names?
Yeah, sometimes.
And what did she call you?
Well, you know, things like imbecile or a lot of cursing and stuff.
I don't I mean, this is not an everyday occurrence, but yeah, it happened.
There were times where when the divorce got stressful, she became verbally abusive.
In what way?
Just vicious name-calling.
I can't remember exactly everything, but just a lot of really heavy, intense cursing.
Yeah, demeaning things.
Yeah.
Did she badmouth your dad?
Oh man, yeah.
A lot.
Not to laugh again, but yeah, it was...
Yeah, it was...
Yeah, nuts.
Yeah, she badmouthed my dad a lot.
Before, during, and after?
I think before and during, and then after.
She's totally changed.
She has...
Once she stopped taking that particular medication she was on, she completely changed and completely mellowed out and went back to her old self, the old generous sweet mom that I always remembered.
Once that happened, she would always say, I don't know what I was thinking.
Your father was such a great man.
They still talk.
They're friends.
They talk a lot.
Hang on.
When was she on the meds?
On and off from when I was 12 when the divorce started to when I was 19-ish when that credit card stuff happened.
So like on and off for seven years to the best of my knowledge.
And what do you mean by on and off?
Like 50-50, 80-20?
I don't know.
I think that she took Prozac when I was 12.
And then I think she took that for a while.
And then maybe she stopped.
I don't want to say the wrong information.
I'm not sure.
Okay, so did she badmouth your dad before the divorce?
Probably.
I assume so.
I think so, yeah.
Because she wasn't on meds then, right?
No.
Right, no.
Yeah, she was not.
Yeah, right.
And when she got off the meds, did she badmouth him less?
I know that's a hard question to answer because it's probably somewhat of a blur.
Yeah, yeah.
I know that after that last bout of craziness that she went through and really obsessive behavior, once she got off that medication when I was 19, she calmed down so much.
My mom and dad have a close relationship now and they're really nice to each other.
They're just really respectful of each other.
It's completely different, honestly.
Now, at this point, it's been like this recently.
It's like they have a track record now.
And they have a good relationship, and I have a really strong relationship with both of them.
All right.
Well, is there anything else that you wanted to ask or to say?
Yeah.
The reason I... Well, we've been talking for a while, so of course I'm sure you want to move on.
But the reason I brought it up was because it impacted my ability to trust my partner in relationships.
And that sometimes I would think, like, to feel a certain way or be mistrustful, I was wondering if it was just like a relic of my experience with my mom or if it actually was justified.
And then when the situation happened, my initial question, I was kind of wondering, is this a relic of, you know, these things in my past or is it actually legitimate to wonder about this situation or to find it inappropriate?
And I think, you know, I think I have your answer.
Well, I'm not sure that you do.
I mean, I'll give you my thoughts, and I don't really have an answer because this is a negotiated process for everyone.
But you have PTSD, post-trust stress disorder, right?
And that's a joke, by the way.
But you have sensitivity to trust disorder.
And, you know, you've got betrayal.
And it's so funny, you know, like your mom is always concerned that other people are betraying her and then she ends up doing a terrible betrayal, right?
Right.
I never even saw that.
That sort of projection is not uncommon, right?
There's no fear like that of a cruel person.
So, your girlfriend, I assume, knows this stuff, or if not, she should.
Yeah, I've told her.
And so that is the reality of your constitution as a human being.
So the idea, well, is it just or is it not, to me is not particularly...
important because it's an impossible question to answer.
Yeah.
Right.
If you are, you may be way better at detecting betrayal than most people.
Right.
Right?
I mean, you just maybe created it, and so the idea that you would discount your own feelings that have been well-trained for years to detect betrayal would not be just.
Can you over-detect betrayal?
I don't know.
Maybe.
Who knows, right?
But the reality is that your girlfriend, to be with you, who knows about this history, needs to be aware that you have this history and needs to be extra sensitive around the issues of betrayal.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, that's the deal of dating you.
You know, we all come with baggage and other people got to carry a little bit just as we carry theirs, right?
Okay, yeah.
And so she can't say, well, you know, this is, I can do whatever I want.
This is just your history.
Look, I mean, if a friend of mine has just come back from war and combat, I don't drag him off to go and see American Sniper.
Right.
Right?
And say, hey man, it's just your history.
You deal with it.
You know, I don't want you bringing this to our movie night.
It's like, no, I'm going to go and take him to see, I don't know, Finding Nemo 2 or something, you know, where I'm fairly sure that the underwater gunfire is going to be kept to a minimum.
Yeah.
And so when you know that somebody has a particular raw spot, then you work around it.
And that to me is...
So giving people knowledge of your history is saying to them, here's where it really can hurt.
Here's where it really can hurt.
And then people...
You need to see how people respond to that.
Yeah, and that's what I got from reading your book.
Because, you know, when you're completely open and honest like that and vulnerable, their reaction tells you all you need to know.
You know, if they...
If you give them that and they use it against you, obviously you run for the hills.
And if they take it and they're respectful of it, obviously that's a really good sign.
But you don't know that unless you're completely and truly open and vulnerable, as far as I understand what you wrote in the book.
Yeah, I think that's one aspect.
And the other thing, too, is just to expect people who know things about your history to be more sensitive around Those issues.
And other people who are like, oh, I want to go and see whatever movie I want.
You know, if I want to go see Black Hawk Down with a PTSD war victim, that's my...
And it's like, well, you're kind of showing your stripes there and they're pretty tiger-y.
Great, great.
That's one thing.
The second thing I would say is that, I mean, Alfie, you've got a pretty unusual history.
Yeah.
And because you have a father who's twice divorced...
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
periods of deficient judgment, something like that. - Craziness and yeah. - Then I think, you know, I would strongly suggest, and if you're in school, you can get really great, well, shouldn't say really great, I don't know, but you can get reduced cost therapy, which, you know, now I think would be a great time to do it.
You certainly don't want to, you know, therapy is way cheaper than divorce.
And so I would really recommend that.
And the reason I say that is because you're still very much around the laughing about these tragedies, which means that it's uneasy in your soul, right?
Yeah, I'm glad that you pointed that out because I didn't know I had that reflex until you had pointed it out.
So, yeah, I think that therapy would be good.
I went once, but I didn't see it through.
I have to focus more on that, I think, when I have the time to do so.
FDR1927, my thoughts about good therapy.
But, okay, well, thanks so much for calling in.
I really appreciate it.
Give us a call back if she ever decides to, you know, go swimming with Brad Pitt or something, and we'll talk more about it.
Thank you so much.
I'm a big fan.
I really appreciate everything.
Thanks again.
Alright, thanks, Alfie.
Up next is Chris.
Chris wrote in and said, Hey Stefan, I wrote in part of my book about the development of logical thought patterns in the brain and how raising children with violence actually releases chemicals causing epitoptic cell death in the active areas of the brain during that violent incident, similar to your forming a logic gate in a silicone structure of a computer.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that and discuss with you about how this is sort of a smoking gun evidence proving that one should follow the non-aggression principle.
That's from Chris.
Well, thanks for calling in.
Can you give us any more details about this cell destruction that you referenced?
So yeah, a little bit.
What I started with is looking for why is it that people hold on to things so strongly.
Because I really have taken a lot from your work in the non-aggression principle.
But having looked at my own background and growing up in a very religious structure...
Very much tight controls around the community and family.
I saw people that were basically like, we'll say, like the jihadists, but on the Christian side.
Very structured in their religious beliefs.
And I always wondered why that was so strong and why people would be so passionate about something to the point where they'd be violent if it was questioned.
So I started looking into what are these things that cause that.
And in part of this, my research, I'm not a neuroscientist, But I'm actually a 20-plus year engineer for computer engineering and cybersecurity.
So I started relating what is it that I know about the computer systems to what I'm reading in neurobiology.
I apologize for that.
It seems to me my connection is going in and out.
But I think I was talking about in my own thought patterns and logic, and this is what I write about and what I focus on, is how the human brain works and how we can develop it to be the best version of ourselves.
But in my own development, I kept running into these Call them mental blocks for the lack of a better term.
And I realized as I was writing and going back to the same sections, I went up to mental blocks at the same place.
