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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:29:45
How to Meet Rational Women, and My Son Is in Prison!
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Time Text
Okay, we have this.
We're connecting a guy.
A guy's name is Stephen.
How does it go?
Moulin X Stéphane Stéphanopoulos.
I'm sorry.
I didn't hear you above all that Greek.
Maybe you should turn down your interest rate.
You know what?
That's just as great though.
You do the show.
I'm just going to manage the call.
That's great.
Please turn down your interest rate.
It's screaming so loud in my ear.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I think I'm done, though.
I think I'm tapped.
I think I peaked.
No, no, no.
Do it for three hours and see if you need to have a nap like I do.
Because you're weak and old.
Oh, man.
You know, it sucks that these are still getting these bastards back.
Oh, deny reality, will you?
Well, no problem.
Right, right.
My audio's coming through, okay?
Oh yeah, you're coming through fine.
I'm doing this from the house today.
Hopefully we won't have any problems.
I'm not going to try rolling the dice with any more cafes because obviously it didn't work out too well.
That's the technical team's commitment of excellence.
Hopefully it'll work.
Let's cross our fingers, shall we?
Next we'll be folding your parachutes.
But I didn't do it here because I knew it was bad.
Well, my issues are all set, so I'm fixed.
Yeah, I'm going to keep the number of callers down.
No, concurrent callers down.
So I think right now we'll keep it at where it is, and then when people are done, if I could ask you to just jump off the call.
Sorry, can I just... I'm hearing a bunch of chicken sounds on the line.
Is that... Oh, sorry, that's your technical cowardice.
My mistake, sorry.
I thought it was actual chickens, but it turned out it was just you.
If I had a good comeback for that, I would... Wait, did you hear them again?
I swear I can!
Anyway, perhaps we should go on with the show, what do you think?
Wow, you know, I think I'm running out of money this month.
Oh no!
Suddenly, suddenly, running out of money!
Wow, there's like a moth in my wallet, what's happening?
Alright, you win.
Sorry, I forgot who is dependent on who here, and clearly that's just not a good idea.
Alright, so would you like to start?
Alright, everybody!
It is sometime in March.
You know, I used to have a real job and I used to know what day it was.
Now I'm lucky if I grab the month.
It's the 11th of March, 2012, and I'm afraid we have had to bid a fond farewell to the beard.
It's oh, so sad and so tragic.
I quite like it, although it can be a little bit itchy and it does make me feel when I'm wearing turtlenecks like I have spiders giving birth to all the many-legged creatures from hell on my neck, but it is a great way to store food for later.
But unfortunately, like most married men with daughters, I live in a benevolent dictatorship and I'm afraid that the spikiness of the beard has been vetoed by the Estrogen Brigade and I am happy to exceed and it is unfortunately a spiky beard.
All the hair fell down from my scalp and bred into iron filings in my chin and cheeks.
So I'm afraid we've lost the beard.
I like the look and I got a lot of compliments on it and thank you to everyone who did take the time to not notice what I was saying and rather notice that I actually had facial hair.
That's important.
So yeah, it really is too bad.
It was really nice having something to idly braid and of course I was looking forward to carving various patterns into it and growing it so long that I could tie it to my nipples.
Of course, like most people, that's the goal of beards, but it didn't really have any luck.
So yes, sadly, there is no hipster beard.
So anyway, listen, what's our colloquy look like, JJ?
Well, SS, we have a couple of people online, starting with Tom.
All right, Tom.
Tom, I'm all ears.
I am Dumbo.
Speak.
Speak louder?
Can you hear him?
I cannot hear him.
I do not hear him at all.
Tom, it seems like we're not getting any signal from you.
So let's move on to Will, and hopefully you can find the unmute button.
Oh, wow.
Already?
OK.
Yes.
I'm on you, my friend.
Oh, I'm doing good.
Alright, mentally prepare.
Mentally prepare?
You mean, you've been sitting there on hold for a while, you get on the line and it's like, now I must mentally prepare!
So you're basically like Michael Moore showing up to the Olympics and saying, I'm gonna train!
Okay, sorry, go on.
Alright, well, I'm having a little difficulty with dating.
A little bit.
I'm 19.
I've been out of high school for some time.
Coincidentally, I haven't had a date since high school.
I'm finding it difficult finding dates, necessarily.
It's hard for me to approach a stranger.
with intentions in mind and start, you know, ask and ask them out on a date.
Because in high school, you just ask people out, you kind of already know.
Yeah, you're sort of in a crowd already.
And you can say, hey, you want to go grab a movie?
And it's pretty casual.
And it's obviously a lot less, you know, stressful and so on.
So yeah, I got it.
Yeah.
And it's just, it's, I mean, I did take some time off to introspect, and I wasn't a... You sound very enthusiastic about that.
You're like, yeah, I did have to go to the hospital to get my appendix out because it was slated for attacking my colon, and I did take some time to introspect, and then I... Okay, go on.
No, it was worth it.
Yeah, I learned a lot about myself, and it's... I read Nathaniel Brandon's Six Pillars of Self-Esteem.
Which really helped.
But now it's just a matter of, okay, I'm ready to get back in the Dayton game.
And I don't know if it's a matter of, I don't really see anyone that I'm interested in.
Listen, before we go on, do you mind if I mock your situation very briefly?
Very briefly.
We practice on ourselves before we practice on others.
We practice integrity and honesty with ourselves before we practice honesty and integrity with others.
In that light, or taking that approach, have you thought about practicing asking out your hand?
Because I find that can be very helpful.
You can put a little lipstick on it, some eyebrows, and you can even bribe a little flower or two.
Also, a manicure can be very helpful to get closer to your hand.
Well, I do have some sock puppets that I can use.
You do have sock puppets?
Well, that helps a lot, although they can get kind of messy after a while, if you know what I'm saying.
But yeah, so you can obviously practice with your hand before practicing with other people.
Okay, that's the end of my semi-humorous mockery, but So, first of all, I completely understand and I feel for you.
It's weird how hard it is to meet people when you get out of school, right?
I mean, in school you've just got this conveyor belt of people you're stuck with all day and you're just meeting people and meeting people.
Some you like, some you don't.
But it's kind of weird that, you know, and I think it's quite tragic.
It's, you know, sort of another problem with with the public education is that you know they say what you gotta socialize you gotta learn how to socialize in school right and the reality is you actually don't learn that many social skills in school I mean you learn how to give big people your lunch money and you learn how to hide from the jocks when they come coming down the hallway and you learn maybe to trip the mathletes but you don't really learn how to introduce yourself to new people and so I feel for you there's a very hard thing it's a very hard thing and
I remember when I was gold panning up north after high school, I was living with a tiny Japanese woman who was nice enough, but we didn't have a whole lot in common.
I had a girlfriend back in Toronto, but I was in Thunder Bay.
I was based in Thunder Bay, going a lot into the bush, so I didn't really have anyone to talk to.
I used to go to the university gym to exercise.
I remember sitting there in the sauna, Not, you know, I didn't have the greatest social skills back in the day.
And I was sitting in the sauna, I was chatting with some guy about politics or whatever, and I basically asked him out.
You know, because I just thought, you know, hey, you know, we're having a nice conversation, maybe we can catch a movie sometime.
And it wasn't until after he packed up his towel and left in a fair hurry that I realized that, you know, asking a guy out for a movie when you're sitting under a towel in a steam room may not be the most obvious signal of, you know, Heterobromance in the making.
I really do feel for you and the cold call, so to speak, is tough.
I've done it a few times and actually I had a very nice relationship that came out of it when I ended up chatting with a woman in a coffee shop.
But it's tough.
I also met a woman on an airplane.
Of course, that's a little easier because You know, unless they're willing to hit the eject button, it's really hard for them to get away.
And so it is tough.
It is tough.
I mean, I can tell you some of the things that helped me in terms of meeting women.
Joining clubs is a good thing.
Online dating, I know there have been some success stories, but to me that's always a bit roll the dice with a whole lot of snake eyes.
Joining clubs, I think, is a good idea.
Whatever hobbies you have, that kind of stuff is a good idea.
If you go to some place where you can see the same people on any kind of repetitive basis, that gives you much more of an in for having a chat with people.
Striking up conversations with neighbors or if you live in an apartment with people, you know, just saying hi when you go in the lobby, you can sort of work your way in that way because everyone you meet has a whole social circle of friends that they themselves got from high school that you might find somebody interested in.
You can, of course, you can throw parties.
I was going to say you're going to throw dinner parties, but of course you're 19, not 49.
So you can throw parties and you invite people that you wouldn't normally invite, right?
So you can say, you know, have a party.
And, you know, assuming that they're, you know, it's not necessarily the local biker gang, but, you know, invite people who may be just right on the fringe, or just say, you know, BYOB, and bring your own friends as well, and then you can meet more people that way, and you might find ways of expanding your circles, so to speak.
I find that at work it's always pretty tricky.
I certainly never had any relationships with anyone I've ever worked with, any romantic relationships, but it is, it is tough.
It is tough.
I found in general that if you're, you know, obviously polite, and and and respectful and and uh... hopefully somewhat engaging and can hopefully be a little bit funny then i've not found any woman in particular who's been upset about the cold contact you know the sort of i don't know you but you want to start a family?
so as long as it's you know and you know you you can offer her your number so that she has the choice whether to call or not that kind of stuff i used to i mean when i was younger i used to go clubbing a lot uh...
Not, you know, of course I'm from Canada, so people think that means baby seals, but I meant discos.
And so I used to go dancing a lot, a lot, like two times a week, three times a week.
And occasionally I would meet women through that venue.
And they would often offer to give me their number in return for their purse, because I found that was very helpful.
And so you sort of meet them, and maybe you go for a coffee afterwards, and you exchange numbers, and that can sort of work out as well.
But that again, that's a bit more hit and miss, particularly once you've done some introspection and self-knowledge.
Of course, that narrows down the field quite a bit.
And this may be all stuff you've thought of, and I'm sorry if it's completely redundant, but how does that strike you?
I've tried to go into the bookstore a little more often, but At the bookstore, there's just middle-aged women with their children there.
I mean, people my age are at college right now.
Right.
They're all at college.
And so it kind of like, at the moment, even statistically, it's kind of hard to meet people around my age.
I've I don't know.
I've thought about so many things.
I talked it over with some of my friends.
One of my friends was like, just go to college.
I said, okay, but that requires lots of money to do, and it's not so simple to just go to college.
I'm not going to go to college just to meet women, obviously.
Of course, you could just go to college bars, right?
I mean, they don't check your student ID at the door, right?
You can just go to college bars.
Right.
Oh.
Yeah.
I guess I could do that.
I'm kind of afraid of the bar situation.
Just a little, you know, a little... The word, I mean... Yeah, just the whole booze thing.
I don't really enjoy it very much.
Right.
Now there may be of course there may be courses that you can take in fields that you're interested in that are offered by the college but again you may run into the middle-aged patooey I can't believe I'm saying that as a middle-aged guy but now I understand from the age of 19 you don't want to be dating milfs right?
So you may be able to find some college courses or something like that that would sort of be in the evening or whatever that may be sort of more appealing to you but But the other thing too, have you talked to your friends and said...
Listen, I mean, social networking is very helpful.
You assume your friends, you know, know something about you and what your tastes are, and so you can say, you know, I'm looking for a Belgian woman who's really into lederhosen and riding well-oiled dolphins or whatever, whatever your particular thing is.
Young Filipino boys.
Young Filipino boys.
I would not really ask for that in any public context whatsoever, but you can say to friends, look, I'm lonely.
I'm lonely.
I've done the six pillars of self-esteem, but my seventh pillar of self-esteem is getting a decidedly non-workout kind of month.
So this is something that you can ask your friends for and just be vulnerable and say, look, it's hard to meet people.
Do you guys know anyone who might be single, who might be interested, who I could get – we can all get together or whatever, but if you know someone – Because remember, of course, there are, you know, millions of women, billions of women out there probably, who have exactly the same issue.
They don't know how to connect.
With women, it's really tough.
Because they're not, I mean, for a woman to do the cold contact is really unusual.
And they're sort of raised to be a little bit more passive, or a lot more passive, really, in waiting for that kind of stuff.
I mean, it's really frustrating.
I've actually seen this in In clubs, and I've sort of joked about it with women before, you know, a woman's at a club, or a woman's at a bar, or a woman's at a restaurant, or she sees some guy that she really likes, she's really interested, she's got a nice smile or whatever, right?
And she wants him to notice her, so she'll do all this hair flips and, you know, whatever, I don't know.
Oh, my boob fell out.
Wait, sorry, that was my cold contact approach.
My damn boob tripped!
Can you help me shovel it back in?
And it's really frustrating for them because they can't go and talk to these guys for the most part.
That's something that is considered to be in the realm of possibility for women.
And so it's like trying to get a wild squirrel to feed from your hand.
It's okay.
I'm interested.
You can talk to me.
It's okay.
Come on.
Come on.
Get a little closer.
I don't know if they have to have a little Xbox controller in their hand to lure you in or something like that.
But I would remember that you may be doing a favor for a woman by talking to her.
And if you're an FDR listener, for sure you're doing a favor to the woman by talking to her.
But she may really want that and be unable to express that.
And so I think that's really important.
The other thing that I would suggest and you know I realize I'm probably treading on all kinds of sexist toes here but I'm just giving you my sort of honest thoughts and experience.
is don't necessarily talk to the most obvious woman.
You know what I'm saying?
Don't necessarily talk to the most obvious woman.
You know, as I said before, I would have overlooked my wife.
