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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:01:34

Feminist Straw Woman Attacks!

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	Good morning, everybody.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	If you're watching this or listening to this on YouTube, be sure to subscribe to the channel.
	Other than that, I guess we are ready to roll with the calls this morning.
	Who be on the first list?
	All right.
	Up first today is Ruth.
	And Ruth had a criticism about the estrogen-based parasites kill all men.
	So go ahead, Ruth.
	Hi, Stefan.
	Good morning.
	How are you doing?
	I'm okay.
	I think we've got a bit of a lag, so it's going to sound a bit strange, probably, this conversation.
	No problem.
	Okay.
	I don't know where to begin, really.
	I wrote a little rebuttal to you in the comments.
	Should I go through it, or how do you want to do it?
	Sure.
	Yeah, but we'll go through it.
	If we can do it point by point, of course, that probably would be easier.
	I'm not real great at, you know, here's 12 points, rebut them kind of thing.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Well, nor am I, so that's fine.
	OK, I think the first point, the general point I wanted to make was that it felt like you were oversimplifying reality to make a point.
	You seem to be splitting women into either sort of saints or whores, as if there was nothing in between.
	And I didn't think it served any of the women well, either the saints or the whores, if you see what I mean.
	It was a poor representation.
	You know that none of those are arguments, right?
	It seems, I feel, it doesn't seem to serve poor representation.
	None of those are actually arguments.
	I mean, if you want to talk about how you feel about the show, that's fine, but you're not actually making arguments yet.
	Or you're not actually rebutting, you're just saying, I didn't like something, or it seemed to me that kind of thing, right?
	I think oversimplifying and splitting things into polar opposites... No, no, no.
	See, oversimplifying... Hang on, hang on.
	Oversimplifying is not an argument.
	It's just an adjective.
	Right?
	You can't just say I'm oversimplifying.
	You have to tell me how I'm oversimplifying.
	Okay.
	Women, in your definition, seem to be either... No, no.
	Hang on.
	Hang on.
	The moment you say seem to be, you're not making an argument.
	Because then, when you say seem to be, you don't actually have to reference anything I said, right?
	You described women as being parasitic, estrogen-based parasites, parasitic whores.
	I certainly did not.
	I certainly did not.
	OK.
	I certainly did not say that that was the definition of women.
	I mean, I said that there are some women who are like that for sure, and I talked about exceptions to that as well.
	This is my point.
	You make it sound as though it's either one end of the spectrum or another.
	Hang on, hang on.
	You have to get precise in your criticisms, right?
	Maybe you've never done this before, but you make it sound as if is not an argument.
	You're just telling me something about your perspective, but you're not referencing anything I said.
	The first thing that you've referenced about what I said is incorrect, right?
	So you make it sound as if it seems to me as if, or you seem to be oversimplifying.
	None of these are actual arguments.
	I don't know how this conversation is going to go, because this is probably just the way I speak because I'm British.
	No, it's the way you speak because you don't know how to make an argument yet.
	I mean, I'm not trying to be rude.
	I'm just pointing out I'm British as well, and I know how to make an argument.
	And you have to be trained on how to make an argument, or maybe you have to have experience.
	on how to make an argument.
	But if you want to talk about your feelings, we can talk about your feelings.
	But if you say, it seems to me that you're doing something, what you're doing is you're escaping, or you're trying to escape the need to prove anything.
	You're trying to escape the need to refer to anything that I actually said.
	And you're trying to give me your impressions, which we can talk about.
	But let's not pretend that it's a rebuttal to something I said, if you're just talking about your feelings.
	I'm not trying to be rude.
	I'm just sort of pointing out the precision that's necessary in a debate.
	I didn't like the fact that you picked on the Kill All Men campaign.
	I thought that that was ridiculous.
	So your problem with the Kill All Men campaign was that I had a problem with it?
	No, my problem with it was that it was so far at the end of the spectrum of Nobody thinks like that.
	There's like 0.001 people in the world who actually think like that.
	So to be outraged by it is a sort of a faux outrage, you know?
	It's so far off the end of the bell curve what people actually think as to be pointless discussing it.
	Well, it was a meme that spread fairly far and wide and no women that I knew of seemed, or that I heard about, seemed to have any particular problem with it.
	I mean, look, do you understand if there was a kill all blacks meme and all the white people were cheering or saying that it was funny or that it was, you know, I mean, you get that some black people might say that that's kind of offensive, right?
	When people say offensive things, it is offensive, but there's so few people saying it, Stefan, that it's meaningless.
	If it was a thing where women actually believed that, then I might agree with you, but it was something on Twitter that I'd never heard of before you mentioned it, and will probably never hear of again.
	Is your issue that I mentioned something that was fairly widespread, at least across the social media that I saw, and was commented on as not being found offensive by women?
	Are women saying, wait a minute, if you're saying kill all men, even as a joke, well, I love a man, My father is a wonderful man.
	I mean, it's not a joke in good taste, that's all, and we shouldn't spread it.
	I mean, that's all.
	I'm not saying people have to say, oh my God, let's have a jihad against the people who say that, but just, you know, check the kind of sentiment and say that this is kind of in poor taste.
	But there wasn't really any of that.
	There was retweeting of jokes.
	There are quite a few things that are in poor taste, Stefan, but I wouldn't make a huge argument out of them.
	There are people who say stupid things on the internet all the time, but so what?
	You know?
	Most people aren't like that.
	Wait a minute.
	Wait a minute.
	Oh my God.
	Okay.
	So you're saying to me that people say stupid things on the internet, but so what?
	But you're calling me in to call me out for saying stupid things on the internet.
	So it's only when it's directed at men that it's not a big deal.
	If it's directed towards women, then it suddenly becomes a big deal.
	You want to call in about it, right?
	It's a bit like, you know, the Daily Mail newspaper.
	When they pick stories, They pick behaviors that are so far from the norm and then get very outraged by them.
	It's manipulative of their audience, but it really is saying nothing.
	All it's saying is outrageous comments are outrageous.
	Hang on a second.
	So if outrageous comments are not worth commenting on, then why are you commenting on my video?
	I didn't say it was outrageous.
	Oh, sorry.
	You thought it was I think it is polarizing.
	I don't think it's representing reality very well.
	And I think you've got a big audience.
	Well, how is that different from the Kill All Men hashtag?
	And I think that gives you a responsibility.
	Because I don't know who made the Kill All Men hashtag, but they're presumably anonymous.
	They're not taking responsibility for their thoughts.
	And you are.
	I don't understand that at all.
	So it's okay to be offensive if you're anonymous?
	It's just pointless discussing it.
	There are a lot of things... Okay, so why are we discussing this?
	If outrageous or over-the-top perspectives are not worth discussing, why are you discussing this?
	You are setting yourself up as an authority.
	I have no idea what that means.
	What does that even mean, setting myself up as an authority?
	You're telling people that your opinions are important.
	No.
	When have I ever said in a podcast, my opinions are important?
	I think you've probably transmitted that to people, that idea to people that you believe that philosophy is very important, that it can be life-changing.
	Right.
	And I make arguments, but I don't know about setting myself up as an authority.
	I don't know what that means.
	I put my arguments, perspectives and facts in interviews with experts out on the internet and if people find them valuable, great.
	If they don't, that's their choice.
	But I don't think I've set myself up as some sort of expert that people have to believe because I'm an expert.
	I just make the case and people accept it or reject it.
	The way it seemed to me, and I'm using that word seemed again, the way it came across to me listening to that show was that you were juxtaposing a lot of unrelated statistics and a lot of your own comments about your own beliefs And painting a picture, and you're painting a picture of women that a lot of men listening to your podcast, and maybe women as well, might just take on board as their own view.
	And that could have consequences.
	I hope it does.
	I hope it has consequences, of course.
	I don't talk to you to not change people's minds, for sure.
	So you do think it's important then?
	Do I think that the information that I talk about is important?
	Of course, otherwise I wouldn't talk about it.
	I don't read off my grocery list for heaven's sakes.
	Okay.
	So you do value your opinion.
	And you expect other people to as well.
	I have no idea what other people do with my opinions or not, or my arguments or not.
	What I'm getting at is that you have a lot of listeners and the things you say can be taken on board by people.
	I don't mind having this conversation, but you need to actually make an argument.
	This is a show about philosophy.
	This is not a show about you having emotional difficulties with something I'm saying.
	This is a show about philosophy.
	If the statistics that I quoted were incorrect, I'm happy to correct them.
	If the arguments that I made about a certain type of woman Are absolutely incorrect and there are no types of women like that, then you better mention that to the people who sell makeup and push-up bras and Cosmo magazine.
	You better inform them that they actually have no customers and they should really reallocate their economic resources.
	But if you're just going to talk about, well, you set yourself up as an authority and it seems to me this and my impression was that and so on, this is not a show about your subjective opinions and impressions.
	This is a philosophy show, which means you need to bring at least one fact to the conversation.
	Okay.
	How can you criticize women for paternity issues and abortion issues and so on, when you cannot possibly criticize men for the same behavior because they're unable to have children?
	How is it okay to criticize women solely on their ability to give birth, really?
	How is that fair?
	Wait, hang on a second.
	Do you think that I was criticizing women for their ability to have children?
	No, I think you were talking about the kind of behaviors that arise when women maybe have another man's child or when they decide to have an abortion or perhaps, you know, when they leave the relationship altogether.
	I have no issue.
	I have no, no, no.
	First of all, I don't think abortion came up in that show.
	But secondly, I did not criticize women for wanting to have another man's child.
	If a woman is dating a man and then wants to have another man's child, she can break up with that man and go have the other man's child and then say, hey, you're the dad, take care of it.
	I have no idea what show you listen to, but the idea that I'm criticizing a woman for the ability to have children or for wanting to have another man's child is deranged.
	You're talking about women getting pregnant by another man and then getting their husband to raise that child as their own.
	Lying about the paternity Of the child.
	Yeah.
	And do you not think that's bad behavior?
	I do think that's bad behavior, but I do also think that if men were able to have children, that they would be doing the same thing.
	This was a show about women.
	This was not a show about men.
	Look, do you not think... And the reason I'm calling in... Oh, I'm sorry.
	Please, don't let me finish my thought.
	You go ahead.
	The reason I'm calling in is to give some balance to that show about women.
	I'm not.
	You're not giving me any balance at the moment.
	Pardon?
	You're not giving me any balance at the moment.
	Go for it.
	No, no.
	I mean, if you feel that balance is important, why aren't you talking about the things that I got right in the podcast?
	Oh, balance is only important when women are involved.
	So whenever you talk about negative behaviours of women, you automatically have to match that with negative behaviours of men, right?
	Because you can't just focus on the negative behaviours of women.
	You always must bring men in to balance it out.
	But when we talk about... Hang on, hang on.
	When we talk about the negative behaviours... Okay, I'll mute you if you talk over me.
	If you talk about the negative behaviors of men, do you automatically bring in the negative behaviors of women?
	Like, if I had done a show on the military-industrial complex, or the war in Iraq, or criticism of almost exclusively male politicians, if I talk about the immense amount of evils done by men in the world, do women automatically call in and say, well, I understand that you were talking about bad things that men did, but what about the women?
	Right?
	Whenever I talk about, well, men hit women, do women then call in and say, well, yes, but you have to remember that those men were raised by women, and that's one of the reasons they might be angry at women.
	No.
	Whenever I talk about male evil, women never call in to say, well, we've got to balance that with female immorality.
	But whenever I talk about female immorality, women call in and say, well, you have to balance it.
	Well, what about the men?
	I mean, this is a double standard, and I reject it completely.
	When men go into the army or, you know, high office politics or whatever and, you know, do bad things, that's not an essential maleness.
	Women can do those things too.
	But you're criticising women for behaviours that could only be committed by a woman.
	So?
	And therefore trying to... I'm sorry, I don't... I have no idea what that means.
	So the fact that only women can behave that, only women have the biological capacity to have children and lie to the man, I mean, so what?
	If you're saying it in a way as to make it sound as though men could not or would not engage in that same behavior if they had the opportunity.
	No, no, now you're just making something up.
	I'm criticizing women for something that yes, only women can do.
	But I never said, but if men had the capacity to do it, men never would.
	Did I say that in the show?
	I mean, you can make up stuff if you want, but then you might as well have a conversation with the mirror, because it's got nothing to do with my show.
	Stefan, it's implied.
	Oh, implied!
	I'm sorry, I didn't realize you had a magic word that let you put your opinions in the face of facts.
	I didn't realize you could use the word implied to then ascribe an argument to me that I never made whatsoever and consider yourself rational.
	That's an amazing ability.
	How cool.
	Oh no, it's implied that I'm right and you're wrong, so look, I can't believe I studied all this philosophy when I could have just used the word implied to impute arguments to other people and then strawman them to death.
	Or strawwoman them to death, I guess, in this case.
	Implied is not an argument.
	Can I tell you about another point that I found annoying?
	Not really.
	No, not really.
	No, because there's just not enough quality in the conversation as yet, right?
	If you want to quote a fact or if you want to quote an argument that I actually made, let's see, if you want to critique something that I've said, the important thing is to quote me back to me.
	In context, and then I can talk about that, but all you're doing is talking about your impressions, your feelings, and using the word implied, and describing things to me that I never said, and criticizing me for biological realities that I frankly have no control over.
	So if you if you have a point that has something to do with something I argued, any kind of fact or perspective, I'm certainly happy to hear it.
	But more of your impressions don't really count as philosophy.
	Right.
	OK.
	What else?
	Yes.
	What I didn't like when you spoke was the fact that you were describing women in your past, and you were describing them a number.
	I think you were calling them, you were saying you'd been out, you'd dated some 8s, 9s and 10s, I can't even remember what you said now, but it was numbers.
	And later on you claimed that you Women commodify themselves.
	When I criticized you in the comments afterwards and I said, you know, you're treating women like commodities when you describe them that way.
	Now, I want to understand why there's a double standard here.
	Why you are allowed to reduce women to a number which describes merely their physical attributes, their physical attractiveness.
	And yet, we don't like it when women want to look presentable, wear some makeup, brush their hair, Whatever it is that you don't like about women being able to beautify themselves.
	How do those two things coexist in your mind?
	I'm sorry, I don't follow the argument.
	I'm not trying to be obtuse here.
	I'm really just trying to understand.
	If there's a contradiction, I'm happy to explore it, but I'm not sure what it is yet.
	Sure.
	You describe women that you had previously been out with.
	You gave them a number.
	I think you said, oh, I've been out with some seven, eights and nines or something.
	I can't quite remember.
	I'm not quoting you verbatim.
	But that was the gist of it.
	And men often do that.
	Men often talk about women in terms of giving them a number.
	That reduces them as a human being, as a person, to just their physical, the quality of their physical attributes.
	Now, I want to know why you think that's okay to describe women in that way in one breath.
	And then in the next breath say they shouldn't be dressing themselves as sex clowns or whatever it was you said by wearing makeup.
	So wait, do you think that it's men who objectify women?
	I think it works both ways, Stefan.
	No, look, I'm trying to understand because whenever I go to the supermarket or wherever, there are magazines at the airports or whatever.
	Whenever I go there and there are magazines and the magazines are aimed at women, I mean, I'm sure you've seen them.
	I'm sure I don't need to tell you anything.
	I'm not telling anything you don't know, but those magazines are all about how to make yourself more attractive physically.
	I've actually picked up a couple of these magazines and I'm going to go through them as a show.
	But they're all about how to make yourself more attractive.
	And they all have tens, like the most physically attractive women on the covers.
	And those magazines are all stuffed full of physically perfect or near to perfect women who are further enhanced with makeup and Photoshop and all this kind of nonsense, right?
	And that is women Photographing women, maybe with some gay men in attendance probably, but women photographing women for the purpose of selling magazines to other women.
	So the idea that the objectification of women or the reduction of women to some sort of physical entity alone, that this is somehow caused by men, doesn't seem to jibe at all with the fact that almost all the media that is dedicated to women is completely obsessed with physical appearance.
	And only physical appearance.
	There's not, I mean I've flipped through these magazines, there's not shows about politics, or economics, or self-knowledge, or philosophy, or logic, or anything.
	It's basically just about, here's how to get better blowjobs, here's how to do your cheekbones, here's purses that make your hips look great, and here's shoes that make your ass look great.