And I started thinking to myself, what is it that's causing these?
And how can I address them?
Because I feel like I'm a very logical person.
I should be able to think through anything and just kind of go there.
And I realized it was almost at the same sentences sometime that these logic blocks, mental blocks, would come in and I would just stop thinking and Go off in space and I had to do something else most of the time.
And I realized what it was I was doing every time is I was writing something and following a logic pattern that I did not believe.
And I'm like, wow, if this logic goes through my brain and I don't believe it, my brain stops.
Why is that?
So I started looking into these patterns in people's, you know, how development is done and what neuroscience had to say about it and come up with that, hey, whenever you're thinking and you get that That release of the chemicals in your brain actually causes brain cells to die.
So could this possibly be that we are having...
Wait, wait, wait.
Sorry, sorry.
The brain cells dying, could you give me what leads up to that again?
Yeah, it's the corticotropin release factor, the chemical released when we have hyperarousal in our brain, so the fear terror, actually causes apoptotic cell death, which the nucleus dies and then the brain cells disappear.
The body cleans them up.
And sorry, is that why, you say, if people are in car accidents, they usually can't remember, like if it was a really bad car, they can't remember the car accident?
Exactly, that's where I'm going.
But it's even deeper formed than that, so what it is, is whenever you get, somebody makes you afraid of something, or you're afraid of something, say you're going through a logic pattern to do something, and you become, have massive fear, it actually stops, it It stops you from having that logic process again the next time your brain goes there.
So what it is basically doing, and I'm a computer engineer, so I said, you know, this is how we make gates in silicone.
We actually burn them in when we do the process, and then we use computer software to use the logic to use what gates are there.
That kind of plugged into a lot of research as what happens and where this is happening really kind of set home that we have, and the more kind of structured you are punished and your belief structure is burned into you, giving you more and more of these areas in your brain.
That you're not allowed to follow the logic.
You actually have to follow some alternate logic, which is what makes us kind of illogical and irrational because that step in our brain is burned out that we would naturally have followed because of this punishment, this abuse.
That caused this chemical release and the brain cells to die in that area, that we have to find some other illogical pattern that makes sense to us.
But now, the next time somebody's confronted with this, that same logical thought, they can't take that next logical stop, step.
Now, hang on.
Sorry, Chris, interrupt.
But you keep saying logical thought.
Yeah.
And do you mean sequential thought?
Because some of what people are afraid of are illogical thoughts, like paranoia or...
Or OCD or something, but then some of what people are afraid of are logical thoughts.
So do you just mean a step-by-step sequence of thoughts or do you mean only logical thoughts that people are afraid of?
I just need to sort of understand that.
I'd say it's a sequence of thoughts.
I don't mean to be nitpicky, but logic, of course, is in my holy, I kissed the hem of its garment, so I just want to make sure we're on the same page.
So a sequence is like dominoes, and they can be incorrect thoughts, but they may follow from, you know, if I think people are out to get me, then, you know, a car backfires on the street and I throw myself under my couch or whatever.
So it's a sequence of thoughts, may not be hyper-rational or rational at all, but it is a sequence that I may then avoid if it's getting close to prior cell death trauma, like thinking towards the graveyard, so to speak.
Yes.
And basically, and that's kind of my point, is that's what creates the illogical patterns in people's brains, is every time you're giving fear or you're in panic, you create gates in your brain that make you not be able to take that next time you go through that same sequence.
Your brain stops there and finds some alternate way to think.
So we don't have to be rational because we have these and we The sequence of thoughts then becomes interrupted with these programmatic, basically, areas in our brain that are deficient.
But now, the more of these we have and the more punishment we get, we actually can now see that brains of people that are abused are smaller.
And it only goes to reason that the more places you have hyperarousal-caused, induced apoptotic cell death, the less active areas of the brain you're going to have.
So it's kind of a progression that I follow as to what is and what I went looking for was what is a belief structure and why do people become so violently opposed to questioning that?
And when you come to the point where the logic to make that next logic stop, Stave, if you want to think there is no life after...
I'm afraid of death, so I can't think about death.
So many people have this, I call them logic thought stopper that says, next time my brain goes through a logic sequence that says, I think about this life being the end, I can't think that, so I find some other alternative.
And there's many other alternatives to what you can think about other than that one thought.
But it's actually the fact that, and when I started looking at them and evaluating beliefs in general, They all follow that negative logic, where it's not something you actually believe, because your beliefs are many different branches and things you can think of in logic progression.
But it's actually the one thing you cannot allow to think that stems your beliefs from.
Yeah.
Well, I obviously think that's a powerful statement.
I would go one step further as well.
And Mike, if you can look this up, I know we've got it somewhere.
The degree to which child abuse has effects, even unto the grandchildren.
Because it seems that child abuse creates reproducible epigenetic changes to the genes.
In other words, I'm abused and therefore my genes change.
And those changed genes to some degree will pass even to my children.
And so it is a multi-generational form of genetic warfare to abuse a child.
And I think that we can really understand that poisoning a person is bad enough, but poisoning a person and their child is even worse.
It's a sequential harm to the integrity and happiness and processing Equilibriums of the mind and and body that is occurring when a child abuse its genetic a damage to to the organism and You know one of the the most three common phobias.
This is a while ago.
Maybe it's changed Maybe it's I don't know mean people on Facebook now, but the most three common phobias a while ago were height for falling not falling but hitting It was heights as spiders and snakes And people all over the world.
This is the top three fears.
Well, this all makes good sense.
And they've actually done studies where they put babies on plexiglass towards the edge of a table so the baby can't crawl over the plexiglass.
The babies from very early on stay back from the edge.
In other words, that there's a genetic, it would seem, aversion to Heights, even for babies.
Of course, spiders and snakes were things that could kill you that were very hard to defend against and very hard to see.
You know, tigers and so on, you can see, you can defend yourself against.
And so the fact that people would have these smoking craters of terror around heights and snakes and spiders would make sense because it's much more efficient.
Wherever you can, it's much more efficient to give Instruction genetically than it is through learned experience.
Now, genetic instruction is very helpful in that it's really, really quick, easy to transmit, and keeps people the safest.
The problem is it doesn't really respond well to changing circumstances, which is where epigenetics comes in.
And we'll try and kick in based upon the environment and then above these so we got genetics epigenetics and then above that we have The realm of learned or tribal or cultural Experiences and so on right so at the genetic level we seem to be scared of heights and snakes and spiders at the epigenetic level We are scared of ostracism and and abuse and and all of that and at the cultural level We learned that the red berries will taste good and help you and
feed you and the green berries will kill you.
You can't do that epigenetically and you can't do that genetically because the environment may change.
And this kind of stuff is really significant.
I'm just working at the moment on a series...
called the gene wars and it's really fascinating the degree to which this stuff can transmit itself and the degree to which genetics is so powerful in helping to understand human society like do you know this is kind of weird I didn't even know why I was white you know in terms of like Caucasian skin color well I guess pink it's the gay white but I didn't even know why I was white you probably know this but do you know why white people are white?
I am not familiar with that, no.
It's really quite fascinating.
White people are white because the skin pigmentation, the darker it is, the more, of course, you resist the sun's rays, right?
Because you don't want to be getting sunburns and skin cancer if you're living in the tropics, right?
Because there's sun all the time and all day and all that kind of stuff, right?
Now, what does the sun give you that you need to live?
Vitamin D, right?
So in the tropics, because there's so much sun, you get this dark skin which resists sunburn and also doesn't make sure you don't OD on vitamin D. But then when you go north, you get this god-awful winter.
We've just survived here in Canada.
You get this terrible winter.
Now if you have a dark skin, then you simply cannot absorb, for like a third or more of the year, you simply cannot absorb any vitamin D. Because the sun is coming at such an angle and you just, you know, with dark skin you can't.
And so the dark skin people who went north got rickets and got sick and didn't reproduce and so on.
And then those who had a mutation towards lighter skin, which then comes with like...
I think it's only 2% of the world's population is blonde or whatever.
I think I've just taken that number down a little bit over the last few years.
My remaining hair is turning into very tight steel wool, it seems.