I mean, I think she's completely gorgeous now, but was not particularly on my radar of, you know, obvious potential candidates for starting a family with.
But, you know, I break out in a cold sweat every time I think about what might have happened if we hadn't talked.
Well, we would have talked because we're on the same volleyball team, but don't necessarily look for the most obvious.
You know, the one with the blondest hair, or the most flirty, or the longest legs, or whatever it is, right?
I would say that it's important to spread your radar for who might be interesting to talk to.
And so that would be another suggestion that I would have.
Right.
I'm sorry, somebody said semen.
Spread your semen.
It is important to spread your semen.
That's not necessarily the best cold contact that you want though.
Yeah, so basically just talk a lot.
Talk a lot?
Where did you get that from?
Is there any time where I said talk a lot here?
No, look, I mean, if you find a woman attractive, talk to her.
If you find a woman attractive and she's not you know, currently necking some leg-armed bicycle, like biker guy, then to go talk to her.
Seriously!
I mean, life is short and I have never looked back and regretted something that I've done out of courage.
I've never looked back and regretted.
I have looked back and regretted things that I didn't do because you know what happens, so let's say you see someone who's really attractive to you from whatever context and you don't do it, right?
Well, I'll tell you what will happen later.
What will happen later is you will only remember how attractive she was.
You will not remember how scary it was.
I guarantee you.
Do you understand?
Oh yeah.
That's how regrets accumulate in life.
Yeah.
Is that we don't remember the fear.
We only remember the desire that we did not act on.
And don't accumulate that.
I mean, you're a young man.
Your whole life is ahead of you.
Don't start accumulating regrets, because regrets become avoidance.
And that's not a good thing to have.
So just smile and say hi.
All you have to do, it's just one syllable.
Hi.
That's all it is.
Now if you get maced, then it's like, okay, maybe I won't say hi to that person again.
It's just high.
That's all you have to do.
You don't have to commit to getting a number.
You don't have to commit to getting a date.
You don't have to commit to, am I attractive to women in general if this woman smiles at me, yes or no?
Right?
Because it's not what it comes down to.
All you're doing is just saying hi.
Yeah.
Now, if the woman smiles and says hi, then you can say, how are you today?
Or, you know, what's new?
Or, you know, I have a ferret in my pants.
Would you like to pet it?
Whatever it is that's going to come to mind.
That, you know, may of course end up with you getting tasered.
But all you have to commit to is one syllable.
One syllable, that's not the end of the world.
Don't raise the stakes any higher.
If she just gives you a funny look, it's like, OK, so she doesn't want to chat.
And you've just had a very efficient interaction, and you've gathered no regrets.
You've gathered no regrets.
You've stepped right over a big regret stain that will stay in your life forever.
All you have to commit to is just to say, hi.
And if she smiles and says, hi, Then, you know, just talk to her.
She's just a human being, right?
She's not a goddess who holds the future fate of your masculinity and self-worth in her hands.
She's just a person.
Women are just people, right?
And if you were on, you know, if you were chatting with, if you saw some guy who, I don't know, had a Freedom Aid Radio t-shirt on and probably nothing else because he's got, you know, why would you need to wear anything else?
Well, obviously, if he's like me, he would have a Freedom Aid Radio hat on, but that's it!
So if you saw a guy who had a Freedom Aid Radio t-shirt and you say, hey, I listen to that show.
But you wouldn't be like, now we're going to become best friends and now we're going to move in together.
You're just going to be, hey, I listen to that show.
That's all it is.
That's all it is.
I've always had this problem of being one step ahead of myself.
Yeah, I'll start talking to a woman and I start thinking to myself, like, oh wait, if I ask her out, what are we going to do on our date?
And then, what are we going to talk about?
And okay, after we talk about it, what if there's an awkward pause?
And what if I wanted to move in with her?
And what are we going to do when we're married?
What are our kids going to look like?
And I would confess all of that right after I said hi.
Hi.
Oh my God, I can't believe I just said hi.
You know, I'm so worried about whether you're going to find me attractive.
And I'm thinking, do I have a canker in the inside of my mouth?
And I'm thinking, you know, one of my ear lobes is longer than the other.
I wonder if you noticed that.
I should probably tilt my head, uh, like one way or another.
And now I'm just babbling to you and you're sort of backing away slowly.
But listen, don't worry.
Don't, don't leave because I want to have a family someday and I'm going to be a great dad.
I listen to philosophy.
Right.
No, I understand.
I understand.
Yeah.
I have noticed that people, I haven't noticed that people react positively when I do or when I'm very honest and I just start saying all these things about like, oh yeah, I just had this weird thought about this and the other and that's always kind of helped me.
Right.
Or you can just say, hey, how about breakfast?
Should I call you?
Just nudge you.
Anyway, look, the overthinking thing is important.
So tell me where you think that comes from.
Um, I think it definitely comes from keeping some sort of rationality in my life, being able to plan out all that.
Um, at least that's my opinion.
I think it just always, I have to, you know, if I don't being able to predict.
Sorry, go ahead.
Oh, did we lose him?
Hello?
Did we lose him?
Oh, it looks like he dropped.
Alright, well, just as we're getting back and listening to this afterwards, I don't think that that's generally where these things come from.
If anybody who's listened to the show for a while knows, when I ask where do you think these things come from, I'm asking about childhood.
I'm asking about childhood experience.
And if people don't connect with that, then I think that's That's not the case.
Intellectualizing is... How can I put this?
Okay, so if you are in a field and you want to walk to a tree, then you can just walk to the tree.
You just walk in a straight line, you go to the tree, and that's what you do.
And you don't really have to think about other things, but you're not focused on just whatever, right?
And so That's one thing.
Now, if you are in a field and you want to walk to a tree, but in between you is a maze, a big high hedge and you can just see the valley, then you have to really concentrate on navigating through the maze.
Oh shit, did I go this way or not?
Did I see that holly branch before?
I think I've been this way.
You have to double track.
You might have to draw things on your head.
You can't just walk and enjoy the walk to the tree because you've got to navigate your way through a maze.
And that is a real challenge.
What we call over intellectualizing or overthinking things, in my opinion, comes from not having clear social signals or being in a very complicated emotional environment when we're children.
That we can't just spontaneously express and be listened to and be natural.
But what happens is we have to overthink things because we're in a maze.
We need to get somewhere.
and we're in a maze and so we really have to analyze and think and figure out what are the consequences if I say this and what are the consequences if I say that and that comes to do with you know the mildly totalitarian thing that some parents do which is the rules keep changing but the punishments remain the same and then we have to overthink a lot of things because we're in those kinds of situations.
I don't know if you caught any of that or if you're back even.
Did you get any of that?
I caught the maze part.
Right.
So when you were growing up as a kid, I mean, were your interactions with your parents and if you have siblings, were they sort of easy and natural or were they kind of complicated and you had to really think things through and figure out the consequences of things?
Oh, I had to think about the consequences.
Yeah.
It's like if you go, like the year 2000, I went to Morocco for Y2K because I felt that, you know, what better place to be?
If the world goes to hell in a handbasket than in a foreign country where I don't speak the language or even read anything to do with it.
But when I was in Morocco I didn't know what the etiquette was or what the protocol was.
So I don't know if you're supposed to kiss people on the cheek or if that's considered a wildly gay insult that's going to get you crucified.
I don't know.
I don't know if you shake people's hands.
I just didn't know.
So I had to really observe and watch because I wanted to be sensitive to the local customs and I didn't really know what they were.
And now you could say, well, you're overthinking things.
It's like, well, no, I'm not, because I'm in a state of ignorance about the causes and the effects.
Because this stuff is not... I know how to catch a ball in Morocco because the physics are the same, but I don't know what the social interactions are when I'm in Morocco.
And so if you want to talk about it a little bit and sort of see if this theory goes anywhere useful for you.
When you interacted, were you in a stable and predictable environment or were things, you know, changing?
Like, if somebody's in a bad mood and they then just sort of make up a problem and then you go, oh my god, somebody's in a bad mood, how am I going to avoid the problem they want to make up?
As opposed to living in more sort of rational, predictable environments, if that makes sense?
Yeah.
Okay, that was a very short speech.
If you'd like to go a little longer, that would be fine.
Well, my family, we would, I'd always get lashed out at whenever, like my old man, he would, if he was ever having a bad day, he'd be the kind to come home, start screaming, yelling, and then, you know, we have to, oh, we have to deal with it.
Dad's in a bad mood.
But he would need some, okay, first, I'm really sorry to hear that.
That is not at all fun.
But people who are in a bad mood, and want to lash out, want to discharge their venom, they usually need some pretext for it, right?
Yeah.
And so we always feel if we can avoid the pretext for it, if we can avoid the pretext, then we can avoid the anger.
Does that make any sense what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Makes sense.
I mean, my mom used to be in a really bad mood when she'd come home from work sometimes.
My brother had a theory that if the place was not messy, then we wouldn't get in trouble.
You know, because you look around and say, this place is so messy, it's a pigsty, and she'd get angry about that.
Yeah.
I didn't believe that.
You know, if it's not the mess, it's going to be something else.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, my friend, he has a similar situation with his mother, and he's like, she always finds something yelling at him, and he says, like, if it's not one thing, it's always the next.
You know, they'll find something.
It doesn't matter what it is.
But for a long time, we think it does matter, because that's what we're taught, right?
So the angry parent says, I wasn't angry.
You made me angry because you did or didn't do X. That's what they say.
And it's complete bullshit, right?
And it's completely abusive.
Because it's blaming the child for the emotional immaturity of the adult, right?
Right.
Children do not cause adults to be angry.
I guarantee you.
children do not cause adults to be angry anger is owned by the individual anger Anger is owned by the individual, and certainly acting out or lashing out, but people want to believe that it's something that other people are doing that is going to make them angry, and once they have that permission slip from hell, then they can unleash without guilt, right?
Right.
And it's an absolutely terrible, terrible, wrong, abusive, immoral approach to say that my child may be angry and therefore I can shit on them, And it's justified.
So because we're told that when we're kids, I'm angry because the place is a mess.
Then we, of course, we don't want our parents to be angry with us, and so we say, okay, well then I will tidy the place up.
But then the next thing, let's say the place is tidy, and then they come in and they say, I'm angry because there was a light left on upstairs.
And I keep telling you kids, electricity is expensive, I'm not made of money, it doesn't grow on trees, no respect for that, right?
And then it escalates, like the light's left on upstairs and suddenly you have no respect for human property.
And you're a bunch of wild savages, like it's, right?
So you're like, okay, shit, okay, so the place has got to be clean, and the light's got to be off.
Upstairs.
Okay.
Next time I come home.
I'm angry because there were shoes left in the hallway and I tripped.
Oh shit, okay, this place has got to be cleaned up, turn the lights off upstairs, got to make sure the news, right?
And this is so, we end up with this incredibly complicated thing in our lives, right?
Yeah.
Which is, I've got to run through the checklist of 12 million things to figure out how not to get yelled at.
And so is it any surprise at all, and I mean this with incredible compassion and sympathy my friend, Is it any surprise that you try and overthink things through and figure out what's going to happen in the future?
It's not overthinking.
It's a perfectly natural defense against this kind of shit.
- Yeah. - Have you seen the movie Chronicle at all?
It's Chronicles of Riddick with Vin Diesel?
No, it's a movie by Max Landis about these kids that get superpowers and basically it's more about the kids and their social interactions.
At one point in the movie, one of the main characters, he lives in an abusive home and at one point he's arguing with his dad and His old man's going on like, yeah, I spent all my money on school.
And he says to him, you don't pay for school, you idiot.
And his dad looks at him and says, what did you call me?
Right?
I'm just, I'm sitting there in the theaters.
I'm like, oh my God, he got it.
Cause that's what they do.
The second you, the second you do anything like that, it just, the situation now, it's not about the thing anymore.
And now it's about you calling him an idiot.
Now the whole situation's changed.
Right, right, right.
Oh, yeah, it was an amazing movie.
It was really good.
Chronicle, I will try and check it out.
Thank you.
Is it recent?
It came out in theaters earlier this year, and I don't know if it's in theaters anymore, but it's definitely worth it.
I will check.
Again, it's not about the superpowers.
Superpowers just create conflict.
It's about, or a different way of expressing conflict, it's about the kids and the interactions with their high school and their parents and it was just really interesting to see how this kid and what his life at home was like and how that changes him when he has these superpowers.
Right, and of course superpowers are apt.
It's an apt description of what people, the kids in these difficult situations end up with, right?
I mean, some people have been very impressed by my capacity to think on my feet and to reason and to debate and so on.
But, you know, that came a lot out of my having crazy pressed up against my face for fifteen years straight, right?
Yeah.
And so, you do develop kind of superpowers when you come, you know, And you end up either very good or very bad, which is why there's that polarization in heroic comic fiction.
You're sort of overthinking.
I get that it is a real challenge in that kind of environment, but it also has its real benefits, right?
Oh yeah.
I developed a lot of skills from growing up in a bad home.
Right.
So first of all, I would say it is not something that you developed.
It's not something that was innate to you or that you chose to develop or that you have.
You know, I just have this problem.
I overthink things.
It's like, no, I had to do that.
I had to do that.
That was inflicted on me.
I have this thing that was inflicted on me called, quote, overthinking.
And it was never overthinking in the past.
Because I did have a real challenge to deal with.
These things.
Yeah.
So, I would be very sympathetic about that in my opinion.
What are you thinking?
I never thought about my ability to overthink things at all.