	So the idea that this is somehow a male pursuit to physically objectify women, I don't quite understand.
	Again, I'm happy to hear counter-arguments.
	A couple of things.
	One is you haven't answered the criticism about why you think it's okay to describe women a number to describe them in your past.
	I don't know why you think that's okay, but you seem to.
	No, I am answering the question, which is that if it's okay for women to do it, how is it bad for men to do it?
	I don't know any women who would give themselves a number to describe themselves.
	Do you know any women who are interested in their physical appearance and who do things artificially to enhance their appearance?
	Dye their hair, put makeup on and so on?
	Yes, and I dye my hair and put makeup on myself.
	Women, okay, one thing to understand about women is that we like to beautify our entire environment.
	We may start with ourselves, but if you look in your house, I'm sure you'll find objects and furnishings and things that your wife chose and brought to the marriage that beautify your home.
	And they also enjoy beautifying And if you let them, they'll beautify their neighborhoods and their children's schools, and it will go on and on.
	Women are a bit like magpies.
	We like shiny things, you know?
	We like pretty shiny things.
	It's just sort of what we like.
	I suppose it's our hormonal makeup.
	But that doesn't mean to say that every time we wear makeup, we are trying to gain some kind of sexual advantage.
	We also... Oh, no, no, sorry, sorry, no, no, that's... I mean, I've got to take one point at a time.
	If you want to continue, that's fine, but I do want to take one point at a time, but go ahead if you want.
	Okay, so, but makeup is specifically designed to mimic sexual arousal, right, as you well know.
	The makeup on the lips is designed to simulate sexual arousal.
	A woman's lips get redder and fuller.
	Enhancing cheekbones is designed to show symmetry in the face, which is a mark of genetic health.
	Makeup around the eyes is designed to make the eyes look whiter and brighter, which is a sign of youth.
	and fertility, and push-up bras are designed to enhance subcutaneous fat around the boobs, which means that the woman is more fertile and better able to breastfeed, and hair dye is designed to simulate youth, which is sexual fertility.
	So no, makeup is not neutral.
	Makeup is sexually suggestive by its very nature.
	I think it's a stretch, Stefan, to say that when women get up in the mornings and try and make themselves look presentable, and usually the basis of it is so that they feel confident when they leave the house.
	I think it's a stretch to say that this is all in order to gain some kind of sexual currency.
	I know that's not what I...
	But you see, if I-- If I give you actual biological facts and you say, that seems like a stretch, you obviously are having difficulty processing facts and you are responding with, I don't know, it's not even an opinion, it's an opinion masquerading.
	I think it's a stretch, it's not an argument.
	You're having trouble processing the facts that I'm presenting to you.
	Are you saying that women who wear makeup are all whore-ish?
	What is it you're trying to say?
	I had no... See, if I'm telling you things that are facts, and then you respond with, what are you trying to say, you're not dealing with the facts.
	Are facts, like, are you allergic?
	Do you need some antihistamine when facts are presented to you?
	Because he's trying to bend it into something else.
	You said it's not sexually suggestive.
	I gave you the facts that show that it is, and now you're going off on some other tangent.
	I didn't say it could, I mean, it can be applied in a sexually suggested way, particularly if you then go and, you know, pose in a kittenish pose or whatever and get photographs taken of yourself.
	Yeah, sure.
	I've never found kittens to be sexually attractive.
	I'm saying that for all intents and purposes, most women, when they get dressed and brush their hair and put on makeup, are trying to make themselves feel confident and presentable for the world.
	And that's about as far as it extends.
	And our interest in makeup and pretty things is probably due to our hormonal makeup, yes.
	But it's not an aggressive thing.
	Did I say it was aggressive?
	Anyway, listen, I'm sorry.
	We're not able to connect.
	I've got to move on to the next caller because we're not actually having a discussion about anything that involves facts or any statements or any information.
	So if you want to speak for all women and say that they're just trying to make themselves look presentable, Then I guess I don't quite understand the degree to which fashion magazines, which continually talk about sex and physical attractiveness and rate women on scales all the time, why they're not just saying, this magazine is about how to look presentable.
	And I also don't know why putting on sexually suggestive colors is necessary to make yourself presentable.
	I do understand why women might feel more confident if they enhance their sexual attractiveness to men, because that's what gains some women Coinage, I guess, in the world.
	But, you know, if you find rebuttals to any of the facts or arguments that I put forward, I certainly would be happy to talk again.
	But, Mike, if we could move on to the next one, I would appreciate it.
	All right.
	Up next today is Jesse, and Jesse wrote in with some criticism about the How They Are Winning, How We Are Losing video and the Don't Kill Your Conscience video.
	So, Jesse, do you want to go ahead with that criticism?
	Yeah, hey Stefan.
	First of all, I'm a big fan and I just think your show is amazing, so I feel honored to be here.
	Well, thank you.
	Yeah, so if you don't mind, I actually wrote an email to Michael.
	It's a short email, so we can go through it and it summarizes my point.
	So, it starts here.
	I love your channel, I've been watching for a little over a year now.
	I haven't donated yet, as I've been struggling financially, but with a new job and a fresh paycheck, I was planning on contributing for the first time.
	But after watching your recent donation request... Hang on, hang on, wait, wait, wait!
	Jesse!
	Sorry, sorry, that's a little bit of a like... I'm not sure what you mean by donated.
	Like, people say, I don't have much money, so I can't donate, right?
	Yeah.
	But that's not what donating is, as I've talked about about 10,000 times in the show, right?
	So, giving money is one way to contribute to this show, if that's what you want to do.
	But in general, people who have less money generally have more time, right?
	And people who have more money than time may find it more valuable to donate money.
	People who have more time than money It's a different discussion.
	I'm not trying to say I was unable to contribute to the cause of Free Domain Radio.
	to go and post stuff on Facebook pages and Reddit pages or whatever to help read the word that way.
	I think.
	I'm sorry?
	It's a different discussion if you...
	I'm not trying to say I was unable to contribute to the cause of Free Domain Radio.
	That's not the point I'm trying to make.
	Well, no, no, no, but you use the word donation as a description of your financial capacity, which is not how I've ever described it.
	I've never said that the only way to contribute to the show is to give money to the show.
	Okay, no, okay.
	So have you donated any time to the show?
	No, but at that point... Do you have time?
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Do you have time to donate?
	Well, at the moment I sent the email, or right now?
	Since you've been listening to the show?
	I would say so, yeah.
	Okay, so basically, because if you say, I can't donate because I don't have money, you haven't listened to what I've said.
	Because what I've said is, and you don't have to donate to me, you could say, look, Steph, there's this way better show than you have.
	And I have promoted that show like crazy.
	I'm like, great!
	You know, if you're provoking shows that get people to think, whether it's this show or someone else, I've said this so many times, right?
	So when people come to me and say, well, I haven't donated because I don't have money, that's a defense mechanism.
	That has nothing to do with what I said.
	That is saying, Steph, I'd love to help you out.
	I just don't have enough money.
	When I said about 10 million times, and in the two very shows that you're referencing, that money to me is only one of many possible ways that you can help the cause of reason, philosophy, and freedom.
	So if you haven't Donated any time to promoting your ideals, whether it's this show or something else, that's a different conversation.
	But if you're saying, well, Steph, I haven't donated money because I don't have money, and that's the whole sum of donations, and that's the whole sum of helping things out, then you're strawmanning me, right?
	You're not saying anything that has anything to do with what I've been talking about.
	Right.
	I guess I haven't watched enough videos for that point to completely sink in, but I was talking about money in this email, but I sort of view this email as maybe it didn't cost me that much time, but it's sort of my way of hopefully giving some constructive feedback to you, because I really think there's a point of improvement for you in here.
	Well, hang on.
	See, this is where, and I'm sorry to be interrupting everyone so much this morning, I really apologize for that, but do you really think that if you, like if I put these two videos out about donations that you're referencing to or about supporting freedom or supporting philosophy in whatever format people want, if you missed most of what I said, do you think that you're in a great position or a credible position to give me critical feedback?
	I guess that's a good point.
	Right, because you said, I guess that didn't sink in, even though literally I said it 10 times in each video.
	Right, so 20 times I said it over the course of 40 minutes or 45 minutes, that it's not just money.
	So if you haven't absorbed that, even though it's very clear that that's what I said repeatedly, if you haven't absorbed that but you want to continue to go on with giving me critical feedback, I'm just going to tell you you've got a bit of a steep climb.
	Do you know what I mean?
	Well, it's true that I didn't listen to 95% of what you said, but I would really like to give you some useful and critical feedback.
	Okay.
	I mean, I guess that's the theme of the morning so far.
	But sorry, go on.
	Okay, but I...
	I feel like, I'm sorry that I started with I feel, but it seems to me that you can turn that back on you.
	You just said I feel in a different way.
	Yeah, I know, I know, I'm sorry.
	But saying that the message is in the video, you just didn't pick it up, so you have no right making this argument.
	I could say... I didn't say.
	I didn't... No, no, no.
	You see, you're not listening to me.
	Even live, you're not listening to what I'm saying.
	I didn't say you have no right to make the argument.
	I said it's going to be a challenge for you to make the argument.
	In fact, I think it's a steep climb to make the argument.
	I didn't say... I said you've lost some credibility.
	I didn't say you have no right to make the argument.
	See, and this is the challenge in communicating with people.
	And the reason I'm being really annoying about this is because when you're going to talk to people, it is very important To listen, listen, listen to what they say and respond to what they say.
	And this is not fundamentally a philosophical thing, this is fundamentally just a human communication thing, right?
	Because if, when you hear something from someone, you then reinterpret it in a defensive way, you will never connect with anyone at any fundamental level, right?
	Right?
	So, I mean, with the last woman, I'm saying like, well, two and two make four.
	What are you trying to say?
	It's like I just said, two and two make four.
	Well, I don't know what you mean by that.
	It's like two and two make four, is that, you know?
	So when I say it's tough to criticize me if you haven't listened to 95% of what I said, and then you respond as if I said, you have no right to criticize me.
	In other words, I'm somehow disallowing you on some weird moral level from criticizing me.
	You're not responding to what I said.
	And that's tragic.
	And I mean this tragic, and I mean this in a sympathetic way, because it tells me everything about your personal history, right?
	Because, you know, people say to me sometimes, well, Steph, how come you keep going into people's childhoods?
	It's because they keep bringing their childhoods to the conversation, whether they know it or not, right?
	So what it means is that you've grown up in an environment or in a family where direct communication that is relevant to what someone just said does not occur.
	In other words, people are constantly misinterpreting and escalating and being defensive and changing the topic and strawmanning and no true Scotsman fallacying and all that sharpshooting.
	They're doing Lots of that kind of stuff and you're not having direct communications about what someone just said.
	I mean, tell me if I'm wrong.
	I mean, this just seems to be the way it would have to be.
	Yeah, it's hard to assess.
	I mean, it's the first time I'm confronted with that kind of statement.
	But I would say that it's, when someone tells you, for instance, don't be defensive, it's hard not to be defensive just in answering that question.
	So, in you telling me... Hang on, hang on.
	Did I tell you not to be defensive?
	No, no, no.
	But when you say... You said I was defensive, I think.
	Mm-hmm.
	Strawmanning is fundamentally an emotional defense.
	Strawmanning is not a logical fallacy.
	It's only tangentially a logical fallacy.
	It's an emotional defense.
	When people receive information that stimulates their lizard brain in a fight-or-flight kind of way, What I think you said was that you thought I sounded defensive.
	dismiss it rather than dealing with their feelings, which is where straw manning comes from.
	But yeah, because-- but please go on with your thoughts.
	OK, so what I think you said was that you thought I sounded defensive.
	Is that about right?
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, if you misinterpret what I said in a way that allows you to completely dismiss what I'm saying, then clearly something I'm saying is bothering you.
	You can't respond to it directly, so you have to just kind of wipe it off the map.
	So, yeah, I think that is being defensive.
	I didn't say you shouldn't be defensive.
	I don't think it's very productive to be defensive, but it is a habit that so many of us learn when we're growing up.
	Yeah, and so the point I wanted to make after that was that once someone says you sound defensive, it's hard not to sound defensive because you're responding to somewhat of an accusation.
	Well, again, you see, accusation, right?
	I mean, I'm identifying something that happened, right?
	I wasn't accusing you.
	I didn't call you a bad person.
	I wasn't getting angry.
	I wasn't escalating.
	I was simply pointing out that you weren't responding to what I said.
	but rather to something else invented that you can more easily dismiss.
	It seems to me as defensive behavior, but it was not an accusation.
	But the fact that you would perceive that, I use that word again, because I'm not bringing it to the conversation, but it's here, that it has to come from your history.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	So when you were a child, how were disagreements handled in your family?
	I guess with my mother, there was always room to talk about it, but with my dad, there basically rarely was.
	Thank you.
	And in what way?
	What would happen with your dad?
	He would explode very easily.
	And explode how?
	How would that manifest?
	You know, scolding and raising his voice and me and my brothers were all spanked as children.
	By your father or by both parents?
	Both, but my mother actually was following children's doctor advice in spanking, and she was using a kitchen spoon to do it, and my dad just used his hand.
	Wait a minute.
	Are you saying that your mom was reading some pediatrician who said hit your children with implements?
	No, she was visiting a pediatrician who said that.
	How do you know that the pediatrician said that?
	Oh, because my mom...
	Were you there?
	No, no, I wasn't there.
	Oh, your mom said that.
	Your mom told you that.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And she's willing to hit children with implements, so of course we can completely trust her word for something.
	The doctor told me to hit you with a spoon.
	It's best medical advice.
	A wooden spoon.
	Right, so I personally wouldn't believe that.
	Someone paid me a million dollars to fake a straight face if I heard that.
	I wouldn't accept that a doctor told her that.
	I don't know, maybe there are pediatricians who do say that, although what they're actually doing in general in most places in the world is they're counseling your mother to become a criminal, right?
	Because certainly up here in Canada, I don't know where you're from, it doesn't matter for the course of this conversation.
	But in Canada, if a pediatrician told a mother to hit a child with a wooden spoon, he would be counseling her to perform a criminal act because it is illegal.
	You can hit children not on the face and only with your hand between the ages of 2 and 12.
	in Canada, but hitting with implements is illegal.
	And the idea that a pediatrician would counsel someone to become a criminal and to perform an act of criminal assault on a child seems to me really fucking unbelievable.
	So I wouldn't believe your mother in that situation, but again, you know, I wasn't there, but generally people who beat their kids with implements, I don't consider them to be the paragons of virtue, honesty, and integrity, so I just wanted to point that out.
	Yeah, it seems pretty crazy looking back now knowing what I know.
	I'm incredibly sorry.
	And was it on bare skin?
	Sorry?
	Where you hit with the wooden spoon on bare skin?
	Yeah.
	Was it on your butt?
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	I talked about this recently, this sort of third eye.
	I cannot, for the life of me, figure out.
	Things can go kind of haywire in relationships, but at what point do people say, well, this is weird.
	I shouldn't be doing this.
	At what point do they say, gosh, this is not right.
	If you're yanking down your son's trousers or pants and underwear, grabbing a spoon, holding that child down and hitting him to the point of producing red welts on his bare ass.
	At what point does the parental observing ego kick in and say, well, this is kind of freaky.
	I'm actually hitting a child on his bare ass with a big wooden spoon.
	It amazes me how few people have those kind of WTF breaks in their brain.
	What am I doing?
	What am I doing?
	You know, I just woke up in a Vegas hotel room with a live boy and a dead hooker.
	What am I doing?
	You know, it's like people don't even blow past that stuff.
	And at no point does it seem that they go, well, this is weird.
	So, I'm incredibly sorry for that, for those experiences.
	How often did this happen between your mom and your dad?
	Yeah, I guess I got in a lot of trouble as a little kid, so quite often, more than I can count.
	But the thing is that... Okay, hang on, hang on.
	I'm sorry.
	If I said yesterday I was walking in the mall and I got punched in the head by some random guy, would I say, "Well, I got into trouble at the mall"?
	I guess not.
	No, I would say I was assaulted at the mall.
	Yeah.
	So when you say you got into trouble as a child, I think that's a euphemism and I think it's an emotionally easier one to deal with than I was repeatedly assaulted as a child.