And so those who went north, if you didn't get paler skin, because paler skin lets in more vitamin D, you had vitamin D deficiency.
And that is really quite fascinating.
I'm white so that my skin can get vitamin D from the sun despite living in a cold climate.
That's why people are white.
And this is also, interestingly enough, there's a good set of theories, whether they're true or not, I don't know.
But there's a good set of theories that says that's why the South in America had slavery and the North didn't.
Because the African slaves...
Didn't do well in the North at all because they didn't get even remotely enough sun.
The sun couldn't get through the darker skin and give them the vitamin D. And even in the South, I think from the 1820s until the 1920s, whenever a criminal was brought into the prison system in the South, Somebody wrote down, I guess the attending prison guard wrote down, you know, their height and their weight and their skin color, and they had various shades of darker and lighter for the Africans and the mulattoes or the half white, half blacks.
And you can see that the darker the skin, the shorter the person, because the growth was not the vitamin D is essential for sort of bone growth and both the bone strength and so on.
And in general, the blacks, the African slaves were shorter Than the whites, because they were taken out of a sun-rich environment in Africa, and they were taken to the south in America, which, you know, is still warmer than the north, but not as warm as Africa, and so they had a bad time of it.
And in the north, they could barely be productive as slaves at all, because it's a lot of hard work, and they just didn't have the bone strength or the height, or the, you know, they were just constantly getting sick with vitamin D deficiency.
So, anyway, that's just a sort of by-the-by.
I hate to waste that research, and I don't know if I'll ever get a chance To talk about it.
But the degree to which genetics does shape human society is really quite powerful.
Mike, did we find anything on that granddaddy thing?
It's certainly true.
I'm looking for something that would be palatable to read in this format, which I haven't found yet.
You want to do interpretive dance?
I've seen some of that stuff.
It's glorious.
I am the fourth generation of the Beatles.
So, it's only the donator section stuff.
Come on now.
Yeah, that's right.
With no time.
But no, so, like, in all seriousness, it is, yeah, it burns out parts of the brain.
It, you know, I talk about, and people can go to bombinthebrain.com for more of this, so I can do a search on YouTube for bombinthebrain.com.
It causes great harm to the system as a whole, right?
Significantly higher chances of things like ischemic heart disease and cancer and drug addictions and alcohol and tobacco consumption and premature death.
I mean, child abuse shaves You know, 10, 15, up to 20 years off people's lives.
It is a very potent environmental toxin for children and it is a kind of environmental toxin that hijacks significant portions of the DNA, of the genetics, and transmits the effects of the abuse through to the next generation.
And the reason for that, of course, makes perfect sense biologically and from an evolutionary standpoint because Human beings did not have to adapt from non-child abuse, sorry, from child abuse to non-child abuse situations.
Child abuse was de rigueur for almost all of human history up until the last 100, 150 years maybe.
And I would argue, of course, it's still rampant, rampantly going on with 70, 80, 90% of parents still hitting their children.
And so we did not have to adapt to an environment without child abuse.
And so the effects of the trauma of child abuse, for it to go from environmental to epigenetic to genetic and transmit itself to the next generation, was the most efficient way to get people to conform to their fears of disapproval, parental was the most efficient way to get people to conform to their fears of disapproval, parental assault, and ostracism, the combination of which, if they weren't afraid of it, would lead to their death or their abandonment by the tribe, and therefore a complete inability to pass
So, yeah, I think it is this giant smoking crater of the human heart which, you know, this is one of the reasons why since I know all of this and I know that as a victim of severe child abuse My genes have been altered and will transmit themselves going down the line to the next generation why I have to be a peaceful parent to the nth degree to counteract the epigenetic and now genetic pass-through
of child abuse to my children.
Yeah.
So to go on with what you said, is there a proof or evidence that we're passing on, say, if I had a child when I was 25 and then I had another child when I was 35 and I had changed my brain since then, is there proof that we're sending on a different DNA from one point in time to another?
I don't know of any proof, but again, I'm A reasonably read amateur in the field.
So I don't know if there's any proof.
That would be a very small sample set, tragically, of people who had radically reformed their parenting from aggressive to peaceful between children.
So I don't know if I would really be surprised if any studies had been done on that.
And of course, the other thing, too, is that I mean, people looking at society, particularly from academia, are like fish saying, water, what water?
It's just the way things are.
And so, even if you were to radically reform your parenting style, Brian Kaplan and others, he's been on the show too, but more about the myth of the rational voter rather than this other stuff.
But his argument, and other people have made this argument too, is that as far as your child's personality goes, it doesn't really matter.
How you parent, it doesn't really matter.
I mean, assuming that you're not a horrible abuser, right?
You can break kids.
You know, like if I'm carrying a vase, I can carry it from one place.
Whether I carry it fast or slow, it doesn't really matter.
It's still going to be a vase when I get to my destination.
If I drop it, well, it's a bunch of shards and that's sort of different.
So you can break kids, but you can't really do too much to make them different, so to speak.
Now, those are the arguments that are put forward.
There's other arguments that I've read recently that say it doesn't really matter how much time you spend with your kids, they turn out pretty much the way they turn out.
And the reason for that seems to be that peers have a very strong effect on children as opposed to parents.
Well, that's because, of course, children are locked into this gulag of public school with various ranges of homicidal and maniacal and sociopathic peers, to some degree, or at least some of them.
And so, yes, of course, that's where the predators are, and you lock them in with these predators, and so, strangely enough, they end up being more influenced by their peers.
than they do by their parents and the peers are very much the lowest common denominator and the pretty people and the athletic people which is basically from a philosophical standpoint the same kind of group they end up dominating the social environment in just about any horizontal non-voluntary tribe or tribal environment or confined environment and so I don't I believe at the moment these arguments that parenting doesn't matter that much.
I think that if you put your kids in public school, of course you're going to diminish in your authority as a parent.
I also think that most parents, the vast majority of parents, are non-philosophical, non-individuated, and therefore they're just part of the generic Borg blob.
Of humanity, and therefore the idea that this generic Borg blog is going to have different, radically different, or even somewhat different effects on parenting is like asking a hawk, you know, from 300 feet up to pick out one ant over another.
You know, they're all kind of undifferentiated, which is, I think, true of a lot of people's characters.
That having been said, I think that for them to say that parenting doesn't matter would be like saying it doesn't matter if you're raised Mormon or Muslim or atheist, you're going to end up pretty much the same person.
I just don't believe that's true because if that were true, they wouldn't bother putting so much energy into indoctrinating children.
And yes, atheists can indoctrinate children if they inflict conclusions rather than methodologies on their kids.
So not all atheists, but some.
Does that...
I mean, so I don't know this 10-year gap and I've radically changed my parenting.
It depends if they're on the other variables, which a lot of researchers wouldn't take into account.
Like, if you take a kid from public school and you compare them to somebody who was homeschooled or unschooled or in the Waldorf school or even Montessori...
What would that difference be like?
But there are other people, Charles Murray has talked about this, who say it doesn't matter whether your kid goes to public school or some elite private school.
They're pretty much going to end up with the same IQ and the same personality no matter what.
And I'm still exploring this area, and it's very much a challenge and confusing.
Weird for me, which means that I've got to push even further to try and understand it because it goes against the grain for me who's focused so much on parenting.
But that means I've got to drive myself in further and either correct my position or understand where things are coming from.
So, yeah, I don't know if the 10 years would make much of a difference.
Yeah, I spend a lot of time looking at how now after I've kind of seen the negative logic thought stoppers, whenever I come to a place where I stop thinking or I also might be hyper aroused where you actually get upset at somebody and you're like, why did I get upset?
So I've come to the conclusion that there's a lot of really ways that you can start then unwinding yourself once you've figured out that These patterns in your own thinking are caused by some adverse reaction that you have to something in the past.
I help people and talk to people to look at how do we then start to make ourselves a better version of ourselves by understanding what in ourselves signifies these things and then exploring them in an exploration cycle of what What we can do to alleviate them or at least figure out what caused them.
And then you can make a conscious decision whether you want to be still following that pattern or not.
And you have somewhat of a control to rewire yourself.