I never really… Let me give you an example, right?
So, if you and I are gazelles.
Right?
And we're in the Serengeti.
And you turn to me like, shit man, I think I just saw a lion in the grass.
I'm going to have to look pretty hard for that lion in the grass.
And I say, oh man, you're just overlooking.
What are you doing?
Don't worry about it.
We're fine.
That would not be a very good survival strategy for me, would it?
No.
If you think there's a lion in the grass, It's a pretty good idea to look hard, right?
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
And remember, the way that our minds developed as children is not with the relatively peaceful parenting of the present.
The way that our minds developed as children was when there was a significant risk of infanticide and child abandonment.
This is how our emotional apparatus developed at a time where displeasing the tribe or displeasing the parents could literally get you killed.
I mean, the tiger metaphor is not a metaphor.
I mean, I'm not saying that parents are out, you know, killing disobedient children very much anymore, of course, right, in the West.
But the way that our emotional lives developed was in a situation of child death, of child sacrifice, of child abandonment.
And so we do not allow ourselves to displease our parents.
I mean, we will fight with them perhaps when we get older, when we get more self-sufficient, right?
So the teenage, quote, rebelliousness, right?
Compared to the latency period, right?
So there's the toddler rebelliousness, the latency period, and the teenage rebelliousness.
The teenage rebelliousness is, well, I can now hunt for myself, so screw you, right?
But during the time of dependence, we don't.
We just don't.
Because of the threat.
of abandonment and murder, which is, again, it's not something that most parents threaten their kids with anymore, but it doesn't matter because that's what our emotional development was, right?
I mean, if you put a robot lion that's very realistic in the grass around antelopes, they're not like, oh, you know what?
I can hear a little whirring sound.
That's like a robot lion.
Don't worry about it.
They were like, shit, I'm not taking that chance, right?
So now, angry parents, raging parents, abusive parents, I genuinely believe, I don't have any proof for this.
It's just an idiot theory, right?
But I genuinely believe that they trigger feelings of incredible danger.
And historically, you know, given the amount of infanticide that occurred in the past, the amount of child sacrifice that occurred in the past while we were developing as a species, I mean, there's nothing but support for that.
But I think that what we do is we say, well, why would I have such a strong fight or flight mechanism?
I mean, my dad was just angry.
He wasn't going to strangle me.
He wasn't going to throw me out in the snow.
But our most primitive, the most primitive aspects of ourselves, they don't know that.
We don't know that it's a robot tiger, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I was always afraid of being kicked out of the house.
Just on a regular basis, always afraid.
I'm like, I'm going to get kicked out.
Did you get that as a threat?
Oh, I mean, yeah.
I mean, oh, regularly.
Or being sent to military school or something like that.
Right.
So, of course, for you this was pretty significant, right?
Because again, historically, in the development of a species, being kicked out of the tribe meant you just died.
Yeah.
And it certainly meant you didn't reproduce, right?
So even if you didn't die, you end up living in some cave on your own, you didn't then reproduce.
And therefore, the genes would be weeded out that would Not view that as a complete disaster.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
And sorry, somebody's just mentioned in the chat, they say, well, some parents will still use the threat of abandoning their child to make them do what they want.
There is that.
I mean, there is that aspect, right?
So parents will say, you know, if the kid doesn't want to go, well, that's it.
I'm leaving.
You can make your own way home.
Well, that is the threat of abandonment.
And that is, I genuinely perceived at the very base of our brain, that is perceived as a threat of death.
Because, I mean, it would be.
I've seen parents do this with five-year-olds, four-year-olds.
I mean, I'm leaving you in the jungle and I'm just going to go back to the tribe.
Well, that's not going to go very well for the child, right?
Alright.
Yeah, Bill Cosby used to say this too, I brought you into this world, I can take you out.
Or, you know, you can be replaced, right?
Because you just have more kids or whatever.
And so, yeah, that is definitely, that is a threat of, that is a threat to death.
I mean, we would never, you understand, that's an illegal thing to say to an adult.
It's illegal to threaten to kill an adult.
But you can threaten it with a child and, you know, you can end up in a sitcom and everyone will laugh.
Even though an adult has complete choice about interacting with you, but as a child has not.
So no, really what I'm saying, Will, is you're not overthinking things.
I would really work to have more sympathy with yourself about that.
Yeah.
Yeah, that kind of answers my question.
I understand there's other callers.
I've been on for a while, so I'll let you know.
Thanks for the help.
I really appreciate it.
Oh, listen, you're welcome.
And listen, I'm so sorry.
This is not how dads should behave.
It's not how parents should behave.
It's not right.
And I'm so sorry that you had to go through that.
That is not how people's charts are supposed to be.
I really, really want to express incredible sympathy for that.
Thanks.
Thanks a lot.
You're welcome.
You're not overthinking.
You're self-protecting.
You can change it, but the first thing you need to do is respect it, right?
All right.
Well, thank you again.
A great call.
It's always a little nice when a theory doesn't completely fall flat on its face.
So, if you find this theory helpful, I would definitely look into your history about that.
So, if we can move on to the next folder, I'm all ears.
Yeah, Tom, you're up.
Hey, what's up?
Hello, hello.
Can you hear me?
Alright, cool.
So, I'm going out of the personal sphere now, into more general stuff.
It sort of relates to what you were discussing.
It's about this book I was reading.
It's called The Brief History of Humanity.
It's by an Israeli author.
He's a professor of history in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
He writes of the development of the species, right from the beginning, the hunter-gatherer, to now, when he thinks there would be a transhumanist movement and it would go above being humans.
And there are some interesting concepts in this book, especially relative, you know, to an Israeli author.
And basically what he says is that when humans evolved from groups that contained, like, the social instincts that you're born with can only cope with, like,
150 individuals and to have like millions of people cooperating you need you need a bigger order than that you need you need an imagined order that's bigger than you know acquaintances uh acquaint you know people knowing each other so you need a bigger thing you need uh you need a religion you need a nation you need uh yeah you need a trade or whatever so everything that's
Like morals and all these stuff, they don't have any relevance outside human interactions, which is one thing.
And the other thing is the definition of religion in his book.
making of human rules based on a superhuman order like in Islam you have the gods in communism you have you know social classes or whatever but in the theory of relativity you have a superhuman order but you don't extract rules for
for humans from it, you know, there's not, there's no the physicists party or whatever, you know.
And, uh, the question is, and what, uh, the definition of, uh, uh, how you could be affected by, uh, by, well, Maybe I just need to think more about it.
I'm getting confused a little bit.
All right.
Do you want to come back on later in the show?
Yeah, maybe.
Okay.
All right.
We'll come back later.
And the brief answer is that UPB is not affected by the history of ethics any more than physics is affected by the history of alchemy.
Other than that you know that alchemy is not correct because it was not based on the scientific method.
It was not testable or reproducible.
There was no null hypothesis or failure criterion.
UPB is not affected by the history of ethics.
UPB is not affected by superstition.
The theory of evolution is not affected by the story of Genesis.
So yeah, I don't see... Again, I'm happy to hear more if you think about something else.
Anyway, let's move on to the next folder, if we could.
All right, Jack, you are up. - I love.
Hello.
Oh, Jack, I'm so sorry.
It just came up here that given that we've had complaints that there aren't enough female callers, we're going to have to call you Jacqueline and you're going to have to do the entire question period in a really bad and probably offensive falsetto.
Is that okay with you?
I don't think that would work.
I can do everything except the worst.
Oh, come on, give it a shot.
Give it a shot.
Can you do a wig?
That way you might get an offer to go out for dinner from Will.
Anyway, so please go ahead.
Sorry, go ahead.
Okay.
I had a question I wanted to ask you, but then when you mentioned your experience in Morocco, I'd rather talk about that.
So that's what I'd want to ask about.
Okay.
Is it similar to an experience I had?
I had a several year period where I was in a relationship and then engaged and then married to a woman from South America.
And my first few, actually pretty much all the times I went down there were very stressful, kind of in the way you described, where you go down there, you don't know You don't want to offend everybody, but you don't know exactly what to do.
So I found myself trying to observe every single thing that was going on.
And the other thing is I spoke Spanish not at all the first time I went down there, which made it even harder to make sure I was following the cultural norms.
Right.
And what I experienced is it was very draining emotionally and intellectually.
And it was compounded by the fact that her family was extremely large and they would always throw a big party whenever I was down there.
So I'd be down there with, you know, like several dozen people all wanting to interact with me and at first it was okay because, you know, I'd have enough, you know, I don't know, emotional energy or whatever.
to be able to interact with them, to work past the language barrier.
But after a while, it was just where I felt completely drained and had to, sometimes I'd have to just go outside away from people to recharge for a few minutes.
And I kind of felt bad about it because everyone was still being positive and they just wanted to say hi because I was the exotic foreigner who was dating, you know, one of their family.
I was wondering, is that anything at all like what you were talking about in Morocco?
Was there a nickname for you, girl pillaging gringo?
Was it something like that?
I didn't hear that at all, but you seem pretty positive about it.
I mean, I'll give you my thoughts, and you know, with the caveat ahead of time that this is completely politically incorrect, and I'll give you my thoughts.
If I have someone who is coming from a foreign culture to come and stay with me, And I pretty much feel that with every status tube passes through my threshold.
But if I have someone from a foreign culture who is coming to stay with me, it is incumbent upon me as the host to ensure the comfort of my guest and to understand that my guest is not going to know how to do things and to understand that that is going to cause my guest anxiety.
And I find that this is not very common in other cultures.
And I will tell you what I think.
I think that in other cultures... Sorry, there's a little bit of background banging.
If that's you, if you could make sure that doesn't happen or mute yourself, that would be great.
Sorry, that's my dog, so I'll mute myself when I'm not talking.
It's like your dogs have no sense of Skype etiquette, and so this really just ties into the whole thing.
So, in cultures that are more primitive than social status and one-upmanship, is the way that things go, right?
So if you sort of think of the ghetto culture, the black culture, and I don't mean sort of middle class or educated, but you know that sort of stereotypical ghetto black culture, well, rap.
And rap is all about braggadocio.
Rap is all about one-upmanship, and I'm the best, and I'm the greatest, that Muhammad Ali kind of stuff.
And in most cultures that are relatively undeveloped, social status, one-upmanship is is the way that things go.
This is how you get your prestige, this is how you get your self-esteem, is to be the dominant alpha male or female or whatever.
And so what happens is if someone comes into your culture who doesn't know your culture, then in a more primitive culture what will happen is you will laugh at that person's mistakes and you will feel superior because you know the culture and they don't know the culture.
And it's a pretty pathetic way to feel superior, but it's one of the reasons why people don't help you to navigate their own social milieu, is they kind of get off on watching you fumble around and make mistakes and not know what to do, and it makes them feel stronger because it makes you look weaker.
So that would be... Sorry, go ahead.
I'm not sure if that's what I experienced.
They were all very helpful and reassuring, and I think it may have been my own issues, plus just the inherent difficulty of trying to work through so many language barrier, cultural barriers, and the sensory overload of being in an environment where everything's different.
Well, my question is though, but why was it?
I'm certainly glad to hear that about your wife's family, that's great.
But why was it stressful for you?
In other words, why was it difficult for you?
I mean, when I went to China for business for a couple of weeks, actually I came back from Morocco, spent two nights at home and then went to China.
I was actually supposed to travel with a couple other business people but they were unable to make it at the last minute so I ended up just going alone, crossed my fingers that somebody was going to be there to meet me in Beijing.
But I did not feel That it was stressful being in China and not knowing anything about being in China because I didn't know anything about being in China.
I didn't feel stressful that I didn't know how to speak Mandarin because I was the big nose foreign person that nobody expected to speak Mandarin.
And so my question is, why was, like when you're in a situation of not knowing much Spanish, of not knowing the culture, of not, right, why was it?
stressful.
In other words, was there not an unreasonable expectation of competence in a situation where you simply could not conceivably have confidence or ability?
Well, I didn't feel this kind of stress when I was traveling in other countries.
I was doing this when I was in the Navy, so when I was with other people that I knew, just kind of out in touristy areas, I didn't feel any stress.
It was only The first time that I felt any stress being overseas was when she invited me to come visit and I was going by myself with no one that I knew.
I was at their house.
I guess that seems a little bit... It's more intimate for sure.
Yeah.
What did your wife do to prepare you for this and to prepare other people for your visit?
She told them I was coming and where I was from.
Her preparation to me was, oh, don't worry, it'll be fine.
Which is not good preparation, right?
Right.
I tried to prepare myself, coming in ahead of time.
In retrospect, she wasn't all that supportive as she could be.
A lot of her family was coming from far away and they wanted to see her too, so she wouldn't always help me out as much as I would have liked, because she was also doing her own things with her family.
Right.
Yeah, it's tough to be a guest and to be assertive, but I generally feel that if the guest is uncomfortable, it's the fault of the hosts, and it shouldn't be your job to To be stressed and to try and find a way to make it work.
I mean, that's not your job.
You're the guest, right?
And so it's other people's job to make you comfortable.
Right.
So did they know that you were stressed or did you kind of keep it to yourself?
I would pretty much keep it to myself.
I would just, sometimes I would just go out, like I said, go outside or just hang out somewhere while I could Recharge a little bit.
Can you tell me why this, because this remains an issue for you, right?
And as you said that you wanted to talk about this rather than your other thing.
I'm trying to figure out why.
I'm sure there's a very good reason, I'm just not sure what it is.
I don't have that experience now, but I was actually going to wonder if you ever experienced the, I guess that emotional draining of trying to deal with lots of people.