	Because you try that with an adult, you are probably going to jail not only for assault, but for some sort of sexual assault as well.
	Like if you take some 19-year-old girl on the bus, you put her over your lap, rip off her pants or her skirt and her panties, and hit her with a soup ladle on her bare ass.
	I don't know, I'm not an expert in this at all, but I think that would be kind of like a sexual assault.
	Yeah, and I think that the most pernicious thing about spanking is that just hearing you talk about it, like intellectually I understand that it's just absolutely what the fuck are you doing like intellectually I understand that it's just absolutely what the fuck are you doing as a parent, but emotionally it's become somewhat normalized, at least that's what I notice in
	I'm not emotionally outraged at what happened to me.
	Whereas intellectually, I think I should be.
	Right.
	Why do you think that is?
	I guess you sort of you you you sort of you normalize your, I guess, your moral landscape to your parents, that your parents are never absolute boogie men, or at least not if their relationship is somewhat good.
	So when you look back, they can-- because my relationship with my parents is good right now, at least that's how I feel about it, When I look back, I can't say they completely fucked up, because that's just like cognitive dissonance.
	That wouldn't work.
	I think that sort of plays a role.
	Yeah, I mean, I think there's some truth in that.
	Now, this is going to be an odd argument, and I'm not going to say that it's going to apply in every situation.
	It may not even apply to you, but I hope that it will make some kind of sense.
	So, you know, one thing that people have a tough time processing is that taxation is forced, right?
	So you get a letter from the government and it says, you know, you owe us X amount of dollars.
	That's the beginning, that's the first in a set of dominoes that could end up with you getting killed, right?
	That doesn't happen when someone sends you, here's an offer for a free credit card.
	You know, you throw that out and nothing happens, right?
	Other than you don't end up as a debt slave.
	With the government, when they tell you, you know, we've raised your property taxes, now you have to pay 5% more, or whatever, that's the first in the domino that could end up with you getting killed.
	Right?
	Because if you reject the letters, and you don't pay the money, then eventually some judgment will be made against you, and the police will come, assuming they can't garnish your wages, then the police will come, and they will try and collect the money, and if you can't pay, they'll try and take you to jail, and if you resist, and you pull out a gun, I mean, they'll shoot you.
	Right, so that letter is the first in a domino that leads to violence.
	And all threats of violence are death threats.
	This is really, really important to understand.
	All threats of violence are death threats.
	Right?
	So if we all understood that, you know, the police will come and say, can we have the money?
	And if you say no, then like somebody from Jehovah's Witness or Collecting for United Way, they'll just go on their merry way.
	Then we would say, okay, well, this is just, you know, they'll maybe come to our house, but they'll never pull a gun, they'll never, right?
	Or if you say, well, they'll pull a gun, but they won't, the guns are unloaded, they're made of chocolate or whatever, then it would start to get kind of absurdist, right?
	But every law, every directive Every commandment from the state is a death threat because the ultimate escalation has to be to death.
	It has to be to be willing to kill people who resist enough.
	Every edict, every letter from the government that demands something is a death threat.
	Now, when it comes to the physical abuse of children, the question is, if you resist, So how old were you when-- what you hit when you were like 10 or 12 or 14?
	Yeah, definitely in the period younger than that.
	But yeah, I'm not sure what age it stopped, to be honest.
	Well, it probably stopped around puberty when you got bigger, right?
	Probably.
	It's amazing, it just is a miracle how many parents discover reason when the children get big enough to hit back.
	Whoa, whoa, he's big!
	Okay, let's start reasoning with him or whatever, or at least not hitting him.
	This is cowardly, of course, but inevitable.
	And so let's say it happened when you were 12, right?
	So when you're 12, you can fight back.
	You can fight back.
	And let's say that your mom wanted to hit you on your bare butt when you were 12.
	Well, when you're 12, you're probably physically close, if not superior in strength, particularly if you're a boy, to your mother, right? - Yeah. - So you could elbow her in the belly, I'm not saying you should, but you could elbow her in the belly, slap her in the face, you could punch her, you could also get an implement like a rolling pin or something, and you could fight her off like you would some bully or some attacker in an alleyway, right?
	Yeah.
	So what would have happened if you had fought to maintain your physical protection, your physical integrity, if you had fought back against this this beating with a wooden spoon?
	At 12 or at younger ages?
	No, at 12.
	Yeah, I guess, yeah, I mean, it's hard to say, but it would be somewhat of a fight with my mother, I guess.
	And, yeah, I mean.
	Right, so let's say you got into a, sorry to interrupt, let's say you got into a fight with your mother, a physical fight to protect yourself.
	And let's say she got a black eye or like, would she just back down and say, okay, well, I'm not going to hit you anymore.
	Or would she escalate?
	If she got a black eye, she would get my dad or something.
	And what would your dad do?
	He would be able to overpower me and spank me.
	Well, I mean, what if you had a rolling pin or something that you could try and hit him with?
	Again, I'm not saying you should or would or whatever, but if, right?
	If you did try to protect yourself, like against anyone who was trying to assault you, what would he do?
	Yeah, at that point, I mean, he'd back off, I think.
	You think he would back off?
	If I had some type of weapon?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	You don't think he'd call the cops?
	Yeah, so if I were to hit him or my mom with it, yeah, like one of them would call the cops.
	Right, and then of course if you try to resist the cops, you would be in danger of being shot, right?
	Yeah, agreed.
	So do you see what I'm saying?
	Like, so the reason we submit to physical abuse as children is because it is a death threat.
	In other words, if we resist, if we apply self-defense in that situation, then it's going to escalate to the point where our life could be in danger.
	And that's what I mean when I say all threats of violence are actually death threats.
	I actually had a second question about taxation.
	I don't know if we have time because my first point sort of completely dissolved.
	We've got lots of callers today, right mate?
	Yeah.
	I'm sorry, if you could hold that one off, I would really appreciate that.
	But I would certainly talk to your parents about what you experienced as a child and see if you can come to some sort of resolution about that.
	But I am incredibly sorry that you faced that level of aggression and violence and quasi-sexual assault.
	Absolutely reprehensible.
	Again, I try to remember what people in the future are going to think when they look back at how we treat children these days, so often.
	I'm incredibly sorry for all of that.
	I really, really wanted to express my deep sympathy.
	It's really tough stuff to live with.
	Of course, you say you have a good relationship with your parents.
	I understand where you're coming from, but the problem is, if you actually are upset with your parents, or if you do have problems with your parents, and you're not addressing it with them, it has no option but to spill over that problem, that resentment, that defensiveness.
	Has no choice, in a sense, but to spill over into other relationships, which is why you kind of treated me like your dad, because you're not treating your dad like your dad, so you end up having to treat me like your dad.
	Like I'm being sort of aggressive, and therefore you have to fog and defend and strawman.
	But I wish you the very best, and thank you so much for calling in.
	Please feel free to call in again.
	And Mike, who do we have up next?
	All right, up next is Immanuel.
	And Immanuel wrote in, and this is a summary of his question, but he wanted to know if the possibility that a balance of power disbalance could exist within society mean that governments, while immoral, are preferable to an anarchist society.
	Hello.
	How are you?
	Very nice to be here.
	Thanks a lot for inviting me to be on the show.
	Yes, that was my question.
	I originally put it forward as a statement and then rewrote it into the form of a question.
	Basically, I've only listened to a couple of your sessions and I found them very interesting.
	I absolutely agree with your assertion that governments are fundamentally immoral.
	But I have a bit of a problem with some of the concepts, such as hegemony and balance of power, and what seems to me the inevitability of formation of some sort of control structures to regulate things.
	And I thought perhaps a good place to start would be a definition of some of the terms in the statement, perhaps?
	Sure.
	Definitions are always good.
	So would you like to start with hegemony or shall I?
	I don't mind either way.
	No, go ahead.
	I certainly get enough talking in these shows.
	I'll give you a break for a minute if I can.
	I don't know how long I'll last.
	Hegemony in my understanding of the concept is that in any given system where there is competition, eventually leadership will emerge.
	Now, if you apply this to a scenario of a small group of school children in a class environment, you see tendencies generally of an emergent leader.
	And up until that point, you see some, I mean, in some areas of authority, maybe not an out-and-out leader is exactly accurate, but an emergence of leadership in certain areas.
	And up until the point that leadership emerges, it seems to be that there's energy wastage in that competition process.
	It's not peace.
	There's some sort of conflict going on.
	And But once the conflict is resolved and there's a clear leader in that given system, then the harmony of the system can resume and a more efficient functional system can take shape.
	uh... this could be applied to uh... the nation state system you know a monetary system where uh... uh... clear leader uh... emerges and therefore creates a more uh... peaceful harmonious uh... scenario yeah yeah okay so that i'm sorry i'm going to move on to another that's why you know definitions usually a fairly concise and that uh...
	Yes, yes, I did ramble.
	So for me, hegemony is, so there's, you know, me holding a gun to someone's head, and that's obviously direct physical violence.
	Then there's kind of like an indirect physical violence of, you know, pay me or, you know, you'll go to jail for non-payment of taxes or something like that.
	So to me, and I think this is fairly standard, hegemony is sort of an indirect form of control using threats of violence rather than a gun directly to the head.
	So when you start talking about the emergence of a leader in a monetary system, I have six million questions pop up like fireworks in my head, which I think are probably worth talking about.
	Because the most fundamental question in human interactions is gun or no gun, violence or no violence.
	And I was listening for that, and it seems like there's a lot of conflation.
	There's obviously military hegemony, government and all of that kind of stuff.
	But in terms of free trade, I don't know how there would be hegemony because there's no coercion in free trade.
	I mean, there's certainly richer and poorer people and there's better and worse singers too.
	You know, the fact that Celine Dion is a great singer doesn't mean that she stole her great voice from my wife or something, right?
	I mean, that's sort of different, right?
	Sure.
	So I guess we have a slightly different definition there of hegemony.
	But what...
	Would you like the encyclopedia definition?
	Yes, sure, why not.
	Okay, hegemony is an indirect form of government and of imperial dominance in which the hegemon, leader state, rules geopolitically subordinate states by the implied means of power, the threat of force, rather than by direct military force.
	In ancient Greece, hegemony denoted the politico-military dominance of a city-state over other So, it's sort of like American hegemony is American influence.
	Now, bribes given by governments to other governments are a form of military or violent hegemony because the money has to be stolen from the population or the unborn through force, right, in order to give the money to someone else.
	The sale of arms, the propping up of governments, the lending out of military advisors, and so on.
	These are all somewhat indirect forms of violent control over others predicated on the aggression against the domestic population, which gives them the resources to do that.
	I think we're diverging a little bit from the original target of the statement.
	I think you there is also evidence well I would assert there's also evidence that in certain periods of human history there's been more violence when there's been more nation-states at a similar sort of power level and then
	A more peaceful society resuming after each cycles of peace and war when different nation-states become balanced and fight it out and then a clear leader emerges from that group.
	A leader in force, sure, but a leader nonetheless.
	Well, the in-force is kind of the key, right?
	Sure.
	So, it's your question in a... Well, no, I don't think in-force is the key.
	I don't think in-force is the key.
	The key is there's more peace.
	There's more harmony in the system.
	That's the point I'm making.
	That when you have... Sorry, more harmony in which system?
	In this, for example, in the global nation-state system, when you don't have armies rolling into each other's territories vying for control of resources and power structures, if there is one particular government that is in control of the majority of the resources and the power structure, no one else bothers to, you know, you have less wars in those periods of time.
	And that's the concept of America being the hegemon of the last, since the Second World War, there's been no more out-and-out Global conflicts.
	The conflicts have been local power disputes, not global ones.
	And why do you think that superpowers have stopped going to war with each other after the Second World War, at least direct wars as opposed to proxy wars like Vietnam and Korea?
	That's a very good question.
	I think the majority of wars since then have been via proxy, absolutely.
	What was the exact question again?
	Why has there been less wars since then?
	Well, the answer is nuclear weapons, right?
	So, because there's mutually assured destruction, and the leaders themselves will be destroyed in a war, and also their citizenry, their land, their natural resources would be destroyed in a thermonuclear war.
	Then they don't fight direct wars anymore because the leaders themselves are at peril.
	Leaders want to destroy human life.
	They don't want to be destroyed.
	Like, a thief wants to violate property rights.
	He doesn't want his own property rights to be violated.
	Nobody wants to steal something in order to have it stolen from them.
	Otherwise, where would we have George Clooney movies?
	So, the fact that there's nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction is one factor.
	And as a result of that, as a result of that factor, Being unable to gain resources from geography, now government leaders gain resources from time.
	So rather than stealing from your neighbors, they may steal from the future in the form of debt.
	So the war has now become a time war rather than a geography war, but the level of predation remains fundamentally the same.
	You're a neutral point that there's been less war because of mutually assured destruction through nuclear weapons.
	I don't think that... Sure, I think that's a big part of why there's been less conflict since America established themselves as the hegemon, but in past power struggles further back in near history,
	You've certainly had other scenarios where an emergent power has come to dominate politics or gain a monopoly on force in a regional area.
	That has then led to more peaceful times that had nothing whatsoever to do with nuclear weapons or mutually assured destruction.
	I don't think that's the key reason.
	You're just doing a whole bunch of adjectives and descriptions, right?
	Give me an example and then you can do less.
	Sure, sure.
	Let me get more factual.
	Let me have a quick look on my webpage here.
	Oh, is it now a theory in search effects?
	I looked this up.
	That's not the best way to approach it.
	I know there is examples in the last 500 years of other theories anyway, other people putting forward theories that this is the case.
	Look, I mainly put forward this question as a means of exploration of the topic.
	I haven't made up my mind on either.
	You want to talk about like anarchy of free society, a stateless society.
	Could there not be invasion from other countries or the development of a new state within the free society?
	Is that right?
	I would definitely say that there's some key threats to a functioning anarchist state algorithm.
	Absolutely.
	I can't have a conversation about something as abstract as key threats.
	What is that?
	Something that's going to scratch the door of my car?
	What are we actually talking about here?
	Give me something specific.
	This is like trying to wrestle the fog demon.
	I think we've explored a hegemony as far as we could.
	Would you like to think about some threats and coming back later in the show?
	and I don't want to put you on the spot if you don't actually have any particular threats you'd like to talk about to a free society.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Well, I will accept that invitation.
	Thank you.
	Yes, perhaps I could join back in after the next caller for just a brief recap.
	Let me do a little research.
	Thank you.
	Fantastic.
	All right.
	Let's move on to the next caller.
	All right.
	Brandon wrote in and said, what steps did you take to gain viewers when you first started Freedom and Radio?
	Making new podcasts twice a week?
	How did you manage to find new ways to express stop beating your kids, government is evil for your show?
	I like it.
	It's like, well, you have only two things to say.
	How on earth can you still be baroquely flourishing on these two themes and milking it for 2700 podcasts?
	Well, you know, it's sort of like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
	There's like four notes, but he plays around with them a lot, I guess.
	Well, I mean, I've never really... I've never really focused on trying to gain listeners.
	I think Mike can attest to that in a wide variety of contexts.
	In fact, Mike is occasionally like, you know, we really should focus on whether this is productive for the listeners or a positive experience for the listeners.
	I've really only ever wanted to have a show Where I can speak the truth, at least as I can argue for it, as passionately, as entertainingly as possible and then see who is interested in that.
	I sort of resolutely reject the idea that I should not do certain topics or avoid certain themes and so on.
	because it might upset the listeners.
	I think that would be disrespectful to philosophy and disrespectful to the future.
	So I have a cure for cancer, but I really don't want to upset the cancer industry, right?
	I mean, that would not be respectful to the people who might have cancer, right?
	So I've never really focused on what I can do to gain listeners.
	I mean, I did some advertising.
	Part of why I gave out the books for free was to sort of get free advertising and build goodwill.
	But I think that I have not really tried to do that.
	I mean, there's one or two topics that I'm still mulling over whether I want to broach with the world or not.
	But other than that, I have not really tried to condition what it is that I say because I really want to gain the right kind of listeners.
	And The moment you start trying to manipulate people by withholding and saying this but not that in order to try and gain some sort of effect on people, you fundamentally have a different kind of conversation and a different kind of relationship.
	It's sort of like some woman starts chatting you up at a bar.
	And then at the end of the night, she turns out to be a prostitute.