But then in a reactive situation, you're still reacting to them as you are programmed.
So that programming is very strong, even if you can logically understand that you're going to start breaking it.
Yeah, and I mean, I think that our susceptibility to environmental influences is so strong that, at least in my life, I've chosen to simply not surround myself with triggers.
I mean, that is the reality.
I mean, you know, some guy who spent, you know, 10 years in combat in the front lines and people have died in his arms and he's had his hand blown off and he's blown up and shot dozens of people or whatever...
That guy, I don't think you can't ever go to a war film and not be that guy.
I mean, this is not going to happen.
It's like pretending I'm never going to understand English in the future because I'm going to learn some other language.
I'm always going to understand English because that was my native tongue.
And so, for me, and I think this is a useful thing in general for people to think about, we tend to have a kind of superhero relationship.
To our own triggers.
And of course, in the interest of abusers, they want to tell us it's our fault for responding to triggers.
Well, just don't respond to those triggers.
It's like, well, that's not under my control.
That's an autonomous nervous system response.
That is not under my control.
I don't have the capacity to unwill...
Sorry, to will...
The eradication of the effects of history on my nervous system.
That is not under my control.
It doesn't mean I can't manage my thoughts.
It doesn't mean I can't.
But for me, I didn't want to spend the rest of my life having been around traumatic people, destructive people when I was growing up.
I didn't want to spend the rest of my life managing my response to...
Destructive people.
I did that my whole childhood.
Why the hell would I want to do that as an adult?
Should I have any possible choice or option to do anything different?
And so I don't have abusive people in my life.
I actually can't have abusive people in my life because of my history.
Other people may be can, you know, I mean...
But if you've been repeatedly mauled by lions, being a lion tamer is simply an exercise in masochism.
It is not...
A rational and healthy thing.
It is a repetition compulsion.
And the other thing too is that even if I felt that I could somehow handle having abusive or destructive people in my life, it would be pretty horrible to try and think I could make that choice for my daughter because I can't make that choice for my daughter.
She's...
I may have that choice for myself, although my inner child would disagree, but I certainly don't have that choice for my daughter.
So I have a son as well, and something that I did without really noticing before I came to the realization of what I've been writing about with these kind of logic thought stoppers is what I call them, is that I always took the approach that I wanted to give him a reason why I was telling him to do everything, even when he was young.
Kind of conversations with my four-year-old where I'm exploring why am I telling him to do this thing?
Because I don't have a reason for it.
I just kind of have done it all my life.
And somebody else told me.
Somebody else trained me to do it.
So a lot of...
I think there's a big piece to take from going forward and maybe help parents understand that what I call nondescriptive negative programming where we yell at our children to stop doing things But we don't give them the what are you supposed to be doing piece.
So what we're doing is we're triggering them to stop thinking, get a little bit of fear, create one of these logic thought stoppers, and then wait for external for the next order, for the next command, for the next thing to do.
So training our children to not think for themselves by Telling them to stop doing stuff, but not explaining what it is we're trying to stop doing.
So continuous training by just the nondescriptive negative, just the no.
If you see a toddler running towards a highway and you yell no at him, what's he do?
He gets afraid because somebody's yelling no at him.
He stops.
He learns to take the next order externally.
So the reason piece with training our offspring to not program them as much except for the absolute required times to have these kind of holes in their sequential thought process, if you don't want to say logic patterns, that they involuntary follow is a big piece that I think the next generation of parents needs to hear.
Yeah, and be willing to be coached by your children.
I wanted to do a video recording today because I'm really pumped about some stuff I figured out about gene wars.
And I was chatting with my daughter at breakfast and I said, oh, I'm going to have to do a video today.
And she's like, well, why didn't you get it done during the week during your times of scheduled work?
I'm like, that's a good question.
I did this, I did that, I did the other.
And she's like, well, then didn't you make your choices?
But why does that mean that, you know, it's Saturday?
Why does it mean that you're not able to play with me?
I'm like, well, you have a good point.
I do have my scheduled times to work during the week, which we know about.
And if I didn't get it done during that time, does that mean I get to impinge on our Saturday together?
And I said, you know, you...
You're right.
I won't do the video.
You're right.
I can wait.
It's not essential to get it done today.
It's not time sensitive.
Jeans will still be there on Monday.
And so, yeah, I mean, just be willing to listen and be coached by your kids.
It means that they don't have to escalate when they have a disagreement with you.
Yeah, that's absolutely the reason piece.
Not just training them to stop thinking and look external to themselves for the next...
Next thing to do.
I mean, that's the biggest piece of what I see kind of missing in the world of raising children is everybody is so busy that they just turn to their children and tell them what not to do all the time, what not to do, what not to do repeatedly.
Oh, and it's always because the parent feels anxious about something.
Yeah.
It's almost never because there's some sort of rational, because otherwise you give them the rational explanation for it.
Yeah.
But there's no training to them of to think logically through things.
There's just all these things in their brain that they stop thinking about.
Yeah.
Well, I appreciate your thoughts on it.
And, you know, we continue to push out the mantras of peaceful parenting.
And, you know, it's still my hope, the libertarian community.
The guy mentioned Hoppy at the beginning.
And, you know, I don't know much about Hoppy other than...
I think that there was some pro spanking message or whatever that he was talking about with some other libertarian thinkers.
It is still my hope and my goal to encourage libertarians to think about the non-aggression principle with regards to children.
If it is a principle, we should try and enact it against the most helpless and vulnerable members of society, which is certainly children.
And we should also try to enact our principles in the spheres of life where we have the greatest control.
Having principles you can never affect is functionally the same as having no principles.
And so it's like, I have food, I can never eat it.
I bought a piece of land from some guy.
He has never told me where it is.
It's like, well, isn't that exactly the same as not owning that piece of land?
Because you can never visit it, you don't know where it is, and so on.
So values that you cannot bring into existence, that you cannot affect in a sphere you have control over, pretty much are the same to me of having no values.
And of course, libertarian argument, well, we do education and we do politics and so on.
I've already made my case about those, but the reality is that with regards to children, with regards to promoting peaceful parenting, we have a way of bringing the non-aggression principle into people's lives in very actionable and effective ways that make their children happier, that make their family lives infinitely happier, and breed an entire cohort that make their family lives infinitely happier, and breed an entire cohort of kids that will be the envy of the world and the foundation of a Not a bad payoff for dealing with the icky childhood stuff.
Thanks very much for your call, man.
You're welcome back at any time.
I'm just enjoying following along all the computer science things that you were talking about, which I certainly did better than with the math guy the other day.
Thanks very much for calling in, Chris.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Take care.
Alright, thank you, Chris.
Up next is Alex.
Alex wrote in and said, Is property is something that is created?
I agree with this statement, but I am not sure that it explains something that was not produced by a person can be exclusively used by that person.
I believe that this question is of paramount importance when it comes to ending wars, such as one tribe fighting the other for resources and or land.
That's from Alex.
Hello, Alex.
Hi, Stefan.
Can you hear me?
I can.
How are you doing?
Good.
Hi.
I'm well.
How are you?
Well, thank you.
Doing one of my favorite things, chatting with listeners on a Saturday night, so all is well.
Tell me about how you feel that this is going to end war?
Well, I believe that up to a certain point in history, basically all wars were fought over resources and land and stuff like that.
So if we create a system that provides a rational way to give land to certain people that deserve it and not to those that don't deserve it, then that will simply end all war.
Because, I mean, like, what are you going to fight over?
I mean, the rest is all...
UPB deals with the rest of these issues that you bring up.
Okay, so you understand how if I make something that it could be considered my property.
Sure.
And that's a Lockean...
It's called the infusion of labor argument.
It's the idea that if you mix your labor in or you infuse your labor with something, it becomes yours.
I think it's a finer...
I'm not sure how to degree to which it's really philosophical.
It's just one of these common sense-y kind of things.
But my argument says that...
The only thing that is really property is something that's created.
Now, in order for something to be created, you need exclusive use of a resource.
So, for instance, if nobody could ever own land, there probably wouldn't be many crops, right?
Because you wouldn't bother planting the crops if anyone could come along and grab it, right?