Like you came here out to West Texas.
And that was in a similar situation, so I was wondering if you had any feeling of stress there, trying to maintain the positive interaction, maybe beyond what you feel comfortable with.
No, I mean, I do sometimes feel, not exactly stress, but I feel that I want to talk to more people individually.
And so there's a lot of people who want to chat with me and I want to have like a two-hour conversation with everyone.
I mean that's sort of my reality when I'm sort of meeting people in a group.
I really like to get to know people and really want to sort of know what makes them tick and what's important to them.
That's not really possible in much of a social group.
I do, yeah, I sometimes do get No, I was just thinking about the Sunday show I did, which was almost three hours the other week, and that was a little tiring, just because it's a lot of concentration.
It's easier to talk to people when you can see them.
When you're just listening, it's hard.
You've got to try and figure out whether you're hitting the other person's issues without being able to see them.
That takes a lot of concentration, for me at least.
But I don't feel that.
The only thing that I do feel sometimes when I'm in a group of libertarians is I'm not I mean, the two areas where I probably have the most disagreement, I guess there are three areas where I would have disagreement with a lot of libertarians, which is sort of political activism, parenting, and religion.
And so sometimes I wonder the degree to which I feel comfortable speaking my mind fully about those things.
I try to be as honest and open as I can, but that's something I sort of navigate a little bit sometimes.
So you're surrounded by people and you don't know how well necessarily they're going to receive you.
Potentially hostile or... Well, not me.
I mean, it's not personal, right?
So let's say that I, you know, talk about something, the subject of spanking comes up and there are a couple of parents around the table who spanked their kids or maybe still spanked their kids.
It's not me that they would be upset by because I didn't invent whether spanking is good or bad, right?
It's not, you know, if I show them a painting I did, then that's more personal.
But if I'm the vehicle for the facts, there is always the concern that people will attack the messenger.
You know, it's like when I say, hey look, adult relations are voluntary and you don't have to spend time with abusive people, which everyone accepts in a marriage situation, but very few people accept in a parent-child situation when everyone's an adult.
Well, it's just a fact.
But people have a habit of shooting the messenger sometimes, so that can be a bit of a concern.
But it's not personal to me.
You know, if somebody gets upset about a spanking thing, It's not personal to me.
They may try and make it personal to me, but it's not my fault that spanking is bad for kids.
I mean, I didn't design the human brain.
I didn't figure out human physiology.
I didn't, you know, figure out how much cortisol should be in this.
I mean, I'm not responsible for the fact that the state is evil or abuse is destructive or spanking is bad for kids.
These are just the facts.
And, but there is a little bit, you know, and I'm not, it's not my fault that there's no God.
It's my fault that there's no God.
I'm sorry.
I understand your explanation and it makes sense.
But people, you know, a doctor comes and says, "You have cancer," and they say, "You gave me cancer." I'm like, "No, no.
It's not my fault.
It's just what it is." I understand your explanation, and it makes sense.
I'm just wondering, is it really possible for in that moment where they look at you and you see the hostility, is it really possible to not take that personally even if it's just for a second?
Well, no.
I think we may be talking about two different things.
I certainly feel that there could be a negative outcome that would be unpleasant for me.
I mean, obviously nobody wants to walk around making people upset, right?
So it could be.
It could be that there will be a result to that interaction which may be negative to me, but that's what I'm concerned about.
Not whether the person is going to attack me, but rather the negative outcome.
If I were bothered by personal attacks, I would have quit this crazy gig years ago, right?
But still, it doesn't mean that I'm out there looking for negative reactions and awkwardness and whatever, right?
Right.
I guess I just had the idea that it would have to be really stressful to go out in public like you have.
Yeah, I just, even online where you're disconnected from the other people, you can get really hostile reactions back to these ideas.
Sure.
And they're able to affect me even though I can't see the person.
So I was just, I was thinking that you being out, putting yourself in front of audiences that you don't know how they're going to react, had to be draining somehow.
No, it's not.
Stressful.
No, I love it.
I love meeting people.
I love doing the public speaking now.
I'm getting more used to it.
I'm eager and happy to do it and I genuinely do really like the interactions with people because even the negative interactions can be positive.
They're just negative in the moment, right?
You know, like you stub your toe.
You're like, shit, that's painful.
But then you say, well, maybe next time I'll turn the light on when I'm walking around the living room, right?
So even the negative interactions have turned out to be very positive in my mind.
And so no, it's not stressful for me.
I eagerly look forward to it.
In Texas, I tried to make myself as available as I could for people who wanted to chat.
And that wasn't that I was, you know, I'm not getting paid for that.
It's not a duty or obligation.
It's a genuine pleasure.
I mean, I love, love, love, love to meet, to meet the listeners and to hear, you know, how philosophy is working or not working for them and how they got into it and why they think they're into it and stuff like that.
It's not stressful.
Like, I'm eager.
I am eager to do it.
The only thing that I don't do is, you know, I sort of try and usually have a nap before a speech.
But other than that, It's not stressful, it's a genuine and deep pleasure and I do it more often if I could.
I wish I could get to that point where I don't feel all those, you stubbed your toe, that I didn't feel those quite as much or that they didn't linger as long.
Right, right.
Well, there are times where they've lingered longer for me for sure, but it really is just a matter of going back to the basics.
And remembering that, at least for me, I sort of say, well look, I try to have integrity with the facts.
I really do.
The great thing about having integrity with the facts is that if people get upset, then they're upset at the facts.
They don't try to make it about you, but they're upset at the facts.
And so I think that's an important thing to remember.
That philosophy is not personal, any more than science is personal.
I mean, there are aspects about some people more drawn to ethics, some people more drawn to aesthetics, some people more drawn to epistemology or metaphysics, things that you may be more drawn to.
The fact that science is impersonal doesn't mean that you have no preference about being a biologist versus a geologist or a physicist or a chemist or whatever.
So there's personal drives in the realm of it, but they're just facts.
And if people get upset at facts, I have sympathy for that.
I mean, it means it tells me everything about how they were raised, but it's not about me.
I mean, if I've made a mistake in my argument or I've made a mistake in quoting the facts.
Oh, yeah, that reminds me.
So when I did my Screw Talent video, somebody pointed out that the guy who raised his kids to be chess players was Hungarian, not Russian.
So thank you.
I appreciate that.
Anyway, so it's important to remember that we have to hook our brains into reality, which is what the purpose of philosophy is.
So it's not, you know, I like red, you like orange.
Damn that orange!
That orange is highly offensive to me.
That's a little more personal because you like, right?
But it is very different from I like.
So the statement of religion is, I like to believe there's a God.
The statement of philosophy is, there are no gods.
And the I like is what is personal.
And people who attack you at the personal level, all they're doing is they're confessing that their own beliefs are in the category called I like, I prefer, I want, I need.
Not.
It is.
When somebody has a foundation in reality that is personal, in other words it's in social reality, it's not in real reality, when they base their metaphysics on the opinions of the tribe, Then all beliefs are personal and therefore if somebody else's beliefs contradict their beliefs they go for the person.
Because their own beliefs are personal.
And of course nobody wants to believe in the bullshit of the tribe.
No child is born wanting to believe in the bullshit of the tribe.
The reason that children end up believing the bullshit of the tribe is because they get attacked and rejected if they don't.
And so a belief is based upon attack and rejection.
So if you contradict that person's belief as an adult, if they haven't done any self-work, then they will react with attack, because that's how their beliefs were formed, was through attack.
So if you want to change someone's mind, you have to attack them.
You can't appeal to reason and evidence, because your own beliefs are not based on reason and evidence, right?
You live by the sword, you die by the sword.
So I think that's important to remember.
I guess I just have a hard time translating the intellectual understanding of what they're doing into not taking it personally when you get the emotional attack back.
Maybe that just comes with practice?
Well, you just have to keep focusing.
I mean, look, I get probably about a hundred insults a day.
That's a lot.
Yeah, I mean, that's the nature of the beast, right?
I mean, I'm sad that it's only a hundred.
I wish it were more.
Because that would be telling even more truth.
But I get about a hundred insults a day.
And, you know, they're about the way that I look, they're about the how that I sound, they're about whatever, right?
And it's, you know, but my question is always, well, where's the argument?
Yeah, I mean.
Does somebody have an argument?
that they can appeal.
Have I made a mistake in reason or in evidence?
And if they don't have an argument, then it's got nothing to do with me.
And it certainly has nothing to do with the truth, right?
Right.
Right.
So here's one from on the chat I had with Loret.
Steph bot equals deluded egotist.
I think he means egoist.
And it's true.
I mean, it's sad but true that The people who are the most insulting are the people who have the least grasp of grammar.
So, Stephbot equals deluded, egotist, unfunny, shite, quote, philosophy with followers who are mostly gullible, confused sorts who just believe every word he utters as truth.
Sad.
Right?
So, I'd probably get about a hundred of those a day in one form or another.
And what does that have to do with anything?
I mean, there's no argument there.
There's no, you know, he's made errors here, here, and here.
It's just, it's just somebody spewing venom for, you know, for, you know, for whatever reason that they have, right?
The ideas are threatening or whatever, right?
Of course, it tells you a lot that somebody is continuing to watch something that they find so ridiculous, right?
Like, I can't believe he said this crap in this video!
I must watch another one!
It's like, no, no, you really don't.
I can't believe they shit in my sandwich at this restaurant.
I must go and order another sandwich.
No, you really don't have to go and order another sandwich if they shit in your sandwich.
But does that have anything to do with me?
Of course not.
Yeah, it seems so easy intellectually.
Putting it into practice, though, I guess for me just seems difficult.
In that moment, it does hurt when people recoil back at you, even if it doesn't have anything to do with you.
Yeah, I wouldn't say that it hurts.
What I think is, I mean, this sounds all kinds of Zen, but it's true, is what I think is, that's really sad.
How sad that is.
I mean, imagine that person's history.
I'm not saying that they have no responsibility.
I'm not, of course, right?
But nobody who was raised with any kind of decency would be that way.
Right?
All he's doing is he's telling me, this is the shit that goes on in my head that was dumped in there in my childhood.
And I am helpless now in the face of these voices.
And I have got to point this flamethrower at you for five seconds because I'm so fucking tired of getting burned all the time.
I just have to point it at you and burn you because it gives me a few seconds of relief from the living goddamn torment that is my soulless existence.
How awful.
To have a monkey that attacks you so consistently that the only way you can get any relief is to throw it at somebody else before it inevitably boomerangs back and goes for your own jugular again.
What a horrible existence.
Yeah, I guess maybe I'm just taking it, it's harder for me to not take it personally based on my own experiences in the past that I still need to deal with.
Yeah, because it's the only difference I can think of.
No, it's about avoidance, right?
It's about avoidance, right?
Because if you had people like this in your past when you were a kid, you couldn't avoid them.
Whether they were in school, or they were in church, or they were in your house, or whatever, you couldn't avoid them.
Right.
But as an adult, you can.
Yeah, I can avoid them, but if I want to talk about these ideas, then I'm going to run into them.
So, there's kind of a conflict there.
I could completely avoid them by just not Not talking about anything in public.
But I have this other desire to talk about these things, which means it's going to bring me back into contact with people like that.
Sure, yeah, and you don't have to.
You don't have to talk about these ideas.
Or you can do it anonymously on a blog where you don't allow comments and don't publish your address or whatever, right?
Right.
But, Nia, that's not very satisfying.
So it's, I have conflicting desires that I just have to work out.
Yeah, and listen, I wouldn't do it until you're ready.
I wouldn't do it until you can keep some sort of perspective for sure, because otherwise you'll be scared off philosophy by the trolls.
And that's, that's, that's a loss for everyone.
It's a loss even for the trolls, right?
Right.
It's a, it's a little bit easier.
Somebody just sent me another one just popped in just in my inbox.
I wasn't sort of looking at it, but it just popped up.
Somebody just wrote on my Kony 2012, just another government program video.
Somebody wrote, I just lost a lot of respect for you, Steph.
You're clearly out of your element on this one.
And part of me is like, well, tell me how?
Don't show me some leg and don't flirt and no date, right?
I mean, tell me how.
But they never do, right?
What they do is they want to put out these kind of provocative, like, oh my goodness, I am out of my...
But I can't be moved without reason and evidence.
It can't be moved.
Somebody's just going to say that, oh my god, you're clearly out of your element on this one.
It's like, but what does that mean?
My question is, does that help me correct something in a future video?
In this video, I plan to be in my element rather than out of it.
Because there's no content, there's nothing.
It's not even a cry for help.
It's just a minor eruption from an ancient agony.
on the part of another.
Because when people sort of say, well, you're wrong, I have no respect for you, or you get these ones, yeah, I'm out of here, unsubbed, you know, it's like, you've lost a subscriber, it's like, and I'm so sorry because your statements were so helpful that I'm sad to see you go, it's like, you know, and don't let your, you know, the door hit your ass on the way out, right?
Because it's not, there's no facts, right?
I mean, just, you have to just say to yourself, I will not be moved except for reason and evidence.
And insults.
The other thing too is that I think that we have, you know, let's not underestimate the degree to which people who frighten us also anger us as well and we want vengeance against them.
That's how people get drawn into, like, trollcasting, right?
That's how they get drawn into the troll swamp, is they want to punish the people and expose them and make them feel bad and revenge against them and so on.
But that's the great thing about being a moralist.
You know, the Christians get to be nice And turn the other cheek, because Satan is going to burn people's hides to a crisp for all fucking eternity, right?