	Like I heard this story about a guy who's on a plane.
	Literally, so Vegas, right?
	There was this crash in 2008.
	And it was really tough for the prostitutes there.
	I'm not talking about like the journalists.
	I mean the more honest ones.
	And so what would happen is the prostitutes would fly out to towns that flew into Las Vegas.
	And they would try and pick up men on the plane, chat with them and so on.
	And then hang out with them at the baggage claim.
	and then say, listen, let's spend the night together, by the way, I'm a prostitute or whatever.
	and And that's, you know, that's hard work.
	That's a lot of effort that's going into trying to make a, trying to, I guess, cut money out of men's wallet with your scissor legs or something.
	I don't know what the right analogy or metaphor would be on that.
	But if you're on the plane and some woman is flattered, some attractive woman is chatting you up or whatever, then when it turns out you get that she's a prostitute, that's a whole different kind of thing, right?
	Because you know that she's got an ulterior motive in having a communication with you.
	Now if I were to say, and I mean I know, I could be a bazillionaire this time next year if I simply said that I now renounce atheism and went on tours of churches talking about how great Jesus is and so on.
	They would pay huge amounts of money, it would be a fairly public conversion and it would be massively profitable.
	Of course if I were to renounce my youthful anarchism and run for office I would certainly be able to achieve some decent level of office with my language skills and charisma and so on.
	So there's lots of things I could do if I wanted to get more.
	Like if money was the object, there's lots of things that I could do.
	I could bow to the pressure of people who don't want me talking about child abuse and don't want me calling abusive parents abusive parents.
	So there's lots of things that I could do to modify what it is that I talk about in order to gain more viewers, in order to appeal more to the masses.
	But then I'm just a whore on a plane.
	Right, and I just, you know, I don't want to be in the next Samuel Jackson movie.
	I want these motherfucking whores off this motherfucking plane!
	It's not the oxygen mask that drops down that you put over your face, but I just really, really try to focus on speaking the most important truths that I can.
	I just did a podcast which basically says you're only a philosopher if you can actually change people's behavior towards virtue in a tangible, measurable way.
	That's what makes you a philosopher.
	So I've always really focused on what is going to cause people's behavior to change the most in the best possible direction and the definition and promotion of moral excellence is the fundamental goal of this show and I've really tried to be as Enjoyable and entertaining and passionate and positive and clear as possible.
	Like I have this good ability to do pretty rigorous rational analyses and good research along with having this like florid metaphor hyper caffeinated hamster wheel of allegory and colorful language that comes out.
	Hey, that just happened again.
	And so I've really tried to put that down.
	And so the people who say, well, this was extreme and this went too far and so on, I mean, they're having trouble with the colorful language.
	I don't mean the swearing.
	I mean, so the allegories and analogies and metaphors and so on.
	But it's important to wake people from the kind of hypnosis of culture.
	And culture uses symbols and allegories and artistic language in order to ensnare people.
	And I think the You know, the same weapons that can bind people can also release them.
	And so I find that sort of the dry academic discourse, which I actually quite enjoy, is one way to build a case.
	But if I can really connect with people's unconscious, to their emotional centers, to their lizard brains, through colorful language, that can wake people up.
	Like why would the estrogen-based parasites show?
	I'm trying to wake men out of sexual hypnosis.
	I'm trying to use extreme language to Break them out of a kind of hypnosis of hormones.
	And so I can't hold back.
	I can't be less strong than the enemy I'm confronting.
	I refuse to bring a knife to a gunfight.
	And so if I'm trying to stand against the massive tidal wave of male hormones that produces sexual hypnosis, I am going to go full-tilt boogie into that fray and call in every metaphorical airstrike I can imagine to try and wake men from that sexual hypnosis.
	So yeah, I don't really try and focus on building the audience.
	I try and focus on telling the truth and assume that the right audience is going to congregate to that.
	I wanted to explain my emotions before we continue this because I am actually very, very nervous of talking to you.
	Because it's kind of funny, just yesterday I was listening to you as casual.
	And now here I am like talking with you but I decided that I am not going to college and what I wanted to focus more was the creative aspect instead of the honesty aspect because I already understand that when you speak up for these things
	Yeah, so how did you find, what I'm looking for is how did you find different ways and more specific ways to like, did you read specific books to be more accurate on the things you were saying?
	Well, I try to listen to really good communicators and I also try to get as much new information as humanly possible.
	So, I've been delving deep into the men going their own way to the MGTOW movement.
	I'm really striving hard to understand something which is quite foreign to me.
	And I think that there's a lot of really interesting and powerful criticisms and perspectives from that school of thought.
	I didn't really know much about men's rights until a year or two or maybe three ago.
	So I'm really sort of trying to delve into that.
	I didn't really do much around gender issues earlier on in the show, but when I started to get into Gil Reitzwart and other great thinkers out there, Barbara and Sandman and other kinds of people,
	It's very stimulating and one of the greatest things about what it is that I'm doing is I get to pursue new modes of thought or new arguments or new perspectives that are very foreign to me, that are completely different from what I grew up with and even sort of the quote radical thought that I've been into for 30 odd years.
	So, yeah, I mean, so Objectivism blew my mind, Jung and Freud and self-knowledge and Nathaniel Brandon blew my mind, and Iyamari Rothbard blew my mind, and some of the modern sort of economic, Austrian economic thinkers blow my mind, and some of the men's rights stuff.
	So wherever my, you know, my mind gets blown is where I try to get to a productive conversation and it's a real, it is a genuine honor and the greatest gift I think that this show is giving to me is the pursuit of new topics and new ways of approaching things.
	Oh yeah, although I'd read it many years before, the bomb in the brain stuff like fdrurl.com forward slash bib, the bomb in the brain stuff and the degree to which child abuse has specific medical health effects down the road It's something also that blew my mind in getting a chance to call up and talk to the study's author and have him on the show.
	All of that stuff is fantastic.
	Alison Gopnik's Philosophical Baby and Stuart Shanker's work and so on.
	It all just blows my mind.
	There's so many amazing things going on in the realm of human thought these days that doesn't really have anything to do with anarchy or even economics or whatever, but to do with human development, which I think is foundational to all the other things.
	Getting into parenting, Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards stuff kind of blows my mind, which I'm sort of interested in exploring.
	Just remaining stimulated.
	If I get bored, you will get bored, right?
	That's sort of inevitable.
	Constantly finding, and the great thing is that there's new geisters of thought and reason popping up all the time.
	We have a list of show topics to work on that is as long as Well, I really can't use that word on air, but let's just say it's very long.
	If I can stay interested, if I can keep going on the cutting edge of stuff and remain stimulated myself, then I can pass along that stimulation to others and hopefully keep people excited about basic principles and the overwhelming Tsunami of empirical evidence that is supporting the non-aggression principle and respect for property rights.
	Like, you know, violence is visible from space.
	You know, this is an amazing, you can do a search for this meme, but basically what I call violence is visible from space.
	In other words, if you look at the nighttime view of Korea, North and South Korea, right?
	South Korea has all these city lights and North Korea is, you know, dark as the under flap of a midnight witch's tit.
	And the fact that coercion is literally visible from space, that the light of freedom burns much greater, of course, in South Korea than it does in North Korea, is one of these fascinating pieces of empirical evidence that where violence grows, the lights of civilization literally go out.
	That's really fantastic stuff.
	And of course, you know, Bitcoin gets me thrilled and excited with an amazing possibility for stateless interactions and all that, so... It is... Oh, Bob Rosa, yeah, he's also... I haven't listened to as much of his stuff, but people have found him to be very helpful.
	on YouTube.
	Warren Farrell and all these people I get to talk with.
	This is why I'm talking at a domestic violence conference.
	This is why I'm going to be talking at a men's rights conference.
	That stuff really turns my crank.
	It really gets me.
	Like all schools of thought, there's stuff I think is valid.
	There's stuff I think is invalid.
	There's stuff I think that may be valid but is unsupported as yet.
	Really fascinating to be able to pursue these kinds of things and to allow them to inform what it is that I'm doing.
	But I'm very often just very surprised by the stuff that comes out of my mouth.
	I know that sounds kind of weird, but I get a question and sometimes, half the time, I don't even know why I'm asking for particular information and that only makes sense to me after the fact.
	Then I say, oh, that's why I was asking for that earlier on.
	And particular solutions, they spontaneously arise within me.
	And this is all the result of years and years and 40,000 hours of work in philosophy and self-knowledge and writing and communicating and acting and voice work and all that kind of stuff.
	But I remain surprised by the shows sometimes as much as everyone else.
	And that's what keeps it very lively to me.
	That's why I don't over-rehearse my speeches.
	Like for the speech in Amsterdam, I did it twice.
	Because if I over-rehearse, then any spontaneity is like being half on a train track.
	You're either on the train track, in which case you've memorized the speech, in which case you lose a lot of the spontaneous energy.
	Or you're off the train track but have some idea where you're going, right?
	So, and also why I try not to give the same speech twice ever.
	You know, I'm not like a band where people are like, Freebird!
	You know, play that song that I love and play it like it is on the record.
	Don't screw it up, right?
	But I sort of really try to give new speeches because otherwise why would people show up?
	I mean, because it's the same thing they've heard before.
	I hope that, does that help at all?
	Yes, it does.
	Yeah, because I'm starting a YouTube channel myself called Lost in Remorse.
	It sounds sad at first, but it's supposed to be like... Do you know the company Johnny Cupcakes?
	Uh, vaguely, but I don't even know why I know that.
	Oh, but the idea is you go and think it's a bakery, but it's actually a clothing store.
	And what I use for my channel is that I turn the things that can be looked at as negative as Things, reasons for you to move forward.
	Like, people, when people look at stress or, like, people see them, like, evil government.
	In a way, this is bad to have in our daily life.
	But, in a way, I find it all enjoyable.
	Because if things were just perfect and happy, there wouldn't be any reason for you to create freedom in radio.
	Or, any reason for you to think of, like, creative ways to express the thought of stop beating kids and government's evil.
	And, I don't know.
	Just the flaws is what I find make life beautiful.
	I'm asking you this now, so... Well, you know, I mean...
	If no one got cancer, you wouldn't need any cancer doctors.
	But I don't think that makes cancer beautiful.
	Not cancer itself is beautiful, but life.
	I'm very nervous right now.
	No, I'm not trying to tell you you're wrong.
	I'm just a usual Socratic provider counter example.
	We need leprosy medicine because there's leprosy, but that doesn't make lepers having a beautiful life.
	I think that we want to work on prevention.
	I think prevention is the greatest chance for there to be a beautiful world.
	If you had some way of stopping everyone from smoking tomorrow, you would be saving Hundreds of millions of lives over the long term, right?
	And that would be a pretty cool thing to do.
	That would make life a lot more beautiful because, you know, dying of esophageal or lung cancer is not a whole lot of fun, I would imagine.
	So I think that working on the prevention, which is kind of why I talk about child raising and all that, working on the prevention I think is really the key.
	And that, I think, is the greatest chance that we have for making life more beautiful.
	But, you know, we want to stop war, but war doesn't make the world Beautiful.
	Obviously, I'm sort of paraphrasing it.
	I'm sort of giving you an absurd extension of your argument.
	But it is because of our horror of war and our horror of illness and so on that good people work to prevent that.
	It's a horror against evil and the danger of human evil, which is the greatest predator in the world or in the universe that we know of.
	The desire to defang the human predators to prevent them from coming into existence through peaceful child raising.
	I think that is Really really important for for us and in a way You know if you're kind of like a born fighter Then the fact that there's fights in the world may be of some value to you But the question of course for me is like so I enjoy really enjoy the physical philosophical Rough-and-tumble like I enjoyed the conversations with the people who called it to criticize And I you know we always invite more people to come in you know if you've got a beef with something I've said you know come in be prepared but
	But, come in and we'll talk about it.
	I really enjoy those conversations.
	They're challenging and very exciting and very, I don't know what's coming next and not, you know, not, oh, tell me about your childhood kind of stuff.
	But, so the question is, if I enjoy these conflicts, why do I enjoy these conflicts?
	Well, part of it is, of course, because I had a conflict-ridden childhood and I developed a lot of skills along those lines which are challenging.
	So, yeah, so I just want to sort of point that out.
	The world is a wonderful place in terms of its opportunities, but it's kind of a horrifying place.
	Didn't some Saudi blogger get sentenced to 100 lashes, a quarter million dollar fine, and 10 years in prison for writing something about Islam that could be considered offensive?
	Hard to find the beauty in that, of course, right?
	there's not much that we can do to change that, at least in the short run.
	Yeah.
	I've kind of lost my pace of where I wanted this conversation to go.
	But thank you.
	Well, remind people of your YouTube channel as well.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	When I'm making these videos, I make videos about facing procrastination and all these things.
	And I'm just not sure of how to get it out there.
	Because the thing with the Internet is that they think that everything that you do is public, but the way the Internet works is kind of in reverse because to get hurt, you have to be ashamed.
	Assertive to get out there and to expose yourself.
	If you want some advice on this, then don't think marketing, think authenticity.
	If you want people to pay attention to you, do something that is different, right?
	I mean, if there are a bunch of people walking on a conveyor belt in an airport and one guy is on a pogo stick going the other way, who do you notice, right?
	Yeah.
	If you want to stand out, be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on a Japanese subway train and you will stand out.
	Do something that is different than what everyone else is doing.
	By definition, pretty much fundamentally, you will stand out.
	In the realm of human communication, there's this weird hoarding aspect to people's communication.
	Like they're always holding something back and that has a lot to do with fears of vulnerability, it has a lot to do with fears of rejection, fears of attack, fears of trollery or whatever it is.
	But vulnerability, right?
	When a lot of people are around vulnerability, They're like sharks with blood in the water that's going into a feeding frenzy.
	They're overt sadists.
	I don't know what percentage of the population they are, but they're the people who, when you wire up their brains, their happy joy orgasm centers light up when they see acts of deliberate cruelty being portrayed in front of them.
	It makes them happy to be cruel and to be mean.
	Those are the overt sadists.
	But the reality is that a lot of people, I don't know what percentage it is, but based upon the history of people who go to war and people who respond to being conscripted and people who vote in obvious lunatics and tyrants, a significant portion of people, perhaps even a significant majority of people, are latent sadists.
	In other words, they're not necessarily going to go out and create a concentration camp, but if you put them in a concentration camp, boy, they're really going to go to town on the prisoners.
	And this was shown in Phillips and Bardo's Stanford Prison Experiments, which there's actually a documentary on.
	This psychologist is now head of the APA, I think.
	But the psychologist took a bunch of college students and divided them into prisoners and guards.
	And this was supposed to be a couple of week experiment, but it had to stop after a couple of days because the amazing amount of sadism that was being displayed on the part of these supposed guards to these supposed prisoners.
	Nobody was there because they were bad.
	They were just like literally arbitrarily coin flip divided into prisoners.
	And they had to abandon the experiment very quickly because of the amount of unleashed sadism that came pouring out of these people arbitrarily assigned to the roles of prison guards.
	This is what I mean by latent sadism, that there are just massive amounts of people who, if given the opportunity, if given immunity from consequences, and if given power, will become torturous, will become abusers, will become brutes.
	It is a latent capacity in most people and of course has a lot to do with early childhood and spanking and terrible schools and religious indoctrination.
	I don't think it's sort of human nature.
	So I think that is a really important thing to understand.
	about the world and the horror that is latent within humanity if the right people get in charge and take people in the wrong direction.
	But we all know that there's these sharks in these bathtubs, right?
	There's guillotines over the hammocks, right?
	That there's this latent sadism in people around us.
	And so it's hard to wear your heart on your sleeve, to leave nothing behind, to hold nothing back, to put all your cards on the table.
	It's hard.
	That's counterintuitive.
	And then you become the guy on the pogo stick heading the wrong way with everyone leaning bored on a conveyor belt in an airport.
	So leave nothing behind.
	Put everything on the table.
	Hold nothing back.
	Communicate as passionately and as honestly about who you are.
	And yeah, I mean, some people will want to attack you because blood in the water and they're just late in sadism or over sadism comes out.
	But a lot of people will find that very compelling.
	that you, uh, you speak your truth plainly and clearly, uh, you provide the evidence for it, and you are passionate about what it is.
	You know, I mean, a lot of people are just walking zombies, right?