And this is sort of the argument between certain cultures where property really never developed.
And a lot of that had to do with an excess of resources, also very aggressive societies.
And so you end up like nobody bothers figuring out how to do agriculture because somebody's just going to come along and steal your wheat and so on, right?
So in order to have agriculture, you need to have a reasonable expectation of exclusive use.
So when somebody goes and fences in an acre, let's say, they want to build a house and they want to have a garden, right?
Yes.
They're not going to build the house and have the garden unless they have a reasonable expectation that that acre is going to be viewed as theirs, right?
Right.
And so property rights over the acre are assumed in order for something to be created that wasn't there before.
It's a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for the creation of the house and the vegetable garden for the person to have use of property.
So if he fences it in, Then, the way that common law works, if I remember rightly, and it's not true everywhere, but this is the general, and I know this from when I was doing flamestaking up north in Canada when I was after high school but before college.
The way it kind of works is you're allowed to fence in your property.
And then you have a certain amount of time in which you should develop that property.
You've got to do something with it.
Now, if you don't do anything with it, then it refers back to an unowned state and other people can claim it.
And that's so that people don't just go around building these huge swaths of property, which they then can will to their heirs in perpetuity forever, even though they've never visited it, never done anything with it.
So if you want houses, you have to give people the right to the land.
Now, if they take the right to the land, don't do anything with it, generally it reverts back to an unowned state.
But if people irrigate it and they till the soil and they clear the trees and remove the rocks and they build the house, well then they have created something which is a house and crops, whatever, corn or wheat or maize or whatever.
And so it's not...
That something is just unowned and someone takes a claim to it and that's the end of the story.
It is because the most valuable property is that which is created.
Stuff that is just kind of found is not particularly valuable.
I mean, that's why most people live in houses which are created rather than caves Which are found and that's why people like to have a stake rather than something that they found by the side of the road that has its spine sticking out.
I mean that's an eyeball missing across the street or something.
And so the most valuable things in life in the economy are those that have the most, the furthest from nature where the most value has been mixed in.
You're never going to trip over a naturally formed cell phone in the dirt or something, right?
Absolutely.
The most valuable stuff is that which has had the most labor mixed into it.
But for any labor to be mixed into something of any real value, you first have to have...
The right to the space that it's going to be created in, if that makes sense.
Sure.
Now, like, do you mind, like, if I just jump in here, like, a little bit?
No, no, go ahead.
It's supposed to be a conversation, so go ahead.
Right, right.
So, like, my point is that, theoretically, you could end up with a situation where you have a monopoly owner of all land, or at least, let's say, a country amount of land, right?
No, no, hang on, hang on.
No, I mean, my point is...
I can't keep doing these crazy premises to begin with.
So let's say we have a country, let's just say, I don't know, that's Australia.
It's a giant island or whatever, just so we don't have to worry about borders that aren't water and land.
So we've got a country called Australia, and let's say that a general common law is dominant in that society, whether it's enforced by DROs or social exclusion, ostracism or whatever, right?
So there's a common law thing which says you have to enclose the land and then you have to do something with that land.
And you can't just do something, like you can't enclose 100 acres and then dig a hole in one acre and say, well, that's it.
Like you have to actually do something with the land.
And so how would some one person or one organization end up with all that land?
Well, I mean, I think if you look at any monarchy, I guess you see how one person can end up, well, theoretically.
No, but that's a state, right?
Sure, sure.
No, that's exactly what I'm saying.
In 1933, I think when property taxes first really began to be imposed in a general sense, the American government owns everything.
It owns everything and you pay your rent to it.
But that's a state situation, right?
No, you're absolutely right.
My problem is that I'm having trouble arguing with people who claim that the state is just basically a corporation with a monopoly on land and thus they can make any laws up that they choose.
And if you don't like it, you can just go away somewhere.
I mean, you know, anywhere.
They don't really care about that.
How is a state different from a company that simply is the monopoly owner of all land?
Well, a company has competition.
A company, by definition, does not have a legal monopoly on the use of force, right?
That's why there's no Walmart army.
Well, I mean, you're right.
I'm not saying it's moral or not, but my point is if at some point you had a person who just, I don't know, he built a huge fence around a huge area and, you know, he just, I don't know, he built like robots that did something, but at some point you had like some people show up and he said, all right, I'll give you some land and, you know.
You can use it for whatever you want, but you have to follow my rules.
And then you kind of have this, like, quasi-monarchy, aristocracy, like, you know, whatever.
And the way that I see it, you can argue that perhaps, you know...
Wait, sorry, sorry, sorry, hang on.
So, I just want to be sure I understand it.
I don't mean to interrupt your flow.
So, let's say that I am a developer.
I buy up 100 acres, and I put, I don't know, let's give people some elbow room.
I buy 100 acres, and I put one house on each acre, right?
Okay.
I build one house on each acre.
And then I say to people, you can come and buy these houses, but I'm only going to sell you a lease to the houses.
You can't buy them outright.
It doesn't become your property.
It's still subject to some kind of agreement in this neighborhood.
Maybe it's like nobody can have a gun.
Oh, I don't know, whatever it is.
It's gun-free.
And so they are putting up that...
Choice.
And you see this all the time with condo agreements in old age homes.
No syphilis, please, right?
So in old age homes, they have particular rules.
They have hotels, of course, have noise rules.
And you can't, as I keep getting told, steal the beds.
You know, all these kinds of things.
No, I had that on when I came.
Really?
So, yeah, there's tons of places.
You know, you can't go and sell the rental car again.
I keep hearing about this a lot every time I come back.
Offer to split the money.
They're like, it's still illegal.
So there's tons of restrictions on one's use of other people's property if you don't own it outright, right?
So I don't see how that's the same.
Like saying that a hotel which says you can't take the bed, even though you've rented the room, is somehow the same as the United States government.
I think that that's kind of a stretch.
Well, I mean, I don't know if I agree with you completely.
Like, I mean, at some point, you had people homestead the United States or, you know, get it from the Indians, I don't know, whatever.
Like, the point is that they now control this land.
And despite the fact that they have, like, this government or, you know, whatever that, like, makes the laws, I mean, it comes down to people.
And, like, it's a group of people that virtually own everything, right?
No, no, no.
But, look, first of all, if the – let's say I've got a house next to the hotel, right?
Sure.
Sure.
If the hotel changes its policy, does that change my house?
No, no.
You're not affected by it.
Well, I mean, I guess, I don't know if they just make some crazy rules.
I mean, I don't mean does it affect my house in any way, shape, or form, but can they tell me what to do with my property if they change their property?
So if they change their price of rooms, that doesn't affect my house, right?
No.
If they decide to hire robot gardeners, that doesn't affect my use of my property, right?
So their property is used by them, and my property is used by me.
The government assumes control over everyone's property.
Yes.
And in other words, there's dual ownership, right?
So I supposedly own...
Whatever.
My house, right?
But I still have to pay off the government every year.
Otherwise, they'll take it away from me.
So you have dual ownership, which is not particularly prevalent in any other situation, right?
I mean, that's what the mafia says to people who have little Italian restaurants.
They say, oh, you know, you got to give us some money.
Otherwise, some bad things might happen to you.
Bring the cannoli.
Yeah, yeah.
That's criminal.
If I go to someone else's property and say they now owe me money or I am going to Kidnap them and lock them in a basement, that's illegal.
But when the government imposes property taxes on you, that is perfectly legal.
And so you have this opposing ethic and this is where you have to work at breaking people down.
This is why saying the government does it doesn't make any sense because the government is just a fiction that is wrapped around a bunch of people with guns.
And so why does one person get to impose unilateral dual ownership on other people and extract money from them?
And in the public sector, that's called virtuous taxation and the price of civilization.
And in the private sector, that's called an extortion and a shakedown and people go to jail.
How the hell can people justify opposing ethics for the same carbon-based life forms?
Well, I mean, my point is just this, that, like, let's say you, like, a matrix scenario kind of thing.
Like, if you're inventing land with your mind, right?
Like, you just think about it and...
Oh, dude, dude.
Oh, come on.
Hang on.
I'm sorry.
I'm just...
Where are we going here?