So they can project all of their anger and desire for vengeance onto the devil, right?
And so they can be sort of nice and smiley because the devil's going to do their dirty work of vengeance, right?
But I mean, I know, I'm old enough now to know what the conscience of bad people turns into and how their lives go.
I mean, if this is how people act, right?
That they sort of send these insulting, nasty, venomous, empty.
I mean, I know how their lives are going to go.
I know how their lives are going right now.
And I am never cruel enough.
I mean, I'm never cruel enough to imagine a punishment as bad as hell.
But I'm also never as cruel enough to imagine a punishment as bad as people experience within their own hearts in these kinds of situations.
So anyway, listen, I want to make sure we get on to the other callers if that's all right with you, because we have only 40 minutes left on the show.
But I hope this was somewhat helpful.
Alright, well, next up we have Henry.
Oh, I'm going to add somebody on the phone, sorry.
It's your first name, John.
Please, let me do a little Harry Belafonte.
Just a tiny little bit.
My second name's John.
Henry John, he could hammer, he could whistle, he could sing.
Anyway, go ahead.
So basically, I'm a Colin virgin.
I've never done a Colin show on radio before in my life.
Well, and I'm afraid given that this is not radio, you remain unpopped.
So basically, I'm like about 58.
My parents came over from Holland, Roman Catholic, very authoritarian family and stuff like that.
And we went through all the different things.
They were strongly liberal in Canada.
They forced us to go to church all the time until we finally… Let's clarify that because liberal means something different in the U.S.
Oh, I know.
But you mean liberal party, not sort of like… Yeah, liberal party in Canada.
They would always vote liberal party.
And where am I going through?
So basically, I've been down in the States for about 13 years, down in California, and right after 9-11, things just changed totally.
Before that, I'd bring the kids down, I'd just walk through the airport security, go pick them up at the The gate, anyone coming to visit, I could just walk into the gate.
And things are just getting really, really shut down down there.
So I started listening to a few programs that a coworker gave me, like Alex Jones and Rents and stuff like that.
And then I started following Daily Kos, Huffington Post, and find them totally left-leaning and they were totally censoring everything they were doing.
So during the last election, I was kind of hopeful for Obama.
I was looking a lot at Ron Paul, but I couldn't talk to any of my friends about Ron Paul because this was Berkeley, California.
If I mentioned Ron Paul, they would just throw me in the bay.
That's another funny thing.
in the same bag as David Duke.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
There's no arguments.
It's just, yeah.
Yeah, that's another funny thing.
I've actually listened to a bunch of David Duke's videos and stuff and a lot of things he makes kind of sense on.
And then the Tea Party came in and the radical right took over.
So that was done.
So I've basically always been anti-authoritarian because of my father and actually my teachers and stuff like that during school because I was kind of the runt of the school.
So everyone would kind of chase me, beat the fuck out of me.
Oh, can I say that on here?
We prefer motherfucker, but you can go with the short version of that client.
And I found a really good defensive mechanism.
I would run off school property and they wouldn't follow me because they were all afraid of the authoritarians.
But then once the principal caught me, that was it.
I got strapped, sent home, all that crap.
So I've always been anti-authoritarian.
So now I've been listening to your program for about two years.
like when you were broadcasting in the car and stuff.
Whoa, old school.
I love it.
Yeah.
And so I was thinking I was kind of becoming a minicurist or whatever you call it.
What we say is we say minicurist and then we sort of spit into the corner.
I'm kidding.
Go on.
But right now I've been looking at more of the anarchist side and it just seems to make sense to me.
So a lot of the people like suddenly that all kind of came together like Colbert from Colbert Report, John Irving, all these different guys.
So I've been kind of following their actions lately.
So I have a couple of questions for you.
Go for it.
Okay, can you ever foresee a state and a stateless system coexisting?
Or is there going to have to be like a total crash of the state system in order for the stateless system to come out?
I've been listening to a lot of your programs and you say, yeah, it's not going to happen in my generation, maybe in two or three generations, but can you see a kind of a slow progression or does it have to be all or nothing?
This is really theoretical but I'll share with you my thoughts.
I think that it's not going to be very easy.
Yes, I understand that.
No, it's not going to be easy for a stateless society to be next to a government society.
It's not going to be easy.
Okay.
The reason is, of course, that people are going to want to come to the stateless society, right?
Right.
And so there's going to be a loss of tax livestock as they pour over the border, right?
I mean, there'd be no better way than to give Americans empathy for Mexicans than for Canada to become a stateless society, right?
Because then they'd be all looking to get over here, and they'd be getting people to help mules, to get them to help them over, and they'd be sneaking out and trying to, you know, stashing their gold up their butts to get out of America, whatever, right?
And so, I mean, even liberalization seems to be tough, right?
So, I think America puts a lot of pressure on Canada to keep drugs illegal, although Canada, I think, would be much more likely to go the European, if not the Portuguese, model.
Where drug addicts are viewed as people who need to be helped rather than criminals who need to be caged.
But of course, if Canada did become... They almost brought it through, didn't they?
There's been several initiatives, yeah.
And of course, as far as I know, the majority of the Canadian population does favor decriminalization, at least of marijuana.
uh... so uh... so uh... you know that the question is if there was this you know the candidate was a state of society tomorrow uh... then you could basically anyone could move here and just come and live here and they could come and work here they could buy houses and they could enter the contracts and they wouldn't need a passport and they wouldn't need uh... to register with the government they wouldn't need social security cards or insurance cards or you know any of these any of the status paraphernalia And they wouldn't have to pay taxes, right?
I mean, so it would be a mecca.
I mean, if you think of how many people fled the hellhole of 18th and 19th century Europe to come to America, and America was, I mean, relative to now, pretty virtually stateless.
I mean, you basically would pass your quarantine tests on Ellis Island and then just go to it, right?
You didn't need a passport, you didn't need work papers, didn't need a green card, didn't have to register for income taxes, none of that shit, right?
And The whole world swarmed to America, and the best and the brightest and the hardest working, they all swarmed to America.
Anybody with two gumptions to rub together ran to America, and that changed the history, of course, of Europe considerably.
It's hard to imagine that Europe would have had the same 20th century history had they not lost the majority of their best people to come to... I mean, would you have had the same massive world wars and all that kind of crap if people had not?
Sorry, people have not fled to the U.S.
So I think that there would be a challenge having a neighboring country because the neighboring country would have to put a lot of restrictions on people.
So if Canada became a stateless society, then America would have to start putting a lot of restrictions.
Like, if you go to Canada, we're going to freeze your bank account until you return, or whatever it is.
You can't take gold out, you can't travel.
So what would happen is the fences, which are completely visible to the legal mind, would actually start to become visible to the general livestock mind.
Governments want to pretend that it's patriotism that keeps you there, not guns.
And so what happened when neighboring countries become more appealing, the real defenses start to rise up around the country to have people not leave.
And so that's a problem.
So there would be a lot of pressure brought to bear.
But the question is, of course, brought to bear on who?
If there's no government, you can't bring pressure to bear on any particular entity.
So I think it's more likely that it's going to happen In a sort of more gradual way.
The general gist of my idea is that children are raised better which means you have far fewer social problems.
When you have far fewer social problems like crime and drug use and addictions and divorces and all this mess, when you have far fewer social dysfunctions, eventually the social institutions will have to adapt.
I mean they can hang on like grim death for a hell of a long time because they're the government so they don't respond to market forces.
But eventually People are going like, okay, wait a second here.
Why do we have a war on drugs when we have so few drug users?
Why do we have a welfare state when we have so few poor people?
So eventually people would just say, look, we don't need this stuff anymore.
We don't need the overhead of the state because society is getting, you've got to heal society and then you can get rid of the state.
You can't get rid of the state and wait for society to heal itself.
That's just not right.
You take the band-aid off after the wound has healed.
You heal society and then the state will be shrugged off as unnecessary.
It doesn't take 100% of the population to be switched over.
I forget where I read on it.
It's 10-20%.
If they are hooked on an idea, they can change society over No, no, it's not about changing people's minds.
You can't change people's minds because people don't think.
Well, you can educate people.
No, you can't educate people about a state and a society because people can't think.
What you can do is you can appeal to people to stop hitting their children and you can appeal to people to stop neglecting and abusing their children and abandoning their children to daycare and you can nag at them to stay home and you can nag at them to defer getting a 3,500 square foot house rather than spend time with their children.
You can make that the social norm and then children will grow.
No, but you're not converting anyone.
What you're doing is we have to raise children.
Let me finish.
You have to raise children who are capable of thinking before we can reason with them.
And right now, certainly adults, very few of them are capable of any kind of rationality.
And we know this from the bomb in the brain stuff.
http://www.fdrurl.com So from the bottom of the brain stuff we know that there are very few people who are capable of rationality.
Now if children are raised with less aggression and greater parental connections and intimacy then those children will be capable of reasoning.
Now they'll still grow up with all the status propaganda but they will be capable of much more rationality than the current population is capable of.
And then rational arguments can win.
Right now we're speaking to people in English who don't speak English.
We have to have them grow up speaking English so that they can actually listen to the arguments we're making in English.
And so when we're speaking the language of reason, we need people who are able to potentially speak the language of reason and that is not at all a significant population within the human species at the moment.
It's a tiny, tiny, tiny number of people who are actually able to listen to reason.
And so the way that it happens is we get parents to treat their children better, or we make that case, we make that encouragement.
And part of that is through the voluntarism within the family, right?
I mean, some parents won't, right?
So when women gained the right of divorce, then some men started treating them better, not because they had innately been converted to the ideas of rational feminism, but because they were afraid their wives were going to leave them.
Whatever it takes, whatever it takes for people to stop hitting their kids and yelling at their kids, we have to do.
And then those kids will grow up with the capacity to reason.
And then We can make the arguments but I don't believe it's possible to make the arguments at the moment.
I'm sorry for speaking over you.
I'll shut up now.
No, that's no problem.
I'm looking at your past and you grew up in a very bad family and stuff and yet you were able to come out of it.
I'm looking at my past.
It was very authoritarian.
I've gone through a lot of different cycles and stuff.
I've done a lot of reading and I'm coming out of it so maybe there won't be Millions of people that will come and see the light, but I think there are a lot that will.
And I think by your last statement, you were kind of writing them all off and saying that the only direction we can go is through the children, which I totally agree with, is changing the whole concept of how we raise children and how we educate children.
But I still think that in order to get the children into the new system, You still have to do some re-education on the parents to say, don't hit your kids.
Stuff like that.
So there, there still has to be a higher level education.
in society in order to make it come through.
Does that make any sense?
Of course, I'm not writing off everyone, otherwise I wouldn't be doing my show, right?
Let me ask you this.
Was your enlightenment a process of rationality or was there an emotional component to it that you felt made you more open to these ideas?
Let me think.
That's probably a bit of both, but I think it was more the logic of it, because when you broke it down into the two simple facts that there's non-aggression and property rights, and the logic – I'm a computer scientist, so – and there was no logic that worked anymore.
Everything built in society fails under those two premises right now.
Let me ask you this.
Except there are social interactions and stuff like that.
They're working fine because everyone's socializing.
Everyone's kind of getting along until you've got this damn government on top of you.
Well, let me ask you this.
When you were a child, were you spanked?
Oh, yeah.
One of my fondest memories was my brother getting hit in the head with a vacuum cleaner hose.
Oh, crap.
It was pretty aggressive.
I've got three kids.
They're all in their 20s now.
I want to talk to you a bit about that later.
I think I remember spanking them once and I never did timeouts or anything like that.
It was very non-aggressive.
First of all, I'm so sorry about your childhood and secondly, congratulations on the choices you made.
Magnificent.
But why do you think you made those different choices?
I'm not saying causal, like determinists or anything, but what factors?
Because a lot of people don't.
But what factors do you think?
I have no idea.
I just didn't want to do it.
I really disliked authoritarians.
I hated my principal.
I didn't like my dad because I always thought he was mean.
Like cops.
I don't like government, even though I was kind of voting liberal all the time and big government.
Yeah, but you didn't not hit your kids because you don't like cops.
There had to be something else, right?
Because that's a very different choice from how you were raised.
I have no idea why what triggered me never to hit my kids.
Well, I did it a few times.
I know, but I mean, relative to how you were raised, it was very minor.
My suggestion would be this.
What do I know?
Take it with a grain of salt.
Well, I guess you've gone through the same situation, because you were, from your old interviews and stuff, you were kind of abused by your mother and stuff, and yet you are totally non-aggressive to your kids, so you kind of came around that.
That's because I remember.
Oh, I remember very well, yeah.
Right, and it's because you remember.
I think it was that hit on the head with my brother.
That just, like, threw me.
It was just such anger coming out of my father and stuff.
Right.
So you remember what it was like to be in those situations.
You remember the fear, the horror, the anger, the helplessness.
You remember all of that big bundle of negative experiences.
And so you don't want to do that to other people, right?
Right.
But there's a lot of people, I mean, I've talked to them on the show, a lot of people who are like, I don't remember anything before I was 10.
Well, that's dangerous, right?
That's dangerous because it means then that you don't, I mean, we assume you're not blocking things out that were great fun, you assume you're blocking things out that were bad, but it means then if you don't have any empathy, if you can't have any empathy for yourself when you were a child, as an adult, right?
Thinking back, if you can't remember what it was like to be a child, then it's much more likely that you will inflict whatever horrors you experienced on you, on someone else, because you don't have the emotional empathy and memory to not do that, right?
So I think it's got something to do with memory.