	And if you have life and you're willing to communicate that life and you're willing to show the world how much you care, you know, care is just like a bullseye for people to shoot their arrows of indifferent hatred at, uh, bullseye.
	But to really care is to be very unusual in the world and to care about the right things in the right way and so on.
	It's a real challenge and I would say, you know, wear your heart on your sleeve and really be passionate and care about what you're doing and the audience will find you.
	They will be drawn to you Yeah, one thing I've obtained from this TV show is that all the people that I have around me, I can imagine just how they'd be when they become parents.
	It really is a sad thing and I try to communicate these things with the people around me but They don't get the things I'm trying to say to them.
	Wait, wait.
	What do you mean they don't get it?
	How do you know they don't get it?
	Maybe they get it, but disagree.
	Maybe they get it, but reject it.
	Yeah, that's what they do.
	One more question I want to ask you.
	What questions do you think it's important to ask yourself to give you a clear vision moving forward?
	I'm sorry, can you say that again?
	What questions do you think is important to ask yourself to have a clear vision for?
	Like, if you know the answer of what am I passionate about, that will give you certainty of where you're heading when you do certain actions in life.
	Well, I think you're still talking about it like just what am I passionate about.
	Yeah.
	But... I'm asking you like... You know, the important thing is also what does... No, the important thing is what does the world need?
	I could be passionate about building abacuses, or I could be passionate about building horse-drawn carriages, but economically, that's probably not a very great proposition.
	I'm now awaiting the flurry of emails of people saying, well, these guys build abacuses, and these guys build horse-drawn carriages, and there's the Amish.
	But in general, it is important to say, well, what does the world need, too?
	It's not more of asking myself.
	Questions for how can I serve the world?
	No, no, that is what you said was asking myself what am I passionate about.
	No, the original question was... You also have to ask what the world needs.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, the original question is what kind of questions I should ask myself to have a more positive... Well, sorry, so what does the world need that I'm passionate about?
	There's lots of stuff that I'm passionate about that the world doesn't need, so it's not really part of this show.
	There's stuff that I am passionate about that the world needs, that is part of the show.
	There's stuff that the world needs that I'm not passionate about, which is not part of the show.
	So you've got these two circles, what the world needs and what you're passionate about.
	And the most productive is the intersection of these two circles.
	What you're passionate about, which the world actually needs.
	Because you cannot sustain a passion that has no effect on the world.
	I mean, or if you can, you're like Howard Hughes insane.
	Right?
	So, if you say, I want to be a painter, I want to be a painter, I want to be a painter, and you paint for 40 years, and nobody buys your pictures, and nobody hangs your pictures, then you're crazy.
	Right?
	Because you paint in order for those paintings to be seen, at least I'd assume they'd have something to do with that.
	But you can't really sustain a passion that other people cannot change their behavior upon.
	Because your passion is literally like recording a beautiful song with the mic turned off.
	Right?
	No one's going to hear it.
	It doesn't matter.
	A tree falls in a wood, blah, blah, blah.
	So, your passion is refueled by its ripple effect on the world.
	Right?
	As Freddie Mercury said, I can only sing as well as the audience wants me to.
	Right?
	You can't give a, are you ready to rock, kind of live a performance if the audience is picking their noses, looking down at their shoes, not responding to anything you're doing.
	Right?
	The call and answer of performer and audience is a mutually Escalating energy system.
	And so you put your passions out there, but if it's not what the world needs and it doesn't allow people or trigger people to change their behaviors, then you will eventually just run horse shouting down a well.
	Right?
	You're giving a speech to an empty hall.
	Can you give a great speech to an empty hall?
	Not really.
	Right?
	So when you have a passion that can actually have an effect on the world, which is why people who get stuck in politics, well, I mean, they're doing it for money and power, but not to change the world for the better, because that never happens through politics.
	But this is why, for me, the energy that I have for the show grows and grows and grows.
	And of course, I'm continually committed to improving.
	I'm still maybe 40 to 50 percent of where I want to be.
	as a communicator, I've still got lots of hiccups, lots of verbal tics, right, right, right, and things that I want to improve, spontaneity that I want to still break through, inhibitions that I still want to dismantle within myself.
	So I still have got so far to go as far as human communication goes.
	But the reason I want to get there is the better I am at communicating, the fewer children get hit.
	The better I am at communicating, the fewer children will get hit and yelled at and abused.
	And so if I hesitate in the weird mad surfing of trying to get hit Completely intimate and original communication.
	If I hesitate and I falter and I don't come up with some really great compelling line or analogy or metaphor or whatever, then, you know, 20 kids might still get hit.
	Yeah.
	Because that won't be shared that 20 more times or somebody may not listen to the end of the show.
	A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
	The sugar is the humor, is the energy, is the assertiveness that people like to see in the show, which I've been working on more and more of.
	And so, how do I drag people up the open-bellied sandpaper of getting to a higher place, which is painful and difficult for them?
	Well, I obviously have to be as entertaining and engaging and original and startling as possible.
	So, but I want to do that because it has an effect on the world.
	Because it can make people better.
	Because it can make people decide to stop working at jobs they hate and stay home with their children.
	Because it can make people decide, as it has for many, many people, to not circumcise their sons, or to breastfeed their children for at least the recommended 18 months, to raise the intelligence of the world through peaceful parenting, breastfeeding, and lack of trauma in infancy, and so on, to allow for the bond to be cemented between a mother and her children.
	And a father and his children to get people to be less materialistic and therefore to consume fewer of the world's resources.
	Lots of great stuff that I can do, but because it actually changes people's behavior in the world, that is what propels me to want to get better.
	And so that intersection of what the world needs, in other words, what the world will change based upon what you say and what you're passionate about, is the best place to work from, I think.
	Yeah and the way you communicate really to me is a beautiful thing and I am trying to like reach the point where I can communicate and the way you communicate, do you just think of things as you go or do you have like these metaphors and all these evidence and examples like memorized?
	No, no.
	The metaphors are spontaneous, which is why I rarely repeat them.
	If I'm telling a story I've told before, I always try to say, I've told this before, because I've always found it disconcerting when people tell me the same stories.
	I used to have a boss.
	He'd keep telling me the same stories as if I'd never heard them before.
	And that's an exercise of power and lack of empathy.
	So no, the metaphors are almost entirely spontaneous, which is why they sometimes backfire.
	But some of the arguments I've thought about before, but in the conversations in particular, it tends to be more More spontaneous thought in the moment.
	And that's a result of a lot of practice and also a humility with regards to how much further I can go in being a better communicator about these very important things.
	Because it really matters how good I am at it, because it changes people's behavior.
	And the better I am at it, the better the world can get.
	I see.
	Yeah, I have goosebumps just talking to you right now.
	I think... But remember, sorry, just the last thing too, remember I've written 30 plays.
	I've written like six or seven novels.
	I've written hundreds and hundreds of poems.
	I've analyzed my own dreams fairly exhaustively.
	So I've worked with metaphors and analogies very deeply for tens of thousands of hours.
	So it is not something that is just like, wow, he's just got this weird gift for metaphor.
	It's like, well, no, that's like saying Schwarzenegger has weirdly big biceps.
	It's like, well, he moved a lot of metal in dark rooms and he took a lot of steroids, I think.
	So, um, without the steroids.
	So it's, you know, it may look sort of, I guess, dazzling and so on, but, uh, it is, uh, it is the result of a lot of hard work behind the scenes or, or, and this is why I sort of say to people, you know, the donations are, Not unimportant, because the show really is simply the tip of the iceberg of all the work I've done my whole life.
	And I say that so that you can feel more comfortable and confident.
	Don't assume that what I have is just some sort of weird gift.
	It's the result of very hard, very concentrated... I also went to theatre school, where we did improv and all kinds of cool stuff.
	Body work, I've done yoga, Alexander technique, posture work, which is the Alexander technique.
	So lots of work has gone into what people see in the shows and I wouldn't want them to think that that's just some magical gift that appeared out of nowhere.
	It is the result of a lot of hard work and I say that, you know, to encourage you to do the work and not dismiss your potential because of an imaginary gift on my part.
	Yeah.
	Alright.
	Thank you for everything that the research you have given me.
	If possible, is there any more that you can give me like after the show?
	Like links that you use yourself to improve?
	Because I'm trying to just I mean, I've had a request for a reading list for these many years.
	I will work at it.
	Maybe we'll shuffle that up a little bit on the priority list, but I will certainly try and do that.
	But, you know, just be as honest as you can, as passionate as you can, and find something that moves you to move the world.
	And I think that's the best place to work from.
	All right.
	If we can move on to the next.
	Up next is Ben.
	And Ben wrote in and said, I'm partway through a graduate program for counseling and struggling with ambivalence about whether to finish it.
	Complicating my decision is that all the people I am close to or am moving far away with.
	On one hand, I can stay geographically alone for just over a year and come out of it with a master's degree and a year of internship experience doing what I want to do.
	On the other hand, I can go be with my friends now, with the debt I've already accumulated, no degree, and trying to build a counseling practice without the internship experience.
	Is the internship and degree worth a year and a quarter being both geographically separated from the people I care about?
	Do you have any thoughts or advice that may help?
	Thank you very much.
	Questions of personal aesthetics in a philosophy show.
	Always a challenge.
	Well, what are the economics of you starting a counseling business without the degree, which I assume doesn't give you access to people who have insurance, right?
	Yeah, at least in this, yeah, right.
	No insurance.
	So you'd be more like a life coach, right?
	Yeah, and I'd probably call myself that for safety's sake.
	Right, okay, so do you know the proportion of people who go to therapy who are there as the result of insurance?
	I don't.
	That's probably a good thing to look into.
	I could see that.
	These are the kind of questions when it comes to practical matters.
	Your gut won't help you that much if it's not informed by facts.
	You could call up life coaches and say, how's business?
	And make sure they're not geographically in your area so they don't view you as potential competition.
	But you can call up life coaches and say, has it been a huge issue?
	And you can offer to pay them.
	I know you're in debt and so on, but $75 for half an hour could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
	Not a bad investment, right?
	So you can call people up and say, look, I'm not in your geographical area.
	I'll be happy to pay you for your time, but I need some advice on getting started.
	That sort of stuff can be really helpful.
	Just have a list of questions that are really important.
	How much is office space?
	How much do you charge?
	What proportion of patients do you have to turn away?
	What potential clients do you have to turn away because you don't accept insurance?
	Then call the people who are licensed and ask them the same questions.
	Then you can make a cost-benefit calculation on whether it's worth it.
	If the life coaches are getting by on $10,000 or pounds a year and the psychologists are making $150,000 a year, then it may be worth all the counselors, you know, then that's one set of facts and so on, right?
	So I would definitely say that these sort of facts as well.
	Also, what kind of therapy do you want to do?
	If you want to do mainstream therapy, then there's a lot of benefit, I think, in being licensed.
	If you want to do therapy that's a little bit more off the beaten path, then it may be more of a challenge to do that.
	So, there's a wide variety of things that you can talk about in these areas, but facts are the key, right?
	Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.
	You know, look for people who are doing these different things that I'm considering doing and get more information and that will, well it should at least have an effect on kind of my gut feelings and my ambivalence if not resolve it.
	Well no, but ambivalence is just another word for lack of information, right?
	If I'm ambivalent about which way to go in the woods, it's because I don't have a GPS or a map or a compass.
	Should I go this way?
	Should I go that way?
	I just lack information.
	This is why relationships that are chock full of ambivalence are relationships that simply People are avoiding empirical information about those relationships, right?
	This is why I say to people, if you've got a problem with your parents, your siblings, your spouse, go talk to that person.
	Tell them about your concerns.
	Tell them about your thoughts, your feelings, your experience.
	That is information gathering.
	Once you have enough information in your life, you will have no ambivalence about Right.
	I mean, it doesn't mean that all ambivalence can be avoided.
	I was ambivalent about starting the show.
	Now that it's doing well, I'm no longer ambivalent.
	Man, I really wish I'd stayed as a software executive.
	Right?
	So, ambivalence will happen where information can't be gathered, and that ambivalence is a spur to get the right information, which is, I want this show to do well, so I'm going to work really hard at it and do a hopefully really good job.
	But wherever you find yourself torn in two directions, it's because you're avoiding gathering information about what you need.
	And what that means, of course, is that you have grown up in a family where the gathering of information is specifically rejected, mostly because whatever you find out about that family, people don't really want you to know.
	That's my guess, but tell me if that fits at all.
	Yeah, I would say that definitely fits in terms of my family.
	I want to say real quick, because I think this will help me, is that I'm feeling pretty nervous.
	And what are you nervous about?
	Well, it started as I was waiting to chat.
	So, the other day you actually had a call, I think, with somebody who was talking about wanting to move between two different cities, and I was kind of remembering that this morning, and I think having some inner criticism, like, oh, I'm asking you a question that doesn't have an objective answer.
	Well, no, you are asking me a question, as was this guy.
	The reason I ended the call with that guy was because he didn't want to talk about the real reason.
	And there's a reason why you're still on the call with me.
	Because you said, well, should I do this?
	Should I do that?
	And I said, well, you need to gather some information.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	So, if your question was really about that, you would have stopped talking to me.
	You'd have said, great, okay, well, you know, I won't waste your time, I obviously got to go get some information, thanks for the advice, right?
	Yeah.
	But you're still on the line.
	And that's not a bad thing, but it means that there's something that you really want to talk about that's not that.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, maybe I'm just not... So, what is it?
	Yeah.
	I listen to the words between the words.
	Yeah.
	Well, to be honest, at least at this moment, I'm not sure.
	Let me ask you this.
	How do you know that it's your anxiety?
	Like versus like my family's anxiety?
	Oh, someone's.
	I guess I don't know for sure that it's It belongs completely to me.
	How well do bad people in people's lives fare after people talk with me?
	Yeah.
	Because one of the things that happens in this show is, you know, how well would you say if you've listened to the show before, how well do bad people in people's lives fare after people talk with me?
	Not well.
	Yeah.
	Not well.
	Yeah.
	And they're very upset that the person talked to me and that I gave them a perspective that was hopefully beneficial to the future piece of mankind, which means anti-beneficial to the bad people in their life.
	Yeah.
	So, So, if people who feel anxiety in talking to me It may be that there are people in your life who don't want you to be talking to me.
	In other words, people who you've internalized, alter egos in your head, that don't want you to talk to me.
	Because it will cost them for you to talk to me.
	Yeah.
	I mean, there's certainly still, you know, work I'm doing with the family that's internal to my head.
	So that's one possibility.
	That there's still something there that I...
	Oh, go ahead.
	Yep.
	Alright.
	Yes, that's the foghorn.
	You have earned the first Free Domain Radio Foghorn in a week or two.
	Oh, man.
	No, that's good, that's good.
	That means we're going to new territory.
	We need to put out some songs.
	Who in your life is not happy if you talk to me? - Well, I'm having trouble with that question just because I don't speak to I'm having trouble with that question just because I don't speak to my family and I'm continuing therapy that I've been doing for years to improve
	with myself and to further understand how growing up in the family that I was in has impacted me and kept me from having a life that I really want.
	Sorry, I don't want to start fogging again.
	Does that make sense so far?
	No, no.
	Look, I may be incorrect.
	Yeah.
	I mean, maybe you're just nervous because you're nervous, right?
	In terms of, like, you've listened to a lot of me and you're talking to me live and all that.
	Yeah.
	It may have nothing to do with that.
	It's just one possibility.
	It could be your friends.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	I mean, are your friends giving you information like you need to get information to make a better decision?
	Are your friends helping you with this decision?
	Are your friends echoes of your past or, you know, drop downs from your future?
	They are from the future.
	I have one friend who came along with me as I started speaking the truth about my experience and my family and as I started talking about important things that are true.
	So you have one friend who came along?
	Yeah, from the past.
	And then I have several.
	And other friends and people who've met you after that process?
	Yes.
	And we have talked about and continue to talk about the pluses and minuses of this decision that I'm considering.
	All right.
	Well, then it might just be nerves because you've maybe listened to a lot of me and have never talked to me live, in which case It's not something that needs to be further examined.
	I just wanted to double check that it wasn't some alter ego that was getting anxious and saying, disconnect from the forehead of truth.
	I think that's something for me to continue to consider though, is maybe whether it's actually like There's some reason I'm conflicted and quite nervous.