My point is that your ownership of land that you claim is your property, how do you claim it as yours?
Just because you're using it, that means that someone else isn't using it.
My point is how do you actually claim it?
If I just build a tent somewhere or something, I'm going to be kicked out from there in a couple of hours or something like that.
Wait, you've got to slow down because you're just firing a whole bunch of stuff past me.
I don't know why.
I'm sorry.
I think I had to drink a lot of coffee.
Hang on.
We got inventing land in my mind to how do you own things to if I pitch a tent, someone's going to throw me out.
Do you mind if I take it step by step slowly?
My mind?
Right.
I would love it if you took it step by step.
Let's do this.
So my point is this.
Trying to catch these like speed of light javelins of thought is not going to put holes in my hands.
Sure, sure.
Right.
My point is that like if you could create land like physically or you know with your mind however then yeah nobody can claim that land is theirs.
Like if they come and say all right you have to give me this virtual thing that you created and it's just no I'm sorry man that this is extortion.
But If you just, you know, you show up in the woods, you build a house or whatever, right?
Or something like that.
And then it, like, turns out that you built your house on top of some kind of, like, unobtainium, right?
Well, a reference to that movie, you know?
And then you're like, alright, now all the unobtainium is mine.
And it's like, well, no, it really isn't.
I mean, do you kind of, like, get wrong?
Well, because, I mean, anybody could have built that house there.
It's like, why is it yours, necessarily?
Because you can't build a house unless you own what's underneath the house.
Well, I mean, that's my point.
Do you own anything that's underneath the house?
Of course you do.
Why?
Because if somebody, let's say that you have a house, and somebody decides to drill a giant cave three inches underneath your foundations, what's going to happen to your house?
Well, it'll fall probably.
It's going to fall into some giant Florida-style sinkhole.
Yes.
Right?
And so you have to own what's underneath your house.
It's like saying you can own the second floor of your house but not the first floor.
What's underneath your foundations is required to hold your house above the molten core of the earth.
So, yes, you have to own what's underneath your house.
I'm saying, like, it would be logical to obviously own what's underneath your house if you're, you know, if you actually plan to live there.
But my point is, how do you actually, like, claim ownership?
Like, this really, in my opinion, does...
Oh, no, hang on, hang on.
Again, we're moving too rapidly here.
So, now we understand why you own the unobtainium under your house, right?
Because people can't get to it without harming your house, right?
Well, I don't know.
Maybe they can, maybe they can't.
That's a good question.
Well, if it's four miles down, I don't know.
Let's not worry about unobtainium four miles down when we still have peaceful parenting to establish and convincing people that taxation is theft.
Let's not worry about unobtainium four miles down at some point in the future.
Like fiction, physical impossibility, let's not worry about that.
But how do you establish ownership?
Well, you establish ownership by putting the fence around it and then what you create...
Is yours and if the necessity for being able to create something is putting a fence around something then that's how you create it because otherwise Any culture that doesn't allow for any private ownership of land is going to remain in a state of subsistence That is not going to have any particular they have no rules.
They have no philosophy.
They have no particular intellectual culture.
They have no science.
They have like they have none of the things that Being able to put a goddamn fence around a square acre is the beginning of.
Any culture that doesn't recognize that, I don't really care about them because I would scarcely call it a culture at all.
And so, you need to have that in order to get everything else that comes out of that.
And so, you know, say, well, how is it justified?
Well, the only places where it's not justified are never going to show up in the intellectual history of the species anyway.
Well, I mean, like, right now, you can't just build a random house in the U.S. anywhere.
Maybe you can.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm not really sure.
But from what I know, you can't just build a fence somewhere and claim that that land is yours.
That's because of the state.
Well, sure.
But, I mean, the thing is, the state, from what I understand, it rose out of this, like, free market without ethics.
Just freedom.
Like, you can kill anybody.
You can do anything you want.
That's where the state...
Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Oh, my God.
Dude, I don't know who you're role-playing here, but...
Are you saying that the government grew out of a free market?
No.
I made some specifics.
Free market, not in the term that we're discussing.
In the term that free isn't free.
You can do anything you want.
That kind of free.
Murder is fine.
Anything is fine.
That kind of freedom.
Can you tell me a society in history where murder was fine?
Sure.
Where there was never any social or legal prohibition against murder.
Well, no, I mean, you have to understand that murder by a group of people is fine now by most governments.
I mean, they just won't tell you about it, or if they will...
No, no, no, dude, dude, you're moving the goalpost again.
You said that the state grew out of a society where murder was fine.
Okay, sure.
And I'd like to know what society that was.
I've never heard of it.
Any tribal society where you just have a bunch of men...
Well, no, I have to disagree.
I mean, you know, they come in, they kill the man, they take the woman and, you know, the resources.
Well, no, war.
That's different.
War, okay, for sure.
Well, I mean, it's murder, isn't it?
I mean, I'm sorry.
Like, I think that's murder in my opinion.
Like, if you just kill somebody for their resources or, you know, for their woman or something, whatever.
So, I mean, in my humble opinion, it just erodes out of this chaos.
And right now, like, when...
No, no, no, no.
No, come on, come on, man.
So, two opposing tribes would fight each other, for sure.
But within the tribal structure, I don't know of any tribes which had no prohibitions.
Like, you could just go and kill anyone, you go kill the priest, you could go kill the chief, you could go kill anyone, and people would be like, oh, good show, right?
They'd drop their monocle into their near beer, and they'd be fine with it.
I mean, there have been, as far as I know, through, again, I'm no anthropologist, but...
Throughout human history, there have always been bans on rape, theft, assault, and murder.
Now, of course, when it comes to fighting other tribes, that's a whole different kettle of fish.
But the state doesn't arise out of intertribal, right?
The state arises out of a tribe, right?
Well, I mean, it's like...
Basically, you're just saying that murder is like when, you know, you murder a person who's like right next to you of the same tribe.
But my point is that murder was fine as long as you kill someone else, I guess.
Or, I mean, the point is murder was still fine.
You just had some random, you know, explanation for it.
Or, you know, the gods told me to murder this person.
It's like murder was fine.
I mean, until...
Okay, but if you've got a problem with intertribal murder, saying that there was...
It was, you know, murder was allowed in the past and then states came along...
No, no, no.
Murder is allowed now.
It's like hundreds of millions of people slaughtered by states in the 20th century alone.
Absolutely.
No, I agree with you there.
I think that the state now, there are certain people in the state that think murder is fine, torture is fine, everything is fine.
Like you take a look at Guantanamo Bay.
Certain people in the state, aren't you talking about you, me, 12 other people who don't agree with that?
No, I don't agree with it.
Everyone just about agrees that murder is fine on behalf of the state.
It doesn't matter what I disagree with because they have the guns and I don't.
So, I mean, they have to keep up this, like, you know, like, you're not a slave kind of thing.
Like, we can't kill you kind of thing.
But in reality, they can.
They just don't because it's not profitable for them.
I mean, for whatever reason, they don't.
But they can.
I mean, it's been done.
It's done by every government from what I know.
Well, I appreciate that.
I mean I just – I don't know what we're having a disagreement about.
Well, no.
My simple point is that like when you say like this kind of situation where somebody has a monopoly on land, it can't happen.
Well, I kind of think it can.
Like if right now the government – like the US government just says, yeah, you know, we were wrong.
All right.
I'm just going to sell all the land like to a private individual.
And boom, now we have a private individual that owns all this land.
Why?
Because he paid a dollar for it.
I mean, it seems like a fair trade to me.
But that's got nothing to do with the free market or a free society.
No, I agree with you.
I absolutely agree with you.
Like, if you take the non-aggression principle, if you take all this, it has nothing to do with it.
And that guy would sell most of the land anyway.
Well, I don't know.
Or maybe he would just say, all right, now I'm the new government and now we're going to have these laws that, you know, if you don't follow them, well, you're trespassing on my property.
You should get out.
Well, okay, so then he has to buy all of this land, and he has to buy an army, and he has to buy enforcers, and he has to buy prisons, and he has to set up ports, and he has to have police, and he has to arm them, and how the hell is he going to make a profit out of that?
He's just going to sell the land.