I've done a podcast called Morality is Memory or something like that which is basically the same argument.
Now I don't know what's different about why some people can remember what happened to them as kids and other people they either don't remember or they remember some super cool alienated weird dissociated retelling.
of their childhood.
Like, oh yeah, you know, it was, you know, my mom used to chase us around with a wooden spoon and we'd try and get away and, you know, we just thought it was ridiculous.
And, right, so they kind of recast it as this keystone, almond jerry kind of bonk on the head kind of stuff, right?
And, of course, a lot of the violence that was in those kinds of kids shows in the past were a lot to do with the need to recast violence as some sort of game or some sort of It turned into a battle of wills or a game or something like that.
Since you can remember what it was like, then I'm sure that was key in not re-inflicting it.
I've also never been an aggressive person.
I run away and hide in front of the school rather than fight.
One other point on my first thing is you had the show on Somalia which was kind of showing how a stateless society can run for a while and then sure enough they found some natural resources and took it over.
I don't remember if you remember making that show?
I do.
I'm just not sure why we're going to Somalia just at the moment.
Oh, because it was a stateless society for a while, so it did exist for a period of time.
Yeah, sorry.
It just seemed like we whipped right out of here.
Yeah, I know.
Sorry.
Where did we go there?
I have my little points in the computer, so I had to go back.
No, well, Somalia originally was a state society, and then it became a stateless society.
Right.
What's it somebody was saying, you know, if you love anarchism so much, why don't you move to Somalia?
It's like, well, if you love government so much, why don't you move to North Korea?
Anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
Okay, so the next one is my son.
He's doing like history, politics, double major.
He used to be much more kind of normal, but now he's becoming super big government.
and And he's saying, oh, we can't survive without big government, blahdy blahdy blah.
And last weekend I actually talked to him and he says, yeah, yeah, the government would never stage 9-11.
I'm going, what?
Like five years ago you said, yeah, it was obvious they did it.
So I'm kind of wondering if you have – let me see.
Well, I can tell you why I think that's happening.
Well, I think it's the education system.
I think he's being brainwashed.
I wouldn't say that.
No, I wouldn't say that.
No, I would argue it's because he knows he's going to end up in some state-supported or state-protected profession.
What's he going to do with his experience in politics, right?
He's going to have to end up being an academic or a policy wonk.
He's locked in the death orbit around the state now, right?
I mean, unless he's going to go take his history degree and be a software entrepreneur like I did.
That's a good point.
So it's self-preservation.
I know I'm going to have to hang around the mafia, so I guess I'll just say that they're okay.
That would be my suggestion.
You can ask him about that.
You know, what is it you plan to do?
I mean, I guarantee you that it's going to end up having to be some sort of state dependent position.
So, you know, I think he's just building that bridge ahead of him.
He wants to do his PhD and stuff like that.
And he wants to become a teacher.
A professor, right?
Teacher or professor.
Well, if he doesn't get his PhD, then he would just become a teacher or something like that.
Yeah.
And everybody who wants to go into the educational profession knows that it's, you know, it's lefty socialist hell, right?
Yeah.
I mean unless he's going to go teach economics at George Mason University or something, that's where he's going to be, right?
Yeah.
So anyways, I remember – I'm so sorry.
I do want to – we've got another couple of callers and I want to – we've had a fair amount of chat.
I just want to make sure I get to the other callers and just certainly want to call back but a great chat.
I really appreciate some great, great thoughts about that.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right.
Jimmy, Jamie, Bambi, let's get to the next caller.
I'm not going to dignify that with a response.
Next up we have Ben, and then after that we have a phone caller.
Well, hi Steph.
My name's Ben, and I'm a theater... Ben, why did you only fold five and not six?
I don't understand that.
Sorry, go ahead.
Well, I too am a virgin caller, and really excited to be on the show.
Actually, my first time... Well, let me sprinkle a little of this powder into your drink.
Sorry, go ahead.
Just a little background, I think I'm probably unique among your listeners.
My journey kind of started, I read this book called Atlas Shrugged.
I don't know if you've heard of it.
Sorry, how do you spell that?
I think it's A, I'm not sure.
It's been a while.
So, I started with Rand, and I actually came from an evangelical Christian background.
As a younger person, and I was a Southern Baptist until about 16, and Red Rand kind of started opening up, and that was a, coming from the background I did, it was like taking crowbars to my eyes to open them gradually.
It was a very, very gradual process.
And in the last 16 months, I'd say, it kind of accelerated a lot.
The soil was kind of loosened up a little bit and then I was actually in college a little over a year ago pursuing this liberal arts ideal of an education and I was studying political economy and I happened upon a young girl's YouTube account and she was talking about an Nathaniel Brandon book and we started talking about psychology and she kept mentioning your name.
And I was like, who the hell is this guy?
She was talking about you left and right.
So I started watching your videos and the last year or so I've spent too many hours on YouTube doing that.
And so that actually led me to drop out of school.
I moved back to my home state of Virginia.
I got a job, got two jobs, moved out of my house so I wouldn't be financially hostage to my parents so that I could I kind of expressed my own beliefs a little bit more.
I was having to go to church on a weekly basis just because I was not independent.
I just wanted to have the esteem to look in the mirror to know I could say no if I wanted to.
So it's been kind of a whirlwind.
I've moved like three times and now I'm out in Indiana on a new job.
So on the surface, the past year or so has probably been the most radical changes in my life that I've had.
And on the surface, as I look back, I can kind of count some of the accomplishments and have some pride in all that.
But I know I want more and I know I'm capable of more.
And there's things I need to do that I can't do.
Sorry, more what?
Excuse me?
Sorry, more what?
I've read some of Brandon's books and some of Alice Miller's books, and there are proactive things I could do in my daily life to improve my emotional health, some habits I should work on developing.
If I listed them all off, I would take the last 15 minutes of the show, and I don't want to do that.
My question I'm getting to is this.
I know that coming from my background, I have a boatload of issues.
I've got mom issues.
I've got a ton of things I could work on and I need help with and I need coaching and I would love to get into psychotherapy.
My question for you is, As a person with relatively limited purchasing power today and with psychotherapy being... I think that's a good way of putting it, right?
Yeah.
With psychotherapy being as expensive as it is often, you know, my insurance would cover three meetings a year if I'm about to kill myself or something like that.
And so finding a person, I feel like it's important to find someone who is ethically, philosophically, And maybe even in terms of statism, on the same page and coming from the same worldview, when we're starting to tear into my psyche and try to figure myself out, I want someone to be
to understand, to see those things in the same light as I do before we start such an intense project.
My question for you is, how would you recommend finding a person to do that with, a professional to go through those things with, and is there an option out there for a young 20-something who doesn't have a ton of money?
As far as being able to finance that because that's the most intimidating thing.
I'd love to go live on the street and sell drugs and get psychotherapy from Nathaniel Brandon in LA, but I can't do that.
So what would you suggest and if you have any suggestions?
Yeah, I mean there's things that you can do to make therapy more Efficient, I think.
You know, this is all just my idiot amateur opinion.
Nathaniel Brandon's got workbooks and other people have got workbooks that can be very helpful.
You can work through those.
You can keep a dream journal and try and figure out what your dreams are about.
I think that can be very, very helpful.
And John Bradshaw has got some good books, I think, for working through stuff like that.
I think you can start to make lists.
You know, if I were in your shoes, I'd say, OK, well, how was my worldview shaped through religion?
What do I believe about the world?
What do I believe about virtue?
What do I believe about worldview shape?
No, you know, look, I mean, obviously, religion didn't teach you how to dial a phone, right?
So certain things like Sharia law doesn't tell you what the cycle of your traffic lights should be.
But you have a view of humanity.
I think this is essential for everyone.
I'm glad that you brought it up.
I think that it's essential for everyone.
So tell me, are human beings good, evil or neutral?
What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, the Christian upbringing would tell me evil.
So that's important, right?
Sorry to interrupt you right after you ask a question, but that's not something you want to gloss over.
Exactly.
So if you brought up Christian, then human nature was good until that bastard talking snake got involved and convinced the rib woman to make Adam eat the magical apple, in which case they got kicked out, saw the fire placed in their way, and the The woman was cursed with childbirth and the man was cursed with work.
And that's one of my greatest individual struggles is, as a Christian, my life was My relationship with Christ, as I perceived it.
And that was everything.
That was the lens through which I saw the world.
And to have that, and Jesus teaches that it's not just cheating on your wife that's bad, it's lusting after a woman.
Every thought, just every flicker of anything that goes through your mind is subject to judgment as good or evil.
And even after you recognize the irrationality of the faith, It is so difficult emotionally to not – and that's one of the problems I ran into getting into reading Rand was it was such a convenient transition over to her to moralizing everything I thought and everything I did.
And immediately judging it as good or evil, and instead of doing it by the Sermon on the Mount, I was doing it by Galt's speech.
No, and I mean, Rand can get a bit, you know, Beethoven has a macabre sense of life, and it's like, oh, come on!
Oh, come on!
You know, I can't get to the... Well, of course, she comes out of the Jewish tradition, right?
And in all religions, Judaism, Christianity, there are two aspects, right?
There is thought crime, right?
Right.
And in UPB, there is no thought crime.
In my ethics, well I shouldn't say my ethics, in hopefully rational ethics, there is no thought crime.
There's no such thing as a thought crime.
And I think that thought crime is the opposite of self-knowledge.
Because if you're going to divvy yourself up into good and evil, then you cannot pursue self-knowledge any more than you want to make love to the ugliest person in the world or become best friends with Charles Manson.
Right?
So self-knowledge requires a lack of judgment.
Now, judging outside yourself I think is valid and healthy and good.
But in terms of self-knowledge, and Rand was very honest, she said, I don't understand psychology at all.
So in terms of self-knowledge, We have to be non-judgmental.
And in that, you know, the Buddhists and the Zens and the, you know, judge not lest ye be judged.
Fantastic for your ecosystem, for your inner voices, for your inner characters, your alter egos.
Yes, no judgment, curiosity.
There is no evil within the mind.
There is evil in the hands that strangle the hobo.
There is no evil within the mind.
Whereas religion, of course, carves the mind into good and evil, and the evil vastly outweighs the good.
And it sets you at war against yourself.
The reason that you are set at war against yourself is so you cannot question the source of the rules.
You cannot question the source of the rules if you are at war with yourself.
Even though on a cognitive level I know that and I understand that, it is just so difficult emotionally to separate myself from that and to stop doing it to myself.
As I talk about the habits I need to pick up, That's something I would like to work on and address, but go ahead.
Yeah, philosophy, colon, Satan is your friend.
And he is, of course.
And Satan, frankly, is one of the more likable characters in the Christian pantheon.
I mean, Jesus is okay when he's taking on the moneylenders, and I think we could use him with the Federal Reserve right now.
But Jesus, for the most part, at least the way he's depicted, is that dewy-eyed gay fellow Hugging the lamb in inappropriate ways.
I mean, that to me is, you know, that's not the way.
Shouldn't you have a fucking tan?
You're from the Middle East, for Christ's sake.
What's with the blue eyes and the pasty skin?
What are you, like some British royalty?
Are you kidding me?
And, you know, the Virgin Mary, you know, one woman's tale to cover up her infidelity just got way out of hand.
And so it is a...
It is a challenge to take away these archetypes to recognize that they are alien artifacts planted in your mind by people who frankly want to control you.
And this is not to say that there are not good Christians and people who have good faith that allow them or encourage them to do good things.
I fully, fully accept that.
You know, there are good Christians and there are bad atheists.
I really, really understand that.
So I'm not saying it's all just some evil Machiavellian plot.
But the reality is That we cannot have individuation, we cannot be who we are if we are possessed by the fairy tales of sun-baked Bedouins from five thousand years ago.
That is not who you are.
Given the inheritance that Christianity suffered from, or used, or you know the Mithras religion, the other religions, it wasn't even them!
And so it's like a kid running around, you know, saying, I'm Harry Potter.
No, you're not.
You can pretend to be Harry Potter and that's fine, you know, you can play a game or whatever.
But if he's really becoming Harry Potter, that's not healthy, right?
Right.
If he really, really gets the glasses and, you know, he starts speaking in a British accent and whatever, right?
Of course, Harry Potter grew up to be an atheist, or Daniel Radcliffe did anyway.
But the reality is that that is not who you are.
Because that is other people's stories, other people's mythologies.
That's not who you are.
But It's now a part of who you are.
And I just need to exercise it.
And I just need to exercise it, too.
Well, first of all, you can talk to Jesus because he's in there, right?
I mean, you can still talk to Jesus because he's part of your mind, right?
I mean you believed in him, he's internalized, he is an area of psychological energy for you, he's got his own particular perspectives and voice and so on.
But the problem is you simply can't speak to Jesus as an authority figure with infinite knowledge, right?
Because he's not a God, he's a part of yourself.
So you can have conversations with Jesus, but you cannot pray to Jesus, right?
You can ask Jesus, you can tell Jesus, you can interact with Jesus, but I'm afraid you have to do it as an equal.
What I'm saying is you're Jesus.
See, being Harry Potter is bad, but being Jesus apparently is very good.
This is a big ego boost for me right now.
Yeah, that's right.
Now, throw some water on the ground and see if you can win.
Alright, so to recap, and we'll leave time for that last patient caller, you would recommend checking out the workbooks of Mr. Brandon, Mr. Bradshaw, Dream Journal.
Yeah, I think those are the only ones that I did which I can sort of recommend.
You can do FDR 1927.
You can check that out.
FDR, these are people from the chat window who are writing it down.