	I mean, well, okay, so let me just tell you kind of the idea I had, and maybe if it's not rational, you can tell me.
	Maybe there's something I'm missing here, which is, I think what I was kind of thinking is like, I've got this strong ambivalence.
	I think I know at least a fair number of the facts on each side, and I think what I may have been looking for is, like, somebody with more wisdom and experience than me.
	Like maybe there would be something that I haven't thought about that simply – okay.
	Okay.
	Okay. - Okay.
	You asked me, Steph, how can I make this decision?
	And I gave you an answer.
	Yes, get more facts.
	But you're still, but you're still, but you agree?
	Yes.
	But you're still talking to me?
	Yeah.
	What does that mean?
	It means there's something else that I want.
	It's like I'm sitting here, I'm sitting here trimming my hedges, I'm sitting here trimming my hedges, and you stop and you say, how do I get to the Sunnyside Mall?
	And I say, straight ahead, two left, one right.
	And then you just sit there.
	Yeah, it means there's something else that I want out of the interaction.
	And I don't want you to miss that opportunity, right?
	Yeah.
	If there's something that you want, I'm happy to chat.
	If you want to take time to think about it, you're welcome to call back in.
	I'm just aware that you didn't get what you want.
	Can I help?
	Maybe it's that I'm... Yeah, go ahead.
	You may.
	Ben, how do you feel about your friends moving away?
	way.
	Yeah, yeah, I feel quite sad suddenly.
	Well, you know, I, I really value you know, I, I really value these people and I, there's so few people in the
	world that I can really, really connect with, you know, and who, really connect with, you know, and who, who share my values and they just have, you know, a
	for the truth and empathy for children and they want to talk about their histories and how things have affected them and they want to do great things in life and I'm really and you know I'm thinking what's it going to be like to spend
	About a year and a half, a little bit less than that, like without any of that around me, geographically.
	I don't know, I was, I kind of moved away from the sadness there at the end, I'm not sure.
	How did that, what do you think about that?
	Well, the fact that your friends moved away from you, there's something that's communicated there that you might not be conscious of.
	Me and my wife, we live in a place that's rather cold.
	We don't like it very much.
	And we've had plans on the table like, okay, let's move south, let's move to someplace nice.
	I live in New York.
	There's high taxes.
	There's a whole lot of reasons not to live in New York.
	Why do we still live in New York?
	Why do we still live where we are, where it's cold, even though we have the means to move elsewhere?
	I live where I am because it's as close as I can possibly be to where Steph is.
	Right now.
	Yeah.
	And my relationship with Steph is incredibly important.
	Being around with him, being around to watch his daughter grow up and play with her, that's incredibly important to me.
	It's more important to me than the weather being warm.
	It's more important to me than dodging taxes.
	So I'm staying in a place that is, I would look at it as certainly not ideal because the relationship and the friendship and everything that goes along with that is a higher priority for me.
	Then it being warm or what's going to happen elsewhere?
	Yeah.
	So by your friends moving, and I'm not saying they're bad people, I'm not saying anything like that, but it is communicated that whatever is where they move to is a higher priority for them than the relationship.
	And we know that because they have moved.
	And of course, especially for people who are not talking to their families, friendships become like almost infinitely more important, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, I feel like I'm building a family of choice here.
	there.
	That's something I want.
	I want to find great people to be really connected.
	What's the emotion, Ben?
	Don't intellectualize it.
	What's the emotion?
	We just said that based on the empirical evidence of the decisions your friends have made, a move is a bigger priority than the friendship.
	How does that make you feel?
	I do feel hurt that... a part of me does feel hurt that Um, people don't want to stay close to me if they can go somewhere for the kind of economic benefits, I guess, that that's the higher priority.
	Which isn't to say that they're bad for doing it or something like that.
	But I do experience hurt.
	And I have been feeling sad about my friends having moved.
	And have you been able to have conversations with them about how you felt about it?
	Yeah, I... For the most part, I haven't done that.
	Why?
	That's a good question.
	I think that's what you called it for.
	It's because you want to be supportive.
	You don't want to pressure them. - Thank you.
	I think I also have like a part of me that says, well, I could like, I could move.
	I could move to, you know, I could, I could quit school.
	So I don't have to spend this time and make sure to Does this mean I'm not valuing the relationships?
	Why should they come to where I am?
	Well, is this a conversation?
	As we are a group of friends, we're incredibly important to each other.
	We each have these goals and needs that would benefit from moving to this location.
	This may not be perfect for everyone in the relationship, but because the friendships and the group is so important to us, it's a group discussion as far as what's best for all of us.
	I'm feeling a little confused.
	Can you – Well, if Steph all of a sudden said, you know, I'm going to move to Timbuktu, just out of the blue, and it wasn't like, hey, you know, our relationship is important, this is something I'm considering, you know, how do you feel about this, you know, if that kind of wasn't broached that way, I'd feel pretty upset.
	Yeah.
	And rightly so.
	Mike, our fortunes are now bound together for better or worse and we can't get a muggle job ever again.
	It's this or nothing, right?
	This or panhandling.
	So I was like, Mike, I'm going to go.
	Although our fortunes are bound together, I'm jumping out of the airplane and there's only one parachute and I don't even think to offer you to hold on, right?
	That would be pretty rough, right?
	Definitely.
	We have a tough time sometimes saying what we feel if we believe what we feel is inconvenient to the other person.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, if you say to your friends, listen, I feel heartbroken that you're leaving, doesn't that sort of feel like inconvenient to them?
	Yes, yeah, there's something about...
	Not sure how to put it into words, but there's something there in terms of some kind of criticism of me, in my head, about that.
	Yeah, and so you want to be supportive of your friends moving, and I find the word supportive very dangerous.
	Very dangerous!
	Support me usually means let me exploit you.
	You know, and again, I'm going to talk about women here because that's been, you know, my major experience.
	I don't date guys, so this is why I talk about women.
	But in my experience, when a woman says, be supportive, it means give stuff to me for free.
	That's generally what it means to be supportive.
	And, you know, be supportive of my career means do stuff for me, but there's never any sense of like, okay, but how are you going to be supportive of my career if it's the man or whatever, right?
	So, we have this The idea that friendship means not being inconvenient and being supportive and being this blank propulsive base that their rocket launchers or their space shuttles can lift off from.
	And I think that if we have friendships where we are uncomfortable with being inconvenient, then we're missing something essential about the friendship and we are not trusting the friendship enough.
	If you say, listen, it's completely breaking my heart that you guys are moving away, then you are being honest, right?
	But if you come from a dysfunctional family, then feelings are not things that you share, but commandments you impose, right?
	There is no unloaded gun in this duel, right?
	And so to squelch your self-expression is to refrain from controlling other people in that paradigm.
	Yeah.
	Because in dysfunctional families, if someone's upset, everyone else has to change their behavior to fix that upset.
	It's not something that is communicated that you can listen to.
	It's a demand to which you must adapt, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	We lost your emotions completely, right?
	What would it mean for you to... Okay, what is the most... Let's pretend that you've got your... Close your eyes, whatever works for you.
	Physically relax your body.
	Pretend that your friends are right there in the room.
	And here's your chance to tell them about the move and what it means to you.
	What would you say?
	We can wait.
	I'm sorry.
	Oh, he actually just dropped off the line.
	Oh, he did?
	Yeah.
	Let's see if we can get him back.
	Maybe he thought I meant that he should go to his friends and talk to them.
	He's really taking this in the moment.
	I like that.
	It's very, very proactive.
	Are you back now, Ben?
	Yeah.
	Sorry, I got dropped.
	Oh, no problem.
	So, did you hear?
	So, what would you say to your friends if they were in the room?
	And you were to be as honest as you conceivably could be about what the move, what their moving means to you.
	You can feel free to reference the Christian apocalypse novels left behind.
	Well, I'm...
	I guess I'm blanking a bit and feeling a little A little numb.
	Right, so don't do that.
	Just tell them what you want.
	You can tell me that you're not going to tell me, but just tell me.
	What would you say to them about the move and what it does to you?
	Your feelings are not commandments, right?
	Just because you say that you're sad someone's doing something, you're not telling them to change.
	You're just being honest about how you feel.
	In fact, it's disrespectful to alter your behavior based upon what other people feel.
	Because it's turning their feelings into bullies, which alienates them from how they feel.
	So let's just pretend that your friends will listen to you attentively and will not change their behavior based upon what you say, but really want to know how much they mean to you.
	Well, I feel quite sad.
	I think that's a good question.
	I mean, I want to say, I do think you've hit on something here, Steph.
	I'm not sure if I'm ready to... No, no, just do it.
	God, man.
	You want to be a therapist, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Get in touch with your feelings.
	Reach down below your knuckles, massage your lower ribs, and to tickle your prostate.
	Well, I think I did earlier when Michael asked me, when Michael came in, like, I felt it.
	Yes, but you must do it on command for the sake of the show.
	No, I'm kidding.
	Right?
	But no, look, this is, you want to help people be in touch with their emotions as a counselor.
	Yes.
	Right?
	So, this is something you feel incredibly strongly about.
	This is something you feel incredibly strongly about.
	Yes.
	Don't you want the people, you love these people, right?
	You love your friends.
	Yes.
	Right?
	If you withhold that you're going to miss them, then you are withholding your love from them, right?
	Yeah.
	So what would you say to them?
	Not to get them to change, right?
	But to have the room and space to be honest with people without your emotions being little fascists that order them around, but just to speak openly into the space.
	I don't know if I'm going to move to where they are.
	I really like these people.
	No, you're talking about them.
	You will connect with your emotions when you pretend that you're talking to them.
	I don't know if I will move where you are.
	I feel really sad.
	that we might not live together.
	Like, I'm happy we can at least talk, you know, over the over the internet, but I'm really sad that that we might not, you know, get to live together and get to do things, get to do things together and be A really consistent and intimate presence in each other's lives.
	And you know, if, if some of us have children, just be a part of that together in each other's, you know, children's lives.
	And, and, um, I, I haven't decided yet, but I feel quite sad.
	Yeah, I'm feeling pretty sad and my heart is like beating harder.
	Right, and now your friends, I hope, would be curious then, right?
	The three most powerful words in the English language are not I love you or go to hell, but tell me more.
	Tell me more.
	Yeah.
	So tell me more about how you feel.
	And that's a way of giving your feelings the respect of listening without alienating you from them by assuming that they're commandments.
	So tell me more.
	How is this for you?
	I mean, you don't talk to your family and we are the closest people that you have and we're not moving down the road or across town.
	We're moving to the other end of the world.
	Yeah, I'm feeling kind of like a...
	I'm going blank again a bit and feeling like a tension, like a cutoff in my throat. - Thank you.
	Do you feel angry?
	Remember, they're only feelings, they're not commandments.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Okay, do you feel angry?
	A part of me does, yeah.
	I also do feel some anger.
	Okay, so if I were your friend, I would say, well, tell me about the anger.
	I really want to understand that.
	I really want to learn about that. - Well, you know, you know, I,
	I think the thought that is associated with the anger is... I'm not sure.
	I'm getting confused and blanked out again.
	Well, I'm just going to give you my thoughts.
	They might certainly jump in, but why are they moving?
	Are they moving for money?
	Yeah, for economics.
	Yeah, basically it's way cheaper.
	It's like way, way cheaper and there's a lot of work that English-speaking people can do to make very good money with very few working hours, basically.
	So they've got time and money and more energy to pursue other kinds of things.
	When you're not working 40 hours.
	They don't want to sort of struggle to create value in a Western economy.
	They kind of want to have automatic value because they happen to know English.
	Well, I think they want to have more time.
	I think they just want to take advantage of Being able to make good money with working a lot less so that they can use that time to spend with the people who are moving over there and journaling and working on projects and that kind of stuff.
	Do you think they're going to raise families over there?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I think there's some ambivalence that they have about whether they want to raise families or not.
	So it may not be a permanent move, right?
	Yeah, that's part of it too.
	It's at least one of the facts.
	It's one of the facts.
	I don't know how long these guys are going to stay where they're at, if they're going to move, and where they would move It's a fine short-term plan but it's a terrible long-term plan.
	That's sort of my thought about it too.
	chat room who's seeing a lot of experience with English as a second language.
	It's a fine short-term plan, but it's a terrible long-term plan.
	I mean, that's sort of my thought about it too.
	I'd be curious to hear a little bit about what do you think about it as not so good in the long run.
	Well, I'll tell you what I think.
	This is devil's advocate position.
	I think that you've got some right to be upset with your friends.
	They're moving away from a core group of friends.
	They're going to see children treated terribly, openly beaten.
	It's not like Asia is some paradise for children.
	It's terrible for children, China in particular.
	I've talked to a bunch of listeners who've moved out there.
	It's brutal on children.
	They are milking the accidental benefit that they have called knowing English, which they didn't earn.
	And what?
	They're going to journal?
	They can journal here.
	You can get a job at Starbucks here and you can live, you know, like I did when I was a student, six people to a house and you can do all of that kind of stuff and you can actually start to build a life for yourself and build some skill sets.
	But people are going to get sucked into the hole called having ESL and it's a ghetto.
	It's like a one-way ghetto.
	I mean, what do you do in the long run?
	You can't come back and be a teacher in the West.
	What job skills are you getting over there that if you want to come back and raise a family, isn't going to have you begging for a job as a waiter?
	What's the plan that's always working What's the long-term plan?
	What's the long-distance plan?
	This is a short fix.
	Oh look, there's economic opportunity in Asia.
	I can go teach English there.
	But if you're teaching English to children, you're going to see them getting brutally treated for sure.
	And you won't be able to do much about it.
	Yeah, I mean, I think the idea is that, I mean, these people all want to do something entrepreneurial eventually.
	And I think the idea is they'll have more time and money to put into their entrepreneurial pursuits because of the economic situation over there.
	If that makes sense.
	Is he in?
	Hang on, we should try and get a guy in who's got lots of ESL experience.
	That's English as a second language.
	Yeah.
	I asked him to speak to us in Mandarin.
	and yeah, it's important to test my capacity to follow subtitles in Kung Fu movies.
	Still calling him.
	He's not picking up.
	He's playing hard to get.
	I like that.
	Just as people who want to join the call should be always playful.
	But I think you kind of have a right to ask, like, okay, what's the plan?
	So you're going to have some leisure, you're going to have some money, maybe.
	Then what?
	You know, entrepreneur is another dangerous word, you know?
	I want to be an entrepreneur, right?
	Which is pretty much like saying, I want to make money.
	Okay, well, I guess I like to breathe, you know.
	Okay.
	But, you know, from the want to the how, it's a pretty big chasm.
	I think you can make a case to your friends for not moving.
	or Or for, you know, I think a real friend is somebody, I was talking about this just in a listener call last night, a real friend is somebody who really watches someone's back and being supportive is most times being really critical.
	That's real support, is being really critical of someone.
	Right, so if they want to go move to China to teach English, a real friend, in my opinion, right, I think a real friend steps them through all of the really tough questions that they may not have thought about to make sure that it's something that is going to work for them.
	And you know how I said to you, you know, get information about what potential clients need insurance and stuff.
	These people should be getting information.
	About what are the long-term career paths for ESL?
	What are the economic opportunities in China that they may wish to pursue?
	What kind of work do they want to do?
	Is it going to be something that requires that they not be in China or something?
	I don't know where they're going.
	Have you asked them all the tough questions and say, listen, I'm really going to grill you on this, but this is a huge life decision.
	This is going to be like the next three to five years of your life.
	This is the beginning of your career after school.
	This is going to shape everything you do.
	Yeah.
	This is you moving away from women who grew up in the same culture and moving to a culture where women treat children really badly, as do the men, to an authoritarian culture, to a very foreign culture.
	So, you're now taking yourself out of the marriageable dating pool, most likely, for the next three to five years.
	And then when you come back, you're going to kind of be half-cultured.
	Half one culture, half the other.
	How much are you going to have in common with people who haven't gone through the same experiences?
	Have you really thought all this through about what this is going to do for your long-term life prospects?
	Yeah, the dating thing you bring up is one of my concerns as well.
	The pool there is much... Have you shared it with them?
	Yeah, yeah.
	And what do they say?
	They agree it is a smaller dating pool.
	It's basically just the expat community.
	Whereas here it's like, you know, it's many, many times bigger, the pool of possibly eligible, you know, compatible women.