Well, I mean, I don't know.
He doesn't have to sell the land.
He can impose his – like, all right, imagine that, like, you have a world government, right?
I mean, I don't know how far we're from it, but perhaps we'll get there one day.
Hopefully not, but, you know, never know.
No, no, no.
We're not talking about a world government.
You've got to – man, I've got to – this is like – this is like you're talking to somebody whose vocal cords represent something in Vegas I'm pulling an arm on and lemons are spinning around.
I mean, we're talking about a guy who buys a bunch of land from the government.
No, no.
I'm sorry.
No, let me finish.
I just can't keep going from topic to topic.
Go ahead.
This is like being drugged and driven around behind a truck in a bank.
I think we're on the same topic.
Please go ahead, though.
No, no.
So we're talking about a guy who's bought a bunch of land from the government.
So let's say he's got a million acres, right?
Now, he can't possibly develop a million acres because the amount of capital that it would take to produce We're good to go.
What the hell people want with a million acres?
There's no way one guy could ever know that, whereas people with more local requirements and conditions and perspectives and funding and research and needs analysis and all that, they can figure out what to do with those million acres infinitely better than some guy who says, oh, I know what to do with acre one and acre two and acre...
He's not going to know any of that stuff for a million, right?
No, you're absolutely right about this.
And so he's going to make far more money selling off the land.
So even if he gains some monopoly, he's going to have bought that land because he wants to make money from it.
And the best way for him to make money from it is to sell it off over time to a variety of individuals who are going to use their local expertise to develop it to the best economic use possible.
So even this situation where a guy buys, I don't know, a million acres for a dollar, he's only going to realize any real profit by...
By developing it.
Plus, also, under common law, if he didn't, whatever land he didn't develop in a year or two would probably revert back to common ownership.
And since he can't possibly develop the million acres in a year or two, he's going to end up having to sell it off anyway to people who can provide that.
So even if one guy gets a million acres from the government for a buck, there's just no way it would ever stay in his hands in any way, shape, or form.
Yeah.
Okay, so just to make it a little bit clearer, let's just say that this world government sold the whole earth to this one guy.
We have common law, right?
I understand that these are kind of crazy scenarios, but I mean...
The whole government...
The whole world government sells the whole earth to one guy.
Why on earth would a one world government sell the whole earth to one guy?
Well, because perhaps this guy decides that he wants to be all anarcho-capitalist and he says, alright, I'm going to buy the earth.
Basically, he controls the government to begin with.
That's my point.
But wait, hang on, but let's say, so the government is getting half the money from everyone in the world because they tax everyone, right?
Yes.
So the government, the one world government is getting half the money from the entire world every year.
But somehow, someone is going to get enough money.
Now, so companies are generally valued at 10 to 20 times earnings.
And that's companies that don't get half the money from the world every single year.
So this would be at least 20 times earnings and probably closer to 40 or 50 or maybe even 100 times earnings.
But let's just say 20 times earnings.
So this Government, if it's getting half the money from the entire world, it's being valued at 20 times its earnings, right?
So that's 10 years of the entire planet's entire income, and one guy is going to have that money to be able to buy that from the government.
He doesn't buy it.
That's my point.
He is the one that controls the government now, but he controls it through force.
But to make it legitimate through, like, you know, to purchase it, you know, to make it seem like a...
I thought you said the government sells this.
Right, but he is the government.
That's what I'm saying, that the guy is the government.
In a way, he's just this king of the world, and then he says, alright, I have to make good on, make it seem like I'm a virtuous person, so I'm going to pretend that I'm a nice guy, and I just buy it from the government, and then we'll just...
We'll change things.
And how much does he buy it from the government for?
It doesn't matter because he is the government.
Oh, it does matter because if there's not enough money in the known universe to pay for half of the value of the entire world's income that the government gets every year, it kind of does matter.
Well, you see, the thing is, income is usually measured in dollars, well, from what I know.
And you have an organization that can print as many dollars as you want.
So the thing is, they can buy up the world.
I mean, whatever price.
The price doesn't matter.
If you control the government...
No, it does matter.
If your business plan is, I'm going to sell a casino to a homeless guy, then that's not a very realistic scenario.
No, but this isn't a homeless guy.
This is the man who controls the government.
Like, let's just assume that it's one person.
I mean, it can be a group of people.
It doesn't really matter.
But he just decides that, you know, I'm going to basically sell myself this land and, you know, and then I'm going to put in place the same laws that we just had before.
So, I mean, like, my point is he bought the land.
Yes, he did, I guess.
Legitimately, because the government does own all the land now.
And, like, your point about the fact that in two years he can lose that land.
All right, I can accept that.
But then that's the answer that I'm looking for.
Okay.
If I've solved the problem by not saying anything right now, I won't press my luck by saying anything.
No, my point is that your solution is simple.
Unless he starts working all this land in two years or whatever, a certain day, then we simply take all this land from him and we consider it.
Well, no, I hate to say this, but my solution doesn't exist.
Because you're talking about a universal solution.
Right.
And so why would he care about common law, right?
Well, sure.
That is my point.
I mean, we will have a war or something.
I mean, I don't know.
Well, I will certainly say that if one man somehow ends up owning the entire planet, the odds of a free society become somewhat insignificant.
And that one world, one person dictatorship would be a challenge for a free society.
I'm not particularly worried about it because I'm more worried about whether we can get people to stop hitting their kids in their own home.
But if you have a particular concern about one guy owning the entire planet and not respecting common law, I guess our paths will diverge in terms of our moral focus.
Okay, but, like, I mean, it doesn't have to be one guy.
Like, do you think, like, 20 guys is, like, a better scenario?
Like, I understand what you mean.
I mean, we have to raise children peacefully, but, I mean, this is the end of all war if you simply...
If you, like, my proposal, I mean, I don't know if you want to hear it or not, but, like...
I do.
I do.
But I just want to say I don't care if it's one or 20 guys.
But, okay, yeah, I'd like to hear your proposal.
Well...
We basically say that land cannot be owned by an individual.
How do we get things done?
You have a government or a group of people or whatever, and if you want to, say, build a house, you come to some kind of agreement.
Not an agreement.
You have an auction for a piece of land, and whoever wins this auction pays this group of people.
They disperse all this money that they got to everybody and absolutely everybody fairly.
Wait, wait, hang on a sec.
So there's an auction for, let's say I want an acre to build a house and a garden.
Yeah, like you physically go, I want this place.
You point at it.
Yeah, point on a map and I say, I want this place.
And then the government has an auction, is that right?
Yes, yes.
And then I pay – let's say I pay $100,000 for this acre of land.
No, no, no.
Like you don't pay.
You basically – you agree to pay a certain amount like for – like for 20 – like basically you lease the land for 20 years for a certain – like I don't know, whatever, a certain amount of money.
And who do I lease the land from?
You lease the land from this entity that controls all the land but they don't – they can't take this money.
They have to just spread it out evenly to everyone.
Basically, the logic behind this is that if you say, I have universal control over this land, that means that effectively you're keeping other people from it and you simply pay for that right.
That's all I can say about this.
And you can do the same thing.
But you have, I mean, under the common law scenario, you have paid for the right to have other people not use your land because of the labor involved in enclosing it and developing it.
Right.
There is significant labor involved in keeping other people from your land.
Like if you just enclose a farm, right?
Like you say, all right, I'm going to build a farm on this place, right?
But it turns out that you build a farm on an unobtainium mine, like some – and then you're just like – Are we back to sci-fi here?
Okay.
Yeah, sure.
I mean I'm sorry if you're – An oil field.
No, because I thought we already dealt with this one.
My point is this, that you don't own the land just because you build a fence around it.
That seems really strange.
No, and we've gone through that.
You do not own the land just because you build a fence around it.
What was the answer to that?
That you develop it.
I understand that.
My point is just because you build a farm somewhere doesn't mean that the land is yours.
That means the crops are yours.
I agree with that.
Are you going to grow the crops without being able to exclusively use the land?
Are you going to get floating crops?
Are they going to hover over the land and get their subsidence from passing insects?
I'm not sure how that works.
How do you get exclusive ownership of this land?