FDR 1716.
FDR 1658, a great year.
How to pursue self-knowledge when you can't afford a therapist.
I feel that that might have something to do with it.
And there is also How to Choose a Good Therapist, which is a podcast.
Those are the podcast numbers, correct?
Because I've always used your YouTube.
I haven't checked the podcast out.
Yeah, check the podcast numbers.
You can do searches on the website to find them.
I don't think those were ever videos.
I have 900 videos and over 2,000 podcasts.
It's not a one-to-one relation.
You're not loquacious at all.
No.
That was Satan talking right there, right?
Thank you so much.
I appreciate your time and thank you for everything you do.
You're very welcome and please feel free to call back.
All right.
Let me know how it goes.
Yes, sir.
All right.
Caller, you have four minutes.
Go!
No, I'm kidding.
We can go over.
Hello?
Yes.
Are you hearing me?
I am.
Okay.
Okay.
So, I have... This is probably going to run out of time real shortly here.
No, no.
We'll go over.
Don't worry.
I appreciate your patience.
Okay.
Because this is real important to me, so I really appreciate it.
I just had a daughter.
She's four months old.
And I'm going to be in the middle of... I have a few years to convince my wife to not put her into public schools.
So I've got that working.
I've got time for that.
And she's kind of warm to the idea.
But it's going to be a difficult, difficult thing because she's from... she's Japanese.
And they are very...
much more socialist in the United States as far as schools and just top down.
You said that they're much more socialist in the United States.
You meant Japan, right?
Yes.
She's still programmed in the school way and they do so much homework and I don't want my daughter to go through that.
I know you have a lot of resources available for that.
Yeah, look I mean first of all what I would suggest is that you learn more about the Japanese school system.
Because you need to understand where your wife is coming from.
So let's say that the Japanese school system is way better than the United States school system.
And I would imagine in some ways I would theorize that that probably is better in many ways.
It's more of a homogenous culture.
They haven't had the family disintegration that the United States has had, and they don't drug their kids as much, so they don't get all that weirdness.
So my guess is that your experience of education from the state is quite different from her experience of education from the state.
And so you really want to make sure that you get into her shoes, though not necessarily the rest of her clothes.
It depends.
But try and get into her shoes and ask her what her experience of government schools was and what she liked about it, what she didn't like about it and so on.
The first thing, if you want to convince someone of something, the first thing you need to understand is what is his or her reference point.
Because otherwise you're talking about how bad schools are, which may have been your direct experience, but it may not have been her direct experience.
In which case you need to understand where she's coming from in terms of When you say government schools, your experience is obviously something you've talked about, but her experience is different.
So that would be my first suggestion.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, that totally makes sense.
And the other issue I had, I don't even know how to phrase it, a question about this, because I have a son also who is 20.
Oh my goodness!
New sperm, meet old sperm.
Yeah, yeah.
So he actually, I really messed up in raising him and not being around and things of that nature.
I made every mistake in the book and now he's in prison.
Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry about that.
Yeah, and it's just, it's hell for me and it's hell for him.
How can you reach someone in prison?
Right.
Do you mind, talk about this or not, as you see fit, I mean you haven't got any names here, so what do you think that you did that was, as you say, you said you made every mistake in the book.
You know, there are other people out there, I'm sure, you know, it doesn't make a good situation out of a bad situation, but it gets as much gold out of it as possible.
What would you do differently or what were the mistakes that you think that you made or you feel that you made that resulted in this situation?
Well, the first mistake was mate selection.
Oh, right.
Yes, please, everybody, be very careful with who you hook up with for the purposes of procreation.
It is the most important decision you're ever going to make.
Sorry, go ahead.
So I tried to make it work with her and our relationship for about the first three years of his life.
But we ended up eventually, inevitably, breaking up.
And so I wasn't there.
Sorry, what were the complaints that you would have about her as a wife and as a friend and as a mother?
Sort of incompatible, I guess.
She sort of had a dark cloud over her and was sort of negative about just everything.
If you could think of a negative attitude about prosperity, about rich people, about men, about... We won the lottery!
Oh man, now people are going to just want money from us.
Right, right, right.
She's just kind of a cranky old I think she's turned around in recent years.
A minister of doom and gloom from the kingdom of woe is me, right?
Yes, yes, yes.
So that was it.
Just sort of combative.
Combative how?
Well, you know, actually after we had split up, we were living across the state, about a four hour drive away, from each other and so I would call and talk to my son and I'd hear her in the background just saying bad things about my family.
Because her family was poor, my family was more well-off and so you know those sorts of things, just being negative.
Well I'm sorry to interrupt but I mean that's sort of a judgment thing too right?
I mean because That's not what a mom should be doing, even if she thinks it.
Right.
She shouldn't be telling.
So there's a judgment thing around that, like what's good for the kids versus what is an immediate emotional relief for her?
Right, right.
The selfishness?
Does that make any sense?
Right, right.
And that was one thing that always bugged me, was that I would have the restraint to not say anything negative about anyone involved in my son's life when he's grown up, because that's something for you to figure out later on.
Especially something like the me against the conflict.
I grew up with divorced parents, and it wasn't a good thing, but they made the best out of it they could by not using me as fodder to throw against each other, if you know what I'm saying.
Alright, and what else?
Anyone else?
And I just don't know.
I'm trying to reach him so that he doesn't go back.
I'm sorry, I'm just trying to, because it seems to me that that's not quite enough for him to end up in prison.
Like what do I know, right?
But that doesn't strike me as, from what I know about childhood trauma and its relationship to criminality, that doesn't like having a mom who's kind of inappropriate and selfish or whatever, and a dad who, I don't know, you said you were not there, is that right?
Right, and I think that's the main thing.
He came to live with me later on when he was about 13, but he'd already been doing drugs, He had already kind of set his path and I was trying to, uh, I think what I was trying to do was to get him back, get him off drugs and get him kind of on the right path.
And I don't think I, and I know I did, I did the wrong, the wrong thing.
I used violence.
I, uh, didn't respect him the way I should have.
And what you mean when you say that you use violence?
Well, I did spank him.
And we did have physical confrontations where I lost control of my temper.
I didn't punch him or things of that nature, but it did become sort of a fight between us.
And how often would you spank him?
I just did it once.
Oh, you just did it once, okay.
Once I did it, I felt stupid because he was almost as big as me at that point.
Not that it matters, it's never right to do it now and I realize that now, but at the time I was going off the advice of a friend who kept his son off of drugs by violence or threat of violence.
Do you know if your ex-wife, did she remarry, did she have boyfriends over or what other kinds of influences was he exposed to as a child, your son?
Yeah, she's been married just a few years after, or got together with her current husband just a few years, like maybe a year after we split up.
And he has three younger brothers.
Oh, from the second husband?
Yeah, yes, from that marriage.
Right.
And I'm not, I believe they had a decent relationship with the stepdad, but I don't think that, It was optimal.
I don't think it ever is.
Based on my experience with my stepfather, I don't think it ever is an optimal situation.
Right, right.
And if you don't mind me asking, what landed him in jail?
Well, okay, this is his second time, actually.
So the first time was something I would consider an actual crime.
where he actually stole something, broke in to a place or whatever, and he did that time.
And then once he got out of there, he was out maybe two months, and he got caught, as you said, with the wrong type of vegetation.
Right.
Oh, cough medicine too, for God's sake.
He had cough medicine.
You can't have that.
Right.
And how long is he in for?
Until 2014, I think.
Oh my God, really?
Yeah.
Well, hopefully with some good behavior, right?
Right, yeah.
I'm hoping that there's a way that we could... Was he on probation?
Is that one of the reasons why it was harsh?
Yes, yes.
Because it was so soon after the judge threw a book at him because he was just like fresh out and then he decided to go... No, I don't agree with the crime, but it was...
I mean, I don't agree with the drug laws at all.
But they're there, right?
But they are there and it was symptoms of not wanting to, of still trying to relive the criminal dream, the criminal fantasy of being the big boss or whatever.
Right, and so your question is, obviously as a parent you would want this to never ever happen again.
to your son and so is your question sort of what can you do to to try and get through to him?
Well, look, you understand I don't know.
I mean, this is very complicated.
I can certainly share with you some of my amateur thoughts if you feel this would be helpful to you.
I think that people steal because they feel that they've been stolen from and generally what they feel they've had stolen from them is the happiness of their childhoods.
Again, not to pump this stuff, but I think it's useful.
You can look at the Bomb and the Brain stuff that I've got on YouTube and some of the interviews that I've done in this area.
One of the problems with divorce, and there are many problems with divorce, of course, is that you really do lose a lot of control over who's in your children's lives.
I don't know.
I'm just theorizing, right?
But the second husband might have had a creepy uncle.
I don't know, right?
But you really do lose control over who's in your children's lives.
And therefore, a lot of their behaviors, if you don't know the context, can seem kind of incomprehensible, right?
So, I mean, if I were in your shoes, I would sit down and say, okay, okay.
I have to look at this as a parent, as a cry for help.
Because if it's not, then there's nothing I can do.
And I think it's a good first approach.
And I think it could be of real value.
But I would sort of really ask about childhood.
You know, I would really ask and say, like before apologizing, you have to know what you're apologizing for.
And so the first thing that I would do is really, really try and get a handle on what your son's childhood was like.
Not just the part you saw, of course, but the part that he experienced.
I feel fairly sure, which doesn't mean anything, I'm just telling you, being honest about my feelings, I feel fairly sure that if you're persistent in that conversation, then information will emerge out of his childhood that places his adult actions in a context that makes sense.
Until you have that context where things sort of make sense, then I think it's very hard to help him.
OK.
And you can do that.
The good news is, of course, you can do that through letters.
I don't know what the visitation rights are like or how public it is, but you can do that with letters.
I mean, the thought just struck me.
I'm not sure how vulnerable you want him to be while he's in jail.
I don't know.
But if there's a way to ask him even about factual elements, you know, just saying, you know, you could say something like this.
Look, I know I'm late to the game.
I know that I wasn't there enough for you as a kid.
But I really do want to understand your history, understand where you came from and see the parts of your childhood that I didn't see because I wasn't there.
So give me your five best memories, your five worst memories and really try to get a sense of what may have occurred for him or what developmental stages may have been missed that would give him these kinds of poor judgments.
I don't buy that people end up in jail because they're dumb.
I don't think that's the case at all.
I think that people end up in jail because they have missed particular stages in their development and they have not had a chance to explain the story of their lives in a way that makes sense to other people And therefore make sense to themselves.
And because their lives don't have any shape or course or they have no history that bears on where they are, they make decisions in a vacuum without relevance to their histories.
I know this is a very abstract way of putting it and I hope this makes some kind of sense.
But if you can find out about his history, I feel quite sure that you will find things that will put his current actions in a kind of context.
And thinking about it and maybe, you know, allow himself to be vulnerable enough, which it is difficult in there.
It is difficult to find any time to be where you can think for yourself or by yourself.
I mean, not think for yourself.
And so maybe those things that he'll be able to allow himself to sort of feel the hurt that he wasn't allowed to feel.
Yeah, I mean, it doesn't have to be a big emotional thing, but even just to get him thinking about his life.
You know, if you grew up in a very difficult childhood, then you have no context for your current decisions, because so much stuff is repressed or whatever, right?
So there's no narrative, there's no thread that, well, you know, I don't know, this is a completely different situation in some ways, of course, but the first caller was like, well, I tend to overthink things, and he hadn't made any connection between that and his father's anger when he was a kid.
So now he doesn't think about it, well, I just have this habit of overthinking things.
It's got a narrative that goes back and connects with his history.
And if your son doesn't have a narrative that makes sense and connects with his history, then I think he's going to be making decisions in very short term and in a way kind of conformist or compliant.
You know, the criminals look quite rebellious, but they're actually quite compliant because it takes a certain social environment to foster that kind of criminality.
In other words, you know, so when he broke in and stole stuff, there had to be a bunch of people that he talked about it with, that were like, yeah, you know, or like, it's a very kind of compliant lowest common denominator social environment.
And if he doesn't understand how that seems kind of normal to him because of something in his history that I don't know about, you don't know about, and hopefully he knows about at some point, then he won't be able to put any of that stuff in context.
It would just seem normal to him.
So he has to look upon his path as a deviation from the way his life should have been and could be, hopefully, in the future.
But he has to see how he was knocked off course.
Does that make any sense?
Yes, yes, yes.
And so, yeah, I would invite him into this now.
I mean, I think you're going to have to be patient.
This might take six months, it might take a year, it might take two years before he starts to really think about this stuff.
But I think that persistence and that patience is all.
Yeah, he's got time.
You also, I would strongly recommend reading In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté, G-A-B-O-R-M-A-T-E, but it's got that funny little bizarro slash above the E. It's called In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts.
And he works with, I mean, a different level of dysfunctional people than your son, but I think that what he's got to say about this stuff It's very, very important.
I mean, I've had a little interview with him, but the really important stuff is to read his books.
I think that's really important.
And again, I'd recommend having a look at the Bomb and the Brain series on YouTube.
But there is a way to have his behavior come into context with his history.
And I think until that happens, it's going to be almost impossible to change it.
But once that happens, it will be impossible to sustain his current course.
Once you make those connections, it changes your future.
That would be my strong guidance.
And of course, for you, I mean, I always recommend this to people who are facing these challenges.
I think therapy is always a fantastic thing if you find the right therapist.
Because obviously, as his dad, there were potentially things that you could have done prior to this situation unfolding the way it did.