	Well, and if you go with an expat community, if you're new to the expat community, you're not going to have much in common with a woman who's been there five or ten years.
	And what if she doesn't want to come back, but you do?
	Or what if she wants to go back and you don't?
	I mean, it's a very unstable long-term dating pool.
	Yeah.
	I mean, that'd be one of my worries.
	And how much, sorry, how much do employers... I tell you this, I mean, when I was an employer, If somebody had a resume that said, well, I've just spent 10 years in a Thai village teaching English.
	I mean, I just hear a distant jungle masturbatory sound and assume that they just ran away because they didn't want to create value here, they didn't want to go through the struggle of creating an economic life here, and they're kind of flaky.
	I mean, you know, I still talk with them, maybe I'd be wrong, but I never looked at, you know, I spent five years in China teaching English as a second language.
	I just assumed that someone with an arts degree who didn't want to try and find a job.
	with any kind of real competition, and just wanted the automatic value of having inherited English from their childhood.
	So do people know what is the book value, what is the economic value of ESL experience when they get back?
	Well, I mean, if they don't even know that, then these decisions are lunatic.
	I think that Most of them are not intending to come back to the US, but one of them is sort of like more up in the air, as far as my understanding.
	OK.
	Do they know what it's like to stay in China?
	Yeah.
	Most of them have been overseas for a couple of years before.
	Yes, but getting married, raising children, what are they going to do about the one-child policy?
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	That they're going to have children.
	They don't know that they're going to have children.
	They might not have children.
	Well, we might get hit by an asteroid, but these are decisions that have impact.
	Yeah.
	It certainly has an impact on me because I would like to have children.
	I would like to find a romantic partner and have children.
	But this is what I mean when I say, when I was an employer, I viewed people with ESL experience as complete flakes.
	I'm just telling you, this is not any kind of proof of anything.
	I'm just telling you my experience.
	And again, it doesn't mean I wouldn't talk to them.
	Maybe I was wrong.
	But oh my God!
	I mean, because what's the plan?
	I go to Thailand to, you know, fine, go backpacking for a year and have fun.
	Great.
	You know, I view that as sort of a well-rounded gentleman's education or gentlewoman's education.
	But the idea that you go teach English for five years and then come back, it's like, well, what the hell was the plan?
	That is not forward thinking.
	You need to figure out if you want to have kids.
	Or at least not make decisions that are going to vastly limit your ability in that area.
	There's no massive, I mean obviously you're in your early 20s, but is it early or mid 20s?
	Late 20s.
	Late 20s!
	There might as well be a giant tin full of tuna.
	I mean, I'm telling you, there's like a Charlie the Tuna is dancing all over their economic graves.
	Come on!
	By your late 20s, you have no idea whether you want children or not, these people?
	For me, there's some things I do know about the future that I want.
	I want to be a therapist.
	No, no, I'm talking about your friends.
	Yeah, they don't know.
	They don't know.
	So they're in their late 20s and they don't know whether they want to have children or not and they're not willing to think ahead to figure out how they might structure their life so that children can be had much more easily.
	They don't know whether they want to get married because if you're voluntarily going to a different culture with a tiny incompatible dating pool, you might as well just, you know, shoot your nuts off and not worry about the DNA at all, right?
	So that's what I mean by, you know, flakes.
	And so my question is, I'm not saying your friends are all flakes, Ron.
	I mean, I know that's sort of what I'm talking around.
	But what I'm saying is that, what happens if you bring these important considerations to your friend's attention?
	In other words, are they just still living, well, this'll be cool.
	You know, economics are tough here, but this'll be cool.
	I can go and get a job right away with no struggle and no effort.
	And I get paid for something I never even bothered to have to learn.
	That to me seems kind of lazy.
	It seems kind of avoidant.
	And it seems very immature.
	especially for late 20s you know and look these are just if these were my friends this is what I would be this is what I would be be talking about
	I'm 29, I want to go and journal.
	It's like, you do get the 29 thing, right?
	You're not like a 14-year-old girl trying to figure out if Bobby likes you.
	Look, it's a challenge to get an economic life going in the West these days.
	It is.
	Yeah.
	But these guys are obviously educated and the unemployment rate for people with an education is vastly lower than the general population.
	Unemployment rate for people with degrees is like two or three percentage points.
	It's tiny.
	They can get jobs, right?
	But they'd actually have to work at them and there would be opportunity to grow.
	ESL is a dead-end street where you just milk your existing knowledge in a foreign country for no chance of advancement and very little chance of dating.
	It's extending adolescence into Wrinkleville.
	And so if they were my friends, I'd be all over them.
	you know, You know, saying, you know, and if they're just like, well, you know, que sera, sera, I'm just going to go out and see what it's like and this and that.
	It's like, hey, dude, you're almost 30.
	The time for experimenting with a variety of lifestyles is kind of over by almost 10 years, right?
	Or at least 7 or 8.
	So, if they don't know what they want to be, but they're making plans that are all hazy and nonsensical, and not taking the challenges of getting jobs with career paths in the West, but instead going to milk their existing unearned knowledge in Asia, I would be pretty intent on grilling over those decisions with them.
	Because I care.
	Because I care.
	I don't want people to end up like, I'm 35, you know, which for these people is not long away.
	I'm 35 and I'm in China.
	Right?
	And there's no women here to date.
	Um, and what do I do now?
	I guess I can stay here and then I'll be 40, 45, have no kids and whatever, right?
	No marriage, no, you know, roots, no whatever, right?
	Or I can go back and be incompatible with the people who are, who've stayed and, right?
	I mean someone who stays and let's say they become, I don't know, some accountant or some lawyer, Web designer, they build a career, they start a business.
	By the time, you know, they're in their mid-thirties, they're pretty accomplished.
	They've got a good income and you're coming back or these people are coming back with nothing.
	You know, I'm sure even the people who hire at Starbucks are like, ooh, ESL?
	Ooh, you know, we find them more flaky than our croissants.
	And so what are they going to have in common with women of, you know, professional accomplishment and education and growth, right?
	It's an avoidance of challenge.
	It's an avoidance of going to build a life that you can have some control over.
	And it is a bleeding away.
	of economic value.
	Because when you go and you spend five years in a foreign country teaching ESL, you're not building your skill set.
	You're just milking your prior skill set that, again, for the millionth time you didn't earn.
	But you're not learning how to manage, you're not learning how to deal with customers, you're not learning how to deal with negotiations, you're not learning how to deal with contracts or suppliers or any of that sort of stuff.
	The idea that you're going to go out into some backwoods in China and become an entrepreneur just seems pretty, pretty dicey.
	Pretty unthought through, I guess that makes sense.
	If that makes sense.
	So, I think that you may be inhibited in your communication with your friends because you may not want to ask them the tough questions that I think give them the greatest chance of happiness in the long run.
	Mike, I know you brought this whole thing up to begin with.
	What do you think?
	No, that makes complete sense to me.
	I have a bit of a rant brewing within me.
	I don't want to interrupt the call to rant.
	I notice a trend, and I see this a lot, like on Facebook and social media and stuff, people posting, you know, I'm going to quit my job.
	I'm going to liberate myself from my job, and I'm going to do X. And X is normally like, I'm going to sell my testicles on the black market, or I'm going to start an online basket weaving thing, or something like that.
	There's something.
	And I'm going to quit my job.
	I'm going to go do this.
	This is my dream.
	And the comments that follow, it's always an endless series of... You go!
	Oh, go!
	Yes!
	Congratulations!
	That's amazing!
	Oh, go!
	Yay!
	Yay!
	Woohoo!
	You go!
	There's never any like, so what, you're doing what now?
	What's the plan?
	I mean, that's okay.
	Well, what's your one-year plan, two-year plan, five-year plan?
	You know, how much money do you need on a monthly basis to get by?
	Are you cutting your expenses?
	There's never any like serious Debate about, alright, well, I care about you.
	I care about what you're doing.
	If this is important to you, let's talk about it.
	Let's make sure you're not, you know, jumping off a cliff here.
	Let's make sure you're making this for the right reasons, that there's not any unconscious bullshit going on, that you're doing this, and it is something that's going to lead you to where you want to be 5, 10, 20 years from now.
	There's not that.
	And it's all under the guise of, you know, being supportive.
	And I certainly felt this pressure from people in the past.
	There's people that they post stuff like that or, you know, bring up, I'm making X life decision.
	And they don't want you to ask those questions.
	They don't want you to to have those conversations.
	They want you to tell them how great their plan is.
	They want you to tell them how great their idea is.
	They want you to just cheerlead them as they march off a cliff and do something that's incredibly self-destructive for themselves and their life.
	And you want that information.
	You want to know if the people around you actually want honest feedback, if they're open to criticism.
	They're being supportive!
	Like a jockstrap over a gaping chest wound.
	You want that information if you can actually be honest if you have concerns or aren't clear on exactly why they want to pursue this or how it's going to lead them to be where they want to be.
	You want that information because if you have people around you who don't want you to give that kind of feedback, they just want you to suppress that.
	They just want you to shut up, smile and nod as they go and do something that's incredibly stupid or self-destructive.
	You don't want those people around you for when you are making life decisions, because Lord knows they're not going to give you any type of constructive feedback.
	Lord knows they're not going to have your back.
	Lord knows they're not going to be really supportive.
	They're just, oh yeah, you're doing that thing?
	Great.
	See, if you don't call me on my bullshit, my nonsense, my bad ideas, Then I'm not going to call you on yours either.
	That's the deal and that's the trade you're making if you're in a relationship like that.
	So I really caution people.
	Do not be just the faceless cheerleader that's, yay, you want to do a thing!
	Yay!
	A thing!
	Congratulations on your thing.
	No, ask them damn questions about what they want to do.
	See if it's viable.
	See if they've thought it through.
	If it's just some half-baked idea that hasn't been given any thought that's going to be incredibly self-destructive for the person, Say that!
	Give that feedback!
	Don't let them march off that cliff!
	If you let them march off that cliff, you're not a very good friend!
	I'll share this story.
	I had a friend of mine that wanted to write a book.
	He wrote a book.
	He wanted feedback on the book.
	He gave me the book to read.
	I read the book.
	The book was not very good.
	So, you know, I was in the uncomfortable position.
	of having to tell a friend of mine that something they worked on and were really excited about, to tell them that it was not good.
	And I provided feedback and criticism, things that could be improved, things that could be tweaked, things, you know, that could be improved upon in further rewrites.
	And this friend was not happy with me.
	This friend wanted me to tell them that their book was great.
	They wanted a rubber stamp on their project to say, this is great, fantastic, what you've been doing is exactly what you should be doing.
	And they were actually upset with me when I told them their book was not great.
	And, you know, here I am in the uncomfortable position of, wow, there's a project that's really important to somebody that I care about.
	It's not very good.
	And I have to say that that's not easy.
	That's not easy.
	There's no like, wow, I really appreciate you giving me that critical feedback.
	I can understand that's a tough position to be in.
	I have to break it to me that this project I've worked on for months and months and months, it's not good.
	I appreciate you being honest.
	That's a tough thing to do.
	I appreciate your feedback.
	Now, I might disagree with your feedback.
	Tell me more.
	Tell me more about what you don't like, right?
	But instead, my friend was upset that I gave him the honest feedback that his book wasn't very good, and instead told me, can you tell me some more things about what you like about the book?
	Which, okay.
	There wasn't much I did like about the book, unfortunately.
	The punch was... So, then eventually, way down the road, a friend told me that, you know, you were right, and I completely rewrote the book, and...
	It's better.
	But in the moment, you know, there was no appreciation for like, that's hard feedback to give.
	And I appreciate you doing it.
	I appreciate you taking the time to read my book.
	I appreciate you giving me that honest, honest criticism.
	I need that.
	And I need people around me that are going to do that.
	Thank you for being that type of person.
	Instead, I got, tell me some nice things about my book.
	Libertarians are so against subsidies, except of the emotional kind.
	Don't subsidize bad businesses, it causes a misallocation of economic resources.
	But I'm going to encourage you to pursue something you're pretty bad at, because that's going to have no opportunity cost at all.
	That guy Elzug, can you give him another call?
	I think he wants to.
	So he said basically that the first two years of ESL were the best two years of his life.
	That's what got him trapped.
	He said, I really wish I could have talked to the guy because I really messed up my life doing ESL.
	Now I'm 49.
	It's going to be damn hard to move back to the United States.
	Very tough stuff.
	Yeah, so maybe if you grew up in a dysfunctional household, Grilling people.
	Look, in business, I was, you know, I didn't just start doing this on this show in business because I was head of R&D for many years.
	I was continually grilling people who wanted to do stuff, right?
	When Mike joined on board, the first project was revamping the message board, right?
	And, you know, we did some, I did a bit of grilling on that, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Definitely.
	It was much appreciated.
	Is this an effective use of time?
	Is this an effective use of resources?
	You know, what is the long-tail picture of this project?
	Is this something that's worth doing, you know, in the future?
	How can we measure this versus everything else that you can do?
	And your thing was, well, don't you want the message board to be upgraded?
	Which was like, you know, wouldn't you like some positive thing in the world?
	Well, sure, but resources are finite and we're trying to, you know... And so we had conversations about how to...
	How to best allocate resources, and I have the same thing too, right?
	You're like, Steph, stop doing X, right?
	Because it's not a good use of your time, and we're constantly trying to remind each other, I think, of the best way to allocate resources to get the message out, which is important.
	But you may, like if you grow up in dysfunctional families, everybody's a house of cards.
	You know, and you've got to walk around a bull in a china shop kind of thing, because people are in such a fragile state that they Emotions become these giant swinging bats in a Swarovski crystal store.
	And so you may want to redefine what it is to be supportive of people.
	And to be supportive of people is to cross-examine them about the next five years of their life investment to make sure That they know what they're doing and they've thought everything through and they have all of the information that they need because so many, so much of what people call decisions is just avoidance.
	It's just avoidance of responsibility, avoidance of growing up, avoidance of challenges, avoidance of growth, avoidance of rejection.
	Hey, you go teach ESL in China, you ain't gonna be rejected by anyone.
	You go for job applications to something you really want that you can build a career on, you'll face a lot of rejection.
	So, it may be that you are not Necessarily working in the way the friendship could be worked in.
	When I was looking for investment, investors would give you 2,000 questions trying to pick apart your business plan and your assumptions.
	If you didn't have information that you needed, they would let you know.
	Maybe you could get back in the room and maybe you couldn't.
	And that's just a process that's Socratic reasoning, right?
	Which is, let's really cross-examine people about their goals and plans, and friends should welcome that, right?
	Like when you had questions and I said, well, do you have this information and that, right?
	I mean, you were like, yeah, that is helpful, right?
	If your friendships are good, then your friends may be annoyed by it, but they will welcome it and they will certainly thank you.
	If not necessarily right in the moment, hopefully within a day or two they'll say, you know what, that was a whole lot of stuff I'd never thought about.
	But if they resent you, that can be rough.
	Sorry for the rant or ramble.
	Does that help at all?
	No, yeah.
	I think you guys have both given me quite a bit of Good stuff to chew on here.
	It's kind of a lot.
	I want to listen again.
	Yeah, it is a lot.
	But I think definitely some important stuff and some important stuff going back to my family and just being assertive with people and how that's actually a caring thing and it'll only help me to become a better therapist as well.
	It's definitely something I need.
	To work on is being willing to say something that might Be a little discomforting for somebody in the moment.
	I hope.
	I mean, I'm not a therapist, but if I understand the job, if you're not doing that, at least to some degree, you're really not being a therapist, right?
	Or a philosopher, right?
	I mean, a philosopher, the job is to change people's behavior by asking them uncomfortable questions or giving them perspectives that they may not have thought of, that they're not going to get from somewhere else, right?
	Again, I'm the guy on the pogo stick hanging in the other direction.
	Conveyor belt airport scenario.
	People don't usually dig in.
	These are conversations I have with friends.
	These are conversations I have with my wife.
	These are even conversations that I have with my daughter.
	To love people is to not give them the keys to the car when they're drunk.
	That's not loving, right?
	I want to be supportive, so I'm giving him the keys to the car when he's drunk.
	That's not being supportive.
	That's called being an enabler.
	Right?
	And friendship and families have been so brutally redefined as enabling is the highest value.