By developing.
Well, as we talked about, you enclose it and then you develop it.
Right, but my point is here, you don't enclose and develop it.
You simply say, alright, I can do with this land so much good that it'll be great.
And I'll pay you this much money to everyone to just stay off my land, respect my property rights, and that's it.
This government, they can't control how this money is spent.
They just have to give it away.
They can't do some public...
Public good, kind of, build an army, you know, whatever.
They just have to spread the wealth.
That's it.
That's their only function.
Okay, so the government owns the land.
It's not going to be corrupted by anyone.
Let me finish my thought.
Everyone is paying everyone else for the right to use land.
So if I pay $10,000 to the government to use land, my neighbor pays $10,000 to the government to use land, the government gives my $10,000 to my neighbor, it gives my neighbors $10,000 to me, and nothing in particular has done except we've moved a bunch of stuff around.
Well, sure.
Unless you have a waterfront property and your neighbor is behind you in housing terms, of course your property is worth more.
So if you enclose that property, it will be the best idea ever.
But here, you basically have to pay for that property.
You say, yes, I want to live in a waterfront.
I want to see the ocean for whatever reason.
And you have an auction and you say, yes, then I will pay more.
And then you end up paying $11,000 while your neighbor ends up paying $10,000.
And somebody doesn't pay anything.
They just live in the woods where nobody even wants an auction or whatever.
So somebody can pitch a tent in the woods and they don't have to pay anything?
Unless there's an auction for this place.
Like if somebody comes up to his exact tent and says, all right, I need this land that you're on and I'm willing to pay this government like $1 for it.
Then, yeah, I mean, unless you propose to pay $2, then you should, like, pick up your tent and kind of move on.
But the good news is that if you're a virtuous person, you are part of the society, and this money, it goes to you.
So, I mean, you'll have $2, you know, just from this.
Oh, okay, so you don't like the poor.
Is that right?
No, no, no.
Hang on.
In this scenario, you have to have money in order to buy land.
The beautiful thing about common law is you don't have to have money to buy land.
I mean, you only have to enclose it and start developing it.
And that can be virtually free.
Well, listen, I mean, Stefan, when you say you don't like the poor, I mean, I have nothing against the poor.
I'm not really...
No, you want a situation where you have to bid money To get land.
And poor people have more labor than they have money.
And so any situation which is cash-based is going to be highly discriminatory against the poor.
With the common law, like think of the people who went to settle the frontier in America in the 17th, 18th century and so on.
They didn't have any money.
In fact, sometimes they didn't have a dollar to their name.
But they would go out and what they had was...
Time, energy, and labor, which the poor has an excess of relative to the capital of the rich.
So any situation that you're going to set up where people have to bid money in order to get land is going to favor the rich and basically shut the poor out of land ownership.
And what that means is that we end up with a feudal system where people who've got a lot of capital end up owning a huge amount of land and everybody else has to end up renting from them from here to eternity.
I have to disagree with you on that because, I mean, if you're moving to the moon or something, nobody's really going to auction off a piece of the moon.
There's no point.
But you can move there and just live there.
Same thing with the woods and all the land that is currently not used there.
I mean, are you seriously saying that your option is to move to the moon?
No.
Why is the moon coming into this?
You can't get to the moon and you can't live on the moon.
My point is that if you just want to go to some place where there are no people and nobody wants to build anything here, then you just go there.
It's simple as that.
But if you want to stay in a place that has to produce something, then yes, you have to pay for that.
The good news is if you're totally poor, you're totally broke, well, everybody that owns the land is paying these taxes and you're getting your fair share.
So, I mean, eventually, I mean, you can rent an apartment, I have no problem with that.
Like, the rich person, he buys the land, he builds the complex, right?
Whatever.
And you just basically live off, you can just basically live in this apartment complex for just, you know, the stuff that we get from the land tax, basically.
What prevents the government from playing favorites with the land that they have?
Well, because you have a direct auction.
If somebody messes up...
You have a free society, keep in mind.
They don't have an army.
No, no, no.
You've got a government.
You don't have a free society.
Okay, fine, fine.
You have this institution that holds these auctions and then simply takes the money.
No, no.
You have an institution that owns all the land.
Thank you.
So that's a government.
Well, I would say...
Because they have established ownership and control without the investment of labor.
See, the beautiful thing about requiring enclosure and development is it makes sure that land ownership does not get concentrated.
No, I understand what you mean.
But my point is that that's like them owning land on the moon.
They can't do anything with it.
You have an auction that simply passes this land to another entity.
Wait, wait, wait.
Sorry, sorry.
You've got these words like magic spells or something.
Are you saying that the government would have control of all of the land, but there would be no favoritism?
No, that's not what I'm saying.
You should watch my George Washington presentation, by the way.
I have, I have.
Because that's very important in terms of seeing what happens to even pretty strict rules around the distribution of land to veterans of the Seven Years' War and the degree to which Washington just shafted everyone and took the best stuff for himself.
And the degree to which Washington manipulated huge amounts of politics with massively deleterious consequences just so he could get a whole bunch of stuff to go pondering.
past his house and his land and raise the value of it.
So tell me, how is it possible for a group of individuals to have control over all the land and auction it off to people with no bribery, no favoritism, no corruption whatsoever and And please provide me a historical example.
I'd love to see it.
Okay.
Can I go step by step?
Well, first of all, you – I mean, when I use the word people, I mean, just – I don't know.
You can do it by robots for all I know.
I mean, you could just place an order for an amount of land.
You would have a bidding war and somebody would win and somebody would lose.
Yeah.
I mean, a historical example, well, I mean, like you said, we've always had this government that had this army and that owned everything.
I think that the correct term is not ownership, but custodianship.
But how would – wouldn't this agency need force to keep people from settling this land?
No, no.
This is how I see it.
Like their job is to make sure that all these – I'm sorry.
Here, I'll start over.
If somebody like decides to go on your land, right, you can apply to a private court or whatever, right, and you get your settlement like that.
The court says – You need force, right?
When you've got a court, you need force to be able to...
No, this is a private court.
This is a private court.
You just simply go there and they say, yes, this guy was in there.
Wait, wait.
So hang on.
You've got a government that controls the land, but all of the adjudication is done by a private court.
Well, my point is that you have an institution that says...
It can be...
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
I don't have an exact...
Dude, I'm sorry to interrupt, but you keep saying, my point is, when I bring up an objection, you say what my point is, and then you change the subject.
I don't think...
Alright, let me just start over.
You're saying you have a government that controls all the land...
It has no enforcement mechanism and the courts are all private.
Why wouldn't the courts then just enforce the common law which was developed peacefully over thousands of years by largely or less status societies?
I have nothing against that except for the fact that somebody still has to own the land because just because you start developing a piece of land does not make it yours.
It makes the crops yours, it makes the house yours but it does not make the land yours.
It's as simple as that in my opinion.
Oh, okay.
Well, look, dude, you're just insulting me now because I've given you very strong arguments as to why this.
And now if you just say, well, we write back at the beginning as if I've not said anything.
And you've also insulted me by saying it's as simple as that.
Like your statement is just some simple thing like two and two make four that I can't with my fuzzy headed immature brain possibly figure out what it is that you're saying.
So with that, I'm afraid we're going to have to end the conversation.
But I do appreciate it.
I apologize.
I do appreciate having the opportunity to run through ownership stuff.
I clearly haven't gotten through to you, but hopefully it's been helpful for other people.
Can I just make one suggestion?
Geo-libertarianism, can you just look it up and maybe give a read and do a vid presentation on it?
Is that where you're coming from?
Yes, absolutely.
Well, I'm afraid I'm going to have to put that as a hard-coded minus on my Google search term.
However, if there are other geo-libertarians who want to call in...
Can at least address some of the arguments without saying, well, it's as simple as that, as if everything's explained and I'm just an idiot.
If other geo-libertarians want to call it, I think that would be quite interesting.
And again, I do appreciate the conversation.
I'm sorry about the way that it ended, but that's not really up to me.
So thanks everyone so much for calling in.
Thank you for a wonderful, wonderful conversation on this lovely and thankfully getting warmer Saturday night.
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