And if you didn't see them, If you did see them but didn't act upon them, whatever you could have done to try and avert this stuff, then that's important to know why.
The reason is not that you can't fix the past, but you can at least avoid the same thing.
So if you're going to go from a situation where you didn't intervene in a strong enough way to a situation where you're now going to try and intervene in a strong enough way, you need to know what kept you from intervening beforehand so you can do something different now.
Does that make any sense?
Yes.
I have this strength and conviction in myself to do things.
I did miss a lot of cues.
Right, and you don't want to miss those again.
Right.
You've got to find out why you were missing those cues so that you don't miss them again, because if you're going to be the cavalry now, you don't want your horse to fall again like it did last time, right?
Right, and that is my motivation, seeing what happened to my first child, to make sure I do everything right with my daughter, and your philosophical parenting This makes so much sense.
Yeah, I hope it does.
I hope it does.
I mean, non-aggression and property rights seem to work well on every level.
Well, respecting her preferences, it's just so... At this point, she can't speak, so I just cannot wait until there's language involved in the picture so that I can explain to her the few times where I've got to change her diaper or do things that make her uncomfortable to explain to her that It's just the necessary evil, if you will, in child language.
Right.
And also, again, for parents, I strongly recommend, particularly parents with toddlers, babies, Alison Gopnik, G-O-P-N-I-C-K, I think.
She's got The Philosophical Baby.
She's got a bunch of talks on YouTube.
She's done a TED Talk.
She's very much at the cutting edge.
Sorry, Allison Gopnik.
She's very much on the cutting edge of researchers who are studying the cognitive abilities of babies.
Babies are incredibly smart and they're incredibly aware and this is where you get the most opportunity to help your child's personality to develop in as natural, spontaneous and free a manner as possible.
She's been on my show as well.
I think I had a pretty good interview with her despite me making bad jokes about her encouraging babies to smoke cigarettes.
I would have her read her stuff.
Throw it on audiobooks.
I think she's got some stuff on audible.com.
I think it's really important.
Babies don't look that smart, but man, if I had one-tenth the brains of my daughter when she was born, I'd be even more loquacious.
I see the total intelligence and the total scientist that she is, running experiments, taking in input and figuring things out.
I see it.
I see the wheels spinning.
I see what's going on.
And I also can feel the frustration of her not being able to control her hands the way she wants to and things like that.
But I do totally see it now that I'm, like I said, I've listened to your speeches about philosophical parenting and respecting the preferences and just the viewpoint of them being born essentially perfect.
And so the last thing that I would recommend with regards to your son is that there's a journey for yourself into your history because your son is a product of his history, your wife's history, and your history as well.
And your history, and as you say, there are signs that you avoided or that you didn't see or you did see but didn't act upon.
That's to do with your history.
And so the most important thing is for you to figure out how your history contributed to the current situation.
And that's important because otherwise If we don't understand how our own behavior is contributing to the situation, then we approach the problem as kind of know-it-alls, as like, I'm here to help, like we just came across somebody by the side of the road and we're trying to give them CPR.
Whereas if we are the one who actually ran them over, we have a slightly different attitude, so to speak.
So I would really recommend that self-knowledge, you know, therapy and working within yourself, working in your own history, that's going to help with your daughter.
I think it's also going to give your son the greatest chance to We do speak a lot.
not as somebody who's just gonna sort of blame him, like, "Well, what in your childhood made you act this way?" as opposed to his childhood as a mixture also of your childhood, particularly the unseen aspects of your childhood.
And the more you can see them, and the closer you can see them, I think the better off you'll be in terms of being able to help him. - We do speak a lot.
We are able to speak fairly often, and I have brought up things about my childhood that I wasn't happy with and kind of shared I shared in that that's explained to him in the way that I can, that that's kind of why it's a cycle that's been going on.
It's kind of why I did things I wasn't proud of with him or I made the wrong decisions.
I shared with him that, hey, I had the same feelings that I didn't like being spanked with a 2x4 when I was a kid and other abuses that I went through as a kid and that sort of thing.
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
Now, the other thing too, which is, of course, tough as a parent, I know this, of course, personally now as well, but to invite criticism.
To say, you know, what did you dislike about me as a parent?
I ask this of my daughter every couple of days.
I will ask her and say, well, how am I doing as a dad?
What do you like?
What do you not like?
And we have that kind of regular conversation about things that she doesn't like.
You know, what was your favorite part of the day?
Things that she liked.
What didn't you like about today?
And then we would try, because that way we get a chance to negotiate about things not in the heat of the moment.
And so, you know, if she says, well, I, you know, you wouldn't let me play with this, whatever, right?
And then we can have a discussion about it without the thing itself being in her line of sight and her desperately wanting to do it, which raises the stakes, right?
And so she wants to eat popcorn and we've decided not to let her eat popcorn because she's still a little bit too young.
So we were at the mall and what didn't you like?
Well, I didn't like that you didn't let me have any popcorn.
And it's like, well, that's great.
Well, let's talk about it.
And we can talk about it then without the popcorn being right in front of her face and her having that whole full body burning.
And her salivating.
Yeah, yeah.
That was going to be my question.
That gives you an opportunity.
To explain the things, like I mentioned earlier, how I can't wait until language comes in the picture so I can explain the things that she doesn't like.
The discomfort.
And that's just wonderful.
And I wish that was done to me.
I wish I would have done that with my first son.
I wish that more parents would do that.
As opposed to the authoritarian route, which I more or less went with with my son.
with my son.
Peter Wortsman: Right.
So the invitation to criticism, I mean obviously I do this with the show here.
I do this, I get lots of invitations to better behavior in my inbox and I do this with my wife, I do this with my daughter, with friendships, what can I do better and so on.
So I think that's really really important, the invitation to criticism.
I think I would guess that if your son hears you talking about yourself It may not be quite as engaging for him as him getting the chance to, you know, vent the stuff that he didn't like about how he was raised.
I think that could be pretty helpful.
And then, you know, again, you have to really avoid, well, I did that because... Or, well, maybe I did that, but it was a lot less bad than what was done to me.
But just to, you know, be that sponge, and listen, and absorb without... I'm sorry?
Yeah, my stepdad was famous for that.
He was like, well, you know, you You got it easy because when I was your age, I was hit with a 3x4, not just a 2x4.
I hope that's somewhat helpful.
I feel for you.
I got to tell you, I admire what you're doing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right, yeah.
So look, I hope that's somewhat helpful.
I mean, obviously, this is a – and I feel for you.
I mean, I got to tell you, I admire what you're doing.
I mean, it's a real shame that they've got to this, but it sounds like you really are concerned with your son, and it sounds like you're really going to step up and try and do the right thing.
And I just want to say how much I admire you for that.
I think that's a hard thing to do and I think it's a brave thing to do.
One last question.
Do you have a reference page?
I do want to have some information available that I can present to my wife through this process of I don't have a lot of resources about homeschooling.
I'm still sort of getting into it.
Maybe I should take her to, well, yeah, we can do the, she literally told me, yeah, well, we could maybe do the homeschooling, but first, maybe kindergarten through third grade, she'll go to public school.
And I think, and that's just like the worst possible time.
That's the worst time.
I don't, I don't have a lot of resources about homeschooling.
I'm still sort of getting into it.
You can check out unpluggedmom.com.
Right.
Brett Lynn is a great resource for that.
Brett and I, of course, run schoolsocks.com.
No, it's not schoolsocks, potomatic.schoolsocks.com, I think, but I'm not a great resource.
Maybe I will be at some point in the future.
It's still a couple of years away for me for that decision, but there are lots of people out there.
But just go gather the statistics and say, look, I mean, would we send our son to a dentist who had this kind of track record?
No, we wouldn't.
We would find a better dentist and if all the dentists were the same, then we would have to look into alternatives.
Maybe, you know what, home dentistry may not be the best metaphor to use in this situation, but just look at the statistics of demonstration from teachers of, oh yeah, homework I think is crap, you know, I mean it's just crap.
Homework is a junk and homework has been shown statistically of no effect whatsoever.
You know where I could find that or that sort of study to bring out there?
You can check out John, I'm sure you know John Taylor Gatto, G-A-T-T-O, and you can try that and he's got lots of resources about how destructive education, public school, public schooling is to children and he's got tons of books.
That is the biggest difference between Japanese and American schools, the Japanese She said that when she was going through high school, she would get about three hours of sleep because of all the studying she had to do.
Yeah, well, you don't want to do that, of course, right?
And of course, if Japanese education is so great, why have they been in a recession for the last 20 years and have a birth rate of 1.2?
Right?
I mean, that's not a healthy society, right?
So it's not to say that Japan is terrible or evil or anything, but based upon the track record of Japanese society over the past couple of decades, They went from an absolutely blisteringly suicidal war to permanent occupation from the United States to a boom to massive debt and recession.
If Japan is so healthy, why are they in debt 230% of their GDP and still have no economic growth and why are they basically dying off as a species?
Their replacement rates are so ridiculously low, in three generations there'll be nobody on the island.
So I would just recommend that If you know to look at the effects and and say these are objectively and empirically these are not great effects in a society and it must have something to do with the education so there is something to be said for looking for alternative approaches.
I really appreciate your time.
Yeah and you know if you get a chance and you'd like to please feel free to drop me a line.
Well, what happens is I hire a bunch of people and they come to your house every month and they remove one kidney.
regards for what it's worth and my very best wishes for the future.
And with that, we will close off the Sunday show.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I was maybe giving you a chance to plug some donations here.
How does a subscription work with Free Domain Radio?
Well, what happens is I hire a bunch of people and they come to your house every month and they remove one kidney.
It's sort of a two-month plan and after that, I basically sell you off for parts.
No, the donation levels, there are a few, you know, five bucks a month, 10, 20, 50 and 100.
And you can sign up for them on the website and they go through PayPal.
And so I never know, I don't have to know who you are.
I never get your credit card number.
It's all handled by a third party who I think is incredible.
And basically it just automatically takes money out of your PayPal account and ships it to the compound here in Canada in gold on the backs of yaks.
So that's what's set up and there are a couple of levels of goodies.
There are some private message boards for people who've donated who want to have discussions out of the sort of Google public eye, and there are some bonus podcasts and some bonus books floating up around the donator levels.
And so, yeah, I mean, I sort of try.
It's like a freemium, right?
I mean, everything's free, but there are a couple of bonus goodies for people who've donated.
I definitely think all you get out for free is just wonderful, but I definitely think it's worth doing the moral thing and exchanging some greenbacks.
Well, yeah, I mean, I hope that people sort of understand that and that this – look.
What we do here is, to my knowledge, perfectly unique.
It is perfectly unique, right?
So there are places where you can go for self-knowledge, and there are places where you can go for philosophy, and there are places where you can go for economics, and all that kind of good stuff.
But, you know, where we try to sort of bring the first principles to bear everywhere, and there are places where you can go to parenting, but do they necessarily work from first Moral principles?
Probably not, really.
And so I think that we're really trying as a community here to, you know, take a couple of basic principles that I think are pretty well logically validated through universally preferable behavior and saying, OK, let's just keep applying these and keep applying these and see what happens and see how it goes.
And that is a, to my knowledge, that is a completely unique experiment in human history.
It is a completely unique approach that we're taking as a community to bring philosophy really to bear on things that we can change.
As I say, I always try to avoid trying to apply rules in situations that I can't control.
And so non-aggression, property rights, this is things that we can affect in our relationships, particularly with our children.
So I think that it is an empirically proven the best and only way to improve a life.
You know, if we, you know, if we win out, I think we will.
If we win out and the philosophy of philosophical and peaceful parenting wins out and children are raised without aggression, I hope everybody understands that all the greatest evils of the world are going to fall away, are going to go.
What we're doing here is we're working to end war.
Understand?
We're working to end abuse.
We're working to end rape.
We're working to end theft.
We're working to end predation through fiat currency.
We're working to end all of these great bottomless from the dawn of time historical evils permanently without a shot being fired, without a voice being raised.
And so I think this is the very best place for the future to grow from.
I think this is a very unique place and yes, so if you think that too, then yeah, obviously We need resources.
We need resources to finish the documentary.
We need resources to do outreach.
We need resources for technical equipment.
We need resources for bandwidth.
We need resources for people to eat.
Me, I like that too.
I'm a fan.
And so, yeah, I mean, I hope that if people get the importance of what's going on here, that it will be worth a few bucks a month.
I think if people don't, then, you know, then they shouldn't.
But then I think they need to find a rational case as to what's more important.
You know, people, I think charity is important and I think donating to causes that that you believe in is important.
I certainly do that.
And if people find that there's a better place for the future to grow from, if they find that there's a place with more empirically verifiable beneficial aspects to humanity, they need to tell me.
I'll go work for them.
Because my goal is to do the best and most important work to help the future be a peaceful and happy place.
If I'm not doing it and if there's evidence that other people are doing it better, then I would go and work for them.
But if not, then I think it's a good thing to donate.
And people can go to freedomainradio.com forward slash donate to do that and it is of course most most gratefully appreciated.
And with that I think that we can end the show.
It's 4.33 on the 11th of March 2012.
I would also recommend I just to put out a video with a great article called The Great Sugar.
Let me get the title here.
Yeah, the great, it's How Government Makes You Fat, The Great Sugar Shakedown, which is an article by James Bovert called The Great Sugar Shaft that I've read and put on YouTube and it's going to come out as a podcast as well.
I hope that you will check that out.
And I hope that you will have an absolutely wonderful, wonderful week.
And I will talk to you next week, if not sooner.
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