	And when people say supportive, they mean enable my bad decisions.
	And if you question people, or you criticize people, or you ask them for information that is relevant to their decision-making process, you're not being supportive.
	Which means, you know, I know I'm a drunk.
	I know I drive drunk.
	Give me a drink and the car keys anyway.
	And if you don't, you're not being supportive.
	Right?
	And fuck supportive.
	what we want is the truth.
	All right, well...
	I want to mull all this over, but, you know, I appreciate both of your feedback.
	Right.
	And recognize that, you know, especially if you're not talking to your family of origin, you're going to have a tough time challenging your friendships.
	I want to mull all this over, but I appreciate both of your feedback.
	So, all right, well, thanks.
	Great, great call.
	Great question.
	I'm sorry we couldn't patch in the guy with ESL.
	No, Mike, go ahead.
	I was saying we got one more caller if you're up for it.
	I want to But Michael wrote in and said, I've always felt very skeptical of things in my entire life from a young age.
	So many things from religion, to my teachers, to politics, to my parents, to existence.
	And thus has contributed so much to who I am right now, morally, politically, spiritually.
	Where does this general skepticism develop from?
	Why does it feel so inherently natural as well as so valuable to me?
	And you've had this skepticism as long as you can remember?
	It started from a pretty early age.
	Definitely, I would say, when I first started going to my religious classes.
	I was raised in a bi-religious household, so I don't know if maybe you wanted to start there.
	Bi-religious?
	That's like a religion that swings both ways?
	Yeah, so my mother was raised Christian, and my father was raised Jewish, and so when they got married, they decided, I guess they fought over which religion the children were going to be raised under.
	Yeah, because one parent worships Jesus, and the other one comes from the clan that murdered him.
	You know, that can create some family tensions, according to the myths.
	Exactly, Stephan.
	Yes, so I guess my father won that battle and we were raised Jewish up until I went to Hebrew school up until the age of about maybe 12 or 13 and then kind of rebelled against it and was allowed to stop going.
	And so I ended up stopped going to Hebrew school around that age and what kind of was I would say an atheist for much of that point after, always questioning, always kind of rejecting the whole thing, and always trying to find questions, but never really got much response from my parents or even my friends, most of whom were all, most of my friends in the town I grew up in were raised Christian or Catholic.
	So I was in the minority being raised Jewish, so that was always confusing as well.
	But yeah, I kind of just rejected the whole thing until I kind of What kind of Jew is your father?
	Is he religious Jew?
	Is he cultural Jew?
	Is he nationalist Jew?
	So that was kind of where I think a lot of my skepticism started early on.
	Sorry, hang on a second.
	I mean, what kind of Jew is your father?
	Is he like a religious Jew?
	Is he a cultural Jew?
	Is he a nationalist Jew?
	I mean, what kind of Jew is he?
	Yeah, non-practicing.
	So kind of wears the mezuzah around his neck, had a bar mitzvah, but kind of stopped going after.
	So in America, a lot of Jews, they have bar mitzvahs and then they stop kind of practicing after that.
	And yeah, they just, you know, maybe they have Passover dinner with their family every now and then, but that's pretty much it.
	They don't really do much as a community or practice, at least my father in the Jewish community that he was brought up in.
	So yeah, you know, when I was going to Hebrew school, you know, every Friday we would go to some services that were like an hour long.
	Um, but that was it.
	And then once I stopped going, the family stopped going, uh, as well.
	And, uh, yeah, and so holidays as well.
	So we would celebrate, um, we would celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas at the same time.
	Um, so that was kind of ridiculous as well.
	So, you know, you can see how it was very confusing as a kid to make sense of all that.
	Right.
	Right.
	You're going to hell, but at least they'll have the good comedians, right?
	I got it.
	Yeah, exactly, exactly.
	Got it.
	A friend of mine who's Jewish was given a book called The Big Jewish Book of Why, which of course is all about Judaism, and he said, no, no, no, it's The Big Jewish Book of Why Me?
	So, yeah, I mean, I think that the answer is pretty clear.
	I mean, you were exposed to two ideologies.
	You were exposed to two superstitions.
	And the automatic compare and contrast is, well, these must both be bullshit, right?
	Plus, I mean, the Jewish tradition is critical of many things, right?
	I mean, the Jewish rabbinical tradition, it's somewhat Socratic, right?
	The cross-examination of things, not core.
	And Judaism is fantastically flexible.
	It's the reason it survived for so long, right?
	It's wonderfully flexible.
	You know, hey, if you're not into gods, okay, you know, you can be cultural.
	If you're, you know, more religious, we'll accept that too.
	If you just want to be a crazy Zionist, hey, come in the fold, man, you don't have to believe in the culture or the religion, just, you know, believe in Israel and pay your taxes, right?
	I mean, it's a very adaptive...
	Belief system, I guess you could say.
	So, yeah, I mean, you were exposed to two people who didn't take their beliefs seriously, so of course you're going to be skeptical, right?
	Because if your mom, who was raised Christian, took her beliefs seriously, right, then she wouldn't marry you.
	Exactly, yeah.
	And she conceded that.
	For a Jew, the Christian is worshipping a false prophet, right?
	The true prophet is Mel Brooks.
	So Jesus would be a false prophet in the Jewish tradition, and that would be a very serious theological offense.
	So you're two people who are like, well yeah, we like rubbing our naughty bits together more than we like Page turning the Torah or flogging ourselves with Catholic sticks.
	And so you had two people who married, despite religion, who didn't take it obviously particularly seriously.
	And so you would be exposed to skepticism in the very fact of your existence, right?
	That two people of conflicting theological beliefs made a baby together.
	So it seems to be kind of natural that you're going to be pretty, you know, your very existence is the result.
	You were birthed by skepticism and irreverence to ideology, right?
	Yeah, exactly, and they did end up getting divorced not too long into that marriage, so that's not too much of a surprise.
	Beyond that, I definitely say it's obvious where my skepticism comes from, but I think that's one of the reasons why I connected with your show so much.
	on and some other great thinkers out there on this because of what i think there's this natural skepticism that that i think you show on in some of the way you approach topics and you approach uh... you know listeners and callers and things like that and i i you know i've been fortunate enough to have a few uh... more skeptical people in my life but it seems on average that most people don't have that skepticism you know they they kind of uh... you get very uh...
	close to a certain belief or ideology, and they don't like to challenge it.
	That's because most people's parents aren't enough of a hypocrite, right?
	I mean, you had the delightful joy of having two enormously hypocritical parents, right?
	Exactly.
	They couldn't impose a uniform ideology on you because it was just so ridiculous, right?
	Right?
	Yeah.
	You must follow Judaism, my son!
	It's like, didn't you just marry an Arab?
	Except for that, you must, right?
	You must worship Jesus.
	It's essential for you to get into heaven.
	Didn't you marry a guy who's, right?
	Except for that, right?
	So, so, you know, there was obvious excepts for that in your upbringing.
	So how are you going to, uh, how are you going to, how are you going to take anything seriously as far as those kinds of ideologies go?
	I mean, there are other things too, right?
	I mean, that, that are obvious hypocrisies like, uh, you know, the, the mom who hits Her daughter for hitting her brother, right?
	But that's violence and therefore it's short circuits.
	But yours was cultural and ideological and so, yeah, of course I think you would view with skepticism any ideology because your parents, by getting married, rejected consistency of ideology.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I understand what you're saying, definitely.
	And I just think that, you know, it's odd that, you know, that unfortunate circumstance of pure hypocrisy, along with the other things in my life, have led to that skepticism.
	But when I view the world today, you know, and all the propaganda and all the nonsense that's thrown at us, all the lies, all the bullshit from everywhere, I'm happy that I have that skeptic ability Over some of that comfort other people tend to show, because I think it allows me to at least find some truth, if you know what I'm trying to say.
	Did you get sucked into the great danger of skepticism, which is relativism and or nihilism?
	I've definitely been sucked into a lot of different things over time.
	I went back and listened to a couple of your old podcasts.
	Yeah.
	I don't think so.
	Not so much relativism.
	What was the second one you said?
	Nihilism.
	Nihilism.
	I'm not familiar with that one.
	You're skeptical and you deconstruct arguments, but you're just demolition.
	You don't build, right?
	There's nothing that is true in the skeptical universe.
	No, I think I try and build.
	I think I try and build on arguments and things like that.
	I don't think I'm destructive.
	No, I didn't say destructive.
	I just said nihilistic.
	To be destructive of false ideologies is nothing wrong with it, right?
	But are you able to clear away the rubble and build something new, or is there always another creaky old house that needs a wrecking ball?
	Well, I feel as though I'm in the moments of building that house right now.
	I'm trying to find those building blocks, and I would say your show is one of those resources that I take different blocks from, and I'm trying to make my own ideology, my own view of the world.
	I'm fogging up!
	You've got ridiculously non-rigorous, non-philosophical answers to the question of objective values, right?
	I'm in the process of trying to build that house.
	I mean, I know I introduced the metaphor, but that was around the destruction of false ideologies.
	And you said my show, like your show, Steph, is one of the resources that I'm using to build my values or my perspective on the world and so on.
	That's not philosophy.
	First of all, don't ever use my show to build your perspectives.
	Right?
	The whole point is philosophies.
	It's like, you know, well, Richard Dawkins, I'm using science to build my particular view of science.
	You know, I'm using mathematics to build my particular take on mathematics, right?
	It's like, well no, I mean, if it's mathematics, it's objective.
	If it's subjective, it's not mathematics, right?
	So, in terms of your values and stuff, this is what I mean by relativism and or nihilism, right?
	So, it sounds like you've gone more towards the relativism in that you think you can build your own philosophical values, which you can't.
	It's like building your own theory of physics.
	It's like, no, if it's a theory of physics, it's valid, it's universal, and if it's your theory, it ain't physics, right?
	So, you've gone relativistic, which is the great danger of skepticism.
	Squishy, exciting, mustachioed trap of Nietzsche, right?
	Which is, there is no God, there is nothing, right?
	Right, right, right.
	In episode 219, you were talking about the Cartesian demon and Descartes and things like that, which I didn't feel as though I was doing, but now that you throw it back at me, I see what you're saying.
	I like that.
	Throw it back at you.
	That's a neutral phrase.
	Now that you stuffed your objectivity down my throat like Bubba the Inferno.
	No, no, no.
	I mean it in a good way.
	I mean it in a completely good way.
	In an appreciative way.
	Calling me out.
	I was waiting for a bashing to come out of it.
	Yeah.
	Well, I guess what I mean, I totally hear what you're saying on that.
	And I guess I'm struggling to find the best words to put it.
	I do know that in finding your show, I've been able to... I feel as though I understand things better.
	I have a more critical view of things than I did before.
	So I'm not trying to seem as though I'm being lazy and just gathering ideas from your show.
	Those videos that you've been putting out about putting your money where your mouth is and things like that, I think those have been great videos.
	You know, I just donate to the show, I just bought some Bitcoin, you know, things like that.
	That kind of stuff has really resonated with me and that's the kind of stuff that I'm trying to... Oh wait, sorry, you said you donated to the show, right?
	Oh, well then you're completely correct and you have nothing to change.
	No, I'm just kidding.
	Look, there's so much bullshit in the world that it's like It's like the Aegean stables.
	You can literally go in and shovel that shit for the rest of your life.
	There's so many false beliefs and bullshit superstructures of culture and superstition and patriotism and nationalism and racism.
	There's so much bullshit in the world that the problem with skepticism is you will never run out of targets.
	You will never ever run out of targets to dismantle.
	And half the time you dismantle them, they'll just pop up somewhere else.
	It's like playing whack-a-mole with great white sharks and the little hammer that would be more appropriate to a Monopoly board.
	than a carny.
	So my concern is that if you're trained to be skepticism, then you're a sharpshooter of bullshit.
	But since there's basically a tsunami of bullshit that arises and comes in at us from every single direction, my concern is you're going to think that you're doing a whole lot of good in the world by sharpshooting lead into bullshit.
	My concern is with skepticism that dismantling bad structures is not You know, building new structures.
	If you build a great enough new house, all the dilapidated houses will be thrown into shop relief, right?
	So the best way to destroy the decrepit is to build the glorious, right?
	I mean, there's no point shooting at darkness thinking you're going to make light.
	You just make light, and then the darkness becomes very vivid to people.
	And so, the best way to enact skepticism in the world is to build a system that's rational, to build a system that's empirical, to build a system that is communicable, to build a system that is understandable by a five-year-old and actionable, all the stuff that's in universally preferable behavior.
	Write my free book at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
	Build a life and build a system that is rational and consistent and good and validates the moral instincts of mankind.
	And then all of the bullshit will fall in time of its own accord, right?
	The rational, if communicated well enough, drives out the irrational.
	And rather than putting lead into giant waves of bullshit, I would suggest, rather than being skeptical, be a builder.
	And when you build something glorious enough, nobody wants to live in that shitty stuff anymore anyway.
	Otherwise, you just knock it down and people are homeless, right?
	Right, right, right.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I appreciate that comment.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I know it's been a long show.
	I don't know if I'm digging to get to anything else.
	I guess that maybe I shouldn't look at it as so valuable as I do.
	I guess some of my childhood I know wasn't valuable.
	I definitely was hit a good amount as a child, different things like that.
	And I have, you know, in recent times, you know, in trying to do all this bullshit sniping, like you called it, I have been disconnected with a lot of my family and my friends, you know, because I've been trying to, you know, push these issues and talk about these issues.
	And yeah, it seems to really push people away.
	And I think some of that is good.
	For certain reasons.
	Be like a flare you can shoot up of positive moral energy and people will find you.
	You know, if you're a bullshit sharpshooter, you certainly will drive away the unstable, but you will not draw to yourself the virtuous.
	Right, right.
	And so, you know, that's why finding a good, rational, empirical philosophy that you can accept as objective and live by will create a beacon of...
	I mean people find this show, we did like almost 800 gigabytes of downloads just the other day.
	People are finding this show in droves and that's partly because there's a, you know, There's a building to come live in, right?
	We're not just knocking down shit and leaving people homeless.
	Without a change in parenting, the end of religion created the totalitarian states of the 20th century.
	I mean, if you're raised in a tyranny at home, you either have a god tyranny or you have a state tyranny, but you will have a tyranny either way.
	So, the fact that skeptics knocked down religion without reforming childhood created the hundred-plus Million deaths a decade, it seems, sometimes in the 20th century.
	So there are ways to build a structure which people can move into and flourish in without necessarily having to knock down.
	What we want is for old beliefs to be abandoned, not destroyed.
	We want to lure people with the promise of something better, right?
	We don't want to starve them.
	We just want to do sit-ups to the point where they put down the cheesecake, right?
	And so I think if you really want to live a life that is going to draw good people to you and I think is the happiest life you can get, then don't focus on tearing down bullshit.
	Focus on building something glorious where people will just leave the bullshit behind to get to.
	I think that's the best approach.
	And I just want to sort of pass that along.
	Skepticism is great.
	I think it served its purpose in your life, but I would suggest working to build something that is going to be better and more glorious and more inviting for people.
	And that way I think you will end up with people around you who have the similar enthusiasm and grounded perspective on how to be good as you can have.
	I definitely take that to heart and I will start building and stop destroying from that perspective.
	I think that's something I need to start doing.
	I need to start bringing more virtuous people into my life with that.
	Thank you, Stephan.
	Thank you for all you do and I appreciate you taking my call.
	Thank you, and I'm very sorry about the degree of violence that you experienced as a child.
	I didn't want to have that pass as if it wasn't serious.
	Yeah, I know.
	It's been a long show, and maybe I'll try and call in again in the future, and we can dig into that graveyard.
	But yeah, thank you very much.
	I can't wait to see the show grow even further.
	You're doing really great things for the world, putting yourself out there.
	Thank you very much for your support.
	but I really appreciate that.
	Yeah.
	Go back in anytime.
	All right.
	All right.
	Thank you for, yeah, thanks again to Mike for great contributions to the show, fdrurail.com forward slash donate.
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	It's really, really important.
	You know, spend an hour a week sharing the shows.
	It's not like we're lashing to you to a church pew or something like that.
	When you share the shows, you really do help families become more peaceful.
	You really do help improve the quality of children's lives.
	And I think it's a great thing to do.
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	Share the shows.
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